Just as we call the biological cooperative activated by our cells our body, we erroneously consider the random collection of bodies, arising from and activated within the confines of the North American continent between Canada and Mexico, the “Americans”. Considering how this flock has represented itself to the rest of the planetary population since the end of World War Two, like crows, we might well be called a murder of humans.

His people called him Cronot, the time master. Little did they know he had nothing to do with time — absolutely nothing. His vocabulary contained no temporal terms of either the chronological or spiritual variety, which he considered the same thing. Nor did he refer to the material world in terms less lively than event or being; there existed no mere things.

Off the track of time, that clothesline from which the spectacle airs its latest developed film, he became like the camera left in a field throughout spring whose film when played back at an accelerated rate reveals the interrelated lives of its plant and animal denizens. Knowing he was the accumulation of all the events of his life experience he could observe the any period in the same way by enveloping the succession of events in the event of recollection at any time he chose.

So too could he serve as a fair witness to the minutest changes in what those distracted by time’s impatience would consider a rigid thing. Knowing that the eternal present is the only instant of existence he maintains stability unachievable within the spectacle.

While all around him his people pursued promises of a carrot just like they eat in the penthouse in the tallest building in the world through a maze of multiple multiple choices and tricks to be performed, he reached down and pulled a fresh one from the fertile loam in his garden.

As his people schemed on capturing the golden goose for the perpetual something-for-nothing golden eggs promised to be out there somewhere he collected his breakfast daily from his hens.

Knowing all too well the race as intimately as any of his people still nipping at each other’s heels on the stairway to the penthouse, he laughed heartily at his dogs frolicking in the open field while he massaged his healing heels.

Having worked from dark to dark to earn a brighter future that never came, as most of his people yet feel compelled to do, he took profound delight in watching the Earth expose and hide the sun any now it was a good idea.

Once the willing maker of better traps for gawking mice along the spectacle midway, he sympathizes from the distance afforded by the internet and the wisdom to realize it is still the midway, gaining more variations and seeming more real every day.

To his people it seemed like he could disappear — at times.

It was the verdict of a two-day battery of psychological tests given him to judge his fitness to work for the earth moving machinery manufacturer known as Caterpillar. In his last semester, with nothing but liberal arts electives on his class schedule, Russ indulged himself in the perks being showered upon graduating electromechanical engineers in the age of the punch card Fortran computer industry’s embryonic stirrings before Silicon Valley was a sparkle in Douglas Englebart’s eye. Trip to Pratt & Whitney in Florida, to Boeing in Seattle, ah yes, this was what it was all about.

He had snorted at the verdict with the understanding that his four-year stint in the Marines before college were experiential evidence that he could work well with others under the direst of circumstances. He’d hated the whole enlistment for the blatant bullying psychology boot camp employed in shaping the minds of killing machines and so spent the rest of his stint observing the culture maintained within the indoctrinated mindset of such unquestioning patriotism. He took the best offer from the best company and entered the private sector as an acquisitive yuppie apolitically against the Viet Nam War.

Several years later, when his eldest entered school he began to recognize a parallel indoctrination in public education as he watched her, and recalled himself, dumbing down her beautiful natural curiosity to satisfy the demands of obedience to the certitude of authority in their idea of what constitutes correct answers to twelve years of probationary examination. The difference between the purpose of the simple military, “my country right or wrong” ethic and the “my truth right or wrong” being pushed by the public education system was one of magnitude not only in scope, but in inscrutability.

The military shouldn’t question orders or they might hesitate fatally and become wasted fodder — at least that’s the modern justification for the withdrawal of direct human participation in the slaughter of humans by the use of drones as we, the “legal combatants,” methodically rub out beings we deem “illegal combatants,” along with the smudge of acceptable collateral annihilation of the civilian population amongst whom they live cravenly hide.

Citizens shouldn’t question authority or they might — what — think for themselves — become an enemy of the state — become unexploitable — invulnerable to usery? The National Security Agency protects the authority of the government by hiding its ways, means and purposes from the very people being manipulated into sycophantic obedience while claiming the secrets are kept from the always potentially envious enemy jealous of our superior standard of living. He could only conclude that they consider citizens to be a likely enemy; if they knew. He never liked secrets.

The correlation of these two parallel Pavlovian processes piqued his curiosity about the human vulnerability to considering information transmitted by words as more valid in describing experience than one’s own information transmitted by bodily sensations. To vanquish all foes was the purpose of the military’s mindless obedience, but what was the purpose the military enforces and protects so mindlessly — against what?

Such ponderings lead him to a conversation with a gorilla named Ishmael who asked him to find the myth of his culture. How had man felt justified in departing from the relatively symbiotic ways of the hunter-gatherer to begin disrespectfully wiping out all local lifeforms to establish agriculture and the ensuing urban aggregation around the food getting places?

He felt like a cicada molting in the spring as he slowly detected the cicatrix of a shell within which he’d lived his entire life. The discovery reawakened observations of the natural world he’d long denied for their stark contrast to the cultural norm of going along to get along. The expansion of his vision formed cracks in the wall of the invisible prison the myth of western civilization is. The husk hangs clinging to his memory of civilization while he carefully extracts his natural genetic memory from the muffled existence it had survived.

He found that, ultimately, he did not work well with others and Caterpillar’s psychological testing was spot on; he would have eventually ceased cooperating with the purpose of an earth moving equipment manufacturer, just as he has the purpose of the earth owning corporation known as western civilization, US branch office.

It seems it’s that part of a cycle that seems to swing my way every six or seven years which, after at least ten such occurrences, I’ve come to call the Big Sad. The phrase “sadder, but wiser” describes the accumulation of experience for one dedicated to understanding the condition of the civilized human that seems to rob individuals of their genetic potential. In such a funk, I cannot seem to articulate my thoughts with the intention of “selling yeast” when I feel like a rolling pin flattening the most pneumatic of wishful thinking, so I here construct a conversation across the history of western thought with a dash of eastern insight for flavor to describe my thoughts in the words of others who have influenced me:

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government.”

“The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out,” replied the proverbial zen master.

“If moral behavior were simply following rules, we could program a computer to be moral.” Samual P. Ginder, Capt. USN

“As the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.”

“Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.“

“If you torture data sufficiently, it will confess to almost anything.”

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

“It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.”

“Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt.”

“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.”

“One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.”

“It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties which make the defense of our nation worthwhile.”

‘Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.”

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

“If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential.”

“What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men — each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature — are shot down wholesale.”

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

“A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.”

“For men tied fast to the absolute, bled of their differences, drained of their dreams by authoritarian leeches until nothing but pulp is left, become a massive, sick Thing whose sheer weight is used ruthlessly by ambitious men. Here is the real enemy of the people: our own selves dehumanized into "the masses." And where is the David who can slay this giant?”

“Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.”

“When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?“

“Nothing produces such odd results as trying to get even.”

“If you devote your life to seeking revenge, first dig two graves.”

“The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life
when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.”

“I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town.
A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.”

“Too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they don't want, to impress people they don't like.“

“Future generations may regard the people of the First World nations as bona fide idiots—blithely driving SUVs and watering golf courses—and regard the people of Third World nations as aspiring idiots. I doubt future generations would understand. It is not that we are idiots; we understand. However, in the end we seem to have as much control over the current social trends as lemmings do over their fate.”

“Follow the money.”

“Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything -- anything -- be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.”

"If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst."

“Life cannot be classified in terms of a simple neurological ladder, with human beings at the top; it is more accurate to talk of different forms of intelligence, each with its strengths and weaknesses. This point was well demonstrated in the minutes before last December's tsunami, when tourists grabbed their digital cameras and ran after the ebbing surf, and all the 'dumb' animals made for the hills.”

“Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.”

“…the television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.”

“I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.”

“War is God’s way of teaching American’s geography.”

“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.”

“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”

“Nature's laws affirm instead of prohibit. If you violate her laws, you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman.”

“How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!

“The plastic virtues: purity, unity, and truth, keep nature in subjection.”

“Nature can provide for the needs of people; [she] can't provide for the greed of people.

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”

“Humans -- who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals -- have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and "animals" is essential if we are to bend them to our will, wear them, eat them -- without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret.”

“Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives.”

“A human being is part of the whole, called by us "universe," limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons close to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from our prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all humanity and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

“An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.”

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”

“It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.”

“The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member,
but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.

“Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.”

“What's done to children, they will do to society.”

“Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.”

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule”

“Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?"

“To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less
important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.”

“It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would

occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts.”

“You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image
when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.”

“In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”

“By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong.”

“If you don't find God in the next person you meet,
it is a waste of time looking for him further.”

“My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread, I'm selling yeast.”

“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”

When I can look Life in the eyes,
Grown calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the Truth,
And taken in exchange---my youth.
-Sara Teasdale, poet (1884-1933

Did you ever wonder, when you find something unique in your experience, whether it is something unique in the universe or that you are just the most recent observer of something that practically everyone else has known forever and takes for granted so never mentions — intrepid explorer on the curious forefront of inquiry or the slowest wit on the planet? Here’s one of those pragmatic moments of western thought when inadvertently stumbling into a zen understanding.

The theory of universal Darwinism allows as how, despite the exactitude with which genes copy themselves, the endless variation of life forms we perceive is a result and proof of the effect of their earthly environment’s inability to kill the survivors before they could replicate their information. What appears as design to imaginers of some master designer/creator is the natural result of information (DNA) being copied most by those variations that work. What works best produces copies that are that much more able to survive the dangers of living that kill all less able copies. Changes in the environment are always new challenges to and determiners of increasing hereditary complexity.

There can be little doubt whether whatever natural event one observes is unique in its occurrence. Even if it was the same event, the uniqueness of the observers’ reality tunnels at the moment of observation make the chances two people have ever been conscious of the same experience something like ∞ X ∞.

In this way it also leaves little doubt that what is never mentioned is either so indescribable as to be unconsciously filtered out of one’s reality tunnel or, if noticed, so extraordinary as to evoke fear of appearing insane to a culture whose existence defines sanity … or comfortably, civilly pigeonholed into the language of the myth with the facile subconscious mental collator creating reasons to increase the complexity of the language to more precisely separate events into things for expert specialization — denying annoying contradictions rather than expanding the inclusiveness of the categories.

Ever so often I am stopped in whatever tracks I’m following when I encounter yet another example of communication that makes me realize what a powerful organic intelligence the development of language proves the physical body to be. Language enables one to listen to stories being told around fires since grunts and pointing became not enough. Language is the major cultural development responsible for the extended life expectancy of humans through the improved ability to describe more exactly the location of predators from saber-toothed tigers to omnivoracious viri. Whether language spread from the first word enunciated to become all the dictionaries in the world or from a “hundred monkeys” blooming in diversely separate groups of people is an interesting speculation but not relevant to my inquiry in this post. I am thinking of the process of spreading from any one point and how that must have evolved.

That we can meet another who has never experienced the same culture in which we were born and have always lived, nor we in theirs, yet exchange profound, precise ideas about the natural world if we share the same language, is the most wonderful and damning of all cultural embellishments to human’s natural existence. Wonderful because we can describe in minute detail what we see, feel and think as a means of evoking recognition of a truth, about which the words flutter like butterflies about nectar, as a common experience of something vaster than separate cultures can ever nail down. Damning because when we describe in minute detail what we see, feel and think, the reality of the natural connection of all parties' experience becomes obliterated by an argument over whose symbolic butterfly’s close order drill skills can best the other.