Philosophical Reflections on Political and Cultural Issues: The Way for Mankind, Book Two

Par Jean-Marie Paglia

This book is an analysis of our world's present condition seen from a spiritual vantage point. Its holistic view exposes the major problems we face: arms budgets, twisted democracy, nuclear energy, overpopulation, giant cities, etc, and allows us to consider what the solutions might be. We cannot solve our problems without the coherent and unified vision that can be found in ancient spiritual traditions. The ageless wisdom of Tao offers a profound and little-known understanding of the origin and structure of the world. It gives us the means to understand what we are, what our destiny might be and how we might best live.

• Langue: Français
• Éditeur: Books on Demand
• Date de sortie: 17 mars 2021
• ISBN: 9782322199952

Jean-Marie Paglia

The author is a professor and certified practitioner of Chinese Medicine. He specializes in the study of taoist teachings and draws inspiration from the modern elucidation of this ancient wisdom. He hopes this will be a rewarding experience for all readers.

Aperçu du livre

1. Our Top Priority

This is a table of priorities in global expenditure at the turn of the century (1998). Figures are expressed in billions of US dollars:

The figures come from the Global Issues website in the section on consumption, and give us a precious and precise insight into the values which define human society.

The most striking revelation would be to compare the first and last of those priorities.

The figures are already out of date, and we’ve made a lot of progress since then – a dozen years later, military spending and arms dealing exceed 1,100 billion dollars a year (far more than spending on medicinal drugs at around 643 billion dollars), making it humankind’s largest expense item.

This, then, is the main business among nations, and it demonstrates the struggle between them to share world domination. Beyond each nation’s legitimate need for security, it is also and above all a question of looking after its own interests, in other words, gaining control of raw materials and markets, control which is established by force, and by the presence of military bases and armies.

Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry? President Woodrow Wilson recognized. (1)

The most highly decorated Marine Corps General in U.S. history, Smedley D. Butler understood all too well the real nature of the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. foreign policy in general when he concluded after his retirement in 1931 that during his 33 years as a Marine officer operating on three continents, he served ‘as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers … a gangster for capitalism.

Half a century later, General A.M. Gray, former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, identified as threats to the United States those insurgencies which have the potential to jeopardize regional stability and our access to vital economic and military resources. (2)

And here’s one final quotation to bring us a little more up-to-date:

In order to keep this economic balm [oil] flowing, to keep the status quo static and the balance sheets of the major oil companies brimming, we’ve [the U.S.] installed our military as a kind of mega police force in the region. Our official reason for being there is to ensure stability, one of the great buzzwords in the history of business, but this is nothing more than spin – the military is in the Middle East to guarantee that whatever comes out of the ground is exploitable and controlled by American multinationals. (3)

This is nothing new – triumphant economic imperialism has always been the norm for superpowers over the centuries. But it should be pointed out that there have often also been nations which have traded and prospered without too much belligerence and domination. In this day and age, some of the most prosperous democratic countries among the superpowers do not vie for political hegemony.

Indeed, trade can be a peaceful and cooperative activity. We might conclude that a choice is always possible, to get out either the sword or the scales – as they used to say. There is no need to get out both.

The urge to control trade and commercial relations stems from the desire to grab more than one’s due. This is how the choice is determined. But we can choose the other way, and then there is no need to resort to a hold-up – for example, when buying bread – if you pay the correct price, any baker will be happy to supply you with what you need. If you take over his store, steal his cash and then force him to work for you for a pitiful wage, that could provide a reason for war.

Large corporations are driven by the rule of maximum profit, so when nations take charge of opening the way for them abroad, there is no doubt that the goal is to ensure that those multinationals continue to reap the highest profits under the most favorable conditions.

The big stick, the gunboat and invasion regularly take precedence over the cashbook for any state which can afford it.

Do nations possess nuclear, chemical and biological weapons because of fear of attack from some other nation, or is it mainly because without them the stronger cannot otherwise exploit the weaker? (4)

Our history books were written to recount and glorify the devastating course of our basic activity. The deadly horrors and ceaseless crushing of destinies they tell of can be used as a mirror to help us understand what we are.

We are creatures which often choose the worst behaviors without even realizing it. Instead of peaceful, profitable trade, our insistent greed makes us choose war and domination whenever possible. We endure this devastating way of life because we do not allow ourselves to move beyond our main characteristic – we remain rooted in our own self-centeredness, which is quite natural, of course, but also blind and unconscious.

Here lies the root of the ills which befall humanity. We generate our own misfortunes and if we were capable of realizing this, we would already have gone a long way towards avoiding it. Instead, we always tend to make the situation worse.

The bones of the victims of war may end up forming the next geological layer of the Earth, but in the meantime, it would be extremely useful to grasp the appalling damage and waste we are frantically creating.

Firstly, let’s listen once again to President Eisenhower’s courageous and prophetic appeal:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children … This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. (5)

Less than one per cent of what the world spent every year on weapons would have been enough to put every child into school by the year 2000 and yet it didn’t happen.

Education changes the world. It is the inescapable way to ensure material and intellectual development. It is the key to a positive future and greater human accomplishment. It is also the most effective and least costly investment.

And yet, we don’t really bother with it. Perhaps have we kept it for ourselves like a treasure, monopolizing it. It is a debt we owe those who are lacking an education.

We all want a peaceful and prosperous world, yet nations continually battle over the world’s wealth and keep the world impoverished. If the citizens of the industrialized world knew that poverty could be largely eliminated even as they worked fewer hours, politicians would have no choice but to work for peace and the prosperity that it would bring. The Cold War alone wasted five times the wealth necessary to industrialize the world and do away with most poverty. Likewise, just 14 percent of the industry producing arms at the peak of the Cold War would be enough to industrialize the world to a sustainable level and eliminate most poverty in only forty-five years. (6)

It is hard to imagine the waste of resources that military spending represents as it defies our imagination, and our blindness may forever prevent us from seeing the wonderful world we could have brought forth instead.

But we could try for a moment to recall the more concrete facts which have tainted our existence:

Pollution from nuclear waste, antipersonnel minefields, cluster bombs, depleted uranium bombs, propping up dictators and corrupt regimes and curtailing human rights, overthrowing democracies, etc. – anyone is free to add what’s missing from this list…

And we could try for a moment to understand what our present is made up of. We can timidly observe that there isn’t the slightest chance that things will change any time soon. The arms race is like a vice that feeds upon itself and evolves on its own. Indeed, the fact that countries arm themselves incites rivalries and naturally leads others to arm themselves as well, and consequently, instead of bringing security, this takes us to a higher and more widespread level of danger. We accumulate ever larger and more varied stocks of weapons, which require ever more maintenance and updating, constantly increasing the risks for the safety of us all.

The arms industry is gorging itself and constantly demanding more, combining, in this greasy swill of billions of billions, greed for itself and hostility towards others, the best guaranteed recipe for its own success. This is the concrete expression of the modern immortal Hydra, the monster whose many heads regenerate and multiply and who breathes out a virulent poison…

We have amassed enough weapons to destroy the planet several times over – evidence of the moral unawareness which is the basic feature defining us human beings.

We ought to have realized that it was enough to have destroyed the world once, for next time we won’t even be able to use our wonderful weapons of mass destruction.

We even ought to have realized that there are more positive activities than creating the means to destroy everything, but in reality, that degree of perception is not yet within our reach.

This totally infantile and immature vision of ours is even more apparent if we look at what’s on the cards for the future.

An article published in January 2007 by TomDispatch.com gives us a description of what’s in store, and it’s worth taking a look. (7)

The article, entitled Our Nightmarish Weapons of Tomorrow, tells us what the new developments in the United States will be, but other countries will not be remaining idle.

Fighting on the ground will resemble a video game, with hi-tech equipment capable of crushing the enemy while remaining out of harm’s way.

The new F-35 fighter plane will destroy the enemy, making light work of enemy defenses, at, however, the cost of some $275 billion dollars; in other words, the most expensive program ever seen.

They are also envisaging a hypersonic F/B-22 bomber, undetectable on radar and capable of taking on the color of the sky and changing shape as its fuel tanks run dry…

They’re planning a rocket-launched vehicle capable of striking any target on the planet in less than two hours.

The anti-missile program, which has already cost $200 billion without producing any convincing results, is being funded until 2024 with around fifteen billion dollars each year.

Spending is decided with relative discretion, and that discretion allows almost unlimited sums to be pledged.

Fritjof Capra wrote:

By brainwashing the American public and effectively controlling its representatives, the military-industrial complex has succeeded in extracting regularly increasing defense budgets that are used to design weapons to be employed in a ‘science-intensive’ war ten or twenty years from now. A third to a half of America’s scientists and engineers work for the military, using all their imagination and creativity to invent ever more sophisticated means for total destruction – laser communication systems, particle beams, and other complex technologies for computerized warfare in outer space. (8)

Obviously, it’s impossible to halt this incredible and extravagant spending as it provides work for hundreds of companies – the powerful arms industry knows how to control government decisions and calling an end to it would mean a total crash for the global economy.

Any ordinary person who considers this problem understands that the issue at stake lies in the incredible profits that are to be made from the business. The matter of nations’ security is secondary. For all practical purposes, the enemy is mostly hypothetical, fortunately. If the threat is not blatant, it has to be invented and magnified so that the game may go on. But eventually, by dint of evoking it, the hypothetical enemy becomes real. Every new lethal invention eventually also leads to the would-be enemy possessing it too, and this is true even for the most advanced research.

That is why the delirious madness determining our future will not stop growing. The more it grows, the more justifiable, profitable and enduring it becomes.

Any ordinary person will also realize to what extent this spending is futile, as the enemy emerging is not the one we have been preparing to meet. The politics of domination cause unforeseen enemies to surface, like barefoot carriers of bombs who can defy the most sophisticated devices. They act on an individual level, and outflank state military organizations. Their determination is just as absolute as the power of apocalyptic machines. This puts everyone back on an equal footing. The fundamental laws of universal balance naturally occur and recur.

This means that we are living in an increasingly dangerous world just as we tend not to pay attention when hearing about wars left, right and center because it has always been so, and we have got used to it.

But the number of countries possessing nuclear weapons is constantly growing and the reasons for conflict are also on the rise – be it only because of the growing scarcity of global resources.

It’s obvious that the danger is becoming ever more threatening and increasingly real, especially if we take into account our level of moral evolution, which can only progress at an infinitely slow pace. We who are such primitive and spiritually unevolved creatures, who have not progressed beyond our culture of aggression and domination, are now equipped with terrifying weapons which we’re almost sure to use. The only obstacle which has prevented this so far is our fear for our own lives. It is vital that something happen before the human zoo once again causes pandemonium.

This leads us directly to examine what is wrong with mankind. First, we should establish the distinction between the individual and the collective. The problem with global militarization lies with states, not individuals.

Nations declare the wars to which individuals are subjected. When conflict occurs, populations generally claim neither to bear a grudge against their enemy nor to have wished for the tragedies, especially when things are going badly. And surely they are sincere.

This does not go to say that individuals are in no way responsible. They are the same, from the top to the bottom of the ladder. Individuals bathe in the collective consciousness – it encompasses their cultural and mental education; they identify with leaders, sharing to a greater or lesser extent their aims, and they may adhere completely to them if the propaganda and communication are good enough. For leaders to be supported and followed by their people, they have to remain sufficiently close to the people they lead. They know how to flatter popular sentiment to guarantee support. Individual political power and the collective consciousness mutually influence each other.

Of course, nations and the lobbies which influence them have objectives of their own which differ from those of individual people but we are not aware of this.

In fact, the State pyramid is a prism which magnifies in its leaders the qualities and flaws of the ordinary individual. Leaders are not the exception – they are from the same mold.

Whether it is in the visible splendor at the summit of the nation or in the obscure existence of the individual, the same nature and the same passions manifest themselves.

It is, then, within the ordinary human creature that we should look for the flaws that bring misery upon the world.

We should recognize our fundamental greed, which brings together the powerful and unquenchable desires of the ego; greed for money, obviously, but also for