Grow Home: Defending the Nation vs Fighting for the Empire TPS-0128

Reconciling the difference between defending your nation and fighting for your empire. I care about very deeply about the corrupt state craft of co opting the evolutionary, the biological, the hormonal, the intrinsic characteristic of being a human who is born with the will to fight and die and be sacrificed for righteous reasons that some people would call the killer instinct.

How about praising the defender instinct? Not everybody has it. It doesn't always occur within the Alpha folks, but maybe it concentrates there. Point being, there is an energy, I believe, a natural energy that is alive within all life of defending whatever is precious to you. That energy is expressed in so many different ways all throughout nature.

There are very aloof parents who abandon their young, there are parents who are very protected with their young. The spectrum is very diverse. But I believe within all living beings, there is a defensive force, a defensive mechanism.

Some species have that so called hard wired and some species have it more nebulous. In the realm of values and principles and ethics and all kinds of moral philosophy and psychology and religion.

Within every population of every species, there seems to be those who are more designed for self sacrifice and combat.

That's true at a biological level across many species, where there is no ambiguity about the biological differences for those who are equipped for combat, and those who are not.

They don't need rites of passage to determine to separate the adults from the non adults if you wanna be as broad as possible.

But that instinct has become perverted, in my view, by the very modern impulse to build empires.

The narcissistic sociopaths, to put it kindly, if they can hijack the impulse to be a warrior defender, who is willing to risk and sacrifice their bodily integrity, their safety, their sleep schedule, their comfort.

They're willing to degrade all of these aspects and many more in order to express their intrinsic energy of wanting to defend what's precious within their world view, the land, the people, their people, their land.

However, it gets ugly when you get into the us and them.

It is a beautiful thing, that impulse to defend, so for that impulse to defend to be this raw material that empire builders manipulate in a twisted manner in order to, either by offering treasure in exchange for the risk of blood, or by compulsory conscription or drafts...

Those who were most aggrandized by the expansion of empire have for hundreds and thousands of years now, luckily, not tens of thousands, but for thousands of years, a handful of thousands of years...

Those narcissistic sociopaths have effectively, by financial duress, and arm twisting, or by propaganda, or by force, join the military, or be killed by the military, whatever the dynamics are, it's a bastardization of that pure energy of defense.

I have to wonder, for all those who have been killed and mangled and maimed on the fringes of the empire, do they ask themselves, what if I had not been seduced by the glamour of the war machine's propaganda and I had stayed within the borders of my nation, which many such borders were not gifted charitably, but were fought and died for in gruesome, morally questionable, to say the least battles that at least for now, are cool enough even if they're simmering, there are not hot wars on all sides of the borders of every of every nation in the world.

The geography of peace, the inflammation of borders, there are enough places, enough nation states on Earth today where not every angle, not every plane of their border, is embroiled and inflamed in conflict.

That's a blessing, I thank all the forces for making that possible.

The impulse to say, okay, every horrific, ugly, unfair, unequal, unjust process that led to the borders, the political geography of the world today, the political map of the world, whatever led to that in this moment, let's call time out, and let's say now, let's mend fences. To me, that's what peace on Earth requires.

There are people who are inheritors of tyranny, inheritors of atrocity, who profit from the atrocities of the past and who have no remorse or sympathy going about their lives with the privilege that is on the backs of the conquered and the colonized.

They live, and I live, and we live in a disgusting, hideous parade of ill gotten gains to this day.

It's all in the legacy of violence going back hundreds and thousands of years.

So if there was some way to call time out, and I believe that the international suite of human rights and rules of engagement and international forms of justice in the courts that exist, that they're making a best effort to call that time out on Continued brute and blunt force.

Modern imperialism at least attempts to have some sensibility about if you're gonna do it, you better do it in an insidious manner, not in a obvious and blunt force manner. You can get away with it if you're insidious, like globalization.

At least there's some international hesitation if not resistance to the unrestrained imperialism and violence that really characterizes civilization for thousands of years, up to now, only very recently, has there been any sort of repulsion around mass conquest, mass violence. That was a good way to make a living, a good manifest destiny agenda for king and country. A noble, chivalrous expression of the energy that I'm hoping can someday be returned to its sacred place in the natural order, in my view, which is defensiveness.

The thought came to me today, which was that if you're looking for innocence, don't try to find it in wild nature, because there are plenty of species out there for whom self interest is the norm.

However, you wanna explain it in terms of Darwinism and evolutionary biology and whatnot, a selfish gene, if you will, I don't know enough about that to speak intelligently about it but I will say it's not very peaceful out there.

There appears to be more cooperation and competition amongt various species of life on earth. On the whole it's a cooperative biosphere But where competition occurs, it can be so shockingly devoid of remorse that You would think that life on Earth was irredeemably atrocious.

So these projections that we have about innocence and righteousness and morality and ethics and whatnot...From a studying the way that natural, organic weaponry evolves...there's a lot of heinous violence that I've studied that I've witnessed in nonhuman animals of all shapes and sizes in the wild.

Between what I've experienced and what I've studied, I would have to say that one of the gifts and privileges that we as human beings have is to be able to adjudicate and to prevent and avoid and quarantine unchecked violence.

That, that is our gift, one of our gifts. We have many gifts. I don't know who gave them to us. That's not my concern in this moment.

It's a fool's errand to try to find innocence throughout nature. I don't know if it's 50/50, but as much innocence as you will discover, you will find, I don't know if it's proportionate, but you will find a shocking amount of non innocence in wild nature in terms of the dynamics of competition between and among species. I'm not delusional about that reality so I'm not projecting a delusion about nature into a utopian fantasy of pacifism for humans.

We know anthropologically that it's possible for humans to live in peace with each other and their neighbors, relatively speaking. That just may have been the dominant paradigm before civilization. There's so much diversity of human culture, and there's so many living and non living examples of human cultures that did not engage in organized violence that we have to say, there's no excuse not to pursue a better way.

We have the capacity to live in peace with each other and with our neighbors.

So there's no apocalyptic spiritual bypass cop out to escape from the responsibility to be in pursuit of refinement of the arts of peace.

Because we have historic and prehistoric examples where human relations are peaceful in various cultural and geopolitical configurations.

They were able to get it right, if that was the prerogative.

But one thing that distorts and corrupts that potential is warlords, the sociopathic, narcissistic, power hungry, greedy, disgusting, miserable, hateful, hollowed out souls in shells of human bodies.

One of the names that comes to mind is Caligula. I've done a bit of study and research, and it's really scary when you have to acknowledge that this legacy of tyrants, mad people with lusts for power and dominance, this derangement that the Earth is cursed by…

It doesn't seem to be as malicious in wild nature, although there are examples of what I would consider to be equally, if not more, malicious and violent personalities within different species, where dominance hierarchies are the dominant paradigm.

I'm just here thinking, I don't wanna be fodder for the meat grinder of World War One style conflicts on planet Earth. That's not what my soul is here on this planet to do.

I appreciate and enjoy peace and the beauty of wild nature, with all of its flaws and all of its violence going on.

To me, it's at a scale where it's not excessive, where it's limited. It has intrinsic limits, whether by design of a creator or not.

Organized, deliberate mass mass extinction, technological capacity, these are limited. These things are perpetrated by only one species, and not the entire species, but only a very small number of cultures within that species, and that very small number of cultures have only risen to dominance because of this bastardization of the warrior defender instinct.

So it's up to each and every one of us humans alive whether rich or poor, are we going to serve the narcissistic sociopaths?

Are we gonna be the lap dogs of Caligula or are we going to resist empire in all its forms and shrink the ambitions of the elite so that we become gardeners and stewards of a very defensive military paradigm within borders that are very peaceably negotiated, so that respectful outcomes can be enjoyed and appropriate sharing and distribution of resources can occur without organized violence.

It came across my feed of data recently this notion that as much as you can personify a nation state, there was a notion that was expressed that Japan, and I'm not speaking for it, don't shoot the messenger. But what I heard was some geopolitical analyst, who said, Japan militarily is about its own defense. It does not care or want to get involved in violence on a scale beyond its borders. That's my way of phrasing it. It just was so poignant the way it was expressed, it made me think, well, what if that was all the nation states that exist?

What if it was simply their prerogative to just defend whatever it is that they have now? If they don't like it the way it is, they're gonna have to use the power of persuasion They're gonna have to use the art of charm. They're gonna have to go on a charm offensive in order to change the circumstances that they're in.

Because in the so called rules based order, we don't eat each other's lunches geopolitically speaking, we don't bully each other because collectively, as an interconnected world, we aspire to not dehumanize the other.

Yes, fighting arts are real, combat is real and may it be the last resort.

May it be a sacred expression of energy that can somehow be sustainably immunized against the corruption and the perversion of warlords and the sociopathic narcissists who profit from organized violence.

There's plenty of evidence that human beings have lived and can live in beautiful remorseful, ethical peace internally and externally, within and beyond all borders.

So the sentiment is not give peace a chance, let's give war a give war a rest.