THE ULTIMATE PARADOX AND CONSUMMATE IRONY INHERENT IN HUMAN EXISTENCE

For more than a decade I have been trying to communicate to members of my species a thesis that I have been developing and perceiving with ever increasing clarity over the past three decades, that there is an ultimate paradox and consummate irony inherent in human existence, that human beings have the potential for intelligence but that this potential can only be realized by individuals becoming capable of accurately interpreting their experiences; and, that human history had constructed a near insurmountable obstacle to human beings becoming capable of connecting the dots and achieving civility - that impediment being the socially learned drive guilt.
Inherent in the human condition, in the sentient condition is the ability of make choices, any sentient being can choose to be civilized and develop the capacity to apply their higher mental processes to social reality; or, he or she can choose to be uncivilized and ignorant and never transcend the state of talking animal; but what I would like to explore is yet another possibility; that this capacity could be disabled human existence could be imprisoned in the shackles of determinism creating a situation in which individual human beings are immutably and interminably reduced and consigned to being puppets on the strings of culture; and, never be able to realize the innate potential for freedom and independence created by their capacity for intelligence.
This ultimate paradox, this contradiction has given rise to a crisis in human affairs, a crisis that can only be resolved by a fundamental change, the most fundamental change an individual could contemplate; what is at the core of this crisis is the contradiction inherent in the fact that competition and conflict has, for all of human history, been the engine driving members of the species up the steep incline towards civilization that this has been the means relied on to precipitate positive developments albeit at a high cost in human life and suffering; but that the detritus of a burgeoning scientific establishment that is creating global warming has combined with perhaps the highest attainment of that Establishment the invention of weapons of mass destruction to create the need for competition and conflict to be replaced by new basis for human interaction, the synthesis of cooperation - consistent with the Hegelian process of change what I have been attempting to do for the past three decades is to expose the intrinsic nature and malefic, ubiquitous impact of this contradiction, most perniciously that it produces the laming of human intellects; while simultaneously exposing the very beneficial positive effects of a new, diametrically opposed basis for social interaction in the desperate quest to precipitate resolution of this awesome crisis by communicating to members of the human species a higher form of truth.
I am hypothesizing that the vast majority of human beings have been deprived of the capacity to choose, to have their behavior mediated by intelligence and limited by the dictates of conscience; members of the human species have been consigned to acting driven by impulses from the subconscious compartment of their minds and to never developing the means to develop and use their higher mental processes, the unique boon afforded members of the species Homo sapiens by the process of evolution.
The following exclamation in extremis by the man called Jesus could be a completely accurate description of the human condition from the beginning of time:
Father, forgive them they know not what they do. (St. Luke Chapter 23, Verse 34)
The vast majority of human beings are not only cockeyed optimists they are also wholly opportunistic and are prone to fiercely clinging to the assumption that we do know what we are doing even while perennially confronting social conditions and circumstances wholly at odds with this conclusion - I believe like Jesus, that with regards to the social milieu we do not have a clue about what we are doing; furthermore, that the seemingly random unfolding of events has created a situation in which we have totally renounced and rejected the capacity for intelligence the unique, inestimable gift of evolution to members of the human species; that the vast majority of human beings have completely failed to develop a capacity for logical rational thought and continue to be for the duration of their lives, talking but never thinking animals, concisely and briefly, our intellects are lamed by guilt a direct and inevitable consequence of the practice of coercion determined culture.
But wait I am not done in describing the awesome, pernicious degree of folly discernible in human affairs precipitated by a fickle, insensate, mindless fate; even while we have been effectively prohibited by the random unfolding of events and circumstances from applying our intelligence to social problems, our higher mental processes have been lamed to preserve and perpetuate the status quo that ‘might is right;’ simultaneously we have become increasingly logical and endlessly creative with regards to manipulating the physical environment; and, have created a burgeoning scientific and technological establishment to the extent where there are only two viable alternatives that confront us today; either we will suffer swift and total annihilation the consequence of the deployment of the weapons of mass destruction that we have devised; or, we will be consigned to enduring slow, lingering deaths from the seemingly irreversible, lethal long term effects of global warming.
But since it would appear I am only the second human being during all of human history who is capable of action mediated by higher mental processes and limited by the dictates of conscience, at this exceedingly critical moment in human history, I am here to offer a third alternative - a future replete and redolent with peace and prosperity; I am here to state that if a bare majority of human beings can change the man or woman in their mirrors by telling the truth as much as is humanly possible the practice of this methodology will create the mental acuity that will permit our species to overcome all the seemingly insurmountable obstacles to our survival in the long term.
Some months ago I confided in my mother that I believed that by telling the truth and doing the right thing as much as was humanly possible over a period that has spanned the past three decades I had become a man as good as Jesus was reported to be, she took that pronouncement to mean that I believed that I too was the son of an omnipotent god, that I was a latter day messiah, capable of performing miracles; and, of living forever.
I wish to make clear from the very outset that like Thomas Jefferson, I do not subscribe to any of that nonsense; what I do believe is that I accidentally embraced a moral approach to social reality, that of telling the truth and doing the right thing as much as was humanly possible; and, by practicing this approach I had eventually been transformed into a rational being, I had become capable of separating the facts from the numerous fictions that have become part and parcel of our documented history; and, had become capable of creating the accurate description of social problems that is the necessary prerequisite to finding solutions to these vexing, massive issues.
The American philosopher William James (1842 – 1910) insisted that the right to believe was determined by the will to believe. There is no scientific evidence for or against the existence of God or of human immortality, but we are justified in believing that there is a God and that men are immortal, for these beliefs are the deepest cravings of man. Without them, our moral standards, our hopes and aspirations, collapse. (Buchler 40)
In October, 1975 in a small park in Tel Aviv, Israel which contained a sculpture that depicted the thus far interminable, irresolvable conflict between good and evil a memorial to those who had died in the Munich Massacre, I made the decision to tell the truth as much as was humanly possible no matter what the consequences for myself or for others; this decision caused me to embark upon a journey of discovery during which I discovered that for all of my life up that point I had been a completely blind agent of coercion determined culture, carrying my ultimate fate in my soul while groping for my destiny with very little knowledge of the consequences of my actions because my higher mental processes were confined in the shackles of determinism.
On that date my life was at its lowest ebb, I was contemplating my imminent divorce an event that would cause me to be a visitor in the lives of my beloved children, my contribution to this tragic state of affairs had been the numerous affairs, infidelities and dalliances that had punctuated the eight years of my marriage facilitated by countless lies and deceits; hence my decision to tell the truth as much as was humanly possible for the rest of my life.
During this journey of discovery one of the most disheartening and debilitating facts that I have had to confront is that up to that moment I had had no real moral standards, that I had been a completely depraved human being and a bully to boot; that on more than one occasion I had used my superior strength, intelligence or social status to have my way with women, that I had mentally and physically abused my wife and the mother of my children until she had a mental breakdown, all because I had become aware that she had engaged in one affair, a direct contrast to the numerous affairs I had engaged in during the years we had been together.
If I can somehow achieve the impossible and penetrate the massive, ancient delusion that is the inevitable consequence of being an agent of coercion determined culture; for the first time at last the world of men and women in which I exist will have moral standards instead of there being an ever increasing difference between concept and precept in their lives; moreover, there will be a realistic alternative to existing in a world in which ‘lies brawl on a barren world, which to believe.’
In the vast majority of movies, television shows and fictional novels right perennially defeats and overcomes might, in the real world from the beginning of time might has been right, we have lived in a world dominated by and dedicated to satisfying and fulfilling the needs of a miniscule elite while the vast majority of human beings have experienced poverty, hunger and misery and very accurately could be described as the wretched of the earth; and have been conditioned to be oblivious of their pitiful states to the extent that if asked hubris would cause them to vehemently deny their pathetic and miserable conditions.
I want to demonstrate just how far I have progressed up the steep incline towards civility and morality because of the resolution I made on that blissful in retrospect, transcendent, watershed October day, just how much in the interim I have come to appreciate the estimable value of telling the truth - at any time of the day or night I will passively and unresistingly submit to being attached to a lie detector machine, waive my Fifth Amendment rights, answer any question about any and every moment and detail of my past life; and, submit to any punishment or penalty that my peers deem appropriate to atone for my actions; the subconscious compartment of my mind is as empty as I can make it and I am deeply and totally committed to doing whatever is required to keep it so, in the immortal, enlightening words of Dylan Thomas:
I have longed to move away
From the hissing of the spent lie
And the old terrors’ continual cry
Growing more terrible as the day
Goes over the hill into the deep sea;
I have longed to move away
From the repetition of salutes,
For there are ghosts in the air
And ghostly echoes on paper,
And the thunder of calls and notes.
I have longed to move away but am afraid;
Some life, yet unspent, might explode
Out of the old lie burning on the ground,
And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.
Neither by night’s ancient fear,
The parting of hat from hair,
Pursed lips at the receiver,
Shall I fall to death’s feather.
By these I would not care to die,
Half convention and half lie.

I shall die not as the man I want to be, or hope to be, or pretend to be, but as the man I am, that moral independent iconoclastic free spirit forged in the crucible of truth.
The first important revelation that proceeded from my practice of the discipline of truth was an appreciation of how stupid I had been to sexually neglect a young, healthy woman, how could I have been oblivious of the fact that such neglect must, soon or late, prompt her to be unfaithful if only to satisfy the relentless goading of her innate sex drive?
I had been the product of a broken home, had witnessed my mother being unfaithful to my father with strangers on at least two occasions, had endured the intense pain, misery and suffering occasioned by my parent’s divorce; and, watched my three siblings twisting and turning on the rack created by a broken home; and, had sworn that my children would never be subjected to that traumatic experience; yet I had engaged in actions diametrically opposed to those that would have preserved my family life blissfully unaware of the baleful, malefic consequences of my actions.
I belatedly realized that I could have had my cake and ate it, I could have serviced my wife as well as my several paramours, after in depth introspection facilitated by the practice of free association I realized that what had prevented me from doing this was GUILT, I had needed to justify and rationalize my manifest infidelities and had exaggerated and magnified my spouse’s human faults and imperfections to achieve that objective.
What I am evoking is a cultural theme; it is the string, guilt, which reduces each and every one of us to being puppets acting and performing driven by the dictates of culture, a design for human existence that I hold, is unalterably malignant, inordinately vile and completely depraved.
I live in Sunrise, Florida within a fifty mile radius of where I sit writing today there are numerous cities each with a mayor, a city hall, a police force, a library, water treatment plant, and garbage collection services. South of my location there are the cities of Plantation, Davie, Pembroke Pines, and Weston to name a few. North of where I sit writing there are the cities of Lauderhill, Tamarac, Margate, Coconut Creek, Pompano Beach, Oakland Park, and on, and on, and on.
In addition to each city having its own Police Force, there is the Broward County Sheriff’s Department, and a Department of State Troopers who police the highways in the State of Florida.
Each of these cities are perennially and desperately strapped for funds because they were incorporated without a tax base large enough to make it feasible for them to provide all the services and amenities that local government entities are expected to offer.
The rational solution to this problem would be to merge these municipalities into a governmental entity which could precipitate economies of scale and which would have a tax base large enough to support the provision of necessary services.
This problem is not confined to Florida it can be observed nationwide, forms of government that reflects and cossets the interest of the few; but which are destructive of the common good, governmental bureaucracies with compositions that are diametrically opposed to those that would contribute to the common good.
Then there is the Nine Trillion Dollar national debt, accumulated by both major political parties in their quest for political power, a quest certain to have been an exercise in complete futility until they could have come to grips with and resolve the ultimate paradox and consummate irony that is inherent in the human condition; that in concept we embrace the notion that ‘right is might,’ while in precept we are agents of coercion determined culture and are incapable of action that is inconsistent with the ideology that ‘might is right.’
This duality and dichotomy taints, immobilizes and renders futile every initiative and program conceived and implemented by the political bureaucracy in the USA and worldwide as demonstrated by the following and by the results of war on poverty declared by the United Nations:
How Farm Subsidies Harm Taxpayers, Consumers, and Farmers, Too
Driving Small Farmers out of Business. Farm subsidies are promoted as assistance to family farmers. In reality, they finance the demise of family farms and prevent young people from entering farming. Economists estimate that subsidies inflate the value of farmland by 30 percent. High farmland prices make starting a farm prohibitively expensive for younger people, who would also have other expenses, including buying expensive equipment, seeds, and pesticides. With young farmers unable to enter the industry, the average age of farmers has increased to 55.
Because agribusinesses are already the most profitable, they often use their enormous farm subsidies to buy out smaller family farms. In what has been called the "plantation effect," family farms with less than 100 acres are being bought out by larger agribusinesses, which then convert them into tenant farms. Three-quarters of rice farms have already become tenant farms, and other types of farms are trending in that same direction. Since 1945, the number of farms has dropped by two-thirds, and the average farm size has more than doubled to 441 acres.
This consolidation is not necessarily harmful and may improve efficiency. Large agribusinesses are not villainous. They often succeed because they can produce large quantities of food at low prices. Furthermore, the blame for the tilted distribution of farm subsidies lies with Congress, which writes the laws, rather than with the agribusinesses that cash the checks that they receive because of those laws.
Nevertheless, taxpayers should not be required to finance this consolidation through farm subsidies. By raising land values and financing consolidation, farm subsidies drive out existing small farmers and prevent new farmers from entering the industry.

The Scandalous Distribution of Farm Subsidies
One can imagine the result if Washington tried to solve poverty by creating a welfare program that applied only to workers in the fast food, cleaning, and retail industries. Everyone in those occupations would receive a government check, with the richest executives receiving the largest checks and the poorest workers receiving the smallest. Workers in other industries would receive nothing, no matter how poor they were.
Obviously, such a policy would be nonsense, yet this exemplifies how farm subsidies are distributed. The government's solution to alleged farmer poverty is to subsidize growers of wheat, cotton, corn, soybeans, and rice while giving no subsidies to producers of fruit, vegetables, beef, poultry, and livestock. Because subsidies are paid per acre, the largest and most profitable farms receive the largest subsidies, while family farms receive next to nothing.
Thus, a large, profitable rice corporation can receive millions while a family vegetable farmer receives nothing. Overall, farm subsidies are distributed with little regard to merit or need.
Corporate Welfare. Farm subsidies are promoted as helping struggling farmers, but Washington could guarantee every full-time farmer an income of nearly $40,000 for just $4 billion annually. Instead, farm policy is designed to aid corporate agribusinesses. Among farmers eligible for subsidies, just 10 percent of recipients collect 73 percent of the subsidies-an average of $91,000 per farm. By contrast, the average subsidy granted to the bottom 80 percent of recipients is less than $3,000 annually.
According to the USDA, the majority of farm subsidies are distributed to commercial farms, which have an average household income of $199,975 and a net worth of just under $2 million. Commercial farms are also among those that need subsidies the least because they are the most efficient. Former U.S. Farm Bureau President Dean Kleckner writes that the top quarter of corn farmers (usually agribusinesses with economies of scale) can produce a bushel of corn 68 percent cheaper than the bottom quarter of farms can. (Excerpt from article by the Heritage Foundation)
In every nation on Planet Earth ten per cent of the populace controls ninety per cent of the wealth, which will be the experience in agriculture in the USA if this policy of farm subsidy is not changed.
There is always method in my madness, in Broward County in what I believe is a vote buying scheme contrived to have a positive effect on the performance of the Democratic Party in the mid term elections, Twenty Million Dollars has been assigned to subsidize some two hundred enterprises - which could be said to have been added to the welfare rolls.
In 1996 while I was attending Broward County Community College I attempted to sound the tocsin about the state of the education product, one of the most destructive components of that system was the multiple choice test, in which a student was faced with four answers so that individual started off with a twenty five per cent chance of being right, subsidizing businesses will have a similarly destructive effect on the free enterprise system.
I suggest that providing subsidies is so completely nonsensical that it takes us to a place beyond the Twilight Zone in terms of the exceedingly destructive impact intervention by the State Intervention has had on national economies, beyond the imbecility of Communism of state ownership of the modes of production, into a zone of economic non being and sterility into which only the Obama Administration would have the effrontery, gall and outright stupidity to navigate especially at this particular perilous period in the history of this nation.
Just consider how long Twenty Million Dollars would last if it were utilized to attempt to subsidize the wage bill of one Wal-Mart Supercenter, but already disingenuous gullible employers are gearing up to employ only those meet the requirements that attract the subsidy in the hope that they will be added to the depressingly long list of recipients of governmental largesse; even though these requirements are blatantly unconstitutional and discriminate against every other class of worker.
At this juncture we might want to examine what might not be an exhaustive list of those who have their snouts in the Government trough; first of all national and state agencies are the employers of the largest numbers in every state, of individuals who produce nothing but shuffle papers and fill out forms, then there are defense, construction and other types of contractors, the millions of unemployed, those who receive Social Security Benefits including welfare mothers and the permanently disabled, then we have retired persons; and, those on Medicare and Medicaid, Food Stamps and emergency cash assistance, who receive Farm and other kinds of subsidies.
The question is what percentage of the able bodied remains to produce goods and services, and create a tax base from which can be collected the revenue to pay these porcine individuals; and, service the gargantuan national debt?
Other questions might be reasonably asked by an objective observer to this sad, perilous state of affairs, how many potential investors did the Six Hundred Billion Dollars loaned to AIG dissuade from becoming entrepreneurs?
How many were put off by the Eight Hundred Billion Dollar Stimulus Package, the source of the Twenty Million Dollars being used to subsidize two hundred small businesses in Broward County, by the way how were these chosen to be recipients of government largesse?
I may be still crazy after all these years but should any member of the Obama Administration expect and anticipate that any investor who is not crazy would want to invest in a nation which has a national debt of Nine Trillion Dollars which must at some point be paid while the Government of that nation has unlimited power to tax; and continues to spend as if they have unlimited cash reserves, as if there is a money tree to support their overweening profligacy?
This is the straw that broke this camel’s back, this is what convinced me to take the baton of truth from my brother Jesus and attempt to construct a hypothesis that would explain how would it be possible for agents of coercion determined culture to be educated in ivy league universities and have high intelligence quotients yet have absolutely no clue about what they were doing; and moreover, be completely oblivious of that fact.
My conclusion is that a design for human existence based on the world view ‘might is right,’ whose ethos was competition, whose dominant social roles were territorial predator and hapless prey, which relied on coercion to motivate the other, whose impact on the species had been unalterably malignant, inordinately vile, and completely depraved could only be perpetuated by beings whose intellects had been disabled, whose intellects were completely lamed by guilt.
Then I examined the history of that species and discovered that for at least One Hundred Thousand Years of the history of our species its members had languished in a ‘state of nature:’
During the Paleolithic and Mesolithic ages man had already become master of the animal kingdom in the sense that he was the chief and most adaptable of predators; but despite his tools, his social organization, and his peculiar capacity to enlarge and transmit his culture, he still remained narrowly dependent on the balance of nature. The next great step in mankind's ascent toward lordship over the earth was the discovery of means whereby the natural environment could be altered to suit human needs and convenience. With the domestication of plants and animals and with the development of methods whereby fields could be made where forests grew by nature, man advanced to a new level of life. He became a shaper of the animal and vegetable life around him, rather than a mere predator upon it.
This advance opened a radically new phase of human history. The predator's mode of life automatically limits numbers; and large-bodied predators, like early men and modern lions, must perforce remain relatively rare in nature. Thus larger populations, with all the possibilities of specialization and social differentiation which numbers permit, could only be sustained by human communities that found ways of escaping from the natural limits imposed by their predatory past. This constituted perhaps the most basic of all human revolutions. Certainly the whole history of civilized mankind depended on the enlargement of the human food supply through agriculture and the domestication of animals. (McNeil 10)
For a period that lasted for One Hundred Thousand Years early men existed in hunting and gathering societies in the crucible that was the ‘state of nature’ during the subsequent Ten Thousand years the form of government that dominated was Absolutist regimes, culturally and socially an extension of the ‘state of nature’ since under these regimes an absolute ruler had the power of life or death over his subjects.
Whatever its ultimate origin, the institution of kingship stabilized itself in Sumer by superimposing military relationships upon an older religio-political system. The authority of a field commander over his army served as prototype for the king's authority over the city; and the rise of kingship may be conceived as a process whereby extraordinary powers delegated in time of war became normal in peacetime. Kings arrogated to themselves supreme military and judicial authority and organized royal households analogous to the divine households of the temple communities. In so doing, they encroached upon the administrative authority of the priestly colleges; and no doubt the relation between king and priest was often an uneasy one. Perhaps accommodation usually occurred without prolonged dispute or open violence; but we are informed that Urukagina, king of Lagash (ca. 2400 B.C.), openly set himself against the priests, proposing to restore the good old days by protecting the poor and weak against priestly oppression. In time, however, royal usurpation became sanctified by myth and ritual, of which the central act was an annual ceremonial marriage between king and goddess of the city.
In proportion as war became chronic, kingship became necessary. Concentration of political authority in the hands of a single man seems to have become the rule in Sumerian cities by 3000 B.C. (McNeil 43)
During the initial One Hundred Thousand years that human beings existed they were perennially exposed to the paradigm of predation, of prey contributing their everything up to and including their lives to satisfy the need for energy resources of the predator, they learned this model for human existence in the learning crucible that existed then; and, I suggest, this model has determined, thus far immutably, the fundamental, intrinsic nature of human existence.
They were not only conditioned to playing the roles of territorial predator and prey, they learned to murder without compunction interlopers and trespassers into the land area required to support the tribe, to kidnap females from other tribes so that their tribe would not be lumbered with too many defectives the consequence of inbreeding, activities essential to survival then which now attract legal sanctions including execution.
The basic issue that confronts us today is how to break habits successfully practiced for One Hundred and Twelve Thousand years?
The fundamental conflict that we are engaged in is not between good and evil but between the ways of thinking, attitudes and patterns of behavior that were learned in the crucible that was the ‘state of nature,’ and, the more rational, moral, and civilized that dreamers and iconoclasts like myself have fantasized about constructing.
In these articles I have subscribed to version of history opportunistically widely popularly held that human history should be divided into a prehistoric, largely undocumented era, an ancient era; and, a modern era.
The fact is that until the human species becomes aware of, rejects and renounces the design for human existence based on the ideology ‘might is right,’ whose ethos is competition, whose dominant roles are territorial predator and hapless prey, which relies on coercion to motivate action; what we will be doing, all we will be doing is repeating the past over, and over, again.
Up to this moment, I had been prey to the fallacy that the modern era began Two Thousand years ago; but in fact two thousand years ago was when ethics and values began to have a significant impact on human affairs; but this precipitated another adaptation that perpetuated the status quo of coercion determined culture, the requisite cultural change that I am promoting did not occur, what happened was that ethics and values were adopted in concept, while in precept human beings remained agents of the design for human existence learned in the ‘state of nature.’
This is evidenced by the fact that the revolutions that overthrew Absolutist Regimes, the French and American revolutions, occurred a mere four centuries ago; and, what occurred as a consequence of those social cataclysms were sterile exchanges of elites; as was the consequence of the Russian revolution in the Twentieth Century.
In fact, the adaptation that perpetuated coercion determined some two thousand years ago, left it not only revitalized but considerably stronger; since as a consequence of this adaptation human beings no longer knew what they were doing, they became oblivious of certain critically important components of social existence, for example, the role played by motivation in human action.
As evidenced by the fact that over the past four centuries massive limitations have been placed on the degree and extent to which coercion in any form, overt or covert, could be applied to human beings – without creating an alternative means of galvanizing the patterns of behavior required for societal functioning and progress.
This is in itself and by itself is an absolute and incontrovertible proof of the hypothesis I am promoting – how could human beings cease driving other human beings with whips, exquisite tortures, manacles and chains; and, laterally by the threat of dismissal; without substituting an alternative means of motivating the effort needed to produce goods and services.
A paradigm that applies to every social institution, how could they cease to use the rod to socialize children; or, cease to deny women access the means to make a living; and, erase the Draconian penalties and system of blind justice that was the basis of societal order – without creating an alternative means of attaining that objective without being aware that such was needed – resulting in the destruction of family life, the failure of the education system, the high rates of divorce; and, anomie and incipient chaos loose in social systems where attempts are being made to create functioning democracies.
How could they?
They could because the accommodation that permitted the perpetuation of the status quo of coercion determined culture after the discovery of ethics and values diametrically opposed to the notion that ‘might is right,’ effectively disabled the higher mental process of human beings and caused them to not know what they were doing.
What I am saying is that the miniscule elites in every social system denied the majority access to education and by so doing caused them to interminably be languished in a state of being talking animals, in a condition that caused them to be easy prey so all the years of human history they could never act only react to changes in the social environment, impulses for change could never come from this group.
But what disabled the intelligence of members of those miniscule elites who controlled, and continue to control, ninety per cent or more of the wealth generated in every country?
What I am suggesting is that their capacity for intelligence was disabled by guilt, by the activities that were required to accumulate and increase their power which they consigned to the unconscious compartments of their minds, but being unaware of the awesome cruelties, tyrannies and abuses of power that they were engaging in had a price, guilt, which effectively disabled their capacity for intelligence.
According to Freud, then, the repressed, or unconscious, is the unverbalized. (Dollard 198)
The question is how did professed Christians, individuals who paid lip service to Christian values, how did they engage in the horrific acts of brutality that occurred in the Crusades, during the period when human beings traversed the Middle Passage, how were Europeans capable of genocide against American populations, how were white Americans capable of genocide against Native American tribes, how did Germans kill millions of human beings in concentration camps, how do Jews many of them descendants of those who survived those concentration camps commit genocide against Palestinians?
Human beings are capable of such atrocities because they possess a subconscious compartment in their minds to which they can consign material which is unverbalized, which they never talk or think about thereafter, because they have the means to not know what they are doing.
I have experienced both states, for the first thirty years of my life I was an agent of coercion based culture and did not know what I was doing; for the remainder of my life, I will be sixty five years old on September 11 of this year, I have been painfully stripping from my psyche the ways of thinking, attitudes, irrational beliefs, illusions and delusions that I had accumulated during the initial thirty years of my existence and have come to know what I am doing.
The unbreakable leash on which inappropriate behavior is chained is that once I came to understand the consequences of my actions, when I realized and became aware of the negative impact I could have on the lives of others I became incapable of such actions; but reporting on acts that I engaged in the years prior to my marriage on July 13, 1967 might help to demonstrate the effects of guilt as well as how function was achieved in social systems whose design for existence was coercion determined culture.
During that period I lived in my father’s house and worked at the Esso Refinery on a rotating shift, which meant that two weeks out of three on Friday mornings I was alone at home with the maidservant Gwen who was hired to give all the rooms in the house a thorough cleaning once each week.
I paid her as much as she earned to clean the house to have sex with me, an exercise that was not onerous or tedious because I suffered mightily from premature ejaculation and was a one minute man, or, on some occasions a thirty second man; as was demonstrated when our housekeeper returned early from her trip to Coronation Market where she bought ground provisions and other food items not readily available elsewhere, not wanting to lose the income I provided Gwen changed my oil even while our housekeeper was knocking at the door of my room knowing that our relations would be exceeding brief.
Yet for the duration of my honeymoon I acted diametrically opposed to what had been my prior experiences, I had sex as many times as I wished to, and could control my ejaculation so that my new wife also attained orgasm, sexual prowess that I had never displayed before in my life; and have seldom demonstrated in all the years since.
This sequence of events demonstrates the impact of guilt on function; and, how a ritual, the marriage ceremony can reduce guilt and seemingly miraculously improve function, a connection I was unable to make until years later after I began to practice the discipline of truth.
Simply stated, this is my objective today, to provide members of my species the means to overcome the laming of their intellects produced by guilt; and, provide thereby the means for my race to overcome the obstacles to creating a future replete and redolent with peace and prosperity.
And I speak from experience, from blind protagonist groping for my destiny immutably imprisoned by the shackles of determinism I have developed into an individual capable of prophesy, who before the conference of the Democratic Party in August, 2008 created the following description of events:
In the Western movie, “The Big Country,” the hero played by Gregory Peck, when about to engage in the quixotic and heroic enterprise of mounting a rogue bronco; asked the Mexican stable hand for advice; that worthy said simply and succinctly “Don’t do it.”
In that romantic fantasy created by dream merchants, the hero disregarded that advice and rode that recalcitrant and rebellious equine to a standstill and sustained no permanent damage, no broken body parts, despite being thrown on numerous occasions; and, so demonstrated his courage, stamina and bravery.
I am about to proffer the same advice to Senator Barack Obama, in respect of his quest to become the first African American President of the United States of America, I say to him, “Don’t do it.”
I say this because when you are sworn in a few months from now, you will be taking responsibility for cleaning up the most gigantic, toxic, foul smelling mess that any new President will ever confront in the modern era, or any past era, of American politics; and, you will begin with an immutable and awesome liability, the racial bigotry in this nation.
And:
I have not referred to Senator McCain because I believe that his prospects are as dim and as dismal as that of the proverbial snowball in hell.
To state that the body politic, if they were better educated, would be more amenable to accepting and supporting long term solutions to the gigantic, gargantuan mess created by the Bush Administration, no President in history will have a harder row to plow to return the ship of state to an even keel; is, to shed copious, meaningless tears over split milk.
Can Senator Obama play the flip flop role of political animal to be elected, and, once he is in office act in a principled fashion?
If he has not the courage and foresight to tell it like it is now, where will he find the courage to do that after he is elected when there are imperatives and issues of even greater moment on his plate?
What he is doing now is engaging in the first responses of what will become a habit, a methodology that will inform all his initiatives, policies and actions throughout his administration, an approach that informed the approach of every modern President, an approach that has palpably and comprehensively failed; that has culminated in the failure that is apparent in every circumstance and aspect of existence in what used to be the richest nation on Planet Earth.

And:
The point I am trying to make is that there are large numbers of human beings in this country who would not vote for Senator Obama if it was unmistakably clear he was a present day King Midas capable of the alchemy of transforming base metals into gold, or, tap water into high grade gasoline.
The amount of excrement that has accumulated in this social system under the Bush Administration is such that cleaning it up will become a Herculean task, requiring a mythical hero capable of cleaning what has become analogous to the Aegean stables of Greek mythology; and, Senator Obama’s failure to perform this miracle of societal redemption, he will very likely preside over this nation’s demotion from superpower status, will be easily explained by some people, who will never understand that no human being would have been equal to this task; and will assume that his failure is a consequence of his ethnic background and determine to never again entrust this lofty, crucial, executive position to a black man.
In fact, the reason for this failure, this now easily discernible, unmistakable governmental and political failure, is the accumulation of fecal matter that began to clog this social system when a limit was placed on the extent and degree to which coercion in any form, overt or covert, could be applied to citizens - without substituting an alternative means of motivating the patterns of behavior necessary for societal order, functioning and progress.
This secular decline will continue, global warming will continue apace melting the polar ice caps; the economy will continue to suffer from the malady of low levels of production and productivity; the rates of crime and drug abuse will continue to climb, as will divorce rates; even as the health care system and the education product continue to exist in a limbo of insignificance, incompetence, corruption and ineptitude - until Americans become capable of connecting the dots, realize that the fundamental problem is coercion based culture, and embark upon the requisite cultural change by adopting positive reinforcements as the means relied on to motivate action.
But that will never happen in time to save Senator Obama, so I have created an alternative ploy that will allow him to confound his critics.
I suggest that in the upcoming Democratic Convention he throw his support and delegate votes behind former Vice President Al Gore and cause him to be Candidate of the Democratic Party in the upcoming Presidential Elections, with Senator Barack Obama as his Vice Presidential nominee.
This recommendation has little to do with the relative merits of these individuals and everything to do with the need, the pressing vital need to unify this nation and enlist the maximum cooperation and engage the capacity for self sacrifice in all segments of the body politic necessary to clean up the mess created by corruption, immorality and selfishness and to restore this nation to its preeminent position and superpower status on Planet Earth, this recommendation has the deliberate intent of removing the justification and excuse of racism for those whose deeply embedded prejudices and predilections would cause them to effectively be a ‘bone in the throat’ of this momentous and transcendent enterprise.
If Senator Obama were to embrace this expedient, it would also provide an example of altruism and sacrifice so patriotic and so redolent and replete with commitment to the common good, especially because it would be the quixotic and idealistic gesture of an individual of color, an individual the descendant of the most oppressed national and ethnic grouping on Planet Earth; that it might by itself and in itself overcome the divisions and prejudices that divide this nation and create national consolidation.
Three decades ago I made a similar and equally bizarre suggestion to adherents of the Jamaica Labor Party, who then seemed certain to achieve a massive plurality in upcoming elections in my island in the sun.
I suggested that a government of national unity would be in the best interest of the Jamaican nation, and in the best interests of the Jamaica Labor Party; because such a government would best be able to sustain and endure the political fallout from balancing the national budget which would require cutting fifty thousand civil service jobs and other measures of fiscal austerity that would require extreme sacrifices from the Jamaican people; that recommendation was comprehensively and contemptuously ignored.
And:
The consequence of ignoring these recommendations was that Prime Minister Seaga was forced to call a snap election that overtook the nation like a ‘thief in the night,’ which the Jamaica Labor Party won, because the major Opposition Party did not participate; but which eventually resulted in that organization spending eighteen years in the desolation and wilderness of being the political opposition.
The point I am trying to make is that my recommendations may seem to be quixotic, romantic and downright impractical to ambitious, selfish political animals whose primary objective is to attain and sustain their political position and prerogatives whatever the spin they put on this unseemly and venal enterprise; but these recommendations are actually what are necessary to achieve the common good; moreover, in the long term they would redound to the benefit of the most power hungry politician.
To be more specific, if Senator Obama were to embrace the expedient of stepping aside when he has the nomination won, he might create the national unity and the national consolidation necessary for national redemption, and, recoup the fortunes of ‘Uncle Sam’ at a time when that personage seems to be more demoralized, more apathetic, more hopeless than at any time in this nation’s history; he would also make certain that he would be deservedly afforded the status of national hero - whether or not Al Gore was able to galvanize the American people to make good on his recent ambitious challenge with respect to overcoming global warming; and, Senator Obama is young enough to capitalize on, and reap great political rewards from his seemingly quixotic, unprecedented and idealistic gesture.
I am not claiming perfection, I am capable of making mistakes recently I was sure that “Dudus” would never be allowed to be deported to the USA, I was wrong; what I am trying to do is compare the capacities of two approaches to social reality to create the accurate description of problems that are the necessary prerequisite to finding solutions to these problems; one approach is one lamed by guilt which perennially produces prescriptions diametrically opposed to those that would create function; the other is based on the prescription telling the truth will make you free, that the practice of the discipline of truth will create the mental acuity required to ensure the survival of the species; and, create a future replete and redolent with prosperity.
Thirty five years ago I stumbled upon the mechanism that impelled cultural change, telling the truth as much as was humanly possible and began slowly and agonizingly to KNOW what I was doing; since then I have tried to communicate the inestimable, redemptive value of telling the truth to members of my species, who have seen my efforts as attempts to rip and release the skeletons from their closets and destroy their lives; when what I have been doing is attempting to demonstrate that the necessary prerequisite to solving any problem is its accurate description.
Communicating this has proved impossible; it has been an exercise in complete futility for me to galvanize even one human being to do what I have done, to tell the truth until it significantly improves his or her mental acuity, which always has been my objective.
I am going to present my prescription for the revitalization of the American economy but before doing that I would like to attempt to communicate some other extremely significant components of my journey of discovery.
I was privileged to be the Change Agent for a group of stevedores as they developed from being agents of coercion determined culture whose ideology was that ‘might is right,’ whose ethos was competition, whose dominant roles were territorial predator and hapless prey, which relied on coercion to motivate the other; and, observe as they became agents of cooperative capitalism, whose ideology was that ‘right is might,’ whose ethos was cooperation, which relied on positive reinforcements to motivate the other.
I was able to examine in great detail the origins and development of this organization structure by having access to its history from its inception when Esso opened a Lube Plant in Kingston, Jamaica to supply markets in the Caribbean and Central America and began to export this product in cans, pails and drums over its Dry Cargo Dock.
Esso contracted out the stevedoring service required to load the Motor Vessel Esso “Caribe,” and on each occasion this vessel arrived to be loaded large numbers of prospective stevedores gathered at the gate to the dock and remained there as long as the motor vessel remained in port.
A stevedoring gang was chosen and if the effort of any individual slacked he was immediately replaced amidst loud cries of “All Gone” by one of those who remained at the gate to take advantage of just such an eventuality; in these conditions loading rates up to twenty four tons per hour were achieved.
The stevedoring operation also included the import of fertilizer materials for an operation that bagged and sold fertilizer to Jamaican farmers, this plant was laterally purchased by Grace Chemical without any disruption in the stevedoring operation; until the arrival of an automatic boat which could unload the fertilizer materials without human assistance.
The skilled workers who operated the cranes, winches and forklifts in the operations organized the stevedores and the entire group sought to become members of the National Workers Union.
Strike action in pursuit of this objective followed and strike breakers were hired out of Tivoli Gardens, a garrison enclave of the Jamaica Labor Party.
Violent clashes began to occur between the stevedores on strike and the scabs, but a bloodbath was averted by an agreement amongst the workers that when operations began anew, one stevedoring gang would be recruited from individuals who lived in Tivoli Gardens.
A poll of the workers and the National Workers Union was granted bargaining rights for the stevedores; and, the threat of dismissal was no longer meaningful or potent means of motivation and unloading and loading rates deteriorated very significantly, on some graveyard shifts it began to be observed that no material was loaded or unloaded; and, stevedores began to be observed in reclining positions and to be emitting sounds more appropriate to bedrooms than an industrial operation.
This organizational structure became a microcosm reflecting what was happening in social systems worldwide which were attempting to create functioning democracies and in which human beings had begun the arduous journey from subject to citizen.
The situation became intolerable for the Esso management and that component of the stevedoring operation was removed to the Kingston Commercial Docks, the unloading of fertilizer was facilitated by flexible metal conveyor belts that could be extended to side of the Motor Vessel on which the fertilizer materials could be loaded and conveyed directly to storage bins so this component was therefore tied to the Dry Cargo Dock since the Commercial Docks did not have similar facilities.
It was at this point I was interjected into this industrial arena to organize a cooperative organization to replace the Contractor who had absconded after unsuccessfully attempting to navigate the shoals and reefs of insolvency caused by the loss of income from the Esso component of the operation.
In subsequent negotiations the Esso management created an open ended system of rewards for the operation which demonstrated to me the clear advantage and superiority of positive reinforcements over coercion as the means relied on to motivate human beings.
I became aware that the hourly rate did little to motivate productivity especially because it was the market rate of reward in a country where there was unemployment rates of upwards of twenty per cent; that it was the threat of dismissal that had galvanized effort; in fact hourly rates were dysfunctional and counterproductive since the longer the motor vessel was at the dock the greater the take home pay of the stevedores.
In the new open ended system of rewards the hourly rate was converted into rate per ton loaded by a mathematical conversion so simple that the majority of stevedores many of whom were functionally illiterate could follow and understand the calculations, a critically important component of selling the new system to the stevedores.
In addition, the Esso management volunteered the information that the Motor Vessel was hired at $1200/hour and that if demurrage savings resulted from the change these savings would be shared equally among members of the fledgling cooperative organization.
I feel constrained to state for emphasis that I was constrained to perceive and contrast the different organizational structures and the ideologies that underpinned these structures intimately and closely; the first motivated by the threat of dismissal, which produced a market rate of wages with direct consequences for the quality of life of the stevedores; that this depended for function on the notion that ‘might is right,’ or more accurately that the workers had no rights; but which produced loading rates of twenty four tons per hour.
That this was succeeded when the Union gained bargaining and other rights for the stevedores that this resulted in rising tides of indiscipline, incipient chaos and the bankruptcy of the organizational structure; and, loading rates that fell to zero on the graveyard shifts, the impact of democratic ideals and institutions now being experienced in the USA and world wide because in precept the notion that ‘might is right’ still dominates social relations and agents of coercion determined culture are psychologically incapable of creating systems of reward that would release the creativity of labor because their minds are lamed by guilt.
With the advent of the open ended system of rewards the workers eventually attained loading rates of thirty two tons per hour, the closest productivity of Jamaican workers had approached that of similar workers in the USA, a fact that could be easily verified because the Esso “Caribe” was loaded with a similar cargo in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; further cooperation and trust increased between the Esso management and members of the cooperative structure to a degree unprecedented in my experience, for example, the management acquired loading hooks from a Scandinavian operation for the fifty five gallon drums that improved the loading rate from twelve tons per hour to sixteen tons per hour; moreover, pilfering of the product was reduced which had been accomplished by product being redirected to small canoes that were ‘fishing’ in the area whenever the “Caribe” was in port.
Need I say it; I became a devotee of culture which depended on positive reinforcements to motivate the other to the extent that this became the basis for all my social interaction.
It began innocuously enough, my significant other during that period used to read before sleep sometimes this had the consequence of reducing my conjugal rights; instead of demonstrating my disgust I used positive reinforcements which resulted in sexual relations so different, so comparatively more fulfilling that coercion was extinguished from my courtship repertoire.
It reached the point where on every date that I engaged in thereafter I played the role of ‘prey,’ with the certain knowledge that this would inevitably, soon or late, prompt the other actor to become the predator, chasing someone who was not really motivated to escape but really fully and deeply appreciated the stimulation, excitement and the lubrication produced in the predator by the chase.
Finally, transcendentally I decided that I would attempt to climb the mountain to attain the moral pinnacle of monogamy, I set myself the objective of being faithful to my significant other; when I canvassed this possibility with my father he said he had never been faithful to one woman; but he was faithful to all women; which must provide some insight in how difficult it was for me to break the habit of promiscuity.
But eventually I succeeded even in this transcendent, momentous enterprise; when I decided that I would immediately report all incidents of unfaithfulness to my significant other the first time I confronted her, after they occurred.
Once I made this resolution, I discovered the means to become a moral being, not only had I found the unbreakable leash on my promiscuity but on all my inadequacies.
Mr. Simpson got away with murder because after stabbing his former wife and the mother of his children, and another human being, innumerable times; he was so unrepentant that he hired a team of lawyers to champion and promote his guilt, to declaim, “If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit.”
The key to this system is that it is a ‘state of nature,’ it is permissive of human beings avoiding responsibility for their actions; I was never caught being unfaithful I was too careful and intelligent for that, no one even came close to catching me, I would never have been so careless and indiscreet as to make love to a woman in the bed she shared with her husband or anywhere else in her home.
But once I could do it, once I had achieved complete fidelity, my intelligence required me to compare and contrast the two states, to break it down and understand it.
What my analysis produced that there was period that lasted for about three months maximum when love was new, when you would go to some convenient place to make love during your lunch time, when you could not get enough of the other person.
Then, the withdrawal began, you began to be careful during those periods when you might do the unforgivable, call her by the wrong name; when you began to be less than completely honest about your activities and schedules, because such knowledge must result in your having to explain gaps in time, and inconsistencies in your whereabouts.
And, for me, for romantic me, infidelity must be justified and to do that her faults and inadequacies must be magnified for after all you have great judgment and lust would not have blinded you to the point where you are saddled with someone that is totally inappropriate, you are not and never could be, a low biter.
But now you are faithful, there is no reason to worry about uttering the wrong name, no reason to obfuscate about your comings and goings, you can be trusted and you can trust; you can reveal who you really are and relax with another in that knowledge and you begin to reach levels of closeness and intimacy that were unprecedented in your experience, and these conditions reinforce each other so that you can begin to be tolerant about her faults and imperfections and accept and respect her as she really is, you become capable of LOVING another human being who is not a child.
And this capacity for increased intimacy and for love spreads to all your relationships, as had the other capacities that were the direct, inevitable consequence of the practice of the discipline of truth; and one day you arise to a new actuality the fact that you have become a civilized human being.
It is this journey of discovery that I am promoting for every single human being; I am promoting positive reinforcements as being infinitely superior to coercion as the means used to motivate the other; that the notion that ‘right is might’ creates the possibility of happiness for human beings, in the same way that the notion that ‘might is right’ creates social systems in which the majority can be described as the wretched of the earth.
There was another critically important component to my attaining this synthesis, on my way to Israel I sojourned in Mattapan, Boston with a woman with whom I had been infatuated, the other woman in the last affair before the breakup of my marriage.
Her cousin was studying medicine at Boston University and made me a present of a text he saw me idly reading, the name of that book was “Personality and Psychotherapy” by John Dollard and Neal E. Miller, it was an analysis of Learning, Thinking and Culture; and, without the knowledge it contained it is likely the human species would never have the opportunity to avoid self destruction implicit in the innovative synthesis that I am attempting to communicate.
It introduced me to behavior psychology and contained the following:
Human behavior is learned; precisely that behavior which is widely felt to characterize man as a rational being, or as a member of a particular nation or social class, is learned rather than innate. We also learn fears, guilt, and other socially acquired motivations, as well as symptoms and rationalizations – factors which are characteristic of normal personality but show up more clearly in extreme form as neurosis. Successful psychotherapy provides new conditions under which neurosis is unlearned and other more adaptive habits are learned. (Dollard 25)
And:
The field of human learning covers phenomena which range all the way from the simple, almost reflex, learning of a child to avoid a hot radiator, to the complex processes of insight by which a scientist constructs a theory. Throughout the whole range, however, the same fundamental factors seem to be exceedingly important. These factors are: drive, cue, response and reinforcement. They are frequently referred to with other roughly equivalent words – drive as motivation, cue as stimulus, response as act or thought, and reinforcement as reward. (Dollard 25)
I as strove to understand this text have taken erroneous positions, I have stated that coercion determined culture inevitably produced neurosis in agents of that design for human existence, I now would more accurately state that this produces individuals who do not know what they are doing, some to such a degree that they are neurotic.
Every process or laboratory technician in the Esso Kingston Refinery stole gasoline, a practice that began as soon as gasoline began to be available near the end of 1963, a pattern of behavior initiated by personnel from oil refineries in the USA and Canada who had been recruited to train and assist Jamaicans in the start up of the Esso Kingston Refinery, from which I may deduce that this practice was the norm in all these refineries.
For the first year of operation I stole gasoline, until I saw a lab technician stealing this product before travelling to his honeymoon in Negril with his new wife in the car; and, decided that this practice had become too dangerous, that individuals had become too careless and complacent and that someone would soon be caught and decided that someone would not be me.
Then, I was exposed to the experience of Frank Serpico a detective in the New York Police Department and decided that, like every individual in the refinery, every detective in the City of New York was on the ‘sheet.’
And, laterally I became a Union Officer representing thousands of Jamaican workers and realized that immorality was ubiquitous and endemic among Union Officers, politicians and workers in that country.
I also wrote a column for the Daily Gleaner as an independent journalist for three years a period during which that conclusion was reinforced beyond reasonable doubt.
What I think today is that the way to accumulate power has requirements that result in the individual’s intellect being lamed to some degree; and, the greater the accumulation of power the more immoral are the requirements and the more the intellect is lamed.
For example, after developing a compulsion to utter in mixed company of refinery technicians and their wives many years after the fact, I referred to the pilfering of gasoline; and, the silence, the pregnant with guilt silence that greeted my faux pas convinced me that no wife present was privy to those activities of her husband; and, these individuals who had habitually stolen gasoline for several years had buried this fact deep in the subconscious compartments of their lives.
Consider how deeply buried must be the criminal activities of detectives, judges and politicians when they stand to lose so much if discovered; and, what they will do to avoid being found out.
Just how dangerous it is to be opening the doors of closets that contain the skeletons of individuals or organizations was demonstrated to me when I had the temerity to criticize the life style of my beloved daughter; and, was made homeless as a result.
The real issue here is whether a bare majority of human beings in any social system, a social system being the totality of learning circles, of drives, cues, responses and reinforcements in any nation, can break the habit of seeing the other as prey, as individuals became habituated to doing during the One Hundred Thousand years the species languished in the ‘state of nature;’ and, see the other in social interaction as being worthy of their respect, compassion and their love.
I had a clear head start in this regard, when Shimon Zuckerman during the lecture on Communication in the Afro Asian Institute asked for definitions of love, I answered,’ to care for someone more than you care for yourself,’ I love my children much more than I love myself; and, I loved that daughter more than I had ever loved any other human being and demonstrated this for all the days of her life yet she made me homeless, for telling her the truth.
In the context of a situation in which it is generally accepted that describing any problem accurately is the necessary prerequisite to finding viable, workable solutions.
When that happened most of me died, what lived was that part of me that has a magnificent obsession, to change the world into one in which incidents of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man is the rare exception rather than the rule as it is today.
I am now convinced that I can survive anything, whatever this world of talking animals throws at me; and, that when what’s left of me dies with my final breath I will be crying, freedom…freedom…freedom.
And I am not in any sense straying from the issue - that culture is ubiquitous, pervasive and deeply embedded in every social system; and, the awesome difficulties that are involved in creating positive changes.
The text “Personality and Psychotherapy” was written by two Americans and is greatly valued in Israel, one Instructor in the Institute when he became aware that I had a copy told everyone else, a lot of people in that country are aware of the significance of human motivation, those deported from the Arab countries learnt first the value of working hard; if necessary they moved sand from one place to another, and the next day they moved it back, or they did not eat.
In the USA, as I write, some people have been receiving unemployment benefits for three years, they are learning the habit that you can live without working or engaging in any activity to support yourself, a habit as destructive as subsidies and not unrelated to that thinly disguised corporate welfare program.
In the USA has occurred during the past one hundred years some of the most important advances in the Social Sciences, yet these have had no impact on the operation of any social institution, no impact on the operation of governmental bureaucracies, or, on the operation of any political party which are all committed to winning elections even though it is palpably obvious that every win has a negative impact on the common good, or if we are lucky no impact at all.
No one in this country has any idea what a Learning Circle is, very few have ever heard about the “Modernization Ideals” I live marooned in a population composed of talking animals, among individuals the actions of the vast majority of whom are not limited by the dictates of conscience or mediated by higher mental processes.
It was the same in Jamaica; only in Israel did I meet anyone who had the least pretensions to civility in precept; and, now that nation is engaged in trying to steal Palestine from the Palestinians as the world impotently watches.
Yet I remain hopeful, on most days I believe that fate could not be so cruel as to spin out a human being who was willing to endure the inability to satisfy any drive for the best part of thirty years; who was capable of enduring unpredictable bouts of poverty, of losing everything of economic, social and emotional value again and again without losing his resolve to tell the truth and do the right thing as much as was humanly possible; who could bear bouts of homelessness without losing his compassion and sympathy for the wretched of this earth; a man who has his red wings who has abstained from sex with others for seventeen years in the cause of cultural change; I must believe that the human species will survive, that we will turn around this avalanche of Absolutism and live to populate the stars.
The Congress must pass an Amendment to the Constitution that requires that the Annual National Budget by balanced, that the government spend what it earns; that balancing the budget by borrowing can only be utilized to an agreed percentage to achieve this objective with the unanimous agreement of members of both Houses of Congress.
An Emergency Fund, separate from the Revenue Account, must be created by contributions from each State, to take care of National Emergencies, Acts of Nature, and other such Occurrences so that these never again become a burden on Revenues.
That after three years incomes will no longer be taxed so that taxation never again becomes a disincentive to production of goods and services; that a Consumption Tax be introduced that will provide revenues for the government, a penny per pound on items like flour, sugar etc. a hundred per cent on items like luxury automobiles; for the initial three years both revenue streams will be collected to ensure that collection can be streamlined to avoid disruption in the transition period and to pay down the National Debt to a manageable level; with the proviso that any new enterprise that produces a saleable item that hires more than thirty workers be absolved of paying taxes on profits or incomes for a period of three years.
That all hourly rates by replaced by open ended systems of reward; by straight incentive or progression schemes that provide real rewards for merit, initiative, hard work and effort.
That each and every Public School be locked down with notice and searched for drugs, weapons and contraband; and, those found in possession of such items be summarily expelled; that when such schools reopen corporal punishment, uniforms and other aids to creating discipline be instituted and rigorously enforced without fear or favor. In addition that a Free Literacy Program becomes a legal requirement for all those who cannot read at High School Graduate level.
That the use of prohibited substances be decriminalized since the effect of the war on drugs have failed to curtail or limit the use of such substances but have had the effect of making drug trafficking the most lucrative and profitable enterprise in the USA and filled the jails and prisons clogging the Legal System; and, providing unimaginable wealth to criminal organizations which wealth is used to destroy the integrity of public officials at every level. It would be interesting to observe the effect of such a policy on poppy farming in Afghanistan, on the production of cocaine in South America; and, on the production of marijuana everywhere. If a Jamaican farmer receives Twenty Dollars for cultivating a pound of sugar and Four Hundred Dollars for growing a pound of marijuana, it is clear which one he will be motivated to grow whatever the risk, interdiction and criminal penalties clearly have not worked so why not try economics, if we remove the risk by decriminalizing ganja the reward for growing a pound of marijuana may sink to Twenty Dollars leaving the Jamaican farmer with a real choice. For the past three decades I have been telling the truth which has resulted in me being unable to make a living, suffering poverty and homelessness, and worst of all, loneliness, all for describing social reality in a way that would certainly produce a better quality of life for human beings and result in the survival of the species, is that not the ultimate paradox and consummate irony of existence, is that not a crock?
A week each year of National Reconciliation and Forgiveness during which any individual may confess the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, a period during which no revelation perceived to be the truth will be prosecuted or result in any punitive action against the individual whatsoever, in keeping with the truism that every human being is imprisoned by the shackles of determinism and must be afforded access to a new beginning.
It is likely that my truth will again precipitate a nomadic existence for me, so I am already looking forward to experiencing the fall this year in the New England States with a possible visit to Martha’s Vineyard thrown in for good measure; but I will stay around to see if there are any Americans who realize that they face a peril more potentially dangerous to the American way of life than Pearl Harbor and the 911 attach combined; and that the only means of overcome this threat to the survival of democracy is the ability to produce goods and services profitably without government handouts or subsidies.
Politicians on every side tend to minimize the threat for the most part because they are responsible for creating it by attempting to fashion a Welfare State, the threat we face is the enemy within, the threat posed by coercion determined culture; the threat of those who wish the other to be easy prey, whose greed and venality has no limits, whose actions are not limited by conscience or mediated by higher mental processes; the threat from my view is as great as the British faced at the height of the Battle of Briton when Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared:
The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength. Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.
We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
This is a much more difficult struggle we face, we dare to confront the enemy within us, coercion determined culture; and, what is at stake is the survival of democracy, the issue is whether our children will grow up having to learn Chinese to make their way in the world; what will be tested is whether we can produce without chains on our bodies and whips flaying our skin, whether we can produce galvanized by positive reinforcements; and, by our love for freedom.
Whether you are pig with your snoot in the government trough, or a drug dealer, or a Welfare mother, or an ordinary man or woman, a worker in commerce or industry, or a college student, or a manager, it is time to stand up for freedom; it is time to understand that freedom is in the final analysis is the intelligence, self discipline and will to act to preserve and enlarge societal order, discipline and progress without coercion.
It is time to hitch all our energies, all our merits, all our efforts to the national plow to demonstrate that we can produce galvanized by the profit motive, by enlightened self interest, that we are committed to the common good, that we are willing to sacrifice and endure to preserve the freedoms that together constitute the American way of life.
I would like to fight this battle not by running away to the New England States, but by trying to see if without subsidies or handouts or government grants or welfare we can profitably refine bagasse the deitrus from the production of sugar into ethanol, whether we can refine grasses to produce ethanol profitably, to that enterprise in any capacity I would freely commit the rest of my life, so that the South may rise again, that through cooperation we may join hands to whistle Dixie to a Reggae Beat.
Bibliography
Dylan Thomas Selected Poems 1934 – 1952 Copyright 1938 by the New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Personality and Psychotherapy, An Analysis in Terms of Learning, Thinking, and Culture by John Dollard and Neal E. Miller Copyright 1950 by the McGraw-Hill Book Company.

YES WE CAN!

After celebrating the 234th Anniversary of the birth of the United States of America with barbecues and fireworks, as we pass this milestone how we can be so blasé, sanguine and complacent and remain completely oblivious to the fact that we are engaged in the most desperate struggle to ensure the survival of the American way of life, that what is at stake at this the most potent and perilous moment in the history of this nation ‘conceived in liberty and dedicated to proposition that all men are created equal’ is the premise on which this nation was founded, that wealth and prosperity can be created in a free enterprise system.
More, that family life can function and be sustained in a social system in which a wife and mother has equal access to education and the means to make a living, that children can be socialized without being brutalized to the values and attitudes required for societal order and progress, that order and stability can be preserved in the absence of Draconian penalties.
What has been proved in the past Twelve Thousand years is that human beings can be driven up the steep incline towards civilization, what remain in doubt, in serious doubt given the predicament in which this nation finds itself, is whether any nation can avoid descending into chaos and anomie when coercion in any form, overt or covert, can no longer be utilized to motivate the other.
From my perspective, perhaps I am still crazy after all these years; the danger is so great that to my eyes we face a situation as potentially dangerous as the people of the United Kingdom confronted at the height of the Battle of Britain; and sadly, we face this threat to the destruction of the American way of life without the services and leadership of a Winston Churchill, a Margaret Thatcher, or even a Golda Meir.
What we have is a petulant, whining, spineless idiot with impeccable academic qualifications and a high intelligent quotient who seems to wilting under the heat and pressure and secretly fervently wishes he had stayed out of the kitchen, whose inexperience seems more and more apparent rendering him incapable of dealing with a problem of this magnitude and complexity; and, most dauntingly who seems to have completely surrendered and given up, who on the campaign trail again and again lead a chorus that chanted “Yes we can” but now in pronouncements and policies reveals that all he has the intellectual capacity and moral will to change in the real world is his address from the Capitol Building to the White House; and, while pathetically wringing his hands admits in his overall demeanor and body language that his slogan should have been “No we can’t.”
I continue to entertain the home that Americans not only have the courage, resiliency and willingness to sacrifice necessary to overcome this threat to their way of life, but if this does not exist they will find it from somewhere within; or else the world faces the near certainty that freedom and democracy will perish and be erased from the face of Planet Earth; and, we will enter a new era of Absolutism which will be dominated by the tyranny and ruthlessness of Communist China, by those who perpetuated the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and more recently the assault on, and repression of freedom of dissent in Tiananmen Square, a right that we take for granted.

Today, Americans face the acid test; they must discover whether they can produce goods and services profitably without coercion, whether they can socialize and educate their kids without resorting to the rod; and, whether they are really committed to creating a government of the people, by the people, for the people?
And the enemy they face is not an external foe; the enemy is within each and every one of us, it is the design for human existence shaped by human history and experience.
Americans on the shores of Tripoli, on Guadalcanal, on the beaches of Normandy, in the obscure trenches of the Cold War, during the blockade of Berlin, during the Cuban Missile Crisis and in the jungles of Vietnam have proved they can resist tyranny; now they face the most dangerous foe possible, the enemy within each and every one of us, it is time for the change, it is time to change the man or woman in our mirrors.
What I am going to do is what I do best describe the problem accurately the necessary prerequisite to its solution.
The conflict we have been fighting since the beginning of time is not between good and evil; it is between the rational and the irrational; in fact the problem posed as between good and evil makes it impossible to resolve.
To create understanding and comprehension of the above conundrum requires asking and answering the question, what adaptation would result in a being that was capable of intelligence, of creating and appreciating art, literature, philosophy and of devising weapons of destruction; while also being capable of surviving the ‘state of nature?’
Survival in the ‘state of nature’ required a being who could endure the stresses and strains of a world which had not yet attained its ecological balance, who could survive among creatures whom because of their size and power were much better physically equipped for garnering existing energy resources.
The answer on Planet Earth, one answer to this evolutionary dilemma, I am sure there are others, was a psyche divided into two compartments, the conscious and subconscious – an adaptation which has produced down the ages the duality and dichotomies which have pervaded and poisoned human existence the fundamental of these being the conflict between the rational and irrational; thus was created a being with a capacity for learning, for actions mediated by intelligence and limited by the dictates of conscience; or, for actions driven by impulse and by emotion.
What is not fully appreciated is the awesome immensity, scope and functionality of the adaptation that divided the human psyche into two compartments, a development which I suggest resulted in the selective ‘blindness’ of members of the human race, that makes it impossible for them to know what they are doing in certain areas of existence, one which in human beings created an well nigh unlimited capacity for self delusion.
The observation might be made that an individual confronting an experience eliciting intense fear or pain e.g. the interval of time that begins moments before an individual crashes head on into a telephone pole and ends when that collision occurs, such an unfortunate human being does not consciously decide to consign this extremely harrowing interval of time to his subconscious, this occurs involuntarily.
Moreover, it has been the experience that some individuals are capable of burying so deeply in the subconscious compartments of their minds memories of experiences that they can pass lie detector tests that attempt to illicit information about activities about wrongdoing they have engaged in but are capable of completely forgetting ever happened.
The subconscious compartment of the human psyche was essential to surviving the One Hundred Thousand years members of the newly emergent species Homo sapiens of the genus hominid spent in the ‘state of nature.’
The adaptation, the critical adaptation, of dividing the psyche of the human animal into two compartments combined with the fact that the human organism is unique because of an absence of instincts to create an organism who could learn, change and adapt but one that could also develop powerful habits:
Absence of instincts: An instinct is a relatively complex behavior pattern biologically fixed for a species. Nest-building techniques among birds are a familiar example: they vary between species but not within species. If man possessed such biologically fixed behavior patterns, they would limit his learning and his socialization; variation and change would then be impossible.
Man has biological drives rather than instincts. A drive such as hunger or sex, is an organic tension that is felt as discomfort or impulse but does not direct behavior to specific goals or in specific ways. A drive impels activity but does not determine it in detail. That man is activated by drives rather than by biologically fixed behavior patterns makes his needs amenable to social direction.
The absence of biological instincts makes socialization possible. Other aspects of man’s biological nature make socialization imperative. (Broom 84)
What I am hypothesizing based on the available facts about human nature is that man was, and is capable, of learning the attitudes and patterns of behavior required for survival in the ‘state of nature’ into which he initially emerged; and, as well, he has the capacity to become a civilized human being.
But he did not evolve in a civilized environment but in the ‘state of nature’ and learned the attitudes and patterns of behavior required for survival in that milieu, the strongest men whom we must assume were most influential in shaping opinions, beliefs, attitudes and therefore culture were daily engaged in the drama of predation in which the prey gave its all including its life to satisfy the needs for energy resources of the predator.
Two other components of this experience we can be sure of, that early man had to protect the hunting grounds of the tribe and repel or kill any member of another tribe who encroached into the area of land required to support the tribe.
Also, to prevent the tribe being burdened by too many defectives the result of in breeding, early men had to kidnap women from other tribes, have sex with them until they conceived and so could not return to their own tribe.
Early man lived in bands of predators competing with other collections of predators for existing energy resources, competing bands might be composed of human beings, or lions, or tigers, or wolves, but what is clear is that the more intense the emotions elicited by experience the more powerful and difficult to extinguish are the habits learned; and, the ‘state of nature’ must have been the most intense learning experience member of the species Homo sapiens has ever been subjected to.
The duality inherent in the human condition had its genesis in the fact that the human mind was divided into two compartments, the intrinsic nature of human culture was DETERMINED by the fact that for the first Hundred Thousand years of human existence they lived in a ‘state of nature’ and became habituated to a certain design for human existence, one whose world view was that might was right, whose ethos was competition, which relied on coercion to motivate the other, whose dominant roles were territorial predator and hapless prey.
That period of time, a period of time unimaginable to a human being whose life expectancy is seventy seven year, caused the culture to develop a life of its own, so ubiquitous was it, so pervasive was it, so deeply embedded in social interaction, so habituated was its agents to the mindset ‘might is right’ so that this came to be self perpetuating since it was reflected in the actions of every human being.
No more powerful demonstration and proof of this exists than the nature of the culture and social system that was produced after human beings discovered how to domesticate certain grasses and animals the humble beginnings of agriculture and began to create settlements many of these sited on the deltas of large rivers where areas of deep alluvial soil where particularly conducive to growth of crops.
For the succeeding twelve thousand years Absolutist regimes proliferated and endured, regimes in which an absolute ruler had unlimited power of life and death over his subjects, an unmistakable extension of the situation in the ‘state of nature’ wherein the wants and needs of the predator was satisfied by the prey at the cost of its life.
Two thousand years ago, after ten thousand years of Absolutism during which the culture that held that ‘might was right,’ whose ethos was competition, which relied on coercion to motivate the other, whose dominant roles were territorial predator and hapless prey was reinforced, grew more sophisticated and held sway around the globe; a gentler world view with the diametrically opposed world view that ‘right is might’ began to make its presence felt as the human race discovered values and ethics.
But when humanity belatedly developed ethics, the notion that ‘might was right’ was so deeply entrenched in human affairs that human beings were little more than puppets on the strings of a design for human existence that was by then unalterably malignant, inordinately corrupt and completely depraved.
So an accommodation occurred, an unconscious accommodation occurred, in concept individuals embraced the gentler, more moral way of life; even as in precept they continued to be agents of coercion determined culture - where the conflict had been external as the mighty perennially prevailed, this discord was internalized it began to be waged in the psyche of every human being.
Why was, and is the notion that ‘might is right,’ so seductively powerful and enduring when it can never be rationalized, justified or be considerate equitable?
Because in social interaction in which this world view prevails all the territorial predator has to exhibit and demonstrate is that which makes them powerful, whether that might be physical strength, economic, political or social power, to create a situation in which the other, the weaker actor in the drama of predation MUST do whatever is required to satisfy their needs, wants or desires no matter how this tramples on the rights or personal autonomy of that other.
It is popular and enduring because it deprives one actor in the social interaction of the right to chose.
It is this characteristic that was, and is, the basis for prostitution, chattel slavery and feudal societies; it is this that makes the accumulation of power of any kind an irresistible compulsion for human beings; it is this predatory attitude however subtly camouflaged that has produced all of the poverty, misery and suffering that has been inflicted on the wretched of the earth as the strong has deliberately and consistently denied the weak those attitudes and aptitudes that would have caused them to transcend the condition of being easy prey.
It is this dichotomy and ambivalence that exists to some degree in every single human being, all want their personal autonomy to be sacrosanct, while the other MUST do whatever is required to satisfy their wants, needs and desires.
Today we speak of dictatorships of the Right or the Left, what this diplomatic terminology conceals is the unalterable, undeniable fact that most nations of Planet Earth continue to be governed by Absolutist regimes; and the vast majority of human beings have not begun the arduous journey from subject to citizen, even in many so called democratic states.
This is the enemy within that confronts every citizen of these United States of America, for a real, functioning democracy is impossible unless a bare majority of citizens has embraced in precept the Golden Rule, unless they are willing to do to the other as they would have done to them, unless they are willing to protect and defend the personal autonomy of the other as they would their own.
On the social site Facebook I paraphrased the man called Jesus and said, “Let not your hearts be troubled for this is the year of the change,” this is the change I was speaking of, because this is the only change that can make a difference in the lives of human beings, this is the only change that can create a future replete and redolent with peace and prosperity for the human species, this is the only change that will allow us to survive the weapons of mass destruction we have devised.
We must leave the ‘state of nature’ behind, we must reject and renounce the ideology ‘might is right’ and embrace the world view that ‘right is might’ in precept.
When we say that man is determined that he never has been free, what do we mean?
When Constantine had his religious experience, when it is claimed he saw a sign in the sky that he interpreted as saying under the sign of the cross he would conquer; and, he became the patron of the early Christian Church, this ostensibly signaled a great victory for proponents of the world view ‘right is might;’ but did it?
Today, that Church is the single most powerful institution perpetuating the status quo that ‘might is right’ among the populations of Western Civilizations.
It holds that the One Hundred Thousand of evolution that is critical to understanding and confronting the fact that human culture was determined and how it was determined never happened; that man and the earth and the stars in the heavens were created in seven days by an Omnipotent God.
It holds that everlasting life will be the reward of those who are possessed by the Holy Ghost, when in fact only telling the truth can make us free; when only the practice of this discipline can create the objectivity in human beings that will allow us to create the accurate descriptions of the existing social reality, the necessary prerequisite to finding solutions to the urgent, pressing social problems that beset us.
It uses the untold wealth generated by collecting tithes down the centuries to protect and insulate its priests from responsibility for their worldwide sexual abuse of minor male children, causing all those who donate such tithes to be accessories before or after the fact, in respect of these atrocities.
Or more recently, we may reflect on the events that occurred after the desegregation of the Public School system in the USA, ostensibly another great victory for those who embraced the notion that ‘right is might;’ but, white parents did not want black teachers to be able to discipline their children so they caused corporal punishment to be removed from the Public School system precipitating the incipient chaos and disorder in which the education system now languishes:
Chris Hedges documents in his watershed article “America the Illiterate” an appalling condition:
There are over 42 million American adults, 20 per cent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at fourth-or fifth grade level. Nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.
For every arduous, painstaking step forward we slide two steps backward into the ‘state of nature,’ a situation that cannot be changed or remedied until the human species embarks upon the most fundamental change we could contemplate, the rejection and complete renunciation of the notion that ‘might is right,’ in precept; and, cause all of our actions to demonstrate our commitment to the notion that ‘right is might.’
The real question that confronts every member of the species Homo sapiens in this the first decade of the Twenty First Century is whether or not a bare majority of us in any social system are capable of becoming moral beings?
In the classic conception of drama – as in the theoretical phase of a scientific study – the will of the actors was confined in the shackles of determinism. The outcome at the final curtain was predetermined by the opening up of the drama in the first act, accounting for all the conditions and causes of later developments. The protagonist carried his ultimate fate in his soul, while he was groping for his destiny. In life, while the drama is still unfolding – as in the practical phase of a study, when policy inferences are drawn from value premises as well as from premises based on empirical evidence – the will is instead assumed to be free, within limits, to choose between alternative courses of action. History, then, is not taken to be predetermined, but within the power of man to shape. And the drama thus conceived is not necessarily tragedy. (Myrdal 35)

Bibliography
Sociology, A Text with Adapted Readings, Fourth Edition by Leonard Broom and Philip Selznick, A Harper International Edition.
Asian Drama, An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations by Gunnar Myrdal, Second Printing Pantheon a Division of Random House.