You want the truth? You can't handle
the truth.
Or maybe you can. It hardly matters.
The truth correlates to the facts and the facts are embedded in
reality. Reality doesn't change, so you are going to handle reality,
the facts, the truth, like it or not. Or, put another way, failure to
observe reality will not stop reality impinging on you. So far, this
all sounds self-evident, but give me a minute and I'll get to where
it isn't. If you find the current reality confusing, it will all
become clear by the time I'm done.
To clarify requires some structure that
is solidly based in reality. The first questions should be, what is
real? What is the most fundamental statement about reality that
pertains?
Biological organisms compete.
If anyone cares to undertake the
endless quest for a biological organism that does not compete, feel
free.
Competition is conflict.
No matter how passive that conflict may
be, it is still conflict. A strangler vine is unaware of the
existence of the tree, but at the end of the day the tree is still
dead.
Conflict is war.
That may seem a little less firm, but
observe that though there was no malice on the part of the strangler
vine, the tree is still dead. It may have reproduced before it dies,
but so did the strangler vine. The conflict continues. You might
argue that war is a property of organisms that organise, but that is
us so I find no comfort there.
Competition is conflict and conflict is
war. No malice is necessary on the part of anyone at all.
Just for fun, let's take a human
example. 'The abiding mystery of Easter island' is one of my
favourite falsehoods. Observe the events in sequence and there is no
mystery. Europe stumbled across the island accidentally; Europe being
the Dutch, the accident being that they were looking for a posited
continent that didn't exist. They fund an isolated nation, a people
of one culture, without internal conflict, without external contact
and so no external conflict. They apparently didn't even have
weapons, subsuming the natural desire of young men to compete in an
annual competition, the winner gaining some advantage. The Dutch
describe a fairly stable farming nation. The statues were in place at
the edge of the island. By the mid 1800's the statues had fallen and
the island was a depopulated ecological disaster zone.
So, what happened? Did the Dutch arrive
with the malicious intent of destroying the nation of the people of
Easter island, wrecking the totemic statues and destroying the
ecology? No. They primarily stopped to re-supply food and water. The
conflict of cultures was sufficiently immediate that on the beach a
dozen people died, despite being welcome enough to land, lead by a
local, greeted with curiosity by locals who didn't recognize a gun as
a weapon and so tried to take it from the hand of someone who did
know it as a weapon. The Dutch wanted food and water, they got food
and water, they left.
As ships from other European nations
stopped by to visit, the interactions resulted in further losses.
Pathogens from outside the isolated people took a toll, the
introduction of a non-indigenous religion lead to internal conflict,
they people toppled their own totemic images, ships took some for
sailors due to losses of their own men to disease, some were taken as
slaves and were later freed from Peru, taking smallpox home with
them. This would be the mid 1800's and soon after the almost
unpopulated island was turned into a sheep farm – and that accounts
for the destruction of the ecology.
Competition is conflict and conflict is
war.
How much malice was involved in the
destruction of the nation of the people of Easter island? Some at
some times over that few hundred year competition-conflict-war, but
for the most part, very little.
[If you're wondering how the statues
were moved into place in the first place, the locals were asked on
many occasions and answered the same way, “They walked.” I see no
reason not to believe them. Having walked an upright fridge-freezer
across a kitchen floor and a wardrobe across a bedroom floor, it
looks to me like an eminently sensible answer. The scale is
different, but the principle is the same.]
Off the coast of India, there is
another island. The nation of people here kill anyone who turns up.
No one goes there.
Competition is conflict, conflict is
war.
Views through this lens, the whole of
human history adjusts itself into better focus.
It should be obvious that a competition
of ideas is a conflict of ideas is a war of ideas. Any doubts about
that are easily dispelled by by a brief examination of The 30 Years
War, The Cold war, or indeed most or even all wars to some degree or
another, in that ideas played a part in the divisions.
If you think that's bad, this next
obvious logical deduction will make you wince (or howl or something).
Different nations of different peoples express different cultures and
have different ideas about what is right and wrong, good and bad,
lawful and unlawful, and self-evidently want to live under political
systems laws that reflect that. Where two nations inhabit the same
territory, there will be competition to determine these things; some
people(s) will find themselves living under laws they find abhorrent,
and this will lead to conflict.
Shall we take a look at some of these
conflicting idea? Well, why not. You must be familiar with some of
them, or at least aware of the existence of same.
Equality.
Of all the dumb ideas I have come
across, this one is so self-evidently absurd that it's barely worth a
mention, yet it will get the longest. There isn't any. It isn't
possible to have what doesn't exist. Equality of outcome is
impossible, equality of opportunity is equally impossible. That the
bell curve concept exists in mathematics and can be applied to any
and all areas of human endeavour makes the impossibility of equality
obvious. The consequence that there are things I can never have and
never be is mitigated by the fact that there are thing is I can be
and can have. Same for everyone.
Tolerance
You won't have to think very hard
before you stumble across something you will not tolerate. It
probably took you about three seconds.
Inclusion
The same as tolerance. No, I don't want
to include cannibals in my family, community, town, country, culture,
nation.
Diversity
Diversity simply ensues competition of
what must by the definition of diverse be different from each other,
ensuring competition between the diverse, and competition is conflict
and... well, you know the rest.
Freedom of Speech
If you are surprised to see this one
included on the list, I would respectfully suggest that you have not
been paying sufficient attention to some of the things some people
are openly saying. Some of those things are openly and self-evidently
evil (and there's a word I don't use often) and no, I can see no
justification for a society permitting freedom of lying and freedom of
promoting evil things. A society is partly defined by those things
which are a taboo, verboten, or whatever. The only competition is
over which things, competition over this is conflict, and I'm
not going to bother saying it again.
That there are people who will
immediately attempt to jump all over me for expressing the above
repudiation of ideas that have been permitted to become so mainstream
that conservatives now passively or actively defend them will be proof of
the underlying reality – competition is conflict...
While I'm here, a quick word about
Sumto. The series is called The Price of Freedom, and really that
should have been phrased as a question, because that's what I was
trying to have Sumto work out over time. Well, reality overtook the
project and I have put the work aside for now. The truth is that the
price of freedom is everyone else's freedom. And the price is too
high. A culture develops over time, through competition and conflict
and war, over what freedoms the people of the nation decide they can
give up, enforce others giving up, and which freedoms they can afford
to keep or cannot abide to live without. This process is ongoing. It
never ends. These are decisions the individual doesn't get to not
make. They are what make an individual who he or she is, a family
what it is, a community what it is and a nation of people what it is.
The process becomes particularly sharp where different nations of
different peoples inhabit the same territory, as they have different
answers and … well, again, you know the rest.
I'm about done here. Read back from the
top and you will come to a place where I point out that malice is not
necessary for competition to be real (it's optional). Competition may be real yet unnoticed by
one or either party, that conflict arises by the nature of the
competition inherent in being a biological organism, no matter how
passive that competition may be. As we are a species that organizes,
war is an inevitability and viewed through this lens it should now be
no surprise that history is written as though it were the history of
war (and attempts to avoid or defer war), as war is conflict and a
history of conflict is a history of competition, and competition
cannot be avoided, even if no malice existed in any human heart.
Now I recommend that everyone go and
sort themselves out.
I was going to leave it there, but by
chance I came across someone literally frothing at the mouth. This
concerns specific subjects, current subjects, but is as an apt
expression of the foundational reality expressed above.
