The Most Dangerous Man!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 9, 2015
“There are three classes of people in
the world. The first learn from their
own experience. These are wise. The second learn from the experience of
others. They are happy. The third neither learn from their own
experience nor the experience of others.
These are fools.
“A man of the best parts and greatest
learning, if he does not know the world by his own experience and observation,
will be very absurd, and consequently very unwelcome in company.
“He may say very good things; but they
will be probably so ill-timed, misplaced, or improperly addressed that he had
much better hold his tongue.”
Lord Philip Dormer Stanhope
Chesterfield (1694 – 1773), English Statesman and Man of Letters
The most dangerous man is out of sync with
his times for he is able to penetrate the noise and sense how it listens.
He is guided by a vision that is not
revealed to his cognitive mind but occupies his spiritual comprehension, a
wisdom that seems conscious but is not, a sense of things which otherwise seem
senseless.
He is the undeclared enemy of
convention and all those who are guided by that tradition.
He is a student of history which means
he is a student of his times.
Many ignore him, but when they can’t, they
twist his words back to corroborate their own thinking, and if that fails, they
are bent on destroying him for he is a danger to them and all that they hold
dear.
He looks at the world as it is and does
not fear the fact that it is changing.
They look at the world as it was and
deny the fact that it is changing.
He admits he does not have answers but
can clearly see that conventional wisdom is not wisdom at all, but the mind of
a fool unhinged from the reality of what is collectively being experienced.
He has never been trusted because he
has little interest in second, third and fourth sources of information,
information with which the collective “they” find precious and the resume of
their guiding actions.
He understands them because he records
how their actions listen, and uses this to articulate some sense of what he
sees on the horizon and why he sees it so.
They ask him, “Is this your vision?” He answers, “No, it is yours!”
They ponder this and decide he is a
madman, a danger to himself and others and must be dealt with in the spirit of
what it considered rational, wise and final.
They justify this mindset because he
says such inflammatory things as “The ISIS were inevitable as they represent
the blunt edge of the future turned back on itself.”
They ask him what he means by
this. He answers with a question, “How
else can you explain ISIS?”
They answer collectively, “That is a
stupid question!”
“Stupid or not,” he replies, “How can
you explain then, how one hundred thousand, thousandth percent of mankind has
crippled the world?”
Confidently, they reply, “Because they
are a terrorist group!”
He asks, “What is a terrorist group?”
They walk away from him in disgust,
shaking their heads, now more fearful of him than ever before because he is a
madman with an agenda, an agenda that they don’t understand.
One of the group says flippantly, “He’s
a terrorist.”
All their eyes light up. “Yes, yes, he is a terrorist. He is one of them.” Then they ponder what should they do. How can they control him, dispose of him
without themselves acting like terrorist.
Someone says, “Isolate him, place an
embargo on him so to speak, and taint his name, spread rumors about him, turn
his family against him, his employer, his friends. Then someone adds, “Until he becomes like us.”
“Yes, yes,” they say in unison, “Until
he becomes like us, sane and responsible.”
No one learned anything from the most
dangerous man because no one got inside what he was saying, no one listened.
Two thousand years ago, an empire was
unraveling, the Roman Empire, an empire that could not see the hand writing on
the wall. Each time it crushed a
rebellion it won by losing. The more it tried
to dictate the future through control the more it sponsored chaos. It failed to see that the world was changing
because it refused to change and unwittingly sponsored and financed new
enemies.
The most dangerous man of the first
century of the Christian Era was a man named Paul, who was betrayed by his own
people who did not understand him and was beheaded by Rome. He died a failure and was meant to pass into
oblivion but he wrote what he felt, what he saw and what he believed, not
certain if his words would survive, but they did. He had the distinction of being seen as the
most dangerous man by the early Christians of Jerusalem and by the Roman
Empire, who thought they had gotten rid of their nemesis. Instead, this little man changed the world
for the next two thousand years.
This most dangerous man now walks among
us and nobody knows him.
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