earthmoss

• 10: What therefore is Law?
• 11: The two repercussions of Civil Law and Positive Law
• 12: The Rogue, the Sheep and the Villages
• 13: Class and Nation
• 14: The Foundation of Tyranny
• 15: Consciousness of the Other is what it is not
• 16: In order to do this as we look at history we must ask the question, ‘Who benefits?’
• 17: Somewhere over The Rainbow – Heaven, Babyl, and Hell
• 18: To put the same problem again, but in a different perspective

01: Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza

Debtor – a donkey in a quagmire

Community – Irrationals unified by hope of the impossible

Sword of God – The empty stomachs of the poor.

Truthful man – He who is, secretly, regarded by everyone as an enemy.” (Shah:1978:120)

Ambition – Ten dervishes can sleep beneath one blanket; but two kings cannot reign in one land. A devoted man will eat half his bread, and give the other half to dervishes. A ruler may have a realm, but yet plot to overcome the world.” (Shah:1979:99)

Civilization then, is a method of ‘self’-production that drives further self-production, in the form of over-population but more importantly in the form of the consciousness of the individual as self. It is discovering the best techniques as the regulative rules of the game, constitutively founded upon the demand for increase (progress), which faces the ruler of each civilization, balanced against cohering power to his rule in order to achieve this. In other words it is simply the problem of how to get enough carrots for the amount of donkeys you need or to get enough stick wielders to hit the amount of donkeys that you need, and the technique used to accomplish this.

As we have seen, for the first few thousand years of village life, it was the queen who ruled by her divine nature and then she was forced out over hundreds of years by a change in the story of authority to a paternal right to rule.

Now that villages are becoming trade partners and tribute givers in this landscape of war, we must discover the techniques of the city of Ham, Babel, and how the carrot and the stick turned us into three dancing pigeons stuck in a triangle.

“The peaceful co-existence of Lydia, the Medes and the Chaldeans in Mesopotamia, and the benefits which as a result spread to their neighbours, among whom were the Greeks, all came to an end with a great new invasion from the Iranian plateaux, when the Persians bore down on these lands with irresistible violence, crushing all opposition with the dynamism of a people driven on by the impulse of a new religious faith. The Persian conquest began with the kingdom of the Medes, followed by Lydia and the Greek cities of the Aegean coast. With the conquest of all the lands between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, they re-created their own form of the ancient unified monarchy in Babylon, adding to it Egypt and Cyrenaica, and so building an empire broader than had ever before been achieved.

At the head of the Persian aristocracy was a king who derived his authority from his race’s god, Ahura Mazda. But the ‘Great King, the King of Kings’ rarely claimed divine origin, but laid emphasis on being of Aryan stock; of the peoples of the Iranian plateaux. By pressing this ethnic derivation as its title to nobility, the Persian monarchy showed affinities with other races akin to its own which had ruled this area in earlier times: the Persians too had a warrior class which supported the monarchy and made victory possible, and its importance and influence in the state were sufficient for the King to wish to be identified with it. The power of the state had been the creation of the warrior class, and membership of that class was in itself evidence of the King’s legitimacy.

As for the other factor, divine approval, the Persians were a nation of horsemen, and the warrior chosen to rule them was the one whose horse, the sacred animal, the key to Persian power, more precious than man himself, was the first to salute with his neigh to join the rising sun. This was the sign of God’s choice, and it was the choice which justified the sovereignty.

Like the Hittites, the Persians ruled their empire with a compromise between the Aryan aristocratic traditions and the theocratic ideas of the Orient. Among the Indo-European tribes, a king was often leader of the cavalry, but the Oriental peoples would have seen in a king without divine origins simply an arbitrary oppressor. So a conflict arose- and it was not merely ideological- between the aristocratic concept of a nucleus of conquerors who installed themselves by force as governors of an empire, and the idea of a theocratic, universal monarchy, a gift from the one, true God for the guidance and benefit of humanity. The two opposite poles in the conflict were Pharaonic Egypt and the Thrace of the horse-breeding warriors.

The constitutional and political position of the Persian sovereign is an enigma to those who do not see the double nature of his situation, which was a conspicuous example of the meeting and collaboration of two civilizations at different stages of development.

The Persian King could not be simply a solemn, immutable symbol of sovereignty, inhuman, superhuman

 The fact that he was one of the aristocracy himself meant that he had to be the paragon of military skill and courage, of physical perfection, humanity and friendship to the class of warriors who claimed to be, in a certain sense, his peers. On the other hand, as the incarnation of sovereign majesty, the fount of power and authority, the King had to be hedged in with the strictest protocol, to protect him from the approach of anything irreverent or degrading; while his need to protect his own rights made him inflexible against any attempt to question his authority. Thus two contrasting images of him were formed: that of the lovable leader, outstanding for his mental and physical excellence, and that of the hated tyrant, devoted to preserving his own power and position by means of absurd and unfounded superstitions. In his life and actions the two elements existed side by side, and sometimes came into conflict.” (Levi:1955:18-19)

“After the conquest of Egypt, it was only because of the Phoenicians that Carthage escaped Persian domination, and the Universal Monarch’s dream was frustrated by the survival of a great commercial and maritime power. For it was the Phoenicians who provided the Persian King with the fleets that he lacked, and they refused to help him in an expedition against the greatest of their own race’s colonies. During the Scythian expedition the Ionian cities began to realise their importance as the providers of the Persian empire’s naval power, and it was a few years after this that the rebellion began which was to lead to the Graeco-Persian wars. As these two episodes showed, the functioning of the entire Persian empire could be threatened by injustices imposed by its origins and structure, and the difficulties increased in proportion to the political and military importance of the levies made on the subject races.

When the Greeks spoke of the Persian armies as slaves driven on like flocks of sheep in terror of the King’s torturers, they may have been clothing reality in poetic exaggeration and polemic, but they were right in general about a situation which they were in a better position to judge than even the subject races. The value of the levies on individuals or towns was not given its due recognition by the state. This reduced the status of the men who composed the levies to that of slaves, not entitled to any reward for their services.

Because of its peculiar construction, the Persian empire preserved the character of a conquest by a minority, held together only by the implicit threat of force, and neither could nor would change into a unified state like the Egyptian. Egypt was held together by a common religion and obedience to the super-human royal power. Before the Pharaoh there were no privileges- at least in theory- since before God all men were equal, and when privilege were introduced and gradually became more noticeable, they brought with them conflict, disorganisation and rebellion. But the King of Persia could not put his people on an equal footing without compromising his own position- which he did in any case by the conspicuous lack of justice in his legal code.

The distinction which the Persian King made, with no justification but the wishes of the military nobility, between the Medes and Persians and the rest of the population, was perceptible even in the features of his policies which have been the most widely praised, though perhaps the least understood. The comparative freedom of the subject races to organise their religious, commercial and private lives was not, as is often believed, the result of an enlightened tolerance, but sprang from the belief that the Medes and Persians were the only important and active part of the political community, its subjects by right, while the rest were merely passive members. The apparent tolerance they enjoyed was the favourable aspect of an inferior condition, for the King was unconcerned that the races which did not of right share in the community of his true subjects had a religion and way of life different from theirs….

The Persians amazed the ancient world by their conquests. They were a nation of warriors, with a new strategy based on speed of attack with cavalry and light infantry, inspired by their faith in their divine vocation to fight for the triumph of the power of good over that of evil, sure that they would win and bring the laws of Ahura Mazda to the whole world, stupefying it with the speed with which they crumpled monarchies that had seemed as solid as rocks. In a few years the Lydian state, envied and admired by the Greeks, had vanished, and so had those of Babylon and Egypt, after thousands of years of ascendancy. The Persian boundaries reached to places never visited by Assyrian or Egyptian warriors.

Once the empire was established, Persia continued to inspire amazement and awe by her wealth and stability. The causes of weakness in the Achaemenid monarchy were, at least in part, the same as those which led to the downfall of Lydia and threatened the Hittite kingdom, but they escaped the observation and analysis of contemporaries. In particular it suffered from the existence of a chosen class with unjustifiable privileges, the need to delegate power in the provinces and the lack of internal communications leading to a diffident organisation overloaded with controls. In Persia, other elements aggravated the situation; above all, the lack of the navies she needed to control her extensive coastline and her trade abroad. On the other hand the King, surrounded and almost besieged by the ranks of Medes and Persians whom he was forced to appoint to positions of power in his administration, had control of at least one of the elements of power he needed: money.

The descendant of the conquering heroes who had led to victory the finest cavalry and the best archers of the ancient world, proclaiming the triumph of good and of the will of God, having reached the heights of power was without the power to choose what means he would use to secure his position, but had to rely on being the richest man in the world. So the Persian kings treasured up their gold in thousands of tons, making its distribution in their realms deliberately scarce, so that places where the awe of their majesty did not extend could be reached by the corrupting power of gold.

The experience of the eastern Mediterranean was full of lessons for the Greeks and Romans of the classical world, who saw in Egypt, in Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, formidable and dreaded powers. In the Levant two political experiences had confronted one another and mingled: that of the state in which sovereignty was the law of God, and whose leader was a god or his protégé, and that of the state where an aristocracy settled among a conquered race and governed it by right of conquest. These two concepts met and co-existed in a compromise, in the case of Persia, but a fusion of two such contradictory systems was impossible, and the compromise suffered from the defects and inconsistencies of both.

02: The fundamental difference between the two systems law in their origins and inspiration

The divine monarchy of the Pharaohs represented an absolute standard of justice, the complete equality of all men before a king who was God and so not only lord but father of all his subjects. In practice, the King had to rely on three groups of assistants, priests, soldiers and bureaucrats, who became an indispensable and therefore dominant class with all the privileges inherent and therefore dominant class with all the privileges inherent in a position of such significance in the social structure. The theoretical system of absolute equality could not resist indefinitely the pressure of reality, and when the privileges of a dominant class outlasted the reasons for their predominance, injustice and disorganisation led to civil war and revolution. This happened several times in Egyptian history, and the ‘renaissances’ which followed her phases of her evolution clearly represented crises in the reorganisation of political relationships and their adjustment to social reality.

In the kingdoms of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, the situation could never have the theoretical clarity that it had in Egypt, nor was it ever possible to create a perfectly centralised administrative system like the Egyptian. But the most important feature of the Hittite or Persian type of monarchy was that the conflict between an aristocratic and a theocratic, monarchic theory of government made compromise not accidental, as in Egypt, but essential and inevitable, so that conflict, disharmony and injustice were permanent features of the political situation.” (Levi:1955:23-26)

As we learnt in the previous chapter, cities exist ‘to exploit villages’, in order to trade, loot, and gain tribute from their surrounding villages, in a mafia like racket of protection but made more efficient by a claim to ‘authority’ through the emperors new clothes, of esteem, status, an army, and wealth. This ‘exploitation’ required a ruler as we have seen in order to co-ordinate the power that his city story gave him and Others within this cirlce. But the ruler also created new roles in order to control his subjects. These were the warrior and the administrator, who wielded power over the farmer in order to increase the production of finite capital, such as crops or gold or cattle, forming a pyramid of roles or Others-as-Objects-Subject.  From this increase in capital the ruler could then employ more stick-wielders- warriors- and more carrot wielders- administrators.

It would be wrong to strictly say that these delineations are literally correct as the warrior and administrator are really, to the farmer or villager, the bearers of power who have an ‘above knowledge’ (paranoia) about whether the farmer will receive a carrot or a stick and how the regulative rules will be changed accordingly. However it is the administrator that usually wields the carrot or threatens the stick, whilst it is the warrior that wields the stick, and promises the carrot.

As we have seen, the circle, upon settling, becomes a wall of power, a ‘closedness’ contradistinct to our previous ‘openness’ as hunter-gatherers without possessions, whereupon the stick becomes a possible technique of power for the ruler, as well as the carrot previously employed. What we are about to see is how this wall becomes, by necessity, a pyramid.

In order to witness this we must first of all look at the basic ground upon which the ruler dwells in order to create capital through his power of the stick and the carrot.

“Before the modern age, frontiers were not clearly and precisely delimited, and it would be best to think of the power of a dynasty not as operating uniformly within a fixed and generally recognized area, but rather as radiating from a number of urban centres with a force which tended to grow weaker with distance and with the existence of natural or human obstacles. Within the area of radiation there would be three kinds of region, in each of which the nature and extent of control would differ. First of all, in steppe or desert country, or mountainous areas too poor, distant or inaccessible to make the effort of conquering them worthwhile, the ruler would limit himself to keeping the main trade-routes open and preventing revolt.

The local tribal chiefs could not be checked, or forced to yield their rural surplus, if it existed, on unfavourable terms. They might have an economic relationship with the city, selling their produce there in order to buy what they could not produce for themselves. In such regions the ruler could secure a certain influence only by political manipulation, setting one tribal chieftain against another or giving formal investiture to one member of a family rather than another. In some circumstances, however, he could have another kind of influence, that given him by inherited religious prestige…

There was a second zone of mountain, oasis or steppe country where the ruler might be able to exercise more direct power, because it lay nearer to the city or great-trade routes and produced a larger surplus. In such regions the ruler would not administer directly, but by means of local chiefs whose position was rather more ambiguous than that of the chiefs of the high mountains or deserts. They would be given investiture in return for payment of an annual or periodical tribute, enforced where necessary by the sending of a military expedition or the withdrawal of recognition and its transfer to someone else.”

…There was a third zone, however, that of the open plains and river valleys where grain or rice or dates were grown, and of the market gardens from which fruit and vegetables were brought into the city. Here the ruler and the urban strata with which he was linked had to maintain a stronger and more direct control, particularly in places where production depended on large-scale irrigation works. Permanent military garrisons or regular military expeditions could keep this zone in order and prevent the emergence of local chieftains.” (Hourani:1991:138-9)

What we see then is that the ruler exists in a physical limit of power, defined by the Nature of the World he lives in

He also exists in a magical limit of power defined by the circles of families and chieftains who will only give up their capital under the force of the carrot or the stick. That is to say for an increase in power or a decrease in power. The stick is quite obvious in its usage, but the carrot is the one that can become a subtle knife of divide and conquer. By promising a closer connection to the story of the king, awe as religious prestige, to one tribal leader and not another, then the carrot becomes a stick as well as being a carrot. The tribal leader who takes the carrot automatically wields a more powerful stick over his neighbour by aligning his will to that of the rulers and his power. So the carrot becomes both increase and decrease, gain and loss, pleasure and pain, because, unlike the hunter-gatherer, it is not social capital that is being produced, which is infinite, and therefore cannot be taken away by being given to someone else as well, but it is now finite capital that is being produced as land, crops, cattle, gold, etc- Objects, and therefore someone does lose when you gain, someone is taken from when you give.

We also see that in this finite view of the World to increase ones power, has to be divided by these values, in order to decide whether it is  a land is worth conquering, and what people are worth empowering. The world of the ruler is therefore split into different values, based upon his necessary requirement for ever-greater power, and not a decrease of power- the constitutive rule of the state-of-beings-for-itself. Consequently some objects in the world such as fertile land and strong or clever people are valued more than others, and those that are more valuable require more protection, and hence more physical power present in the form of stick-wielders (warriors) and carrot-possessors (administrators) to control the farmers (workers). Therefore the costs of maintaining an army and administrative institution at this level must be apportioned efficiently by weakening physical power in other areas ruled. So where there is less value there is less power displayed. Other areas require no administrators or warriors but merely the story of allegiance to a chieftain by the marriage of his daughter for example. These chieftains, however, are also under a constitutive rule of gain, in order to cohere his people and so necessarily he will try to free himself of this higher power or try to take more than is share, or align himself with other chiefs to overthrow the ruler.

What this means in practice is that the ruler becomes no longer just the Object-ruler but the ruler-as-subject due to the nature of this Nature of his polis (self-interest) and all other polis’ surrounding him, that create a power greater than his own to rule, a power that rules him. This is the power of the true centre of the state, over which all his actions will merely be regulative actions, before they will be self-interested actions, otherwise the state will effectively die through the cause of self-interest. This is the constitutive nature, the electrified cage of desire, that the ruler must play out in his role, subject to this point upon which all his power really derives, each of the individuals of the polis. Therefore the ruler must become a balancer of power, but never the true centre of power.

Upon this constitutive fulcrum of power, he must constantly weigh up the value of invading and taking the chiefs power against the value of receiving tribute just from the threat of power and the carrot of awe. Weigh whether it is better to offer the farmers carrots or sticks in order to increase production, in order to best use the powers of the stick and carrot. Weigh how much he can exploit the individuals, groups, and tribes, before they will revolt, against how much he can give to his chieftains, lords, and vassals before they will cohere their power to his, against how powerful other circles of power are to his own, and if necessity demands an increase in warriors, administrators, or farmers in order to increase the circles power reflectively.

All of this is clear and rational, but what we are also witnessing is a deeper magic taking place within the minds of those subject to his power.

We have seen the being-for-itself, become the being-for-Others, and then by the consequence of needing a ruler to curb its desire, of becoming a being-subject-to-Other. But with the rulers ability to wield the stick through the warrior and administrator comes a change in the mindset of the subjects themselves.

The relationship to power was a one to one affair between the ruler and the subject, but now as the power of labour is divided into producers, administrators and warriors, the relationship becomes a one to two affair, where the subject is talking to another who represents the ruler but is not the ruler, and therefore the subject cannot be truly heard because of the distance between the object of power (the warrior or administrator), and the centre of power (the ruler).

In other words, just as we saw the being-in-Being experience no ontological distance between God and himself in his story of walking with God in the Garden of Eden, and then saw the distance being created by the priest/king who represented this power as the centre of the circle, so now with the King himself we see this same distance being created by the third member of the transaction of power, from ruler to subject. It is now from the ruler on high to a subject beneath him, to a lesser subject, further still beneath the ruler. How does the farmer at the bottom of the pyramid of bodies feel from this ontological perspective of value as subject-object? How does the administrator or warrior feel, when dressed in purple in the court of the King?

Sartre explains this with the idea of the Third, that is the person between you and the ruler

For those of you who have struggled with Sartre and ontology it will be a relief to know that this is the last part of that story that we need to hear, because once we have heard it then we are basically in the ontological mindset of civilization, a mindset that we can understand because we are civilized, and so the consequent language that we will be using to describe civilization becomes coefficient with our ability to understand, through this ontological mindset, the rest of history that we are going to look at. That is to say a mere 5,000 years against the 30,000 years that we have just looked at.

“First we must note that the Us-object precipitates us into the world; we experience it in shame as a community alienation. This is illustrated by that significant scene in which convicts choke with anger and shame when a beautiful, elegantly dressed woman comes to visit their ship, sees their rags, their labour, and their misery. We have here a common shame and a common alienation. How then is it possible to experience oneself as an object in a community of objects? To answer this we must return to the fundamental characteristics of our being-for-others…

Suppose, for example, that the Other is looking at me. At this moment I experience myself as wholly alienated, and I assume myself as such. Now the Third comes on the scene. If he looks at them, I experience them as forming a community, as “They” (they-subject) through my alienation. This “they” tends, as we know, toward the impersonal “somebody” or “one” (on). It does not alter the fact that I am looked at; it does not strengthen (or barely strengthens) my original alienation. But if the Third looks at the Other who is looking at me, the problem is more complex I can in fact apprehend the Third not directly but upon the Other, who becomes the Other-looked-at (by the Third). Thus the third transcendence transcends the transcendence which transcends me and thereby contributes to disarming it.

There is constituted here a metastable state which will soon decompose depending upon whether I ally myself to the Third so as to look at the Other who is then transformed into our object—and here I experience the We-as-subject of which we will speak later—or whether I look at the Third and thus transcend this third transcendence which transcends the Other. In the latter case the Third becomes an object in my universe, his possibilities are dead-possibilities, he can not deliver me from the Other. Yet he looks at the Other who is looking at me. There follows a situation which we shall call indeterminate and inconclusive since I am an object for the Other who is an object for the Third who is an object for me. Freedom alone by insisting on one or the other of these relations can give a structure to this situation.

But it can just as well happen that the Third looks at the Other at whom I am looking. In this case I can look at both of them and thus disarm the look of the Third. The Third and the Other will appear to me then as They-as-objects or “Them”. I can also grasp upon the Other the look of the Third so that without seeing the Third I apprehend upon the Other’s behaviour the fact that he knows himself to be looked-at. In this case I experience upon the Other and apropos of the Other the Third’s transcendence-transcending. The Third experiences it as a radical and absolute alienation of the Other. The Other flees away from my world; he no longer belongs to me; he is an object for another transcendence. Therefore he does not lose his character as an object, but he becomes ambiguous; he escapes me not by means of his own transcendence but through the transcendence of the Third….

It is possible also for me to experience myself as looked-at by the third while I look at the Other

 In this case I experience my alienation non-positionally at the same time that I posit the alienation of the Other. My possibilities of utilizing the Other as an instrument are experienced by me as dead-possibilities, and my transcendence which prepares to transcend the Other toward my own ends falls back into transcendence-transcended. I let go my hold. The Other does not thereby become a subject, but I no longer feel myself qualified to keep him in an object-state. He becomes a neutral; something which is purely and simply there and with which I have nothing to do. This will be the case, for example, if I am surprised in the process of beating and humiliating a man helpless to defend himself. The appearance of the Third “disconnects” me. The helpless man is no longer either “to be beaten” or “to be humiliated”; he is nothing more than a pure existence. He is nothing more, he is no longer even a “helpless man”. Or if he becomes so again, this will be through the Third serving as interpreter; I shall learn from the Third that the Other was a helpless man (“Aren’t you ashamed? You have attacked one who is helpless,” etc.) The quality of helplessness will in my eyes be conferred on the Other by the Third; it will no longer be part of my world but of a universe in which I am with the helpless man for the Third.

This brings us finally to the case with which we are primarily concerned; I am engaged in a conflict with the Other. The Third comes on the scene and embraces both of us with his look. Correlatively I experience my alienation and my object-ness. For the Other I am outside as an object in the midst of a world which is not “mine”. But the Other whom I was looking at or who was looking at me undergoes the same modification, and I discover this was looking at me undergoes the same modification, and I discover this modification of the Other simultaneously with that which I experience. The Other is an object in the midst of the world of the Third. Moreover this object-state is not simply a modification of his being which is parallel with that which I undergo, but the two object-states come to me and to the Other in a global modification of the situation in which I am and in which the Other finds himself. Before the look of the Third appeared there were two situations, one circumscribed by the possibilities of the Other in which I was as an instrument, and a reverse situation circumscribed by my own possibilities and including the Other.

Each of these situations was the death of the Other and we could grasp the one only by objectivising the other. Now at the appearance of the Third I suddenly experience the alienation of my possibilities, and I discover by the same token that the possibilities of the Other are dead-possibilities. The situation does not thereby disappear, but it flees outside both my world and the Other’s world; it is constituted in objective form in the midst of a third world. In this third world it is seen, judged, transcended, utilized, but suddenly there is effected a levelling of the two opposed situations; there is no longer any structure of priority which goes from me to the Other or conversely from the Other to me since our possibilities are equally dead-possibilities for the Third.

This means that I suddenly experience the existence of an objective situation-form in the world of the Third in which the Other and I shall figure as equivalent structures in solidarity with each other. Conflict does not arise, in this objective situation, from the free upsurge of our transcendences, but it is established and transcended by the Third as a factual given which defines us and holds us together. The Other’s possibility of striking me and my possibility of defending myself, far from being exclusive of one another, are now complementary to each other, imply one another, and involve one another for the Third by virtue of their being dead-possibilities, and this is precisely what I experience non-thetically and without having any knowledge of it. Thus what I experience is a being-outside in which I am organized with the Other in an indissoluble, objective whole, a whole in which I am fundamentally no longer distinct from the Other but which I agree in solidarity with the Other to constitute. And to the extent that on principle I assume my being-outside for the Third, I must similarly assume the Other’s being-outside for the Third, I must similarly assume the Other’s being-outside; what I assume is a community of equivalence by means of which I exist engaged in a form which like the Other I agree to constitute. In a word I assume myself as engaged outside in the Other, and I assume the Other as engaged outside in me.

I carry the fundamental assumption of this engagement before me without apprehending it; it is this free recognition of my responsibility as including the responsibility for the Other which is the experience of the Us-object. Thus the Us-object is never known in the sense that reflection gives to us the knowledge of our Self, for example; it is never felt in the sense that a feeling reveals to us a particular concrete object as antipathetic, hateful, troubling, etc. Neither is it simply experienced, for what is experienced is the pure situation of solidarity with the Other. The Us-object is revealed to us only by my assuming the responsibility for this situation; that is, because of the internal reciprocity of the situation, I must of necessity—in the heart of my free assumption—assume also the Other. Thus in the absence of any Third person I can say, “I am fighting against the Other”. But as soon as the Third appears, the Other’s possibilities and my own are levelled into dead-possibilities and hence the relation becomes reciprocal; I am compelled to experience the fact that “we are fighting against the Other”.

For the statement, “I fight him and he fights me” would be plainly inadequate. Actually I fight him because he fights me and reciprocally. The project of combat has germinated in his mind as in mine, and for the Third it is united into a single project common to that they-as-object which he embraced with his look and which even constitutes the unifying synthesis of this “Them.” Therefore I must assume myself as apprehended by the Third as an integral part of the “Them.” And this “Them” which is assumed by a subjectivity as its meaning-for-others becomes the “Us”.

Reflective consciousness can not apprehend this “Us”.

Its appearance coincides on the contrary with the collapse of the “Us”; the For-itself disengages itself and posits its selfness against Others. In fact it is necessary to conceive that originally the belonging to the Us-object is felt as a still more radical alienation on the part of the For-itself since the latter is no longer compelled only to assume what it is for the Other but to assume also a totality which it is not although it forms an integral part of it. In this sense the Us-object is an abrupt experience of the human condition as engaged among Others as an objectively established fact. The Us-object although experienced on the occasion of a concrete solidarity and centred in this solidarity (I shall be ashamed precisely because we have been caught in the act of fighting one another) has a meaning which surpasses the particular circumstance in which it is experienced and which aims at including my belonging as an object to the human totality (minus the pure consciousness of the Third) which is equally apprehended as an object. Therefore it corresponds to an experience of humiliation and impotence; the one who experiences himself as constituting an Us with other men feels himself trapped among an infinity of strange existences; he is alienated radically and without recourse.

Certain situations appear more likely than others to arouse the experience of the Us. In particular there is communal work; when several persons experience themselves as apprehended by the Third while they work in solidarity to produce the same object, the very meaning of the manufactured object refers to the working collectivity as to an “Us”. The movement which I make and which is required by the assembling to be realized has meaning only if it is preceded by this movement on the part of my neighbour and followed by that movement on the part of that other workman. There results a form of the “Us” more easily accessible since it is the requirement of the object itself and its potentialities and its coefficient of adversity which refer to us workmen as an Us-object. We have therefore experienced ourselves as apprehended as an “Us” through a material object “to be created”. Materiality puts its seal on our interdependent community, and we appear to ourselves as an instrumental disposition and technique of means, each one having a particular place assigned by an end…

So long as the detotalized-totality “humanity” exists, it is possible for some sort of plurality of individuals to experience itself as “Us” in relation to all or part of the rest of men, whether these men are present “in flesh and blood” or whether they are real but absent. Thus whether in the presence or in the absence of the Third I can always apprehend myself either as pure selfness or as integrated in an “Us”. This brings us to certain special forms of the “Us”, in particular to that which we call “class consciousness.”…

If a society, so far as its economical or political structure is concerned, is divided into oppressed classes and oppressing classes, the situation of the oppressing classes presents the oppressed classes with the image of a perpetual Third who considers them and transcends them by his freedom. It is not the hard work, the low living standard, or the privations endured which will constitute the oppressed collectivity as a class. The solidarity of work, in fact, could… constitute the labouring collectivity as a “We-subject” in so far as this collectivity—whatever may be the coefficient of adversity of things—makes proof of itself as transcending the intra-mundane objects towards its own ends. The living standard is a wholly relative thing, and appreciation of it will vary according to circumstances (it can be simply endured or accepted or demanded in the name of a common ideal). The privations if considered in themselves have the result of isolating the persons who suffer them rather than of uniting them and are in general sources of conflict.

Finally, the pure and simple comparison which the members of the oppressed collectivity can make between the harshness of their conditions and the privileges enjoyed by the oppressing classes can not in any case suffice to constitute a class consciousness; at most it will provoke individual jealousies or particular despairs; it does not possess the possibility of unifying and of making each one assume the responsibility for the unification. But the ensemble of these characteristics as it constitutes the condition of the oppressed class is not simply endured or accepted. It would be equally erroneous, however, to say that from the beginning it is apprehended by the oppressed class as imposed by the oppressing class.

On the contrary, a long time is necessary to construct and spread a theory of oppression

And this theory will have only an explicative value. The primary fact is that the member of the oppressed collectivity, who as a simple person is engaged in fundamental conflicts with other members of this collectivity (love, hate, rivalry of interests, etc), apprehends his condition and that of other members of this collectivity as looked-at and thought about by a consciousness which escapes him.

The “master”, the “feudal lord”, the “bourgeois”, the “capitalist” all appear not only as powerful people who command but in addition and above all as Thirds; that is, as those who are outside the oppressed community and for whom this community exists. It is therefore for them and in their freedom that the reality of the oppressed class is going to exist. They cause it to be born by their look. It is to them and through them that there is revealed the identity of my condition and that of the others who are oppressed; it is for them that I exist in a situation organized with others and that my possibles as dead-possibles are strictly equivalent with the possibles of others; it is for them that I am a worker and it is through and in their revelation as the Other-as-a-look that I experience myself as one among others.

This means that I discover the “Us” in which I am integrated or “the class” outside, in the look of the Third, and it is this collective alienation which I assume when saying “Us”. From this point of view the privileges of the Third and “our” burdens, “our” miseries have values at first only as a signification; they signify the independence of the Third in relation to “Us”; they present our alienation to us more plainly.

Yet as they are none the less endured, as in particular our work our fatigue are none the less suffered, it is across this endured suffering  that I experience my being-looked-at-as-a-thing-engaged-in-a-totality-of-things. It is in terms of my suffering, of my misery that I am collectively apprehended with others by the Third; that is, in terms of the adversity of the world, in terms of the facticity of my condition. Without the Third, no matter what might be the adversity of the world, I should apprehend myself as a triumphant transcendence; with the appearance of the Third, “I” experience “Us” as apprehended in terms of things and as things overcome by the world.

Thus the oppressed class finds its class unity in the knowledge which the oppressing class has of it, and the appearance among the oppressed of class consciousness corresponds to the assumption in shame of an Us-object….

The oppressed class can, in fact, affirm itself as a We-subject only in relation to the oppressing class and at the latter’s expense; that is, by transforming it in turn into “they-as-objects” or “Them.” …

Similarly we shall find in what is called “mob psychology” collective crazes (Boulangism, etc.) which are a particular form of love. The person who says “Us” then reassumes in the heart of the crowd the original project of love, but it is no longer on his own account; he asks a Third to save the whole collectivity in its very object-state so that he may sacrifice his freedom to it. Here as above disappointed love leads to masochism. This is seen in the case in which the collectivity rushes into servitude and asks to be treated as an object.

The problem involves here again multiple individual projects of men in the crowd; the crowd has been constituted as a crowd by the look of the leader or the speaker; its unity is an object-unity which each one of its members reads in the look of the Third who dominates it, and each one then forms the project of losing himself in this object-ness, of wholly abandoning his selfness in order to be no longer anything but an instrument in the hands of the leader. But this instrument in which he wants to be dissolved is no longer his pure and simple personal for-others; it is the totality, objective-crowd. The monstrous materiality of the crowd and its profound reality (although only experience) are fascinating for each of its members; each one demands to be submerged in the crowd-instrument by the look of the leader.

In these various instances we have seen that the Us-object is always constituted in terms of a concrete situation in which one part of the detotalized-totality “humanity” is immersed to the exclusion of another part. We are “Us” only in the eyes of Others, and it is in terms of the Others’ look that we assume ourselves as “Us”. But this implies that there can exist an abstract, unrealizable project of the for-itself toward an absolute totalization of itself and of all Others. This effort at recovering the human totality can not take place without positing the existence of a Third, who is on principle distinct from humanity and in whose eyes humanity is wholly object. This unrealizable Third, is simply the object of the limiting-concept of otherness.

He is the one who is Third in relation to all possible groups, the one who in no case can enter into community with any human group, the Third in relation to whom no other can constitute himself as a third…Thus the humanistic “Us”—the Us-object—is proposed to each individual consciousness as an ideal impossible to attain although everyone keeps the illusion of being able to succeed in it by progressively enlarging the circle of communities to which he does belong.” (Sartre:2003:437-44)

The Third then, as ruler, defines the world of the subject, and it is only by accepting this world and its right to power, that the subject can increase his own power, through the techniques of that world. His own project becomes a dead-end and he becomes an Object of power- esteem and status-. Those therefore who seek power as beings-for-itself, give themselves over to being subjects in order to realise their desire to greater power. This means that it is the Third that defines their perspective of the world and not themselves. The warrior does not know if beating someone with a stick is good or evil, until he is told what it is by the ruler.

What the warrior does know is that the ruler has the right to authority and that he therefore has the right to the stick the Third has given to him

 This is defined not only by the ruler and the warrior but also by the farmer who defines his-self as an object role and not as a being-for-itself but a being-for-Others-for-itself. Any individual, choosing this change in perspective experiences a reality where anyone in the pyramid is automatically (not-thetically- with no thought) is seen as “We”, as a part of the  Us-Objects, the collective titles of individuals organised to perform a collective technique of production, against the constitutive darpan reflection of the ‘Them’ – the Nemesis of Hubris- that  have been divided from the collective of humanity, that existed for thousands and thousands of years, through this same perspective- a perspective that it serves one to believe- i.e. it is desired due to the power gained, greater than the power of being-for-itself, or familism may produce.

It is not therefore the power to produce, but the power to enforce the techniques of production that now become the modality of value, the look of the Third, the ruler, in his necessarily role in a pyramid to use the stick as well as the carrot, that ‘We’ have handed him through these relationships.

With a chief of a tribe paying tribute it is better to use the carrot of allegiance than the stick of violence- in order to produce more, but with the Us-objects it is better to use a stick than a carrot when the class has no power, and better to use carrots than sticks when the class has power. As Hobbes told us earlier it is fear that is the greater power for the ruler. To reiterate, not violence but fear of violence. Not disabling a worker but putting the fear of God into him, not abusing him but using him, by creating a world of paranoia.

This value basis of Us-objects, as farmers, warriors, and administrators, therefore formed into a state of power relationships, regulated by the rules of the king at the top of the pile, and constituted around desire, lack and now- ‘Them’.

As we saw with the worship of the female goddess who came from the tracts of Asia in order to give birth to civilization, she was brought by the Altai, the peoples of the Golden Mountain. It was her story that gave birth to the authority of the ruler for worshippers of grain.

What we see appear in civilizations that had not appeared before, now that the distance of God as ruler is also manifested in the distance of the ruler by the power of the Third, is that the ruler manifests his own golden mountain in order to show this new sociological totem- to the God Daksha-, not the circle of the aborigines, but the pyramid of Babyl. Not the natural mountain that Moses will bear the law down from as God’s will but an object manifestly created by Us-objects, that focuses its power (of the people) to the capital stone, the stone of the ruler as ‘The Object’ of the people of those underneath him, as subjects.

 Therefore, just as we saw the mice and the Jews naturally imitate the pyramid earlier upon the suffering of the urgrund of their existence as ‘them’ so all of this organisation of peoples into a pyramid of power came naturally, by necessity, due to the settler being unable to let go of his possessions and hence handing the power of the stick to whomsoever could cohere the most people most efficiently to their story of authority. It was not some Machiavellian scheme planned by the priest, but a simple effect from a single cause, (settling). The name for the invisible magical force that this pyramid symbolised in form, is a hierarchy.

03: ‘Hier-archy’ means- ‘government by priests from the Greek ‘heiros’ meaning sacred and ‘kratos’ meaning power.’

“Human beings are by nature status-conscious animals who, like their primate cousins, tend from an early age to arrange themselves in a bewildering variety of dominance hierarchies. This hierarchical behaviour is innate and has easily survived the arrival of modern ideologies like democracy and socialism that purport to be based on universal equality. (One has only to look at pictures of the politburos of the former Soviet Union and China, where the top leadership is arrayed in careful order of dominance.) The nature of these hierarchies has changed as a result of cultural evolution, from traditional ones based on psychological prowess or inherited social status, to modern ones based on cognitive ability or education. But their hierarchical nature remains.” (Fukuyama:2002:64)

A hierarchy therefore exists by deciding how to administrate its value in the right measures in order to firstly: survive in a world of desertification, and then to gain the next desire. This it must do in such a way that it maintains the social cohesion of its peoples will. A will that is ever changing due to the ideas, beliefs, desires, etc, that come into the pyramid and are produced by the peoples inside the pyramid, as well as by the ever changing peoples who are born with-in the pyramid, and its concurrent thrownness and their effects upon the rest of the world and the other pyramids that surround it.  A Hierarchy is a balance of power playing off against other balances of power, that have to then balance power, through war and peace, trade and pillage, etc, etc as we shall see.

The only power that the ruler has in reality, that is to say without the emperor’s new clothes of awe, is the carrot and the stick created by desire and lack. But the power that controls the ruler is the desires of his people for themselves over him, which he must now conceive as the power of his desires over those of his people to control them. Each stick requires a wielder who requires a carrot, and so each gain of carrots requires more stick-wielders to protect the carrots and they in turn require more carrots in order to keep their value or status commensurate with the amount of carrots that the others have against all of the carrots possessed by the pyramid. The ruler then is always, eventually, fated to be overpowered by the reality of his subjects infinite desire for power in a finite world, but it is this very fact that is the reason that he is in power. In other words, it is this exact cause that effects the ruler coming into existence, it is this tension between ideology to reality, that comes to a head in the form of the ruler.

Because he has to come into existence to control this spirit of desire  in order to not see this state of settlers transform into a state of desertification, as those settlers without rulers have seen happen for thousands of years. This is why hierarchy and power come to exist. Settling creates the idea of property rights, which creates a Third, as ruler to defend those rights, who now must decide what else is right in order to cohere those with property and hence value, to his venture and increase his power as a being-for-itself, by dancing the dance of being-The-Object of authority.

If we look at the first civilizations that managed to get this story of production right, and become rulers of many villages then we see that the monument to civilization’s invisible constitutive techniques magically appear in all of them,  Mesopotamian Babylon, Egypt, China, and South America. The Egyptian pyramid of Giza even has conduits that lead to the stars of heaven and its capstone (now missing) was made of gold to show its highest value. In this pyramid, as with many Chinese pyramid shaped mausoleums, or pagan mounds, or Indian Chorten, etc, the king would be buried in order for his spirit to return to the Heavens and the gods, or God, from whence he alone was born.

In other words the first arch-itecture of civilization is the pyramid. Architecture meaning- the technology of the ruler in his manner of building, Bauen- to dwell. Technology means, the technique, the tactics, but arch means ruler, as in Mon-arch, single ruler or king. Therefore the pyramid and ziggurat , the chorten and the mound, are the totemic architecture that represents the magical forces of the awe-thority, necessary to rule a civilization and its innate nature. Indeed the pyramid of Giza exemplifies this truth in its measurements in order to, by reflection, symbolise the power of the Pharaoh over the World.

The Egyptian length of measure was the cubit. It was defined by the kings own body as being the length of the kings own arm from his elbow to his pointing finger-tip. That is to say that ‘value’ and ‘measure’ are the actual manifest physical properties, ‘possessions’ of the kings incarnate form as a conduit of God, and that it is his will that manifests it in the World as the point, the centre of power – but the base length of the Giza pyramid measured out by this Godly yet physically existing measure, is also a direct measure of the circumference of the Earth. In other words, the Pharoahs form as God is the measure of the World, and his golden mountain of power, covers the World in its power. He is the ultimate King of the Earthly World by the awe-thority of the Being of beings, who we are all so distant from consequently from this perspective.

This method of defining a measurement by the length of the kings arm was continued by almost every ruler up until the French Revolution, by which time the amount of different measures in existence due to this system numbered in the thousands, and no one could produce a single system of measurement with any authority because of this way of thinking about measurement as the kings possession by his physical Object.

It is the French Revolution itself that changes the perspective of authority for the possession of the power to the ‘right’ measure from that physical nature of the ruler to that of knowledge. The revolutionaries choose Nature, just as the Pharaoh did, as his source of authority but instead of possessing that Nature, as the pharaoh did, they possess the knowledge of that Nature in order to gain the authority to set the measure right. They invent a new language that we know today name, ‘the metric system’. The metre is sacred because it is natural in that it reflects the value of one hundred thousandth of the distant of the radius of the Earth itself. The kilo is one hundred thousandth of the weight of the Earth. So it is not the pharaohs finger that measures the world, but our knowledge as mankind, that we possess, of the world that is ‘right’. The perspective being that we possess the world through this knowledge that is subject to us as we world the World into its value by the metre and the kilogramme, and ‘quite rightly’ too.

The three aspects of nature, named in man-made language, as Priest-Kings, Administrators and Warriors, are only lose garments (names) upon the nakedness of their nature in the being-for-itself that created them. What I wish to do is to name these roles through the perspective of ‘being-in-Being’, through the eyes of our cave-man who has come across this world but not yet settled. The Priest can don the garment of the King, and the King can don the garment of the Priest with near equal measure, when it comes to the right of power, and the warrior and the administrator as we have seen are two sides of the same coin of gain, one-side bearing the face of the carrot and the other the stick . However underlying these garments lie the three aspects of nature that cause this hierarchical structure to come into existence, by necessity, once a right to rule has been created and over-population is driving your thrownness.

As we have seen through Sartre this is called the Third and that is because it requires three people in order to begin the game. These three people must however regard themselves as Objects of desire, in order for the game that commences to continue. This game I like to call the Three Stuck Pigeons and the Drama Triangle, others like to call it Civilization.

04: The Three Stuck Pigeons and the Drama Triangle

Now that we understand what a pyramid represents (hierarchy) and how it came into existence by necessity (architecture) we must try and look within-side it in order to see how this melting pot of peoples all suffering from a lack, and hence a desire, react to each other in reality.

This new reality of ‘being under the Stick’ of over-population meant that the pyramid of civilization, of protection and of its collective teleology (survival and increase) had to be born, but it did not mean that the nature of a person became ‘being solely under the Stick’, anything but. No donkey chooses to be there, they will do anything to not be there or die in the trying, and that, consequently, is power.

Therefore stick-thrown man, ‘civilized man’, created a different set of natures to the solely carrot-thrown man of the hunter-gatherer. It is these natures that I wish to discuss in order to understand how civilization works, not through the perspective of the king/priest or of the perspective of global or national history, but ontologically through the eyes of an individual and a collective at the same time, using a single language terminology, in order for us to see it more clearly.

Up unto this point we have looked at civilization through the language of its objects as roles such as warrior and king, but what I want to name is the single thing that is happening to all of the people in the pyramid no matter where they are, whenever they are. In other words, to discover- who they are not what they are.

In the world of the family one could either take from another or give to another but there was a third magical action which was to reciprocate another in order to gain personally.

As we saw with hunter-gatherers they had no real possessions but with settlers they do and so they were able to reciprocate through trade in order to gain in power. They were able to reciprocate capital goods for other capital goods, and this created inequality, which created the need for protection, which created the need for warriors, etc.

By turning ones social capital into capital, i.e. by a persons individual power becoming wilfully subject to the power of the necessity of capital goods- over social capital goods, such as family loyalty, trust and love,- and instead aligned to production, from desire, through his role, one could create a situation of paranoia where trust, loyalty, family, and love, could be converted into capital for an individual alone in his role as subject to the King, not to the family, village or tribe. In other words his infinite social capital becomes a super-state of finite capital that gives him more power than his social capital could accrue in comparison to others around him, but consequently will also necessitate constitutive war and peace as the state.

To understand this more clearly let us put it in pigeon language:

Imagine that you are a pigeon in a group of pigeons. That is social capital in phylogenetic terms as you are ‘all pigeons’ and not another type of bird or life-form, particularly one that is beneath you, in this perspective.

Anyway, because of your perceived affiliation with them you choose to always say hello to each one you meet. In like manner each one chooses to do so to you. It costs you nothing but it does gain you a feeling of coherence and hence safety and protection of territory, by being valued in the group. This is social capital before capital exists through desire for power, infinite and hence value-less, that is to say un-valued. Firstly because it is infinite, it is not in short supply or over demand, and cannot be so and secondly because it has not had the perspective of value placed upon it, by desire.

Now imagine that a species of tick arrives in the woods where you live, that causes much illness and disease amongst you all. You could leave the wood, so you don’t get a tick, but you like it here, it is your home, and so you stay. Eventually you, yourself find that you have one of these ticks. Now whilst you have the power to remove all the ticks from your body as an individual you do not have the power to remove those from the top of your head. For that you need another pigeon to come along and peck it off. In other words, as soon as you settle somewhere then you are going to get ticks (nemesis to your hubris- for example over-population and desertification) and are going to come up against an-other with a tick who wishes to use you for its own gain, some of these ticks you can remove yourself but some you cannot as it is beyond your individual power.

But each tick does remove your individual power a little, and the more time you spend getting the ticks off the more time you are not actually doing what you want to do, which is to eat in order to look fit, in order to find the best mate, and have the power to choose which ever pigeon you desire.

Every other pigeon is in this same boat, whether or not they have a tick, because those with ticks are desperately trying to make an-other pigeon become the tick-removing-object that it desires it to be.

This results in a possibility of only three types of behaviour that each pigeon can choose to manifest when confronted by an-other pigeon, once he has chosen to settle and become an Object for the other pigeons.

The first option is to be a Giver as Object: That means that every time a pigeon comes up to you with a tick on its head, you choose of your own free-will to stop what you are doing, and give your time and power to the Other and remove his tick. This would be the natural state of a being-in-Being for example, and would be a universal reaction. Empathy.

The second option is to be a Reciprocator as Object: That means that every time you get a tick on your head you will remove a tick from an-other pigeons head if they first of all remove yours, and only then will you give your time and power to the Other and remove his tick. This would be the natural state of a being-for-itself using reason, sympathy not empathy.

The third option is to be a Taker as Object: That means that you will not help an-other pigeon even if they have just removed a tick from your head, and hence your time and power remain your own. This would be the natural state of a being-for-itself pretending to be a being-for-Others.

The thing that must be noticed however and which initiates the game of civilization is that a reciprocator requires a giver in order to reciprocate and so does a taker. Therefore there has to be a certain amount of givers existing within each pyramid or forest, in order for the Taker to take and become more powerful by the fact that they have only gained energy by the actions of these individuals within the group. If a group does not have enough givers naturally, then, the carrot and the stick must be used upon the reciprocators and takers. This truth then belies the constitutive nature of the state of desire, and the pyramid that it forms causatively is known as: The Drama Triangle.

Richard Dawkins’ book entitled, The Selfish Gene shows us how the Drama Triangle plays itself out in regards to a civilization of such tick ridden pigeons as we saw above, or should I say, of how civilization plays itself out in the Drama Triangle of beings-in-Being, who have left the Garden of Eden in order to dwell for-itself. I expect the perspective from where you stand in the river would weight your estimable (esteemed) decision, about this phraseology:

“Suppose a species of bird is parasitized by a particularly nasty kind of tick which carries a dangerous disease. It is very important that these ticks should be removed as soon as possible. Normally an individual bird can pull off its owns ticks when preening itself. There is one place, however-the top of the head-which it cannot reach with its own bill. The solution to the problem quickly occurs to any human. An individual may not be able to reach his own head, but nothing is easier than for a friend to do it for him. Later, when the friend is parasitized himself, the good deed can be paid back. Mutual grooming is in fact very common in both birds and mammals. This makes immediate intuitive sense. Anybody with conscious foresight can see that it is sensible to enter into mutual back-scratching arrangements. But we have learnt to beware of what seems intuitively sensible.

The gene has no foresight. Can the theory of selfish genes account for mutual back-scratching, or ‘reciprocal altruism’, where there is a delay between good deed and repayment? Williams briefly discussed the problem in his 1966 book, to which I have already referred. He concluded, as had Darwin, that delayed reciprocal altruism can evolve in species that are capable of recognizing and remembering each other as individuals. Trivers, in 1971, took the matter further. When he wrote, he did not have available to him Maynard Smith’s concept of the evolutionarily stable strategy. If he had, my guess is that he would have made use of it, for it provides a natural way to express his ideas.

His reference to the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’-a favourite puzzle in game theory-shows that he was already thinking along the same lines. Suppose B has a parasite on the top of his head. A pulls it off him. Later, the time comes when A has a parasite on his head. He naturally seeks out B in order that B may pay back his good deed. B simply turns up his nose and walks off. B is a cheat, an individual who accepts the benefit of other individuals’ altruism, but who does not pay it back, or who pays it back insufficiently. Cheats do better than indiscriminate altruists because they gain the benefits without paying the costs.

To be sure, the cost of grooming another individual’s head seems small compared with the benefit of having a dangerous parasite removed, but it is not negligible. Some valuable energy and time has to be spent. Let the population consist of individuals who adopt one of two strategies. As in Maynard Smith’s analyses, we are not talking about conscious strategies, but about unconscious behaviour programs laid down by genes. Call the two strategies Sucker and Cheat. Suckers groom anybody who needs it, indiscriminately. Cheats accept altruism from suckers, but they never groom anybody else, not even somebody who has previously groomed them.

As in the case of the hawks and doves, we arbitrarily assign pay-off points. It does not matter what the exact values are, so long as the benefit of being groomed exceeds the cost of grooming. If the incidence of parasites is high, any individual sucker in a population of suckers can reckon on being groomed about as often as he grooms. The average pay-off for a sucker among suckers is therefore positive. They all do quite nicely in fact, and the word sucker seems inappropriate. But now suppose a cheat arises in the population. Being the only cheat, he can count on being groomed by everybody else, but he pays nothing in return. His average pay-off is better than the average for a sucker.

Cheat genes will therefore start to spread through the population. Sucker genes will soon be driven to extinction. This is because, no matter what the ratio in the population, cheats will always do better than suckers. For instance, consider the case when the population consists of 50 per cent suckers and 50 per cent cheats. The average pay-off for both suckers and cheats will be less than that for any individual in a population of 100 per cent suckers. But still, cheats will be doing better than suckers because they are getting all the benefits-such as they are-and paying nothing back.

When the proportion of cheats reaches 90 per cent, the average pay-off for all individuals will be very low: many of both types may by now be dying of the infection carried by the ticks. But still the cheats will be doing better than the suckers. Even if the whole population declines toward extinction, there will never be any time when suckers do better than cheats. Therefore, as long as we consider only these two strategies, nothing can stop the extinction of the suckers and, very probably, the extinction of the whole population too. But now, suppose there is a third strategy called Grudger. Grudgers groom strangers and individuals who have previously groomed them. However, if any individual cheats them, they remember the incident and bear a grudge: they refuse to groom that individual in the future. In a population of grudgers and suckers it is impossible to tell which is which.

Both types behave altruistically towards everybody else, and both earn an equal and high average pay-off. In a population consisting largely of cheats, a single grudger would not be very successful. He would expend a great deal of energy grooming most of the individuals he met-for it would take time for him to build up grudges against all of them. On the other hand, nobody would groom him in return. If grudgers are rare in comparison with cheats, the grudger gene will go extinct. Once the grudgers manage to build up in numbers so that they reach a critical proportion, however, their chance of meeting each other becomes sufficiently great to off-set their wasted effort in grooming cheats. When this critical proportion is reached they will start to average a higher payoff than cheats, and the cheats will be driven at an accelerating rate towards extinction.

When the cheats are nearly extinct their rate of decline will become slower, and they may survive as a minority for quite a long time. This is because for any one rare cheat there is only a small chance of his encountering the same grudger twice: therefore the proportion of individuals in the population who bear a grudge against any given cheat will be small. I have told the story of these strategies as though it were intuitively obvious what would happen. In fact it is not all that obvious, and I did take the precaution of simulating it on a computer to check that intuition was right.

Grudger does indeed turn out to be an evolutionarily stable strategy against sucker and cheat, in the sense that, in a population consisting largely of grudgers, neither cheat nor sucker will invade. Cheat is also an ESS, however, because a population consisting largely of cheats will not be invaded by either grudger or sucker. A population could sit at either of these two ESSs. In the long term it might flip from one to the other.

Depending on the exact values of the pay-offs-the assumptions in the simulation were of course completely arbitrary-one or other of the two stable states will have a larger ‘zone of attraction’ and will be more likely to be attained. Note incidentally that, although a population of cheats may be more likely to go extinct than a population of grudgers, this in no way affects its status as an ESS. If a population arrives at an ESS that drives it extinct, then it goes extinct, and that is just too bad. It is quite entertaining to watch a computer simulation that starts with a strong majority of suckers, a minority of grudgers that is just above the critical frequency, and about the same-sized minority of cheats.

The first thing that happens is a dramatic crash in the population of suckers as the cheats ruthlessly exploit them. The cheats enjoy a soaring population explosion, reaching their peak just as the last sucker perishes. But the cheats still have the grudgers to reckon with. During the precipitous decline of the suckers, the grudgers have been slowly decreasing in numbers, taking a battering from the prospering cheats, but just managing to hold their own. After the last sucker has gone and the cheats can no longer get away with selfish exploitation so easily, the grudgers slowly begin to increase at the cheats’ expense.

Steadily their population rise gathers momentum. It accelerates steeply, the cheat population crashes to near extinction, then levels out as they enjoy the privileges of rarity and the comparative freedom from grudges which this brings. However, slowly and inexorably the cheats are driven out of existence, and the grudgers are left in sole possession. Paradoxically, the presence of the suckers actually endangered the grudgers early on in the story because they were responsible for the temporary prosperity of the cheats.” Dawkins:1989:137-8 .

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

In the above quote we therefore see the three natures of theoretical pigeons and of how their natures effect the civilization that they represent in a theoretical jungle of limited size with a stick or in this case tick, that drives them.

The tick of the settler, as we have seen, is desire, and the tick that you can’t get to alone, is the desire for capital goods, finite phenomena that you hope for and go to war for and to protect. An individual needs the group to defend his land, but it also needs an individual willing to give his time over for it. What he receives as a family member as Object is more social capital, but what the warrior, farmer, administrator gets is more finite capital goods, in the form of role status, esteem, wealth, power, etc, all of which are magical possessions that possess power.

Now that we have named these three choices of being in a World of finite goods, of being in a stick world as well as a carrot world- a pyramid- I would like to put these three pigeons into an inner world where they can once again be free to be infinite.

In reality, these scientifically perceived pigeons in the world are merely the result of our rational perspective from our inner world of reason, as beings-for-itself- it is a story, a scientific myth. Pigeons do not behave uniformly in the role of taker, or giver, or reciprocator and neither do people. We are all Takers, Reciprocators and Givers depending on the relative natures between ‘our power’ and ‘our will’ at that time and at each time, respectively. For example, if I am late for a meeting then I will take the next taxi that comes along, but if I am not then I’ll give it to the guy over there carrying loads of bags, whilst others would still take it whatever. If I am going to die of starvation due to over-population problems, then I am going to take to live, others would give their lives. If I won’t die of starvation, then I will give to someone who might and I’ll probably give it to the person that gave me something before, because I want that person to continue to exist in the world more than a taker, in other words, not give but reciprocate. A taker may become a reciprocator or a giver at any time, and vice versa.

The psychology of the individual may change through these three aspects of behaviour but they will all happen upon an ontology of being-for-itself that sees these three terms, giving, taking, and reciprocating, as valid due to its perspective of owning-itself. The psychology is the water that runs through this river-bed, but the running of water through this ontological bed still shapes the river-bed and determines the course by its ferocity, calmness, falls, etc, but which is still no matter the will of the psyche still overpowered by the Nature of gravity, of the landscape of the world it attempts to possess, and the ultimate destiny of the Great Ocean of Being to which it will always return.

In the world of pre-civilization then, it seems best to give your power to the group that is a group of reciprocators and not takers.

There is no such Object as a giver group as this is feasibly impossible due to the constitutive nature of the individuals that formed the group in the first place- self-interest, and, as we saw, the taker could not cohere a group of sedentary hunter-gatherers together either, as he does not fulfil this base function of increase for the group. Therefore the shape of society was not a pyramid but a circle of reciprocal relationships, where the role of giving was adopted in times of hardship for-others, as we saw previously with friendship networks that spread for thousands of miles between tribes.

For the being-for-itself, this same shape holds true, but whereas the dividing line of the twelve aboriginal tribes symbolised an embodiment of harmony in Nature, by their co-existence, and hence coalescence, the dividing lines of the settlers were those of necessity, of land and property rights, of war and division, symbolising a ‘survival of the fittest’ by which we subsequently view the world from an perceive the same ‘truth’ in how the World worlds. Is an ocean wave an embodiment of harmony or something you must survive, and hence all things must survive?

Now what happens to manifest the drama triangle from the circle is the stick that becomes involved in the techniques of power provided by the desire and lack of the settler tha. As we have seen this stick is the key to city life and civilization.

Civilization means, scarcity of resources in a world of infinite desires and so, unlike our pigeons, who can play civilization only when there are a certain amount of givers, with the stick one merely creates a giver by punishment. We did not see, and do not see pigeons beating each other up until they give-in,  but we do with human settlers.

What we have with the desertification of finite capital is the creation of a game beyond the drama triangle as we know it so far. Not every one can gain by giving in a world of finite capital, and so in every hierarchy in a stick world, there are those who have to become not subjects, such as the farmer who must gain, the warrior who must gain, and the administrator who must gain, but instead ‘abjects’. That is a person who is literally thrown or cast away. Who they are for-itself is no longer a right to power, because that is provides greater power to those who provide the ‘rights’.

These people are not then to be termed as givers but as victims, Takers are not therefore takers but persecutors, and reciprocators that live within such a system are not rescuers of the abject as they see themselves when they give to those beneath them, but instead the creators of them- they are takers who give to those who have taken, before taking what they need and then giving the unequal remainder to those who were the taken from. What they have taken from the abject is the right to be-for-itself, an infinite inner world of social capital, turned solely into being-capital-as-Object, as my reciprocal right, because you are my property, right.

In other words civilization takes the Great Brown River of Conscious Spirit (God-wakan) and over a few thousand years turns this spirit into an irrigation canal of power, a man-made river of its own willed-making- manifest- that creates its own river-bed, its own urgrund, between heaven and earth, through which runs the river of the Leviathan (civilization) into which so many babies must be thrown, must become abject in order for civilization to continue. Throughout the rest of this book we will meet these victims and reveal their names and roles within the pyramid that created them. We will also see how each civilization dies because of its ab-use of these ab-ject victims. In Babylon and for much of history one of the titles of the abject is slaves, today we have a different name as we shall see, but its purpose it the same. Let us look at the abject of earlier times then to understand our thrownness and its language:

“In the second millennium BCE slave trading amounted to serious business for Arab shippers, who are thought to have cleared stock from Africa and shipped it to the Gulf. The slaves were then sold on to caravaneers in what is now Bahrain, who drove their cargoes into Babylonia…

Slavery covered the whole spectrum of society in antiquity and was by no means limited to the pagan cultures. The Old Testament Hebrews were slave owners. They thought nothing especially untoward of owning human property,” (Jordan:2005:8-9)

“I hazard a guess that the word ‘slavery’ takes most of us down a limited number of paths. It may conjure up the spectacle of gladiators facing an untidy demise in the Roman arena, but it probably draws us just as easily towards a recent phenomenon, that of the slave-owning plantations in the American southern states and the British West Indies. These two examples are familiar and they are also useful at the beginning of a search for definitive answers about slavery and its abolition because they negate any popular sentiment that the institution of human bondage has been an isolated aberration.

The Roman and American examples, separated as they are by considerable spans of time and place, blend into a much larger design. The buying, selling and exploitation of human chattels has been an integral part of the fabric of society since history began and probably some time before that. Slavery and the trade that serves it has not only affected personal lives and communities but has also provided the bedrock of major economic systems around the globe over the course of some 10,000 years. Without recourse to enslavement of one individual by another, many of the great civilisations might never have achieved their greatness.

Within an enormous timescale, slavery has been a poor respecter of race, colour or creed

It has been condoned by virtually every major belief system, with the notable exception of Buddhism, which sees no reason to extend human misery beyond that already endured in treading the mystical wheel of life. Islam has condoned enslavement. Throughout the period of Muslim expansionism from the mid-seventh century one of the prime motives for conquest lay in the acquisition of manpower in the form of slaves to underpin the machinery of empire. In the Middle Ages, the Ottomans were fundamentally reliant on Turkish forced labour in their military successes. Christians have rarely experienced qualms about taking others into bondage either. They have felt justified in ensnaring non-Christians, relying on the moral argument that pagans and others need educating in the ways of Christ and, in the meanwhile, are thoroughly deserving of a life of bondage. Adam, so goes the reasoning, guaranteed humanity a prospect of subservient misery at the Fall. Thus in the past Christians saw no impediment to enslaving Muslims, Jews, idolaters and even other Christians.

The suggestion from some quarters that early Christianity was a religion of slaves has to be viewed with a measure of scepticism. Jesus Christ may have had a place in mind for the humble and meek but the ecclesiastical establishment did not always see things in the same way and slavery has been tolerated and exploited by the Catholic Church from the outset, more often that not behind a welter of earnest cant. Protestantism can claim precious little moral high ground either, since it has been culpable of some of the more bizarre dual standards. One of the most intriguing twists to be unravelled in the ensuing chapters lies in the fact that the Protestants provided the bedrock of colonial slave ownership both in America and the British West Indies and were responsible for some of the most outrageous conduct against black Africans.” (Jordan:2005:1-2)

What we are witnessing with the change from a carrot world of taker, reciprocator and giver, to a stick and carrot world of persecutor, rescuer, and victim is what we call the world of war, of politics, of economics, of technology, and of art. They are the language of power born from scarcity of resources, creating the language of supply and demand in a world of finite capital goods, that we will see throughout the rest of this book. They are the constitutional true words of civilization, that lie concealed behind the regulative words of culture, law, and religion.

Today in Politics, the story of the elder and his right to power is made up by each political party and are called not stories but manifesto’s, i.e. they describe the worlding of their will by their hands (manifest). A story of hierarchy as we saw comes from the words ‘priests power’ and the word priest as we have already seen, comes from the word presbyter meaning elder. The group of people in a political party that writes their story is called a Caucus, meaning a collection of elders.  In other words the story of power today is still a hierarchy no matter how you look at it. And so it still relies on the abject as well as the subject, and always will be so, no matter the story of the manifesto.

05: The Social Contract

The underlying constitutional story behind all of the ever-changing regulative stories of any ruler, or political party, of a State of peoples, has a name and it is called, ‘The Social Contract’. Hobbes’ description below shows the necessary truth of the social contract, by the perspective that gave birth to such an idea as the ‘natural right’ of felicity, (which we may take to mean self-interested desire), and of how, from such a resulting embodiment of this nature, a hierarchy is necessarily born in order to form the Leviathan of civilization and rulers:

“Indeed, there is one conclusion that comprehends the whole message of reasoning in this matter: where there is a number of men, felicity is impossible of attainment unless each man acts so as not to do to another what he would not have done to himself. The conditional and the negative form of this conclusion are both essential. It is conditional because the conclusions of reasoning are necessarily conditional; it is negative because it follows from our conception of the character of the individual and his felicity that one man can promote the felicity of another only negatively by forbearance, not positively by activity. There are common negative conditions without which felicity is impossible, and peace or security is the general name for these conditions; but there is no such thing as a common felicity. The other conclusions of reasoning on this matter are consequential from this first general conclusion.

The three most important are: (1) Where there is a number of men, felicity is impossible unless each man is willing, in agreement with each other man, to surrender his natural right to pursue his own felicity as if he were alone in the world, the surrender being equal for all men. The exercise of the natural Right is the cause of the natural condition of war and the common frustration in the pursuit of felicity; the surrender of it is, therefore, a formal description of that condition in which the attainment of felicity is no longer impossible. (2) Where there is a number of men, felicity is impossible unless each man performs his promises under the agreement he makes with each other man. To enter into an agreement for the mutual surrender of natural Right and, at the same time, to take any opportunity that offers to exercise that Right intact, is an inconsistency destructive of peace. (3) Where there is a number of men, felicity is impossible unless it is understood that, notwithstanding any agreement entered into, no man shall be held to have promised to act in such a way as to preclude his further pursuit of felicity….

Since the predicament is caused by the existence of a number of individuals each possessed of a natural right to the free exercise of his will in the pursuit of his felicity and the consequent frustration of each by every other individual, the general form of the deliverance is a will not to will, an agreement to lay down a right in order that the purpose of the right shall not be frustrated. Now, a right may be laid down either by abolishing it or by transferring it to somebody else. And the appropriate method here is transfer, because what is required is not the abolition of the right but the canalizing of its exercise. A mutually agreed transfer of right is normally called a contract; and in this case it will be a contract between each man and every other man in which each transfers his right to a beneficiary who is not himself a party to the contract. But in a contract there are two stages; there is first covenant (which is an exchange of promises or undertakings), and secondly performance.

The form of the covenant here is: I transfer to X my natural right to the free exercise of my will and authorize him to act on my behalf on condition that you make a similar transfer and give a similar authority. But it will be observed that, on account of the character or what is to be transferred, specific performance must always be lacking. All covenant is a state of the will, and we pass from covenant to performance when we do that which concludes the contract; for example, hand over the object to be transferred. But here there can never be anything more than a state of will, never anything more than a covenant, for what each undertakes is to maintain a certain state of will; that is, which each undertakes is always doing and never done.

In short, the deliverance can be achieved only by the perpetual maintenance of a covenant, the daily keeping of a promise, which can never attain the fixed and conclusive character of a contract performed once and for all time. Moreover, relapse from this state of mind is not improbable. The covenant is supported by the fear of death and the conclusions of reasoning, but it is contrary to every other human passion, virtue and defect. It would appear, then, that ‘it is no wonder if there be somewhat else required (besides the Covenant) to make their Agreement constant and lasting.’ And this ‘somewhat else’ is incorporated in the character of the beneficiary under the transfer of right.

There is no deliverance in transferring one’s natural right to another natural person as such; that would be merely to create an artificial tyranny of one in place of the natural tyranny of all. Under the covenant, the recipient of the natural right of each man must be the representative of each man, and a representative is an artificial person; he is one who impersonates a number of natural persons. The covenant then institutes an office, which may be held by one man or by an assembly of men, but which is distinct from the natural person of the holder. By the transfer of right, this representative becomes possessed of authority to deliberate, will and act in place of the deliberation, will and action of each separate man. And in the operation of this authority the multitude of conflicting wills is replaced, not by a common will (that is an absurdity), but a single representative will. And with this, it would appear a way out of the predicament has been found. But we have seen already that this falls short of what is necessary.

The covenant, as a consequence of which this authority is established, is a mutual undertaking to maintain a certain state of will by men who are not only able to retract, but who are often tempted to do so; and if they retract, the hope of deliverance dissolves with the dissolution of the authority. What is required in addition to the covenant, is power to enforce it perpetually. Supreme power must go with supreme authority: ‘Covenants, without the Sword, are but words.’ What, then, is created by this agreement of wills is an artefact, a single Sovereign authority and power and a multitude united as subjects under that authority and power, together parts of a single whole called a Commonwealth or Civil Society.

This is the generation of the great Leviathan, the King of the Proud; non est potestas suprt terram quae comparetur ei. And its authority and power (which are not the same thing) are designed not only to create and maintain the internal peace of a number of men living together and seeking felicity in proximity to one another, but also to protect this society as a whole against the attacks of natural men and other societies.” (Hobbes:1651:xxxvi-xxxix)

“The purging emotion (it is to emotion that we go to find the beginning of deliverance) is the fear of death; for, the existence of other men increases a man’s fear of the final eclipse of desire by the same amount as it decreases his certainty of getting what he wants, and since his certainty is nil, his fear will be infinite. This fear illumines prudence; man is a creature civilized by the fear of death.” (Hobbes:1651:xxxvi)

In Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll sets Alice in a Caucus race where everyone involved runs around in a circle not getting anywhere, neither winning nor losing

The only reason that they are running the race in the first place is to get dry from their previous thrownness where they had found themselves in a flood, i.e. the Deluge of Noah, caused by Alice’s tears when her Nature changed and she became too big for her environment and hence her project in the World.

In order for Alice to go where she wills, she is forced to shrink her self willingly in order to gain entrance to the mad kingdom ruled by the queen of hearts (desire and whim) where everyone did her will or else  it was ‘Off with their heads’, make my subject, abject.

The race itself is pointless of course because the enlightened rationale of equality, libertie, and fraternitie, enjoindered and promulgated by each caucus’ story is a regulative story imposed upon the constitutional nature of the human-race as adherents to desire and hence a hierarchy. This is the true coherence of the regulative dance of pigeons in the caucus who are, by these tears of desire forced by fear of illness, of dis-ease, into the race. But each caucus will surely make sure that their story of the right to power makes themselves way up the river of tears, because their ontological perspective as desirers and their sociological status as elders (paranoia) makes sure the delusional nature of their story is enacted how they ontologically desire and will use force to enforce it as is their perceived right, by whatever means that right was handed over to them.

Now there is another word for a victim of this race  that I like better because it takes us back to the beginning of victims as a creation of settled life and of their necessity. The name of the slave before man created them through his desires is the scapegoat. To understand the scape-goat we must return to the idea of sacrifice and see how the God Daksha- civilization- changed its experience, and hence meaning, from alimental communion to a renouncing of power, and why it was necessary to do so:

“Aaron alone was to sacrifice for himself and the priests a young bullock; and for the rest of the people, he was to receive from them two young goats, of which he was to sacrifice one; but as for the other, which was the scape-goat, he was to lay his hands on the head thereof, and by a confession of the iniquities of the people, to lay them all on that head, and then by some opportune man, to cause the goat to be led into the wilderness, and there to escape, and carry away with him the iniquities of the people. As the sacrifice of the one goat was a sufficient, because an acceptable, price for the ransom of all Israel; so the death of the Messiah, is a sufficient price for the sins of all mankind, because there was no much required.

Our Saviour Christ’s sufferings seem to be here figured, as clearly as in the oblation of Isaac, or in any other type of him in the Old Testament. He was both the sacrificed goat, and the scape-goat; he was oppressed, and he was afflicted (Isaiah liii.7); he opened not his mouth; he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep is dumb before the shearer, so he opened not his mouth: here he is the sacrificed goat. He hath borne our griefs (verse 4), and carried our sorrows: and again, (verse 6), the Lord hath laid upon him the iniquities of us all: and so he is the scape-goat. He was cut off from the land of the living (verse 8) for the transgression of my people: there again he is the sacrificed goat. And again, (verse 11) he shall bear their sins: he is the scape-goat.” (Hobbes:1651:316-7)

The scape-goat is the bearer of the sins of civilization

We have seen how the word sacrifice began as a communion with God such as a feast or walking in the Garden of Eden as being-God-with-you, but not, as yet, of how this became transmuted into the idea of sacrifice that we know today by the distance that the priest-role created between ourselves and God, and of the punitive aspect of this distance in the form of sin, guilt and shame. This then is the reason for the sacrificial goat, to take some of our earthly power for ourselves and to return it back to spirit through the Nature of death, and hence to God’s will to God’s World of the sacred and out of the settlers world of the profane and the power it represented to do so.

“For by holy, is always understood either God himself, or that which is God’s in propriety; as by public is always meant, either the person of the commonwealth itself, or something that is so the commonwealth’s, as no private person can claim any propriety therein.

Therefore the Sabbath, God’s day, is a holy day; the temple, God’s house, a holy house; sacrifices, tithes, and offerings, God’s tribute, holy duties; priests, prophets, and anointed kings, under Christ, god’s ministers, holy men; the celestial ministering spirits, God’s messengers, holy angels; and the like: and wheresoever the word holy is taken properly, there is still something signified of propriety, gotten by consent. In saying, Hallowed be they name, we do not pray to God for grace to keep the first commandment, of having no other Gods but him. Mankind is God’s nation in propriety: but the Jews only were a holy nation. Why, but because they became his propriety by covenant?” (Hobbes:1651:270-71)

“Of holiness there be degrees: for of those things that are set apart for the service of God, there may be some set apart again, for a nearer and more especial service. The whole nation of the Israelites were a people holy to God; yet the tribe of Levi was amongst the Israelites a holy tribe; and amongst the Levites, the priests were yet more holy; and amongst the priests, the high-priest was the most holy. So the land of Judea was the Holy Land; but the holy city wherein God was to be worshipped, was more holy; and again the Temple more holy than the city, and the sanctum sanctorum more holy than the rest of the Temple.

A SACRAMENT, is a separation of some visible thing from common use; and a consecration of it to God’s service, for a sign either of our admission into the kingdom of God” (Hobbes:1651:271-72)

The scape-goat in like manner is societies sacrifice resultant from the distance to the ruler that that Third creates and the pyramid of power. It is not taken out of the World but only out of the world of the civilization. It is allowed to go free back into the wilderness, in order to limit once again the effects of desertification, that created our settled state, and now our civilization. The root of the word scape is escape, which is derived from the word ‘cape’, escape therefore literally means ‘to slip out of ones cape’, and cape means, a covering for ones shoulders. In other words, just as we saw the son’s of Noah with their garments over their shoulders symbolising the turning away from ‘the covenant’ of being-in-Being that naked Noah has arranged with God after The Flood, so with the scape-goat we see the garment of civilization create the scape-goat who must turn his back on the God of civilization –Daksha- that the ruler symbolises.

That is why two goats were sacrificed, one for each God, and why one was killed to return to spirit, and the other returned to Nature, describing the distance between these realities created from this perspective. Sacrifice from this perspective is a willed renouncement of power to the Gods that we have created of Nature and Daksha, both of which are in aletheia- God- wakan.

Just as we saw wealthy tribe members buried with their dentalium shells in order to keep the measure of value constant i.e. in balance, so the sacrificial goat and the scape-goat are sociological attempts to balance the requirement for more power against the effect of desertification- it is a punitive ritual.

The people were therefore aware when they began this practice of returning a goat back to nature, as well as a goat back to God, of the price paid by the abject in their society and symbolised it, in the form of a goat, a uniformly existing piece of power that all individuals have as settlers in order to live and recognise as this power. The feelings of sin, guilt, and shame that accompany the ritual symbolise the lack of necessity for these abject peoples to be created apart from that it is created by their own desire for power, for pleasure and pain, for less fear. But due to these same emotions they see it as their necessary right to enforce the state that stops them being abject themselves, as well as those others who already are. And they are right to think that, simply because, these abject others are also beings-for-itself by reason of the social contract and its necessity. They are only abject because they lost, not because they weren’t fighting.

Given the opportunity, the abject would rise up and take our power, just as we have theirs, and power is finite in an unequal pyramidical constitution made up of our natures, and so this is the urgrund of ‘right’- fear of death through becoming abject, unvalued apart from in no longer existing, no longing being-a-mouth-to-feed, but instead fertile soil upon which we can grow.

In like manner Jesus becomes the scape-goat of civilization where God sacrifices his own son, in order to show us this truth anew. In this same story it is the reciprocation of the people for gain that bears (give births to) the lies and corruption of a democratic vote that denies Pontius Pilate the power of deciding what is right in order to save this very abject son but instead gets the people to save us a murderer instead (Barabbas, meaning ‘son of the father’- tradition- which  requires murder to protect land) and calls it ‘right’, thanks to the carrot of gold, of desire of self over God offered by the elders of a tribe who do not wish to lose their power over the people which they call the true path to God and only they possess.

As for the previous 40,000 years when it was everyone’s ‘right to power’ but no-one saw a ‘reason’ to take it, we can only hazard a very reasonable guess why God waited so long to let us in on this truth, through the necessity of renouncing his own son, in an attempt at alimental communion, with us, through our state, upon our terms.

Term comes from the latin, terminum, meaning boundary, or ‘closedness’, and this word itself derives from the ancient Sanskrit ‘tri’ used around the times we are discussing. ‘Tri’ means to pass-over, to ‘go beyond’ or ‘complete’. But ‘tri’ is also the root of our word three, i.e. a tri-angle has three aspects to it- three sides and three angles. This triple enclosed aspect of time and space is the perspective that creates the ‘three worlds’ of mine, not mine, and not yet mine, of past present and future, of the being-for-itself. In the story of the pass-over itself God’s spirit sends a punitive death to the first born sons of Daksha, symbolically removing their power of authority through the familial technology of civilization. In the same way, God asked Abraham, from the Hebrew ‘av hamon goyim’, meaning ‘the father of a multitude of nations’) to sacrifice his first born son in order to show his faith to God, and not to familism- inheritance, tradition and land, whilst telling him to leave his land, and father nations under a new covenant.

The same covenant as we saw become Daksha- where settling land was now seen by God as a necessity by which to exist, and hence a new covenant was perceived. In scripture we are told of this new covenant by the fact that it is Abraham that set up the Kaba of Mecca for the fourth time. 

The scape-goat then doesn’t just mean victim, a scape-goat is a word that admits the shame of its creators who need not have made it but still chose to do so, and now must continue to do so, because a return to the Garden of Eden is not possible but through flaming swords, symbolising the sharp blade of reason and the flames of transformation. Slavery is a term that resounds, with the abject truth of its unconcealed nature of being. It is a creature recreated into an object-of-power, solely in order to be driven out by a stick-wielder in a stick-world, unlike the sacrificial goat who only had carrots before he was released back to Being. The scapegoat is forced by hand, by the manifest will of the Other to leave the pyramid of gain and must fight for his own existence, just as each of the members of that pyramid will be forced to do if they refuse to sacrifice some of their power to it.

But the scape-goat for me refers to an inescapable truth therefore, and that is the idea of injustice

Do you think that the settlers threw away their best goats or their worst ones? Do you think they threw away those objects that would decrease their power or increase their power? Were the scales of justice truly blind and impartial or were they necessarily weighted?

“[J]ustice is a condition in which the optimum balance is achieved between individual aspiration and collective need (which may be seen as a sum total of the combined individual aspirations of the members of a society). As such it is an aspiration which may be more or less closely approached by given societies but is unlikely ever to be perfectly attained in any human endeavour. Injustice, in contrast, is a condition of society in which the humanity of the people living in it, both as individuals and as social creatures, is fundamentally denied. It is not directly associated with aspiration, it is rather a definition of the point at which a social order fails to attain or maintain a minimum acceptable standard and at which its ‘legitimacy’ is fundamentally called into question either in general or in some particular respect.” (Penner:2008:250)

“Justice ultimately, however, is about a concept of ‘right relations’ in society and the choice is not between individualism and cooperation, but rather a choice to be made for the expression of the individualism of human beings as social creatures.” (Penner:2008:240)

“We are all value-esteemers, and war has been one of the principal ways through which (often by default) people have asserted the right to be what they are, or to aspire to what they would like to become. The great problem, of course, is that what we wish to be or to become is often achieved at the expense of other people. The trick has been to find a way of asserting one’s freedom without reducing the freedom of others.

“Lastly, obedience to his laws, that is, in this case to the laws of nature, is the greatest worship of all. For as obedience is more acceptable to God than sacrifice; so also to set light by his commandments, is the greatest of all contumelies. And these are the laws of that divine worship, which natural reason dictateth to private men.” (Hobbes:1651:239-40)

“The rights of the sovereign that are not also duties are, as a whole, of less importance. They include the right to choose counsellors, to delegate the exercise of certain rights, to determine if necessary the succession and to pardon certain offences. The only one of particular note is connected with religion. What religion is for the free or natural man, we have considered already; and we shall expect it to be something different for the civil man. Here, as elsewhere, nature is replaced by artifice. A man’s religious beliefs and fears arise from the defects of his prudence and reasoning and are among the springs of his action. But in a civil society the prudence and reasoning of the individual (so far as conduct is concerned) have been replaced by the artificial prudence and reasoning of the Leviathan. And, unavoidably, an artificial religion will spring from the defects of this prudence and reasoning.” (Hobbes:1651:xlii)

“Ignorance of the causes, and original constitution of right, equity, law, and justice, disposeth  a man to make custom and example the rule of his actions; in such manner, as to think that unjust which it hath been the custom to punish; and that just, of the impunity and approbation whereof they can produce an example, or, as the lawyers which only use this false measure of justice barbarously call it, a precedent; like little children, that have no other rule of good and evil manners, but the correction they receive from their parents and masters; save that children are constant to their rule, whereas, men are not so; because grown old, and stubborn, they appeal from custom to reason, and from reason to custom, as it serves their turn; receding from custom when their interest requires it, and setting themselves against reason, as oft as reason is against them: which is the cause, that the doctrine of right and wrong, is perpetually disputed, both by the pen and the sword: whereas the doctrine of lines, and figures, is not so; because men care not, in that subject, what be truth, as a thing that crosses no man’s ambition, profit or lust.

For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any man’s right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion; that the three angles of a triangle, should be equal to two angles of a square; that doctrine should have been if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry, suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.” (Hobbes:1651:67-68)

Now that we have entered the Leviathan we must look at justice in a constitutively unjust world of persecutors, rescuers, and scape-goats (victims). We must be sure that ignorance does not follow us, in the form of tradition and the ‘common sense’ of justice that this profligates over time. We must look at the truth to see ‘aletheia’ as best as we can.

Natural Law and Man-Made Law

“Now there is nothing in this situation which is peculiar to Australian societies. There is no people and no state which is not a part of another society, more or less unlimited, which embraces all the peoples and all the States with which the first comes in contact, either directly or indirectly; there is no national life which is not dominated by a collective life of an international nature. In proportion as we advance in history, these international groups acquire a greater importance and extent. Thus we see how, in certain cases, this universalistic tendency has been able to develop itself to the point of affecting not only the higher ideas of the religious system, but even the principles upon which it rests.” (Durkheim:1982:426-7)

As we have seen, already in this book, there are two perspectives of mankind now, the hunter-gatherer and the settler. The religious system and the principles upon which it rested for the Australian aborigines was, and is, the truth, that all peoples belong to an international peoples, and indeed this ideology (in Durkheim’s mind) gave birth to the religious practices of its peoples, who lived therefore in an experience of freedom through equality, peace and fraternity.

What therefore are the principles upon which our settlers live? They are the freedom to empower oneself. From this perspective one may have sympathy that an-other wants to do so likewise, but not empathy, thus the social contract must be drawn in everybodys mind by some new manufactured story. A story that deals with that fundamental Lack and Desire in a finite world of competition for finite goods of its beings. As we have seen this is why by necessity they created a ruler and why by necessity they created a pyramid of hierarchical power, and also why by necessity they created the abject.

As we saw with the distance between the sacred becoming the distance between the profane peoples and the sacred peoples and how this resulted in the scape-goat to balance power within the group by a collective lessening of power. So we also witnessed the carrot being made distant from the abject by the use of the stick and how this stick gave birth to a new God- Daksha- civilization. This stick has a different sequence of names when used by the priests that wielded it upon the scape-goat. At first it is called taboo and then it becomes known as law. Let us see this transition.

06: The Sacred Word of God According to Daksha

“By definition, sacred beings are separated beings. That which characterizes them is that there is a break of continuity between them and the profane beings. Normally, the first are outside the others. A whole group of rites has the object of realizing this state of separation which is essential. Since their function is to prevent undue mixings and to keep one of these two domains from encroaching upon the other, they are only able to impose abstentions or negative acts. Therefore, we propose to give the name negative cult to the system formed by these special rites. They do not prescribe certain acts to the faithful, but confine themselves to forbidding certain ways of acting; so they all take the forms of interdictions, or as it commonly said by ethnographers, of taboos. This latter word is the one used in the Polynesian languages to designate the institution in virtue of which certain things are withdrawn from common use” (Durkheim:1982:299-300)

“In many ways, hierarchical religion has been the handmaiden of politics and virtually indistinguishable from the former as a hierarchical means of building second- and third- order coalitions from lineages to empires. For much of human history, there was no clear dividing line between the hierarchical authority of the state and the hierarchical authority of religion. King and high priest ruled over the same domain and often were united in the same person. Religion legitimated political rule: Confucian doctrine supported the mandarinate in China, Shinto promoted Emperor worship in Japan, and European kings ruled by divine right. Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam all made free use of state power to spread and enforce their doctrines, often at the point of the sword. Cuius regio, eius religio.

The largest-scale human communities that transcend the borders of states are religious in nature. Many date back to the so-called axial age, and most sprang from the teachings of either single individuals- Confucius, Christ, Buddha, Muhammad, Luther, Calvin- or relatively small groups of individuals. Although the hierarchical authority of organized religion is not necessary for the production of ordinary moral rules, it was absolutely critical historically for creating civilizations. The great civilizations- Islamic, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, and Confucian- whose boundaries still, according to Samuel Huntington, demarcate the fault lines of world politics- are religious in nature.

Hierarchical religion was important in the shaping of moral norms in another critical way. Neither our biological dispositions favoring social cooperation, nor the kind of spontaneous order we can achieve through decentralized bargaining, will ever result in moral universalism- that is, moral rules that apply to all human beings qua human beings, on which current notions of human equality and human rights rest. Natural order and spontaneous order ultimately reinforce the selfishness of small groups and consequently a small radius of trust. They produce the everyday virtues of honesty and reciprocity, and result in hierarchy and order, but only within the relatively small communities in which they are shared. They result is what Mel Brooks would call the morality of Cave 76, where everyone outside the cave can go to hell. Those outsiders are fair targets for communal aggression…

It might seem strange to credit hierarchical religion with the breaking down of barriers between human communities, since we commonly associate religious passion with communal violence. Sectarian conflicts between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, Muslims and Orthodox in Bosnia, Hindus and Tamils in Sri Lanka, are regular headlines. But if we look at human history in a longer-term perspective, religion has played a critical role in increasing the radius of trust in human societies. Competition and cooperation are inextricably intertwined in human evolution: we secure domestic order within our community so that we can better compete with other communities. But the scale of those communities has been constantly increasing, beyond the family, beyond the tribe, way beyond Cave 76. The organized religious groups that today are fighting it out among themselves stand at the end of a long process of social evolution that secured order, rules, and peace within ever-larger communities. We owe to religion the fact that it is civilizations rather than families or tribes that are today the basic unit of account.

And it is religion alone that first suggested that the final community within which its moral rules should apply- the ultimate radius of trust- should be mankind itself. This kind of moral universalism is present in many axial religions, including Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, and it is Christianity that bequeathed the idea of the universal equality of human rights toward moral universalism, but it nonetheless may be unrealized by any actual religion, but it is nonetheless an inextricable part of the moral universe created by religion.” (Fukayama:1999:235-7)

“Today we are beginning to realize that law, morals and even scientific thought itself were born of religion, were for a long time confounded with it, and have remained penetrated with its spirit.” (Durkheim:1982:69-70)

“Again, the title of a holy nation confirms the same: for holy signifies, that which is God’s by special, not by general right. All the earth, as is said in the text, is God’s; but all the earth is not called holy, but that only which is set apart for his especial service, as was the nation of the Jews. It is therefore manifest enough by this one place, that by the kingdom of God, is properly meant a commonwealth, instituted, by the consent of those which were to be subject thereto, for their civil government, and the regulating of their behaviour, not only towards God their king, but also towards one another in point of justice, and towards other nations both in peace and war; which properly was a kingdom wherein God was king, and the high-priest was to be, after the death of Moses, his sole viceroy or lieutenant.” (Hobbes:1651:268)

“There be so many other places that confirm this interpretation, that it were a wonder there is no greater notice taken of it, but that it gives too much light to Christian kings to see their right of ecclesiastical government. This they have observed, that instead of a sacerdotal kingdom, translate, a kingdom of priests” (Hobbes:1651:269)

“If the kingdom of God, called also the kingdom of heaven, from the gloriousness and admirable height of that throne, were not a kingdom which God by his lieutenants, or vicars, who deliver his commandments to the people, did exercise on earth; there would not have been so much contention, and war, about who it is, by whom God speaketh to us; neither would many priests have troubled themselves with spiritual jurisdiction, nor any king have denied it them.

Out of this literal interpretation of the kingdom of God, ariseth also the true interpretation of the word HOLY. For it is a word, which in God’s kingdom answereth to that, which men in their kingdom use to call public, or the king’s.” (Hobbes:1651:270)

Negative cults (all religions associated with a state of peoples), therefore are a result of civilization, they are a direct result of the need to both, curb the desires of a group, and also, to cohere the groups power through this negative technique and increase its overall power, – a negative ritual of power to stop desertification (the ritual of the scape-goat)- or a positive spirit of power to increase a will-to-arms against an-other civilization- as the spirit of sacrifice that soldiers and civilians truly embody in order to gain for themselves ultimately, and usually to gain a lack of fear, which they term, peace. A boundary that humanity needs to pass-over with its spirit of Civilization- Daksha in order to escape such a term that bears its opposite- war.

These taboos and ritual practices that manifest them are what therefore become the laws of the priest, but these laws are not from the priest himself, they are from God, through the priest. What we must ask ourselves, is which of these Gods is being heard, Nature or the will of the priest as the conduit of God in a civilization, constitutively formed to destroy itself and its very ground, by its urgrund nature.  If it is true that these priests are really hearing the will of God, then we must reasonably ask the question, ‘How is it that the laws of priests, after 40,000 years of not having any laws or priests, only elders and perspective, suddenly became so profusely given by God in the form of negative prescriptions around the world at this same time as civilization comes into existence, around the world? What happened to the Natural law of equality, liberty, and fraternity, that hunter-gatherer man had lived under for so long?’

It is the term ‘Holy’ as used above that answers this question

Holy means whole, and as we saw with the Aborigines, whole meant (on principle) not only all peoples but the whole universe. The word Catholic, in like manner, means universal in order to represent the Universal Truth that embraces all peoples by God’s will but Catholic also now means through his commandments- which surprise, surprise are all negative taboos, that we will see change in accord with the priests and their contextual society throughout the next 5,000 years, and we will witness the hearing of the voice of God as it effected them personally in order to judge, the truth, by walking a mile in their own shoes, and not our own.

The second root of the word Holy allows us to see why these interdictions suddenly appear in the mouth of the elders of the group. Holy also comes from Hale, meaning to haul, to drag, to draw violently, especially a boat, from holian meaning to acquire or to summon. In other words, upon the distance created between the sacred and the profane by the Leviathan of civilization the priest became a fisher-of-men who hauled their boat (their desirous bodies) towards heavenly gain not earthly gain. The universe as a whole became an idea which, through negative practices and laws, could be used to become a reality, a heaven on earth, a return to the Garden of Eden, a utopia, and any other such dream words in a worlding of individuals dreams. How can one return to Eden when one has property rights and another doesn’t? Hey, at least this way, some can have property and gain, right?

These negative cults then came into existence by necessity, just as did the king, and as we saw above, in primitive settler groups, the distinction between them was not different, they were one and the same person:

“Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man. For war, consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known;… so the nature of war, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is PEACE.

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

It may seem strange to some man, that has not well weighed these things; that nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade, and destroy one another: and he may therefore, not trusting to this inference, made from the passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by experience. Let him therefore consider with himself, when taking a journey, he arms himself, and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his doors; when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knows there be laws, and public officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall be done him; what opinion he has of his fellow-subjects, when he rides armed; of his fellow citizens, when he locks his doors; and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chest. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words? But neither of us accuse man’s nature in it. The desires, and other passions of man, are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions, that proceed from those passions, till they know a law that forbids them: which till laws be made they cannot know: nor can any law be made, till they have agreed upon the person that shall make it.

It may peradventure be thought, there was never such a time, nor condition of war as this; and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world: but there are many places, where they live so now. For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small families, the concord whereof dependeth on natural lust, have no governments at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before….

To this war of every man, against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law: where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice, and injustice are none of the faculties neither of the body, nor mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his senses, and passions. They are qualities, that relate to men in society, not in solitude. It is consequent also to the same condition, that there be no propriety, no dominion, no mine and thine distinct; but only that to be every man’s, that he can get: and for so long, as he can keep it. And thus much for the ill condition, which man by mere nature is actually placed in; though with a possibility to come out of it, consisting partly in the passions, partly in his reason.

The passions that incline men to peace, are fear of death; desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a hope by their industry to obtain them. And reason suggesteth convenient articles of peace, upon which men may be drawn to agreement.” (Hobbes:1651:82-84)

“A law is a command, the expression of will. Its mood is imperative; its essence is authority. In law, a general rule is laid down which creates the artificial distinction peculiar to civil society, the distinction between right and wrong. The categories right or just and wrong or unjust are what replace the surrendered natural right of each individual to do what he wills. They are the consequences, not the causes, of sovereignty; and their bearing is determined by the will of the sovereign expressed in law. It follows, then, that no law can be unjust, and that no conduct can be unjust save that which has been made so by being forbidden by law. The law of property, comprehensively, is the most important expression of the will of the sovereign authority, because it is by this law that, each man coming to know what is his own and being protracted in the enjoyment of it by the sovereign power, the most elementary form of the peace of civil society is established.” (Hobbes:1651:xl-xli)

Could it be therefore that law resulting from these negative cults is nothing more than awe once again, accompanied by a lovely and necessary story of authority?

Well unfortunately the answer is yes, but as always it becomes a bit more complicated once we look at it through the perspective of the settler.

Up until the time of civilization, all peoples lived under Natural Law, that is to say God’s will, but now that mankind has split from that will and gone his own way, to walk his own path-ein of knowledge gained by experience, he no longer actually lives by God’s law. Having a crop from one’s own land not God’s whole land, is not a natural law.

But the settler still requires laws in order to curb desire and so he turns back to God’s will as authority and names these constitutive taboos of society- laws or, in the form of negative cults-commandments, and finds himself having to actually name these laws and write them down in language for the first time, on stone tablets.

Now Hobbes, above, referred to life before this as being a state ‘nasty, brutish, and short’, and is quite famous for doing so, but, as we have seen, life, before settling was disease free, and abundant. He did not have the facts we have today as provided by science, as he lived in the seventeenth century, but neither still, did he have the perspective to interpret the biblical story of the Garden of Eden as being real as we now do. So he was wrong and the kingdom of God is not perceived from this perspective as a ‘commonwealth’ because it is not ‘valued’ in that way, and a social contract is not a ‘sacrifice of power’, but a ‘communion of nourishment with God’. We are not ‘the fittest surviving’, but ‘an embodiment of harmony’, with God, if we follow His Nature, and not our Own.

This must, by necessity, raise this question. Did God actually set up a covenant with Daksha, and accept that civilisation was now necessary in order to man to survive, or did the priests of these settlers simply right a story that confirmed their hierarchy and their power for-itself? We will need to walk in the shoes of many of these priests methinks, and see what the result is, throughout the rest of this book to make sure we can answer before we form an opinion.

A sacred thing, is not something that is Holy but something that has been made Holy through consecration. In other words it is something recast back into the Universal, having been separated from it by entering the profane by which the world is firstly cast. That is to say a sacred commandment requires a conduit, the priest, but it is the priest that has made the profane by his very existence, as ‘priest’, as sacred Object amongst profane Subjects, not as a human-being-in-Being with other like beings.

Before God’s sacred law became spoken by the priest therefore it was silent, invisible, and for 40,000 years, all pervasive.

“The obligations to be considered here arise from specific legal rules or from the end for which the civil order was instituted. Rights are liberties, and therefore arise, not from law, but from the silence of law. The obligations and the rights of the subject are, consequently, exclusive of one another and together compose the whole of his life.” (Hobbes:1651:xliii)

As we see from above, before the spoken wrongs there were only unspoken rights

In other words, before the negative cult of the priest, there was only communion through the karmic practice of God’s will as hunter-gatherers who lived within their rights in accordance with God’s silent will. But before the priest arrived there came settlers who took what they liked as their natural ‘profane’ right. Remember that profane means before the sacred, i.e. before the priest speaks the sacred words of wrongs. The priest named the Law of God in order to return the settlers profane worlding back to the Whole World- the Universal- through obligations, negative interdictions, commandments. What today we would call trying to stop the war and bring peace through reasoned argument. An argument we would hold in a court of Law, such as the International Criminal Court that we shall visit later. But we also witness the birth of the subject whose rights can no now longer exist as one.

The silent law has become spoken law, and that gives birth to the idea of obligation, an obligation, under the social contract of self-interest. Natural right, becomes the right to be-for-itself, and negative taboos become the obligation of the for-itself. We become victims of guilt and shame to our own desires, and yet gain our freedom and our rights by fulfilling these same desires, and we need a third to tell us which is ‘good’ and which ‘evil’ to weigh us in the balance of power, and name us as an object of desire or of abjection, esteemed as stated or as scape-goated, necessarily. For Hobbes this distinction is a consequent of this natural right, and hence natural, from here it is but a short step, a step summed up in the emotion of fear, that will bridge the gap to natural law as a necessity, if one is to hope for felicity at all.

“For as long as every man holdeth this right, of doing any thing he liketh; so long are all men in the condition of war. But if other men will not lay down their right, as well as he; then there is no reason for any one, to divest himself of his: for that were to expose himself to prey, which no man is bound to, rather than to dispose himself to peace. This is that law of the Gospel; whatsoever you require that others should do to you, that do ye to them.” (Hobbes:1651:85)

“From the time of the ancient Greeks until the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, there was essentially only one philosophy of law: natural law. As a term, however, ‘natural law’ is misleading, since originally it did not denote a theory of law at all, much less a ‘natural’ theory of law. Originally, ‘natural law’ was an idea whose purpose was to explain the nature of morality, not the nature of law. The basic idea was that man, using his reason, and possibly with the help of the revelation of the gods or God, could come to understand how he should act rightly in respect of his fellow man, and this was understood as a kind of ‘higher law’ morality of reason and revelation was a morality which purported to take account of man’s nature, hence the title natural. And because this combination of revelation and reason laid down rules for behaviour, the word law seemed appropriate, hence natural law. Natural law, then, was principally a theory of the nature of morality, not a theory of law, in which the model of law was used as a model for understanding morality” (Penner:2008:11-12)

The Authority of God’s Not so Silent Natural Law

The beginning of God’s law being written down in language then was, as with the beginning of the ruler and his necessary language, one of necessity, in order to curb desertification and war, both within and without the pyramid of peoples, backed up by the stick- the negative cult. But it was not the necessity of distribution of power, but of the necessity of a distribution of morality, backed up by the stick, to curb desire. As we will see it was also one founded in awe of the priest and of his writings.

In the above quote we are told that up until the seventeenth century natural law was the only type of law in town and so in order to elucidate this perspective of God as the urgrund of justice and law I am going to use the words of Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth century proponent of just this perspective, a perspective that will not change from the time of Babylon up until his own, and just slightly beyond, as we shall see.

So the means by which we obtain our laws today lay in the means by which natural law got its laws around 5,500 years ago at the dawn of civilization. In this light one must read Hobbes words in regards to Christians, Muslims, and Jews, as indicating not just those peoples but all civilized religious peoples, from the Babylonians up until the seventeenth century, and indeed beyond if they claim knowledge of natural law as their foundation of justice and morality.

“Having spoken of the right of God’s sovereignty, as grounded only on nature; we are to consider next, what are the Divine laws, or dictates of natural reason; which laws concern either the natural duties of one man to another, or the honour naturally, of… namely, equity, justice, mercy, humility, and the rest of the moral virtues. It remaineth therefore that we consider, what precepts are dictated to men, by their natural reason only, without other word of God, touching the honour and worship of the Divine Majesty.

Honour consisteth in the inward thought, and opinion of the power, and goodness of another; and therefore to honour God, is to think as highly of his power and goodness, as is possible. And of that opinion, the external signs appearing in the words and actions of men, are called worship; which is one part of that which the Latins understand by the word cultus. For cultus signifieth properly, and constantly, that labour which a man bestows on any thing, with a purpose to make benefit by it. Now those things whereof we make benefit, are either subject to us, and the profit they yield, followeth the labour we bestow upon them, according to their own wills. In the first sense the labour bestowed on the earth, is called culture; and the education of children, a culture of their minds. In the second sense, where men’s wills are to be wrought to our purpose, not by force, but by compliance, it signifieth as much as courting, that is, a winning of favour by good offices; as by praises, by acknowledging their power, and by whatsoever is pleasing from them whom we look for any benefit. And this is properly worship: in which sense Publicola, is understood for a worshipper of the people; and cultus Dei, for the worship of God.” (Hobbes:1651:235-36)

“Again, there is a public, and a private worship. Public, is the worship that a commonwealth performeth, as one person. Private, is that which a private person exhibiteth. Public, in respect of the whole commonwealth, is free; but in respect of particular men, it is not so. Private, is in secret free; but in the sight of the multitude, it is never without some restraint, either from the laws, or from the opinion of men; which is contrary to the nature of liberty.

The end of worship amongst men, is power. For where a man seeth another worshipped, he supposeth him powerful, and is the readier to obey him; which makes his power greater. But God has no ends: the worship we do him, proceeds from our duty, and is directed according to our capacity, by those rules of honour, that reason dictateth to be done by the weak to the more potent men, in hope of benefit, for fear of damage, or in thankfulness for good already received from them.” (Hobbes:1651:236-7)

“But God declareth his laws three ways; by the dictates of natural reason, by revelation, and by the voice of some man, to whom by the operation of miracles, he procureth credit with the rest. From hence there ariseth a triple word of God, rational, sensible, and prophetic: to which correspondeth a triple hearing; right reason, sense supernatural, and faith. As for sense supernatural, which consisteth in revelation or inspiration, there have not been any universal laws so given, because God speaketh not in that manner but to particular persons, and to divers men diverse things.

From the difference between the other two kinds of God’s word, rational, and prophetic, there may be attributed to God, a twofold kingdom, natural, and prophetic: natural, wherein he governeth as many of mankind as acknowledge his providence, by the natural dictates of right reason; and prophetic, wherein having chosen out one peculiar nation, the Jews, for his subjects, he governed them, and none but them, not only by natural reason, but by positive laws, which he gave them by the mouths of his holy prophets.” (Hobbes:1651:233-34)

“It is true, that God is the sovereign of all sovereigns; and therefore, when he speaks to any subject, he ought to be obeyed, whatsoever any earthly potentate command to the contrary….According to this obligation, I can acknowledge no other books of the Old Testament, to be Holy Scripture, but those which have been commanded to be acknowledged for such, by the authority of the Church of England….

As for the Books of the New Testament, they are equally acknowledged for canon by all Christian churches, and by all sects of Christians, that admit any books at all for canonical….The light therefore that must guide us in this question, must be that which is held out unto us from the books themselves” (Hobbes:1651:246-47)

“Again, it is manifest, that none can know they are God’s word, (though all true Christians believe it,) but those to whom God himself hath revealed it supernaturally; and therefore the question is not rightly moved, of our knowledge of it. Lastly, when the question is propounded of our belief; because some are moved to believe for one, and others for other reasons; there can be rendered no one general answer for them all. The question truly stated is, by what authority they are made law.

As far as they differ not from laws of nature, there is no doubt, but they are the law of God, and carry their authority with them, legible to all men that have the use of natural reason: but this is no other authority, than that of all other moral doctrine consonant to reason; the dictates whereof are laws, not made, but eternal. If they be made law by God himself, they are of the nature of written law, which are laws to them only to whom God hath so sufficiently published them, as no man can excuse himself, by saying, he knew not they were his.” (Hobbes:1651:254)

“And first, if it be a law that obliges all the subjects without exception, and is not written, nor otherwise published in such places as they may take notice thereof, it is a law of nature. For whatsoever men are to take knowledge of for law, not upon other men’s words, but every one from his own reason, must be such as is agreeable to the reason of all men; which no law can be, but the law of nature. The laws of nature therefore need not any publishing, nor proclamation; as being contained in this one sentence, approved by all the world, Do not that of another, which thou thinkest unreasonable to be done by another to thyself…

For example, if the sovereign employ a public minister, without written instruction what to do; he is obliged to take for instructions the dictates of reason; as if he make a judge, the judge is to take notice, that his sentence ought to be according to the reason of his sovereign, which being always understood to be equity, he is bound to it by the law of nature: or if an ambassador, he is, in all things not contained in his written instructions, to take for instruction that which reason dictates to be most conducing to his sovereign’s interests; and so of all other ministers of the sovereignty, public and private. All which instructions of natural reason may be comprehended under one name of fidelity; which is a branch of natural justice.” (Hobbes:1651:177)

“For through a wrong sentence given by authority of the sovereign, if he know and allow it, in such laws as are mutable, be a constitution of a new law, in cases, in which every little circumstance is the same; yet in laws immutable, such as are the laws of nature, they are no laws to the same or other judges, in the like cases for ever after. Princes succeed one another; and one judge passeth, another cometh; nay, heaven and earth shall pass; but not one tittle of the law of nature shall pass; for it is the eternal law of God. Therefore all the sentences of precedent judges that have ever been, cannot altogether make a law contrary to natural equity: nor any examples of former judges, can warrant an unreasonable sentence, or discharge the present judge of the trouble of studying what is equity, in the case he is to judge, from the principles of his own natural reason.” (Hobbes:1651:181)

“Lastly, they are to be taught, that not only the unjust facts, but the designs and intentions to do them, though by accident hindered, are injustice; which consisteth in the pravity of the will, as well as in the irregularity of the act. And this is the intention of the tenth commandment, and the sum of the second table; which is reduced all to this one commandment of mutual charity, thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: as the sum of the first table is reduced to the love of God; whom they had then newly received as their king.” (Hobbes:1651:224)

“At Mount Sinai Moses only went up to God; the people were forbidden to approach on pain of death; yet they were bound to obey all that Moses declared to them for God’s law. Upon what ground, but on this submission of their own, Speak thou to us, and we will hear thee; but let not God speak to us, lest we die? By which two places it sufficiently appeareth, that in a commonwealth, a subject that has no certain and assured revelation particularly to himself concerning the will of God, is to obey for such, the command of the commonwealth: for if men were at liberty, to take for god’s commandments, their own dreams and fancies, or the dreams and fancies of private men; scarce two men would agree upon what is God’s commandment; and yet in respect of them, every man would despise the commandment; and yet in respect of them, every man would despise the commandments of the commonwealth.

I conclude therefore, that in all things not contrary to the moral law, that is to say, to the law of nature, all subjects are bound to obey that for divine law, which is declared to be so, by the laws of the commonwealth. Which also is evident to any man’s reason; for whatsoever is not against the law of nature, may be made law in the name of them that have the sovereign power; and there is no reason men should be the less obliged by it, when it is propounded in the name of God.” (Hobbes:1651:188)

 “The obedience required at our hands by God, that accepteth in all our actions the will for the deed, is a serious endeavour to obey him; and is called also by all such names as signify that endeavour. And therefore obedience is sometimes called by the names of charity and love, because they imply a will to obey; and our Saviour himself maketh our love to God, and to one another, a fulfilling of the whole law: and sometimes by the name of righteousness; for righteousness is but the will to give to every one his own…

But what commandments are those that God hath given us? Are all those laws which were given to the Jews by the hand of Moses, the commandments of God? If they be, why are not Christians taught to obey them? If they be not, what others are so, besides the laws of nature? For our Saviour Christ hath not given us new laws, but counsel to observe those we are subject to; that is to say, the laws of nature, and the laws of our several sovereigns: nor did he make any law to the Jews in his sermon on the Mount, but only he expounded the law of Moses, to which they were subject before. The laws of God therefore are none but the laws of nature” (Hobbes:1651:385-86)

“The Europe of his day was aware of three positive religions: Christianity, the Jewish religion and the Moslem. These, in the language of the Middle Ages, were leges, because what distinguished them was the fact that the believer was subject to a law, the law of Christ, of Moses or of Mahomet. And no traditionalist would quarrel with Hobbes’ statement that, ‘religion is not philosophy, but law.’ The consequence in civil life of the existence of these ‘laws’ was that every believer was subject to two laws- that of his society and that of his religion: his allegiance was divided. This is the problem that Hobbes now considers with his accustomed vigour and insight. It was a problem common to all positive religions, but not unnaturally Hobbe’s attention is concentrated upon it in relation to Christianity.

The man, then, whose predicament we have to consider is, in addition to everything else, a Christian. And to be a Christian means to acknowledge obligation under the law of God. This is a real obligation, and not merely the shadow of one, because it is a real law- a command expressing the will of God. This law is to be found in the Scriptures. There are men who speak of the results of human reasoning as Natural laws, but if we are to accept this manner of speaking we must beware of falling into the error of supposing that they are laws because they are rational. The results of natural reasoning are no more than uncertain theorems, general conditional conclusions, unless and until they are transformed into laws by being shown to be the will of some authority. If, in addition to being the deliverance of reasoning, they can be shown to be the will and command of God, then and then only can they properly be called laws, natural or divine; and then and then only can they be said to create obligation. But, as a matter of fact, all the theorems of reasoning with regard to the conduct of men in pursuit of felicity are to be found in the scriptures, laid down as the commands of God.

Now, the conclusion of this is, that no proper distinction can be maintained between a Natural or Rational and a Revealed law. All law is revealed in the sense that nothing is law until it is shown to be the command of God by being found in the scriptures. It is true that the scriptures may contain commands not to be discovered by human reasoning and these, in a special sense, may be called revealed; but the theorems of reasoning are laws solely on account of being the commands of God, and therefore their authority is no different from that of the commands not penetrable by the light of reasoning. There is, then, only one law, Natural and Divine; and it is revealed in scripture.

But Scripture is an artefact

It is, in the first place, an arbitrary selection of writing called canonical by the authority that recognized them. And secondly, it is nothing apart from the interpretation….And interpretation is a matter of authority; for, whatever part reasoning may play in the process of interpretation, what determines everything is the decision, whose reasoning shall interpret? And the far-reaching consequences of this decision are at once clear when we consider the importance of the obligations imposed by this law. Whoever has the authority to determine this law has supreme power over the conduct of men, ‘for every man, if he be in his wits, will in all things yield to that man an absolute obedience, by virtue of whose sentence he believes himself to be either saved or damned.’

Now, in the condition of nature there are two possible claimants to this authority to settle and interpret scripture and thus determine the obligations of the Christian man. First, each individual man may claim to exercise his authority on his own behalf. And this claim must at once be admitted. For, if it belongs to a man’s natural right to do whatever he deems necessary to procure felicity, it will belong no less to this right to decide what he shall believe to be his obligations under the law natural and divine. In nature every man is ‘governed by his own reason.’ But the consequences of this will be only to make more desperate the contentiousness of the condition of nature. There will be as many ‘laws’ called Christian as there are men who call themselves Christian; and what men did formerly by natural right, they will do now on a pretended moral obligation. A man’s actions may thus become conscientious, but conscience will be only his own good opinion of his actions. And to the war of nature will be added the fierceness of religious dispute. But secondly, the claim to be the authority to settle and interpret the scriptures may be made on behalf of a special spiritual authority, calling itself, for the purpose, a church….Whence could such an authority be derived?

We may dispose at once of the suggestion that any spiritual authority holds a divine commission to exercise such a power. There is no foundation in history to support such a suggestion; and even if there were, it could not give the necessary ground for the authority. For, such an authority whatever to order men… A special spiritual authority for settling the law of God and Nature, cannot, then, exist; and where it appears to exist, what really exists is only the natural authority of one man (the proper sphere of which is that man’s own life) illegitimately extended to cover the lies of others and masquerading as something more authoritative than it is; in short, a spiritual tyranny.

There is in the condition of nature, where Christians are concerned, a law of nature; and it reposes in the scriptures. But what the commands of this law are no man can say except in regard to himself alone” (Hobbes:1651:xlv-xlvii)

It would seem then that the author of natural law, and the consequence ‘rightness’ of justice adopted from it, is from none other than the priest who tells you that he has heard God and you have not. The distance the being-for-itself creates is therefore the mystical invisible world that the priest inhabits and speaks from of above knowledge- paranoia. It is a world of awe of consequent esteem and of consequent power in a pyramid world of power plays in which his morality play has great power because of the magical invisible force of sin, shame, and guilt brought on by the settler life and his karmic experience of war, gain and loss, killing and hatred of the Other, and the profound feeling of being alone and full of lack, that this ontologically creates. It has nothing to do with being-in-Being and that perspective and experience any more.

Before we move on to see how this morality play ends up changing the law of God and why, let us just see that there is no difference in the minds of these civilized peoples between the law of God as Nature and the law of the state as God, as dictated by its ruler priest.

07: Civil law

“That the condition of mere nature, that is to say, of absolute liberty, such as is their, that neither are sovereigns, nor subjects, is anarchy, and the condition of war: that the precepts, by which men are guided to avoid that condition, are the laws of nature: that a commonwealth, without sovereign power, is but a word without substance, and cannot stand: that subjects owe to sovereigns, simple obedience, in all things wherein their obedience is not repugnant to the laws of God, I have sufficiently proved, in that which I have already written. There wants only, for the entire knowledge of civil duty, to know what are those laws of God. For without that, a man knows not, when he is commanded any thing by the civil power, whether it be contrary to the law of God, or not: and so, either by too much civil obedience, offends the Divine Majesty; or through fear of offending God, transgresses the commandments of the commonwealth. To avoid both these rocks, it is necessary to know what are the laws divine. And seeing the knowledge of all law, dependeth on the knowledge of the sovereign power, I shall say something in that which followeth, of the Kingdom of God.” (Hobbes:1651:232)

“The law of nature, and the civil law, contain each other, and are of equal extent. For the laws of nature, which consist in equity, justice, gratitude, and other moral virtues on these depending, in the condition of mere nature, as I have said before in the end of the fifteenth chapter, are not properly laws, but qualities that dispose men to peace and obedience. When a commonwealth is once settled, then are they actually laws, and not before; as being then the commands of the commonwealth; and therefore also civil laws: for it is the sovereign power that obliges men to obey them. For in the differences of private men, to declare, what is equity, what is justice, and what is moral virtue, and to make them binding, there is need of the ordinances of sovereign power, and punishments to be ordained for such as shall break them; which ordinances are therefore part of the civil law.

The law of nature therefore is a part of the civil law in all commonwealths of the world

Reciprocally also, the civil law is a part of the dictates of nature. For justice, that is to say, performance of covenant, and giving to every man his own, is a dictate of the law of nature….Civil, and natural law are not different kinds, but different parts of law; whereof one part being written, is called civil, the other unwritten, natural. But the right of nature, that is, the natural liberty of man, may by the civil law be abridged, and restrained: nay, the end of making laws, is no other, but such restraint; without the which there cannot possibly be any peace. And law was brought into the world for nothing else, but to limit the natural liberty of particular men, in such manner, as they might not hurt, but assist one another, and join together against a common enemy.” (Hobbes:1651:174-75)

“Concerning the offices of one sovereign to another, which are comprehended in that law, which is commonly called the law of nations, I need not say any thing in this place; because the law of nations, and the law of nature, is the same thing.” (Hobbes:1651:231-32)

In the above quotes we see the perspective of the settler and his consequent commonwealth- perspective of value, of his natural right to be felicitous in gaining his desires, which he terms as equal opportunity, of the social contract of gain that underpins the law resulting from this perspective, with no true authority, and finally of how outside of the pyramid anarchy reigns as these different techniques for controlling the masses, called religious negative instructions prescribed by the arbitrary law-makers do not have any meaning between nations, ‘because the law of nations, and the law of nature, is the same thing.”. This perceived, thing, we have come to term, ‘survival of the fittest’, but may be more exactly expressed culturally, as the term, ‘might is right’. Because the urgrund of law is simply this, “law was brought into the world for nothing else, but to limit the natural liberty of particular men, in such manner, as they might not hurt, but assist one another, and join together against a common enemy.” So the fundamental requirement of law to necessarily come into existence is a desire for gain- now to be perceived as a right, and the necessity of perceiving a common enemy, a symbol of fear, by which to cohere people, and force them to invisibly give up their power to the authority that will protect your gained desires- to be a necessity.

Now that civil law and natural law have been proved to be one in the same thing within the perspective of the state or nation,  we can see that the law then becomes a possession of the state itself and consequently, within its bounds to interpret scripture and enact punishment. This brings up four rather nasty repercussions that we must discuss before we end this discussion on law and this chapter on the language that built the tower of Babyl that confused all of mankind.

The first problem, and the one that goes on to create the other three is that as if by magic, the authority of enacting God’s laws has now become the possessions of the state as civil law, and consequently, as it is now civilized so the civilians who preach the law believe that they have the authority to possesses the right to enact the punishment. As we saw Hobbes name this new God that we worship- Publicola above, so we have seen the Hindus name it Daksha. “And this is properly worship: in which sense Publicola, is understood for a worshipper of the people; and cultus Dei, for the worship of God.” (ibid)

The truth of the matter however is that the state exists in sin for which it should itself be punished, as its actual purpose is to increase its own power not Gods, which is of course infinite and needs not our help.  It therefore, in order to have the authority to punish, cannot exist in the profane world of this sin but must make itself sacred in order to be above its own state. It must become a super-state of Godly justice. Belief in Law is a super-state.  “As for sense supernatural, which consisteth in revelation or inspiration, there have not been any universal laws so given, because God speaketh not in that manner but to particular persons” (ibid)

This super-state born from the consequences of a stick world of paranoia, takes from God the right to inflict punishment karmically through Hubris and Nemesis as he has done through the curse of Cain, the Flood of Noah, and Pandora’s box. It is now mankind that is given the right to punish the individual, and not the society that bore and raised him in its ways, as with Sodom and Gomorrah.

Unfortunately, we now know that the actual moral precepts that form these laws are based upon a moral state that existed before civilization for thousands of years and was formulated on equality, liberty, fraternity, and Gods right to power. The only punishment, of ostracization or murder was only to be utilised when someone tried to gain for themselves, over the group and God. How therefore can the state claim such a right, when its purpose is gain and its resultant teleology so resplendently opposed to any kind of embodiment of harmony? And, more importantly, How can it expect to achieve, equality, liberty, fraternity and peace, when esteem and power for each individual that makes the pyramid exist, is its urgrund? In other words the state that names the state of natural law by removing it from Gods manifestation to mankinds right and justified necessity suffers from hypocrisy.

08: Hypocrisy

“It is recorded in the Tradition of the Masters that Jami once said, when asked about Hypocrisy and honesty:

‘What a wonderful thing is honesty and what a strange thing is hypocrisy!’

‘I wandered to Mecca and to Baghdad, and I made trial of the behaviour of men.

‘When I asked them to be honest, they always treated me with respect, because they had been taught that good men always speak thus, and they had learned that they must have their eyes downcast when people speak of honesty.

‘When I told them to shun hypocrisy, they all agreed with me.

But they did not know that when I said “truth”, I knew that they did not know what truth was, and that therefore both they and I were then being hypocrites.

‘They did not know that I was being a hypocrite  in merely saying “Do not be hypocrites”, because words do not convey the message by themselves.

‘They respected me, therefore, when I was acting hypocritically. They had been taught to do this. They respected themselves while they were thinking hypocritically; for it is hypocrisy to think that one is being improved simply by thinking that it is bad to be a hypocrite.

‘The Path leads beyond: to the practice and the understanding where there can be no hypocrisy, where honesty is there and not something which is mans aim.’” (Shah:1979:104-5)

Hypocrisy then, is a man of esteem claiming that he and not you have the right to punish an-other because of his blood-line, or his status over you, when that status comes from a God who does not believe in status or esteem but in equality and fraternity, just as the hypocrite is saying they believe in, whilst telling you that they have a right to it that you do not, necessarily.

All of the power symbols of the pyramid, such as wealth, status, awe, esteem, and honour are therefore rights bestowed by God to the rulers who God speaks through, and in order to gain power oneself one must become subject to these rules and the story of authority of the state. But the state, by necessity must create not only subjects, but also, as we have seen in the form of slavery, abjects. That is to say scape-goats who must be hated and thrown into the river. One can offer carrots of authority for so long, but those on the bottom of the electrified cage cannot be offered them. They must be offered sticks only, and to justify this behaviour it is psychologically better to hate them than to love them. They are the producers of carrots but not the possessors of them.

If they possessed one carrot then how could you get them to work for a carrot? If you offer a manager a bonus for creating more carrots, then he can offer a bit of that bonus to the four supervisors under him, but if that supervisor splits his quarter of that bit of a bonus, down to the twenty people that work under him, then how much carrot-power does he really have over these people? Not very much as he is offering them not very much. But what if you wield the stick? One stick threatening the sack works better that a tiny bit of carrot on twenty-five people being-for-itself. In fact the stick can be offered as a carrot. ‘One of you will have to go, but obviously not the hardest workers’.

This then is the state of paranoia and injustice that is the State of increase and desire, that is called just and dictates a spiritual tyranny of hypocrisy called the law. It does this in order to cohere the reciprocators of the story who gain by doing so, but as it becomes tradition it becomes an invisible God, justified by tradition, accepted non-thetically, without thought, and so people will hit you with a stick, because ‘it is written’.

In relation therefore to God’s law becoming civil law we must look at the story of the judge, the slave and the magical invisible force of hypocrisy that pervades the relationship.

Hypocrisy means, pretence to virtue, and comes from the Greek plays where the actor would play a part, act a role on a stage, a risen platform above the subjects who have come to see it in order to ‘culture their minds’ (education) to the perspective of the aristocrat that sponsored the play, with a hypocritical motive of gain laying behind it. Just as with the law. Hypocrisies ultimate root however comes from the Greek word κρίνω meaning, ‘I judge’, revealing just how entwined this notion is with the law and its true nature within the aletheia- unconcealedness of being- that we have just unconcealed.

Solomon, The Mosquito, and the Wind

“One day a mosquito went to the court of King Solomon the Wise.

‘O great Solomon, upon thee Peace’, he cried, ‘I come to seek redress at your Court for the injustices which are daily being performed against me.’

Solomon said: ‘State your complaint, and it will certainly be heard’.

Said the mosquito: ‘Illustrious and all-just one, my complaint is against the Wind. Whenever I go out into the open, the Wind comes along and blows me away. I therefore have no hope of reaching the places which I regard as my lawful destination.’

King Solomon spoke: ‘In accordance with the accepted principles of justice, no complaint can be accepted unless the other party is present to answer the charge.’

He turned to his courtiers and commanded: ‘Call the Wind to make out his own case.’

The Wind was called up, and presently the breeze which heralded his coming was felt to rustle slowly, then stronger.

And the mosquito shouted: ‘O Great King! I withdraw my complaint, because the air is driving me round and round in circles, and before the Wind is actually here I shall have been swept away.’

Thus were the circumstances imposed both by the plaintiff and the court found to be impossible to the cause of justice.” (Rumi, Mathnavi)” (Shah:1978:187-8)

In the above story, we see that the mosquito, out for a justice that is its natural right, by law, cannot receive the law because of the power of the Other party. This wind is the natural state of the court, that of gain for itself. To put it back in terms of the Leviathan, the wind could be seen as a river, and the mosquito, a minnow. Yes the minnow has the right to be free, but the river by necessity, must flow in its natural direction. For the river Leviathan, we have just discovered that the strongest current that guides that river is that of self-interested-gain, because that is right. The State has no power to stop this flow, and so it cannot hold court, it cannot contain the ‘truth’ it professes when even a tiny mosquito claims the rights that it professes it possesses the power to grant, if the case be just by natural law. What does it mean to be on the wrong side of the law when the law is a desire to increase in power, but you wish to increase social capital by using your power for good? It means that you are wrong, and should be punished because you are not helping the ‘us’ that you are naturally (naturalised) a part of.  

10: What therefore is Law?

“Law is neither the truth of power nor its alibi. It is an instrument of power which is at once complex and partial. The form of law with its effects of prohibition needs to be resituated among a number of other, non-juridical mechanisms. Thus the penal system should not be analysed purely and simply as an apparatus of prohibition and repression of one class by another, nor as an alibi for the lawless violence of the ruling class. The penal system makes possible a mode of political and economic management which exploits the difference between legality and illegalities.” (Foucault:1980:141)

“The most frequent pretext of sedition, and civil war, in Christian commonwealths, hath a long time proceeded from a difficulty, not yet sufficiently resolved, of obeying at once both God and man, then when their commandments are one contrary to the other. It is manifest enough, that when a man receiveth two contrary commands, and knows that one of them is God’s, he ought to obey that, and not the other, though it be the command even of his lawful sovereign (whether a monarch, or a sovereign assembly), or the command of his father. The difficulty therefore consisteth in this, that men, when they are commanded in the name of God, know not in divers cases, whether the command be from God, or whether he that commandeth do but abuse God’s name for some private ends of his own.

For as there were in the Church of the Jews, many false prophets, that sought reputation with the people, by feigned dreams and visions; so there have been in all times in the Church of Christ, false teachers, that seek reputation with the people, by fantastical and false doctrines; and by such reputation, (as in the nature of ambition), to govern them for their private benefit.

But this difficulty of obeying both God and the civil sovereign on earth, to those that can distinguish between what is necessary, and what is not necessary for their reception into the kingdom of God, is of no moment. For if the command of the civil sovereign be such, as that it may be obeyed without the forfeiture of life eternal; not to obey it is unjust:…But if the command be such as cannot be obeyed, without being damned to eternal death; then it were madness to obey it, and the council of our Saviour takes place” (Hobbes:1651:384)

Law then is not an institution or religion in its own right, standing on its own urgrund of truth and right, it is a part of the system of the state, necessarily constructed due to the necessity of cohering a lot of beings-for-itself together. Unfortunately as Hobbes’ tells us above, many of the people who claimed authority to point out a law of God were in fact merely not just hypocrites but liars who wished to gain power from adhering peoples actions to this law purely for their own gain.

“In other words, when our worth is not accorded its correct value or estimation, then we tend to become angry. War, in that sense, can be seen as a thymotic assertion of self-worth. Plato understood the dynamic very well. We can only think of justice, he adds, when an injustice has arisen. Justice arises from the (irreconcilable) divisions which all societies establish (which is part of the complexity of civilization) in states where there are lords and servants, rich and poor, where there is the beautiful and noble and where there is the desire to invade the sphere of others- in other words where there is war. The just state is one that reconciles differences, not abolishes them (for difference as complexity is what defines a civilization). Justice constitutes what has been brought back (often through war) to moderation from a state of historical excess (injustice). It is human discontent that gives us the insight into what justice is, and why we demand it for ourselves (The Republic, 372d)” (Coker:2010:31-2)

God’s law then, are those eternal laws that no-one for 40,000 years even needed to name because they were the choice of the individual who from his perspective of being-in-Being did not need to be told what he ‘ought’ to do, because of his relationship with God or Nature. Upon these laws being housed in the perspective of the settler they required naming as settlers do not live in the World of God, but in a world where they have property rights over God’s eternal law, i.e. hypocrisy. Upon the creation of cities, that controlled these settlers villages and land through the warriors and administrators came the carrot and the stick of paranoia, whereupon protection of property rights became the rightful power of the judge to administrate through his ‘arm of the law’ manifested by awe, esteem, status, and ultimately by the warriors of justice that wield the stick of equality out of self-interest.

Positive laws are those laws revealed by people who have authority not from God, but by authority of the state itself and its tradition of hypocrisy. So we have seen that religion and law and kingship all rely on the power of God in the first instance but then quickly shed themselves of this naked truth, and don their own garments of awe, esteem, status and tradition (as well as blood-lines) in order to claim the urgrund of the right to power. We have also seen that these creations are wrought from the very fabric of being-for-itself as the true urgrund of the state and its teleological effects in terms of over-population and desertification and hence war.

Let us remind ourselves of the one eternal law that does resonate throughout all of this however in order to elucidate the truth of these state created necessities, as Hobbes has already reminded us above, and as the Holy words of scripture of all three major religions of the World expound: whatsoever you require that others should do to you, that do ye to them.

I don’t think that I require war, thank you very much. Do you think that I should? In other words, I do not believe that I have a property that is mine by rights and not an-others for eternity, because I earned that eternal right in just forty years of working for the state that gave me that right, and has managed to defend it for a certain amount of time. I don’t believe this for good reasons, but it does not give me any security in life, only fear of becoming abject every day along with my family. Only the fear that I will not be treated by others as they would I to them, because that would deny them of their desire for safety, provided by property rights, the very cause of war and the unsafety that they protect themselves from, but not myself, who they deny the same right. In a pyramid it is not possible for finite goods or land to be everyones right, because, as we shall see in more detail later, that does not increase the wealth of the pyramid.

The abject are necessary for justice to employ its stick-wielders of justice, and stick-wielders of justice require gain just like everyone else in the pyramid. The fact that stick-wielders do not increase the power of the state by their inaction- peace- but in fact impoverish it in times of peace, means simply that war is coming and the more the soldiers require the faster war is coming. As we will see, the authority behind the law quickly comes down to how much the soldiers require in order to give the right to it over to the ruler that reciprocates according to their will, of what should be done for them, no matter the price for others within the pyramid.

11: The two repercussions of Civil Law and Positive Law

“The office of the sovereign, be it a monarch or an assembly, consisteth in the end, for which he was trusted with the sovereign power, namely the procuration of the safety of the people; to which he is obliged by the law of nature, and to render an account thereof to God, the author of that law, and to none but him. But by safety here, is not meant a bare preservation, but also all other contentments of life, which every man by lawful industry, without danger, or hurt to the commonwealth, shall acquire to himself.

And this is intended should be done, not by care applied to individuals, further than their protection from injuries, when they shall complain; but by a general providence, contained in public instruction, both of doctrine, and example; and in the making and executing of good laws, to which individual persons may apply their own cases.

And because, if the essential rights of sovereignty, specified before in the eighteenth chapter, be taken away, the commonwealth is thereby dissolved, and every man returneth into the condition, and calamity of a war with every other man, which is the greatest evil that can happen in this life; it is the office of the sovereign, to maintain those rights entire; and consequently against his duty, first, to transfer to another, or to lay from himself any of them. For he that deserteth the means, that being the sovereign, acknowledgeth himself subject to the civil laws; and renounceth the power of supreme judicature; or of making war, or peace by his own authority; or of judging of the necessities of the commonwealth; or of levying money and soldiers, when, and as much as his own conscience he shall judge necessary; or of making officers, and ministers both of war and peace; or of appointing teachers, and examining what doctrines are conformable, or contrary to the defence, peace, and good of the people. Secondly, it is against his duty, to let the people be ignorant, or misinformed of the grounds, and reasons of those his essential rights; because thereby men are easy to be seduced, and drawn to resist him, when the commonwealth shall require their use and exercise.” (Hobbes:1651:219-20)

Hobbes wrote these words in 1651 in order to proclaim the Natural Law that constituted the role of the King to his subjects. His knowledge of history only went back as far as the Early Greeks and their tribal wars as described in the Iliad. He had small knowledge of the primitive North Americans who as we have seen were on their way, through individual totemism, to existing through the perspective of beings-for-itself, and were just discovering war as a consequence.

He had no knowledge of the Australian aborigines who, as we have seen, existed in a state of being-in-Being, and had not known war and inequality, fear and protection for 40,000 years. Consequently Hobbes’ understanding of the roots of human-beings was that of only beings-for-itself as the urgrund of human nature, i.e. a state of natural war alongside natural law. Of course this made sense to him because he himself was a being-for-itself writing a book in order to become affiliated with King Charles II whose right to power he was defending. Unlike Rousseau who wrote of the noble savage as the urgrund of mankind, Hobbes saw civilization as the urgrund of power, coherence, and authority, because in his world view and experience, human beings were in a constant state of war, which made life nasty, brutish, and short, in its natural form. Hobbes quite correctly therefore judged that civilization was a necessity born from this urgrund, and hence so was the law.

He had no idea of the length of time that the silent law had prevailed in the Garden of Eden. As we have seen then this urgrund of Hobbes truth is a lie, but one unknown to Hobbes, and probably to most readers up unto this point. These techniques of civilization are only necessary by the choice of settling. They are Hubris caused by the Nemesis of the settlers’ effect of desertification and over-population. They have existed for only 5,500 years and are not obligatory. This nature was always resting within the being-in-Being, and it was abundance that allowed the nature of being-for-itself to emerge and predominate and form social groups- settlers, the race of Cain.

By this truth I do not mean to say that the law, the ruler, the warrior are therefore evil, not at all

What I mean to say is that they are a necessary evil, that attempts to do good by creating hope and fear and paranoia in order to control the evils of settling. But that is not the end of what I am saying. Once this process of settling gets started, how does a ruler end this behaviour when there is no chance of going back to hunter-gathering because of all of the other settlers. It is no longer viable to tell the story of the hunter-gatherer- myth must die, as we shall see it do so. None of the rulers subjects ontologically can perceive of a world without gain and desire, and lack, they cannot perceive the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of being-in-Being, because they experience no alimental communion only renunciation of personal power.

Is the soldier supposed to no longer train to do unto others what he wishes they do not do unto him, and let an-other take lives, power, and property rights magically away from the power of his God- Daksha over your God- Daksha (or Publicola)? Is the judge supposed to not weigh the balance of the ‘rightful’ desires of the individual against those of the state and its ‘constitutive rights’ that regulate this dance of power and so control at least excess injustice where it can and deny the hypocrisy for this greater good?

The question most pertinent is this. If a collection of people who all wish to gain individually get together and are able to divide power in order to conquer and gain more power, and in fact have to do this in order to not lose against another group of similar peoples, then do you think that they will use these powers to gain for themselves individually over the group or to gain for the group over themselves individually? How many will be reciprocators and how many takers? Well the answer lies in the amount of capital it takes to stop a reciprocator from turning into a taker, and a giver into a reciprocator, etc. 

It depends on the overall wealth of the pyramid in comparison to an-others (treason, bribery, army, etc) and it depends on the overall dispersion of that wealth, that provides enough awe, esteem, and status to the individual and his desires. In other words the answer is, it’s up to you as an individual which behaviour you choose, but you must have the power by which to choose it. When one desires power then the answer is always infinite desire, and so, in the very court of power are those who are there in order to court power.

This is when the hypocrisy of justice and the right to wield a stick upon an-other become purely a lie. Court meaning, a royal retinue, but derived from the word cohort meaning a band of soldiers, or an enclosure, and also from hort-us meaning a garden. The other type of court, as in courtly love, means to seek favour by practising the arts in vogue at court. A vogue of this court was of course the courtesan, meaning literally, ‘one belonging to the court’- a whore of Babylon, the current vogue in Babylon- the first technique of living that created what we call civilization. The other great eternal vogue is desire, as we shall see throughout the courts of every land from now on.

From the repercussions of making God’s law a visible force from an invisible one, namely, civil law and positive law, come their effects- hypocrisy, the effect of which itself is to produce two new concepts into our worlding, those of lying and bad faith.

Lying

 “That which taketh away the reputation of sincerity, is the doing or saying of such things, as appear to be signs, that what they require other men to believe, is not believed by themselves; all which doings, or sayings are therefore called scandalous, because they be stumbling blocks, that make men to fall in the way of religion; as injustice, cruelty, profaneness, avarice, and luxury. For who can believe, that he that doth ordinarily such actions as proceed from any of these roots, believeth there is any such invisible power to be feared, as he affrighteth other men withal, for lesser faults?

That which taketh away the reputation of love, is the being detected of private ends: as when the belief they require of others, conduceth or seemeth to conduce to the acquiring of dominion, riches, dignity, or secure pleasure, to themselves only, or specially. For that which men reap benefit by to themselves, they are thought to do for their own sakes, and not for love of others.” (Hobbes:1651:77-78)

“…primatologists Richard Byrne and Nadia Corp, from St Andrews University, discovered that certain monkeys and apes are perfectly capable of deceiving each other for personal gain. A female gorilla, for example, will mate with a male surreptitiously to avoid a beating from a more dominant male. And monkeys will feign lack of interest in tasty food so that others don’t come and steal it.

Byrne observed a young baboon avoiding a reprimand from its mother by suddenly standing to attention and scanning the horizon, fooling the entire troop into panicking about a possible rival group nearby. He was rather shocked that baboons could do anything quite as subtle as that.

The frequency of deception in a species turns out to be in direct proportion to the size of the animal’s neocortex. Bush babies and lemurs, which have a relatively small neocortex, were among the least sneaky. The most ‘tactically deceptive’ primates included macaques and the great apes- gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orang-utans- all of which are endowed with a large neocortex. So the brainier the ape, the more deceptive its behaviour. And who are the brainiest of all the apes? We are. The Lying Ape.” (King:2006:18-19)

So what, in the opinion of Dr Skinner, is the bottom line. Why do we lie?

“The answer to why we lie is because we can. It’s all part of being human. The acid test of human consciousness is that we can lie. Self-consciousness and the ability to lie develop hand in hand. They are different aspects of the same process. People naturally lie and get other people to lie for them. It’s all very destructive and depressing. There is an upside to being self-conscious, to being human- but this is a downside.”  (King:2006:24)

By the time of Babylon the settler had much that it could desire, and so it had much more ‘reason’ to practice his natural ability to lie in order to gain these desires that were produced by other settlers, he also lived in a world of lack, where the power to gain these desires depended upon this lack to create the power of the stick and fear and property rights, the world was ruled by civilized men, and hierarchies had become well and truly established.

Were these heads of State then, leading their peoples towards a greater way of being towards God, or a greater way for his peoples  (beings-for-itself), or was the ruler simply using these people to gain esteem, power and authority for their own self,  through these techniques of claiming the right to His laws, His truth, His esteem and His power in order to gain greater pleasure for-itself? How long would it take a liar to lie his way to power, rather than earn it? And what if that liar managed to gain the ultimate power? And what if the world is made up of people wanting power and loads of them are willing to lie to get it, if they can get away with it.

How many people close to the throne of power will be the liars and how many the truth tellers? All we need do to answer this is to look at the actual rulers throughout history and see what the answer was for each of them individually in order to see which one of these is ‘right’. To begin with then let us look at the overall history of early civilization with the Babylonians and the Egyptians:

“The imperial age, therefore, was sterile; but that sterility suited the emperors just fine. If you were Snefru, drifting on your barge of slave girls, would you want to change very much?

Now we see why the extra food and surplus wealth of the New Stone Age did not translate into further progress. The food and wealth of the first agricultural and industrial revolutions were not retained by the workers or traders, who might have invested it in some useful technologies. Instead, it was creamed off by kings, priest and soldiers to support their palaces, temples, pyramids, weapons, barges and slave girls and to crush dissent or heterodoxy.” (Kealey:2008:70-72)

The Sumerian priests may have been sincere believers in their gods, though ancient people were not exempt from manipulations of credulity; at their worst, they were the world’s first racketeers, running the eternal money-spinners- protection, booze, and girls.” (Wright:2006:70)

“Having invented irrigation, the city, the corporation, and writing, Sumer added professional soldiers and hereditary kings. The kings moved out of the temples and into palaces of their own, where they forged personal links with divinity, claiming godly status by virtue of descent from heaven, a notion that would appear in many cultures and endure into modern times as divine right.” (Wright:2006:70-1)

It would seem then that the eventual desertification of the lands of Babylon through salinisation and the end of this empire, served only the Priest and the King, who gained power by leaving the temple, selling whores, a protection racket, and drugs for their own personal gain! Is this really the truer law behind the law? We shall look at the entirety of history before we judge.

How are we to understand however the mechanism by which all of the peoples of the pyramid stand by for generation after generation and watch these priest/kings and their minions and henchmen gain whilst they remain for hundreds upon hundreds of years in poverty and slavery?

It cannot be the law and justice that has cohered the people because justice has not been served, and morality has clearly been abused by its proselytizers. Herein lies the lie and the truth. The coherence of the state is always one of being-for-itself as urgrund no matter the regulative dance of law, esteem, rights, etc that it claims over this constitutive dance of civilization.

The claim of equality, fraternity, and liberty, that are announced as goals, but are removed as realities

The structure and coherence of the pyramid therefore is not defined by these manifestations of the invisible force of being-for-itself but are kept invisible through them in the form of the taker/persecutor, the reciprocator/rescuer and the giver/victim/scape-goat. The judge, the ruler, and the priest all persecute in their negative cult in order to rescue, the victims of the state that they have created, but they also reciprocate that persecution by reciprocating these rights to power, gain, wealth, that ensure the creation of the victim in a finite world. In other words, each level of the pyramid reciprocates and sustains itself by sustaining those above it and beneath it, through the medium of the carrot of gain and the stick of loss in a worlding of desire.

What fraternity, what fealty, what equality, what esteem, what liberty, what power does a reciprocator pigeon dance to? He dances for those of his own kind who will reciprocate his dance, and for those who have taken more power and are hence more powerful, and might therefore be the path to further gain so the desired seed will fall through the chute.

The key to civilization forming is the reciprocator. If a single taker came along and just took from each individual, then he would soon be over powered by the many individuals that he had taken from who would naturally form into a group by his actions (Hubris and Nemesis), but if he can convince those from whom he will take, that some of them will gain and not lose, then he gains their fealty and hence their power, and hence can continue to take. This is best illustrated by a nice story.

12: The Rogue, the Sheep and the Villages

“Once there was a rogue who was caught by the people of a village. They tied him to a tree to contemplate the suffering which they were going to inflict on him; and went away, having decided to throw him into the sea that evening, after they had finished their day’s work.

But a shepherd, who was not very intelligent, came along and asked the clever rogue why he was there; ‘some men have put me here because I will not accept their money’.

‘Why do they want to give it to you, and why will you not take it?’, asked the astonished shepherd.

‘Because I am a contemplative, and they want to corrupt me,’ said the rogue; ‘they are godless men’.

The shepherd suggested that he should take the rogue’s place, and advised the rogue to run away and put himself out of reach of the godless ones.

So they changed places.

The citizens returned after nightfall, put a sack over the shepherd’s head, tied him up, and threw him into the sea.

The next morning they were amazed to see the rogue coming into the village with a flock of sheep.

Where have you been, and where did you get those animals?’ they asked him.

‘In the sea there are kindly spirits who reward all who jump in and “drown” in this manner’, said the rogue.

In almost less time than it takes to tell, the people rushed to the seashore and jumped in.

That was how the rogue took over the village.” (Shah:1979:141)

In the above story we see quite clearly that it is the inner desire for gain that drove, all of the characters of this story and not reason which would have saved them, and this desire led to their destruction, and the overall gain of the rogue who simply lied about being a man of God in order to begin his progress to power. The only progress that the ancient world managed to achieve for those who made up the pyramid.

Now that the rogue is in power  as a chief in the village, for our purposes, let us promote him to the king of a city, and place him in the position of ruler/priest/judge, who already possesses the greatest power and so whilst wishing to gain does not also want to lose any of the power he has gained. When he tells his story ‘of having the right to power’ for gain, this time he invokes not a lie, but instead the law.

The Thief, the Shopkeeper and the Law

A thief broke into a shop. While he was there, a sharp awl which the shopkeeper had left on a shelf entered his eye, and blinded it.

The thief went to law, saying: ‘The penalty for stealing is prison, but the penalty for negligence causing injury to an eye is considerable damages.’

‘He came to steal from me,’ said the shopkeeper, in his own defence.

‘That will be dealt with by another court,’ said the judge, ‘and cannot concern us here.’

‘If you take all my possessions,’ said the thief, ‘my family will starve while I am in prison. That is clearly not fair upon them.’

‘Then I shall order the shopkeeper’s eye to be put out in retaliation’, said the judge.

‘But if you do that,’ said the shopkeeper, ‘I shall lose more than the thief did, and it will not be equitable. I am a jeweller, and the loss of one eye would ruin my capacity for work.’

‘Very well,’ said the judge, ‘since the law is impartial, and none must suffer more than he should, and since the whole community shares in the gains and losses of some of its members, bring a man who needs only one eye- an archer for instance- and put out his other eye.’

And this was done.” (Shah:1979:144-45)

The taker, as judge here, is accompanied by a reciprocator, in the form of the shopkeeper. The keeper of the shop of finite capital goods has been given the right to this shop not actually because it is his right, but because it empowers the taker- the judge of this right. The thief is not judged for his crime, it is the resultant loss of power to the state that is weighed in the name of justice and its consequent behaviour of just-punishment, whilst the reciprocator ends up in a state of paranoia because, just like the dancing scientist who didn’t get paid, he has done the dance of reciprocation, received the necessary, power, status and esteem for all these years, as is the law and his right, and yet he has not been in receipt of even the right perspective of justice, namely the thief taking from him his power in the form of capital goods, whilst an-other, a scape-goat, that will not decrease power to the state (the archer) becomes abject from this perspective of justice- and rightly, and hence, reasonably, so.

It turned out to be true for the merchant that the state was not therefore for him as he had been told, but that he was there for the state, and that the state was there for the judge, who always wins given that the game is rigged in his favour, despite any ability for ‘il Poche’ that he may behove himself too in his desired beliefs. Later on we will look at the Jonathan Wild act and the creation of the police to elucidate this further.

This then is the true history of Babylon, and Egypt, and Meso-America, and China, and any other society with a pyramidal form of architecture. It is not ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ it is the truth. That is the benefit of walking a mile in the shoes of history, one can be sure of the behaviour of the peoples by their creations and the results of these creations, and the results of these creations in creating the thrownness that will pick us up and sweep us along in the strongest current- civilized desire as a natural right in a commonwealth, that didn’t ‘exist’, that was not ‘nomina’ or ‘numina’ for 40,000 years and yet has no magically come into existence, has brought in its nature a distance from God, and has bridged that gap with a negative cult to control the power of the God of desire, that they have unleashed upon the world, and upon themselves from hence forth.

Peace is the most efficient mode of war, but war is the term upon which we live, the urgrund nature of settling and property rights and their justice that is unable to be in harmony with equal justice due to desire and its right to felicity.

Now that we have ascertained the true role of the reciprocator, the merchant in our story, in regards to the power of the taker and his perspective of justice, let us look at how society really works when the reciprocator is still being ‘protected’ by the state and in full receipt of his due, esteem, awe, status, and wealth. How does this reciprocator behave. Is it possibly hypocritically?

13: Class and Nation

“Different sections of the community are, to all realities, ‘nations’. Beware of people who ask you questions, when they already have opinions which they want to have confirmed, or by means of which they propose, unknowingly, to reject and thus support their own conclusions.

Association with such people is not only fruitless: it is the mark of an ignorant man

The clerics, doctors, literary men, nobles and peasants, really could be called nations; for each one has its own customs and casts of thought. To imagine that they are just the same as you simply because they live in the same country or speak the same language is a feeling to be examined. All enlightened people eventually reject this assumption. (Samarqandi)” (Shah:1978:164)

In order to explore this truth of nations within a nation defined by the power of each of these nations, respectively to each other and to the whole, let us hear from Albert Hourani who in his book, ‘A History of the Arab Peoples’ describes this process for us within the Islamic World as it formed. Obviously this means that there are at least 4200 years between Babylon and this description but this difference is only one of time, not perspective. The perspective is exactly the same- God and his scriptures as told through its divine positive law speaker- Mohammed- in a world of settlers that only recently used to be nomadic hunter-gatherers until they started trading. I have emboldened some of the writing to make the point clearer:

“Between the two poles of the city, the palace and the market, relations were close but complex, based on mutual need but divergent interests. The ruler needed the economic activities of the city to provide him with arms and equipment for his army and ships, furnishings and adornments for his person, his entourage and family, and the money to pay for them, whether through regular taxation, or by special levies; the merchants provided his financial reserve, to which he could turn when he needed more money than regular taxes could provide. In the same way, the learned class formed a human reserve from which he could draw civil and judicial officials, and poets and artists embellished his court and gave him a reputation for magnificence. For their part, the urban population, and in particular those who possessed wealth and standing, needed the power of the ruler in order to guarantee the supply of food and raw materials from the countryside, guard the trade-routes and conduct relations with other rulers in order to smooth the path of trade.

They needed him also to maintain order and the fabric of law, without which life in a complex and civilized community could not be carried on.” (Hourani:1991:133-4)

“Those who taught, interpreted and administered the law, together with those who exercised certain other religious functions- who led the prayers in the mosques or preached the Friday sermon- had come to form a distinct stratum in urban society: the ‘ulama, the men of religious learning, the guardians of the system of shared beliefs, values and practices.” (Hourani:1991:115)

“The upper ‘ulama were closely linked with the other elements in the urban élite, the merchants and masters of respected crafts. They possessed a common culture; merchants sent their sons to be educated by religious scholars in schools, in order to acquire a knowledge of Arabic and the Qur’an, and perhaps of law. It was not uncommon for a man to work both as a teacher and scholar and in trade. Merchants needed ‘ulama as legal specialists, to write formal documents in precise language, settle disputes about property and supervise the division of their property after death. Substantial and respected merchants could act as ‘udul, men of good repute whose evidence would be accepted by qadi.

There is evidence of intermarriage between families of merchants, mastercraftsmen and ‘ulama, and of the intertwining of economic interests of which marriage might be the expression. Collectively they controlled much of the wealth of the city. The personal nature of the relationships on which trade depended made for a rapid rise and fall of fortunes invested in trade, but families of ‘ulama tended to last longer; fathers trained their sons to succeed them; those in high office could use their influence in favour of younger members of the family.

Whether merchants or higher ‘ulama, it was possible for those who had wealth to transmit it from generation to generation by means of the system of religious endowments authorized by the shari’a (waqf or hubus). A waqf was an assignment in perpetuity of the income from a piece of property for charitable purposes, for example, the maintenance of mosques, schools, hospitals, public fountains or hostels for travellers, the freeing of prisoners or the care of sick animals. It could also be used, however, for the benefit of the founder’s family.

The founder could stipulate that a member of the family would act as administrator and assign a salary to him, or else he could provide that the surplus income from the endowment should be given to his descendants as long as they survived, and be devoted to the charitable purpose only when the line died out; such provisions could give rise to abuses. Waqfs were placed under the care of the qadi, and ultimately of the ruler; they thus provided some safeguard for the transmission of wealth against the fortunes of trade, the extravagance of heirs, or the depredations of rulers.” (Hourani:1991:115-6)

“The alliance of interests which expressed itself in such ways could break down, however. Within the ruling group itself, the balance of power between the ruler and those on whom he relied could be shaken. In the Mamluk state, for example, some of the main functions of the ruler’s officials were taken over by the main mamluk military leaders and their own households. In some circumstances, the soldiers would break their obedience and disturb the peace of the city or threaten the ruler’s power; this was the way in which Ayyubids succeeded Fatimids in Cairo, then Mamluks replaced Ayyubids, and then one household of mamluks took over from another. On the side of the urban population, the spokesmen who mediated the wishes and commands of the ruler to the people could also express the grievances and demands of the groups which they represented. When taxation was too high, soldiers were unruly, officials abused their power, or food was short, the higher ‘ulama had a role to play. They tried therefore to preserve a certain independence of the ruler.

The discontent of the possessing classes in the city did not usually take the form of open disobedience

They had too much to lose by disorder. Their rare moments of free action came when the ruler was defeated by an enemy and rival, and the leading men of the city could negotiate its surrender to the new master. Among the ordinary people, however, discontent could take the form of disturbance of order. The skilled craftsmen and shopkeepers would not easily revolt except under pressure of hardship, the oppression of officials, high prices, shortage of food or materials; their normal condition was one of acquiescence, since their interest too lay in the preservation of order. The proletariat, however, the mass of rural immigrants, unskilled casual workers, beggars and habitual criminals on the outskirts of the city, was in a more permanent state of unrest.

In moments of fear or hardship, the whole population of the city might be disturbed. Moved perhaps by popular preachers denouncing oppression (zulm) and holding out the vision of a just Islamic order, mobs would break into the suq, merchants shut their shops, and some spokesman of the people would bring to the ruler complaints against his officials, or against merchants suspected of causing an artificial scarcity of bread. Faced with such a movement, the ruler might adjust his policy to satisfy some of the demands; officials would be dismissed or executed, the storehouses of the grain merchants opened. The market would open again, the coalition of forces dissolve, but the urban mass would still be there, appeased or controlled for the moment, but as far as ever from a just Islamic order.” (Hourani:1991:136-7)

So here we see then that the law is ‘based on mutual need but divergent interests’ and we have already seen that mutual need as being one of hope and fear, desire and lack, as a perceived right. God’s law and positive law, is needed to control the space between mutual need and divergent interests, and that civilization is in like manner built on this same dual premise. In Sociology this has been named the ‘janus’ complex of the state, meaning two-faced- the hypocite. I call these faces ‘hope’ and ‘fear’ whose heart beats within the body of paranoia that it possesses, and is possessed by. Hobbes calls it the Leviathan. It is civilization.

The above moral truths of God’s law, such as Do Not Kill, do not covet, and do unto others as you would have done unto yourself are therefore promulgated by those who then say, that because they possess these laws, they therefore have the right to kill, to covet, and to do unto others what they do not want done unto them, are hypocrisies, of course, but they are necessary hypocrisies because of our given ‘right’ to desire to felicity to a commonwealth, from an ontology twisted by hope and fear.

For this lawful truth to be unquestioned and accepted as right then the tribe of each civilization makes it a totem (in the form of a blind woman with a set of scales at present and in the words of the bible) and it is taboo to question it without suffering death, by naming it treason for what your questioning will do to society, or manipulating the course (of the river Leviathan) of justice) etc., (remember the Aborigines reason for murder) and ritualises the dancing pigeon in a box called the court-room where he must swear-on-the-bible-dance, in order to place his words into the same super-state of truth that the judge possesses by his affiliation with God.  In other words, the murderer dance cannot be named so, it must be named justice by the judge, right by the king, necessary by the priest, heroic by the hero, of value by the valorous, of honour by the honest.

The truth is taboo, and will result in the name traitor, and the subsequent murder dance by another pyramid hero, judge, or honest man

No-one wants to hear that they are killing a scapegoat, they want to hear that they have been saved from a taker by their collective power. That’s what the traitor was as he threatened the cohesion of will with the unconcealedness of being. This is what the true martyr is to the ‘being-in-Being’. Not the pyramid martyr who demands that their people are saved from subjection by the killing of anothers. Shortly we will meet a truthful man who tells a state this truth, and we will hear his ideas about justice and its place in the worlding of civilization, his name is Socrates, the first western martyr to being-in-Being.

As we have seen then civilization is simply a zero-sum game of taker-scapegoat, scapegoat-taker, with reciprocators facilitating the story of success or failure to its never-ending conclusion. There is no justice only enforcement aligned to cohering the peoples towards greater power in order for the ruler to gain, and then leave the majority in a state of war that they will now control and call ‘protection’. Even though they are protecting you from another ruler who is doing the same thing to his people, and will demand their going to war in the name of ‘protection’ too. But through the ontological perspective of individuality, of family, of identity, of culture, of phylogeny, and of course- hate.

“The illusion of singular identity, which serves the violent purpose of those orchestrating such confrontations, is skilfully cultivated and fomented by the commanders of persecution and carnage. It is not remarkable that generating the illusion of unique identity, exploitable for the purpose of confrontation, would appeal to those who are in the business of fomenting violence, and there is no mystery in the fact that such reductionism is sought. But there is a big question about why the cultivation of singularity is so successful, given the extraordinary naïveté of that thesis in a world of obviously plural affiliations. To see a person exclusively in terms of only one of his or her many identities is, of course, a deeply crude intellectual move… and yet, judging from its effectiveness, the cultivated delusion of singularity is evidently easy enough to champion and promote.

The advocacy of a unique identity for a violent purpose takes the form of separating out one identity group- directly linked to the violent purpose at hand- for special focus, and it proceeds from there to eclipse the relevance of other associations and affiliations through selective emphasis and incitement (“How could you possibly talk about these things when there are people being killed and our women raped?”).

The martial art of fostering violence draws on some basic instincts and uses them to crowd out the freedom to think and the possibility of composed reasoning. But it also draws, we have to recognize, on a kind of logic- a fragmentary logic. The specific identity that is separated out for special action is, in most cases, a genuine identity of the person to be recruited: a Hutu is indeed a Hutu, a “Tamil tiger” is clearly a Tamil, a Serb is not an Albanian, and a gentile German with a mind poisoned by Nazi philosophy is certainly not a gentile German. What is done to turn that sense of self-understanding into a murderous instrument is (1) to ignore the relevance of all other affiliations and associations, and (2) to redefine the demands of the “sole” identity in a particularly belligerent form. This is where the nastiness as well as the conceptual confusions are made to creep in.” (Sen:2006:175-6)

“A remarkable use of imagined singularity can be found in the basic classificatory idea that serves as the intellectual background to the much-discussed thesis of “the clash of civilizations,” which has been championed recently, particularly following the publication of Samuel Huntington’s influential book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. The difficulty with this approach begins with the unique categorization, well before the issue of a clash- or not- is even raised. Indeed, the thesis of a civilizational clash is conceptually parasitic on the commanding power of a unique categorization along so-called civilizational lines, which as it happens closely follows religious divisions to which singular attention is paid.  Huntington contrasts Western civilization with “Islamic civilization”, “Hindu civilization”, “Buddhist civilization” and so on. The alleged confrontations of religious differences are incorporated into a sharply carpentered vision of one dominant and hardened divisiveness.

In fact, of course, the people of the world can be classified according to many other systems of partitioning, each of which has some – often far-reaching- relevance in our lives: such as nationalities, locations, classes, occupations, social status, languages, politics, and many others. While religious categories have received much airing in recent years, they cannot be presumed to obliterate other distinctions, and even less can they be seen as the only relevant system of classifying people across the globe. In partitioning the population of the world into those belonging to “the Islamic world”, “the Western world”, “the Hindu world”, “the Buddhist world”, the divisive power of classificatory priority is implicitly used to place people firmly inside a unique set of rigid boxes. Other divisions (say, between the rich and the poor, between members of different classes and occupations, between people of different politics, between distinct nationalities and residential locations, between language groups, etc.) are all submerged by this allegedly primal way of seeing the differences between people…

This reductionist view is typically combined, I am afraid, with a rather foggy perception of world history which overlooks, first, the extent of internal diversities within these civilizational categories, and second, the reach and influence of interactions– intellectual as well as material-  that go right across the regional borders of so-called civilizations….

The limitations of such civilization-based thinking can prove to be just as treacherous for programs of “dialogue among civilizations…Well-meaning attempts at pursuing global peace can have very counterproductive consequences when these attempts are founded on a fundamentally illusory understanding of the world of human beings.” (Sen:2006:10-12)

“Religious or civilizational classification can, of course, be a source of belligerent distortion as well. It can, for example, take the form of crude beliefs well exemplified by U.S. Lieutenant General William Boykin’s blaring- and by now well-known- remark describing his battle against Muslims with disarming coarseness: “I knew that my God was bigger than his,” and that the Christian God “was a real God, and [the Muslim’s] was an idol.” “(Sen:2006:13)

“Let me illustrate the issue by considering the way my own country, India, is treated in this classificatory system. In describing India as a “Hindu civilization,” Huntington’s exposition of the alleged “clash of civilizations” has to downplay the fact that India has many more Muslims than any other country in the world with the exception of Indonesia and very marginally Pakistan. India may not be placed within the arbitrary definition of “the Muslim world,” but it is still the case that India (with its 145 million Muslims- more than the whole British population and the entire French population put together) has a great many more Muslims than nearly every country in Huntington’s definition of “the Muslim world.” Also, it is impossible to think of the civilization of contemporary India without taking note of the major roles of Muslims in the history of the country.” (Sen:2006:46-7)

“At the end of a comprehensive attack on supposed Indian achievements particularly in mathematics and science, Mill came to the conclusion that the Indian civilization was on a par with “other inferior ones” known to Mill: “very nearly the same with that of the Chinese, the Persians, and the Arabians,” and just as inferior as those other “subordinate nations, the Japanese, Cochinchinese, Siamese, Burmans, and even Malays and Tibetans.” After that comprehensive assessment, if these “subordinate nations” fell prey to some disaffection toward the colonizing West, it may be a little unfair to attribute it simply to self-generated paranoia.” (Sen:2006:88)

“The connection between cultural bigotry and political tyranny can be very close. The asymmetry of power between the ruler and the ruled, which generates a heightened sense of identity contrast, can be combined with cultural prejudice in explaining away failures of governance and public policy. Winston Churchill made the famous remark that the Bengal famine of 1943, which occurred just before India’s independence from Britain in 1947 (it would also prove to be the last famine in India in the century, since famines disappeared with the Raj), was caused by the tendency of people there to “breed like rabbits.” The explication belongs to the general tradition of finding explanations of disasters not in bad administration, but in the culture of the subjects, and this habit of thought had some real influence in crucially delaying famine relief in the Bengal famine, which killed between two and three million people. Churchill rounded things up by expressing his frustration that the job of governing India was made so difficult by the fact that the Indians were “the beastliest people in the world, next to the Germans.” Cultural theories evidently have their uses.” (Sen:2006:105-6)

“Unfreedom can result also from a lack of knowledge and understanding of other cultures and of alternative lifestyles. To illustrate the main issue that is involved here, even an admirer…of the cultural freedoms that modern Britain has, by and large, succeeded in giving to people of different backgrounds and origins who are resident in that country can well have considerable misgivings about the official move in the United Kingdom toward extension of state-supported faith-based schools…

Rather than reducing existing state-financed faith-based schools, actually adding others to them- Muslim schools, Hindu schools, and Sikh schools to preexisting Christian ones- can have the effect of reducing the role of reasoning which the children may have the opportunity to cultivate and use. And this is happening at a time when there is a great need for broadening the horizon of understanding of other people and other groups, and when the ability to undertake reasoned decision-making is of particular importance. The limitations imposed on the children are especially acute when the new religious schools give children rather little opportunity to cultivate reasoned choice in determining the priorities of their lives. Also, they often fail to alert students to the need to decide for themselves how the various components of their identities (related respectively to nationality, language, literature, religion, ethnicity, cultural history, scientific interests, etc.) should receive attention.” (Sen:2006:117-8)

Justice as authority, as the right to do the stick-wielding and the carrot-giving, is nothing more then than esteem, power, and hatred (the emperors new clothes), and story. The reality is that in order for Solomon to be King Solomon with the right to judge he must have the wind (the invisible force of individual desire in the group) to enact his judgement, as that is the cause of his power, gained by this relationship.

At the beginning of this chapter I quoted some word from Mulla Do-Piaza

In them we learnt that it was the unfortunate fate of a ‘Truthful man’- a mosquito- to discover that he was ‘secretly regarded by everyone as an enemy’. If this is true, then what will happen to a truthful man when he attempts to enlighten his fellow pyramid dwellers of the unconcealedness of being, and the consequent lack of truth, that their pyramid contains? Well he did exist, and he told the people that their justice had no foundation to rest upon. His name was Socrates- the warrior, who became Socrates the philosopher, who was then named Socrates- the Traitor, so that justice could be served and he could be murdered by drinking hemlock produced for him by the pyramid power of production, the state, towards its teleological purpose of retaining the power he said they didn’t rightfully possess. You can read this whole dialogue between Solomon and the mosquito in the book that retells these accounts, ‘The Last Days of Socrates’ by Plato, Socrates’ pupil.

The state that Socrates accused was that of Athens, his home, and it is to the Greeks that we are about to proceed to witness the frame-work of states that will define the western-world up to the present day. For our purposes then let us hear from Socrates in another dialogue, this time with a man called Thrasymachus, recorded by Plato, this time in ‘The Republic’, in order to see just what justice really is. Socrates’ opponent Thrasymachus begins:

“’Listen then’, he replied. ‘I define justice or right as what is in the interest of the stronger party. Now where is your praise? I can see you’re going to refuse it.’

‘You shall have it when I understand what you mean, which at present I don’t. You say that what is in the interest of the stronger party is right; but what do you mean by interest? For instance, Polydamas the athlete is stronger than us, and it’s in his interest to eat beef to keep fit; we are weaker than he, but you can’t mean that the same diet is in our interest and so right for us.’

‘You’re being tiresome, Socrates’, he returned, ‘and taking my definition in the sense most likely to damage it.’

‘I assure you I’m not,’ I said; ‘you must explain your meaning more clearly’.

‘Well then, you know that some states are tyrannies, some democracies, some aristocracies? And that in each city power is in the hands of the ruling class?’

‘Yes’.

‘Each ruling class makes laws that are in its own interest, a democracy democratic laws, a tyranny tyrannical ones and so on; and in making these laws they define as “right” for their subjects what is in the interest of themselves, the rulers, and if anyone breaks their laws he is punished as a “wrong-doer”. That is what I mean when I say that “right” is the same thing in all states, namely the interest of the established ruling class; and this ruling class is the “strongest” element in each state, and so if we argue correctly we see that “right” is always the same, the interest of the stronger party.’

‘Now’, I said, ‘I understand your meaning, and we must try to find out whether you are right or not. Your answer defines “right” as “interest” (though incidentally this is just what you forbade me to do), but add the qualification “of the stronger party”.’

‘An insignificant qualification, I suppose you will say.’

‘Its significance is not yet clear; what is clear is that we must consider whether your definition is true. For I quite agree that what is right is an “interest”; but you add that it is the interest “of the stronger party”, and that’s what I don’t know about and want to consider.’

‘Let us hear you’

‘You shall’, said I. ‘You say that obedience to the ruling power is right and just?’

‘I do.’ …

‘Then you must admit that it is right to do things that are not in the interest of the rulers, who are the stronger party; that is, when the rulers mistakenly give orders that will harm them and yet (so you say) it is right for their subjects to obey those orders. For surely, my dear Thrasymachus, in those circumstances it follows that it is “right” to do the opposite of what you say is right, in that the weaker are ordered to do what is against the interest of the stronger.’…’ Thrasymachus agrees that rulers sometimes give orders harmful to themselves, and that it is right for their subjects to obey them….From this admission it follows that what is in the interest of the stronger is no more right than the reverse.’” (Plato:1973:65-8)

“At this stage of the argument it was obvious to everyone that the definition of justice had been reversed, and Thrasymachus, instead of replying, remarked, ‘Tell me, Socrates, have you a nurse?’

‘What do you mean?’ I returned. ‘Why not answer my question, instead of asking that sort of thing?’

‘Well, she lets you go round snivelling and drivelling, and you can’t even tell her the difference between sheep and shepherd.’

‘And why exactly should you say that?’ I asked.

‘Because you suppose that shepherds and herdsmen study the good of their flocks and herds and fatten and take care of them with some other object in view than the good of their states, if they are truly such, and feel towards their subjects as one might towards sheep, and think about nothing all the time but how they can make a profit out of them. Your view of right and wrong is indeed wide of the mark. You are not aware that justice or right is really what is good for someone else, namely the interest of the stronger party or ruler, exacted at the expense of the subject who obeys him.

Injustice or wrong is just the opposite of this, and dictates to the simple and the just, while they serve its interests because it is stronger than they, and as subjects promote not their own but their ruler’s happiness. I’m afraid you’re very simple-minded, Socrates; but you ought to consider how the just man always comes off worse than the unjust. For instance, in any business relations between them, you won’t find the just man better off at the end of the deal than the unjust. Again, in their relations with the state, when there are taxes to be paid the unjust man will pay less on the same income, and when there’s anything to be got he’ll get it all.

Thus if it’s a question of office, if the just man loses nothing else he will suffer from neglecting his private affairs; his honesty will prevent him appropriating public funds, and his relations and friends will detest him because his principles will not allow him to push their interests. But quite the reverse is true of the unjust man. I’m thinking of the man I referred to just now who can make profits in a big way: he’s the man to study if you want to find how much more private profit there is in wrong than in right. You can see it most easily if you take the extreme of injustice and wrongdoing, which brings the highest happiness to its practitioners and plunges its victims and their honesty in misery- I mean, of course, tyranny.

Tyranny is not a matter of minor theft and violence, but of wholesale plunder, sacred or profane, private or public

If you are caught committing such crimes in detail you are punished and disgraced: sacrilege, kidnapping, burglary, fraud, theft, are the names we give to such petty forms of wrongdoing. But when a man succeeds in robbing the whole body of citizens and reducing them to slavery, they forget these ugly names and call him happy and fortunate, as do all others who hear of his unmitigated wrong-doing. For, of course, those who abuse wrongdoing and injustice do so because they are afraid of suffering from it, not of doing it. So we see that injustice, given scope, has greater strength and freedom and power than justice; which proves what I started by saying, that justice is the interest of the stronger party, injustice the interest and profit of oneself.’…

‘Very well, Thrasymachus’, I said; ‘but have you not noticed that no one really wants to exercise other forms of authority? At any rate, they expect to be paid for them, which shows that they don’t expect any benefit for themselves but only for their subjects. For tell me, don’t we differentiate between the one art or profession and another by their ability to produce different results? And please tell me what you really think, so that we can get somewhere.’

‘That is how we differentiate them,’ he replied.

‘And so each one benefits us in a distinct and particular way; the doctor brings us health, the pilot a safe voyage, and so on.’

‘True’

‘So wage-earning brings us wages; for that is its function. For you don’t identify medicine and navigation, do you? Nor, if you are going to use words precisely, as you proposed, do you call navigation medicine just because a ship’s captain recovers his health on a voyage because the sea suits him.’

‘No’.

‘Nor do you call wage-earning medicine if someone recovers his health while earning money.’

‘No’

‘Well then, can you call medicine money-making, if a doctor earns a fee when he is curing his patient?

‘No,’ he said.

‘We are agreed then that each profession brings its own peculiar benefit?

‘I grant that’.

‘Any common benefit, therefore, that all the professions enjoy, must clearly be procured by the exercise of some additional function common to all.’

‘It looks like it.’

‘And further, if they earn wages it is a benefit they get from exercising the profession of wage-earning in addition to their own.’

He agreed reluctantly.

‘This benefit of receiving wages does not therefore come to a man as a result of the exercise of his own particular profession; if we are to be precise, medicine produces health and wage-earning wages, and building produces a house while wage-earning, following in its train, produces wages. Similarly all other arts and profession each perform their own function to the benefit of the subject of which they are in charge; and no man will benefit from his profession, unless he is paid as well.’

‘It seems not’, he said.

‘But if he works for nothing, does no one benefit?’

‘ I suppose someone does’

In fact it is clear enough, Thrasymachus, that no profession or art of authority provides for its own benefit but, as we said before, for that of the subject of which it is in charge, thus studying the interest of the weaker party and not the stronger. That was why I said just now that no one really wants authority and with it the job of righting other people’s wrongs, unless he is paid for it; because in the exercise of his professional skill, if he does his job properly, he never does or orders what is best for himself but only what is best for his subject. That is why, if a man is to consent to exercise authority, you must pay him, either in cash or honours, or alternatively by punishing him if he refuses.’…

So good men will not consent to govern for cash or honours. They do not want to be called profiteers for demanding a cash payment for the work of government, or thieves for making money on the side; and they will work for honours, for they aren’t ambitious. We must therefore compel them to consent and punish them if they refuse- perhaps that’s why it’s commonly considered improper to accept authority except with reluctance or under pressure; and the worst penalty for refusal is to be governed by someone worse than themselves. That is what frightens honest men into accepting power, and they approach it not as it if were something desirable out of which they were going to do well, but as if it were something unavoidable, which they cannot find anyone better or equally qualified to undertake. For in a city of good men there might well be as much competition to avoid power as there now is to get it, and it would be quite clear that the true ruler pursues his subjects’ interest and not his own; consequently all wise men would prefer the benefit of this service at the hands of others rather than the labour of affording it to others themselves.’” (Plato:1973:74-77)

“’You see, then, that I entirely disagree with Thrasymachus’ view that justice is the interest of the stronger; but the point is one that we can examine again later, and far more important is his recent assertion that the unjust man has a better life than the just. Which side are you on, Glaucon? and which of us seems to be telling the truth?

‘I think the just man’s life pays the better.’

‘Did you hear the list of good things in the unjust man’s life which Thrasymachus has just gone through?’ I asked.

‘I heard them’, he replied, ‘but I’m not persuaded.’

‘Shall we then try and persuade him if we can find any flaw in his argument?’…

‘Well then’, said I, turning to Thrasymachus, ‘let us begin at the beginning. You say that perfect injustice pays better than perfect justice.’

‘That’s what I say’, he replied, ‘and I’ve given you my reasons.’

‘Then what do you say about this: is one of them a good quality and one a bad?’

‘Of course.’

‘Justice a good quality, I suppose, and injustice a bad?’

‘My dear man’, he replied, ‘is that likely? When I am telling you that injustice pays and justice doesn’t.’

‘Then what do you think?’

‘The opposite,’ he answered.

‘You mean that justice is a bad quality?’

‘No, it’s merely supreme simplicity.’

‘And so injustice is duplicity, I suppose.’

‘No, it’s common sense.’

‘So you think that the unjust are better men and more sensible?’

‘If they can win political supremacy, and their wrong doing have full scope. You perhaps think I’m talking of bag-snatching; even things like that pay, if you aren’t found out, but they are quite trivial by comparison.’

‘I see what you mean about that,’ I said; ‘but what surprised me was that you should rank injustice with intelligence and other good qualities, and justice with their opposites.’

‘Yet that is just what I do.’

‘That is a much tougher proposition,’ I answered, ‘and it’s not easy to know what to say to it. For if you were maintaining that injustice pays, but were prepared to admit that it is a bad and vicious quality, we could base our argument on generally accepted grounds. As it is, having boldly ranked injustice with intelligence and other good qualities, you will obviously attribute to it all the strength of character that we normally attribute to justice.’

‘You’ve guessed my meaning correctly,’ he said.

‘Still, there must be no shirking,’ I rejoined, ‘and I must pursue the argument as long as I’m sure you are saying what you think. For I think you are really in earnest now, Thrasymachus, and saying what you think to be the truth.’

‘What’s it matter what I think?’ he retorted. ‘Stick to the point.’

‘It doesn’t matter at all,’ was my reply; ‘but see if you can answer me this further question. Will one just man compete with another and want more than his fair share of an act of justice?’

‘Certainly not; otherwise he would not be the simple, agreeable man we supposed him to be.’

‘And he will think it right and proper to compete with the unjust man or not?’

‘He’ll think it right and proper enough, but he’ll not be able to.’

‘That’s not what I’m asking,’ I said, ‘but whether one just man thinks it improper to compete with another and refuses to do so, but will compete with an unjust man?’

‘Yes that is so,’ he replied.

‘Then what about the unjust man? Will he compete with the just and want more than his share in an act of justice?’

‘Of course he will; he wants more than his share in everything.’

‘Will one unjust man, then, compete with another in an unjust action and fight to get the largest share in everything?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then let us put it this way,’ I said. ‘The just man does not compete with his like, but only his unlike, while the unjust man competes with both like and unlike.’…

‘So far, so good, Thrasymachus. Do you recognize the distinction between being musical and unmusical?’

‘Yes.’

‘And which of the two involves knowledge?’

‘Being musical; and being unmusical does not.’

‘And knowledge is good, ignorance bad.’

‘Yes.’

‘And the same argument applies to medicine.’

‘It does.’

‘Then does one musician who is tuning a lyre try to compete with another, or think that he ought to improve on the correct tuning of the instrument?’

‘I think not.’

‘But he does try to do better than an unmusical lay man?’

‘He must try to do that.’

‘What about a doctor then? Does he want to go beyond what is correct in his prescriptions in competition with his fellow-doctors?’

‘No.’

‘But he tries to do better than the layman?’

‘Yes.’

Then do you think that over the whole range of professional skill, anyone who has such skill aims at anything more in word or deed than anyone with similar skill? Don’t they both aim at the same result in similar circumstances?’

‘I suppose there’s no denying that.’

‘But the man who has no skill will try to compete both with the man who has and with the man who has not.’

‘Maybe.’

‘And the man with professional knowledge is wise and the wise man is good.’

‘I agree.’

‘So the good man, who has knowledge, will not try to compete with his like, but only with his opposite.’

‘So it seems.’

‘While the bad and ignorant man will try to compete both with his like and with his opposite.’

‘So it appears.’

‘But it was surely the unjust man, Thrasymachus, who, we found, competes both with his like and his unlike? That was what you said, wasn’t it?’

‘It was’, he admitted.

‘While the just man will not compete with his like, but with his unlike.’

‘True.’

‘The just man, then,’ I said, ‘resembles the good man who has knowledge, the unjust the man who is ignorant and bad.’

‘That may be.’

‘But we agreed that a thing is what it is like.’

‘We did.’

‘Then’, I concluded, ‘we have shown that the just man is wise and good and the unjust bad and ignorant.’

Thrasymachus’ agreement to all these points did not come as easily as I have described, but had to be dragged from him with difficulty, and with a great deal of sweat- for it was a hot day…. ‘Well, we have settled that point, Thrasymachus; but you will remember that we also said that injustice was strength.’” (Plato:1973:77-81)

“Would you say that a state might be unjust and wrongly try to reduce others to subjection, and having succeeded in so doing continue to hold them in subjection?’

‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘And a most efficient state, whose injustice is most complete, will be the first to do so.’

‘I understood that that was your argument,’ said I. ‘But do you think that the more powerful state needs justice to exercise this power over its neighbour or not?’

‘If you are right and justice implies knowledge, it will need justice; but if I am right, injustice.’

‘I am delighted that you are not just saying “yes” and “no”, but are giving me a fair answer, Thrasymachus.’

‘I’m doing it to please you.’

‘Thank you,’ said I. ‘Then will you be kind enough to tell me too whether you think that any group of men, be it a state or an army or a set of gangsters or thieves, can undertake any sort of wrongdoing together if they wrong each other?’

‘No.’

‘Their prospect of success is greater if they don’t wrong each other?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Because, of course, if they wrong each other that will breed hatred and dissension among them; but if they treat each other fairly, there will be unity of purpose among them.’

‘Yes- I won’t contradict you.’

‘That’s very good of you’, I said. ‘Now tell me this. If it is the function of injustice to produce hatred wherever it is, won’t it cause men to hate each other and quarrel and be incapable of any joint undertaking whether they are free men or slaves?’

‘It will.’

‘And so with any two individuals. Injustice will make them quarrel and hate each other, and they will be at enmity with themselves and with just men as well.’

‘They will.’

‘And in a single individual it will not lose its power, will it, or produce any different result?’

‘I grant you that.’

‘Injustice, then, seems to have the following results, whether it occurs in a state or family or army or in anything else: it renders it incapable of any common action because of factions and quarrels, and sets it at variance with itself and with its opponents and with all just men.’

‘Yes.’

‘And it produces its natural effects also in the individual. It renders him incapable of action because of internal conflicts and division of purpose, and sets him at variance with himself and with all just men.’…

‘We have shown that just men are more intelligent and more truly effective in action, and that unjust men are incapable of any joint action at all. Indeed, when we presumed to speak of unjust men effecting any joint action between them, we were quite wrong. For had they been completely unjust they would never have kept their hands off each other, and there must have been some element of justice among them which prevented them wronging each other as well as their victims, and brought them what success they had; they were in fact only half corrupted when they set about their misdeeds, for had their corruption been complete, their complete injustice would have made them incapable of achieving anything. All this seems to me to be established against your original contention.’” (Plato:1973:82-4)

“I thought, as I said this, that there would be no more argument; but in fact we had little more than begun. For Glaucon, who never lacked initiative, would not let Thrasymachus’ withdrawal pass unchallenged, but asked: ‘Do you really want to convince us that right is in all circumstances better than wrong or not?’

‘If I were given the choice,’ I replied, ‘I should want to convince you.’

‘Well then, you are not making much progress’, he returned.

‘Tell me, do you agree that there is one kind of good which we want to have simply for its own sake and without regard for its consequences? For example, happiness or pleasure, so long as pleasure brings no harm and its results don’t make us unhappy.’

‘Yes, that is one kind of good.’

‘And there is a kind category of good which includes exercise and medical treatment and earning one’s living as a doctor or otherwise. All these we should regard as painful but good for us; we should not choose them for their own sakes but for what we get out of them, wages or what not.’

‘There is this third category. But what is your point?’

‘In which category do you place justice and right?’

‘In the highest category, which anyone who is to be happy welcomes both for its own sake and for its consequences.’

‘That is not the common opinion,’ Glaucon replied. ‘It is normally put into the painful category, of goods which we pursue for the rewards they bring and in the hope of a good reputation, but which in themselves are to be avoided as unpleasant.’…

The best illustration of the liberty I am talking about would be if we supposed them to be possessed of the power which Gyges*, the ancestor of the famous Lydian, had in the story….

‘Let us now imagine there to be two such rings, one for the just man and one for the unjust. There is no one, it would commonly be supposed, who would have such iron strength of will as to stick to what is right and keep his hands off other people’s property. For he would be able to steal from the shops whatever he wanted without fear of detection, to go into any man’s house and seduce his wife, to murder or to behave as if he had supernatural powers. …Indeed, the supporter of this view will continue, men are right in thinking that injustice pays the individual better than justice; and if anyone wronged or robbed his neighbour, men would think him a most miserable idiot, though of course they would pretend to admire him in public because of their own fear of being wronged.” (Plato:1973:88-91)

*Gyges was reputed to have a ring that made him invisible, when he wore it.

“People are unanimous about the merits of self-control or justice, but think they are difficult to practise and call for hard work, while self-indulgence and injustice are easy enough to acquire, and regarded as disgraceful only by convention; wrong on the whole pays better than right, they say, and they are ready enough to call a bad man happy and respect him both in public and private provided he is rich and powerful, while they have no respect for the poor and powerless, and despise him, even though they agree that he is the better man….Some, in support of the easiness of vice, quote Hesiod: “Evil can men attain easily and in companies: the road is smooth and her dwelling near. But the gods have decreed much sweat before a man reaches virtue” and a road that is long and hard and steep. Others quote Homer on turning aside the gods-

‘The very gods are capable of being swayed.

Even they are turned from their course by sacrifice and humble prayers, libations and burnt offerings, when the miscreant and sinner bend the knee to them in supplication.’

Or they produce a whole collection of books of ritual instructions written by Musaeus and Orpheus, whom they call descendants of the Moon and the Muses; and they persuade not only individuals but whole communities that, both for living and dead, remission and absolution of sins may be had by sacrifices, and childish performances, which they are pleased to call initiations, and which they allege deliver us from all ills in the next world, where terrible things await the uninitiated.

‘Now what do you think, Socrates, is likely to be the effect of this sort of talk about virtue and vice, and how far gods and men think them worth while, on the minds of young men who have enough natural intelligence to gather the implications of what they hear for their own lives, the sort of person they ought to be and the sort of ends they ought to pursue? Such a young man may well ask himself, in Pindar’s words,

‘Shall I by justice mount the higher, or by deceit,’ and there dig in for life? For it is clear from what they tell me that if I am just, it will bring me no advantage but only trouble and loss, unless I also have a reputation for justice; whereas if I am unjust, but can contrive to get a reputation for justice, I shall have a marvellous time. Well then, since the sages tell me that “appearance counts for more than reality” and determines our happiness, I had better think entirely of appearances; I must put up a façade that has all the outward appearance of virtue, but I must always have at my back the “cunning, wily fox” of which Archilochus so shrewdly speaks.

You may object that it is not easy to be wicked and never be found out; I reply, that nothing worth while is easy, and that all we have been told points to this as the road to happiness. To help us avoid being found out we shall form clubs and secret societies, and we can always learn the art of public speaking, political or forensic; and so we shall get our way by persuasion or force and avoid the penalty for doing our neighbour down.

“Yet neither deceit nor force is effective against the gods.” But if there are no gods or if they care nothing for human affairs, why should we bother to deceive them? And if there are gods and they do care, our only knowledge of them is derived from tradition and the poets who have written about their genesis, and they tell us that they can be persuaded to change their minds by sacrifices and “humble prayers” and offerings. We must believe both statements or neither; and if we believe them then the thing to do is to sin first and sacrifice afterwards from the proceeds.

For if we do right we shall merely avoid the wrath of heaven, but lose the profits of wrong-doing; but if we do wrong we shall get the profits and, provided that we accompany our sins and wickednesses with prayer, be able to persuade the gods to let us go unpunished. “But, we shall pay in the next world for the sins we commit in this, either ourselves or our descendants.” To which the answer is that ritual and the absolution of heaven are very powerful, as we are told by the most advanced human societies, and by children of the gods who have been poets and prophets with a divine message and have said the same thing.

‘What argument, then, remains for preferring justice to the worst injustice, when both common men and great men agree that, provided it has a veneer of respectability, injustice will enable us, in this world and the next, to do as we like with gods and men? And how can anyone, when he has heard all we have said, possibly avoid laughing when he hears justice being praised, if he has any force of character at all, any advantages of person, wealth, or rank?…

‘The root of the whole matter is the assertion from which this whole discussion between the three of us started, and which we may put as follows. “all you professed partisans of goodness, from the heroes of old whose tales have survived to our own contemporaries, have never blamed injustice or praised justice except for the reputation and honours and rewards they bring: no one, poet or layman, has ever sufficiently enquired what the effect of each is on the mind of the individual (an effect that may be unobserved by either gods or men), and no one has explained how it is that injustice has the worst possible effect on the character and justice the reverse. Had you adopted that method from the beginning and set about convincing us when we were young, there would be no need for us to guard against our neighbours wronging us; each man would be his own policeman, because he would be afraid that by doing wrong he was doing himself a grave and permanent injury.”” (Plato:1973:95-99)

“’All right’, I said, ‘I understand. We are to study not only the origins of society, but also society when it enjoys the luxuries of civilization. Not a bad idea, perhaps, for in the process we may discover how justice and injustice are bred in a community. For though the society we have described seems to me to be the true norm, just as a man in health is the norm, there’s nothing to prevent us, if you wish, studying one whose temperature luxury has raised. Such a society will not be satisfied with the standard of living we have described. It will want chairs and tables and other furniture, and a variety of delicacies, scents, cosmetics, sweets, and mistresses. And we must no longer confine ourselves to the bare necessities of our earlier description, houses, clothing, and shoes, but must add the fine arts of painting and embroidery, and introduce materials like gold and ivory. Do you agree?’

‘Yes’, he said.

‘We shall have to enlarge our state again. Our healthy state is no longer big enough; its size must be enlarged to make room for a multitude of occupations none of which is concerned with necessaries. There will be hunters and fishermen, and there will be poets and playwrights with their following of reciters, actors, chorus-trainers, and producers; there will be manufacturers of domestic furniture of all sorts, and fashion-experts for the women. And we shall need a lot more servants- tutors, nurses, ladies’ maids, barbers, confectioners, and cooks. And we shall need swineherds too: there were none in our former state, as we had no need of them, but now we need pigs, and cattle in quantities too, if we are to eat meat. Agreed?’

‘There’s no denying it.’

‘We shall need doctors too, far more than we did before.’

‘With our new luxuries we certainly shall.’

‘And the territory which was formerly enough to support us will now be too small. If we are to have enough for pasture and plough, we shall have to cut a slice off our neighbours’ territory. And if they too are no longer confining themselves to necessities and have embarked on the pursuit of unlimited material possessions, they will want a slice of ours too.’

‘The consequence is inevitable!’

‘It will.’

‘For the moment,’ I said, ‘we are not concerned with the effects of war, food or bad; let us merely note that we have found its origin to be the same as that of most evil, individual or social.’

‘Yes, I agree’” (Plato:1973:107-8)

“‘There is’, I said, ‘a certain similarity between the qualities needed in a good watchdog and those needed in our guardians. I mean that each must have keen perceptions and speed in pursuit, and also strength to fight if he catches his quarry.’

‘Yes he will need all these qualities.’

‘And also courage, if he is to fight well.’

‘Of course.’

‘And no horse or dog or any other creature will have courage unless it has mettle and spirit. For have you not noticed what an irrepressible and unbeatable thing high spirits are, making their possessor quite fearless and indomitable in the face of danger?’

‘I have indeed.’

‘We know therefore what the physical qualities of our guardians must be, and that they must have high spirits as a quality of character.’

‘Yes.’

‘But if they have these qualities, Glaucon,’ I said, ‘won’t they be aggressive in their behaviour to each other and to the rest of the community?’

‘It won’t be easy to prevent it.’

‘And yet they ought to be gentle towards their fellow-citizens, and dangerous only to their enemies; otherwise they will destroy each other before others can destroy them.’

‘True.’

‘What are we to do, then?’ I said. ‘Where are we to find the gentle and generous disposition which will counteract their high spirits? If we deprive them of either quality, they won’t make good guardians; yet we seem to be asking the impossible, and if so a good guardian is an impossibility?’

‘I’m afraid it is.’” (Plato:1973:110)

“’ Our ideal philosophic character, therefore, if it is properly taught, must develop to perfection, but if it is sown and grows in unsuitable soil, the very opposite will happen, unless providence intervenes. Or do you share the common view that some of our young men are corrupted by sophists? Can the influence of individual sophists really corrupt them to any extent? Isn’t it really the public themselves who are sophists on a grand scale, and give a complete training to young and old, men and women, turning them into just the sort of people they want?’

‘When do they do that?’ he asked.

‘When they crowd into the seats in the assembly or law courts or theatre, or get together in camp or any other popular meeting place, and, with a great deal of noise and a great lack of moderation, shout and clap their approval or disapproval of whatever is proposed or done, till the rocks and the whole place re-echo, and redouble the noise of their boos and applause. Can a young man remain unmoved by all this? How can his individual training stand the strain? Won’t he be swamped by the flood of popular praise and blame, and carried away before it till he finds himself agreeing with popular ideas of right and wrong, behaving like the crowd and becoming one of them?’

‘Yes, that’s bound to happen,’ he agreed….

‘Then what effect can the private teaching of any individual sophist have against such pressure?’

‘None, I’m afraid,’ he said.

‘None at all,’ I agreed, ‘and it’s sheer folly to make the attempt. To produce a different type of character, educated on standards different from those of public opinion, never has been possible, and never will be possible- in terms, that is, of human possibility, and short of a miracle as they say. For, make no mistake, to escape harm and grow up on the right lines in our present society is something that can fairly be called miraculous.’

‘ I agree’, he said.

‘Then I hope you will agree to this too. All those individuals who make their living by teaching, and whom the public call “sophists” and envy for their skill, in fact teach nothing but the conventional views held by the mass of the people; and this they call a science….

But is there really any difference between him and the man who thinks that the knowledge of the passions and pleasures of the mass of the common people is a science, whether he be painter, musician, or politician? If he keeps such company, and submits his poems or other productions, or his public services, to its judgement, he is going out of his way to make the public his master and to subject himself to the fatal necessity of producing only what it approves. And have you ever heard any serious argument to prove that such productions have any genuine merit?’” (Plato:1973:253-55)

God’s law, God’s power, God’s right then, seem to have been taken into the hands of the Babylonians and Egyptians so far in order to enrich the ruler and not the ruled. It has been turned into injustice, because of the role of the reciprocator who also wishes to gain, and can do so much better if he aligns himself with the unjust who has taken. As Socrates observes and Glaucon and Thrasymachus agree, it would be a miracle if a baby born into this world was not corrupted by it, and any one who wished to change it would not have the power to do so, because injustice is endemic to the hierarchical nature  of the people themselves through their desires. The desires of the mosquito cannot be heard against such a wind.

We have arrived therefore at a conclusion about civilization that is not exactly worthy of worship

It has been proved that equality, liberty, fraternity, justice, and even abundance can and have been the majority state by which humans lived and still in Australia, attempt to continue to live. It has been proved that the conduit of God, in Babylonia as both King and Priest turned God into a story of distance that they could bridge and across which they could bring back, for themselves alone, the rights to power, to law, and to awe, and that when they did this they formed the people into a form that served only themselves. I think therefore that we have proved that they were not really sent by God as Kings, or spoken to by God as Priests. By this I am not saying that revelation does not happen, that Moses and Noah were power hungry guys. Not at all. What I am saying is that the medium of revelation that founds our laws were just as easy to manipulate as any other form of right to power, that we have seen so manipulated.

In fact, I am saying more than that. I am saying that no matter the truth of the initial belief, it will be corrupted by the nature of the people holding it, who will only see it through the eyes of personal gain and loss of power because belief that is desired for an egoic story of ‘right’ and ‘good’ will be perceived, produced, and then chosen. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Therefore a revelation that we should kill an-other pyramid to increase our safety will always be taken up by the people, whilst one that calls for a loss of power, such as a new tax, will always be fought against by the people, and a new tax for just the richest will always be fought for by the poor and against by the rich within that pyramid- oh yer, and the rich will always win because it is the majority will of the people to be rich as individuals really.

This is a big claim to make, and I do not make it lightly. It must be proved more than just in Babylon and Egypt. It must be proved throughout all civilizations throughout all history, and this is just what the rest of the book is going to do. Until such a time let us not believe this statement here. If you believe me already then that is a matter of faith, not knowledge, and I request that any one who does believe me already return to a more cynical mindset, because they would be wrong!

Why would anyone who believes me be wrong? Well that is the last section of this chapter. You see it is all very well to tar everyone with the same brush of being-for-itself and are only looking out for themselves. Even though it has been proved that the very language and structures of civilization have been born from this perspective.

A lot of readers of this book will be angry that I have done so, when they relate this information to themselves. Imagine that you are a judge reading this, and I have just stripped your world of not only its authority but also of the idea of being able to ever administer true justice. Imagine that you are a soldier who has just come back from Iraq and you have just read that you were told to hate in order for every one you are subject to, to gain, whilst those beneath you will still, by necessity, remain poor in a zero-sum game, and that desertification is the fate of your country anyway, as well as war in the meantime.

The intent of many such people was not to kill or deliver injustice or to hate unjustly, it was to protect and to serve. It was probably the same intent by which they are trawling through all of these words of mine thus far, namely for justice, equality, liberty, peace, etc, not awe, esteem, wealth or personal power. They are not hypocrites or liars therefore, but people who are trying to what is ‘right’ in a thrownness that they found themselves born to karmically, by the actions of their ancestors, who may also have been so motivated due to their inculturation and education. It seems harsh to name such a virtuous person a liar or hypocrite, if not shameful.

Yes, their sacrifices ultimately were for the gain of themselves and their group of people over an-other. Whether or not their opinion differs from this, it is their hate and killing or judgement and imprisonment that creates the abject that it relies upon as a technique of stopping economic desertification. But their intention may well have not been all of this.

Most likely it was to protect that which they love, and serve, and sacrificed themselves for and judged people for not loving it also. In other words to protect that which they believe that they have the right to possess over an-other, because of their traditional sacrifice of their life, their time, their talents, their ancestors, to their state, and of course for money each month, that if it wasn’t enough and didn’t increase over time, due to how much time had now been sacrificed suddenly wasn’t enough reason to do these same patriotic actions and produce those same patriotic feelings. Is that wrong, or is it understandable based upon a childhood education of planned ignorance about all that we have just learnt from academic literature so far, and of the planned hate of the ‘other’ who we must judge and fear ‘for they are evil, wrong, and commit the heinous atrocities that only states manage to do’.

Is it wrong when every part of his world is covered in things to be desired, that ontologically also inform him of his right to possess them, and everyone around him goes about possessing that which they desire. Is it wrong when desire, as hope combines with fear in order to create paranoia, and to demand either more power to be safe or more power to judge those one fears, as reason would now dictate. Is it wrong to non-thetically accept the traditions of your circle without questioning the cause that created the partitioning of humans into cultural circles of us and them, haves and have-not’s, in the first place, and of its right to do so, to bow instead to tradition, to awe, to esteem, to status, to the interpreters of rights, that are born from this twisted vision inculturated for 5,500 years, in his-stories of subsequent war, disease, movers and shakers, deceivers, famine, rape, murder, poverty, luxury, human rights prescribed as the human wrongs of a negative cult created by the desire for possessions and the fear of losing them.

I think that it is not even right to term such questions using the word wrong

A child does not have the capacity to question the world, because it does not yet understand it. It must firstly accept a model of the world that is ‘normal’, by which I mean, an acceptable perspective by which to reflect the world to another and hence to communicate, i.e. to be able to use a language that can frame these perspectives and mirror them successfully. Once this world-view of his family is assimilated only then can his inner world begin to question the value of this world against the value of believing in it, against his place within the world and what he desires to therefore believe in. This is the teenage years of rebellion where the fruit of good and evil has been digested and knowledge has become a part of the teenagers perspective consequently. Given the magical power of all the forces of desire, authorities education, esteem, honour, laws, rights and wrongs, architecture, peer groups, and the behaviour of this whole world, etc, etc, ‘Isn’t it really the public themselves who are sophists on a grand scale, and give a complete training to young and old, men and women, turning them into just the sort of people they want?’ ‘Then I hope you will agree to this too. All those individuals who make their living by teaching, and whom the public call “sophists” and envy for their skill, in fact teach nothing but the conventional views held by the mass of the people; and this they call a science….’

What then is a good name for some-one whose actions and intentions are in accordance with a civil morality that as we have seen in Babylonia, has been usurped by the very immoral ones who have educated them, but who are unaware of it? Some readers of this book will already know all of the above, and will be quite unperturbed by the state of this state for they agree with it. The universe is here for them to gain in pleasure and less pain, at the necessary expense of others- but that’s nature for you, they would say- ‘survival of the fittest’- and what’s the point of the other’s who aren’t fit anyway.

But for many reading this book, they may well believe that by paying taxes and working hard and obeying the law without question meant that the abject might not be created, rather than must be created, that war might be averted, rather than is innate by these same actions, that their love for their country was not also a latent hate for an-other, that teaching children their rights, was born from denying them for others and maintaining that balance of power, that having a job, necessarily denied another from having one, that taking land necessarily denied another from having any, that taking is our natural right by God’s grace as told to us by priests who ran racketeering, drug dens and prostitute rings, and who, we will see, continue to do so throughout history- the Catholic Church and American armies being the Big Fish today.

A Babylonian soldier- who looks back at the end of Babylon and sees only the abject, the still poor farmers, the last of the wealthy reciprocators and a very very rich king who now no longer even lives in the temple that gave his ancestors the authority to world this world as a conduit of God, but who instead lives in luxury in his own palace of self-worship as Daksha, surrounded by a desert that his will and that of his subjects have worlded- was not a hypocrite or liar, but may have believed what his society had taught him, had faith in the words of the priest when he was told what not to do, and which of God’s laws he did not need to obey when it came to those outside of his pyramid.

He did not understand the language of those outside of his pyramid when the hunter-gatherers came along and told him of the one God-wakan and His right to the World, and he did not understand the language of those in another pyramid when they told him of their Gods right and hence of their right to his land, how could he do so and remain a good soldier. How could he see himself as anything other than good, when praised and rewarded by the king himself, who was the conduit of God, and when, as Sartre tells us, it is impossible to act when seeing oneself as evil? The Babylonian soldier was just acting normally, as was everyone else, without questioning it, and was rewarded for doing so. Just like the salivating dog he was being good, and would continue to do so until the food stopped coming at the ringing of the hollow bell of authority.

To begin to approach naming such an understanding and to name it something other than liar or hypocite, ignorant or brainwashed, but just normal, let us hear this same truth but not from the eyes of a soldier but instead from that of the king of Babylon.

The last King of Babylon would have looked back at his saline unfertile land, at his wealth and at his subjects poverty, and remembered his father, and his fathers fathers, who came before him, and who left the people in the same state. He would have been told throughout his forming years of how the saline fields are caused by the over-population of the peoples that he rules, and of how they therefore needed to be ruled in order to stop this process of desertification.

His only powers lay in, firstly the awe the people held him in and so he had to don the emperors new clothes, a tradition that had passed through his family blood-line, and secondly, in the carrot and the stick that controlled how this power of awe was made visible amongst the people and controlled them. By tradition the King would not question his legitimacy, meaning his lawful right, because the law by now has become separate from God as a possession of himself. He knows that he doesn’t get messages from God, he knows that he doesn’t have any real connection with God or super-state that the people should believe in, but he has spent his whole life with reciprocators who reflect his power as Object, and he has witnessed the esteem and power he possesses through this, and this is the super-state that makes him believe his desired truth of the truth that he is a conduit of God or his very own son. He also remembers how often he has manifested that power when he protected the people with his army of warriors against invading states, and of how he kept them fed by his army of administrators, and of how they were treated justly and equally under his arm of the law.

In other words whilst he is unaware of any actual power from God that should be worshipped, he is aware that he is not just an ordinary person but an ‘Object of worship’, and that this Object of worship which he now identifies as himself (becoming in-itself-for-itself) is actually necessary in order to protect his people because it is tradition. This super-state is of course one of believed above knowledge- of paranoia created by a magical web of hope and fear that radiates up through the relationships of hope and fear of the polis and becomes power in the hands of the king, who is himself fearful about losing it, and hopeful about increasing it.

What however did the first king of Babylon think?

He didn’t think that he had a power to God, he knew that it was the Queen who he had just usurped, whose matrilineal family line had existed for thousands of years, was rightful queen, and not himself, by his very nature as male.

What did the first queen think who told the story that she was the conduit of God and not the other family leaders of the village of families? She didn’t think that she had a power to God, she knew in the same way as the last king of Babylon knew that he was rightful king, and the first king of Babylon knew that he wasn’t the rightful king, that it was the Queen who had just usurped the very race of Adam that had existed for thousands of years, with wakan- God as rightful queen, and not herself, by her very nature as a being-for-itself.

What she also knew however, and what all of these kings of civilization knew was that they were still necessary to exist, they had all come to a head, because settling created the problems of over-population and desertification, and so ‘something had to be done’ or life for everyone would turn out to be ‘nasty, brutish, and short’. The fact that they could also gain for themselves over others as their right, was born from the necessity of gaining over others to survive, and then increased relatively to the amount of power others had in the group and their maintaining of power through balancing it successfully. God had left the building, the Bauen, and in its place sits the God of civilization Daksha, with a language all of its own that will confuse mankind for ever more. But as we saw, Siva allows civilization a new covenant because of the necessity of control that the ruler will now embody, but not enact himself.

Negative cults that increase, not negate his power, are a necessary hypocrisy that must accompany this ‘right’ perspective, as must the story that relays it. If the truth be told, all that can be hoped for is a weakening of the state and its demise or take-over by another Daksha who will take yours and your reciprocators power, so if you don’t increase in power your reciprocators will not patriotically reciprocate, and if you ask to much power from them, then they will also not patriotically reciprocate. Therefore it is better to live the lie, to keep up the pretence of wearing a garment of authority, and hand out dances of status and sacrifice as a means to an end more efficiently but still necessarily met, whether you believe you are a God or not, or are a God or not.

This universal position, known by all leaders is what Plato called ‘The Noble Lie’. If, as we have seen, God’s law called for equity and fraternity, etc, then those conduits of God would have manifested this in their actions. By this I do not mean those done by others through their power, but those personal actions, such as their chosen lifestyle. As we have seen, the rulers of the civilization of Ham, unlike those of the rulers of divine revelation such as his father Noah or of Moses, manifested a lifestyle, a garment, that was drug riddled, whore filled, luxurious and distinctly unjust in comparison to God’s decrees that existed without their rule for 40,000 years.

In other words by the time we get to the people of Ham and its rulers, the Lie is apparent but unspoken. No king wants to tell their child that he isn’t really the conduit of God and that it is all a show, and so the act, the role, becomes real it becomes the psyche of that family, and even they believe it, as they experience the super-state of worship by the traditional reciprocators. As we will see, they even believe it when they have taken the throne from another blood-line, because they believe by winning a fight of arms, they must therefore have been God’s chosen conduit and therefore it was always their right and fate and destiny to take the crown at that time as was Gods weaving, for purposes greater than we can hope to see, etc, etcetera.

Noble literally means ‘well known’ but we more familiarly know it in terms of the nobility who possess the power

That is to say that knowledge is power and those who possess it are the well-known-  the noble. ‘It’s not what you know but who you know’. In this light then we can see that possession of knowledge is possession of power and possession of the knowledge that the public ‘truth’ of divinity is a Noble lie changes the perspective of the ruler from one of ‘ought’ meaning ‘to owe’ and in this instance meaning to owe to God moral conduct in accord with Natural Law,  to ‘is’, The truth ‘is’ mine, the reality I world is mine, the possession of right and wrong is mine, and there is no higher authority such as God by which I must be tied.   

If one sees ones base of power as a Noble lie, but one that attains you a lot of power to believe and none to disbelieve then you will keep up the façade and try to fool others by your dance and your dress, and keep them dancing too, just as Thrasymachus advises, until such a time as you see greater gain somewhere else. But what need, in private to maintain this façade? The reciprocators around you will not tell anyone because they will lose their status position and they have chosen to be reciprocators because they are takers (being-for-itself) that see reciprocation is the best way to gain power at present (in their thrownness). If there is an opportunity to take power they will do so, but until then they will reciprocate. Therefore those closest to the Object of power (the king) will be others who have no moral oughts as their perspective only the right to power as their perspective of what ‘is’ right and wrong, and what ‘is’ their right over other’s ‘rights’ is judged on this basis, not Gods. Thereupon the entire structure of society and its power distribution would quickly become based upon power and esteem and not morality and God, whilst the story remains the same, the reality has changed.

Now those who believe that façade are not simply fools or suckers, they are simply children who have been taught the façade since birth by their own parents and by the teachers who taught their parents, and by the teachers who taught their teachers, etc, etcetera, from the commencement of the Noble Lie around 7 to 8,000 years ago, upon the instigation of the matrilineal line of rule, told in the mythology and sculpture of a settled people. A mythology that we saw become changed into a patriarchal form when it was written down in Greece a few thousand years later under patriarchal authority, tradition, and inculturation.

The urgrund of their truth is good, it is God, but the Noble Lie that has perverted that truth is bad. It is impossible to truly say, if the first Queen believed in her right or just the necessity of someone taking power and an elder shaman having to take the role, just as a republic will cede control of the state to the President in times of war today. As we have now seen, magic does truly exist as an invisible force, and we do not know precisely how the perspective of individual totemism, settling, familism, desertification, and over-population, mixed with the urgrund of the being-in-Being perspective and experience of a universal spiritual magic through ritual and dance,  to become claims to power, revelation, prophecy, etc. We only know that abundance caused an increase in desire in our inner world, that was felt as a lack, that enacted a ‘small insurance policy’, and began to change the dance for good.

I will elucidate this further in my next book, but for now it is only true to say that we do not know enough to have an opinion either way. Was is always a Noble lie or did it become perverted into one? Do others become fooled by the façade by societies retelling of the story through tradition, and so the lie becomes a magical force, greater than its conjurors, like the magicians apprentice, where the attempt to clean up the mess by using a magic spell results in a flood and then a division upon division upon division of power until the Object that was one, becomes a state of many, each bristling for a fight?

Whatever the truth, we now know that by the time of Ham, the Noble Lie, had been revealed to Ham by his Father, Noah, the possessor of revelation, and was contra to this way of life. We have seen this not only in biblical language, but in the language of archaeology, sociology, history, and finally with the Grasshopper that becomes a locust, through biology itself, by which we have linked these changes through the techniques of esteem and awe that produce the serotonin that metamorphoses both solitary grasshoppers and us into the same state of desertification and sociability, which again we have witnessed in Mythology, throughout the world, and architecture throughout the world, throughout the time that we have been discussing so far.

However, despite truth or lie, underlying civilization in the aletheia, it is the necessity of maintaining a coherence of power, against the powers outside of the pyramid that are looking to take your power as a collective of people by killing you, and against the powers inside the pyramid that are looking to take your power as a collective of people by killing you. So even when the lie is discovered it cannot be dropped, it must be adhered to, and the lie must continue to be promulgated because there is no better story of cohesion to tell, especially for the reciprocator/takers, who will lose all their authority for power by changing the story.

What trumps God as right and power? It is not the truth, merely the philosophy that you can afford when surrounded by beings-for-itself, and not beings-in-Being. In other words, ‘survive and increase power in order to survive’ is the constitutive injustice of hierarchy as a form of civilization that is a self-fulfilling prophecy of repeating the same stick-wielding and carrot offering to your peoples and all other peoples through a story that is efficient enough to cause greater increase than the other pyramids around you, named justice.

By necessity, therefore, truth and justice must go hang. Hope and Fear will be the philosophy that can therefore be afforded at all times, throughout all civilizations, unless of course, one can become so powerful that one becomes a super-power and every other nation a sub-ordinate power. Maybe then hope and fear will abate some what but still what do we do with the paranoia, the great delusion of those in power who still by the finite nature of esteem and status and wealth compete against themselves in a zero-sum game for humanity? And seeing as these types of people rule, how do we stop them using their possession of knowledge, to increase our paranoia through hopes and fears, the stick and the carrot?

These questions are the reason for the rest of this book. We are going to look at all of the ‘greatest’ civilizations that have come since Babylon, and see how they have dealt with these problems and questions. We will then be able to look at our own modern civilizations greatest powers and be informed about how these earlier civilizations produced the thrownness of our modern world, and weigh this knowledge in the balance of our own idea of justice, in order to see how to act.

What we will also be able to do, and will do with each civilization we visit, is to ask the question of whether those people who believed the Noble Lie was truth and lived their lives, even gave their lives, or took other peoples lives, for it, were in fact right. Is the Noble lie a lie itself and the rulers of power- whose previously silent laws we now know resulted in the actual reality of equality, liberty, fraternity, peace and universality- were in fact sent by God, but were simply unable to cohere enough power to make their negative proclamations come into reality because of the nature of the people that they ruled who insisted in living in sin, whilst they themselves did not, or is the Noble lie true and the rulers of power were in fact putting up a façade to take power for themselves and their family, and lived in luxury whilst using as many scape-goats as was efficient in order to harness the maximum amount of power?

I would ask you to imagine this question in the hearts of those scape-goats, those reciprocators, and those takers who live through these times that we are going to visit, and I would ask you to imagine this, bearing in mind that when we arrive at modern times, it will be up to you to balance the scales of justice yourself upon yourself, and see how much of the façade and how much of the truth your actions in the world so far have resulted in producing the moral fabric of the worlding of the World that you envisioned it was causing against, how much it really was causing. Only you will know this judgement because only you have experienced your life, and so only your judgement is valid I have no authority in your inner world and renounce any that you give me.

What your life is, through the eyes of how it has effected, meaning it’s being-for-Others, is what you will weigh  in the scales of justice that is your heart against that of being-for-itself, our usual perspective of judgement, right. It is my job to relate the stories of these Others throughout history and the modern world as told by Others not myself, but I plead that you always remember that it is my garment that I am weaving by default. I have tried to make a patch-work garment by using quotes of Others at great length, with a few stitches from myself to hang it all together and bear its weight upon our shoulders, but I am still the overall architect, and your shoulders you must dress.

It is up to you to decide your place in the river, to witness the abject, being thrown in, and then act accordingly, no change may be judged necessary

Now that we understand the concept of the ‘Noble Lie’ the lie that is well-known by those who are noble. It is much easier to see the distance we have made from the previous terms of hypocrite or liar that we have used up to now in order to gain this perspective. To define this opposing distance and the ground our Babylonian soldier in a new term of perspective we must give this position a name.

Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism looked at this problem of authority and of giving away ones personal power to it without question, and his response was to suggest that each person should be responsible for their own selves in their actions and morality in life. It should be something that we carve ourselves individually, in the same manner, technique or ‘teknon’ that Christ as carpenter –teknon- carved out his morality and then acted by it.

He prescribed this method because of the danger of taking up a story of others and then discovering that one is living, not as a hypocrite or liar, but as some-one living in the situation we have been trying to describe above. He called it living in a state of ‘Bad-Faith’.

Bad Faith

“Saying of Sheikh Ziaudin- Self justification is worse than the original offence.” (Shah:1979:153)

14: The Foundation of Tyranny

The foundation of tyranny in the world was trifling at first. Everyone added to it until it attained its present magnitude. For the half-egg that the Sultan considers right to take by force, his troops will put a thousand fowls on the spit.” (Shah:1979:98)

“If we wish to get out of this difficulty, we should examine more closely the patterns of bad faith and attempt a description of them. This description will permit us perhaps to fix more exactly the conditions for the possibility of bad faith; that is, to reply to the question we raised at the outset: “What must be the being of man if he is to be capable of bad faith?”

Take the example of a woman who has consented to go out with a particular man for the first time. She knows very well the intentions which the man who is speaking to her cherishes regarding her. She knows also that it will be necessary sooner or later for her to make a decision. But she does not want to realize the urgency; she concerns herself only with what is respectful and discreet in the attitude of her companion. She does not apprehend this conduct as an attempt to achieve what we call “the first approach”; that is, she does not wish to read in the phrases which he addresses to her anything other than their explicit meaning. If he says to her, “I find you so attractive!” she disarms this phrase of its sexual background; she attaches to the conversation and to the behaviour of the speaker, the immediate meanings, which she imagines as objective qualities. The man who is speaking to her appears to her sincere and respectful as the table is round or square, as the wall colouring is blue or gray. The qualities thus attached to the person she is listening to are in this way fixed in a permanence like that of things, which is no other than the projection of the strict present of the qualities into the temporal flux.

This is because she does not quite know what she wants. She is profoundly aware of the desire which she inspires, but the desire cruel and naked would humiliate and horrify her. Yet she would find no charm in a respect which would be only respect. In order to satisfy her, there must be a feeling which is addressed wholly to her personality– i.e., to her full freedom- and which would be a recognition of her freedom. But at the same time this feeling must be wholly desire; that is, it must address itself to her body as object. This time then she refuses to apprehend the desire for what it is; she does not even give it a name; she recognizes it only to the extent that it transcends itself toward admiration, esteem, respect and that it is wholly absorbed in the more refined forms which it produces, to the extent of no longer figuring anymore but as a sort of warmth and density. Now suppose he takes her hand. This act of her companion risks changing the situation by calling for an immediate decision. To leave the hand there is to consent in herself to flirt, to engage herself.

To withdraw it is to break the troubled and unstable harmony which gives the hour its charm. The aim is to postpone the moment of decision as long as possible. We know what happens next; the young woman leaves her hand there, but she does not notice that she is leaving it. She does not notice because it happens by chance that she is at this moment all intellect. She draws her companion up to the most lofty regions of sentimental speculation; she speaks of Life, of her life, she shows herself in her essential aspect- a personality, a consciousness. And during this time the divorce of the body from the soul is accomplished; the hand rests inert between the warm hands of her companion- neither consenting nor resisting- a thing.

We shall say that this woman is in bad faith. But we see immediately that she uses various procedures in order to maintain herself in this bad faith. She has disarmed the actions of her companion by reducing them to being only what they are; that is, to existing in the mode of the in-itself. But she permits herself to enjoy his desire, to the extent that she will apprehend it as not being what it is, will recognize its transcendence. Finally while sensing profoundly the presence of her own body- to the degree of being disturbed perhaps- she realizes herself as not being her own body, and she contemplates it as though from above as a passive object to which events can happen but which can neither provoke them nor avoid them because all its possibilities are outside of it.

What unity do we find in these various aspects of bad faith?

It is a certain art of forming contradictory concepts which unite in themselves both an idea and the negation of that idea. The basic concept which is thus engendered, utilizes the double property of the human being, who is at once a facticity and a transcendence. These two aspects of human reality are and ought to be capable of a valid coordination. But bad faith does not wish either to coordinate them nor to surmount them in a synthesis. Bad faith seeks to affirm their identity while preserving their differences. It must affirm facticity as being transcendence and transcendence as being facticity, in such a way that at the instant when a person apprehends the one, he can find himself abruptly faced with the other.

We can find the prototype of formulae of bad faith in certain famous expressions which have been rightly conceived to produce their whole effect in a spirit of bad faith. Take for example the title of a work by Jacques Chardonne, Love is Much More than Love. We see here how unity is established between present love in its facticity- “the contract of two skins”, sensuality, egoism, Proust’s mechanism of jealousy, Adler’s battle of the sexes, etc.- and love as transcendence- Mauriac’s “river of fire”, the longing for the infinite, Plato’s eros, Lawrence’s deep cosmic intuition, etc. Here we leave facticity to find ourselves suddenly beyond the present and the factual condition of man, beyond the psychological, in the heart of metaphysics.

On the other hand, the title of a play by Sarment, I Am Too Great for Myself, which also  presents characters in bad faith, throws us first into full transcendence in order suddenly to imprison us within the narrow limits of our factual essence. We will discover this structure again in the famous sentence: “He has become what he was” or in its no less famous opposite: “Eternity at last changes each man into himself.” It is well understood that these various formulae have only the appearance of bad faith; they had been conceived in this paradoxical form explicitly to shock the mind and discountenance it by an enigma. But it is precisely this appearance which is of concern to us. What counts here is that the formulae do not constitute new, solidly structured ideas; on the contrary, they are formed so as to remain in perpetual disintegration and so that we may slide at any time from naturalistic present to transcendence and vice versa.

We can see the use which bad faith can make of these judgements which all aim at establishing that I am not what I am. If I were only what I am, I could, for example, seriously consider an adverse criticism which someone makes of me, question myself scrupulously, and perhaps be compelled to recognize the truth in it. But thanks to transcendence, I am not subject to all that I am. I do not even have to discuss the soundness of the reproach. As Suzanne says to Figaro, “To prove that I am right would be to recognize that I can be wrong.” I am on a plane where no reproach can touch me since what I really am is my transcendence. I flee from myself, I escape myself, I leave my tattered garment in the hands of the fault-finder. But the ambiguity necessary for bad faith comes from the fact that I affirm here that I am my transcendence in the mode of being of a thing. It is only thus, in fact, that I can feel that I escape all reproaches.

It is in this sense that our young woman purifies the desire of anything humiliating by pretending to consider it only as transcendence, which allows her to avoid even naming it. But inversely “I Am too Great for Myself”, while showing our transcendence changed into facticity, is the source of an infinity of excuses for our failures or our weaknesses. Similarly the young coquette maintains transcendence to the extent that the respect, the esteem manifested by the action of her admirer are already on the plane of the transcendent. But she arrests this transcendence, she glues it down with all the facticity of the present; respect is nothing other than respect, it is an arrested surpassing which no longer surpasses itself toward anything.

But although this metastable concept of “transcendence-facticity” is one of the most basic instruments of bad faith, it is not only the one of its kind. We can equally well use another kind of duplicity derived from human reality which we will express roughly by saying that its being-for-itself implies complementarily a being-for-others. Upon any one of my conducts it is always possible to converge two looks, mine and that of the Other.

The conduct will not present exactly the same structure in each case

But as we shall see later, as each look perceives it, there is between these two aspects of my being, no difference between appearance and being- as if I were to my self the truth of myself and as if the Other possessed only a deformed image of me. The equal dignity of my being-for-others and my being-for-myself permits a perpetually disintegrating synthesis and a perpetual game of escape from the for-itself to the for-others and from the for-itself. We have seen also the use which our young lady made of our being-in-the-midst-of-the-world- i.e., of our inert presence as a passive object among other objects- in order to relieve herself suddenly from the functions of her being-in-the-world- that is, from the being which causes there to be a world by projecting itself beyond the world toward its own possibilities.

Let us note finally the confusing syntheses which play on the nihilating ambiguity of the three temporal ekstases, affirming at once that I am what I have been (the man who deliberately arrests himself at one period in his life and refuses to take into consideration the later changes) and that I am not what I have been (the man who in the face of reproaches or rancor dissociates himself from his past by insisting on his freedom and on his perpetual re-creation). In all these concepts, which have only a transitive role in the reasoning and which are eliminated from the conclusion, (like imaginary numbers in the calculations of physicists), we find again the same structure. We have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is.

But what exactly is necessary in order for these concepts of disintegration to be able to receive even a pretence of existence, in order for them to be able to appear for an instant to consciousness, even in a process of evanescence? A quick examination of the idea of sincerity, the antithesis of bad faith, will be very instructive in this connection. Actually sincerity presents itself as a demand and consequently is not a state. Now what is the ideal to be attained in this case? It is necessary that a man be for himself only what he is. But is this not precisely the definition of the in-itself- or if you prefer- the principle of identity?

To posit as an ideal the being of things, is this not to assert by the same stroke that this being does not belong to human reality and that the principle of identity, far from being a universal axiom universally applied, is only a synthetic principle enjoying a merely regional universality? Thus in order that the concepts of bad faith can put us under illusion at least for an instant, in order that the candor of “pure hearts” (cf.Gide, Kessel) can have validity for human reality as an ideal, the principle of identity must not represent a constitutive principle of human reality and human reality must not be necessarily what it is but must be able to be what it is not. What does this mean?

If man is what he is, bad faith is for ever impossible and candor ceases to be his ideal and becomes instead his being. But is man what he is? And more generally, how can he be what he is when he exists as consciousness of being? If candor or sincerity is a universal value, it is evident that the maxim “one must be what one is” does not serve solely as a regulating principle for judgements and concepts by which I express what I am. It posits not merely an ideal of knowing but an ideal of being: it proposes for us an absolute equivalence of being with itself as a prototype of being. In this sense it is necessary that we make ourselves what we are. But what are we then if we have the constant obligation to make ourselves what we are, if our mode of being is having the obligation to be what we are?

Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the customers with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the client. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually reestablishes by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behaviour seems to us a game. He applies himself to linking his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café.

There is nothing there to surprise us. The game is a kind of marking out and investigation. The child plays with his body in order to explore it, to take inventory of it; the waiter in the café plays with his condition in order to realize it. This obligation is not different from that which is imposed on all tradesmen. Their condition is wholly one of ceremony. The public demands of them that they realize it as a ceremony; there is the dance of the grocer, of the tailor, of the auctioneer, by which they endeavour to persuade their clientele that they are nothing but a grocer, an auctioneer, a tailor. A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer. Society demands that he limit himself to his function as a grocer, just as the soldier at attention makes himself into a soldier-thing with a straight look which does not see at all, which is no longer meant to see, since it is the rule and not the interest of the moment which determines the point he must fix his eyes on (the sight “fixed at ten paces”).

There are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in what he is, as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly elude his condition.

In a parallel situation, from within, the waiter in the café can not be immediately a café waiter in the sense that he can not form reflective judgements or concepts concerning his condition. He knows well what it “means”: the obligation of getting up at five o’clock, of sweeping the floor of the shop before the restaurant opens, of starting the coffee pot going, etc. He knows the rights which it allows: the right to the tips, the right to belong to a union, etc. But all these concepts, all these judgements refer to the transcendent. It is a matter of abstract possibilities, of rights and duties conferred on a “person possessing rights”. And it is precisely this person who I have to be (if I am the waiter in question) and who I am not. …

But take a mode of being which concerns only myself: I am sad. One might think that surely I am the sadness in the mode of being what I am. What is the sadness, however, if not the intentional unity which comes to reassemble and animate the totality of my conduct? It is the meaning of this dull look with which I view the world, of my bowed shoulder, of my lowered head, of the listlessness in my whole body. But at the very moment when I adopt each of these attitudes, do I not know that I shall not be able to hold on to it? Let a stranger suddenly appear and I will lift up my head, I will assume a lively cheerfulness. What will remain of my sadness except that I obligingly promise it an appointment for later after the departure of the visitor? Moreover is not this sadness itself a conduct? Is it not consciousness which affects itself with sadness as a magical recourse against a situation too urgent? And in this case even, should we not say that being sad means first to make oneself sad?

That may be, someone will say, but after all doesn’t giving oneself the being of sadness mean to receive this being? It makes no difference from where I receive it. The fact is that a consciousness which affects itself with sadness is sad precisely for this reason. But it is difficult to comprehend the nature of consciousness; the being-sad is not a ready-made being which I give to myself as I can give this book to my friend. I do not possess the property of affecting myself with being. If I make myself sad, I must continue to make myself sad from beginning to end. I can not treat my sadness as an impulse finally achieved and put it on file without recreating it, nor can I carry it in the manner of an inert body which continues its movement after the initial shock. There is no inertia in consciousness. If I make myself sad, it is because I am not sad- the being of the sadness escapes me by and in the very act by which I affect myself with it. The being-in-itself of sadness perpetually haunts my consciousness (of) being sad, but it is as a value which I can not realize; it stands as a regulative meaning of my sadness, not as its constitutive modality.

Shall we say that my consciousness at least is, whatever may be the object or the state of which it makes itself consciousness? But how do we distinguish my consciousness (of) being sad from sadness? Is it not all one? It is true in a way that my consciousness is, if one means by this that for another it is a part of the totality of being on which judgements can be brought to bear. But it should be noted, as Husserl clearly understood, that my consciousness appears originally to the Other as an absence. It is the object always present as the meaning of all my attitudes and all my conduct- and always absent, for it gives itself to the intuition of another as a perpetual question- still better, as a perpetual freedom. When Pierre looks at me, I know of course that he is looking at me. His eyes, things in the world, are fixed on my body, a thing in the world- that is the objective fact of which I can say: it is. But it is also a fact in the world.

The meaning of this look is not a fact in the world, and this is what makes me uncomfortable. Although I make smiles, promises, threats, nothing can get hold of the approbation; the free judgement which I seek; I know that it is always beyond. I feel it in my conducts, which are no longer like those of a worker toward the things he uses; these conducts, to the extent I connect them to the Other, become, for myself, mere presentations; they await being constituted as graceful or uncouth, sincere or insincere, etc,. by an apprehension which is always beyond my efforts to provoke, an apprehension which will be provoked by my efforts only if of itself it lends them force (that is, only in so far as it causes itself to be provoked from the outside), which is its own mediator with the transcendent. Thus the objective fact of the being-in-itself of the consciousness of the Other is posited in order to disappear in negativity and in freedom: consciousness of the Other is as not-being; its being-in-itself “here and now” is not-to-be.

15: Consciousness of the Other is what it is not

Furthermore the being of my own consciousness does not appear to me as the consciousness of the Other. It is because it makes itself, since its being is consciousness of being. But this means that making sustains being; consciousness has to be its own being, it is never sustained by being, it sustains being in the heart of subjectivity, which means once again that it is inhabited by being that it is not being: consciousness is not what it is.

Under these conditions what can be the significance of the ideal of sincerity except as a task impossible to achieve, of which the very meaning is in contradiction with the structure of my consciousness. To be sincere, we said, is to be what one is. That supposes that I am not originally what I am. But here naturally Kant’s “You ought, therefore you can” is implicitly understood. I can become sincere; this is what my duty and my effort to achieve sincerity imply. But we definitely establish that the original structure of “not being what one is” renders impossible in advance all movement toward being in itself or “being what one is.” And this impossibility is not hidden from consciousness; on the contrary, it is the very stuff of consciousness; it is the embarrassing constraint which we constantly experience; it is our very incapacity to recognize ourselves, to constitute ourselves as being what we are.

It is this necessity which means that, as soon as we posit ourselves as a certain being, by a legitimate judgement, based on inner experience or correctly deduced from a priori or empirical premises, then by that very positing we surpass this being- and that not toward another being but toward emptiness, toward nothing.

How can we blame another for not being sincere or rejoice in our own sincerity since this sincerity appears to us at the same time to be impossible? How can we in conversation, in confession, in introspection, even attempt sincerity since the effort will by its very nature be doomed to failure and since at the very time when we announce it we have a prejudicative comprehension of its futility? Through introspection I intend to determine exactly what I am, and to be it plainly- even though it means consequently to set about searching for ways to change myself. But what does the ensemble of purposes and motivations which have pushed me to do this or that action? But this is already to postulate a causal determinism which constitutes the flow of my states of consciousness as a succession of physical states. Shall I detect in myself “drives”, even though it be to affirm them in shame?

But is this not deliberately to forget that these drives are realized with my consent, that they are not forces of nature but that I lend them their efficacy by a perpetually renewed decision concerning their value? Shall I pass judgement on my character, on my nature? Is this not to veil from myself at that moment what I know only too well, that I thus judge a past to which by definition my present is not subject? The proof of this is that the same man who in sincerity posits that he is what in actuality he was, is indignant at the reproach of another and tries to disarm it by asserting that he can no longer be what he was. We are readily astonished and upset when the penalties of the court affect a man who in his new freedom is no longer the guilty person he was. But at the same time we require of this man that he recognize himself as being this guilty one. What then is sincerity except precisely a phenomenon of bad faith? Have we not shown indeed that in bad faith human reality is constituted as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is?

Let us take an example: a homosexual frequently has an intolerable feeling of guilt, and his wholesome existence is determined in relation to this feeling. One will readily foresee that he is in bad faith. In fact it frequently happens that this man, while recognizing his homosexual inclination, while avowing each and every particular misdeed which he has committed, refuses with all his strength to consider himself “a paederast”. His case is always “different,” peculiar; there enters into it something of a game, of chance, of bad luck; the mistakes are all in the past; they are explained by a certain conception of the beautiful which women can not satisfy; we should see in them the results of a restless search, rather than the manifestations of a deeply rooted tendency, etc., etc.

Here is assuredly a man in bad faith who borders on the comic since, acknowledging all the facts which are imputed to him, he refuses to draw from them the conclusion which they impose. His friend, who is his most severe critic, becomes irritated with this duplicity. The critic asks only one thing- and perhaps then he will show himself indulgent: that the guilty one recognize himself as guilty, that the homosexual declare frankly- whether humbly or boastfully matters little- “I am a paederast”. We ask here: Who is in bad faith? The homosexual or the champion of sincerity?…

But the champion of sincerity is not ignorant of the transcendence of human reality, and he knows when necessary how to appeal to it for his own advantage. He makes use of it even and brings it up in the present argument. Does he not wish, first in the name of sincerity, then of freedom, that the homosexual reflect on himself and acknowledge himself as an homosexual? Does he not let the other understand that such a confession will win indulgence for him? What does this mean if not that the man who will acknowledge himself as an homosexual will no longer be the same as the homosexual whom he acknowledges being and that he will escape into the region of freedom and of good will?

The critic asks the man then to be what he is in order no longer to be what he is. It is the profound meaning of the saying. “A sin confessed is half pardoned.” The critic demands of the guilty one that he constitute himself as a thing, precisely in order no longer to treat him as a thing. And this contradiction is constitutive of the demand of sincerity. Who can not see how offensive to the Other and how reassuring for me is a statement such as, “He’s just a paederast”, which removes a disturbing freedom from a trait and which aims at henceforth constituting all the acts of the Other as consequences following strictly from his essence.

That is actually what the critic is demanding of his victim- that he constitute himself as a thing, that he should entrust his freedom to his friend as a fief, in order that the friend should return it to him subsequently- like a suzerain to his vassal.

The champion of sincerity is in bad faith to the degree that he wants to reassure himself, while pretending to judge, to the extent that he demands that freedom as freedom constitute itself as a thing. We have here only one episode in that battle to the death of consciousness which Hegel calls “the relation of the master and the slave.” A person appeals to another and demands that in the name of his nature as consciousnesses he should radically destroy himself as consciousness, but while making this appeal he leads the other to hope for a rebirth beyond this destruction.

Very well, someone will say, but our man is abusing sincerity, playing one side against the other. We should not look for sincerity in the relation of the Mit-sein but rather where it is pure- in the relations of a person with himself. But who can see that the sincere man constitutes himself as a thing in order to escape the condition of a thing by the same act of sincerity? The man who confesses that he is evil has exchanged his disturbing “freedom-for-evil” for an inanimate character of evil; he is evil, he clings to himself, he is what he is. But by the same stroke, he escapes from that thing, since it is he who contemplates it, since it depends on him to maintain it under his glance or to let it collapse in an infinity of particular acts. He derives a merit from his sincerity, and the deserving man is not the evil man as he is evil but as he is beyond his evilness. At the same time the evil is disarmed since it is nothing, save on the plane of determinism, and since in confessing it, I posit my freedom in respect to it; my future is virgin; everything is allowed to me.

Thus the essential structure of sincerity does not differ from that of bad faith since the sincere man constitutes himself as what he is in order not to be it. This explains the truth recognized by all that one can fall into bad faith through being sincere. As Valéry pointed out, this is the case with Stendhal. Total, constant sincerity as a constant effort to adhere to oneself is by nature a constant effort to dissociate oneself from oneself. A person frees himself from himself by the very act by which he makes himself an object for himself. To draw up a perpetual inventory of what one is means constantly to redeny oneself and to take refuge in a sphere where one is no longer anything but a pure, free regard. The goal of bad faith, as we said, is to put oneself out of reach; it is an escape. Now we see that we must use the same terms to define sincerity. What does this mean?

In the final analysis the goal of sincerity and the goal of bad faith are not so different

To be sure, there is a sincerity which bears on the past and which does not concern us here; I am sincere if I confess having had this pleasure or that intention. We shall see that if this sincerity is possible, it is because in his fall into the past, the being of man constituted as a being-in-itself. But here our concern is only with the sincerity which aims at itself in present immanence. What is its goal? To bring me to confess to myself what I am in order that I may finally coincide with my being; in a word, to cause myself to be, in the mode of the in-itself, what I am in the mode of  “not being what I am”.

Its assumption is that fundamentally I am already, in the mode of the in-itself, what I have to be. Thus we find at the base of sincerity a continual game of mirror and reflection, a perpetual passage from the being which is what it is, to the being which is not what is what it is. And what is the goal of bad faith? To cause me to be what I am, in the mode of “not being what one is,” or not to be what I am in the mode of “being what one is.” We find here the same game of mirrors. In fact in order for me to have an intention of sincerity, I must as the outset simultaneously be and not be what I am. Sincerity does not assign to me a mode of being or a particular quality, but in relation to that quality it aims at making me pass from one mode of being to another mode of being.

This second mode of being, the ideal of sincerity, I am prevented by nature from attaining; and at the very moment when I struggle to attain it, I have a vague prejudicative comprehension that I shall not attain it. But all the same, in order for me to be able to conceive an intention in bad faith, I must have such a nature that within my being I escape from my being. If I were sad or cowardly in the way in which this inkwell is an inkwell, the possibility of bad faith could not even be conceived. Not only should I be unable to escape from my being; I could not even imagine that I could escape from it. But if bad faith is possible, merely as a project, it is precisely because, so far as my being is concerned, there is no clear distinction between being and non-being.

Bad faith is possible only because sincerity is conscious of missing its goal inevitably, due to its very nature. I can try to apprehend myself as “not being cowardly,” when I am so, only on condition that the “being cowardly” is itself “in question” at the very moment when it exists, on condition that it is itself one question, that at the very moment when I wish to apprehend it, it escapes me on all sides and annihilates itself. The condition under which I can attempt an effort in bad faith is that in one sense, I am not this coward which I do not wish to be. But if I were not cowardly in the simple mode of not-being-what-one-is-not, I would be “in good faith” by declaring that I am not cowardly.

Thus this inapprehensible coward is evanescent; in order for me not to be cowardly, I must in some way also be cowardly. That does not mean that I must be “a little” cowardly, in the sense that “a little” signifies “to a certain degree cowardly- and not cowardly to a certain degree.” No. I must at once both be and not be totally and in all respects a coward. Thus in this case bad faith requires that I should not be what I am; that is, that there be an imponderable difference separating being from non-being in the mode of being of human reality.

But bad faith is not restricted to denying the qualities which I possess, to not seeing the being which I am. It attempts also to constitute myself as being what I am not. It apprehends me positively as courageous when I am not so. And that is possible, once again, only if I am what I am not; that is, if non-being does not have being even as non-being. Of course necessarily I am not courageous; otherwise bad faith would not be bad faith. But in addition my effort in bad faith must include the ontological comprehension that even in my usual being what I am, I am not it really and that there is no such difference between the being of “being-sad”, for example- which I am in the mode of not being what I am- and the “non-being” of not-being –courageous which I wish to hide from myself.

Moreover it is particularly requisite that the very negation of being should be itself the object of a perpetual nihilation, that the very meaning of “non-being” be perpetually in question in human reality. If I were not courageous in the way in which this inkwell is not a table; that is, if I were isolated in my cowardice, stuck to it, incapable of putting it in relation to its opposite, if I were not capable of determining myself as cowardly- that is, to deny courage to myself and thereby to escape my cowardice in the very moment that I posit it- if it were not on principle impossible for me to coincide with my not-being-courageous as well as with my being-courageous- then any project of bad faith would be impossible for me. Thus in order for bad faith to be possible, sincerity itself must be in bad faith.

The condition of the possibility for bad faith is that human reality, in its most immediate being, in the intrastructure of the pre-reflective cogito, must be what it is not and not be what it is.” (Sartre:2003:78-90)

A quick way to look at this is to ask someone the question, ‘Do you think that you are free?’

Most people in the Western world would say yes they are free and many other people are under a tyranny, but not them. But actually they are not free if they answer in this manner. Free in reality, means that if you have enough money, then you can get a passport that will allow you to enter another country for a short amount of time, providing that you have more money. You must also have been made a natural possession of the state at birth without your consent, merely by your location in time and space, perceived therefore as the ‘right’ to sincerely possess you, with the morality of the country, of its history, of its power, etc, and therefore of your life and rights as they are told to you.

By becoming an Object of the state you will then be given an Object number called a national insurance number, that insures that you are a part of the nation, and it is this number that will allow you to get a lawful job where you must become an object and perform the dance that fulfils that objective, and then be paid the money you need in order to ‘freely’ buy a ticket to leave the state that has never asked you if you wanted to be its citizen, but which demanded that you went to its schools on pain of prison for your parents if you did not comply, that gave you a number in place of a name, all based upon the location of your mother’s womb when you were born, that inculturated you into being trained and prepared to be this object so that you would increase its power to gain its desires. That is to say, the rest of your life, from the moment you are born is owned by another in regards to its subsequent power, status, esteem, freedom, etc, etcetera, but that you are free to get a passport and try to persuade another group of peoples- state- that they can have you if they want you because of your value to them as this object, not as being you in-itself. That has no value, and hence it has no freedom.

Therefore in this world of sincerity to freedom the underlying truth is that if you are valued as an object then you have the power to be free only if you become that object in bad faith, from which perspective it will seem like freedom. But try an walk the earth as was done for 40,000 years by all, and you will discover others trying to judge your value and name you accordingly. I think the term nowadays is gypsies, a race persecuted by all nations for all time. Where are you free to go and not be under someones possession under their authority- subject? It is bad faith, to think that a tiny little book (passport) bought from an army of administrators and warriors and rulers implies any such thing as a right to freedom. To tell someone sincerely that they are free, as politicians always do, is bad faith when believed and sincerity when espoused by a possessor of your freedom- your jailor. ‘You are free because at this moment, the civil law and I say you are, because it is the most powerful way of viewing you’ is what should be ‘sincerely’ said.

But, if accepted by the listener this is still bad faith in regards to individual freedom. It is a wilful blindness to the reality of your actual freedom because it pays to play the game, more than it does to admit the dance and the power it has over you, whilst it is increasing your power more than the truth.

When your country invades are you opposed or reposed, are you a part of the pyramid or not? When your country doesn’t invade are you opposed or reposed, are you a part of the pyramid or not? Are you proud to be a ‘…..’. The fact that your behaviour of paying taxes, continuing to work, condoning property rights only for those valued in this story, defending yours from theirs, due to tradition and authority, is what you are, the regulative story of what you were before the invasion and what you are now are bad faith. The state is in the state it is in because of the state of its polis, the state does not exist outside of its polis, and you as object create that state. As object we dance negative cults of efficiency- administration- upon the desires of the polis, naming them as objects not as individuals, as numbers, as units of power lead through techniques of efficiency. In other words we are free as long as we sincerely believe that we are a subject-being-for-others, an impossibility, a shattered mirror, a twisted perception, a subjected freedom, that our spirit experiences as the genie in the bottle, so powerful as to be able to world the entire world how we want it but enslaved to a master, who only strokes us when he wants something in the three worlds that he has created as a being for-itself.

Another way that I like to look at this is through the cartoon of Road Runner and Wily Coyote. The instinctive love that children and adults have for Road Runner is that he is free, he can ontologically escape his self as being-for-others, in this case, being dinner-for-wily coyote. No matter what techniques or technology Wily Coyote manifests in the world in order to world his will and turn Road Runner into his objective- dinner, it is Road Runners world that is worlded. Even when a mountain face is painted to look like a tunnel, it really becomes one in the world when Road Runner desires it be so, because Road Runner worlds the cartoon world we are watching. This is the experience of freedom that is denied us in a finite world of infinite desires, where the objective placed upon the other is always for what we desire, rather than for what he desires, or what together we may desire, let alone what HE desires, up there far away from our perceptions from this relative (relational) perspective.

From the perspective of the being-for-itself, the beginning of adulthood is when we realise the truth that we are all worlding the world we individually want, and so there had better be some rules, some violence, some wars, etc. From the perspective of the being-in-Being, the beginning of adulthood is when we realise the truth that we are all worlding the world together and so there had better be empathy with all the world in order to reflect this truth. Rules, laws, violence, gain-for-itself, war, etc are what is not.

“The failure of the first attitude toward the Other can be the occasion for my assuming the second. But of course neither of the two is really first; each of them is a fundamental reaction to being-for-others as an original situation. It can happen therefore that due to the very impossibility of my identifying myself with the Other’s consciousness through the intermediacy of my object-ness for him, I am led to turn deliberately toward the Other and look at him. In this case to look at the Other’s look is to posit oneself in one’s own freedom and to attempt on the ground of this freedom to confront the Other’s freedom. The meaning of the conflict thus sought would be to bring out into the open the struggle of two freedoms confronted as freedoms. But this intention must be immediately disappointed, for by the sole fact that I assert myself in my freedom confronting the Other, I make the Other a transcendence-transcended—that is, an object. It is the story of that failure which we are about to investigate.

We can grasp its general pattern. I direct my look upon the Other who is looking at me. But a look can not be looked at. As soon as I look in the direction of the look it disappears, and I no longer see anything but eyes. At this instant the Other becomes a being which I possess and which recognizes my freedom. It seems that my goal has been achieved since I possess the being who has the key to my object-state and since I can cause him to make proof of my freedom in a thousand different ways. But in reality the whole structure has collapsed, for the being which remains within my hands is an Other-as-object. As such he has lost the key to my being-as-object, and he possesses a pure and simple image of me which is nothing but one of its objective affects and which no longer touches me. If he experiences the effects of my freedom, if I can act upon his being in a thousand different ways and transcend his possibilities with all my possibilities, this is only in so far as he is an object in the world and as such is outside the state of recognizing my freedom.

My disappointment is complete since I seek to appropriate the Other’s freedom and perceive suddenly that I can act upon the Other only in so far as this freedom has collapsed beneath my look. This disappointment will be the result of my further attempts to seek again for the Other’s freedom across the object which he is for me and to find privileged attitudes or conduct which would appropriate this freedom across a total appropriation of the Other’s body. These attempts, as one may suspect, are on principle doomed to failure.

But it can happen also that “to look at the look” is my original reaction to my being-for-others

This means that in my upsurge into the world, I can choose myself as looking at the Other’s look and can build my subjectivity upon the collapse of the subjectivity of the Other. It is this attitude which we shall call indifference toward others. Then we are dealing with a kind of blindness with respect to others. But the term “blindness” must not lead us astray. I do not suffer this blindness as a state. I am my own blindness with regard to others, and this blindness includes an implicit comprehension of being-for-others; that is, of the Other’s transcendence as a look.

This comprehension is simply what I myself determine to hide from myself. I practice then a sort of factual solipsism; others are those forms which pass by in the street, those magic objects which are capable of acting at a distance and upon which I can act by means of specific conducts. I scarcely notice them; I act as if I were alone in the world. I brush against “people” as I brush against a wall; I avoid them as I avoid obstacles. Their freedom-as-object is for me only their “co-efficient of adversity”. I do not even imagine that they can look at me.

Of course they have some knowledge of me, but this knowledge does not touch me. It is a question of pure modifications of their being which do not pass from them to me and which are tainted with what we call  a “suffered-subjectivity” or “subjectivity-as-object”; that is, they express what they are, not what I am, and they are the effect of my action upon them. Those “people” are functions: the ticket-collector is only the function of collecting tickets; the café waiter is nothing but the function of serving the customers. From this point of view they will be most useful if I know their keys and those “master-words” which can release their mechanisms. Hence is derived that “realist” psychology which the seventeenth century in France has given us; hence those treaties of the eighteenth century, How to Succeed (Le Moyen de parvenir) by Beroalde de Verville, … Treatise on Ambition (Traité de l’ambition) by Hérault de Séchelles, all of which give to us a practical knowledge of the Other and the art of acting upon him. In this state of blindness I concurrently ignore the Other’s absolute subjectivity as the foundation of my being-in-itself and my being-for-others, in particular of my “body for others”.

In a sense I am reassured, I am self-confident; that is, I am in no way conscious of the fact that the Other’s look can fix my possibilities and my body. I am in a state the very opposite of what we call shyness or timidity. I am at ease; I am not embarrassed by myself, for I am not outside; I do not feel myself alienated. This state of blindness can be maintained for a long time, as long as my fundamental bad faith desires; it can be extended—with relapses—over several years, over a whole life; there are men who die without—save for brief and terrifying flashes of illumination—ever having suspected what the Other is.

But even if one is entirely immersed in this state, one does not thereby cease to experience its inadequacy. And like all bad faith it is the state itself which furnishes us with the motives for getting out of it; for blindness as concerns the Other concurrently causes the disappearance of every lived apprehension of my objectivity. Nevertheless the Other as freedom and my objectivity as my alienated-self are there, unperceived, not thematized, but given in my very comprehension of the world and of my being in the world. The conductor, even if he is considered as a pure function, refers me by his very function to a being-outside—even though this being-outside is neither apprehended nor apprehensible. Hence a perpetual feeling of lack and of uneasiness.

This is because my fundamental project toward the Other—whatever may be the attitude which I assume—is twofold: first there is the problem of protecting myself against the danger which is incurred by my being-outside-in-the-Other’s-freedom, and second there is the problem of utilizing the Other in order finally to totalize the detotalized totality which I am, so as to close the open circle, and finally to be my own foundation. But on the one hand the Other’s disappearance as look throws me back into my unjustifiable subjectivity and reduces my being to this perpetual pursued-pursuit toward an inapprehensible In-itself-for-itself. Without the Other I apprehend fully and nakedly this terrible necessity of being free which is my lot; that is, the fact that I can not put the responsibility for making-myself-be off onto anyone but myself even though I have not chosen to be and although I have been born.

On the other hand although the blindness toward the Other does in appearance release me from the fear of being in danger in the Other’s freedom, it includes despite all an implicit comprehension of this freedom. It therefore places me at the extreme danger of objectivity at the very moment when I can believe myself to be an absolute and unique subjectivity since I am seen without being able to experience the fact that I am seen and without being able by means of the same experience to defend myself against my “being-seen”. I am possessed without being able to turn toward the one who possesses me. In making direct proof of the Other as look, I defend myself by putting the Other to the test, and the possibility remains for me to transform the Other into an object. But if the Other is an object for me while he is looking at me, then I am in danger without knowing it. Thus my blindness is anxiety because it is accompanied by the consciousness of a “wandering and inapprehensible” look, and I am in danger of its alienating me behind my back.

This uneasiness can occasion a new attempt to get possession of the Other’s freedom

But this will mean that I am going to turn back upon the Other-as-object which has been merely brushing against me and attempt now to utilize him as an instrument in order to touch his freedom. But precisely because I address myself to the object “Other” I can not ask him to account for his transcendence, and since I am myself on the level where I make an object of the Other, I can not even conceive of what I wish to appropriate. Thus I am in an irritating and contradictory attitude with respect to this object which I am considering: not only can I not obtain from him what I wish, but in addition this quest provokes a disappearance of the practical knowledge pertaining to what I wish. I engage myself in a desperate pursuit of the Other’s freedom and midway I find myself engaged in a pursuit which has lost its meaning.” (Sartre:2003:401-04)

“Fear, forgetting, dreams, exist really in the capacity of concrete facts of consciousness in the same way as the words and the attitudes of the liar are concrete, really existing patterns of behaviour. The subject has the same relation to these phenomena as the deceived to the behaviour of the deceiver. He establishes them in their reality and must interpret them. There is a truth in the activities of the deceiver; if the deceived could reattach them to the situation where the deceiver establishes himself and to his project of the lie, they would become integral parts of truth, by virtue of being lying conduct. Similarly there is a truth in the symbolic acts; it is what the psychoanalyst discovers when he reattaches them into the historical situation of the patient, to the unconscious complexes which they express, to the blocking of the censor. Thus the subject deceives himself about the meaning of his conduct, he apprehends it in its concrete existence but not in its truth, simply because he cannot derive it from an original situation and from a psychic constitution which remain alien to him.” (Sartre:2003:73)

“Thus the resistance of the patient implies on the level of the censor an awareness of the thing repressed as such, a comprehension of the end toward which the questions of the psychoanalyst are leading, and an act of synthetic connection by which it compares the truth of the repressed complex to the psychoanalytic hypothesis which aims at it. These various operations in their turn imply that the censor is conscious (of) itself. But what type of self-consciousness can the censor have? It must be the consciousness (of) being conscious of the drive to be repressed, but precisely in order not to be conscious of it. What does this mean if not that the censor is in bad faith?

Psychoanalysis has not gained anything for us since in order to overcome bad faith, it has established between the unconscious and consciousness an autonomous consciousness in bad faith. The effort to establish a veritable duality and even a trinity (Es, Ich, Ueberich expressing themselves through the censor) has resulted in a mere verbal terminology. The very essence of the reflexive idea of hiding something from oneself implies the unity of one and the same psychic mechanism and consequently a double activity in the heart of unity, tending on the one hand to maintain and locate the thing to be concealed and on the other hand to repress and disguise it. Each of the two aspects of this activity is complementary to the other; that is, it implies the other in its being. By separating consciousness from the unconscious by means of the censor, psychoanalysis has not succeeded in disassociating the two phases of the act, since the libido is a blind conatus toward conscious expression and since the conscious phenomenon is passive, faked result. Psychoanalysis has merely localized this double activity of repulsion and attraction on the level of the censor…

Aside from its inferiority in principle, the explanation by magic does not avoid the coexistence- on the level of the unconscious, on that of the censor, and on that of consciousness- of two contradictory, complementary structures which reciprocally imply and destroy each other. Proponents of the theory have hypostasized and “reified” bad faith; they have not escaped it. This is what has inspired a Viennese psychiatrist, Stekel, to depart from the psychoanalytical tradition and to write in La femme frigide: “Every time that I have been able to carry my investigations far enough, I have established that the crux of the psychosis was conscious.” In addition the cases which he reports in his work bear witness to a pathological bad faith which the Freudian doctrine can not account for.” (Sartre:2003:76-7)

“we have not yet distinguished bad faith from lying. The two-faced concepts which we have described would without a doubt be utilized by a liar to discountenance his questioner… The true problem of bad faith stems evidently from the fact that bad faith is faith. It can not be either a cynical lie or certainty- if certainty is the intuitive possession of the object. But if we take belief as meaning the adherence of being to its object when the object is not given or is given indistinctly, then bad faith is belief; and the essential problem of bad faith is a problem of belief.

How can we believe by bad faith in the concepts which we forge expressly to persuade ourselves? We must note in fact that the project of bad faith must be itself in bad faith. I am not only in bad faith at the end of my effort when I have constructed my two-faced concepts and when I have persuaded myself. In truth, I have not persuaded myself; to the extent that I could be so persuaded, I have always been so. And at the very moment when I was disposed to put myself in bad faith, I of necessity was in bad faith with respect to this same disposition. For me to have represented it to myself as bad faith would have been cynicism; to believe it sincerely innocent would have been in good faith. The decision to be in bad faith does not dare to speak its name; it believes itself in good faith. It is this which from the upsurge of bad faith, determines the later attitude and, as it were, the Weltenschaung of bad faith.

Bad faith does not hold the norms and criteria of truth as they are accepted by the critical thought of good faith. What it decides first, in fact, is the nature of truth. With bad faith a truth appears, a method of thinking, a type of being which is like that of objects; the ontological characteristic of the world of bad faith with which the subject suddenly surrounds himself is this: that here being is what it is not, and is not what it is. Consequently a peculiar type of evidence appears; non-persuasive evidence. Bad faith apprehends evidence but it is resigned in advance to not being fulfilled by this evidence, to not being persuaded and transformed into good faith. It makes itself humble and modest; it is not ignorant, it says, that faith is decision and that after each intuition, it must decide and will what it is.

Thus bad faith in its primitive project and in its coming into the world decides on the exact nature of its requirements. It stands forth in the firm resolution not to demand too much, to count itself satisfied when it is barely persuaded, to force itself in decisions to adhere to uncertain truths. This original project of bad faith is a decision in bad faith on the nature of faith. Let us understand clearly that there is no question of a reflective, voluntary decision, but of a spontaneous determination of our being…

But bad faith is conscious of its structure, and it has taken precautions by deciding that the metastable structure is the structure of being and that non-persuasion is the structure of all convictions. It follows that if bad faith is faith and if it includes in its original project its own negation (it determines itself to be not quite convinced in order to convince itself that I am what I am not), then to start with, a faith which wishes itself to be not quite convinced must be possible. What are the conditions for the possibility of such a faith?…

In bad faith there is no cynical lie nor knowing preparation for deceitful concepts

 But the first act of bad faith is to flee what it can not flee, to flee what it is. The very project of flight reveals to bad faith an inner disintegration in the heart of being, and it is this disintegration which bad faith wishes to be….Bad faith seeks by means of “not-being-what-one-is” to escape from the in-itself which I am not in the mode of being what one is not. It denies itself as bad faith and aims at the in-itself which I am not in the mode of “not-being-what-one-is-not”. If bad faith is possible, it is because it is an immediate, permanent threat to every project of the human being.” (Sartre:2003:91-4)

“In a word, reflection is in bad faith in so far as it constitutes itself as the revelation of the object which I make-to-be-me. But in the second place this more radical nihilation is not a real, metaphysical event. The real event, the third process of nihilation is not a real, metaphysical event. The real event, the third process of nihilation is the for-others. Impure reflection is an abortive effort on the part of the for-itself to be another while remaining itself. The transcendent object which appeared behind the for-itself-reflected-on is the only being of which the reflective can say- in this sense- that it is not it. But it is a mere shadow of being. It is made-to-be and the reflective has to be it in order not to be it. It is this shadow of being, the necessary and constant correlate of impure reflection that the psychologist studies under the name of psychic fact. A psychic fact is then the shadow of the reflected-on inasmuch as the reflective has to be it ecstatically in the mode of non-being.

Thus reflection is impure when it gives itself as an “intuition of the for-itself in in-itself.” What is revealed to it is not the temporal and non-substantial historicity of the reflected-on; beyond this reflected-on it is the very substantiality of the organized forms of the flow. The unity of these virtual beings is called the psychic life or psyche, a virtual and transcendent in-itself which underlies the temporalization of the for-itself. Pure reflection is never anything but a quasi-knowledge; but there can be a reflective knowledge of the Psyche alone. Naturally we will re-discover in each psychic object the characteristics of the real reflected-on but degraded in the In-itself. A brief a priori description of the Psyche will enable us to account for this In-itself.

By psyche we understand the Ego, its states, its qualities, and its acts. The Ego with the double grammatical form of “I” and “Me” represents our person as a transcendent psychic unity. We have described it elsewhere. It is as the Ego, that we are subjects in fact and subjects by statute, active and passive, voluntary agents, possible objects of a judgement concerning value of responsibility.

The qualities of the Ego represent the ensemble of virtues, latent traits, potentialities which constitute our character and our habits… The Ego is a “quality” of being angry, industrious, jealous, ambitious, sensual, etc. But we must recognise also qualities of another sort which have their origin in our history and which we call acquired traits: I can be “showing my age”, tired, bitter, declining, progressing; I can appear as “having acquired assurance as the result of a success” or on the contrary as “having little by little contracted the tastes, the habits, the sexuality of an invalid” (following a long illness).

States- in contrast with qualities which exist “potentially”- give themselves as actually existing. Hate, love, jealousy are states. An illness, in so far as it is apprehended by the patient as a psycho-physiological reality, is a state. In the same way a number of characteristics which are externally attached to my person can, in so far as I live them, become states. Absence (in relation to a definite person, exile, dishonour, triumph are states. ….

By acts we must understand the whole systematic activity of the person; that is, every disposition of means as related to ends, not as the for-itself is its own possibilities but as the act represents a transcendent psychic synthesis which the for-itself must live. For example the boxer’s training is an act because it transcends and supports the For-itself, which moreover realizes itself in and through this training. The same goes for the research of the scientist, for the work of the artist, for the election campaign of the politician. In all these cases the act as a psychic being represents a transcendent existence and the objective act of the relation of the For-itself with the world.” (Sartre:2003:184-5)

To put all of this as simply as I possibly can

When we introduce ourselves at a party in this society of beings-for-itself, we all say hello my name is X and I am a X, in other words we say who we are as a being-for-itself,  and then who we are as a being-for-others- as an Object of the state, and what state we are in- our status. It is considered polite to talk to each other about this role as other and the esteem it conveighs or how it doesn’t represent you- the esteem it doesn’t conveigh, before one talks about who you actually are despite this. The truth is that if you bank all day you see the world as a banker, you look at others from that state.

You are controlling time and space, worlding, for not just 40 hours a day when you work, but all the time getting ready, all the travelling to and from being a banker, all the garments you must wear in order to be looked at as a banker, all the washing and shopping, and ironing, all the making a pack lunch and loading your I-player to entertain you on the way to banking, etc, etc, are making you what you really are, whether you name yourself that object or deny that you are that object as you do them, you are worlding that world willingly, and in bad faith if you believe that therefore it is you, or is not you, as you desire.

Curio Bono – Who Benefits?

In the above quotes of Sartre we see Bad Faith being linked to the ontological perspective of the being-for-itself, and becoming named Ego, i.e. that upon which the individual is self-centred, the ‘point’ of the world and their existence and yours consequently. The circular lens through which the World is looked at and acted upon- worlded.

What I wish to do is to link the Ego to the drama triangle throughout the rest of this book, and ask whether the figures that we are about to meet, were driven by egoic desire as takers of power or whether they were egoic givers who wished to empower the society whose story they believed and who then acted accordingly, but were in fact acting in bad faith, or whether they were reciprocators who didn’t believe the story of God and were lying, or did believe the story and so were acting for God or the Atheistic State or whatever other form of regulative dance of civilization we may care to meet.

16: In order to do this as we look at history we must ask the question, ‘Who benefits?’

Who benefits? – is the question the police detective at the murder scene asks himself as he prepares to find the murderer by questioning those who knew the victim. This is his guiding light through the web of lies and truths and bad faith, that he is about to encounter. He does not believe for a minute that he will not be lied to and that some will believe what they are saying but be wrong about the meaning of the facts their look has witnessed, that the taker of the life is updating his facebook page to openly confess, that the friends of the taker who require their place in the river due to him, are waiting to tell all they know so that when he falls, they fall with him, or that the one who tells all they know without erring from the truth is completely safe from harm by those who benefit by the lie.

Now that we have the supply and demand of the stick-world as our paradigm, our clearing, our bauen, we have seen that everything must be valued and that this valuative technique creates not only money as Object, but transforms us into Objects by the habit- the karma- of valuing in-itself, by the hubris of gain we create the nemesis of loss. Therefore someone always benefits.

With this final lens we are now armed with the tools necessary to unpick the story and the history of mankind’s, economic, philosophical, and sociological pyramids of production as manifest in history. What we need to know about each civilization and each ruler is what was their stated purpose and did they in fact achieve it, or something else, and hence whether it was a lie or bad faith or an impossible dream no matter what- constitutively. The only problem we have is, as we have discovered, that the purpose of each pyramid as defined by the story of authority can become a Noble Lie, in reality, when the unjust rule and that they won’t let on that it is a lie for the very good reason that no-one wants to know because it does not benefit anyone within the circle to believe the truth.

In order to look at each pyramid in history then we must ask ourselves what was the pyramids story and then see who benefited

If the two align then we must conclude that, unjust as it is due to the nature of the stick-world and its consequent pyramid, it does at least achieve its purpose. If however they do not align then we must conclude that the story was just, but the behaviour was not. That those inside that pyramid are a community of – ‘Irrationals unified by hope of the impossible’, servicing a lie that merely serves the strongest and has been sold to the majority by withholding the truth, a façade, a property rights of above-knowledge, in order to possess the power of production but pervert it towards self-gain and esteem, or even to a higher purpose that ‘they’ think is better but that no-one else agrees with or possibly even knows about.

What must be remembered at all times, when reading this history is that we are looking as readers with the benefit of hind-sight with which to judge. Those who lived in those times did not, nor did they have the tools we are now armed with in knowing their pre-history and its karmic mode of being in peace. In like manner as we reach the conclusion of part one of this book, arriving in the modern world, and ask whether the purposes of our very own civilizations at present are fulfilling their teleology or a corrupt system that has yet to found a way around keeping the unjust from power, we will find that we do not have the ability to ask who benefits, because we may be being lied to. The only truth that we can take from ancient history to the present day, without change is that there is definitely someone who has been murdered and someone who has benefited, and that the one who benefits always says they were right to murder, not wrong, whilst the opposite is true for those murdered.

In the words of an old man of today who when faced with the recent global recession said on a television interview, “It’s all these banks that have lost all the money, I just want my pension! I’ve done nothing wrong, I’ve worked all my life, but it’s me that’s being punished.’

In other words, without bad faith the old man is truly saying ‘I did what ‘they’ said in order to be reciprocated, and now that ‘they’ have taken my reward from me and betrayed my trust and the real purpose of my life’s work, why is it me that is getting the stick, and not those others- who also lived in a finite world and were taken from up until I was taken from in order for my bank to increase its money, its power, and consequently, mine? It’s not fair that someone else did exactly as I was doing to the best of my knowledge by saving money into a bank account.

The fact that by, ‘mortgaging the world to the hilt to the best of their knowledge, through lending his money- as he had willed it (Egoic-desire)- had for ten years been right in his eyes, as it had served him, or that Others were being taken for not just pensions and savings but every single thing they had worked for, was wilfully ignored by the man. He had had faith that he would get whilst others lost, and called that right. When he wasn’t right, then suddenly the whole system became wrong, because it no longer served his definition of ‘right’.  His karmic actions brought the unconcealed truth of his Hubris in the form of Nemesis, A Flood of societies making, just as was the domestication of wheat, but the crop was money and the waters were the abject thrown into the currency of its river, of the Leviathan, causing its waves of hope and fear to swell to create an angry old men who now felt the injustice they have karmically created, and wanted sympathy for himself alone. – This is living in bad faith, when your right creates the same effects are your wrong, and it just depends which side of the circle you land and you are subjected to.

It is an unquestioned world of flight that will always catch up with you, because it is a part of you, the part that is not the object X, that made the money, will change you into the abject angry old man who before was an esteemed vital force in the worlding that he has worlded and that has made him abject, at which point, ‘I just want my pension! I’ve done nothing wrong, I’ve worked all my life’ become the language of a singular perspective and the super-state of “We” is forgotten as a form of his identity, from this distance magically created he then tells ‘them’ that ‘they’ are wrong, and that ‘they’ should have been worlding the world for him.

Of course that is what they were doing for his whole working life, when he was a part of the super-state and felt the wealth, esteem, status and serotonin run through his veins and increase by their behaviour. As he felt a life of ease for him and not for the abject approaching he felt safe and protected and respected, as was his right by his behaviour, even giving to the abject once a year or once a month or once a week helped him to boost his esteem still further as it related the distance between him and them and hence the righteousness of their relative places in the river. But now that desires creation- civilization and its laws- had revealed his bad faith the only thing left to do was to perceive a split from the We he had now been by this split from bad faith, and object-himself. That is to say to turn himself into another object in order to conceal the facticity of his hypocrisy as naming himself no longer a part of the We, and in order to be-what-is-not and not be-what-it-is.

Let’s see if the reason for his loss had a higher purpose than his own purpose, which I presume was for he and his wife and family to be safe and have a little esteem, a little power to self-assert, over another, whilst resting on his retired reciprocated laurels. The fact that the covenant of reciprocation has been made with children- who have been trained since 5 years old to be able to take up the modes of production by which to keep this old man in his retirement, and with his property rights, and not their property rights- but who have never been asked if they wish to continue this system, only forced by the stick-world of supply and demand, authority and violence, unfreedom and the necessity of protection from people like him, in a world that he has worked all his life in worlding but has in fact only been done in his mind alone and remains unquestioned by the mass common sense of traditional authority, does not seem to have occurred to him. We all know of course that it did occur to him as it occurs to all individuals when they get to the age of puberty and are forced to become Objects-as-subjects to this unspoken covenant of bad faith called in reality the stick of desire upon which civilization is founded and he chose to become a part of it and take what he could get.

All this is soon forgotten by many it would seem upon receipt of money, esteem, power, and status within this covenant, as well, it seems, as are the electrified abject mice that must be trodden on in order that they may possess these finite goods as the rightful Object of them. They are perceived as not even being able to look at him, from such a height.

Now so far, we can only say this above point of view is valid of the Babylonians and Egyptians with their rich rulers and not much else for their subjects as a consequence to all this, but with a lot of pyramid making slaves as a consequence of these reciprocating subjects, who one must conclude, lived in Bad Faith. But surely, one must think in regards to the old man above, that the very entitlement of a pension to an old man who has worked all of his life, shows that the modern western state has a far better regulative dance by which it increases its power, and so is more just, despite the truth of the unspoken covenant of infinite desire for increase in a finite world. Well that is a matter of opinion based on ignorance for both of us at this point in the book, and I will not enter upon such a contagion of reasonable thought. I will agree that a pension dance is a better regulative dance, because it produces so much more power by harnessing the fear of old age and the hope of rest. I will not agree that the old man gets his money because it is more just. Not at this time. Later on you will, not I.

Who benefits then is the pertinent question of justice. Are we electrocuted throughout the entirety of human history in these civilizational states of supply and demand, ‘just’ for great men and women to free us from the problems of civilization that we cause? Or are the necessary electrocuted mice sacrificed, used and discarded willy-nilly in grand Noble lie machines, that ‘just’ produce power, esteem, and wealth for but a few liars, who from their lofty towers of awe and stick power respond by lethargy and disdain, rather than responsibility and sacrifice? And finally, Are you yourself in a lofty tower and are you justly there as a liar and a hypocrite in your mind, or are you in bad faith which cannot enter your mind without the will to look for it, or are you there ‘just’ by God’s will in your mind by which I presume therefore that wherever you are in the river right now, that must also be your will too, and so you are happy, and still happy whilst others are in consequent necessary misery and abjection?

17: Somewhere over The Rainbow – Heaven, Babyl, and Hell

I would like to bring in one last analogy by which to state the nature of bad faith, and the inability of people to see it in themselves, whilst living under the belief that they have a whole view of the world. This is the bad-faith version of heaven, promulgated by many a religion in its bad-faith form of the carrot and the stick. Do you remember how we saw that God was with us on Earth for thousands of years, and then when we became separate from this perspective we saw him reappear as a rainbow, revealing his invisible spirit running through all phenomena. Well now that we are experiencing a carrot and stick world in our outer world, our inner world must reflect (darpan) this truth, and a magical language must be invented in order to describe this experience in a story, a story from which the priests can draw their authority. In other words we must go somewhere over the rainbow, we must claim an above knowledge- a super-state of paranoia that reveals the resonant truth of Gods world that surrounds us, a world of fear and lack, where God still exists, now that he so evidently is not here. These magical words describe where God now is and where he isn’t, and hence where we are. They are Heaven, Babyl, and Hell.

From an egoic perspective Heaven is a reward and Hell is a punishment for each individual, but when one opens ones mind up to consider others, and also your relationship on Earth to those others, then by virtue of reason heaven and hell become the same thing. How?

Well simple, if I know that my utterly beloved daughters are in Hell for eternity suffering unimagined tortures, then it doesn’t matter to me where I am or how I am being treated or for how long- I am also in Hell. Similarly if I know that there are seven levels of heaven and I am on the fourth level then I am not in heaven at all, not only because I know that there is a higher experience of heaven, a great communion with God than that which I am experiencing I also know that by process of deduction, reason, my daughters are in hell whether they are in the seventh heaven or the deepest hell, because, I am actually standing in heaven for eternity in this situation but without my daughters, and so how can I or they be in any kind of heaven when this state is going to last for eternity? On top of that still is this more simply reasoned question: How can I love a God that would do this to some one and call it a wise loving thing to do, in fact the wisest the most loving thing to do because he is all-wise and all-loving?

These creations of his cannot leave hell, they cannot redeem themselves as they could on Earth, they can only suffer for eternity. How can anything you do in a life-time of mere decades of years be punishable by a God of infinite love for eternity? How can you worship a power of love that contains through its behaviour less love than his creation, you, possess for your own loved ones through your behaviour? (Unless of course you are right now flaying your son’s skin off for eternity for stealing a lollipop or not saying the right name to describe this very God).  This is the bad-faith understanding of heaven, and it is easy to reason out, but only when wilfully reasoned out, not thought about through the perspective of the ego that hears the story and thinks, ‘I’m alright then, bliss for eternity if I don’t steal or murder, and believe what the priest told me who tells this particular story of God at this particular moment in time and space’ and subconsciously thinks, ‘screw everyone else for all eternity, that is Gods justice, and not for me to question.’

The fact that it won’t be in Gods power to provide you with a heaven because you will be constantly thinking of the ones you love in hell, unless he removes all of your memories of that person in your life in order to do so, which is firstly impossible because all energy is not destroyed but only changed, and as we have seen God as wakan is all energy, but secondly mind-rape by ones God is not a mode of transport by which to get to heaven in my belief system.

To simplify this down to its bear knuckles, as Woody Allen said, ‘I’m the kind of person who can’t have fun at a party knowing that one of the other guests is starving.’- I expect my Gods experience to be of such ilk for reasons wiser than my own but still for reasons congruent with the perspective the creates this experience, a perspective that is closer to Gods love than that ego over there trying to have sex with a comatose teenage girl and raise hell.

Some pigeons are the type that couldn’t conceive of heaven when there is a tick on anothers head. In other words the type of pigeon that would get to heaven is the very pigeon that would not be able to call it such whilst hell existed without any transcendental purpose, such as forgiveness.

‘I hope he burns in hell forever’, says the righteous believer who will presumably experience a greater ‘heavenly feeling’ in heaven, knowing that not only are they in bliss, but that another is having their flesh burnt off for eternity, as is God’s will and right and justice.

It seems then, that on Earth Babylonian Kings, Priests and their subjects could party all night long whilst their slaves were starving for nourishment and so were their fields, and it seems that many people could settle for this as a version of eternal heaven, and eternal hell, as long as they aren’t in the latter, as a symbol of infinite divine love and awe, without question, as long as their hopes, fears and beliefs were to be reciprocated in this manner eventually for their subjection in the here and now, space and time. ‘They returned to the earth and came from the earth in a cycle that made them and the earth one.’ What therefore happened to necessitate the invention of heaven and hell from a pyramid who hadn’t required it through their experiences, but now suddenly experienced something that made it a necessity?

Before we look at the answer to this question through the eyes of the question, ‘Who benefits’ told to us by a hunter-gatherer (a modern aboriginal Australian) from the nature of his perspective, let us hear from a respected, and esteemed academic philosopher, Bertrand Russell, as he charts the history of the birth of the concept of heaven for the major three monotheistic religions that exist today:

“The earliest history of the Israelites cannot be confirmed from any source outside of the Old Testament, and it is impossible to know at what point it ceases to be purely legendary. David and Solomon may be accepted as kings who probably had a real existence, but at the earliest points at which we come to something certainly historical there are already two kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The first person mentioned in the Old Testament of whom there is an independent record is Ahab, King of Israel, who is spoken of in an Assyrian letter of 853 B.C. The Assyrians finally conquered the Northern kingdom in 722 B.C., and removed a great part of the population. After this time, the kingdom of Judah alone preserved the Israelite religion and tradition. …

In the period of captivity, and for some time before and after this period, Jewish religion went through a very important development. Originally, there appears to have been not very much difference, from a religious point of view, between the Israelites and surrounding tribes. Yahweh was, at first, only a tribal god who favoured the children of Israel, but it was not denied that there were other gods, and their worship was habitual. When the first Commandment says ‘Thou shalt have none other gods but me,’ it is saying something which was an innovation in the time immediately preceding the captivity. This is made evident by various texts in the earlier prophets. It was the prophets at this time who first taught that the worship of heathen god was sin. To win the victory in the constant wars of that time, they proclaimed, the favour of Yahweh was essential; and Yahweh would withdraw his favour if other gods were also honoured. Jeremiah and Ezekiel, especially, seem to have invented the idea that all religions except one are false, and that the Lord punishes idolatry….

After Ezra and Nehemiah, the Jews for a while disappear from history

The Jewish State survived as a theocracy, but its territory was very small – only the region of ten to fifteen miles around Jerusalem, according to E.Bevan. After Alexander, it became a disputed territory between the Ptolemies and Seleucids. This, however, seldom involved fighting in actual Jewish territory, and left the Jews, for a long time, to the free exercise of their religion…

This tranquil existence of comfortable self-righteousness was rudely interrupted by the Seleucid king Antiochus IV, who was determined to Hellenize all his dominions. In 175 B.C. he established a gymnasium in Jerusalem, and taught young men to wear Greek hats and practise athletics. In this he was helped by a Hellenizing Jew named Jason, whom he made high priest. The priestly aristocracy had become lax, and had felt the attraction of Greek civilization; but they were vehemently opposed by a party called the ‘Hasidim’ (meaning ‘Holy’), who were strong among the rural population. When, in 170 B.C., Antiochus became involved in war with Egypt, the Jews rebelled. Thereupon Antiochus took the holy vessels from the Temple, and placed in it the image of the God. He identified Yahweh with Zeus, following a practice which had been successful everywhere else. He resolved to extirpate the Jewish religion, and to stop circumcision and the observance of the laws relating to food. To all this Jerusalem submitted, but outside Jerusalem the Jews resisted with the utmost stubbornness.

The history of this period is told in the first Book of Maccabees. The first chapter tells how Antiochus decreed that all the inhabitants of his kingdom should be one people, and abandon their separate laws. All the heathen obeyed, and many of the Israelites, although the king commanded that they should profane the Sabbath, sacrifice swine’s flesh, and leave their children uncircumcised. All who disobeyed were to suffer death. Many, nevertheless, resisted. ‘They put to death certain women, that had caused their children to be circumcised. And they hanged the infants about their necks, and rifled their houses, and slew them that had circumcised them. Howbeit many in Israel were fully resolved and confirmed in themselves not to eat any unclean thing. Wherefore they chose rather to die, that they might not be defiled with meats, and that they might not profane the holy covenant: so then they died’.

It was at this time that the doctrine of immortality came to be widely believed among the Jews. It had been thought that virtue would be rewarded here on earth; but persecution, which fell upon the most virtuous, made it evident that this was not the case. In order to safeguard divine justice, therefore, it was necessary to believe in rewards and punishments hereafter. This doctrine was not universally accepted among the Jews; in the time of Christ, the Sadducees still rejected it. But by that time they were a small party, and in later times all Jews believed in immortality. …

The time of the prosecution by Antiochus IV was crucial in Jewish history. The Jews of the Dispersion were, at this time, becoming more and more Hellenized; the Jews of Judea were few; and even among them the rich and powerful were inclined to acquiesce in Greek innovations. But for the heroic resistance of the Hasidim, the Jewish religion might easily have died out. If this had happened, neither Christianity nor Islam could have existed in anything like the form they actually took. Townsend, in his Introduction to the translation of the Fourth Book of Maccabees, says:

‘It has been finely said that if Judaism as a religion had perished under Antiochus, the seed-bed of Christianity would have been lacking: and thus the blood of the Maccabean martyrs, who saved Judaism, ultimately became the seed of the Church. Therefore as not only Christendom but also Islam derive their monotheism from a Jewish source, it may well be that the world to-day owes the very existence of monotheism both in the East and in the West to the Maccabees.’” (Russell:2000:312-18)

So with the above quote we see that along with the cohesive power of religion to a community, eventually the increase of that community meant war and eventually that fall of the priests in front of the very eyes of their believers. With the aletheia of the persecution of the priests of the Jewish faith staring at them, unconcealed, in their faces, telling them by experience that God was not looking out for those very individual totems supposed to be closest to him but instead was watching them be tortured, raped and killed, as they themselves were, by the ones he obviously did favour.

How could the rest of the legere, the things that bind- religious negative cult commandments of guilt and shame, of hope and fear, be seen to have authority? If there is no protection for even the highest then there is no authority, and hence no community and hence no need for religion. But, if by magic, the reason that one is being religious for is a magical inner landscape that we can imagine we will possess in the perceived future for eternity, and that is where we imagine the spirit of the priests really are, then there is still every regulative reason for religion, and sacrifice, and subjection to the negative cult once again.

This new conceptual paradise replaces the idea of the Earthly paradise that they are all trying to manifest once more on earth through their religion and becomes a real magical idea, a perspective, from which, we shall all look back through (its veil) and reason that the Garden of Eden, must also have reasonably been such a conceptual magical land, over that rainbow, a placed once dreamed of in a lullaby, ‘a dreamtime Universe (one-song) of the hunter-gatherers’.

Hell, we can imagine by cause and effect,  is a concept co-reasoned, couched within that which must be the consequent lot of those who aren’t obeying our God when they take away our possessions and remove our pleasure and bring us pain. Its power will be used to great effect- through fear, hope and paranoia later on, when it suits those in authority to believe that they need to nourish it (to feed that god through the reasonable sacrifice of scape-goats) to increase its power to negate desire.

Paradise derives from the Old-Persian language which itself was born from Babylonian

The word is pairidaéza, meaning an enclosure, a walled in space, to form a wall of earth. That is precisely what settlers have done both in the outer world with their property rights and in the inner world of subjective experience where the Earth is made walled off from the Garden of Eden. A place that only the magic horse could get to perhaps? The words used to describe paradise to a settler are those that he can understand and imagine from his perspective, they are his desired experience of life, pleasure without pain. These are just words, but they are words that are relatable to the experience of the settler of the times of scripture.

Today we might use words that describe different objects in heaven, such as free wi-fi and a Ferrari for everyone, but the message behind the words would be the same- this religion gets you pleasure for ever, as long as you don’t think about all of the others who you love who will be in eternal pain for something that they did wrong as individuals in a world of desire that was in no way worlded by everyone around that individual and inculturated them in such a perspective as to make their hellish actions but a small leap from the norm, who get into heaven for ever like you will and so your not responsible for anyone other than yourself to yourself. Sorry, lost it there, what I meant to say is: the same message- this religion gets you pleasure for ever, as long as you say the right name and obey his commandments as best you can.

With the experience of Israelite priests, those closest to God, being taken to a reward in heaven because they have been killed on Earth, comes the invisible force of the same reasoning, that the highest priests in heaven do not care about those loved ones of yours who you know are going to hell, they only care for those who are going to join them in heaven. Therefore if an Earthly priest now spends his life trying to save people from hell what need it upset him in heaven when they end up eternally burning their, he tried his best with all of his loving heart, and hence what need it upset God’s divine justice let alone his divine infinite power of love and forgiveness by which words and power you hope to convert the unbeliever to believe in, let alone his or His eternal pleasure.

In other words there is now created a distance between us and them on a metaphysical magical plane where each individual is now, not only fighting for his ‘rightful’ place on Earth but also for one in the ‘right’ heaven. To top all of this good news for those in power is the great magical pay off. Heaven is infinite and so everyone can get in if they so but obey. In heaven there is territory but no territory rights, there is food but no labour and no one has to eat their greens if they don’t like, in heaven there are no queues and no supply and demand, no war, and no inequality because everyone gets what they desire- instantly gratified.

How many people do you think would sell their actual life for a real one where they are in power to be road runner and world their effortless world? If I could make such a possibility happen, if I could create such a magical infinite landscape, what would you world upon it, in place of worlding in the real world? How easy is it to control people whose morality is controlled by their desires being fulfilled, if you can fulfil their desires in a pretend magical landscape?

Sciences mythical infinite world of instant gratification serves this purpose today, through films, television, but most importantly for a whole new generation of individual totemism- video games so real that they are called ‘Second Life’. People get married in real life on Second Life. People in real life make real money designing garments for others to dress their pretend-selves-in-on-Second Life. People spend hours killing hated enemies in this inner world that are real enemies, friends and strangers in the real world in order to dance out the violence of the worlding that was done to them that day and possess power once more. People gain esteem and status and level-ups and little golden stars and lovely little dopamine producing sounds to boot in this magical inner world. People gain friends and followers, they can trend and form complex groups and forces, that become meetings in the real world.

People are warlocks and wizards and warriors and heroes, all of whom are free and good in this inner world and no-one can lie about who they are by wearing a false façade. People are heavenly immortal in this inner world, and infinite in form and incarnation and they cannot be hurt or hurt you so there is nothing to really fear. Only the people in the outer world can turn off the power or declare it illegal or demand something of you greater than thinking about your own inner world desire gratification whilst others starve and go to war as the price in the real world, that is really worlded through this fake one in the same way that a rain dance may produce rain.

Sciences answer to infinite desire is an infinite magical land too, and of course it is making a fortune from it too, and of course it doesn’t really exist but people really live in it, so is it real, and by the same token, is heaven therefore real? Please in the name of reason, walk a mile before you answer. Please then reconcile it with the view of heaven that you are about to hear, as it was before it was a concept, but instead an experience. The view of heaven being on earth, as a Garden of Eden.

Let us hear from the modern aborigines Robert Eggington and Selina Eggington – founders of The Dumbartung Aboriginal Corporation who, have lost their own son due to suicide from having to live as an individual object settler by law and not a hunter-gatherer as per his traditional story and the magical effect this had upon him in destroying his soul and effecting suicide, and who have consequently reacted not with hatred but with love and set up a place, where, in their own words, aboriginal people can come, “to basically just cry, and feel their pain in a community that they belong in.” What is the view of a hunter-gatherer to the concept of heaven and hell and who it benefits really:

 “We believe that when in comes our time to pass on, we go back to the earth, and become part of that earth again, so the cycles of humanity and earth become one, and we are not separated. So if you’ve got a belief system that’s say like a western belief system, you go to be saved outside of this world in a place called heaven, well of course, you can do with this land as you like, you can plunder it, pillage it, rape it and destroy it, it is of no consequence. But in our culture and our laws, if we were to harm the land, and then to hurt that land the way that is being done today, we would be punished spiritually very severely for that. White Australia doesn’t have a sense of belonging to the land, it only has a sense of belonging to the establishment and its institutions, and its cities, that it’s built here. It doesn’t understand this country.”

The settler is possessed by his possessions as they possess him through his institutions, his dwellings, his bauen, which is spread upon a land seen likewise as his, in the triple world of mine, not mine, will be mine, past, present, future, hell, earth and heaven, respectively.  The hunter-gatherer remains one with the earth- not ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ but ‘one spirit ever changing- wakan’, one world in which God is not distant, that is the spiritual punishment they foresee, that this alimental communion is the price of plunder, etc. As we have seen told, they are right.

So we can clearly see that a single God- wakan- that is the Universe, has been separated into a sacred and profane world of divide and conquer, and that others have had the same idea. That the authority of each group comes from a story necessitated as the most efficient one, over familism or pure violence, and under the pressures of desertification and over-population. In order to have moral authority to rightfully kill another circle of peoples then God must therefore be seen to be on your side for your behaviour to be seen as good in your group, and so the different names for wakan that we saw all tribes use but none take to mean a different ‘One God’ suddenly become evoked as magical true names of true power of the one true God, and it just so happens that the name we chose was the right one and therefore we have the right to this power and the above knowledge of how to commune with this God.

Now however, with heaven and hell, the deal is even sweeter, ‘believe in our God and you will receive a reward par excellence, for your behaviour, even when God ends your life through torture, humiliation and death for leading such a good life, rather than just letting you slip away in your sleep as he presumably could of done, seeing as it’s all about you for Him. Oh and by the way, the earth is of no consequence at all, once you have chosen our God, and so is life in fact apart from not straying from the path and working hard. It is all a big test, and so there is no point in worlding anything in this world, leave that to us and our architecture and our laws and our rules and our rights, etc, that we will give to you. Be good, do not world outside of our desires, that we magically hear as knowledge from above, and will let you know about as they happen.

Didn’t a thief tell people to jump off a cliff earlier in order to gain, and thereby gain the whole village?  

Don’t crazy cults commit suicide in order to end their being-for-others who tell them that heaven awaits? How successful is it, to get everyone to kill themselves so that your world can be worlded in comparison to getting them all to stay alive and world your world for you? How long would a religion last that didn’t preach sacrifice of the self without making suicide taboo? What power is conveyed by the anchorite to the religion they enclose themselves up in the name of? And are those that claim authority for that subsequent undeniable magical power really a member of that nation, that Name under which they profess to live? Are they in fact of the nation of being-for-itself (takers) or of being-for-their-God-and-not-yours (reciprocators), or by being-what-God-is-and-what-God-is-not (bad faith), or trying to be-in-Being (truthful men)?

Before we end this tiny analogy of heaven and hell, let me just restate that an afterlife in accordance with that of science, i.e. that energy cannot be destroyed and goes on to become another part of the universe once we die- it is re-incarnated, and taking sciences evidence of actual soul reincarnation can still be combined with the hunter-gatherer view and that of the monotheistic religions. All I am stating is that the common sense version of heaven is an obvious language trap where the map has been mistaken for the territory.

Once again I cannot go into great details in this book, but will in my next. However as this is such an important point for many many people I will quickly combine our previous knowledge with that of all religions once again, (as they were all born from the roots of the Altai) in order to commensurate all religious views to some degree, so that heaven can be at least glimpsed in this fuller way.

Earlier we saw the KaBa of Mecca and discussed the seven perambulations that the Muslim prescribes around it, and we saw this KaBa in Babylon and then remade by Abraham. Seven is a sacred number of days for creation, of colours for the rainbow, and of chakras in the eastern religions, as we have also seen. So if our scientifically confirmed energy does get reincarnated back to the earth, then back to human form, over and over again, as the hunter-gatherers believed, surely this version of the truth must be couched in the idea of heaven too, and indeed it is.

To show this I have shown below a quote about the creation of man from the Earth as told by the Muslim tradition, in order to detail that even in the youngest of these revelations from God this truth is still at the root of our creation and of the seven levels of heaven that are prescribed. Through this understanding we can glimpse that heaven is not a place in the sky but an inner realm, where the seven chakras or wheels that the eastern religions describe and attempt to ‘open’ through their spiritual practices, reflect the constitution of the seven types of earth that we are made from respectively and hence the seven levels of heaven that we can exist in depending upon our spiritual state upon our death.

These levels are not barred off from others in a hierarchy of eternal reward, but are aspects of our spirit that can be dwelled in by our being depending upon our perspective and hence our wisdom, and hence our magical power by which to experience them. Punishment and reward, gain and loss, judgement and damnation, are negative cults placed upon this truth in order to facilitate society as a whole towards these experiences. God does not judge you he allows you to be as free as you will it, it is us that weigh our own selves as our spirit becomes free of our physical perception, the first chakra, and explores the rest through spiritual practices, the efficaciousness of which are not determined by their religious framework but are given extra power by belief in that religious framework and the community of peoples behaviour, understanding and guidance.

The path taken is not the point, the point is the point, and the point is alimental communion, through the transcendence of the physical world into these other six chakras or earth Natures. When these Natures are housed in a physical body, and hence visible, they are described as earth, when they leave the body and become invisible, they are described as light, i.e. the rainbow of Gods Nature, and when these Natures act in space and time through all objects they are called days in monotheism, and lesser gods in polytheism, and winds or snakes or dragons in mythology and eastern religions.

“God sent Gabriel, Michael, and Israfel in turn to fetch seven handfuls of earth from different depths and of different colours for the creation of Adam…but they returned empty handed because Earth foresaw that the creature to be made from her would rebel against God and draw down his curse on her. Azrael was then sent. He fulfilled the task and so was appointed to separate the souls from the bodies, thus becoming the Angel of Death. The earth he fetched was…kneaded by Angels, fashioned into human form by God and left to dry for either forty days or forty years.”  Brewers Dictionary of Phrase & Fable.

Therefore on the seventh day God rested after making the universe, means that God, whilst Being the other six days and all of the objects of the universe that make up space and time is not the ultimate state (perspective) of God, for the whole is greater than its parts, and there is a different level of perception, a heavenly one, called being-in-Being, where one can also be in that perception (alive or dead doesn’t matter). Rest means to repose but comes from the Gothic, rasta meaning, a stage, i.e. a stage in a journey which we call life and reincarnation. However deeper still in our understanding of rest is the root of rasta, which comes from the oldest known language- Sanskrit- where this word is ra-ti, meaning pleasure.

Therefore to rest on the seventh day is to have completed all of the stages of Nature that reside within this ultimate (not highest, or truest, but aletheia) Nature of perspective- called God, which for the individual being talked too would be described I am sure as dwelling in seventh heaven experiencing a pleasure far superior to anything that the being-for-itself can attain from desire and lack, hope and fear. The ‘I’ that partakes of this journey does not experience itself as an ‘I’ any longer due to the changes wrought upon his nature by this journey, individuality has been cast off in order to regain the perspective of the being-in-Being. But, in order to describe this to an individual it must use this individuals language and hence this is where the underlying force to change the meaning of these words and stories lies. The priest who talks of heaven is not therefore lying, but the priest who believes that we remain individuals who look like ourselves and meet our relatives and each have a mansion in a magical land in the sky with a man in the sky called God, are living in bad-faith.

So the invention of heaven as a place and not a state of resting in peace; as a hierarchy perceived by a hierarchical negative state through the language that it had created to describe its own state and perceptions- a language trap, and not as being a state of these spirits or forces of wakan which our perception of them allows us to experience the harmony embodied; as an individuals right and not as a collective spirit, came to be seen in this light reflectively- darpan- karma- hubris and nemesis. Settlers were living in a state that they perceived as separate from the world in terms of a walled off enclosure (idealised as paradise) and that nature of dwelling became their language, and life trap, as we have seen only too well.

The problem of this common sense perception created by this language trap is that by creating a distance to be travelled to get to heaven, that can only be attained through the stage of death, and no longer on Earth, means that life itself changes from an essential aspect of the journey towards God, bearing the fruit of your lifes lessons as a gift of communion, deeper understanding of one’s nature as One’s Nature, and fermentation of spirit in to a grander state of Being that changes the Nature of that Being by our behaviour, and it becomes a test to be passed, a gauntlet to be run, bounded by the walled enclosure of right and wrong.

From this perspective, life becomes finished in its meaning and purpose once the magical words the priest tells you have been spoken, and no experience of communion with God is required in order to earn ones place in heaven in a future space and time, only obedience in hope of heaven and fear of hell, supported by faith, that believes what it desires individually and not collectively.

Collective life becomes meaningless to this purpose other than as a duty is centred around saving oneself, as if your behaviour in the world does not effect the perceptions of others, when we know it does due to the finite nature of the world and the repercussions of desire that we have seen in terms of relative wealth underpinning the idea of value.

If a baby is born and dies within a second of life, does it go to hell or heaven? Either answer is unfair. Why? Because if it goes to hell for original sin, for eternity, without having the chance to understand whatever the language of whatever priest it was, then that is unjust. If it goes to heaven, then that is unfair collectively to all of us who have to go through the test of life, and reasonably therefore all people who believe they go to heaven should do everyone the kindness of ending their life at one second old in order to ensure heaven for eternity for them, as that would be the most loving this to do, as the only point of life is to leave it and get to this heaven anyway.

18: To put the same problem again, but in a different perspective

If a person is born mentally disabled, then they cannot understand this language game of words that they are supposed to repeat and so they are condemned to hell no matter what they do, because they cannot take the ‘one and only true religious path’ that the priest prescribes. But we must also ask something of love in this instance. Why are people formed from seven earths and breathed life into by God, in his image, as twisted, disabled, retarded, etc, in the first place? If life is meaningless apart from in order to proclaim ones acceptance of God or of his Son, a task achieved in a few seconds, then why Be so cruel. But if life is about experiencing a perspective that is required by the soul in order to learn a lesson by which to become closer to God by sacrificing his Ego, then suddenly life has a meaning even when you are disabled, etc.

In fact not only that but suddenly can be seen to be twisted and in need of a lesson when they a born wealthy and powerful. It is not a karmic reward from being good in a previous life, but a necessary perspective from which your soul will receive the experiences that it requires in order to know thyself as a being-in-Being eventually, no matter how many incarnations are required.

In this light, from this perspective, a disabled person may be closer to God than a high-priest or a rich-man, it may be their last lesson or their first, we do not know because we are not able to see their inner world or the perspective of the seventh level, outside of space and time by which to judge correctly. God therefore works in mysterious ways, but they are ways that have a reason. A reason that gives life back its meaning and allows us to understand that priests for 40,000 years were not necessary, but became so by the distance we created and named as Priest and layman, sacred and profane, holy days and days of labour, my Earth and His Heaven, etc. I will prove all of this at great length in my next book.

In these last five chapters, we have witnessed the state it was in and have seen it named biblically, mythologically, archaeologically and even anthropologically as, the Garden of Eden. We have witnessed what it became, and why it became it, through the small insurance policy of agriculture and the desires of the self that were able to be experienced from possessing this policy, onto the consequences of desire itself and how it metamorphosed man and consequently his relationship to Nature, God, and the possession of the World as his right.

We have seen these possessions possess him and become subject to them and the stick world that created the hope and fear of paranoia and the distance of heaven and hell, over the rainbow consequently, magically effecting our collective spirit as humanity, no matter the names applied to each circle, each pyramid, each belief, in accord with its experiences, their effects, and how these seed the next cause whose fruit we ferment through digesting it into a spirit of the Ego, experienced as pleasure and pain, gain and loss, desire and lack.

The following first part of this book uses this platform of knowledge as the lens by which to view the civilizations that have most greatly caused the effects that shape the world today and to go much deeper into them through time in order to show weigh what the state of today is and understand how it is in that state – the why. The second half of the book suggests a different state,- the why, the how, and the state that we will progress towards achieving by your empowerment if willed or will not progress towards by your disempowerment if willed, as is your right and your power.

All I ask is that you question yourself just as veraciously as we are about to question history.