The Human Question 20151115

One may ask why or how can humanity cease such behavior.

The answer is in fundamentalist totalitarianism functioning in either a brand of theism or statism, neither can exist.  The solution for either side of the globe to tilt the other East to West or West to East into harmony is to denounce fundamentalist allegiance in all forms to any doctrine of religion bearing pertinence to governance, morality, or rights assigned or connoted inside a state, nor any rights of state bearing pertinence to a common dignity afforded all humans by the laws of state but instead by the empathy of our species chosen and upheld solely on the foundation of volition.  The equilibrium of state is a currency dispensed in economic disparity carried forward through time by the historical privilege of exploitation, labor, natural resource, and technology awarded by chance, aggression, and power.  This equilibrium will never equate to equality, but it can find peace.

For the West to find peace with the East, the West must shed xenophobic theistic fundamentalism from the public square to compute morality, taxable exemption, and political empowerment in a plurality that to paraphrase Hitchens, denounces the assertion that any form of ‘totalitarian principles must be repudiated in the mind as well as politics.’  The West must start because the West continues to be the maximal benefactor in the inequitable exploitation.  This is the nature of forgiveness, not the wronged seeking vengeance, but the wrongdoer pursuing empathetic acknowledgement of the other’s vulnerability mirrored in one’s own power which is often the root of terrorism, fascism, and totalitarianism, particularly in a theistic iteration.  

The Arab Spring, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Environmental, Marriage Equality, and Future-Feminism movements seek equality based on common humanity recognizing the systematic inequalities rampant through state, financial, and theocratic systems.  The catalyst charged to swell energy to assert these movements is being confronted by concentrated virulent strains of fundamentalist totalitarianism East and West.  These are old wars coming to peak due to the infiltration of communication afforded by the internet exponentially accelerating the evolution of humanity towards empathy by the obliteration of historical ignorance while simultaneously exponentially depleting natural, monetary, and emotional resources in a test of our species’ potential extinction.  Fiscal markets pressurize the purposes of the individual laborer to a lowest common global denominator towards a breaking point of the industrial revolution.  

Which will we choose and when; how much time do we have; how many generations before the water runs out or wealth consolidates into famine or the nuclear missiles launch or the strain of viral warfare of what three men can do in Paris or a bomber in Baghdad or Beirut or six men with box cutters on airplanes.  The margin for error is in the reaction and the functional result that for the plurality of change to exist generations will see the old gods and national pledges become arbitrary.  It is in this acknowledgement where the world is a circle of men holding guns on each other, pointing trembling, and in this a set of hands descends, a firearm is set to floor, the gods die from lack of worship, and the people vote in true democracy liberated of heart, knowing morality, civility, dignity, and freedom were never granted by any of those old words, but by kinship in a common species that needs every heart we can muster to survive choosing to worship not god, state, or wealth, but volition positioned as a fulcrum between responsibility and empathy.