Peaceful Coexistence

Must a philosopher be original and creative, yet not one jolt to the reader.  Must his philosophy be a beautifully flowing stream of thoughts from beginning to some imagined utopia?  So many of us live in hope and die in despair.  My life has been original and creative, but not always. I’ve been jolted into a reality hard to believe. 

Just because the reader has not lived through my experiences doesn’t mean he or she can’t relate. In the past 84 years, I’m a witness to the fact that the world’s dictators have killed millions of people by starving them, by gassing them, by torturing them, by machine-gunning them, on the theory that the end justifies the means.  The end justifies the means says that evil eventually overcomes good.

For instance, during the Great Depression in America, with millions facing starvation, President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt that government had a duty to grant individual aid.  His National Recovery Act was rejected by the Supreme Court.  One of Roosevelt’s picks for the Supreme Court, Justice Brandeis, asserted: “Property is only a means. It has been a frequent error of our Court that they have made the means an end.”  The Taney Court, in Dred Scott’s case, ruled that a black man was the property of a white man.  In America, slavery (property) was the means to an economic end, property now the means to a socialistic end, neither of which is a good end, as history records.

During my early life, despite my need to assert myself, I was kept dependent, wrote a numerologist doing a profile on me. It might take considerable time to break free and become independent.  I would move forward with the courage of my convictions in the directions of my choices.  There are too many coincidences in my numerology profile for it to be coincidence.  In my early life it was do unto others before they did unto me.  I felt inferior. It is do unto others as you would have them do unto you when you are confident of yourself.  We gain self-confidence by thinking for ourselves.  I broke free of my chains at midlife, when my numerology profile said I would.  There is far more to reality than we know. We are connected in ways we are not aware of.

America’s Founding Fathers wrote a Constitution that would have us believe the individual is the means to an end, and government his servant in achieving that end.  America’s Constitution has been changed so much you wouldn’t know you are reading the same Constitution. As history proves, the ideas expressed in my Constitution have never been the case. Yes, I’m an ideologue, but give one authority and he or she immediately thinks in terms of duty to others. Duty to do good turns into control, oppression, anarchy, and finally, dictatorship. Example: after paying for something you are not getting for 14 years,  the proposed health care bill America’s politicians plan to “give” us—their duty—will save taxpayers money.  Is something  always better than nothing? I don’t think so.  A better idea is to give us back the individual as the means, and free enterprise, and the law of supply and demand.  Before government’s duty to us, our health care cost was a small fraction of today’s cost.

A definition of anarchy in my dictionary: a theory that regards the absence of all direct or coercive government as a political ideal and that proposes the cooperative and voluntary association of individuals and groups as the principle mode of organized society. I spent two years sailing the Bahamas out-islands. The above stated theory on anarchy was in practice. In early America, the theory was in practice.  How do we know that societies couldn’t get along in peaceful coexistence?

We hear a lot of whining. Misery loves company, but nobody really cares about the way we feel.  The mind is in a state: it’s mind over matter. If we could all agree to the following three common sense principles, we might make a first step in the thousand mile journey to peaceful coexistence. We all share the same planet; we all have the same basic drives; some truths apply in all ages to all people. 

Start with the idea that government has no duty to the individual; the individual has a duty to himself.  If that’s the way society begins, that’s the way it ends—or else.  When will we ever learn that we are created with more than hive mentality?