"We had to destroy the village to save it."

"We had to destroy the village to save it."

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 2006.


These were the words of a senior officer in Viet Nam that reverberate to the present.

Sociologist Philip Slater has pointed out that we are a violent society and have been since our earliest moments, a frontier society if you will, that hides behind the sobriquet of "progress." So,

· We destroy the environment to save it.

· We invade a country and destroy its infrastructure to make it free and self-sustaining.

· We brutalize loved ones to get them to conform "for their own good."

· We create mega corporations in violation of the idea of free enterprise while professing to save it.

The mission of mega corporations is to improve the economy and living standard of the average citizen by destroying mom and pop businesses forever.

· We destroy initiative and creativity in the interest of promoting education.

· We establish an educational system in operant conditioning program learning in which grades is the focus and learning is an unintended consequence.

· We make education an industry with a factory mentality that extends from preschool to graduate school education and fail to see the violence to the human spirit that is done in the process of making us robotic.

· We seem always amazed when the solutions to our problems generate even more violent problems.

We fail to see the thinking that went into the problem solving was the problem. There isn't a major problem where this is not the case.

· We insist that problems can be solved. Problems are never solved. Problems can only be temporarily controlled.

We are ignorant of the violence of change and wonder why it is so crushing.

· We emphatically insist on establishing stability, predictability and control when for all this attention we repeatedly generate chaos, confusion and conflict.

· We have killed spontaneity, and spontaneity is the fuel of initiative. Innovation is not originality but its step cousin.

We applaud science when it has spent its efforts mainly refining what was discovered a century ago.

· We celebrate innovation in its quest for new toys of technology that drive us socially further apart as we are inevitably driven closer together by sheer numbers.

· We spend literally billions on negative campaigning to be elected to public office because positive campaigning doesn't work. Hate sells and bromides please vacuous minds.

· We are a society of laws and not men, and claim to be governed by due process in which the accused are innocent until proven guilty. But once the accused are awarded the Scarlet Letter by the media, it remains on one's forehead for the rest of one's life.

· We take pride in big being better and being number one being best, failing to see the violence in this. Neither has a center because once the focus is a matter of pride the center is destroyed.

· One of the most destructive mindsets of all is patriotism. True believers drive it with a herd mentality.

· A president once said, "The only thing to fear is fear itself," when fear is the only thing that motivates us.

· We are appalled when a child in the ghetto kills another child for his designer sneakers when that killer child has learned covetousness by television's subliminal stimulation in the continuing violence of want, and from the betrayal behavior of those around him.

· Cynicism is a virus of violence.

Sarcasm is a disease of envy and jealousy.

· We award those the most that contribute the least to society, athletes, entertainers, celebrities, and wonder why we are mired in apathy on the one hand and celebrity worship on the other. There is no greater violence than a second hand life, or living vicariously through the actions of others.

We are a spectator society in the coliseum of our passive perspective with the Roman gladiators now the members of violent sports offered as distractions and for our self-indulgent and mindless entertainment.

· We conveniently think color is the most dissembling violence when color is only secondary to our separation by cultural bias. We are intimidated by difference.

· Those who rise to the top in institutional corpocracy are no threat to those already there. This is axiom. They speak in the same tongue of platitudes and doublespeak.

leadership has far less to do with competence than comfort and connection. The violence of this to the fabric of society has proven devastating.

· We are afraid of ideas so ideas are in short supply.

· When you seek excellence, piggybacking on those already excellent, you fail to create excellence. Excellence cannot be sought. It must be created in the context and culture in which it may operate.

· Competition is a violent and imitative act. The focus is on an outside authority and source. Competition makes for zombie and second-rate copies. It is why our cities all look alike; we all dress alike; speak alike; act alike; and wonder why we are all bored alike with each other.

Danger attracts sleepwalkers in an effort to wake them up from sleep. What could be more inane and purposeless than a television survival contest when eating worms is par for the course?

· When the parent to the man is not an adult than the world is conceived in the irresponsibility and unaccountability of the child. It is a world of autistic violence.

· When a company attempts to save itself by destroying half its workforce, it is guilty of most of the above. Corporate carnage has been the primary strategic plan of most major corporations in an era of a dearth of ideas.

· Dumb animals respond to one-minute management because they have the intelligence of instinct, which is mainly robotic. When man is trained in the same fashion, he becomes an interchangeable part and as robotic as the dumb animal that he most resembles.

· Terrorism is palpable violence which is not new but has been a factor since the beginning of man's earliest days. The motivation for terror is fear and hatred of the strong by the weak. It is driven by pride with a willingness to sacrifice the village to save it.

· Terrorism throughout time has found the terrorized meeting terrorism with terror in retaliation, often with language to hide the fact. It finds the weak and the strong meeting on a common ground of insanity, where war become normalcy and destruction considered the root to peace.

· We have conquered nature but have not discovered the intelligence in our many millenniums to know man. Man remains forever unknown, forever a plethora of oxymorons: cruelly kind, stupidly intelligent, tolerantly biased, peaceably violent, benign neglect.

This was on my mind when I could not sleep and so I wrote it down without editing or apology. A mind on fire is a mind of limited duration, and with that in mind I share these thoughts for whatever they are worth.

Always be well.