I think there is a better angle to take in this mess. I think the main value people on all sides are looking for is freedom, which implies a bit of money, but also a non intrusive government and the power and right to protect oneself. Large state-movements are always a sign that people are being used, rather than cultivated. People cultivate themselves. Governments are a product of this. No government so far has been able to successfully resist the impulse to barbarize their people, for the sake of securing its own position. But some governments resist the impulse more powerfully than others. A government that relies mostly on the self-reliance of its people will be a government busy with predictable tasks of building universal human values; roads, healthcare, a justice system, etc; a government that relies on a complicated system of ideological self-justification, propaganda, by which it compels a certain portion of the people to uphold it against another portion, is a government that will seek to dumb down the people and to make sure none of them can be fully self-reliant. Values are being obscured, human-being is being de-programmed, assimilated into a formula that pertains not to human individuals, let alone to animals or plants, but to the equilibrium of a hypothesized meta-system, Plato’s ‘State’ or the modern ‘global order’ - in service of which all naturally emergent entities must be made to work. Marxists have talked about this all along, but they did not focus enough on the central issue, that of value, and the valuing subject. Values like oxygen, hydrogen and carbon are subconscious to us, we consist largely of our requirement for such elements, one might say; we exist in as much we attain fundamental values. Freedom, self-determination, stands as the central value that sustains all other human valuing and being.
Consider the nation in which the original Arab Spring was kindled; an ancient place that was powerful during Roman times, and where, of all Islamic countries (territories once subjected by Mohamed), the greatest relative amounts of non-believers live and dare to speak out.
reuters.com/article/us-tunis … SKCN0WO2RC
Thanks to NATO efforts, their neighbor Lybia has been transformed into a chaotic hellhole, but this does not seem to impede directly on the process of Tunesian freedom.
In retrospect, it might have been a bit racist, this name ‘Arab Spring’. Like calling the Napoleonic conquest the Caucasian Summer. It was mainly a Carthaginian movement, it was emergent of pre-Islamic culture, of culture that does not need top down commands to keep itself whole and sane. The question is only how much man has been deranged, how much of him is still intact, after this age of top down control; but I think all men are born free, even if many are raised into captivity. To stop the ideological indoctrination of children in general, this would suffice to end all ‘peoples wars’.
It is not so much that God is the cause of war, but that war was the reason God had to be invented. The original god is thus a vengeful one, or rather; God needs enemies. At least so does the God who is associated with Justice. This is why I prefer the Greek and Northern Gods, they are known and loved for being self-interested, namely in beautiful and illuminating ways. Even if there were a magnificent omnipresent logos that prescribes what is healthy for a human, it would certainly appear that man would find most pleasure and honor, and do more worthwhile things, in figuring this out for himself. Imagine the joy in discovering God on ones own. And imagine the thievery then, of teaching a Child that only to one man was given to discover it.
The rest all had to accept it.
Thucydides said that the strong do what they can, and the weak accept what they must. This is a kind of circular reasoning. I wonder if children should be counted among the weak or the strong.
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I was so worried how you’d receive it that I made it go bye-bye.
