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  • apologies for my prolonged absence

  • I've been dealing over the last few weeks with my somewhat Shaky current health

  • It seems probable that I can use arrest if I had the opportunity

  • And I knew how I [should] probably be having a rest right now

  • But be that as it may I have prepared this letter presumptuously to the world

  • Or at least to that corner of it with which I can communicate here at the dawn of the new year in these perilous times

  • Although I usually speak extemporaneously

  • That takes a level of capacity that I cannot quite currently manifest, so I'm going to read instead

  • It's also a careful argument. [I] hope and it required the editing for which only the written word can suffice

  • Dear World

  • On January sixteenth, I'm going to talk with Sam Harris on his podcast

  • Waking up with Sam Harris Dr.. Harris is one of the so-called new atheists of which there are four

  • like the other three Christopher hitchens

  • Dan Dennett and Richard Dawkins who by the way. I always wanted particularly to debate Dr.. Harris is a smart guy

  • And I'm certainly not complaining that [I] will encounter him instead of Darkens

  • So I'm preparing my arguments carefully although. I have been doing so for years the specific ideas. I'm going to share with you today

  • We're obsessing me from the moment. I woke up

  • Somewhat fitfully this morning

  • So I dictated them to my son and then edited them with his help

  • The central problem of human beings isn't religion as the new atheists insist

  • [it's] tribalism

  • We know this in part because Chimps are closest biological can go to war

  • And they're not religious

  • Although they are tribal

  • Tribalism also has a central problem, and it's not competition

  • Despite the tendency of competition to produce at least temporary early winners and losers

  • The problem of tribalism is cooperation

  • Because cooperation is what allows us to exist is bounded groups group by definition is a collective

  • Cooperatively aiming at something it can't be aimed at nothing because nothing cannot unite

  • It only divides

  • Thus attacks on collective purpose because of its tendency to Produce tribalism merely divide

  • The politics of identity which emerged when the central purpose is criticized to destructively?

  • Inevitably produce the situation described in the story of the tower of babel

  • Everyone fragments into primitive tribes and speaks their own mutually in comprehensible language

  • One alternative to fragmentation is of course union under a banner a collective ideal cause or purpose

  • The problem with uniting under a banner as the postmodernists to push identity politics rightly point out is that to value something?

  • means simultaneously

  • to Devalue other things

  • And thus to value is an exclusionary process

  • But the alternative is valueless pneus which is equivalent to nihilism

  • Denialism does not produce freedom from exclusion

  • It just makes everyone excluded and that's an intolerable state direction. 'less uncertain chaotic and Angst-ridden

  • When such uncertainty reaches a critical level

  • the counter Response appears

  • first the unconscious

  • and then the collectively express demand for a leader possessed by the spirit of totalitarian certainty

  • Who promises above all to restore order?

  • The Society without a unifying principle oscillates on Lord between Nihilism and totalitarianism

  • Human beings have been wrestling with this problem since the beginning of civilization

  • In our capacity to form large groups for all its advantages also started to pose a new threat

  • that of the hyper domination of the state

  • Collective or purpose, but without the state. There's just fragmentation into smaller groups

  • the group itself cannot be done away with

  • Because for better or worse human beings are social animals not loners like Sharks are tigers

  • We're team players

  • But being on one team means not being on others

  • this means that any given team sidelines

  • Marginalizes and alienates those who cannot play their game as well as conflicting with other teams

  • In the west starting in the middle east thousands of years ago a new idea began to Emerge

  • Evolved is not too strong a word

  • In the collective imagination you might following darkens consider this a mean although. This is far, too weak a word

  • This idea whose development can be traced back through egypt to mesopotamia before disappearing into unwritten history

  • Is that of the divine individual?

  • This eons old work of the imagination

  • is a dramatic

  • presentation of an emergent idea

  • Which is the solution to how to organize social being without falling prey to nihilistic divisive pneus or deceitful?

  • totalitarian certainty

  • the group must unite

  • but under the banner of the individual

  • The [individual] is the source of the new wisdom that updates the antiquated

  • nihilistic or totalitarian D'Ăªtre tests and Glory of the past

  • for better or for worse

  • That idea reaches its apogee and Christianity

  • The Divine individual is Masculine because the feminine is not individual

  • The Divine Feminine is instead mother and child

  • However, it is a hallmark of Christian supposition that the redemption of both men and women comes through the masculine

  • And that's because the masculine is the individual

  • the Central realization

  • [Express] dramatically and symbolically is that the subordination of the group to the ideal of the divine individual?

  • Is the answer to the Paradox of Nihilism and totalitarianism?

  • The divine individual is the man that every man admires

  • and a man who all women want their men to be

  • The divine individual is the ideal from which deviations are punished by the group with contempt and disgrace

  • And finality to which is rewarded by the group with attention and honor

  • The divine individual is not the winner of any individual game

  • But the player who plays fairly and is therefore continually invited to play the divine individual is the builder

  • Maintainer an expander of the state he who boldly goes where no man has gone before

  • And someone who eternally watches over the windows and the children

  • His power of Direct and honest communication is that which identifies?

  • discusses and then resolves the continuum urgent problems of human existence

  • It is for this reason that he is regarded as the savior of the world

  • The primary image for women is not the divine individual because of the heavy burden they bear for reproduction

  • It is instead the divine mother and child

  • [this] is not to say that man is the divine individual and woman is not although such confusion is understandable

  • given the complexity of the problem

  • Man like women have the divine mother and child as an element of their personality

  • In man however, it's in the background, so to speak

  • as the divine individuals in the background of the psyche for women

  • men by Necessity play less primary Role in the care of Children

  • This frees them to act as individuals in a manner that up to now has been nearly impossible for women

  • Identification with these images is belief in the belief is not the statement of agreement with a set of facts

  • But the willingness to act something out to become something to stake your life on something

  • for men and women alike this means voluntary adoption of responsibility

  • responsibility for oneself Family and State

  • It's in that responsibility and not in rights that meaning itself resides

  • the meaning that makes life bearable

  • Societies that refused to honor both of these elements therefore doom their inhabitants to purposelessness unhappiness sterility

  • And the out for mention dangers of nihilistic to visit pneus and deceitful oppressive totalitarian certainty

  • The meaning and responsibility is the necessary meaning in life

  • Which can serve as a counterbalance to its terrible fragility and tenuous?

  • people must unite under the banner not of their group and not of nothingness, but of the individual

  • This is a brilliant and intrinsically paradoxical solution to the problems of nihilistic nothingness

  • and too rigid group identity alike

  • [it's] the consciousness of the individual which transforms the Chaos of potential [into] habitable cosmos

  • as the greatest origin stories repeatedly insist

  • It is that same consciousness which stands up rebellious and revelatory?

  • To break down the pathological and too rigid order of that cosmos when it has become old

  • Infirm Willfully blind and corrupt

  • It is that consciousness. Which is the image of [God] dwells within every embodied human form

  • the fact of its existence

  • Is the reason that the law of the land itself?

  • Must be bound by ultimate respect for the individual regardless of his or her sins and crimes

  • It is that consciousness not the objective

  • Material substrate of being which should be regarded as the ultimate reality

  • There's no self-evident reason why Dead matter should be given ontological primacy over living spirit

  • Although doing so has produced a massive increase in human technological power

  • Is left that power in the hands of an increasingly disenchanted [populace]?

  • And that presents a mortal danger

  • Such power must be wielded by those who have truly and voluntarily accepted the responsibility of being

  • less [to] [Prove] Fatal

  • The west has long being the civilized embodiment of the idea of the divine individual

  • Who does exactly that?

  • That's what the voluntary lifting of the cross of suffering symbolically represents

  • For all its faults which are manifold the west has therefore served as a shining beacon of hope

  • To those destined to inhabit places too chaotic or too rigid for the human spirit to tolerate

  • About the west is in grave danger of losing its way the negative consequences of this can hardly be overstated

  • a close reading of 20th century history indicates as nothing else can

  • the horrors that accompany

  • loss of Faith in the idea

  • of the individual

  • It is only the individual after all who suffers

  • The group does not suffer

  • Only those who compose it

  • That's the reality of the individual must be regarded as primary

  • of suffering

  • Is to be regarded seriously?

  • Without such regard there can be no motivation to reduce suffering and therefore no respite

  • instead the production of individuals suffering can and has

  • And will be again rationalized it justified for its supposed benefits for the future

  • and the group

  • Effective birth control has emerged as one of the consequences of our powerful technological materialism

  • This has been accompanied by the rise of [state] sufficiently

  • Civilized so that women who inhabit them can walk the streets unaccompanied Din safety

  • We do not yet know how to balance the opportunities that's provided for expanded female individuality

  • With the eternal necessity for a woman to serve as the mother of the divine individual

  • Dividing our civilization into polarized ideological camps of female group identity and male group identity is certainly not the answer

  • We have to be honest male and female alike about what we really want as individuals

  • And talk it out

  • We [don't] beyond dispute. The [Society's] whom emancipate their women are more productive and peaceful and that the relationship is causal

  • Thus it's not a matter of if but how

  • But such amounts of emancipation places a dual burden on the now more autonomous woman who is required to balance?

  • manifesting the potential of our individual spirit

  • With the necessity of desire to Bear and rear the next generation of mankind