The Confederation: Disunion: Foreword

Matthew 22:37-40

37 Jesus said to him, " 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.'[a] 38 This is the first and great commandment. 39 And the second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'[b] 40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets."

[a]Deuteronomy 6:5.

[b]Leviticus 19:18.

Jesus tells us that this is the way Creation works. Humans will invariably respond with a host of "that's nice, but" excuses, all based on what we assume would happen to us if we tried to implement this in a real human society. This misses the critical point that it's not Creation that's deficient, but human society.

Missing critical points is what happens when people arrogantly assume they know what's going on and stop paying attention, when everything is collapsing around them and they really don't have any idea what they're doing wrong.

This book is a "what-if" story. "What if", assuming that Jesus is correct, the unremediated human species finds out how to travel freely in the galaxy, and expands into a large colonial empire? "What if" humans encounter other species, and share their unremediated and often unquestioned philosophies of conflict, politics, economics, and all our other routine ideas about how things work with the Universe at large? "What if" humanity approaches the rest of the Universe with its understanding of "civilization by other means"?

Stories of this sort are a way to illustrate things, usually to people who think they already know enough and aren't paying attention. Jesus told stories, called parables. They often ended-as the audience complained that they were ridiculous, and that no one would think or behave that way-with the punchline that the audience members think and behave that way every day.

Even the most ardent fundamentalist would never suggest the characters in the parables were real, or based on specific individuals. This sort of illustrative story, parable, morality tale, analogy, or metaphor, is inherently imperfect. If they were perfect, they would be the reality itself, which the audience is already ignoring for some reason.

This book is an imperfect representation of both domestic and Scriptural reality, intended to move the point of view to a great enough distance to provide parallax and perspective, to produce a less ignorable understanding of how things actually work. It is told with a lot more words, and much less simply and directly, but it was what was in my mind about 40 years ago, when this process began.

We begin by tearing human civilization apart-Disunion. We will try to put it back together in a future installment. As one of the protagonists often says, "it could get a little rough".