ADDEMDUM -- "THE RISE & FALL OF THE HUMAN EMPIRE"

ADDENDUM – “The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire”

We have become a secular society with our civil religion the government and its economic mandates.  Meanwhile, our corporate infrastructure has lost its integrity and the people’s trust.  Rather than challenge this new corporate “Gilded Age,” reminiscent of its appearance in an earlier period in American history when the “Robber Barons” dictated economic reality, today the populace willingly embraces the new “Robber Barons” material and gossipy authority watching their constitutional rights disintegrate before their eyes with no apparent interest in doing anything.  Thirty years ago, I wrote:

Take corporate America. Any large company today is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation. The pendulum of centralization-decentralization is more a yo-yo contest with no clear winners, only painfully confused losers. Meanwhile, this once powerful and energetic nation doesn’t seem to know what is happening or why. The era of free lunch supposedly ended in the 20th century. This century began with such paternal control and submissive obedience has now run amuck. No one (and nothing) is in control (Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, 1991, pp. 37-38).

Fast forward and we see government in the early 21st century restoring the free lunch while the sacrosanct functions of the Executive Branch, the Judicial Branch, and the Supreme Court of the federal government seem frozen in inertia compromised by ubiquitous polarity and now unraveling in a worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. Appointed functionaries such as the Center for Disease Control and the National Health Organization hide behind the science that they treat with cavalry inaptitude while failing to manage the situation with any consistency in terms of policy or pronouncements. The vacuum left by incompetent leadership in corporate society has left citizens confused and uncertain as to how to protect themselves and their loved ones.

In this climate, young people ignore the muddle treating their cellphones and laptops as their prayer books having converted to the god of self-interests as millennials and centennials are completely bored with the high jinx of CNN and FOX cable news talking heads who continue to poison the airwaves with their narcissistic polarities. If young people are committed to some church or religion chances are its doctrines have a draconian hold on them which is neither challenged nor acknowledged.

This is to suggest our society is broken. The systemic structures such as the chain of command have lost their impact from parents in the home to academics in the classroom to the corporate governess in enterprise to the military. It happened in ancient Greece. We can still hear the lament of Socrates about children of his times:

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

The same occurred in ancient Rome, to the Roman Catholic Church, and currently to the Judaic-Christian culture as political correctness, political identity, and critical race theory distracted from pondering our real challenges to cultural integrity which finds society teetering on the precipice of irrelevance, recalling Nobel Laureate poet T. S. Eliot’s suggestion in “The Hollow Men” (1925): ‘This is the way the world ends not with a bang but a whimper.’

It was in this spirit that I penned this ADDENDUM.

A FUNDAMENTAL WAY OF LOOKING AT WHAT WE HAVE BECOME

“Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose” – The more things change the more they remain the same thing.

French author, journalist, and critic, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808 – 1890) coined this expression that lives on to the present.

One way of looking at “The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire” is what we call “reality.” Is it not something man has been making up, creating, and inventing since the dawn of man’s consciousness to cope and survive in a dangerous environment?

The shaman was able to bottle man’s fears by making up what natural phenomena meant (sunrise, sunset, thunderstorms, torrential rains, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, extremely hot and frigid seasons, and so on). Religions were a natural progression from these early disturbing episodes from pagan polytheism to monotheism.

Continuing the idea that monotheism like polytheism is made up consistent with the legacy of the shaman, evidence of monotheism emerges first in Egypt in the 14th-century (1353 – 1336 BCE) during the reign of Akhenaten. The king was known to have worshipped Aten, the sun god, which constituted the first monotheistic religion in the world. Akhenaten’s exclusive worship of the sun god, Aten, led Egyptologists to claim that he created the world's first monotheistic religion. However, modern scholarship notes that Akhenaten's cult drew from aspects of other gods—particularly re-Harakhte, Shu, and Maat—in its imagining and worship of Aten.

Others claim the world's first monotheistic God was Zoroastrianism, an ancient Persian religion that may have originated as early as 4,000 years ago. Arguably the world's first monotheistic faith, it's one of the oldest religions still in existence. That said, some claim the first god was Brahma and that the Hindus are the creators of god. Brahma is also known as the Grandfather and later as the equivalent of Prajapati, the primeval first god. In early Hindu sources such as the Mahabharata, Brahma is supreme in the triad of great Hindu gods which includes Shiva and Vishnu.

The point is that Judaic, Christian, and Islamic monotheism are relatively recent in the schemes of things yet consistent with the need for some deity outside ourselves to cope with life in its growing complexity and confusion.

Christianity, we see in these pages, has been self-conscious in its quest for dominance, relevance, and legitimacy. In that sense, it has been like other religions fallen prey too often behaving counter to what it claims its sacred mission.

To sustain its existence, Christianity created the “Divine Right of Kings,” which is a European political doctrine in defense of monarchical absolutism, which asserted that kings derived their authority from God and could not, therefore, be held accountable for their actions by any earthly authority such as a parliament.

Originating in Europe, the divine-right-of-kings can be traced to the medieval conception of God’s award of temporal power to the political ruler, paralleling the award of spiritual power to the church.

By the 16th and 17th centuries, however, the new national monarchs were asserting their authority in matters of both church and state. King James I of England (reigned 1603–1625) was the foremost exponent of the divine right of kings, but the doctrine virtually disappeared from English politics after the Glorious Revolution (1688–1689). It was also called “The Bloodless Revolution,” which took place from 1688 to 1689 in England. It involved the overthrow of the Catholic King James II, who was replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, William of Orange.

In the late 17th and 18th centuries, kings such as Louis XIV (1643–1715) of France continued to profit from the divine-right theory, even though many of them no longer had any truly religious belief. The American Revolution (1775–1783), the French Revolution (1789), and the Napoleonic Wars deprived the doctrine of its remaining credibility.

The bishop Jacques-Benigne Bossuet (1627–1704), one of the principal French theorists of the divine right asserted that the king's person and authority were sacred; that his power was modeled on that of a Father’s and was absolute, deriving from God; and that he was governed by reason (i.e., custom and precedence).

In the middle of the 17th century, the English Royalist squire Sir Robert Filmer likewise held that the state was a family and that the king was a father. He claimed, in an interpretation of biblical Scripture, that Adam was the first king and that Charles I (reigned 1625–1649) ruled England as Adam’s eldest heir. The anti-absolutist philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) wrote his First Treatise of Civil Government (1689) to refute this argument.

The doctrine of divine right can be dangerous for both church and state. For the state, it suggests that secular authority is conferred, and can therefore be removed, by the church. For the church, it implies that kings have a direct relationship to God and may therefore dictate to ecclesiastical rulers such as the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church.

That said the patterns displayed in religions of our time continue to clash culturally with each other and with the West in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, and Iran as the West attempts to impose its free enterprise and human rights value system and economic civil religion on them unhappily with the same embarrassing results that occurred with early Christian Missionaries on native Americans in the new world in the 16th century.

The Protestant Reformation ended the dominance of Roman Catholicism and gave birth to free enterprise and capitalism, ending, or so it seemed, European feudalism while European post-World War Two national industrial centers more resembled capitalistic feudalism as I experienced them working for Honeywell in Europe in the 1980s.

Following the idea of everything being made up or opportunistically created as we go along, once Rome fell and the Roman Catholic Church gain new life, the Supreme Pontiff of the Church resembled the Roman Emperor with the Pontiff’s governing Curia resembling the Roman Parliament, the College of Cardinals, Catholic Bishops, Monsignors, Priests, and Monks, the command and control staff of the Roman Army’s Generals, noncommissioned officers, and soldiers.

Industrialism in the West evolved with craftsmen out of feudalism during the middle ages to form small working groups that differed from the original guilds of merchants. There were no bosses but workers of various skills committed to the same enterprise: i.e., producing wood, metal, glass, and machine parts and finished products such as furniture, evolving to carpenters, sheet metal workers, and tool & die, makers.

With war came the invention of new weapons in the American Civil War including battleships, submarines, and canon power providing new roles for tool & die craftsmen to produce machine parts. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, bicycle mechanic Henry Ford became a successful producer of his Model T Ford, while equally self-educated Thomas Edison was inventing the electric light bulb that led to the public utility.

Henry Ford also used the newly invented assembly line to economically produce his automobiles, cleverly coming up with the idea in January 1914 to increase hourly workers' pay to $5 a day when this was more than twice the weekly pay rate for industrial workers. His motive was to make his model cars within workers’ financial means. He also created an incentive plan. Doubling the average wage helped ensure a stable workforce and directly boosted the sales of his Model T Ford as workers could now afford to buy what they were making. It laid the foundation for an economy driven by consumer demand. As a result, the working middle class took off more than one hundred years ago thanks to Henry Ford.

Thomas Edison exerted a similar influence on modern life. In addition to inventing the incandescent light bulb, he invented the phonograph, and the motion picture camera, as well as improving the telegraph and the telephone. More dramatic still, thanks to Edison, the electrical age began on September 4, 1882. That day, Edison Illuminating Company flipped the switch on his power station on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, providing electricity to homes at a price comparable to gas. Cleverly, because Edison used 100-volt direct current to power his new light bulbs, customers could be no further than ½ mile from the generator. But he needed a high-profile location to promote the system. Edison chose a site in the heart of New York's financial district, at 255 and 257 Pearl Street.

Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller, among others, were called “Robber Barons” because they created monopolies in railroads, steel, automobile manufacturing, et al, to control these sources of revenue to result in huge profits while intentionally restricting goods and regulating prices. Author Mark Twain called this period the “Gilded Age,” an era that occurred in the United States during the late 19th century, from the 1870s to about 1900. It was a period of rapid economic growth, especially in the Northern and Western United States.

Continuing our creative thesis, the organizations of these “Robber Barons” in terms of compensation for executives and managers were relatively modest before and during World War Two. Managerial compensation compared to workers was the equivalent of ten times that of American workers – who earned approximately $12.98 per week for 59 hours of work in 1900 or $674.96 a year – or a little less than one-tenth of the $70,000 some executives earned.

Management as a class was a product of WWII. After 1950, management successfully sold the idea to the American public that “it” had won the war by successfully managing logistical support, the timely delivering of supplies and weapons to fighting men at the battlefront, while economically husbanding vital resources to effect a positive outcome of the war, thus implying its extraordinary role in the war’s triumph.

A spate of books after WWII focused fixedly on management in the 1960s – 1980s timeframe to supposedly benefit working men and women in the trenches. To wit:

Robert Blake & Jane Mouton, The Managerial Grid, 1964

Peter Block, The Empowered Manager, 1987

James MacGregor Burns, Leadership, 1978

Saul Gellerman, Why Good Managers Make Bad Ethical Choices, 1985

Paul Hersey & Kenneth Blanchard, Management of Organizational Behavior, 1972

Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise, 1960,

Peter Drucker, Management, Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, 1973, et al

It is clear that management was seen as the parent and workers as its family, an inevitable reflection of the “Divine Rights of Kings” of the middle ages with little sense of, or anticipation of the personal computer, the Internet, the Information Age, much less that one day the majority of American workers would be knowledge workers superseding the position power of management, making management anachronistic and managers atavistic.

That said management’s compensation continued to increase as management became a consortium without precedence multiplying levels of management and creating variable empires within the organization rising to the point where a CEO today can earn as much as 300 times or more in compensation than his or her workers, growing a staggering 940 percent since 1978. Consequently, professionally trained engineers, statisticians, chemists, biologists, and other highly skilled professionals have opted to become pyramid climbers seeking their fortunes as managers leaving their professional credentials behind (see Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Workers, 2nd edition, 2014, The Worker, Alone, Going Against the Grain, 2nd edition, 2012).

Management guru Peter Drucker writes regarding executive compensation:

In the current version of business ethics in the United States, one side has all the obligations and the other side has all the entitlements. This is compatible neither with the ethics of interdependence nor with a universal code of ethics. It corrodes the bond of trust that times superior to subordinate (Peter Drucker: Shaping the Managerial Mind, John E. Flaherty, 1999, p 270).

Some thirty years ago this ethic and trust were already unraveling as the “Rise & Fall” of the corporation was evident in the tea leaves (see Work Without Managers, A View from the Trenches, 2nd edition, 2013).

The Covid-19 Pandemic has accelerated this demise as virtual workers in their homes and not in brick & mortar centers is now a reality. More than 60 percent of professionals now prefer working at home, and 20 percent are willing to take less money to do so, seeing no reason for bosses and the constant disruption of work by managers whose only function seemingly is to get in the way of productive work. We can see how management has mucked up this pandemic from the Center for Disease Control to the National Institute of Health to the President of the United States to the Governors of the fifty states, to the media that takes sides such as CNN and FOX Cable News, leading to the increasing confusion of many Americans, another example of corporate management exceeding its perceptive deft.

At another level, our constitutional government, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the role of elected representatives of our Democratic Republic by the citizens of the United States, the sacrosanct nature of civilian authority over the military and other appointed officials, indeed, the very integrity of the American language and culture, is being compromised at every turn.

New York Times journalist Michael S. Schmidt writes:

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff twice called his Chinese counterpart in the final months of the Trump administration to reassure him that Donald J. Trump had no plans to attack China to remain in power and that the United States was not collapsing, according to PERIL (2021), a new book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

“Things may look unsteady,” the chairman, Gen. Mark A. Milley, told Gen. Li Zuocheng of China on January 8, two days after Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol to try to stop the certification of his election loss and in the second of two such calls. “But that’s the nature of democracy, General Li. We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes.”(Published September 14, 2021, Updated September 15, 2021)

Imagine President Harry S. Truman’s Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall warning the Japanese that the president was about to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 which essentially ended World War Two in the Pacific.

Then remember in the most famous civilian-military confrontation in American history: Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur of his command of the U.S. forces in Korea. This firing set off a brief uproar among the American public but the president held his ground and weathered the emotional storm. On April 11, 1951, President Truman flew to Korea and met with General MacArthur who was saber-rattling at the time threatening to invade Manchuria and even suggested the possibility of using the atomic bomb against China in Manchuria. Truman aware of the general’s flamboyant comments, said, “I’ll put that egotistical bastard in his place,” and he did flying to Korea and relieving him of his command, demonstrating publically that in America’s democracy civilian authority takes precedence over military authority.

Imagine if General Milley bypassed the President of the United States in 1945 as he did in 2020, with the bogus rationale that he had to console China by promising to forewarn China if the United States should ever plan on launching an attack.

It is only a brief 75 years ago when the President of the United States was clearly in charge, only to find this republic three-quarters of a century spiraling into confusion if not chaos prominently crippled with the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, this young nation that will be only 250 years old in 2025 appears to be unraveling as did the empires of Greece, Rome, Egypt, Great Britain, Spain, and the Roman Catholic Church. If there is an iota of truth to the alleged findings of Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their new book, PERIL, our demise as an empire may be closer than we think, and the reason for this provocative assertion that the civilization we cherish and the Judaic-Christian culture that is our heritage and anchor appears to be unraveling.

CONFESSION TO MY READERS

CONFESSION to my readers:



50 years ago CONFIDENT SELLING (1971) was published. The slender volume looked at the business of selling from an entirely different perspective with the seller and buyer as partners, not adversaries. At the time, the rage was WINNING THROUGH INTIMIDATION, which was a national bestseller. CONFIDENT SELLING was written in six weeks in 1969 after returning to the United States from South Africa disillusioned with life and life's purpose. Still young, I resigned from my high-paying job with a wife and four preteen children moved to Florida with no idea what I would do next. Once the first draft of the manuscript was completed, it was sent off to Prentice-Hall, Inc., in Englewood Cliff, New Jersey without preamble and accepted two weeks later. It would be in print for twenty years and go through some thirty to forty printings.



For two years, I read a lot, played tennis and basketball, jogged and swam in the Intercostal Waterway of the Gulf of Mexico. When nearly broke, I went back to school for six years to earn my Master's and Doctorate in social, industrial, organizational psychology. This was a time when graduate students were expected to attend lectures and classes as if still in grammar or high school. I was often absent working as a consultant, as an adjunct professor to several universities, or as a consultant to The Professional Institute of the American Management Association across the country.



Most professors allowed me this latitude as I often wrote for them, and was known for that particular skill. One professor, when I did attend class, before the group of some ten graduate students informed me, "I understand you are quite the writer. Let me inform you if you write the best thesis I have ever read you will receive the lowest grade I have ever given." Then she added, "I suggest you drop this class," which I did. Another professor confessed, “I don’t like you very much. I’d like to fail you in this doctorate seminar but if I did I’d have to fail the other six. So, I reluctantly give you an ‘A’.” This is mentioned because I have constantly gotten into hot water with authority figures, academics being no exception for failure to respect protocol. It is reflected in my published works.



Skipping my second executive career with Honeywell, where I ran into the same experience, I retired once again only now in my fifties, continuing to write, forming my own publishing company writing at my leisure publishing book after book to sometimes alarming response and often not.



December 2012 changed all that. A publisher wrote and followed it up with a call, stating that it wanted to publish nine of my books as second editions and one original unpublished work. At the same time, the Director of Amazon's Kindle called and said Amazon wanted to publish all my works including any novel manuscripts I had written.



Never very computer literate, I had touched the wrong key and lost virtually all my manuscripts that included several novels and short stories. Kindle said, “No problem,” send us copies of your books and we will do the rest, which they did. Alas, I only had one novel which needed work but Kindle said, “Send that manuscript, too.”



From December 2012 until my health broke in 2016, I was at my computer working on these ten books for the publisher, from four to six hours a day, seven days a week. The health problems I am currently experiencing can be traced to that stupidity. Often, Beautiful Betty attempted to prevail but I didn’t listen. Working hard with little interest in what others think has been natural to me since a boy because of my early experience, I suppose, without parents until I was five years old, something I have often written about in my works.



Why be so obsessed? The interesting thing I’ve learned, in my reading, especially concerning philosophers is that they don’t write for an audience but to explore their ideas vis-à-vis their empirical experience.



Psychoanalyst Eric Bernes in “Games People Play,” claims entertainers need hundreds if not thousands of worshipers, most people need reinforcement from a few friends, scientists and philosophers need only one person who understands and appreciates them. Now, with social media on the Internet, people chirp about having scores to hundreds of “friends,” sounding a lot like entertainers. Always being a closet introvert, I have not sought this reaffirmation but have often found it in my reading and that has been sufficient and if not necessary for me.



Curiously, authors are often the poorest critics of their works. That said, the works that I see somewhat in terms of “breakthrough” are CONFIDENT SELLING, WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS, THE WORKER, ALONE, IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE, BE YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND, and this present work, THE RISE & FALL OF THE HUMAN EMPIRE.



Readers have misread the EPILOGUE to this work, which I am not surprised because it looks at some of our most cherished beliefs in a different light. This, I believe, is less true of the PROLOGUE, which I end this missive:



Over the past 500 years, or since the shocking discovery of America, man has been at times on a rollercoaster climbing slowly, then rapidly descending taking tortuous turns at breathtaking speeds to end up pretty much where he started, only to believe because of his “cut & control” progress to be in a different place and space. He sees what he has gained but not what he has lost. Some might say this has been a five hundred year retreat from a God-centered to a man-centered universe, and with all that man has and has accomplished, that man finds himself in a place and space, not all that reassuring. Another metaphor might be that of a locomotive that must first overcome enormous inertia to establish some momentum, but once that is accomplished the momentum builds to acceleration that keeps quickening which becomes impossible to control, but nobody minds as they race past landmarks and sacred markings that they once cherished not realizing they are running from themselves as “Nowhere Man” to a place just over the horizon called “Nowhere Land.”

Jim

EPILOGUE to "The Rise & Fall Human Empire"

EPILOGUE to “The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire”

We are anything if not an interesting species.  We invent words that lead to language, thinking in these words that lead to thoughts, selective thoughts that become philosophies, building our lives around these philosophies into religions, treating these religions as sanctuaries of truth, then fighting to the death to defend these religions as truth personified when they are inventions of our imaginings to protect us from ourselves.

From the opening chapters of our existence those many millenniums ago, we have felt self-conscious and vulnerable to the forces outside, a gift of our consciousness.  Alas, we have always been fearful of the unknown and the unknowable, consumed with self-doubt, wondering why we are here, and why we have been separated from the animal kingdom of Mother Nature that terrifies us, problems these other species don't experience as they simply exist instinctively.

To combat this self-doubt and these misgivings, these fears, and this sense of loneliness, we have created an artificial world that we treat as reality out of these words.  This includes God that we have invented as He must exist in our consciousness as absurd as that seems to many in this "Secular Age" of postmodernity.

It was the seventeenth-century French philosopher, theologian, mathematician, and physicist, Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662), who posited the philosophical wager that human beings gamble with their lives that God either exists or does not.  Since we do not know whether God exists then we should play it safe rather than risk being sorry.   

[Being born during The Great Depression as an Irish Roman Catholic by the good Sisters of St. Francis, my long life has often played havoc with these early certainties.  I am a renegade Catholic, but a Catholic nonetheless, thankful that I had this early nurturing which has served me well in my many careers.  I confess to being a Catholic writer seeing life through that specific filter with that inevitable perspective.  Ideas have always fascinated me, even controversial ones.  That said, I have no inclination to be either a proselytizer or crusader.  My hope is only to stimulate thought in others to be better in touch with themselves.  Nor do I believe the "Good Books" were the works of other than men divinely inspired as they may be.  In this "Secular Age," we are constantly bombarded with extraneous multi-faceted stimulation telling us what to think, what to believe, value, and how to behave.  Our consciousness with its curiosity is without barriers less we construct them around ourselves.]   

Words are our most sophisticated invention.  We have created societies and civilizations out of words from primitive to modern, from pagan gods to the monotheistic God of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.  We see the same God at the helm to guide our species through life and to safety.  Yet, each of these religions treats their monotheistic God as different and as more divine than the others, warring endlessly with each other.

Pagan religions made human sacrifices.  Christianity makes symbolically cannibalistic sacrifices in the changing of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ (transubstantiation), while the purpose of both pagan and Christian rituals are to pay homage to their polytheistic gods or monotheistic God. 

With words, we have created sacred books such as the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran to preserve and reinforce our dependence on The Word to protect and secure our existence beyond our mortality.  We have gone to war with others of our species for failure to acknowledge and follow the beliefs of The Word or for our failure to conduct our lives consistent with The Word.

As evidence of the power of The Word, we have built magnificent churches, temples, synagogues, and cathedrals displaying our ingenuity centuries before the science of architecture and engineering had reached the heights it enjoys today, physical evidence that our species is in touch with the Almighty.

The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire is a modest attempt to show how the use of words has led to language than to mature ideas,  We have in turn built our lives around ideas only to have them come crashing down due to man's shortsightedness.  From the dawn of consciousness, we have progressed and periodically regressed but always remaining optimistic, even utopian, in the worst of times, believing we are equal to the challenge.

Anthropologists claim language was first a form of gossip built around the primitive anxieties of love and hate, envy and jealousy, fear and loathing, loneliness and isolation.  It was neither an instrumental nor a terminal device of consciousness but simply a spontaneous intuitive response to ill-defined needs that have come to dominate our unconscious behavior.  This was displayed in another sense during "The Hunting & Gathering" period some 3,000 years ago, a time when men would band together to forage for food by killing animals much larger, agile, powerful, and menacing.  These men invented crude weapons and used cunning to trap and subdue these prey.  This success led to their survival and enhanced their sense of power using their consciousness.

Men and women next became farmers learning to till the soil and seed plants to provide food in abundance to supplement the need to kill animals exclusively for food, even leading to the domesticated of animals as beasts of burden, which led to the formation of small groups becoming larger groups and then small colonies. 

These developments radically changed social existence as close-knit groups led to the formation of families transferring dominance of the group from women to men.  Every aspect of human existence has evolved progressively and mainly spontaneously and situationally.  This was true of the family, the home, the nature of morality and ethics as they were all inventions of "Men of Ideas" and over time reified into conventions, then defended as if designed by God as the case may be. 

As farms, land became property, ownership of property became wealth, which led to power and dominance of the most resourceful property owners.  At the same time, farmers who perfected weapons for hunting now employed these weapons to defend their property.

"Men of Words" and "Men of Ideas" escalated into prominence.  First as servants to landowners then monarchs and kings who seldom had the time or inclination to learn how to read or write as they saw themselves as "Men of Action," depending upon these clerks to ensure their legitimacy and to sustain their dominance by keeping their ledgers and tracking their logistics.  

On the pages of this book, we see the rise and fall of empires and civilizations: the Greek Civilization and the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, the Spanish and British Empires. 

We also see men of words as philosophers, theologians, economists, and psychologists providing "Men of Action" with the rationale to legitimize their prominence and dominance.  

War is the leading catalyst to the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Faith, the Scientific Revolution, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, the Technology Revolution, and now the Information Age while the Secular Age as such is not defined.

Doubt and misgivings are often the spark to lift our species out of its comfort zone to eventually soar.  We seldom think of motivation being so mundane, but it was quite apparent in the monasteries of the Middle Ages when monks with too much time on their hands followed their curiosity to the dismay of the Catholic Church, a curiosity that led to science, philosophy, and psychology.  Words and ideas are present and mutually interdependent in this narrative over mainly the last 500 years.

Words have led to systems of thought, and these systems have led to constructs by which we now live called by their advocates in a political sense as democracies, oligarchies, and theocracies, and institutionally as universities, corporations, think tanks, governments, and other citadels of intrigue.   

With these many millenniums as our history, we are running out of room, running out of water, running out of food, and running out of fresh air to breathe that continues unabated unless and until we change our ways of thinking, behaving, and living.

The irony is that with our species exalted consciousness and problem-solving capabilities we have become slaves to our appetites, and want our cake and eat it, too.  This has unwittingly placed the survival of our species in jeopardy, as we are still obsessed with the new, failing to see with every new thing, something is lost with “cut & control” finality.

This observer has enjoyed a long life born when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolph Hitler were coming to power which was in the era of The Great Depression, and on the eve of what would become the Second World War in which over one hundred million would perish.  It is this shortsightedness that I have come to identify our species with as NOWHERE MAN seeing him ineluctably moving into NOWHERE LAND.  And for that reason, I have written this book. 

[In the first sixteen years of this new century, I worked off and on to create 24 essays.  Philosopher and novelist, Charles D. Hayes suggested that I post these as 24 individual essays on Amazon's Kindle, which I did in 2016, and now is this book.  The title is credited to Ken Shelton, author, publisher, consultant, and friend who is familiar with my work.]

 

 

 

NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND - TWENTY-ONE

Christian Missionaries on the New Frontier!

James Raymond Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

Originally published © September 8, 2016/© August 19, 2021

GOING ETHNOCENTRICALLY INTO THE FUTURE

Beginning with Columbus in 1492 and continuing for nearly 350 years, Spain conquered and settled most of South America, the Caribbean, and the American Southwest. After an initial wave of conquistadors—aided by military advantages and infectious diseases that decimated the native populations— defeated the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas, Spain organized a huge imperial system to exploit the land, labor, and mineral wealth of the New World.

The Spanish Empire became the largest European empire since ancient Rome, and Spain used the wealth of the Americas to finance nearly endless warfare in Europe, protecting the Americas with a vast navy and powerful army and bringing Roman Catholicism through the missionaries to the New World. While the conquistadors destroyed the institutions and artifacts of societies in the Americas of more than a thousand years, the Soldiers of Christ, or Christian missionaries, took possession of their souls.

WHEN CULTURAL HUBRIS RUNS AWRY

The Spanish Conquistador Francisco Pizarro’s soldiers battling the Incas

Over the course of the empire, the Incas used conquest and peaceful assimilation to incorporate large portions of the western part of South America and centered on the Andean mountain range.

Shortly after the Inca Civil War with the Spanish Conquistadors (1529 – 1532), the Inca emperor was captured and killed on the orders of the Conquistador Francisco Pizarro, marking the beginning of Spanish rule.

The remnants of the empire retreated to the remote jungles of Vilcabamba and established the small Neo-Inca State, which was conquered by the Spanish in 1572.

View from Qalla Q'asa to Andenes

The Ruins of Pisac sit atop a hill at the entrance to the valley. The ruins are separated along the ridge into four groups: P'isaqa, Inti Watana, Qalla Q'asa, and Kinchiraqay.

Inti Watana group includes the Temple of the Sun, baths, altars, water fountains, a ceremonial platform, and an Inti Watana, a volcanic outcrop carved into a "hitching post for the Sun" (or Inti). The angles of its base suggest that it served to

define the changes of the seasons. Qalla Q'asa, which is built onto a natural spur and overlooks the valley, is known as the citadel.

The Inca constructed agricultural terraces on the steep hillside, which are still in use today. They created the terraces by hauling richer topsoil by hand from the lower lands. The terraces enabled the production of surplus food, more than would normally be possible at altitudes as high as 11,000 feet.

With the military, religious, and agricultural structures, the site served at least a triple purpose. Researchers believe that Písac defended the southern entrance to the Sacred Valley, while Choquequirao defended the western entrance, and the fortress at Ollantaytambo the northern. Inca Pisac controlled a route that connected the Inca Empire with the border of the rain forest (Wikipedia).

In a sketchy way, this gives you a sense of one of the sophisticated civilizations the Spanish (and later Portuguese) Conquistadors encounters as they raced through the Americas. They conquered and plundered in quest of this prize, but it was Old World diseases such as smallpox, typhus, measles and influenza that wiped out 90% of the indigenous populations in the New World, making it the key factor in the European conquest of the Americas.

But the Incas were not alone is this devastation. They formed a city-state and powerful and wealthy empire in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador around the 12th century with Cuzco the capital and major city. They ruled the empire with a centralized government in four provincial sectors.

Spanish Conquistadors, led by Francisco Pizarro, conquered most of the Inca Empire in 1533.

The Maya Civilization was located in Central America. It included southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras and had existed without interruption from 2500 B.C.E. to 1500 C.E. Independent of Egypt and the Middle East, the Maya Civilization developed a hieroglyphic writing system. They studied astronomy and mathematics, calculated highly accurate calendars, predicted eclipses, and other astronomical events, and they built elaborate temples and pyramids that are still impressive in their ruins today. The Maya people also had a complex social order.

Aztec Ruins after disappearing civilization

After the fall of Inca city of Tahuantinsuyu, the new Spanish rulers suppressed the people and their traditions throughout the Americas. Many aspects of the Inca culture, for example, were systematically destroyed including its sophisticated farming system. The Spanish forced every family to supply one member of the family to labor in the gold and silver mines or work on a Spanish plantation. When a family member died, and many such laborers did in a year or two, the family was forced to provide another family member.

Interestingly, the major languages of the Incas were Quechua and Aymara, which somehow survived to this day despite the Catholic Church’s attempt to evangelize the people into Spanish. Indigenous languages with the Maya and Aztecs managed to survive but in less in their original form.

ENTER CHRISTIAN MISSIONARIES IN SOUTH AMERICA

Christians enter South America

There is a humane and inhumane interpretation of the second wave of Spanish colonization in the Americas led by the missionaries. Through conquest and brutal occupation, along with the disease that the Conquistadors brought with them from Europe to a native population without the immune system to fight these diseases, the people who were still alive were vulnerable to any kind of kindness.

The missionaries brought such kindness with them along with medicines and medical personnel to tend to the sick and dying, but with a definitive agenda: that these natives would be converting to Roman Catholicism.

Pope Alexander VI (1431 – 1503), one of the most controversial popes of the Renaissance having fathered several children with several mistresses, issued a Papal Bull (Inter Caetera), awarding colonial rights over most of the newly discovered lands to Spain and Portugal with the proclamation to Christianize the indigenous populations of the Americas such as the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas. The state-controlled clerical appointments with no interference from the Vatican.

Spreading Christianity was a top priority, but it went far beyond that. The influence of Franciscans, sometimes seen as a tool of imperialism enabled other objectives to be in the programming including the Spanish language, culture, and value system to the conquerors with the idea of exercising total political control of the indigenous peoples in the New World.

The goal was to change the agricultural or nomadic Indians into a model to mirror that of the Spanish people and society. Basically, the aim was to urbanize this pastoral society by “offering gifts and persuasion and safety from their enemies.” This protection system was also to ensure the security for the Spanish military operation, believing if the missionaries could make the people more docile and passive they would be less inclined to be warring.

The top agenda of the missionaries was committing these natives to Christianity quickly and efficiently, purging them of their native cultural practices, while giving the impression they were blending their traditional beliefs with common Catholic practices, which of course was a ruse. However, the Spaniards did not impose their language to the degree that the missionaries did their religion.

In fact, the missionary work of the Roman Catholic Church in Quechua, Nahuatl, and Guarani actually contributed to the expansion of these American languages, equipping them with writing systems.

The 1510 Requerimiento, issued in relation to the Spanish invasion of South America demanded that the local populations accept Spanish rule, and allow preaching to them by Catholic missionaries, on the pain of war, slavery, or death, although it did not demand conversion. Slavery was part of the local population's culture before the arrival of the conquistadors. Christian missionaries provided existing slaves with an opportunity to escape their situation by seeking out the protection of the missions which was a spur to their conversion.

The Maya people were a religious society and held festivals throughout the year to honor their favorite gods. They sacrificed to the gods and made ritual offerings.

The great cities of this classical period were Tikal and Palenque, which were religious centers. They loved sports and play ball games and left elaborate ball courts. Most of the people were farmers and lived in small communities. Conquistadors did not destroy this civilization as it mysteriously disappeared around 900 B.C.E. leaving abandoned cities. The Maya people, however, survived continuing to live in Mexico and Central America.

The Aztecs were a people who created a presence in the Valley of Mexico around the 12th century and quickly rose to become the dominant power in Mesoamerica. The capital was Tenochtitlan which was built on the raised island of Lake Texcoco. The Aztecs were aggressive warriors and demanded tribute from other city-states in Mesoamerica. A religious society, the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice as part of their religious ritual, as did other civilizations in Mesoamerica.

The Aztec nation was at the peak of its power when it was destroyed by the Spanish Conquistador Hernan Cortes and his army. Once in power, Cortes built Mexico City on Aztec ruins of the destroyed Tenochtitlan.

After the fall of the Inca city of Tahuantinsuyu, the new Spanish rulers suppressed the people and their traditions throughout the Americas. Many aspects of the Inca culture, for example, were systematically destroyed including its sophisticated farming system. The Spanish forced every family to supply one member of the family to labor in the gold and silver mines or work on a Spanish plantation. When a family member died, and many such laborers did in a year or two, the family was forced to provide another family member.

Interestingly, the major languages of the Incas were Quechua and Aymara, which somehow survived to this day despite the Catholic Church’s attempt to evangelize the people into Spanish. Indigenous languages with the Maya and Aztecs managed to survive but in less in their original form.

ENTER CHRISTIAN MISSIONARIES IN SOUTH AMERICA

There is a humane and an inhumane interpretation of the second wave of Spanish colonization in the Americas led by the missionaries. Through conquest and brutal occupation, along with the disease that the Conquistadors brought with them from Europe to a native population without the immune system to fight these diseases, the people who were still alive were vulnerable to any kind of kindness.

The missionaries brought such kindness with them along with medicines and medical personnel to tend to the sick and dying, but with a definitive agenda: that these natives would be converting to Roman Catholicism.

Pope Alexander VI (1431 – 1503), one of the most controversial popes of the Renaissance having fathered several children with several mistresses, issued a Papal Bull (Inter Caetera), awarding colonial rights over most of the newly discovered lands to Spain and Portugal with the proclamation to Christianize the indigenous populations of the Americas such as the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas. The state-controlled clerical appointments with no interference from the Vatican.

Spreading Christianity was a top priority, but it went far beyond that. The influence of Franciscans, sometimes seen as a tool of imperialism, enabled other objectives to be in the programming including the Spanish language, culture and value system to the conquerors with the idea of exercising total political control of the indigenous peoples in the New World.

The goal was to change the agricultural or nomadic Indians into a model to mirror that of the Spanish people and society. Basically, the aim was to urbanize this pastoral society by “offering gifts and persuasion and safety from their enemies.” This protection system was also to ensure the security for the Spanish military operation, believing if the missionaries could make the people more docile and passive they would be less inclined to be warring.

The top agenda of the missionaries was committing these natives to Christianity quickly and efficiently, purging them of their native cultural practices, while giving the impression they were blending their traditional beliefs with common Catholic practices, which of course was a ruse. However, the Spaniards did not impose their language to the degree that the missionaries did their religion.

In fact, the missionary work of the Roman Catholic Church in Quechua, Nahuatl, and Guarani actually contributed to the expansion of these American languages, equipping them with writing systems.

The 1510 Requerimiento, issued in relation to the Spanish invasion of South America, demanded that the local populations accept Spanish rule, and allow preaching to them by Catholic missionaries, on pain of war, slavery or death,

Antonio de Montesinos, the Dominican friar, preached against slavery of indigenous people

Slavery was part of the local population's culture before the arrival of the conquistadors. Christian missionaries provided existing slaves with an opportunity to escape their situation by seeking out the protection of the missions which was a spur to their conversion although it did not demand conversion. Slavery was part of the local population's culture before the arrival of the conquistadors.  

On December 1511, the Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos openly rebuked the Spanish authorities governing Hispaniola for their mistreatment of the American natives, telling them "... you are in a mortal sin ... for the cruelty and tyranny you use in dealing with these innocent people".

Kind Ferdinand (1452 – 1516) enacted the Laws of Burgos which resulted in a relaxing of enforcement while he blamed the Church for not doing enough to liberate the Indians when it was only the Church that had raised its voice in defense of the indigenous peoples.

Nevertheless, Amerindian populations suffered serious decline due to new diseases, inadvertently introduced through contact with Europeans, which created a labor vacuum in the New World.

THE FRANCISCANS

In 1522, the first Franciscan missionaries arrived in Mexico. They established schools, model farms and hospitals. When some Europeans questioned whether the Indians were truly human and worthy of baptism, Pope Paul III (1468 – 1549), who came to the papal throne in 1534 after the “sacking of Rome” in 1527, a very iffy period for the church.

In Pope Paul’s bull of 1537 (Sublimis Deus), he emphatically declared "their souls were as immortal as those of Europeans" and they should neither be robbed nor turned into slaves. The practice, however, persisted.

Over the next 150 years, missions expanded into southwestern North America. Native people were often legally defined as children, and priests took on a paternalistic role, sometimes enforced with corporal punishment.

In America, Junipero Serra, a Franciscan priest, founded a series of missions that became important economic, political, and religious institutions. These missions brought grain, cattle, and a new way of living to the Indian tribes of California. Overland routes were established from New Mexico that resulted in the colonization of San Francisco in 1776 and Los Angeles in 1781. Here too, as in South America, in bringing Western civilization to the area, these missions and the Spanish government were responsible for wiping out nearly a third of the native population, primarily through disease.

Only in the 19th century, after the breakdown of most Spanish and Portuguese colonies was the Vatican able to take charge of Catholic missionary activities through its Propaganda Fide organization and challenge Spanish and Portuguese draconian policies. Pope Gregory XVI (1765 – 1846) took on the “mad monarchs” of his time, and for it is considered one of the most effective popes in Catholic history. He entered the monastery as a boy and was a staunch defender of Catholic orthodoxy in his early life as a cleric, but became – perhaps because the times demanded it – a political conservative and an adept politician.

Born into the post-French Revolution period, he saw the devastation inflicted in the New World on the church by colonializing governments, haunted by the kidnapping of Pope Pius VII (1742 – 1823) from 1809 to 1812 by Napoleon, while himself a rising cleric in the Catholic hierarchy, he proved a different kind of pope when he came to the papal throne in 1831.

But before that time, there was Pope Leo VII (1760 – 1829), who came to the papal throne in 1823 and was pontiff to his death in 1829. The church had not recovered from the shock of Napoleon and the emperor’s violation of the sanctity of Rome and the Vatican. Perhaps that explains why Pope Leo was so harsh and insensitive to the laity. In any case, he was a very unpopular pope, only to die be succeeded by Pope Pius VIII, who reigned only from 1829 to 1830 accomplishing very little and being remembered for nothing.

Pope Gregory XVI, a priest and a Franciscan was unusual in the way he took control from the first, but also in being the last pope to rise to the papal throne who was not a bishop.

From the beginning, Pope Gregory challenged the Spanish and Portuguese policy in the New World with his Propaganda Fide organization, appointing his own bishops to the colonies, condemning slavery and the slave trade, and doing so in a Papal Bull In Supremo Apostolatus, and approved the ordination of native clergy in the face of government racism. Despite these advances, the populations of the Americas continued to suffer sharp declines from exposure to European diseases.

It was a time of upheaval with a “war of terror” on the streets of Paris from 1830 to 1848. Pope Gregory was in the middle of this mix with his own “war of terror.” He quite famously opposed gas lights and railways, fearing the rise of a liberal middle-class elite in the Papal States, and opposed political concessions, making him one of the most hated men in Europe in leftist circles. Infuriating Irish 

Catholics in Ireland urging them to be loyal to their Protestant British monarch. His bottom line was absolute opposition to revolution given its history in his lifetime. Rare (in my experience as a Roman Catholic) was his telling statement on liberalism:

Pope Gregory XVI condemned slavery and backed it with an aggressive pontificate.

“This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civic affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. ‘But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error,’ so says Augustine. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin.”

THE JESUITS

Jesuit missionaries in the Americas were controversial in Europe, especially in Spain and Portugal in as much as Jesuits were disinclined to take orders from governments when such governments saw their cavalier disregard as interference with their colonial enterprises.

From the beginning, Jesuits were often the only force standing between Native Americans and slavery. Throughout South America, but especially in present-day Brazil and Paraguay, they formed Christian Naïve American city-states called “reductions.” These were societies set up according to an idealized theocratic model.

It is partly because the Jesuits such as Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (1585 – 1652) were willing to sacrifice life and limb to prevent Spanish and Portuguese

colonizers from enslaving the natives. Other Jesuits, such as Manuel da Nobrega (1517 – 1570) and Jose de Anchieta (1534 – 1597) were critical in Indian pacification leading to the establishment of stable colonial settlements in the colonies. They founded several towns in Brazil in the 16th century, long before the Franciscans arrived. Among these towns were Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Using a feather rather than a sword, their efforts were influential in pacification, religious conversions and education of Indian nations.

The Jesuit Reductions were a particular version of the general Catholic strategy without the hard club of dogma. It was effectively used in the 17th and 18th centuries of building reductions to Christianize the indigenous populations of the Americas more efficiently than the absolutism to be practiced later.

[When I was a young chemical engineer in the field for Nalco Chemical Company, my next-door neighbor was a civil engineer with a large national firm building highways across the nation. He was from Bolivia, and remembered fondly the Jesuits who taught him, but had little affection for Roman Catholicism and clerics that tried to force dogma down his constitution.]

The work of the reductions created the Catholic order of the Jesuits in South America in inhabited areas of Tupi-Guarani, which corresponds to modern-day Paraguay. Later reductions were extended to Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Uruguay. Jesuits have a popular history of fairness and consistency and follow-through in their practices, especially among the disenfranchised. The current Pope of the Roman Catholic Church Pope Francis I (born 1936) is the first Jesuit to rise to the papal throne and is as controversial with the establishment as were his predecessors those centuries ago, and truly a breath of fresh air in the tradition of Pope Gregory XVI.

Where these Jesuit reductions differed from the reductions in other regions was consistent with Jesuit philosophy: Indian natives were expected to adopt Christianity but not European culture. Under the Jesuit leadership of the Indians, the reductions achieved a high degree of autonomy within the Spanish and Portuguese empires.

With the use of Indian labor, the reductions became economically successful. When their existence was threatened by the incursions of the Bandeirante (Portuguese for “those who carry the flag) slave traders, Indian militia were created that fought effectively against these fortune-hunting Portuguese settlers in Brazil.

The resistance by the Jesuit reductions to slave raids, as well as their high degree of autonomy and economic success, have been cited as contributing factors to the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Americas in 1767. Jesuit reductions present a controversial chapter of the evangelical history of the Americas, and are variously described as jungle utopias or as theocratic regimes of terror.

The suppression of the Jesuits in the Portuguese Empire (1759) and the Spanish Empire (1767) was precipitated by a series of political moves rather than a theological dispute. Monarchs were attempting to solidify their power and centralize their authority in the secular realm, viewing Jesuits as being too liberal, international, and too allied to the papacy. What’s more, monarchs found Jesuits too autonomous and territorial.

That said the papacy threw the Jesuit order under the bus. Pope Clement XIV issued a papal bull (Dominus ac Redemptor) on July 21, 1773, suppressing the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits took refuge in non-Catholic nations, particularly in Prussia and Russia where the order was either ignored or formally rejected. The Jesuits were allowed to return to many places starting in the late 19th century.

ASSIMILATION

The conquest of the conquistadors was immediately accompanied by the evangelization of the indigenous peoples with a clearly Catholic phenomenon to mystically materialize. This helped to solidify the conquest of the minds and hearts of the natives.

The Virgin of Guadalupe id one of Mexico’s oldest religious images. The Virgin Mother of Jesus is said to have appeared to Juan Diego (1474 – 1548) in 1531. News of the 1534 apparition on Tepayac Hill spread quickly through Mexico; and in the seven years that followed, 1532 through 1538, the Indian people accepted the Spaniards and 8 million people were converted to the Catholic faith. Thereafter, the Aztecs no longer practiced human sacrifice or native forms of worship.

In 2001 the Italian “Movement of Love” was created, an evangelization project launched in 32 states. A year later, Juan Diego was beatified in 1990 and canonized a saint by Pope John Paul II (1920 – 2005) in 2002, the first Roman Catholic indigenous saint from the Americas.

Saint Juan Diego is said to have been granted an apparition of the Virgin Mary on four separate occasions in December 1531 at the hill of Tepeyac, then outside but now well within metropolitan Mexico City.

The Basilica of Guadalupe, located at the foot of the hill of Tepeyac, claims to possess Juan Diego's mantle or cloak on which an image of the Virgin is said to have been impressed by a miracle as a pledge of the authenticity of the apparitions. These apparitions and the imparting of the miraculous images (together known as the Guadalupe event) are the basis of the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe. This cult

is ubiquitous in Mexico and prevalent throughout the Spanish-speaking Americas, and increasingly worldwide. As a result, the Basilica of Guadalupe is now the world's major center of pilgrimage for Roman Catholics, receiving 22 million visitors in 2010.

Virgin of Guadalupe

Guadalupe is often considered a mixture of the cultures which blend to form Mexico, both racially and religiously. Guadalupe is sometimes called the “first Mexican,” as Guadalupe brings together people of distinct cultural heritages, while at the same time affirming their distinctness.

One theory is that the Virgin of Guadalupe was presented to the Aztecs as a Christianized Tonantzin, or necessary for the clergymen to convert the indigenous people to the Catholic faith. The missionaries literally built their first churches with the rubble and the columns of the ancient pagan temples, so they often borrowed pagan customs for their own cult purposes.

Such Virgins appeared in most of the other evangelized countries, mixing Catholicism with the local customs. The Basilica of Our Lady of Copacabana was built in Bolivia, near the Isla del Sol where the Sun God was believed to be born, in the 16th century, to commemorate the apparition of the Virgin of Copacabana. . In Cuba, the Virgin named Caridad del Cobre was allegedly seen at the beginning of the 16th century, a case consigned in the Archivo General de Indias. In Brazil, Our Lady of Aparecida was declared in 1929 official Patron Saint of the country by Pope Pius XI (1857 – 1939). In Argentina, there is Our Lady of Lujan. In other cases, the appearance of the Virgin was reported by an indigenous person, for example, Virgen de Los Angeles in Costa Rica.

ASSESSMENT OF MISSIONARIES

For most of the history of post-colonial Latin America, religious rights have been regularly violated, and even now, tensions and conflict in the area of religion remain. Religious human rights, in the sense of freedom to exercise and practice one's religion, are almost universally guaranteed in the laws and constitutions of Latin America today, although they are not universally observed in practice. Moreover, it has taken Latin America much longer than other parts of the West to adopt religious freedom in theory and in practice, and the habit of respect for those rights is only gradually being developed.

The slowness to embrace religious freedom in Latin America is related to its colonial heritage and to its post-colonial history. The Aztec and the Inca both made substantial use of religion to support their authority and power. This pre-existing role of religion in pre-Columbian culture made it relatively easy for the Spanish

conquistadors to replace native religious structures with those of a Catholicism that was closely linked to the Spanish throne.

Anti-clericalism was an integral feature of 19th-century liberalism in Latin America. This anti-clericalism was based on the idea that the clergy (especially the prelates who ran the administrative offices of the Church) were hindering social progress in areas such as public education and economic development. The Catholic Church was one of the largest land-owning groups in most of Latin America's countries. As a result, the Church tended to be rather conservative politically.

Beginning in the 1820s, a succession of liberal regimes came to power in Latin America. Some members of these liberal regimes sought to imitate the Spain of the 1830s (and revolutionary France of a half-century earlier) in expropriating the wealth of the Catholic Church, and in imitating the 18th century benevolent despots in restricting or prohibiting the religious institutes.

As a result, a number of these liberal regimes expropriated Church property and tried to bring education, marriage and burial under secular authority. The confiscation of Church properties and changes in the scope of religious liberties (in general, increasing the rights of non-Catholics and non-observant Catholics, while licensing or prohibiting the institutes) generally accompanied secularists, and later, which has gone on to this day.

ASSESSMENT OF MISSIONARIES

For most of the history of post-colonial Latin America, religious rights have been regularly violated, and even now, tensions and conflict in the area of religion remain. Religious human rights, in the sense of freedom to exercise and practice one's religion, are almost universally guaranteed in the laws and constitutions of Latin America today, although they are not universally observed in practice. Moreover, it has taken Latin America much longer than other parts of the West to adopt religious freedom in theory and in practice, and the habit of respect for those rights is only gradually being developed.

The slowness to embrace religious freedom in Latin America is related to its colonial heritage and to its post-colonial history. The Aztec and the Inca both made substantial use of religion to support their authority and power. This pre-existing role of religion in pre-Columbian culture made it relatively easy for the Spanish Conquistadors to replace native religious structures with those of a Catholicism that was closely linked to the Spanish throne.

Anti-clericalism was an integral feature of 19th-century liberalism in Latin America. This anti-clericalism was based on the idea that the clergy (especially the prelates who ran the administrative offices of the Church) were hindering social progress in areas such as public education and economic development. The Catholic Church was one of the largest land-owning groups in most of Latin America's countries. As a result, the Church tended to be rather conservative politically.

Beginning in the 1820s, a succession of liberal regimes came to power in Latin America. Some members of these liberal regimes sought to imitate the Spain of the 1830s (and revolutionary France of a half-century earlier) in expropriating the wealth of the Catholic Church, and in imitating the 18th-century benevolent despots in restricting or prohibiting the religious institutes.

As a result, a number of these liberal regimes expropriated Church property and tried to bring education, marriage and burial under secular authority. The confiscation of Church properties and changes in the scope of religious liberties (in general, increasing the rights of non-Catholics and non-observant Catholics, while licensing or prohibiting the institutes) generally accompanied secularists, and later, which has gone on to this day.

NEXT – MEDICINE EMPOWERED

NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND - TWENTY-FOUR

Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land – Twenty-Four

PSYCHIC ENTROPY

IS THERE A Way Out OF NOWHERE LAND?

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

Originally © October 17, 2016/August 28, 2021

A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD

In this final segment and the Afterword, we complete the commentary of the PAST IMPERFECT, PRESENT RIDICULOUS, and FUTURE PERFECT. The possibility that human beings may soon be marginalized in the name of progress is no longer a farfetched consideration. The narrative of these twenty-four episodes has been essentially a peripatetic walk through time culminating in the clumsy attempt of the United States to redress a catastrophic wrong (i.e., the 9/11 Osama bin Landen’s Aikido attack on the New York City Twin Towers and the United States Military Pentagon in Washington, DC) leading to a preemptive attack of Iraq to punish that nation for its alleged association with ben Landen and for having weapons of mass destruction, which proved a fairy tale of the CIA, compounded in the process by an attempt to convert Iraq into a “kinder, gentler” society to mirror the West, particularly the United States.

The long shadow of Christianity and its utopian zeal is seen in the presumptive strategy that clings to the United States like a shadow since 1945 when America emerged serendipitously as the lone superpower on the planet seeing the utopian dream of progress through a cloudy ethnocentric lens.

America’s ignorance of the world has manifested itself in psychic entropy to confirm the status of NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND. American physicist Stephen Hawking writes:

Just like a computer, we must remember things in order in which entropy increases. This makes the Second Law of Thermodynamics almost trivial. Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases. You can’t have a safer bet than that!

Hungarian American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes in "FLOW: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" (1990):

To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.

This is an invitation to turn Psychic Entropy on its head to serve rather than continue to be enslaved to the reckless dissonance of the times. This is clearly in evidence as semiotics and semantics signs, meanings, and codes that guide people's lives have been corrupted to justify the radical behavioral change in terms of sex-role identity. Turning Psyche Entropy inside out:

To wit, such designations as male and female, boy and girl, man and woman, husband and wife of different genders, and Homo sapiens being of one species. Instead, this finds boys wanting to be girls, and girls wanting to be boys, using hormones to change their appearance if not changing their sexual anatomy by submitting to surgical sex-changing identity. Boys want to play girls’ sports, and girls want to play traditional boys’ sports. Boys want to dress like girls and girls want to dress like boys. Blacks want to be whites, and whites want to be black, or some other Homo sapiens’ identity. Happiness has turned into pill dependency while self-regard has transmogrified into self-hate. Nobel Laureate for Literature (1946), Swiss-German novelist, poet, and painter, Herman Hesse, writes:

“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.”

British philosopher, semiotician, and semanticist John Locke (1632 – 1704) anticipated when the general public could go off the rails, penning “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (1695) which relates to personal identity. Locke claimed what makes me the same person over time, despite all the differences made to my appearance and character by the passage of the years is that we have an immortal soul which remains invariant through the accidental and oftentimes misguided circumstances of our self-perception.

Accordingly, it is the soul, not the body, that carries our personhood. This implies “a person” and a “human being” is not the same thing. Indeed, Locke treated the concept of a person as a forensic concept, that is, relating to our DNA, fingerprints, biology, pathology, etc. To the question of personal identity, he claimed it consists of “consciousness of being the same person over time.” This consciousness is constituted by self-awareness, memory, and self-regarding interests in the future. Locke introduced the word “consciousness” into English by this theory.

In the final book of the Essay Locke gives his account of the nature of knowledge which in turn guides behavior. This he says consists in “the perception of the connection among ideas and agreement or disagreement and repugnancy, of any of our ideas. In this alone it consists.”

When the connection or disagreement among ideas is immediately obvious, Locke calls it “intuitive knowledge.” When reasoning is required to see the connection or opposition, he calls it “demonstrative knowledge.” His theory is almost exactly what we commonly think of as empirical knowledge, the knowledge that arises in us because of the causal interactions between the world and our sense organs. Generally, perception is a mainly reliable source of information about our world and beyond (The Fisher Paradigm©™, 2018, looks at this concept in pragmatic empirical terms of everyday life).

Personal identity and the common good has been misappropriated from the individual by political identity and political correctness where the politics of resentment cloud the freedom of free choice with persons wanting to abort their DNA and the landmarks of their culture for the surreal.

Francis Fukuyama reminds us in “Identity Politics” (2018) that identity and identity politics are of a fairly recent province popularized by the psychologist Erik Erikson in the 1950s, a man who left Europe without academic credentials, assumed a new name and new identity, finding a home in our most prestigious academic institutions, while becoming a spokesman for the multitude who felt their identity had been stolen.

No longer is maturity and aging gracefully a badge of honor. Now, age is denied as an absolute by those who submit to elective plastic surgery often turning the so obsessed to more resemble zombies. Meanwhile, work has been given a bad name as the State promises to protect its citizens from work as well as pain, and failure, or the necessity of making choices and experiencing the consequences of their actions.

If we accept the State’s promise, all we have to give up is our freedom, individualism, and independence. Political correctness has been on steroids for decades but it now appears more resolute to change our lexicon by removing such terms as Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Easter, and the designations of male and female, man and woman from the language. At the same time, it would eliminate the celebration of Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthday, Columbus Day, and many other such cultural-historical days from the calendar. Given this retreat from history, it is only a matter of time before the busts of Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt will be dynamited into oblivion on Mount Rushmore.

Spanish philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” History is part of our personal identity.

Psychic Entropy goes from high disorder to the point of fanatical order. It can be reversed by negative entropy which is a matter of creative renewal. We are on the cusp of that matter as we live in an age where no one is in charge. Our cell phones and our apps with scores if not thousands of friends has become a societal pacifier leaving little time or inclination to read books, certainly such difficult books and writing as Herman Hesse. I write:

The West is in decline as Oswald Spengler suggested more than one hundred years ago, but what he may not have envisioned is that self-indulgent man, a product of this Psychic Entropic run amuck may one day find man near his journey end (see Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-Indulgent Man, 2015). The earth is becoming a very different place than it has been since the arrival of man. While humans are unlikely to become extinct, the world in which they have evolved is rapidly vanishing.

Psychic Entropy is real. We have seen in modern times going from high disorder to fixated low disorder attempting to establish a sense of being in control when everything is out of control. What once constituted leadership is now simply a struggle for power and dominance at any cost. Decision-making has become chimerical in its conclusions often being inconsistent with unrealistic situational demands. We see this in corpocracy be the institution the government, academia, the military, business, and industry, or the public health industry as each has lost its way to becoming essentially political. 

While position power is now atavistically replaced by knowledge power, the possessors of this power of the majority of the citizens and not those at the top of what is now an anachronistic organizational structure. The dominant virtue of enterprise is artificial in the sense of being dependent on prevailing social convention. Artificial virtue, or the appearance of advocating virtue when vice, iniquity, faintheartedness, fearfulness, and timidity prevail, according to English philosopher David Hume (1711 – 1776) points to consistent conformity to socially espoused norms that often no longer apply, leaving society to slip from the Past Imperfect and Present Ridiculous to envisioning a miraculous Future Perfect, a climate that couldn’t be more suitable to Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land.

While this appears to be the general climate of the United States at the moment, quietly and unobtrusively one industry has managed to thrive no matter the prevailing cultural climate and that is the farm industry, which is the subject of the AFTERWORD in terms of how it has always dealt with Psychic Entropy.

THE COMFORT OF RHETORIC

Dante’s decision seven hundred years ago to write his great poem not in Latin but in what he called the vulgar eloquence – Italian, the language of the people – and the innovation in the following century of printing from movable type represent landmarks in the secularization of society, as well as an affront to the hegemony of priests and oligarchy tyrants. The impact of today’s emerging technologies promises to be no less revolutionary, perhaps even more so. The technology of printing enhanced the value of literacy, encouraged widespread learning, and became the sine qua non of modern civilization. New technologies will have an even greater effect, narrowing the notorious gap between the educated rich and the unlettered poor and distributing the benefits as well as the hazards of our civilization to everyone on earth.

American cultural critic John Leonard (1939 – 2008), “Cri de Coeur,” The New York Review (February 8, 2001)

“There are ample opportunities to help create a more humane and decent world if we choose to act upon them. A democratic communications policy would seek to develop means of expression and interaction that reflect the interests of and concerns of the general population, and to encourage their self-education and their individual and collective action.”

American journalist and political commentator Bill Moyers (born 1934), American journalist and political commentator, A World of Ideas (in a 1989 interview of Noam Chomsky).

WHY NO WAY OUT?

We have overwhelming data to solve our problems, but instead of solving our problems with this providential abundance we mask our difficulties and compound our problems with disinformation.

Novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930) was prescient long before the computer age:

“Is it true that mankind demands, and will always demand a miracle, mystery, and authority?” He answers: “Surely it is true. Today man gets his sense of the miraculous from science and machinery, radio, airplanes, vast ships, zeppelins, poison gas, artificial silk: these things nourish man’s sense of the miraculous as magic did the past.”

John Gray in Straw Dogs (2002) concurs:

“Today for the mass of humanity, science and technology embody ‘miracle, mystery, and authority.’ Science promises that the most ancient human fantasies will, at last, be realized. Sickness and aging will be abolished, scarcity and poverty will be no more; the species will become immortal. Like Christianity in the past, the modern cult of science lives on the hope of miracles.

“But to think that science can transform the human lot is to believe in magic. Time retorts to the illusions of humanism with the reality: frail, deranged, undelivered humanity. Even as it enables poverty to be diminished and sickness to be alleviated, science will be used to refine tyranny and perfect the art of war.”

German economist, sociologist, philosopher, and political scientist Karl Marx (1818 - 1883) scored utopianism as unscientific yet his “scientific socialism” resembles alchemy, not chemistry, but magic, which is utopian, as he believed that technology could transmute the base metal of human nature into metaphorical gold. Moreover, he saw no danger in the expansion of human numbers for he saw no limit to productivity with the abolition of scarcity, private property, the family, the state, and the division of labor. Paradoxically, while he saw religion as the “opium of the masses,” his ideology was consistent with that of Christianity and its deism, which he rejected.

It would appear there is no way out because man does not seem willing to accept that he is an animal no different than a cow or a horse or a tree when it comes to nature. Naturalist E. O. Wilson (born 1929) envisions the next century and saw a closing of the “Age of the Mammals,” and new age as one characterized by biological impoverishment, an “Age of Loneliness.” How so?

According to John Gray, humans co-opt over 40 percent of the Earth’s living tissue. We see this in dried-up lakes, treeless mountains, polluted oceans, toxic atmospheres, and melting ice caps. We are now seven billion souls on earth today. In the not too distant future, we will be twelve billion souls. When there is little available potable water or food supply, energy sources will cease to be the critical mass driving societies to war. It will be potable water.

The synthetic world that humans have created will mirror their collective solitude as there are no exits from the creative fiction of Nowhere Land. New mystics will surely appear suggesting empty spaces in which those that survive can open themselves to something outside their solipsism, possibly a colony in outer space. John Gray suggests these mystics should be ignored for a monastery of scientists is not where peace will be found but by citizens of this small planet communing with nature in the company of other animals, not seeing these creatures as inferior but as beings who have never been inclined to separate themselves from nature or its rhythm and renewal.

PSYCHIC ENTROPY

Entropy: A thermodynamic property that is the measure of a system's thermal energy per unit of temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work. This is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In all energy exchanges, if no energy enters or leaves the system, the potential energy of the state will always be less than that of the initial state. This is another way to refer to entropy.

Psychotherapist Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) created the concept of “Psychic Energy” claiming since our experience is confined to relatively closed systems, we are never in a position to observe absolute psychological entropy. But the more the psychological system is closed, the more the phenomenon of entropy is manifest. A system is closed when no energy from outside can be fed into it; only in such a system can entropy occur. An example would be mental disturbances characteristic of intense seclusion from the environment or the dulling of the psychological affect in schizophrenia.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (born 1934) incorporated Jung’s psychic entropy theory into his “flow theory” of optimal experience in positive psychology where psychic entropy is interpreted as a disorder in mental consciousness that produces a conflict with an individual’s goals. He writes:

“Emotions refer to the internal states of consciousness. Negative emotions like sadness, fear, anxiety, or boredom produce psychic entropy in the mind, that is, a state in which we cannot use attention effectively to deal with external tasks because we need it to restore an inner subjective order.”

We see elements of this in American psychologist Leon Festinger’s (1919 – 1989) A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957) where he argues we make new information fit with information already indicating in our closed mind. This incompatibility (dissonance) could happen when you do something that goes against a value that’s important to you. Or maybe you learn a new piece of information that disagrees with a long-standing belief or opinion. As humans, we generally prefer for our world to make sense, so cognitive dissonance can be distressing. That’s why we often respond to cognitive dissonance by doing mental gymnastics to feel like things make sense again when they don’t.

We see it also evident in American philosopher Alan Bloom’s (1930 – 1992) Closing of the American Mind (1987) where he shows how American higher education has produced psychic entropy by reinforcing cultural biases, myths, and barriers to reality instead of opening young minds to a world beyond their cultural conditioning.

Then there is American academic psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi’s (born 1966) A First Rate Madness (2011) in which he contends that great leaders such as Lincoln, General Sherman, Churchill, Gandhi, FDR, JFK, among others, demonstrate palpable evidence of mental illness, where the singularity of their minds blocks out reality to pursue a closed-minded course of madness to epitomize psychic entropy.

Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

We saw psychic entropy on display when the George W. Bush administration relied on the Central Intelligence Agency’s director George Tenet (born 1953) to accept the CIA director’s “slam dunk” metaphor that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or WMDs). It was wishful thinking culminating in General Colin Powell (born 1937) taking the fall when asked to give a speech of assurance to the United Nation’s Security Council on February 5, 2003, that Iraq, indeed, had WMDs. A tragic comedy of errors followed.

HEGEMONY/IMPERIALISM/PSYCHIC ENTROPY

The missionary zeal neoconservatives in the Bush administration had been building a frenzy since 9/11. Spanish philosopher George Santayana (1863 – 1952) in Birth of Reason (1968) writes:

The humanitarian, like the missionary, is often an irreducible enemy of the people he seeks to befriend because he has not have the imagination enough to sympathize with their proper needs nor humility enough to respect them as if they were his own. Arrogance, fanaticism, meddlesomeness and imperialism may then masquerade as philanthropy.

In this “Information Age,” while John Leonard and Noam Chomsky would suggest a way of getting beyond the madness of total reliance on technology, which still proves – in the case of the CIA – just this side of guesstimates can however be catastrophic in consequence. American conservative cultural and political commentator David Brooks (born 1961) writes:

“For decades, the US intelligence community has propagated the myth that it possesses analytical methods that must be insulated pristinely from the hurly-burly world of politics. Rather than rely on a conference-load of game theories or risk assessment officers, when it comes to understanding the world of things and menaces . . . I’d trust anyone who has read a Dostoyevsky novel over the past five years.”

Inside this critique is the fact that those in government, especially in the 21st century, have been irredeemably bad when it comes to prescience. This transcended from bad to worst with the preemptive invasion of Iraq on faulty intelligence and then escalated into the insanity, which has become the “War on Terror.”

English philosopher historian John Gray sees The Iraq War as serving an economic system that he deems “casino capitalism” where long-term investment has been replaced with ubiquitous gambling. Evidence is that the war, which has already cost multi-$billions will ineludibly be written off as a bad debt. He writes:

“If there is a symbol that captures America in Iraq, it is not the colonial institutions of former times, it is Enron, which vanished leaving nothing behind.”

Workers at “ground zero” after the 9/11 destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City

[Enron was a small company formed by Kenneth Lay in 1985 merging Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth, two relatively modest regional companies. Kenneth Lay then hired Jeffrey Skilling as a consultant in 1990. Soon after, he was made chairman and chief executive officer of Enron Finance Corp. In 1991, Skilling became chairman of Enron Gas Services Company, the result of the merger of Enron Gas Marketing and Enron Finance Corp. Skilling developed a staff of executives who were able to use accounting loopholes, special purpose entities, and poor financial reporting to hide billions of dollars in debt from failed deals and projects.

The esteemed accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, became complicit in this scandal, which resulted in the bankruptcy of Enron Corporation and the dissolution of Arthur Andersen. Enron shareholders filed a $40 billion lawsuit after Enron stock fell from US$90.75 in June 2000 to $1 by the end of November 2001.

The monumental collapse of ENRON

Several Enron employees (24 in all) were convicted of fraudulent practices including Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, who went to prison. Kenneth Lay could have been sentenced to a prison term of 45 years but died in 2005 before sentencing. Enron’s utopia’s underbelly of deceit led to a giant corporation vanishing without a trace, leaving only the nightmare of swindled stockholders facing the future a lot poorer.]

Enron was financial fraud in which rational deception was apparent. What of the fiasco that has become the Iraq War, and by extension the aftermath of that preemptive invasion on the faulty CIA claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Let us peruse this utopian scenario of psychic entropy.

IRAQ: WHERE PRUDENCE FAILED

Once Islam terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers in New York City and severely damaged the US Military Pentagon on September 11, 2001, claiming three thousand lives, the temperament of the nation’s leadership demonstrated a lack of maturity and perspective. Moreover, technology, which had risen to the order of the high church, failed the CIA, the Bush Administration, and the US Congress. The majority in Congress with a closed mind was on board to teach the terrorist a lesson by invading Iraq. It mattered little that the terrorist came out of Saudi Arabia, an ally, and not from Iraq. A tragedy of errors followed that has continued through President Barak Obama’s administration. It is as if the American blind spot is the inclination to treat its myths as reality and acting on them as if a whim in a state of being unhinged.

From America’s first Puritan settlement in 1628 to the present, the United States has seen itself with missionary zeal as the “redeemer nation.” American novelist Herman Melville (1819 – 1891) echoed this sentiment in White Jacket (1924):

“We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people – the Israel of our time, we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.”

English Puritan lawyer John Winthrop (1587 - 1649), founder of the Puritan Colony on Massachusetts Bay stated, “We must consider that we shall be as a city on a hill.” The United States President Woodrow Wilson (1856 – 1924) then echoed these sentiments on November 20, 1914, in his speech to the American people on Neutrality: “America is the house of the Lord and the city on a hill.” He saw the eventual entrance of the United States into WWI as “salvation” to the Allies.

This mindset of Christian rectitude drove “born again Christian” President George W. Bush to invade Iraq. This passion to right a wrong has fallen apart like a house of cards. It was a knee-jerk reaction to a terrible wrong (9/11) with shoddy information. Just as the computer is still dependent upon information submitted, faulty thinking is bound to produce suspect solutions.

America’s ruinous invasion of Iraq is seen by philosopher John Gray as more than a fusion of the utopianism of Bush, but as an “exotic and highly toxic blend of beliefs, none of them grounded in any observable reality . . . a type of ‘liberal imperialism’ based on human rights.”

Where this gets murky is when a government applies its liberal ideal of self-determination and democracy as justification for questioning the legitimacy of a government for human rights violations. Incredibly, once this assessment is made, it goes forward with a good conscience to override that government’s claim to sovereign authority.

Even with all the negative consequences of the Iraq War, the Bush administration with the support of most Americans defended the rightness of its military intervention to overthrow the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. Canadian political author Michael Ignatieff (born 1947) wrote in The New York Times three months before this preemptive invasion of Iraq:

“America’s empire is not like empires of the past, built on colonies, conquest, and the white man’s burden . . . The 21st-century imperium is the new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights, and democracy, enforced by the most awesome power the world has ever known . . . Regime change is an imperial task par excellence since it assumes that the empire’s interest has a right to trump the sovereignty of a state. The Bush administration would ask, what moral authority rests with the sovereign who murders and ethnically cleanses his own people has twice invaded neighboring countries and usurps his people’s wealth to build palaces and lethal weapons?”

Given this scenario, who can question the righteousness of the good and the tyranny of the bad? "The War on Terror” was launched with this righteous sentiment and a score of years later few would disagree that things are worse today than they were in the beginning. There is a word in medicine that describes this propensity, iatrogenic, or the cure was worse than the disease.

It is hard for the West to accept that democracy is not for everyone or that the world is not one contiguous common civilization. Iraq had something approaching stability between its three major groups: Kurds, Shia and Sunni. This tenuous bond was decimated with the Iraq War. The West then compounded the situation by inadvertently creating a vacuum with the withdrawal of mainly American and British forces from the country prematurely leading to the metastasis of ISSI and al-Qaeda as a gestation center for a worldwide jihadist.

Australian political columnist Tom Switzer (born 1971) writes:

“The unintended consequences of the war were not just the dear costs in blood, treasure, and prestige for the United States. Nor were they the hundreds of thousands of deaths of Iraqi civilians. They were what amounted to a strategic victory for the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The human brain is finite in processing information. Therefore, human coping is limited. There are two limiting conditions in our cranial cellular congress to cope with reality. The brain's capacity to process information is finite, and the machinery with which to do it is not a conscious unity. When the space requirements of problems fit the network there, things go well. When they do not, things go awry.

“Tehran’s presence in the Shia South, moreover, was felt well before the withdrawal of U.S. forces. Recall that General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Brigade, spearheaded Iran’s political and military involvement in Iraq a decade ago. Recall, too, al-Maliki’s debt to Iran in helping secure his presidency in 2006.

“By toppling a Sunni regime and bringing democracy to Iraq, the U.S.-led coalition brought to an end the sectarian imbalance that had been in place for generations. The Baathists, like the Hashemites, British, and Ottomans ­before them had kept in place minority rule, giving Sunni Arabs a disproportionate share of power and resources while brutally suppressing Shia and Kurds.

“The invasion in 2003 meant that the majority Shia became the new winners in post-Saddam Iraq, and the minority Sunnis the new losers. The former turned to their Shia brethren in Tehran for support; the latter turned to a Sunni insurgency that has morphed into a plethora of Sunni jihadists, including the Islamic State.”

President George Bush sent Paul Berman to manage the transition of Iraq after the initial victory in 2003 resulting in the overthrowing of Saddam Hussein. Berman was a trained historian and neoconservative technocrat who knew nothing about the discipline of Organizational Development (OD) in social/industrial psychology with its assessment and implementation tools that could have proved useful. OD would not have acted until:

· A thorough understanding of the apocalyptical Islam religions of Iraq and the region were thoroughly perused including the historical relationship of Shia and Sunni and the Kurds to each other, along with the source of the cultural/religious/political conflicts between them in terms of secular and theocratic Islam;

· Unobtrusive data and measurement of the situation had been collected involving extensive personal interviews of the principals including members of the Saddam Hussein government, the military, and the industrial/commercial establishment. This would also include Process Flow Analysis of the demographics history, culture, languages, ethnicities, and long-term/short-term assessment of the Sunni, Shia, and Turk populations at every level of society;

· Surveys, interviews, and direct observation of key elements of the previous political structure including the military, administrative, as well as Iraqi allies and adversaries of government;

· Personnel of nationals of the three dominant groups, as well as the military and political operatives, had been properly vetted;

· Establishing a reasonable transitional time before making any firm commitments to final designators.

· Establishing a strategic and tactical format and process to bring on board critical components of the former administration including the military.

· Foster cooperation with warring factions. This means seeing through surface issues to natural barriers between the factions.

· Determining major concerns that need addressing and redressing immediately; then developing a conflict resolution strategy in which all the factions have adequate representation.

OD aims to make the client self-sufficient. The prescription for establishing that objective cannot be adequately determined until the situation is sufficiently defined and the readiness of the factions involved appropriately assessed.

OD serves – in this case, the Iraqi people and nation – with no interest in promoting one faction at the expense of another. Politics are involved but the psychological climate that is created will be the final arbiter to self-sufficiency.

This did not happen. Instead, the Bush administration launched its regime change of Iraq as if a holy crusade. The banner of the “War on Terror” provocatively promoted human rights and women’s rights across the Muslim world when the United States had entered a hostile environment, first as invaders and now as occupiers with the solipsistic hubris that America was a “savior nation” and knew best. Again John Gray writes in Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and The Death of Utopia (2007):

Paul Berman gave vent to this sublime vision in 2003. It contained no inkling that the result of the overthrow of secular despotism in Iraq would be a mix of anarchy and theocracy. The impossibility of liberalism in Afghanistan – which has only ever had something resembling a modern state when Soviet forces imposed, with enormous cruelty, a version of Enlightenment despotism on parts of the country – was too disturbing to contemplate. All the liberal causes that were wrapped up in the ‘war on terror’ were inherently desirable, and so – it seemed to follow – practically realizable. In their attitudes to regime change, neo-conservatives have been at one with many liberals. Regime change was an instrument of progress …

Nasr Iranian-American academic Vali Reza in The Shia Revival (2006) observes:

The Shia still fear Sunni rule, and Sunnis rue their loss of power and dream of climbing back to the top . . . Each has a different vision of the past and a different dream for the future. There are still scores to settle, decades of them.

Gray goes on to point out that overthrowing tyranny may bring democracy temporarily without advancing liberty. No constitution can impose freedom where it is not wanted or where it is no longer valued. Nor can the secular tyranny that was destroyed be reinvented.

Several blunders followed Bergman’s management of the interim government in transition. The army was disbanded with all its weapons, and soon this became a force with which to reckon. He disbanded some religious groups and left the Sunni minority, which had maintained a stable if a draconian balance between these three Islamic groups -- Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds -- for decades. In an instant, this was summarily destroyed.

American analysts have suggested that perhaps a three-way partition of Iraq is the solution. The idea of a split of Iraq into three states has seemingly only added fuel to the fire as Shia, Sunni, and Kurds are already vicious rivals for power and natural resources, mainly oil.

In any case, the Sunni minority would be likely to lose everything. To wit, the United States is powerless in the face of anarchy, religious and tribal tension between the three groups that the invasion has created. But perhaps the greatest faux pas was to create a vacuum by dismantling the state and the military of Iraq that Iraq’s bitter enemy, Iran, could now exploit for its purposes. President Barak Obama added icing to this Iranian cake when he withdrew all American troops from Iraq without convincing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri-a-Maliki (born 1950), a Shia Muslin, that it would thwart Iran’s attempt to export its terrorism to Iraq and beyond.

GLOBAL TERRORISM AND THE DECLINE OF THE WEST?

There have always been terrorists, but terrorism seems to have been spiked and gone global since the Iraq War. The United States reacted to 9/11 precipitously and emphatically with the preemptive invasion of that country. Does this mean that sovereign states no longer are relevant?

In this new system of justification, the clear suggestion is that market zones have more relevance than the value of nation-states. Does this mean that states that do not behave consistently with the order prescribed by the West they can be attacked? This may sound facetious but the American system, its democracy, and capitalistic economy have been spreading throughout the world since WWII imposing its will sometimes subtly and otherwise not.

There is a pervasive component of utopia in nostalgia for a world without religious and ethnic divisions, a world in which new technologies erase differences. Emperor Constantine of The Roman Empire converted to Christianity in 312 and the Roman Empire adopted the Christian faith in 380. A century later Rome was sacked and the “Dark Ages” followed with Emperor Charlemagne crowned the Holy Roman Empire in 800.

In operational terms, as the sovereignty of many states has diminished including Great Britain, France, Germany, and many other sovereign states, the burden on The United States has grown. This scenario accelerated the decline of Rome, and now with American power integral to the globalization of society, and other states heavily dependent on the US for security, subsistence, and development could this be the formula for the decline of the United States?

China, India, and Russia are behaving as the US has in using global markets to enhance its authority and power. The world outside the United States wants what it has, and it wants it now.

While the “War on Terror” goes nowhere as this is as inevitable as the sun will rise tomorrow, disruptive and tragic as suicide bombers and other bombings are, the most catastrophic risk of the future is nuclear terrorists. Using “suitcase bombs” or “dirty bombs” (conventional bombs with radioactive waste), terrorists could kill hundreds of thousands of people and paralyze social and economic life in an instant.

There is no suitable strategy, no high-tech surveillance methodology, or concerted effort to annihilate the terrorists or lessen the threat other than to understand those who would go to such extremes from their perspectives which appears they believe they have nothing to lose.

It would be pure insanity “to take Iran out” for Iran unlike other countries in the region is a fairly cohesive state. It is the home of an ancient and rich Persian culture and civilization. Should the next President of the United States attempt to destroy Iran, it could trigger an upheaval in the Islam states in the Middle East, including Pakistan and Afghanistan that would make the current situation seem like nothing at all.

It has become the discourse of the West to link terrorism with Arab culture and an Islamic cult of martyrdom. Gray writes:

Islam is a religion, not a culture, and most of the people who live in the “Islamic world” are not Arabs . . . Suicide terrorism is not a pathology that afflicts any particular culture nor has it any close connections with religion . . . Much terrorism is like other types of warfare. Nearly always, wars are fought within or across cultural boundaries.

We make no progress in the dialogue by calling Iran an “evil empire” or looking for simplistic formulae to deal with adversaries who have agendas that differ from our own. This, too, is OD.

Gray adds:

The “war on terror” is a symptom of a mentality that anticipates an unprecedented change in human affairs – the end of history, the passing of the sovereign state, the universal acceptance of democracy, and the defeat of evil. This is the central myth of apocalyptic religion framed in political terms, and the common factor underlying the failed utopian projects of the past decades . . . Apocalypse failed to arrive, and history went on as before but with an added dash of blood.

In this commentary of 24 related essays, we have been going from the “Past Imperfect” through the “Present Ridiculous,” and despite the fanfare of a secular society, religions persist often in all their violence but even more frequently in religious misunderstanding.

Yet, it is science and not religion that has come to be viewed as the vehicle of revelations. Science is now prominent and will be increasingly so in the “Future Perfect” world. Science is the instrument for forming reliable beliefs in which these beliefs are meant to mirror the world, not as “it is, but as it ought to be.

Religion is a human instrument. While science solves mysteries of nature, religion embraces the mystical to nourish the life of the spirit. Science deals with certainties while religion entertains doubts.

Doubts are part of the garment of everyday life. Science and religion serve different needs which may pull in different directions but are equally necessary. The irreducible reality of religion is apparent in the apocalyptic shadow of Christianity. Science or religion can't escape this shadow as it is evident in the common belief in utopian progress and the “Cut & Control” commitment to soaring beyond the norm whatever the costs.

Secular mythmakers differ little from those of religion; all ultimately resort to violence even terrorism. Over the past two centuries, the storyline has been human progress with the clash of dark forces destined for destruction from German Nazism to communist Marxism to ISSI and al-Qaeda terrorism.

Followers of Marxism believed humanity could only advance through a series of catastrophic revolutions; followers of Nazism conspired to eliminate the Jewish race and establish a semi-divine immortal state of Anglo-Saxons; followers of ISSI and al-Qaeda believed the entire Western culture needs to be destroyed and a new Islamic state and culture must become the dominant force in the world.

The aims of each of these secular or semi-religious movements reflect the powerful influence of “The Age of Enlightenment,” an intellectual and scientific movement of 18th century Europe that was characterized by a rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues. The belief was that once poverty was eradicated and education was universal that social equality and political repression would vanish, and formal religion would be no more important than a personal hobby. The shadow of Christianity is equally apparent here as well. Alas, in the future as in the past, there will be authoritarian states and liberal republics, theocratic democracies, and secular tyrannies, imperialistic empires, and city-states in the mix. But there will also be something quite different, which is the subject of The Afterword. People close to the earth have always managed to subsist in whatever insane political climate of their times because they know in being close to nature and the land they are close to God however He is defined.

THE AFTERWORD

ROBOTIC FARMER

WHY THE FARM INDUSTRY IS SPECIAL IN TERMS OF PSYCHIC ENTROPY

The farm industry has never had a series of international trade unions to support and defend its interests. Over the past centuries, farmers across the continent have had to deal with fickled nature: from draughts to torrential rains, from soil erosions to insect infestations, from too hot to too cold fluctuating climates, from forest fires and crop failures to soil erosions, from total dependence on animal power to managing the expense and complex intricacies of machine farming, from mysterious small crop yields to inadequate understanding of genetic vulnerabilities of plants.

Farmers have always been associated with a quiet industry of individualism, independence, and freedom to the stoic demands of farm labor as they chose to farm as vocation and avocation with little or no inclination to bring attention to themselves or this disposition. 

Farmers are one with the land and have remained so over time, adjusting to the dependence of the general public on their ability to meet its ever-increasing demands.

Farmers found the advantage of rotating crops on the land and allowing the land to remain fallow to regain the land's vigor; discovered the benefit of irrigation and showering crops with water overnight when the temperature drops to freezing. They invented and/or invested in new machinery to make farming more efficient and sent their sons and daughters off to college to study agriculture and return with new tools to enhance farming technology. They used pesticides and herbicides economically to ward off such possible crop devastations. While being suspect of the agribusiness and the corporate industry, they realized that this was reality and something they need to embrace rather than fight to survive and still be able to husband their crops and operate their farms.

Farmers have demonstrated that they follow the empirical pragmatic wisdom of psychologist William James (1842 – 1910) who posits the idea that the human experience of emotion arises from physiological changes in response to external events that have been experienced. While not drawing attention to this inherent characteristic, farmers, alone, have mastered Psychic Entropy overtime to their advantage.

THE GENESIS OF AMERICAN FARMING

In 1900, just under 40 percent of the total US population of 76 million lived on farms, and 60 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. Today, the respective figures are only about 1.312 percent of Americans are farmers supporting a population of 330 million, while some 20 percent of Americans still live in what is deemed rural areas.

The United States had between six and seven million farms from 1910 to 1940. Today, there are less than 2 million.

The predominant economic sectors in which most Americans are found are 20 percent in industry and 79 percent in social and governmental services.

Farmers are rich in the United States, but this too is deceiving. Corporate farming now dominates in what is now known as “agribusiness.” The richest farmer with the biggest farm is none other than Bill Gates of Microsoft with 269,000 acres of farmland growing potatoes and carrots. He has 70,000 acres of farmland in North Louisiana where he grows soybeans, corn, and cotton.

Another possible surprise about the contemporary American workforce is that, while women only represent half the population, women hold more jobs than men and occupy 50.04 percent of working positions. Stated another way, there are now 109,000 more women working than men.

Today, the education and health service industry employ the largest number of people in the United States with 34.1 million employed in the education and health care industries.

Agriculture with its scientific management and well-educated farmers has become more proficient and quietly the most taken-for-granted industry in the American culture. When I was a chemist at Standard Brands, Inc. in Clinton, Iowa, a farm community, I found myself one Saturday in Dewitt, Clinton, a small farming community in Clinton County having breakfast in a country kitchen-type restaurant. In conversation with four other men eating breakfast, I learned they were all farmers, and had received agricultural degrees from Iowa State University, one of the esteemed agricultural scientific centers of the country. When I shared this with my colleagues back at work, they were surprised that I was surprised. “What did you think,” one said, “that it was a miracle that we eat so well?”

Agriculture serves as the backbone of the economy of any country, without which it would collapse and face a serious financial breakdown. Exporting of cars and other factory equipment by United States producers is a distant second to agricultural products sold to the world. The United States is rich in highly cultivated land that sufficiently supports a strong economy.

Agriculture is not simply the cultivation of crops but also the farming of plants and animals, cattle and fish. Americans see their country as “the breadbasket of the world” when China has more arable land. Agriculture is also a brewing industry and a source of income for millions of Americans so employed.

Agricultural was chosen to profile the other side of Psychic Entropy where negative entropy has quietly been employed to improve the efficiency, productivity, and the yield of the land through technology, scientific management, rotation of crops, harnessing new methodology including robotics, automation, and hybridization to attain the best quality of crop yield and profit. At the University of Iowa, I had classmates who were children of farmers who were becoming medical doctors, dentists, and other professionals at their parents’ insistence when all they wanted to do is be farmers. They confessed to me that being close to the land was like being close to God, and nothing made them happier.

And aside from this nervous dance to oblivion that seems to consume so many Americans with Psychic Entropy, African American George Washington Carver (1865 – 1943) came to Iowa State in 1891 and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1894. Because of his excellence in botany and horticulture, he was appointed to the Iowa State faculty, becoming the university’s first African American faculty member. He went on to an illustrious career in agricultural science, far ahead of his time.

Nowhere Man is forever lost between a posteriori with his observations and experiments and a priori and his methods of reasoning.