This posting is the second of two to invite people to check out a way of understanding our situation, and the challenges we face. The title of the previous posting indicates what I think this “way of understanding” has to offer at this horrific moment in our nation’s history:
Can't Stand to Look at What's Happening? But Don't Want to Give up the Fight? This Is For You.
The “this” in “This is For You” refers to a kind of “War College”— a way of engaging in the battle (for a more whole world) that steps back from the present ugly scene in America, where a Force of Fascism has triumphed in a “free and fair” election over the Force of American Democracy. Steps back from that level to offer a way of seeing — and understanding — the larger battle of which this American battle against a Fascistic Force is part.
This “War College” promises to illuminate the nature of the forces embattled in human civilization, the shape of the battlefield, and how that battle must be fought — if our better possibilities are to triumph over our worse.
The video here begins a series of pieces that, together, will deliver that coherent, and many-dimensional understanding — that I call A BETTER HUMAN STORY — that I am convinced could have a beneficial impact both
- on the current American crisis, where our democracy is on the ropes, and
- on whether human civilization can get its act together well enough — and soon enough — to survive on this planet for the long haul, rather than destroy itself, which is not at all a sure thing.
At this painful moment in our nation’s history, I find greater strength in attending to the Big Picture (which has been most of my life’s work). In that larger perspective, the recent possibly catastrophic victory of Fascism in the American presidential election is no longer the only thing one sees.
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Regarding my assertion that this BETTER HUMAN STORY might help with our American battle, let me say that my life-long study of the forces at work in the human world enabled me to see the gathering force of Fascism from the early 90s onward. I also have a long paper trail of warnings I’ve issued over the past generation about the rising peril, and about the ongoing failure of the Good Guys to fight the battle as it needed to be fought for the pro-Democracy Forces to win it.
(I posted here late last week a piece titled some “Supporting Evidence Indicating that "This 'Big Picture' Can Help Us Defeat Fascism. In support of the proposition that this way of understanding what we’re up against could help Democracy defeat Fascism in America, I presented the video of a campaign speech I gave (as the Democratic nominee for Congress, in VA-06 in 2012) that went viral. That speech demonstrates that the perspective I’m offering here made visible to me — while most of those in Liberal America were still seeing only politics-as-usual — how the once-respectable Republican Party had become an instrument of a destructive, fascistic force.
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What follows here, below, are two videos that present the foundational idea on which this BETTER HUMAN STORY is built.
1) “Embarking on the Path of Civilization Condemns a Creature to the Destructive Reign of Power,” which is the same video introduced in the first posting; and
2) “Why It Was Inevitable that Civilization Would Evolve in Directions People Did Not Choose,” for those who might want to review that idea by watching a different presentation of it.
For those who would prefer a presentation of this foundational idea that is written — as well as more systematic, and less extemporaneous — there are these:
- This basic idea (articulated in the video) gets presented and developed systematically in a (prize-winning) book – THE PARABLE OF THE TRIBES: THE PROBLEM OF POWER IN SOCIAL EVOLUTION (from the University of California Press, and still in print from SUNY Press.)
- My best attempt to present the essentials of the argument concisely has been an essay “The Ugliness We See in Human History is Not Human Nature Writ Large” (published on 3QuarksDaily in 2022).
Here’s a second presentation of that basic idea
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This foundational idea shows why it is inevitable that any creature on any planet anywhere in the cosmos that embarks on the path of civilization will inevitably be compelled to trace a historical path as tormented and destructive as that which our species has done on earth over the past ten millennia.
Which is why the ugliness in human history — and in the world around us now -- is not a clear reflection of the inherent nature of us human beings. Which pretty well proves that we are better creatures than we have thought ourselves to be. Which is, by itself, a source of greater strength for us.
A destructive social evolutionary force inevitably arises with civilization, and the way that force operates through time illuminates how something as destructive as today’s Republican Party, which is now enslaved to a human monster like Donald Trump, can arise in a civilized society.
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All the coming entries in this series will begin their titles with “War College”— to make it easy for people to follow the Big Picture being laid out.
The next entry in this series will have the title, “War College: The Discernible Reality of a ‘Force of Evil’ in the Human World.”
(People have struggled for millennia to understand “Evil” — how it originated, how it operates, why it is part of our world, who’s to blame, etc. That next piece offers, I believe, the best available answer to those questions.)