Some people think that all that divides people from one another is ideas, that the only conflict between rhetorical me and rhetorical you is that we just don’t understand each other.
The truth is, if we did understand each other, we would realise more conflict. If we all were brutally honest about what we were in this life for, with ourselves and each other, to the point it would be impossible to not understand where we were each coming from, we would realise, that on one level, this life is a war. A war between every man woman and child on the planet for the resources, power and time to do the basic things we all need, and the less basic things we mostly want.
Because we don’t understand ourselves let alone each other, we get caught up in ideas, and ideas smooth this war down a bit. Hide it.
Not that humans are not co-operative, if it gets what they want, they are of course. That’s sensible. But never forget, some things are, must be and cannot change from being zero sum games. Sometimes we find ourselves fighting over the last loaf of bread to feed our starving children.
A noble man knows these things. He fights often and understand what he is fighting for. He knows what the game means, he knows what it means to win and what it means to lose. He understands his enemy, he knows that behind his enemy lies a parallel world to his own, a world of people, who will all suffer just as his people would have suffered if his enemy had won. A noble man knows these things, and so loves and respects his enemy, as he loves and respects himself. He sheds a tear for his fallen enemy, but he does not lose sleep. He knows what he is fighting for, what he loses if he stops. And if, or when, he loses, in his final moments, he is filled with awe for his enemy’s prowess and strength, as he dies, as he knows in his mind and in his heart, the terrors and destruction that will befall his world, of people, who he loves, he cannot help but admire the force that destroys him, and everything he knows.
But we men are not honest, and so we are not noble. We despise the things which threaten us because we are too cowardly to fight without painting the enemy as evil. We are too cowardly to admit love for the things at stake, to admit why we really fight, to admit what we really want, for ourselves, our children, the worlds of people we love. We are too ignorant to realise what is really at stake and so we are constantly assaulted by a sense of unidentified threat. An unarticulable fear, because we do not admit what it is we want, what it is that we need. We do not admit the world as it is, because we are spoiled and fattened slaves hiding behind the walls build by men before us who understood what we do not understand, eating the spoils won for us by men before us who admitted the things we don’t admit. We don’t see the world as it is, because we cannot see beyond our own corpulent chins.
The enemy is the same as us, the hippies and liberals were right, we are all the same. And we are still a threat to them, and they are still a threat to us.
…but that’s not the whole story.
Coming up next week: weakness.
