Armchair Experts

For my Wise and Generous Parents,
Addressing creatures of the Blue Planet:

ever have so many paraded as civilization whilst knowing so little

Despite universal homicidal latency, few people have killed or been touched by malevolent violence, leaving intact a childhood take on life that preserves creative sustaining optimism across your world.

This myopic child-view sacrifices critical thought for its own survival. In everyone the waking dream persists. The threshold of innocence once trodden, however, the child, and the dream, die.

In unison you claim to see your righteousness in conflict - percepts gleaned from mere implication, fed to media by government or corporation, publicly masticated by word of mouth to your subliminally selective ear. To this pot pourie you add a dash of intuition and stand undoubting that your atrocity is truly just, equally certain the enemy's cause is not.

And while cynical intelligentsia don't know everything, not even of their specialty manipulations, conceding 'known unknowns' fails, astonishingly, to dampen ideological enthusiasm.

Defense of nation's common social values (you claim) justifies war - and here critical thinking begins and ends still-born, to the delight of devious government driven by callous barons of commerce.

Each person's world model predicates a rubbery persona sealing rifts between perception and reality. As no two humans can agree on the color of darkness, neither can they (with rarest exceptions) see sufficient of life's landscape to merge outlook with 'outside'.

Schizophrenics, in a moment of clarity aghast, behold life's fabric torn - a fearful disjuncture between self and non-self - before stitching the void with hallucination. Meanwhile the less perceptive (the rest of you) deny unknown possibilty as easily as your retinal blind spot.

With collective historical blindness you released the atomic Satan, a rift of common decency that towers above all attempts to wreak mass death upon opponents. Nature has killed more creatures, more often, but not in an eye-blink - and never in dishonest rationale.

Post-nuclear-indulgence finds lesser weapons fatally easier to use and deployed with dark abandon. The atomic aberration, in an era whose barbarity only increases with hindsight, equates eerily to a mythical bite from metaphorical fruit.

Devoid of deep conscious thought upon any subject, your life-long 'working knowledge' comprises little more than briefings as disinterested students plus accumulated 'opinions' derived from relentless, suggestive, mainstream media mutterings. And there in most intellectual growth stalls, usually for the duration.

History evolves as emerging revelations formerly contemporaneously denied. No living human can judge political news fully informed except in hindsight spanning decades. Yet you each confidently, expertly, instantaneously, intuitively judge the world by mere smatterings from an hysterical, button-pressing, corporate-driven press.

With the skill of a bounding animal the path of instant opinion is negotiated, blind to error with apparent insider insight, by the uninformed populace (the 'great unwashed') that rides the information rapids with adeptness oblivious to fact.

How would I propose you judge the actions of your government? How do you make sense of current history, overcome ignorance imposed by populist journalism, or ever hope to stare down the propagandists and manipulators?

Firstly it is not my place, as a mere curious visitor, to tell you how to do anything. But I'm not short of advice, and cyber space is cheap, so ask yourself a few questions from these thoughts suggested by your history, were anyone to actually fully know it:

Aggravation. Your old nature arises always in conflict for its own sake and gratification, no matter the issue.

Facts are endlessly argued, agreement the last thing proposed, even after warring over simple disagreement of facts.

Commercial advantage, additional to personal dishonesty and overbearing pride, taints all disputes, paints all outcomes, precludes, then occludes, successful negotiation or cooperation. The greatest oxymoronic delusion of the modern era is believing a non-publicly-owned armaments manufacturer can be a 'good corporate citizen.' The concept is laughable and the world teters on the brink due to this sinlge fact.

Control. The powerful cannot explain their vice-like grip upon it, nor greed upon them, as if it was the flame of life itself.

Manipulation. High-risk strategy deters not suicidal, over-confident gamblers with the lives of others often genocidally affected. This mode of action, the fatally-flawed impulsive brutish arrogance and indifference of pre-conflict, is the most common source of tragedy.

Committees. In disrepute due only to the dishonesty of participants, yet perfect for negotiating towards truth. Lay out agreed facts, disagreed facts, deductions, inductions, inducements, implications – and simply agree they exist (as the very first step).

Until the affluent concede their wealth is now fully acquired, their greed sated, and stop seeking advantage at the expense of those less fortunate, progress and your future - are moot.

Religion. The strange ubiquitous perrenial correlation between fervent proponents of matters ethereal and massacres of innocents - not merely continues through millennia to be expunged by education and civilizing influences of the modern state, but - is, in fact, peaking, if last century is not some statistical artefact.

And finally when you, the reader, decides life's true purpose and meaning is to harvest knowledge, wondrously enjoy all there is to know, vigorously defy enemies of truth as though your life depends upon it (which it does, in fact) - when you choose to place above all the informed power of your mind ... will this sad little distraction you imagine the cleverest, uber civilization of all time, if not all space, fade to the insignificance it deserves as a spiteful, vicious, selfish, ugly little non-event in the annals of universal progress.

Then, maybe, you have a chance.

With Respect and Love
Your Beloved Son