Actual Freedom Library

Richard

Peter

Vineeto

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Peter: A double whammy in the dictionary, for if one causes no harm to others one is also free of the feeling of guilt. The ideal of pacifism is the best that humans have come up with as a collective ethic, but we still keep law and order in the world at the point of a gun after thousands of years of adherence to well-meaning ethics, morals, ideals and dreams. At the very core of the problem is the inability of even two people to live together in perfect peace and harmony, let alone a family, tribe or nation. But the perversity is that every human blames the other for the violence and is in complete denial of the aggressive instinct lurking deep inside themselves. In order to become completely and irrevocably harmless you, as you instinctually know and feel yourself to be, have to become extinct.

The path to becoming harmless involves the willingness to question and tackle the well-meaning ethics, morals, ideals and dreams that keep Humanity forever shackled to aggression and sorrow. As we grow in childhood years we are well imprinted with a sense of right and wrong, good and bad by our parents, teachers and peers. As we emerge into the world we became increasingly indoctrinated into believing and joining certain groups of people whose principles we agreed with.

For many in this century the attraction was to socialism, peace, green and eventually spiritual groups. This, of course, meant that one then had to disagree and fight with the other groups representing opposing beliefs. And everybody is in one group or the other. As a consequence, in the world the Left fight the Right, Protestant fight Catholic, the poor fight the rich, Greenies fight the Greedies, Christians fight the Moslems, Democrats fight Communists, tribe fights tribe, the workers fight the bosses, men fight women, women fight men, and so on and on.

Good and right and true are words used by both sides in the arguments, fights and battles, but at the heart of it all that we human beings actually love to fight, blame and resent other human beings. A good example of this was evident in a TV show by Clive James called ‘A postcard from Chicago’. He was escorted through the Black ghettoes by a policeman who explained to him the gang warfare that continually raged. Boys as young as ten were initiated into a gang by breaking the law – robbing a store or mugging someone were typical acts. Eventually, to earn respect in the gang, the boy would have to kill someone and a random drive-by shooting was the popular method. The policeman went on to explain that the gang structure was essentially split into two major groups – ‘Folks’ and ‘People’. This grouping did not represent old tribal, ethnic or religious groupings but was an apparently arbitrary split, invented only in the last decades. After centuries of oppression and slavery gradually coming to an end for these people they have now invented new groupings in order to inflict hatred and violence on each other – the ‘Folks’ fought it out with the ‘People’.

The key to eliminating this violence, anger, revenge, retribution and aggression is to see it in ourselves, rather than avoid the issue by blaming others. After all – the first step to curing addictions such as alcoholism, is to admit you have the disease in the first place. At the very core of Human behaviour lies aggression and violence which, despite all the morals, ethics and good intentions, has not been eliminated after thousands of years of so called ‘civilization’. To remain a believer in these socially imbibed morals, values and ethics is to remain seeking a solution within the Human Condition and is to remain either one of the ‘Folks’ or one of the ‘People’ – a social identity.

Only after the work has been done in dismantling one’s social identity consisting of well-meaning but failed ethics, morals, ideals and dreams, does the opportunity then present itself to go all the way and eliminate one’s very sense of ‘self’complete with the survival instincts of fear and aggression. This radical step of ‘self’-immolation causes a mutation such that the survival instinct no longer plays havoc – no longer does one operate on survival mode and irrevocably bound to outbreaks of fear and aggression that threaten to, or actually do, over-ride any imposed ethics, morals.