ENLIGHTENMENT AND SOCIAL HOPE, Part 2

For Enlightenment by Kathie Malley-Morrison

by Stefan Schindler

Liberation from self-imposed immaturity is liberation from social conditioning.  Liberation from social conditioning is escape from Plato’s cave.  Escape from Plato’s cave involves appreciation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s tragic dictum that “man is born free, but is everywhere in chains” – what Eric Fromm calls “chains of illusion.”

To break the chains of illusion is to become what Albert Camus calls a “lucid rebel.”  A lucid rebel engages in Promethean protest against the vast ignorance that Buddha recognized as the primary cause of suffering.  Ignorance, Buddha said, manifests primarily as greed, hatred, craving, clinging, and delusion.

To overcome such ignorance is to embrace the point made by Karl Marx: “The demand to abandon illusions about our condition is a demand to abandon the conditions which require illusion.”

For example, the primary function of the U.S. military is make the world safe for the Fortune 500.  The primary function of U.S. education is to ignorate.  To awaken people to these nefarious facts, Martin Luther King declared: “Wealth, poverty, racism, and war – these four always go together.”

Hence the only way to move from an age of enlightenment to an enlightened age is to recognize that the four vices noted by King are inextricably entwined with pervasive political sophistry, a lapdog mainstream news media, and jingoistic pseudo-history in what Gore Vidal calls “The United States of Amnesia.”

Equally relevant here is Mark Twain’s observation: “It is easier to fool people than to convince them they are being fooled.”  Also worth noting is that Emerson, Twain, and William James were members of The Anti-Imperialism League.

The point is this: The U.S. will never be the country it ought to be – and will never be at peace, either at home or abroad – until it eliminates Presidential pardons, throws corporate and Presidential criminals in prison, conscientiously repents for America’s Indochina Holocaust (euphemistically called The Vietnam War), and dismantles the American empire (the largest and most globally devastating in world history).

It is therefore also necessary to transfer most of the Pentagon budget to an educational system in which schools and universities are gardens and palaces of self-actualization, artistic expression, authentic historical literacy, sophistry-detecting critical thinking skills, and cooperative creative evolution.

Just for a change: Messages to live by

Let Us Beat Swords Into Plowshares statue at the United Nations Headquarters, New York City.Photograph credit: Rodsan18. In the public domain.

by Kathie MM

As currently envisioned, the U.S. Peace Memorial  will consist of twelve walls, or facets, containing engraved peace quotes from famous Americans (including, for example, Noam Chomsky, Martin Luther King Jr., Jeanette Rankin, Margaret Mead, Albert Einstein) as well as lesser-known figures.

Today, for your continuing inspiration, we share some of the quotations under consideration. Embrace them.

“We must devise a system in which Peace is more rewarding than War.”

Margaret Mead (1901-1978).

 

 

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969).

 

“It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968).

 

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).

 

“Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought.”

Helen Keller (1880-1968).

 

No, I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder kill and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slavemasters over dark people …

Muhammad Ali (1942-2016).

 

“[t]here was never a good War, or a bad Peace.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790).

 

“I believe that the killing of human beings in a war is no better than common murder.”

Albert Einstein (1879-1955).

 

“I am an anti-imperialist.  I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”

Mark Twain, pseudonym for Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910).

 

“We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.”

Jimmy Carter (1924-  ).

 

“I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.”

George S. McGovern (1922-2012).

 

“How can you make a war on terror, if war itself is terrorism?”

Howard Zinn (1922-2010).

 

“… all war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal, …”

John Steinbeck (1902-1968).

 

“… he who is the author of a war, lets loose the whole contagion of hell, and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.”

Thomas Paine (1737-1809).