#that’s not even paranoia that’s just a legitimate concern to be having when your father is a man as powerful and influential | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

latinforsix · 7 years ago

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A Father’s Protest

The following is the text of a protest that I recorded and then posted on YouTube, and because that video is surely destined for lasting obscurity, I thought it only fair to consign its text to the same fate, and so I now offer it here for anyone who may be interested in supporting this outcome…

Before I begin the protest which follows - one that was written before the events of November 8th, 2016 - I want to admit that it took me three days to name the desolate mood which descended upon me that day and which still serves as a kind of unyielding sentry, blocking the paths worn clear by my long-standing faith in humanity, a faith which had, until then, unchallenged access to my thoughts - three days to recognize that I had been feeling, and will continue to feel, a sense of profound personal loss, a loss worthy of mourning, of a grief normally reserved for death alone, and were anyone foolish enough to say to me now that “everything will be OK”, I would ask “but for whom?” and then insist upon awaiting their stammering and tragically flawed reply.

I concede, however, that a stunning victory has been won - a victory over decency, good will, intelligence, honor, dignity, compassion, and civility, a victory over conscience, over progress, over truth, over humanity, a victory over love, because unless you are one of the victors, you already know too well that as of January 20th, 2017, we will be led by the most dangerously radical coalition of fools, scoundrels, narcissists, sociopaths, and rapacious ideologues in our history - heartless, mindless men who, were they to listen to what follows, might decide that it is not an act of protest at all, but rather an act of disobedience, even of sedition – and maybe, this one time, they will be right, and in this rare case, I must hope that they are.

Yet I need only for some to listen, and none to comfort me, for there are countless others who will soon enough need our comfort, and even, perhaps, our sanctuary.

Of late, as I watch the faces of those around me when I go out in public, I have noticed that many have a look which seems to suggest that are they in a state of despair, and perhaps of mourning, but also that they are not, in some fundamental sense, ready – not only for the unfolding of the next four years, but not ready for life itself, not ready at least for the life we now have. This look may have been there for a long time and I am only noticing its prevalence now because this darkening moment has made less shy my wish to gaze into a stranger’s face, and I may be reading into my observation more than the evidence would allow, yet I also wonder whether many of us are simply unprepared for the uncertainties and complexities of a world that we still call modern, as if somehow our time is inherently superior to all times past.

But what if the dark turn of current events, our empty amusements (which more often weary than distract), the difficulty of finding the truth amidst an endless cycle of news, the greater rarity of clear moral and political victories, the gladiatorial quality of our inoperative politics, the exhausting demands, often of survival itself, made upon us each day, and nights made sleepless by the day to follow, expensive devices that isolate as much as unite, the loss of restorative silence and solitude to a chatter so unrelenting that its effects linger even when a quiet moment can be wrenched from our schedules, what if all of these, our obligations and our diversions, imposed upon minds readied for a meaningful and defining interplay between constructive action and creative stillness by the hope for continuing human progress, have left us merely stunned and afraid instead, and not yet ready for what is now to come?

Times of crisis seep into the part of the mind which dreams, and if that part is free to draw upon unassailable moral truths in its reply to a troubled reality, then can a leader be born, but if that part is overwhelmed with turbulent shadow, then will a monster be made.

But onward…

Hi. This is the first of an 11 part protest that I hope some of you will watch to its end in the urgent hope that this dissent from the present, however modest its contribution, has the chance to play its small part in helping to lead us towards lasting and universal reform, and thus the far, far better future which our fears alone have earned, and at a time when we desperately need a renewed faith in both ourselves and that future if we are to create the truly human civilization of which every one of us must, at least once, have dreamt, and which we all should want for all.

We begin…

I have made and now post this video because I feel strongly that my responsibilities as a father, as a citizen, and as a human being require that I offer the following cautionary tale, and by doing so, encourage you to take protective action against the storm that now approaches, a storm whose leading winds have already begun to howl. I may not succeed, but because my intentions are honorable and born of fears which are, in turn, born of love, the consequences of failure would tragically not be mine alone to bear.

I want to talk about the state of our nation and of our world, not, I hope, as one discordant voice among so many others, but as an individual who has quietly assembled those truths which are both self-evident to those guided by love and its attendant concerns, yet tragically obscured by the glossy distractions of modernity and carefully ignored or subverted by those who want only for themselves. This is my intention, while my motivation is my son and the passionate – perhaps desperate - wish that the world he has begun to enter will at last choose to be guided by love and by the gentle, generous thoughts which love will bring, rather than by rank self-interest alone.

Before beginning work on this, I asked myself whether the sense of urgency that lead to it is rational, whether the judgment upon which it is based is sound and not rather overstated or illusory. Did my judgment, my troubled assessment of our world, reflect the legitimate recognition of a danger that is new to a world already skilled in the design of new forms of misery (where even the microbes seem to reveal by their adaptive mastery the delight a creator feels), or was that judgment simply a reflection of the greater intensity of thought and feeling which naturally follows upon the ever-deepening love of one’s child, as well as the arrival of that child’s father at a more thoughtful middle age?

But though my natural vigilance against the darkest impulses of our race may have shaken my stubborn and long-standing faith in the gradual perfection of our shared destiny, I do not believe that my thoughts have been clouded by my love and its worries, but rather that they are now made clearer by them. Therefore, I must continue, and hope that, if nothing else, you will listen and then decide for yourself.

I will keep myself disguised, not to lend drama to an ordinary tale, but because I am not the subject of what follows and must never be, and because if I succeed at all in what I want to accomplish, there are some who might want to use the mistakes that I have made during the natural course of my life to discredit whatever value my words might have for those who otherwise would be prepared not just to consider them, but then perhaps to act upon them as well.

This is neither a desire for celebrity (after all, what would be the worth of anonymous fame) nor a form of paranoia (which is the illusion of a tragic celebrity) - it is instead a fear based upon a knowledge gained from long and careful observation whose only bias is the passionate wish for a future worthy of what is best in us all. Yet I assure you that I am an average man whose life will deservedly never earn the attention of history for reasons of either heroism or villainy, and that the only part of my biography worthy of note is my son, in whose name, unspoken here, I have made this video.

I claim no visionary status, for there is, I believe, not a single thought I offer here that is new, no opinion that is original nor any suggestion novel, but this cannot diminish the value of what I will argue, and for those who may think my views extreme, the fact that I am simply recounting established truths should instead increase the meaning of what will follow, and if either my style or my tone threatens to obscure its value, look past me and towards the ideas that I present, for I am no more than a messenger, though one armed with truths worthy of our renewed devotion, and aware that we must live a truth in order to survive its loss, and then to restore its sovereignty.

I feel that I should tell you now, before I continue, that I have faith, that I have always had an abiding faith in the destiny of Mankind, for I am convinced that someday we will break free of all that now haunts us, and leave the sorrows of history behind…someday. For now, however, the more immediate future is not bright, and the story I will tell is not a happy one, though you will soon understand this, because it is our story.

But if you would ask what I want to accomplish that requires anonymity, which to some of you may seem needlessly theatrical, strategically foolish, or even suggestive of a cowardly and thus more narrow and self-serving purpose, I would answer that I want something much larger and more important than your reviews of this video, something that would be to the benefit of everyone, something that I do not have the power to begin nor the necessary gifts to lead, but which I have grown certain is both essential and for the common good.

I want revolution.

I gratefully acknowledge that resistance to the current regime is already closely gathering, and that it is a vital first act if democracy is to be restored, yet I feel it is important to add that the message of resistance is stop, while of revolution, it is begin, and so we keep in mind that although it will be the resistance which stops the tyranny blocking our return to democracy, it would be the revolution that it kindles which will, at last, begin our progress towards our true and rightful destiny.

It must be non-violent and respectful of the human rights of everyone at every moment, even if the men we confront are not as noble nor as brave, yet it must be so sweeping in its scope, so universal in its appeal, and so constructive in its results that history will have no choice but to judge it a victory for everyone, perhaps even for those who will have lost the struggle. For now, however, judge the value, the meaning, the truth of what I will say by those who oppose it, and by the words they will choose to express their disapproval.

Those same words may be one of the most reliable ways by which to gauge the number, the perverse intensity, the tragically misplaced focus, and the willful refusal to learn, of those who will stand in opposition to my opposition to their agenda, and you would probably only need to review the comments written below this video to understand that. If my experience with video commentary holds true, most of the words which will follow my own will not be kind to what I have said, even though most of those who would post a heckling comment here are those whose freedom and enlightenment I would want to assure. Speak a truth to someone who fears that truth and their fear will respond with an anger which seeks to dismiss that truth and to discredit the ones who have offered it. But I would say to them: don’t be afraid – the truth will not hurt you, if you offer it unguarded entrance, and where there is love, fear can never claim dominion…

Without this revolution, our children may ask us why we did not act when, in early 21st century America, all of the following breaches in democracy were made, or made to widen, while noting that each one represents a loss of, and for, what is most deeply human within us all: the Supreme Court promotes abstract entities to a human status thus demoting ours to theirs and replacing the rule of law with the monarchy of wealth; and a few dozen men, hidden from our view by laws which serve them alone, succeed in purchasing the most destructively ignorant legislators in our history; and congressional districts are redrawn by ideological extremists assuring the anointment of the unelectable; and morally indefensible laws are passed whose sole purpose is to reduce or prevent the voting of targeted racial and ethnic minorities, of those who have already given and lost too much; and corporations are redefined as financial entities whose sole purpose is the maximization of profits, while few note that if this is their sole purpose, they therefore cannot be moral entities as well; and a large, entrenched, fanatical group of representatives conspire to force their delusional reconstruction of social, economic, and cultural reality upon the majority; and under the empty claim of virtuous action, a major political party conspires to return women to a position of legally enforced subservience, neither their bodies nor their destinies any longer their own; and our press becomes too often owned by men indifferent not only to the ethical demands of professional journalism, but to anything other than profit and propaganda; and many millions of our citizens now feel so entitled to their furious resentment and are so diseased with the craving for dictatorial power that they would wound their country rather than brave the noble terrors of self-awareness; and with a membership representing little more than one percent of the population, a single organization, using a demonstrable lie and allying itself with the most thoughtlessly extreme partisans among the smallest political party, is able to prevent the passage of an almost universally supported law written in response to the slaughter of 20 young school children; and a federal government increasingly effective at serving its citizens comes under relentless and well-financed attacks from men educated by talk show hosts and driven by the darkest forms of greed and bigotry; and despite the irrefutable sum and scope of data and overwhelming scientific consensus, climate change, the greatest threat we have ever known other than ourselves (though we ourselves have caused it), is declared a hoax by wealthy men and their elected valets, men incapable of even the elementary conclusion that without science, their wealth would consist of little more than a few extra goats; and a system of corporate and political governance is ordained which both recruits and rewards those least restrained by conscience and to whom compassion would seem an obstacle; and off-shore accounts are found to hold more than enough money to build housing, clinics, and schools for every person in the world who does not now have access to any one or all of these; and millions passively, almost gratefully, accept the transcendent ignorance of affluent religious leaders who would risk the world on the bet that they alone are right; and one man of great wealth and great power, calling himself a journalist, establishes an empire of newspapers and television stations whose profitable but dishonorable objective is to speak to the fear, anger, prejudice, and intolerance of an audience now so demonstrably misinformed that they have become a threat to their own country; and our youth, encased in sound and electronic imagery, remain still too silent in the gaunt face of a tyranny which grows in proportion to that silence; and on heartlessly ideological grounds alone, nearly half of our governors refuse to make medical care available to their poorest and most vulnerable citizens, assuring the unnecessary deaths of thousands and the needless suffering of far more; and the field of psychology – the study of the mind - fails to confront ascendant pathologies that would command every aspect of every life according to a form of thought that should only be found in the darker dreams of troubled children; and language, the foundation of human identity, is bled of meaning by our advertisers, disfigured by the willful incompetence of our politicians, impoverished by the costs imposed for words beyond the monosyllabic, and drained of its authority by schools deaf or indifferent to its transformative power.

But now please note that this list of our self-defeating actions and inactions could easily have been far, far longer than just these, as, for your sake alone, you should already know.

Any one of these defeats – and this word is not too strong - represents a danger to democracy, but together they foretell the rise of a “sociopathocracy”, of a rule by men without the capacity for empathic response, men who cannot feel with or for another, men without regret or doubt or second thought who will have wrenched from a once-free people the machinery of government and corporate power which they will use not to silence, but to mislead, and this far worse than silence because the people will then practice their right to free speech by quoting from textbooks written by the ignorant and approved by the illiterate, and from the poisoned feast of “official pronouncements” which they would neither ever dare nor even think to question because they fear their thoughts would be known to their masters, the mind-readers only of the dead.

In that world, spinning towards us now, only an uprising in the literal sense of this word could hope to win back the freedom and dignity that will have been lost to this brand of modernity and to those whose brand it is: the men who would sell it to an exhausted audience by selling themselves as thoughtful men guided by a humane philosophy. The brute fact is that it is far, far easier to pretend quite convincingly to care than it is to endure the unending sorrows of this world by caring.

To such men I would say, no, you are not acting from devotion to principle, to philosophy, to moral imperative, to ethical constraint, nor even to pragmatic necessity – you are acting from an indefensible sense of entitlement, and from the unrighteous anger and resentment from which your sense of entitlement has grown, and among all of your failures, the most ruinous was your refusal to imagine, because once you had made this morally catastrophic choice, you were doomed to feel nothing more than a bitter, virulent contempt for anyone who does not belong to your dreamless tribe - for you, the feeling of a shared humanity with all must seem, like melody to the deaf, an inexplicable thing, a notion meant for greeting cards, not for sober realists like you.

But we have divided our efforts against what opposes us. At different times we have blamed criminality, carnality, destiny, human nature, conspirators, advertising, extra-terrestrials, priests, naked ambition, politics, parents, fanatics, zealots, egos, ids, hatred, greed, fear, rage, and each of our ideologies, philosophies, and religions. Among others, these are the ones which, according to our mood, we would accuse of standing in our way, of willfully slowing our progress towards the millennial dream of an earthly paradise, of the world made a garden where all of our children are at play while we, their parents, dance to the sound of their laughter and weep for those who had worked to make that garden grow but had not lived to dance there, too.

Yet there is, I believe, only one group that has stood in the way of universal social progress, a single group for which we do not yet have a fitting name, a group whose members suffer, if to differing degree, from a single grotesque deformity of character – they do not know what it truly means to be human, they do not know that we possess the humane passions to which they are emotionally blind, they do not know that we are burdened and blessed with a human conscience, and for them, all the rest, including all the rest of their kind, are nothing more than an audience that has yet to applaud as loudly as they should.

This revolution would not set one faith against another, nor one generation against another, nor one class against another, nor one race against another, nor one ideology against another, nor one gender against the other – none of the old lines of division would hold because this revolution will summon those who possess a conscience, the heart-readers of our kind, to take an unyielding stand against those for whom conscience must seem an unaccountable weakness, a useful defect in their prey, and though the forces arrayed would be strangers to history, the roots of this revolution have grown from primordial ground, and the first time a human being refused to kill a beaten enemy despite the prodding shrieks of his tribe, this revolution became inevitable.

And this revolution must be more than a re-ordering of political power, more than the ascendance of one ideology over another, more than the banishing of arrogance or the triumph of reason, more than a deliverance from the repetitions of history, more than a final end to needless loss, more than renovations, however thoughtful, made to the institutions that have underwritten human civilization - it must be a revolution of human awareness great enough to transform a world, a revolution in the capacity of consciousness not just to think differently, but to dream differently, and by doing so, to become different, to become new beings – still human, though more so.

We are being led by soul-less men whose number will soon be legion. They do not care about those beyond their gated worlds, for to them, we are little more than a resource to be spent to their advantage, customers for things made by children and beaten men, weary participants in our own devaluation, yet I counsel faith with a poet’s words: “come, my friends, ‘tis not too late to seek a newer world”, to which I add: no, it is not too late - not yet...not yet.

What may be most troubling about the current increase in the number and in the power of those who act from self-interest alone, other than the misery they cause (or do not end when they could), is the fact that we have seen this insurgency against love and reason too often before. Now, however, the insurgents are armed with the instrumentalities of modern communication, which can be as wounding to the mind as weaponry to the body. Yet upon reflection, it now seems foolish to think of them as the insurgents and surely more accurate to say that they have always been the ones in power, and so it must instead be love and reason, and those who are their faithful, who are the true insurgents - so be it, and far better.

With all this in mind, I ask you to understand before I continue that for the sake of this revolution, everyone’s humanity must be acknowledged as equal – their actions, however, must not. Because of this, I am convinced that the conflicts which are now playing out around us, and among us, nearly everywhere, conflicts that are spread across almost every domain of human action and interaction, arise from the struggle between the darkest form of ignorance, whose measure of awareness is narrow, grasping, venal, unyielding, and merciless, and minds broadened by a compassionate heart and deepened by a passionate curiosity, imagination’s outward gaze.

Though such conflicts have left no century –virtually no decade - in human history unscarred, they feel different now, and more threatening. In their diversity of cause (as both origin and objective), their near universality of place and constancy of hour, their obscene devotion to the purchase of unbridled power and control, their contempt for the individual (a word whose root meaning signifies that which cannot be divided against itself), their perverse delight in remaining indifferent to the truth, and their disguise of rapacious self-interest in philosophies once meant to liberate, they are pushing us towards a wider and more dangerous conflict than we have ever known.

Yet this, I believe, was almost preordained.

Imagine a room without exit in which you have placed a sociopath and a malignant narcissist in one corner and a human rights activist and a single mother in the other, with a table in the middle of the room on which sits a fully functional computer with active internet access, and it would not be long before the latter couple would quite rationally decide that if they want to survive, they will need to use that computer to knock the other couple senseless.

Forgive the violence – it is as metaphorical as the rest of this story, though metaphors may have incited more violence than has fear and anger – but while violence is one of love’s many tragic opposites and thus the opposite of my intent, I am here because of the many forms of violence, some of them unknown before our time, which haunt the conscience of the best of us, a violence that seems to grow unrelentingly, even in this 21st century, whose arrival may have been greeted with more hope than any other moment in remembered time.

It is a well-practiced and nearly perfected violence that is set against mind and body and heart and soul, against women, children, and the best of men, against principle, against tradition, against freedom, against both new knowledge and ancient wisdom, against the poor, the sick, the young, the old, against faith, against hope, against love.

So, I ask: is the dream of meaningful human progress now so troubled towards unscripted ending - a waking into nightmare - that the primary alternatives to answering the sedative call of the fanatic have become either the acquisition of a fortune or, failing that, a phone? Although I have never thought in recognizably religious categories, there have been moments when I fear that there are energies, once human but no longer, which first have darkened and congealed, and then moved to align themselves for a battle that would be nearly Biblical in its proportions.

I offer this because implicit in this question is the suggestion that something now approaches which could bring a holocaust not solely upon the believers of a single great faith alone, but upon an entire world, and this ashen thought may well exceed our capacity for its bearing, and make a lethal comfort out of vigilance, and from warning, silence.

I ask in sum: is there a singular new threat striding across our world, or at least rising to do so, one differing from its predecessors not in its scale alone, but in the grotesque and yet unquestionable precision of its opposing logic, and allowed to take form not by a fatal scarcity of love, but instead by a system, built by the corrupt, enforced by the cruel, and spread by the ignorant, which will have kept us too busy, too tired, and too worried about the coming day to notice the coming storm.

But here is the script for the horror movie that has already begun now that the theatre has been cleared of the audience from the drama just ended: gather the angry, the frightened, the exhausted, the patriots of their half of a divided country, then keep the facts away from them, offer them their very own villains, let them have their guns everywhere, give them the illusion of influence, enlist an old testament god, demonize the opposition, diminish the authority and integrity of the free press, raid our schools to pay for mansions and citadels, reduce all complexities to the binary, neglect the lessons of history, ignore misery, reward ignorance, create an earlier golden age now lost to degeneracy, blame the vulnerable for all victories delayed by mercy, and allow – unaware - the inner toddler, and if necessary, the inner savage the power to conjure and to defend the inhuman, all so that one day our fates are no more than the destiny of an invulnerable few, and we are no longer governed, but monitored.

There is, however, much ground to cover before the point is made, and a few vital subjects to discuss along the way, the most important of which are love, language, conscience, imagination, astonishment, science, and politics, though because I must rely upon words to make my point, it is with language that I must begin. As a great British writer suggested, language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is, and as I would say in reply, it is just such a refusal that it is now my mixed pleasure to offer you, though first know that ours is precisely the kind of staggering moment in history for which our words were made.

Yet the words I would use to make my case have been taken from our reach. The best of them, the ones with ancient roots, with a poetry to their sound, and with a royal lineage of kindred yet often rival meanings, have been altered with strategic indifference to effect, and now serve a differing purpose.

Words should be transparent, permitting us a glimpse of whatever bright fragment of the world a word is fashioned to reveal in the light of its shared meaning, though when a word suddenly takes on unfamiliar new meanings, not after trial by public use and private assessment, but because our ad men and their commercial masters have so decided, then transparency fades to translucency, and the latter to mere obscurity, though there lies a fragile hope in the thought that when there is no word left to describe a thing, the best description of that thing is then the thing itself, if it has not been driven from existence.

Thus, the words I would speak to praise, to defend, to honor have been wasted upon merchandise, while the words I would use to warn, to accuse, to condemn have been spent upon making what is thoughtful appear threatening instead. Or to use a metaphor that has some hope of catching your divided attention, these words have been made into zombies, seeming at first no different from when last we had met them, and yet upon our reunion, the change they have suffered is tragically clear, and now, ruled by new masters, they shuffle vacantly past us, unaware of what they once had meant to their grateful couriers.

Consider this statement as an example: where there is love, there is hope, where there is hope, there is progress, and where there is progress, there is a future. Every word of this is meaningful, the words together clear and bright, and yet while the sound - and the only meaning they once had offered - is still hopeful and deeply felt, there is now another sound, one that comes from our uncertainty about what these words still mean, a sound that seems to ask: “what was just said?”, while at this troubling moment in our history, the reply just could be: what I just said is, “what do you think about that for a campaign slogan?” Marketing, and thus politics, its fraternal twin, has become our new dictionary.

Some words have this second sound to them, a kind of echo, not so much heard as understood. There is, for instance, something about the sound of the word “must” that I often find troubling. I am not referring to its use as an urgent call to required action, as when a parent tells a child that they must obey certain rules for their protection. I am instead referring to its use as a public reminder of a moral responsibility, as when someone tells us that we must find a way to make the world a better place, as I myself have done and will again. The first sound is simply its common meaning as a moral, legal, or ethical necessity, and for most words the established definition is the only sound we hear.

But for the word “must”, as for others now, that second sound, often not fully conscious, is the recognition that against the backdrop of current circumstance, it has another meaning, one belonging to a different word. For “must”, this second sound I sometimes hear could be translated as futility, or better, the fear of futility, or better yet, the weariness that comes of the fear of futility. It is as if, in reply to this word, we whisper to ourselves: yes, of course we must; there is no sane alternative, and yet…and yet this has been asked of us so many times before by so many people of conscience without once succeeding in awakening those who are still sleeping past the sounding alarms, and this audible shadow, this second sound will then assure that “must” is weakened and made to seem instead a lesser word like “should”, while mere wish, rather than conviction, turns commandment into demure appeal. So, when I use the word “must” in what follows, allow no second sound, and know that something vital is being asked of you.

Also, I have noted recently that some of our best and most thoughtful political writers, women and men devoted to the truth and thus aware of both the power of words and the approach of the inhuman, will often string several compelling adjectives before a noun, like a brood of young following their mother, where tradition and modesty of style might otherwise recommend just one. I have done this myself when I feel that a noun needs a strong supporting cast of adjectives if the point is to be clearly made - after all, a noun without an adjective can be a lifeless thing, powerless to evoke an image and the feelings which that imagery naturally invites.

Yet I worry that ultimately this is an almost useless strategy because these adjectives, and the power they should have to reveal the crucial details - lights shone upon a darkened form - will either be discounted by those who do not want this enlightenment, or, by their number, diluted in their effect for those who do. Nevertheless, strong, precise, accurate, and expressive adjectives are urgently needed, and I would ask that you not let their number lessen their value, and that you welcome each one of them as allies to the cause.

Some things, perhaps most things, perhaps even all things which are most human need to be expressed in words, no matter how few, just as other things are best expressed by music, or sculpture, or dance as well, but what if the words we need to construct our worlds and tell our stories have lost their power – if their meanings have been so foreshortened and diminished, so transformed by alien reference, or so sickened by their time spent with nonsense that they carry no meaning to which we will attend anymore? Then, as in certain raucous movies where the image is equal to the word, we roam among enemies, the image made real by what remains of imagining.

I find it difficult to trust a word that has been asked to hold too much or to keep concealed within it meanings that are its opposites. Confronted by essential words whose traditional definitions have been riddled by their waste upon trivia, many of us now try to restore their power by placing before them a word starting with the alphabet’s sixth letter and ending with “-ing”. I don’t object to this tactic – I have used it myself to make a point – I object to the need to use it and to a loss of meaning so great that to express an urgent thought, I must add the emotions conveyed by our most effective forbidden adjective in order to shore up a word’s fading power.

Emotion should not need to be added to a word, it should be contained within it and kept safe from those who would plunder it for their own narrow purpose, and if any think that we, who are made of words, could bear a world in which the millions of remaining words in the thousands of surviving languages had been bleached not only of their meanings but of the traditions that had once provided those meanings with a shared utility and poetic resonance, then you are, quite literally, at a loss for words, a loss that is your own, though because you are one of us, thus ours as well.

I confess (and again, the word is not too strong) words often fail me now, and I am not used to that kind of silence, to a stuttering to give form to a nameless truth. Yet although this can be disquieting, it also offers a chance, however small, to search for a way to express what lies beyond the words that I can command (or that have command of me), and if nothing more, I know that what lies past the far boundaries of language is either the wondrous or the monstrous – with the first, I feel at home and need no words, but with the second, I find myself wandering among ominous, lumbering shapes I cannot name, and without a fitting name, I cannot know whether to battle them unarmed, or to find wisdom in ignorance, and retreat to warn others of their approach with whatever words may sound the needed alarm.

So, is there anything that I, or anyone, could say that would, by itself and as a consequence of its statement, change the world? Are there words, in any number, any order, any language, any perfecting revision that could persuade you? Although the thought of impossibility offends me, I think the answer must be no. Who can I reach with words alone, and who must I reach, no matter the instrumentality of my labor? Many, even now, contribute to a better world, but these are the ones who have written their own call to action, and do not need my own.

Of the rest, many are silenced by circumstance, though they would speak if they were free, and so it is for those who will not act for all that I would want to make conscience from malice or dreary comfort, yet this would require a living assemblage of words which would descend upon us like a celestial decree written in blood or flame, and I do not have this power, nor, I fear, does anyone.

So, in the absence of the infallible articulation, to what call to gentle arms would we all willingly attend? There are two ideas, differing starkly from each other and yet secretly allied, which might have the power to guide us, though they must first be made into words before they can begin the pursuit of their destiny and thus our own. The first of these, the one in which there lies great hope, is carried by these four words “what still could be”, while the second, the one in which there lies only sorrow, is born by these four others “what might have been”, the muted scream of possibilities forever lost, and the most haunting words I know.

These ideas serve as the boundaries of the possible - one cradling our noblest dreams, the other signifying the agonized recognition of irretrievable loss, and between them lies everything that is human. I may not mention these two ideas again so that they may shed the words that gave them substance here and deepen into truth, but they will be our worthy escorts as we proceed.

So, the challenge is to discuss matters with you that many deeply caring people have already publicly examined with both intelligence and passion yet without having awakened us to collective action. How then do we cast a new and more revealing light upon these same matters in a way that will make very clear the greed, arrogance, and cruelty (the qualities I most passionately oppose) of most of those who have ever taken power, whether by birth, wealth, or brute force, and of those who even now would rule us in an age which should demand instead that we rid ourselves at last of those who cannot see and cannot love and cannot change, and of a form of thought so dark, so resistant to the light which others cast that it would seem grotesque even (perhaps especially) to the insane, and of men who guard against any truth or any progress that does not serve their heartless purpose.

I have neither the wisdom nor the authority to tend to even a fraction of the better words which have been wounded by modernity and which we will need returned to health (and perhaps to battle) if our language is to do more than trouble silence and to advertise. And please note that the primary language of the ad is not of words – in the typical ad there are sounds that sound like words, though their purpose is not to offer meaning, but rather to serve as a kind of auditory hypnotic, and accompanied by the upbeat notes of the jingle, they work to assure the primacy of the image whose own purpose is to create a longing for what the ad men want so desperately to sell us, though because a longing is the desire for something you fear that you can never have, is that typical ad a source of any substance at all, or, for most, little more than a loud and glossy taunt, one that uses words the same way a pusher hawks his pills?

Ultimately, the difference between being able to convey our thoughts effectively, and forever struggling to express ourselves, is the difference between a life of meaning and one that is spent in frustration and despair. This has little to do with one’s vocabulary, it is rather the ability – one which can be taught to every child – to be aware of how we feel and to work to give our feelings an even greater substance by guiding them to the words that will serve their will, and speaking those to those who then will listen.

Or, as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, the limits of our language mean the limits of our world, and I believe this means, among other things, that if we continue to segregate ourselves from others, from our communities, even from those members of our families whom we view as political renegades, there is the risk that as we isolate ourselves from the world, our language would turn inward as well, threatening to devolve into jargon, while the meaning of our most vital words would begin to slither towards their antonyms, and language fracture into tribal dialects that would divide us even further.

But though my own powers here are limited, there are three words I will try to nurse back to a semblance of health in the hope that, while sitting up from their sick-beds, they can help guide me as I continue here, a guidance which may, for instance, include the suggestion that I end this medical metaphor before it wounds the patient it seeks to heal.

Those words are love, astonishment, and imagination – love because the meaning of this sacred word has been diluted by the likes of mere liking and desire (though love itself remains immortal); astonishment because too few seem to understand its great power, and because it just might be a strangely secret synonym for love; and imagination because without it, neither love nor astonishment could make and keep the magic they must always have the power to offer us.

So, what is it we know about love? Well, we know that it is what makes one make of car that car, that it can be inspired by certain foods and cleaning products, that its most potent contemporary symbol is money, that it is what young ladies dream of finding and young men pretend for them to find, that it is ultimately nothing more than the lunar high tide of human neurochemistry, and that it commonly fades away over time and is even more commonly then replaced by one of its many less romantic opposites, like hostility, contempt, rage, vengeance, bitterness, resentment, and of course, eternal hatred.

This was satire, or so I hope you noticed, though even if it was no more than childish sarcasm, it was meant to portray our tragically muddled views on the subject of love, arguably the most important subject of them all. Yet what is love and how do we know what true love truly is?

What if, for instance, love is not an emotion at all, but rather an ecstatically unguarded welcoming, if it is an act of imagination in which a sacred place within our hearts is cleared, a silent invitation sent, and all that is best within us comes forward and gathers in that place – joy, compassion, hope, courage, understanding, empathy, trust, desire, faith, tranquility, gratitude, awe, pride, admiration, humility, curiosity, patience, delight, playfulness, warmth, and kindness, and whomever is then called to join this gathering will be granted a kind of immortality, and forever after be our beloved. Then would true love be the exultant union of our humanity with a worshiped other whose inward presence leads us towards the divine, making us more human still.

But if lurching from humorless satire to this undisciplined metaphysics was uncomfortable, then I am pleased, because I do not want you to be comfortable. I want only one of two things from you – either a willingness to bear agonizing witness to the unbearable, and to have unyielding faith that our world need not be this way, or, if all you can see is a world which brute necessity and natural law have made a simple inevitability, then I want very much to teach you that you are the reason this revolution is now as much a moral obligation as would be caring for an unloved child, as you yourself must once have been.

We have lost our faith in love. We have been lead away from its light, away from the vital knowledge that love is the most powerful, the most curative, the most transformative force in all the world, and the consequence of this loss can only be still greater loss. Modernity has made it easy, and in certain ways even soothing, to believe that love, the sacred passion which for millennia has born all that is best in us, is finally no more than the vaudevillian theatrics of human physiology as scripted by our genetic inheritance and its dispassionate commandment of survival and reproduction.

It is almost as if we have been taught that love is no more than the greatest feeling for another that we could ever know, so when the day comes at last that we feel the greatest feeling for another that we have ever known, we will believe that it is love, and when it fades, we will believe that love fades, too, and so we move on, discouraged, but still in hopeful pursuit of another sweet dose of our own endorphins (the better angels of our chemistry), even though this would mean that love is a relationship with ourselves, with no more than our own bodies, while the other, the once beloved other becomes little more than a convenient source of the external stimuli needed to provoke the desired process to transient life.

So, what is love, you ask (and do you need to ask?). To answer, we first accept that although there are some places where only words can bring us, there are still others where even words cannot go, or can but cannot lead the way, and love is the latter case, leaving words to wonder at a thing which even our poets struggle to portray. And disregard what our dictionaries tell us, because although I feel strongly that dictionaries are one of the foundation stones upon which human civilization rests, I have yet to find one whose definition of love doesn’t sound as if written by someone who has never known love at all.

But I offer you the following and hope that it awakens the memory of what you wanted most when, like all of us, you were wrenched from the contented inanimate and forced into a thunderous place, half too bright, half too dark, and visited by hands as big as you and faces that filled the sky, and where the only thing that clothed you, that kept the world from trembling apart, that soothed the flawless vulnerability of your infancy, was love. But if that love is missing, and we are left to tremble alone, then can a savage be born.

For a time, any sentence beginning with the declaration that there are “two kinds of people in the world” lead me to assume that whatever observation then followed would be a useless simplification of the truth it was meant to reveal, that it was no more than a clichéd preface to a statement that I would inevitably find of little worth. It was love that taught me better. First, with love as later guide, I realized that my assumption kept me from more closely examining what another was offering, and that by doing so, I was offering nothing more than an assumption, one which was, upon reflection, too often wrong.

Yet more importantly, I one day came upon a truth that is well served by that useful simplification, and it is this: of the many among us who have been gravely wounded by early circumstance, there are indeed two kinds of people in this world: those who would never do to another what was done to them, and those who will insist upon doing to others what was done to them. It is, of course, the first kind (for whom the word kind provides another meaning) who know what it means to love, while the second know love only as a frailty to be used against the first. Some whose hearts were broken will always want to heal another’s if they can, or at least never then to break one, while others are, towards others, too broken not to break.

Love is the truest magic whose most commanding spell can transform a predatory animal into a human being on his inexorable way towards the divine. There is simply no power in all the world as great as genuine love, which is the source of all hope and will always triumph over sorrow and loss, and which, when genuine, does not ever fade away. Love will overrule instinct and self-interest, and loosen the rigid boundaries of personal identity which then reach outward to embrace those who will become the part of us we cannot then live without.

But in truth, I do not know the words, nor the lyric order in which to place them, that would speak of love as love would want, though conceding this, I have read through the list of quotes that I have kept for many years where I found a few which say of love what far too many still need to hear:

Whoso loves, believes the impossible - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Love is the only truly rational act – Stephen Levine

Love is our truest destiny and we will not find the meaning of life on our own, for we can only find it with someone we love – Thomas Merton

There is in man's nature, a secret inclination and motion towards love of others, which if it be not spent upon someone or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many, and maketh men become humane and charitable – Francis Bacon

They do not love that do not show their love – William Shakespeare

It is love’s power that those on divergent paths can travel together, and learn before journey’s end that to search for their differing grails is to find the same destiny, and to know that it is sacred - Unknown

The definition of insane is the inability to relate to another human being – it is the inability to love - Richard Yates

And lastly (for the moment):

In love, the purest joy and a profound vulnerability must co-exist, and yet no refuge is more enduring than love, nor mortal guardian as shielding, and where there is no love, neither is there sanctuary – Unknown

From the moment of our birth until whatever age we are when we allow ourselves to be convinced that the world is more rational than it has yet become, we all want above all to love and to be loved in turn, and yet nearly every one of us, under the relentless pressure of mature opinion, comes to believe the world is sane, or at least a place where surely there is shelter somewhere if the darkness comes for us, but because this strangely tranquil view is refuted every day by the news, it can only be preserved despite these facts by a narrowing of awareness and a devaluing of intelligence, and thus are we converted into that tragic form of realist who will not notice his own heart sink when he finally concedes that magic is for children alone, and love is only a kind of dream – vivid, deeply felt, and worthy of remembrance, yet destined to fade at daylight.

But there is a love story of a kind that I want you to hear, a true story that would remind us of the irrefutable power of genuine love even when, perhaps especially when, confronted by death, though before I borrow from history to make my point, you should keep in mind that the following extraordinary moment took place during the Victorian era when the public expression of love, by either word or gesture, was considered impolite and thus discouraged.

Yet on the night of April 15th, 1912, an officer of the RMS Titanic, then in command of a lifeboat already lowered into the water and moving away from the foundering ship, heard something that he would never forget, and here I must quote Second Officer Lightholler himself: "what I remember about that night - what I will remember as long as I live - is the people crying out to each other as the stern began to plunge down. I heard people crying out, 'I love you'".

In my opinion, among all the countless number of gathered details about that night, the personal stories, historical documents, official testimony, articles, books, and movies about the Titanic, this one fact, stated with such quiet simplicity (and you can almost hear in his imagined voice an astonishment so great that he would have struggled all his life to accept its larger meaning) is by far the single most important fact of all.

Yet, if you have ever truly loved another, then you still do, and need no more from me or anyone…but if you have not, and if this most human of longings still has claim upon your heart, then travel off towards the brightest light you see, and never wander from the path that it will carve out from the darkness, and never forget love’s gentle commandment: another than you.

As a single, prevalent theme, not only for this video, but for our common future and its progress, why not love? Every sublime human quality is an inseparable part of love, which then makes love the bright and welcoming home of all that is best in us, while every desolate or ruinous trait is, to love, the unnatural enemy of us all. Forgive – or better, understand - my certainty, but there is no rational doubt that love is both source and affirmation of compassion, imagination, devotion, patience, tolerance, and the capacity for joy and creative achievement, yet also that love, by its selfless nature, stands forever against greed, arrogance, and cruelty, which together form the dark sub-theme of all that I will say and all that I oppose.

Argue against this, if you wish, but defend your position clearly, if you can, and then await with a semblance of courage the passionate expression of incredulous disapproval which that position would so deservedly inspire, and then, perhaps, learn at last what you do not know, though must if you want to know happiness as well.

Though I will say no more for now on the subject of love, a subject for which there is no conclusion except to love, I have saved for you a final quote, one that possesses an intricacy as exquisite as love’s, and a wisdom which required much well-rewarded thought before I could begin to see past its seeming darkness to more fully understand its singular brilliance:

To him who is completely empty of love, existence can become a burden, but never a hell - Ludwig Binswanger

But now that Dr. Binswanger has astonished you (whether you know it yet or not), onward to astonishment…

Where “love” is a word threatened by the rabble of distracted meanings that we have forced upon it, “astonishment” is instead threatened by an obscurity as unwarranted as love’s perverse commercial fame. Part of this obscurity is to the unearned credit of our advertisers who have left this word alone because it has three more syllables than they can manage (which is why an advertisement is called an ad), but it is also because this word points to a state of mind and heart which, like magic, is not something with which a modern adult is supposed to be concerned – ours is, after all, an age that seems to want us scheduled for both perpetual motion (which too often is only action without accomplishment) and constant dialog (which too often is no more than two synchronized monologues). But astonishment asks something very different of us.

When it is genuine and not instead mere bewilderment or surprise, astonishment, born from an openness to both immensity and novelty, is always transformative, and yet it is more than just a momentary disbelief on a scale to make adventure from monotony, it is instead our encounter with something which is so out of place with all that had ever come before, or so at glaring odds with rational expectation that identity itself, our most deeply rooted sense of personal worth and awareness, is altered by its entry into our world and by our subsequent memory of that experience. Upon astonishment, words withdraw until they are needed again, and those that return first are the ones whose meaning is best suited for that moment, the ones least weakened, we hope, by our arrogant abuse of language.

With the thought that the more meaningful something is, the more within us rises up to greet it, astonishment is then our reaction to whatever possesses so much meaning, whether it is beautiful or grotesque (and there is no third, except when astonishment grows into lasting wonder), that the mind cannot assess this meaning at once, but must first create for it an inward dwelling place and clear a path before we give it access to awareness and offer it to memory.

How many of us, however, still allow ourselves to be thus thunderstruck (and it is from the Latin word for thunder that “astonishment” was formed)? An event will astonish us not as much because of its deviation from experience, but because of its disparity with expectation, and it is far more disorienting when a moment is at odds with an enlightened innocence than with the comfortably familiar.

Yet you once lived in a constant state of astonishment. There is a time in every life, from its first minutes until our daily routines refuse entrance to the miraculous, when each moment is without precedent and everything possesses life, when objects which, to a jaded adult, are unworthy of notice are seen to be kindred and rimmed with an animate fire. For most, however, this ecstatic vulnerability to enormity does not survive maturity (the latter another word to rescue, at another time). But this loss of an openness to the extraordinary is, though common, not inevitable, and if lost, can be restored.

I know that I may risk the loss of your interest in astonishment were I to indulge in a repetitious emphasis of its covenant with what is vast (and Sophocles warned that nothing which is vast enters the lives of mortals without a curse, though I disagree), and so I will tell you why I have roused it from its troubled sleep to work towards revolution, and why it will, like love, serve this cause so well – because astonishment renders us mute, because like birds fleeing in advance of the first charged edge of a nearing storm, words take silent shelter before astonishment, knowing they have nothing to offer until thought, the parent and child of language, resumes its tenuous control and deepens the meaning which the heart was first to understand.

Astonishment is the translation of whatever has brought us astonishment into feeling, into thought, and, it could be said, into being - it is the measure of the enormity of that source, like knowing the size of a meteorite by the hole it has gouged from the world, an analogy of destruction, I grant, but astonishment is always destructive, though only to ignorance, conformity, and thoughtless contentment - it is truth’s forced-entry into our hearts.

The thought of welcoming astonishment back into your world may trouble those of you whose worlds have been carefully designed to get by without it, worlds that have been constructed with exquisite care for the demands of the modern adult. You are, after all, disciplined and organized, your countless appointments are delicately balanced against the need to work and to sleep (though you suffer from too much of the first and not enough of the second), and you may already feel astonished enough by the ad-infested sampling of the news you glimpse, news which, depending upon the channel, will leave you both frightened and misinformed, feeling like a soldier ordered to attack the enemy by launching your rations at its armored columns.

Under such conditions, any greater sense of astonishment must seem a senseless luxury, like watching a magic act meant for young children and trying to find the trick which gives the illusion of magic while forgetting that the magic is real and in the keeping of the children.

Astonishment, however, is not a rabbit pulled from the magician’s hat, it is a magician pulled from the rabbit’s, and this may be what keeps you from welcoming astonishment back into your life – you fear that astonishment will exhaust you, pushing you from a merely unrelenting weariness into a fatigue so crippling that it could ruin the fragile machinery by which you manage your breathless schedule.

But no. You are not tired, you are asleep, and true astonishment will awaken you, and from thinnest air it will pull from the hat not the rabbit, nor even the magician, but you.

Of astonishment it can also be said that while some are astonished sometimes, and some, having surrendered the magic of childhood to an impenetrable maturity, may never again be astonished, there are a few who are astonished at every moment, and it is these few, the ones for whom astonishment is a way of being, who should be the teachers of our children and, because no adult is more than half so, the other half the child they used to be, it is these few who should teach us all because they possess one of the greatest human gifts: an awareness of the enduring presence of the magical so unwavering that they can greet what they have seen many times before as if it were the first time. And it is this magic which helps reveal the bond between astonishment and love, because to love is to be forever astonished by those we love.

It also seems that as a moment of astonishment begins to fade into its hushed after-glow, imagination assumes command of the long passage towards thought’s return – at first, it is a vague sense of motion without imagery, but then an animate swirl of faint outlines, strange forms beginning to emerge from a back-lit but dark gray mist, and finally there is light and our theatre’s curtains are drawn, and all this because there was some great truth that had been swaddled within astonishment, a truth that was both astonishment’s cause and effect, though at first too vast and intense to appear as truth, so the mind is cleared away of all judgment and sensation until imagination can reveal it as a truth worth adding to the others which we hold most dear.

I offer this because I now often find some new story so astonishing that when this inner drama plays out, I am left with an awareness which, while agonized, is nevertheless in bright contrast to those duller moments when we are witness to the inhuman yet feel nothing, or no more than a brief annoyance at being disturbed from our waking sleep, and please note that it is possible for something which is not surprising at all to be nevertheless astonishing.

But an example: I recently read a statement made by an official associated with the incoming administration which, though only one among a multitude, was as grotesque, as thoughtless, and as emotionally vacant and intellectually primitive as many of those others, and though I could be forgiven for having already grown too tired by the day’s events to protest - even if only inwardly - I was still left astonished by its unaccountable stupidity (which is not an absence of intelligence, but rather intelligence badly used), and I was glad that I was, because it was then as if that statement was the first genuinely monstrous thing I had ever heard and thus was its depravity made clear, rather than lessened by inclusion in a long list of moments of equivalent indecency, and so once again did an undiminished capacity for astonishment save me from discounting news that was indefensible, and I believe that no beast, however fierce, if gifted with the capacity for speech, would ever have made such a statement – savagery is Man’s alone, and the unfailing capacity for astonishment, love, and as I will soon remind you, imagining, is our only steadfast defense against its final rule.

Love and astonishment are each a kind of benevolent apocalypse. Both sweep away the parts of us that we have worked since childhood to fashion, the parts that allow us to manage a world which requires us to pretend that we were never children at all, or at least that childhood is an extravagance at odds with a productive maturity, a strange demand since pretending is the better part of children’s play.

We are born with the expectation that the world will be beautiful, magical, and safe, that people will be creative, playful, and honest, and that life will be filled with love, joy, and adventure, and even for those children whose experience does not refute this, growing up too often means forgetting how the world enchanted us when first we entered here, and how its simplest moments would fascinate.

But find something that will astonish you, or better still, find someone to love and ride the shockwaves of that joyful undoing to self-mastery and then you will be astonished over and over again every day, whether by the beauty of love, or by the sorrow of its rarity.

Both strangely and not, there are only a few quotes about astonishment, far fewer certainly than love and imagination, though I offer three with the hope that one day, some of you may add your own, and by doing so, make less likely that this word and the vaster world it has to offer will ever again be forgotten.

Astonishment is the root of philosophy - Paul Tillich

Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible - Eugene Ionesco

Astonishment is a kind of birth, a return not just to an earlier time of life, but to the earliest time of all, a replaying of how the world must have seemed that first instant the light appeared and we, an inescapable openness, began - no precedents, no memories, no attendants, no words, no thoughts, no guides – then, no surprise at all that all we could do was cry; yet later, if an openness to the world is permitted to endure, the tears become wonder, the provocateur of astonishment – Unknown

With this in mind, I ask: is it not astonishing that a fanatical obedience to a thoughtless ideology has replaced a shared commitment to serving others; that a faith built upon on a philosophy of love, acceptance, and forgiveness has given way to a sacred devotion to wealth, power, and unholy vengeance; that the health and welfare of women and children – our greatest source of magic – has not been made our first priority; that the universal truths and empirical facts which underwrite our world are now questioned by our leaders; that the governing mechanism of civilization itself is money rather than love; that a person’s color – and this grotesque absurdity must be emphasized – their color, rather than seen as another element of human beauty, is used instead to identify an opponent; that science, the patron of knowledge, meaning, progress, and security is disputed or casually discounted; that journalism, one of the guardians of democracy, has been wounded by corporate self-interest and alternative versions of current events; that poverty is judged a moral failing while ignorance and prejudice are quietly encouraged; that it would take half of the world’s population to equal the financial worth of just five men; that our leaders are knowingly drafted from the ranks of the arrogant and self-absorbed; that the most admired form of power is autocratic rather than altruistic; that the early symptoms of a lethal planetary fever are proudly dismissed as mere fiction; and that a man who not only lacks the emotional maturity and intellectual curiosity of a young child, but is unrestrained by conscience and the capacity for benevolent action, has now taken command of the world’s greatest financial and military power, and seems fully prepared to ignore all other sources of legitimate authority - is it not astonishing?

Though it is surely a defining human quality, astonishment too often does not survive into adulthood as a guiding passion. For many, exposed long enough to the corrosives of the modern world (whose modernity is growing old and fragile), all that may be left of astonishment is a restlessness both troubling in its reach and urgent in its call to act, though I fear that the actions then taken would return us to a darker time, rather than redeem us.

Yet I believe that if the average adult’s diminished capacity for astonishment could be increased by just half – back to the purity and intensity of an older child – then all the world, its mirror wiped clean, would at last begin its call for sanity, bringing chaos only to chaos itself, and making the possibility, real for the first time in our history, of a love offered to all by all. Our capacity for astonishment is an abiding source of hope, and for now, that is enough, and more than enough.

But if you fear that you have lost your capacity for astonishment – which is no less than the will to remain open to experience even when it sweeps through you like a storm-wind - keep in mind that there are forms of astonishment with which, I must hope, you are already familiar - like laughter, whose grating sound and seeming grimace are signs that something has penetrated and overthrown ordinary awareness and, having done so, left you more open to accepting – even when it requires courage – the other forms of astonishment as well, like joy, grief, and wonder.

Yet if not, fear not – the child in you remembers.

That which astonishes us may always seem to come from outside of us, as the news of the day can suggest, yet the role our imagination plays is vital, not only as accomplice to astonishment’s creative destruction of careless tranquility, but as the source of astonishment whenever the news so clearly fails a larger truth that imagination must then complete a story left untold, and from this we can learn that if we imagine bravely, and if, by doing so, we open ourselves to our world and to ourselves, we may find that we are astonished as much by what is within us as by what is not, and will then need the news only to arm us for peaceful action, rather than for horror’s brief reminder that we are still human, after all.

Or better yet, imagine what our world would be like were love to govern, and astonishment will inevitably follow and never be far behind because one of the great virtues of astonishment is that although we can be exhausted by fear, sorrow, doubt, anger, and discouragement (which may be another form of exhaustion), astonishment, like love itself, can only serve to awaken us, as if upon the end of a perfect sleep, and this suggests that astonishment and love may not be not emotions, after all, but rather states of mind, perhaps even of being, that prepare our inner world for our emotional reply.

Without astonishment, we are just organic machinery with a flair for the dramatic, and if I were to choose the quality which is, with love, the most important for our humanity and thus our progress, it would be our capacity for astonishment because it asks of us a willing vulnerability to the drama of life and an openness to each experience without which we would come to feel little more than a secret impatience for our final, unapplauded bow.

I also fear that without the capacity for genuine astonishment, without this readiness to find the extraordinary in the monotonous, or the monstrous in the ordinary, we are defenseless against those who do not care, we are defenseless against the most dangerously heartless people in the world, and I don’t know how to say this any more clearly than that. Yet in this world, to live with astonishment is to be a rebel, and whether you want this role or not, you are very much needed, and for any who are frightened by this thought, I would add that in this world, to live without astonishment is to be either a collaborator or a casualty.

Please note that the bright astonishment at whatever brings us truth, justice, and love will here be called joy, while the dark astonishment at what betrays our expectation of truth, justice, and love will here be called horror, and if you feel that either word is too strong, then your ability to be astonished has been worn down, and instead of horror at what is monstrous, you feel the same resigned exhaustion as would an animal being lulled to sleep by the clattering of the train that is shipping it to slaughter, and instead of joy at what is magnificent, you feel mere relief, a small, brief pleasure that something has broken the monotony of your waking hours, and if so, this revolution should begin within you, and with the realization of how much has been taken from you, a realization which, if honest, will be accompanied by a sense of horror that will begin your journey to freedom.

With joy and horror now as guides (though this may feel like having as our escort to the prom both a poet and a thug), I will soon turn at last to the subject of the opposing sides in this revolution, and that there are opposing sides at all on the subject of what we are and who we must become, and that those sides are now locked in a ruinous stalemate is one of the better reasons for astonishment and for the revolution it would chaperon. First, however, I want to bring imagination into the light (or bring us into its) because no subject, even love, is more important here or, as I hope to show, anywhere else if the better world we can imagine is finally to be born.

Imagination – unlike love, this word (or more precisely, the private theatre which this word should light) does not need to be won back from our advertisers, and unlike astonishment, this word does not need to be brought out of the obscurity of disuse. Its meaning is well known, if only to the ones who possess it and give it sovereignty, but although none can give it to the dreamless, perhaps I can help it to re-emerge for those whose imagination has been self-censored, or, by others, made to sleep.

In the first case, for those with an especially free and vivid imagination in a world so immersed in the daily news and dramatic re-enactment of suffering, imagination may become so haunting that just to get through a life already over-spent by obligation, to imagine at all may be assessed a luxury which, like a home we cannot afford, is more a liability than endurance would allow or bravery achieve. In the second case, there are some who let others imagine for them, and although they could imagine for themselves, they instead permit our media to fill the role their own imaginations would far better play, and quite possibly for the same reasons as those who, to secure serenity, keep imagination from its destined role.

If I go to a movie that arouses the passions which are most hopeful for their expression, has imagination been given substance, or replaced? For some, of course, a movie of great artistic power can incite imagination to continue the story after the movie has ended, thus providing the cast and props for inwardly producing our own sequel. Yet others seem satisfied to have been given by others what imagination, in the absence of the external, would otherwise have worked to offer, leaving the capacity to dream weakened and less able to guide us through those moments when it is best not first to act, but rather to imagine.

Know – or remember – that when a beloved dream comes true, the dream does not become reality – instead, reality becomes the dream, and this, too, is a vital form of magic.

Imagination is the sacred place where we can have conversations with the dead and in this way not only still speak with them, but for them as well, and thus is conscience imagination’s other name. It is also where our memories are brought to life, because a memory is not the same as a remembrance – the latter is a living thing, with literally a life of its own, where a memory is only an image recalled. And as feelings will rummage among words for their proper names and thus the power to journey beyond their natural realm, imagination is the place where feelings go to put on bright costumes and perform their play, and by doing so, tell the story of their quest – imagination is the heart’s dressing room.

Yet beyond all, imagination has its honored place herein because without it, compassion, which is the ability to envision yourself in another’s world and to feel as the other feels, would be impossible, and without compassion, love itself would fade from the anthology of vital human qualities, for how could we love someone if we cannot imagine our way into their hearts to see all that is there to adore, and to bring back from that magical journey the grateful astonishment from which our love is then born into its rightful immortality.

But with the thought that my own imagination may not be up to the task of conveying to you its vital and enduring importance, I again quote a few who would, I imagine, know more than I:

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, and without it, we go nowhere - Carl Sagan

Imagination rules the world - Napoleon Bonaparte

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world - Albert Einstein

Our imagination flies, and we are its shadow upon the earth - Vladimir Nabokov

Those who possess a free and vibrant imagination can build entire worlds from nothing more than wish, worlds different from our own and worthy of our travel, and if they have an artist’s gift, they can share those worlds with those who cannot build their own yet who will be made more human by their visit there – Unknown

To these five, I would add only that imagination’s finest role is not in merely envisioning what could be, but in straining to envision what cannot be, and by doing so, make it so. I have even come to believe that there will come a time when human progress will have brought us to a realm where imagining and reality will be, if not identical, then at least so intimately interwoven that each will be made of the same enduring substance and only their differing names will mark the unguarded border between them.

It also seems that at times, when very tired or very calm and still, we can find ourselves at the outer reaches of imagining, in a place past the realms where words must drop away, and in that place there are, I believe, realities so far beyond our own, not in their distance but in their nature, that we could hope to grasp them at all only by first fashioning the language that would allow our entrance there, a language as rich and varied as music or mathematics or the ones we speak, though so new to us and differing that there could be no analogy found among our stock of metaphors (a stock which forms another form of language), and yet more than this, still further out beyond our present sensibilities, there may be something even more astonishing – wordless languages we could only begin to master were we first to discover the distant realities which they are waiting to portray for us, realities that are beyond the ones that are beyond our own.

But more to the point, I believe that if you try bravely enough to imagine at least certain kinds of misery (while accepting that some will be too much for you to bear), you can sometimes come quite close to what it must be like to feel it, even if you have never known that kind of misery yourself - close enough to know what those who live with it day after day must endure because of those who cannot imagine anything at all, and once you have, it is impossible to forget, and impossible not to act, whether by helping those who suffer, or by fighting those who act to make their suffering a cruel inevitability.

Without imagination, we cannot dream, and ours is a time when dreams are desperately needed, though a brave new dream is struggling to be born, a dream that seems made of the secret longings of us all, or perhaps it is an ancient dream which has waited through a troubled sleep for the light that would begin its waking, yet either way, it is the conflict between that dream and the dreamless world it would transform that has led us to this time, a time threatened not as much by ravenous herds of ragged men finding satisfaction in butchery, but by those who have power and a gift for strategy unguided by compassion, and where there is no compassion, there is no imagination (for they are kindred), and a fantasy life, however filled with dramatic detail, which excludes those in need or does not lead to the wish to serve many, is no more than a grim store of visualizations meant to serve just one, and I would say to you without fear of rational opposition that whatever has power in this troubled world and is not also a moral force must be judged by conscience to be immoral.

These truths are immutable, and no experience or its discounting, no history or its forgetting, no dream or its abandoning, no loss or its stifled mourning, and neither any one nor any god could ever take them from us or diminish their true worth. Yet all our lives their creative light has been obscured and their ability to bring us joy undone, and we have been kept from their brilliance by men driven by fear and anger and sullen resentment, and prodded towards anarchy by those whose tragic estrangement from love requires a chaos that will distract them from the howling emptiness and eternal night within.

But these truths not only light our path, they light the rubble placed to block our way, and thus for the best, they will inspire, while for the worst, they will incite, so watch closely and listen carefully whenever a cause makes claim of these truths as if theirs alone because they belong instead to everyone.

Before leaving the subject of these three sacred words, I warn you against using them without the reverence which they deserve, and which we require for our progress, so know, or remember, that you do not love your car, the score of a game cannot bring you astonishment, and picturing savagery is never an act of imagination.

Now that I have enlisted love, astonishment, and imagination as our steadfast companions here, I turn to the forces who even now stand in opposition to each other, but who must soon meet on the bloodless battlefield of passionate and unyielding debate if we are finally to be rid of the one and lead by the other towards the universal freedom to fashion our lives made joyous by love, made thoughtful by astonishment, and made generous by imagination, and of that generosity please know that it not only reveals a love of others, but a faith in the future as well, because to give to others, especially to those you do not know, requires the belief that your actions will echo into a time beyond your own and that others will hear it and be made better as a consequence - as long as the words which carry this news still have the power to inform.

And of both the power and fragility of words, a final few words as warning: is there a word so unspoiled by modernity, or so rarely used, or so obscure, or so new that it could be brought into this struggle and serve as one of our champions? Or is there any word, no matter how damaged by commercial exploitation, or how emptied by new meanings forced upon it, or how deformed by careless overuse, or how weary from dishonored age that it could be made new and work again on our behalf? I would, for crucial instance, want to use the word monstrous to describe the most inhuman of our actions – and I have - but though it still has power, and a sound that offers added effect, what can it still portray of those same actions?

Not what I would intend, yet I know of none that can, and without them I fear the monsters may go unnoticed, or seem instead mere scoundrels, and so I ask that new words be made by those who can, new words for all that astonishes, or should, and that we start to make them soon.

Yet we are not running out of words – we are running out of meaning. There are many adjectives weakened by our careless habit of proclaiming extraordinary what is not, or of seeking to make irrelevant what is instead imperative, and many verbs obliged to portray differing realities for which they were not made, while many nouns are then rendered uncertain in their meaning by their forced marriage to those adjectives and verbs, and as a consequence, we have arrived at a time when it seems that almost any thoughtful statement, almost any warning or appeal, almost anything to be said about anything, begins to sound like a cliché, the easiest of all statements to ignore – and what then of the power of language to light our way?

After decades of the commercial exploitation of language and our own careless personal use, at this “terrible” moment of our history when we need words to speak with authority, what does “terrible” mean anymore, what does “horrible” mean, or “shocking” or “deplorable” – what does even “true” mean anymore? We have cried wolf with language, and every time we have used a critical word (where “critical” means both essential and dissenting) to describe nothing more troubling than a rainy day or a stained shirt, we have eased the path for greed, arrogance, and cruelty, and given tyranny reprieve from our judgement - and now the wolves are gathering, their eyes wide upon us.

As I continue, not only do I need take into careful account the words I use and whether their current meaning is able to convey what I believe to be true, I must also stay aware of the fact that news of hideous conspiracies are now a form of recreation, a game of vacant words and desolate fantasy, competing with honest journalism for the attention of those who prefer the shiver of excitement felt when hearing rumors of scandal and of plots to subvert the “natural order” of things, of those who value gossip over truth because they feel a little more alive when they secretly celebrate reports of designs against that order while publicly expressing their frightened indignation, of those who would rather whisper prophecies of moral outrage than mourn the tragedies which unfold every hour of every day in every part of this troubled world.

But what I want to tell you is not a conspiracy carefully disguised with a few known facts and supportive quotes, it is simply my report to you of what I have learned from our remaining truth-tellers about the ruthless men who stand with such coldly stubborn indifference between us and the destiny that would be ours were love, rather than self-interest, to lead us, a world resolved, not to administer, but rather to minister – and to everyone, at long, long last.

So, my munitions low (and perhaps my stragglers gone home), I at last turn to the forces arrayed, and I first introduce The Opposition, a force led by men driven by the most destructive human traits: greed, arrogance, and cruelty (and note how each is kin to each), and when found combined within a single personality, these traits are the guarantors of suffering – not their own, of course, because such men will always ensure their own welfare, while the suffering of others is just part of the natural order, as if that order were not designed by these same men, and not instead the most vicious form of tyranny.

Though fiercely opposed to universal human progress because this would compel them to give rather than to take, these men are too few in their number to rule the world, and so they must have an army of followers whose loyalty to the cause is assured by their ignorance of that cause. Therefore, will they enlist the proudly uninformed and from this muddled stock it is not difficult, with the right words (and where “right” offers two meanings), to create the resentment needed to rouse them to defend their masters against any effort to build a world in which every child, every woman, and every man would be treated with equal worth, respect, and dignity.

Resentment is key. I am convinced that the primary motive behind the actions of the man who now would lead us (though towards what shared fate is not yet clear) is not so much an unrelenting hunger for both power and praise, though this is surely true as well, but deeper still, a profound resentment (which is sorrow soothed by anger), and as with all feelings, dark or bright, the source of his resentment must be equal in its scale to the feeling which sustains it.

A resentment as deep, as prodding, and as threatening as his will emerge from an early disappointment so crushing that its gravity will pull everything else into its orbit, while the resentment which then forms is its sentient shadow, and I believe that this resentment grew from the humbling truth that he does not possess an absolute and universal power in compensation for his loss, a power over events, over others, over nations, over truth – a resentment, perhaps, that he is not God, after all, because he believes that, in fairness, he should be, and that if he were, his worship would be assured, his knowledge complete, his power supreme – omniscient and omnipotent forever, and satisfied at last.

But the Opposition represents nothing more than the most cunning among the heartless leading the most frightened and embittered among the ignorant, and how tragically ironic that the latter may never know that the ones they have been incited to oppose include themselves. Yet the ones who would oppose our common destiny must be included in our pursuit of that destiny because those who resist that better world will learn in time that, even for them, that world is better, too. For now, however, the unfeeling are herding the unthinking toward their lot, eager for the coming stampede.

It seems that those who stand against our progress have given us an ironic gift by revealing their number - and they are legion, though we are more. Yet our comfort in this majority ends with the awareness that our opponents represent a profound ignorance, not just of mind, but of heart as well. The question of how to purge this darkness is an ancient one, though other than our faith that love and truth are the lights that are needed, we are left for now with resolute opposition as the only course with hope of final victory.

The record of unfolding history suggests that those who have no heart have convinced those who have been denied the truth to follow them, and together they are enough in both number and intensity to bleed governance of its charity, though it is those without a heart, those who would lead us towards desolation, who are my focus, because knowledge can be acquired, but a heart cannot, while many of those who choose to follow are innocent of malice.

These leaders of The Opposition are blind and they are deaf, yet act as if they alone can see and hear the suffering that is within their power to relieve, suffering which to them is no more than childish whimpering. They are determined to ignore the facts upon which our world has been built and to author dark fictions as ramparts in defense of their merciless intent, their smiles are vain simulations of sincerity, their words corrupted with unfamiliar purpose, their ambitions forever circling back to their own desires – in sum, they are proudly resolved, in the words of a children’s book, to “pull up the flowers and water the weeds”, and if their ravenous craving to remake the world in their own disfigured image were to succeed, our world would become the broken home to exhausted and illiterate men shunted towards premature senescence by a depraved yet unassailable brotherhood who see them as little more than customers.

But perhaps I have worried too much about finding a word whose meaning remains unsoiled – the immaculate exception – and so I did not understand that a few common words placed into the care of a brief, declarative sentence could succeed in conveying what I am convinced is vital, and so I offer this: they do not care.

Those among our elected and appointed leaders who would place power, money, influence, privilege, and personal benefit over those who neither possess these advantages nor hope of gaining them have been so bled of humanity that it is almost as if they belong to a different breed, a mutant, depraved sub-species, Homo Akardos – Heartless Man, and anyone who possesses an authentic conscience, anyone who loves genuinely, anyone who is devoted to the truth, anyone who is guided by a living imagination, will – not must, but will – reject and oppose the authority of those who cannot rightfully claim these qualities as their own.

I do not often use the word “evil” – it has a dramatic effect that tempts its use, yet does not have the explanatory power that is my preference, but in this case, I say to you that those “leaders” who demonstrate beyond all rational doubt that their goal is the unyielding defense of wealth and power even when this will assure the suffering of others, are evil by any definition and according to the ethical teachings of any religion or moral philosophy, and whether you call this evil or not, it is a monstrous, grotesque perversion of everything we hold dear and of everything we must protect no matter the cost in our time, in our comfort, and in our sacrifice.

Most of those who now would lead us are, at best, asleep, dreaming of their treasure as heroes of a savage quest, yet the future is already leaning close in, whispering “they do not care”, and awaiting our resolution.

And of the most powerful of these leaders, I also suggest this: he is forever trapped in a present so consumed with fear and desperate personal need that the past cannot give evidence to imagination, and so he cannot foresee the future which his actions will then spawn – it isn’t that he does not know what he must, it’s that what he knows cannot find its way to him; it isn’t that he has no will, it’s that his will is, by dread, willed obedient to that dread; and it isn’t that he does not remember, it’s that he knows that he must not.

Beyond him, however, it is important to keep in mind that those who are led by the Opposition are not of one kind.

There are some who follow because the leaders they have chosen out of a weary innocence seem passionate, intelligent, knowledgeable, and sincere, and these followers are too busy or too tired to carefully research the positions to which they have passively pledged allegiance, or they remain personally unaffected by what is happening to their more distant neighbors, and so they transform their disquiet about the rumors of nightfall into the gratitude that they need not worry for themselves, and then abandon any further thought with the hope that their leaders will offer help where it later may be needed.

These are citizens devoted to the ideals of family, thriving communities, a strong country, and a safe world, and they do not mean to betray those ideals. They have learned the social algorithms which permit them to live and to work without bringing trouble upon themselves; they are good citizens in most ways who can be expected not to bring trouble upon others; they are parents good enough to make their children good citizens and parents good enough as well; they are good neighbors who tend to their lawns and light their homes on holidays; they make good employees by working hard and without complaint; and they make good friends for those good citizens who share their views, yet there is something missing from their lives.

It is as if, as children, upon the first rumors that there were monsters, after all, they decided that they would always stay in the light and do what was expected of them, and ignore the moments when their submission to the social order signaled that the most human parts of them would need to go untended and fade away, and only appear again in dreams they will never recall. But somewhere within, they know that something vital has been taken from them.

For a time, their anger at this theft of their destiny, and their fear of the powers that took it from them, are little more than a vague foreboding which the remnants of youth and a busy schedule are able to keep away. In time, however, the gathering sense of an embattled life arouses that fear to an intensity impossible to ignore, while the bed-time stories told by The Opposition stoke that anger to the point of lethal rage.

Fear and anger - the armor and sword of our reply to threat, the great motivators, rousing to action those who would otherwise sleep, and less powerful only than love. As long as these good citizens refuse to become more broadly and deeply informed, the ideals to which they once pledged their allegiance will remain under increasing threat by the leaders of the Opposition in whom they so dangerously place their stubborn trust.

Beyond these recruits, there are the enlisted men. Sullen, bitter, resentful, contemptuous of facts and whomever would dare to offer them, driven by an unexamined sense of entitlement born of misdirected anger and conceived in misguided fear, willfully uninformed, deferential to wealth, resistant to change, suspicious of legitimate authority, indifferent to want despite their own, confusing opinion with knowledge, mistaking what is loud for what is true, taking comfort in darkness and troubled by the light, and convinced beyond appeal that they have been chosen for both worldly retribution and celestial reward.

And yet I believe that they, too, could be reached, if the truth could first reach them, and made ready to join the many who are, even now, prepared to challenge the mighty, heartless men who stand against our common destiny, men who possess no capacity for human thought, so none for mercy.

All these are, in effect, the soldiers of The Opposition army, and to the extent that they obey what is not true, they could be won over from the Opposition were they at last to give free access to the truth, though standing between this army and the truth that would free them is an officer corps (and the military metaphor is fitting) composed of zealots who believe in a vision of America and the world which radically deviates from both the lessons of history and the spirit of democracy, and my first objection to their thinking is that it is not thinking at all.

Instead, it is a self-serving patchwork of unexamined beliefs drawn from ignorance and prejudice (which are two different words for the same form of depravity) and I oppose them as passionately as the well-groomed leaders of their retrograde movement because of their celebration of violence, their bizarre fascination with Armageddon, their reverence for the instrumentalities of death, their confusion of ignorance with freedom, their rejection of science despite their selective use of its knowledge, their mistrust of communities beyond their squabbling tribes, their thoughtless misreading of the philosophies of love, their need for those whom they can judge of lower rank, their astonishing failure to see the enduring magic that women offer, their reflexive hatred of authority other than their own, their violent contempt for what is foreign even when it is benevolent, their pillaging of moral philosophies for the words that can then be crudely stitched into the appearance of irrefutable truth, and the perverse skill with which they mistake obsession for commitment, extremism for devotion, and mere affiliation for genuine love.

But of our elected and appointed leaders, it would be a dangerous, perhaps fatal strategic blunder not to concede that these men who lead the Opposition can be quite impressive - depending, of course, upon what impresses you. They have power or wealth or both, they can speak to thousands without a script, they are well dressed, often well educated, in a narrow but suitably credentialed way, and endowed with the instinctive ability to quote whichever moral principles will catch and keep the attention of the audience whose members they wish to bring to their cause.

Their greatest talent, however, is the ability to know which audience includes the men who will follow them, the ones who long for a return to the time when men were men and women were their grateful servants, and the fact that the time for which they long was a long journey through hell for all but the empty men who created that hell and then defended it against those who can dream is, for such men, a fact without either substance or merit. These are not men who know what it means to love.

They do not know that the infinity which is love cannot be diminished, and that whenever we find another to love, a new infinity is added, and never will one take from another or seek to keep away the new, and when the heart is made free by these harmoniously conjoined infinities, we are made more human. Love is, of course, about relationships, those self-chosen bonds between two or more people which endure upon trust, respect, empathy, mutuality, and a shared imagining of how the world might rather be – this is the bond which makes a celebration of our charity, and which is invulnerable to time’s passing, even though we are not.

What modest wisdom I possess, though mostly borrowed from the wise, suggests that there is no wisdom unless it is for everyone. If so, the one truth I know that belongs to us all, even to those who would proclaim it an illusion, is the power of genuine love to heal, to transform, and to humanize. We are born into a profound longing to be loved – it is our first hunger, and if we are given that love, we will also then share it both freely and joyously, but if we are not, life becomes a solitary labor to find that love, a labor that does not always earn our heart’s fair keep.

Love, in truth (its kin), is a way of being, yet so are the radically differing passions which drive much of The Opposition: contempt, bitterness, resentment, and a groundless sense of entitlement that should be far more worthy of our concerned debate than those entitlements which, like boys celebrating the agonized death of a slug beneath a mound of kitchen salt, they attack with such an unaccountably proud and self-congratulatory intensity, while the form of cackling ignorance which haunts progress most is not the one which reflects a deficiency of knowledge, but the one which reflects a deficiency of love, because once love is taken from a child, and never found or felt again, the latter form quickly becomes the former, and thus is built another eager member of The Opposition.

If nothing else, remember always that love is not the word “love” – it is our birthright and our salvation.

I do not want to hurt in any way those who form The Opposition – someone already has. I want instead to teach them that the anger they feel is misplaced and would exactly measure out the tears which that anger obscures, because except for the Sociopath, no one who supports the actions and inactions I have listed here could do so unless they once had been so wounded that anger seemed the better resolution because while tears are private, anger is public and thus will receive the validation of shared expression.

Teach this to the army of The Opposition and in time they would, I believe, take a better and differing path, leaving their commanders unarmed, though if the latter would be willing, we would welcome them as well.

Of the forces arrayed, the other is The Alliance: I briefly considered calling this group something like the League Of Vulnerable Egalitarians because this spells “love”, the guiding spirit of my quest, though it would also spell trouble because not only is it artificial (and so the opposite of what I seek) but like so much else that is artificial, it would rightly be seen as an advertisement of a kind, and though it might seem impossible to most of us moderns, there are other ways of communicating a purpose without cutting away at its substance so that it will fit into an ad which, in turn, would fit – if just barely – into a mind that has been narrowed and dimmed by forms of diversion offered as narcotic compensation for the silencing of its moral and aesthetic sensibilities by men who care for nothing except power while they live and then, if they prove mortal after all, history’s bribed remembrance.

Besides, all egalitarians are vulnerable.

But I wander from light to darkness, and so I return to the better name for this second group, this peaceful army still to be assembled, and I call it The Alliance because that is what it must be - an alliance formed of women, the young, and those men who attend carefully to the news of the world around them and who, upon each report of greed, arrogance, and cruelty are astonished anew and made more ready still to take action towards a better world.

And a fine group of individuals the Alliance will be – passionate, intelligent, well-informed, imaginative (and therefore compassionate), honest, brave, and merciful, though not yet bound together by love and the fears that love must bear, and by a shared astonishment at the horrors that still rival our achievements in their number and devotion to cause, and so they are not now an Alliance at all, and are therefore not ready to oppose the smaller but more dangerously fanatical group of men who have been opposing even the idea of universal human progress for millennia, the men who are, without knowing it, the reason for our revolution.

Yet we have another ally, perhaps the most powerful if unexpected ally of all: those who have come and gone before us, especially those who died too young to fulfill their destinies, and those who, because of a fatal injustice, never had the chance to decide upon their destinies at all, and those who died before they could say good-bye and speak their love to those they cherished above all else, and those who died in agony or in anguish, and those who died without ever having known love, and those who died their names unknown and their graves unmarked, and those who died alone, and those who died when asked to defend what they felt was right or who died when forced to defend what they knew was wrong, or anyone who died needlessly because of war, disease, poverty, hunger, slavery, unbearable loss, or lethal despair.

These legions of the dead should weigh heavily upon conscience because unless we establish a world that is forever meant for all, their lives and their deaths will not receive the gratitude and justice of our final triumph on behalf of the living, the unborn, and our awaiting dead.

Now, to both The Opposition and The Alliance I say: it is time – it is time for the positions you represent to make of their vast and irreconcilable differences a just cause worthy of creative battle, to gather your greatest champions in all the salient fields – history, economics, philosophy, science, law, psychology, journalism, and religion, and at battle’s end, with faith in love’s triumph, begin a world meant for all, even for those whom we once had called The Opposition. Though I would also say to The Opposition and to any who would oppose this Alliance, beware not only love, but love’s anger, for it is invulnerable to discouragement, far readier for battle, and relentless until victory can restore its mercy.

But at what cost, you ask again? What will be the true human cost of this revolution of which I so gladly dream? If it is devoutly non-violent yet unrelenting in its determination to remove from power those who would rule rather than serve, the cost will be only for the heartless to pay and yet, unless they are beyond all redemption, they, too, would learn in time to celebrate with gratitude all that was won for their loss.

After a hundred centuries of festering ignorance and pervasive suffering, some of us have begun to despair of the ancient dream of a world made world for all, and instead begun to hope only for intercession – whether divine, magical, natural, or supernatural – as if humanity were a hopelessly scattered tribe lost among its own debris and praying for their deliverance. Yet the fact is that right now we know enough, we have enough, we are enough to transform this world into a terrestrial paradise, and within a single generation, we could have a world in which even the momentary suffering of a single child would be felt by all, and met with our shared astonishment.

There is, of course, more to be said. I have spoken of current events, of certain essential words, of love, astonishment, and imagination, and of the opposing forces that would compose the revolution which history requires of us all if love and justice are to be shared by us all, yet these are only preface to the argument. With this in mind, I now join together a few of the current events that I have already shared and, by doing so, reveal a bleak but essential truth with the hope that if you have genuine love in your heart, you will be afraid for those you love, that if you are still capable of true astonishment, a vital inner silence will fall as the enormity of this truth settles uncomfortably within you, and that if you have a living imagination, you will be able to see the darkening future which even now is being assembled with an inhuman efficiency and cannot be far from its completion.

Then, made ready by your love, your righteous fear, your astonishment, and your empathic foretelling, you will use your voice, your vote, and your unrelenting will to learn and to act so that the tightening hold of an emerging sociopathocracy is broken by those whom it wants instead to misinform, exhaust, frighten, coerce, or bribe into a hushed and fatal consent. I begin by repeating my earlier statement that “on heartlessly ideological grounds alone, nearly half of our governors refuse to make medical care available to their poorest and most vulnerable citizens, thus assuring the unnecessary deaths of thousands”.

It should be merely self-evident that of the millions who have been denied this care, thousands will die of diseases that could either have been prevented or cured, and though well-established statistics bear this out as well, I would rather quote sense than science, though of my struggle to find the words that would fairly portray the reality with which too many live, I would ask of myself: how can I find other words, better words, stronger words than thousands will die? The answer is: I cannot not, and I need not.

Any position, no matter how noble in its purpose and rational in its statement, can be attacked, and any position, no matter how cruel and irrational in its intent, can be defended, and thus every action can be defended on moral grounds, and every action, no matter how destructive, can be argued as both rational and beneficial on the basis of a principled philosophy, and the fact that a more thoughtful majority may passionately disagree does not, and cannot change this. But if you have love in your heart, your response to this willful indifference to needless human suffering and loss must be horror, astonishment’s desolate nightfall.

Defenses of this action have been offered, of course, but whether they are based upon economic, political, or even philosophical or moral arguments, the reasons for providing that care are, for those with a heart, forever and indisputably self-evident, and the crucial difference between those who oppose that care and those who are its champions is that the latter possess a living conscience and the others do not, and there is no middle ground nor exception to this truth.

My point would simply be this: as soon as the facts about the effect on those in need are understood, the debate should end without further argument, and in the better world that all but the merciless want, this would be invariably true. For the ones who decided to deny medical care to those in need, there was no love to guide them towards sanity, there was no astonishment at the thought of those who would suffer and of those who would die, and there was no imagination to offer the images of the tragically inevitable consequences.

There was nothing good or fair or admirable about this decision, and those who made it are among the leaders of The Opposition whom I very much want to consign to those darker moments of history whose only value would be as a lesson towards the light, because with this law we had come to moral closure, which is the moment – always within our grasp - when a morally ideal threshold is reached beyond which no further principled debate is needed in order to assure the most humane result, and so we can and should ask these leaders of The Opposition: what is it that you love more than the people you could protect, but do not?

I quote another earlier statement that “with a membership representing little more than one percent of the population, a single organization, using a demonstrable lie and allying itself with the most thoughtlessly extreme partisans among the smallest political party, is able to prevent the passage of an almost universally supported law written in response to the slaughter of 20 young children”.

I should not need to say more, of course, though I must, of course. Could anyone reasonably deny that it is virtually a logical impossibility that one could have a heart and not be horrified that a small group of cold-blooded men could defy the will of a nation at a moment when another horror was pleading for the justice of love?

So, I ask, what principle, what reason, what argument, what moral law, what religious teaching could argue against that act of love without seeming grotesquely empty and utterly cruel in comparison? Or to ask a simpler yet more central question: where was love that the reply to this staggering loss was instead sociopathic in its indifference, not only to the children, but to a nation awaiting resolution. I demand your answer - not for me, but for yourself.

And of those who stood in the way of humane action, we ask again: what is it you love more than the people you could protect, but do not?

With these two issues as first illustration, I say to you, without fear of rational dissent, that I know – not believe, not suppose, not claim, not suggest – I know that love would ask that any debate come to an end as soon as the facts, the human facts are clear. What sane counter-argument could there be to accepting an established system of medical care that would prevent the unnecessary suffering and deaths of thousands, or to a thoughtfully crafted proposal of legislative action that would keep guns from madmen?

None - and yet in both cases, love lost out to the self-interest of men who care far more about their political careers than about the lives of those they were sworn to protect, and so once more did the fanatic find a way to disguise ignorance as principle and make wisdom, which is love when love is made thought, seem treachery instead. But the fanatic will always value his moral principles more than the people for whom those principles had once been fashioned as refuge, though it is only for their power to provide him cover that he will mention them at all.

We ask: where was love and astonishment and imagination in these two cases? Why did not love prevail, silencing the opposition, as soon as a solution was offered, and why did not our horror at this loss rally us to further action, and why did not imagination foretell the future thus darkened by these atrocities of inaction and refuse to give way? Because as I also stated earlier, “a system of corporate and political governance has been established which both recruits and rewards those least restrained by conscience and to whom compassion would seem an obstacle”.

Both corporate and government leadership represent political office (the corporate by virtue of its purchase of government) and so it is to politics that I will now turn, though with the same discomfort I would feel if I were discussing poverty, disease, or any of the horrors that in a better world politics could solve, but in this world does not.

Before I continue, however, I offer some comfort by reminding you that when The Opposition recruits, it also reveals, so watch closely who is chosen to lead, and who will follow, and towards what objective – power, profit, or people, and then support when you can, and oppose when you must.

Fairness requires that I first state very clearly that there are politicians who are devoted to that better world, that there are women and men whose dream is not their own, but ours instead, women and men who are worthy of our admiration and gratitude for what they have done to bring us closer to a world in which love is the primary light by which we make our way towards a universally shared freedom, as well as the watchfulness against inhumanity which that freedom requires of us all.

This truth must never be forgotten or ignored. Yet although this is the truth, it is sadly not the only truth. By an outrageous manipulation of the news, of laws, of precedent and tradition, and of the emotions of those they have deliberately misled, a fanatical minority has gained ascendancy, subverting the will of a more thoughtful, if strangely passive majority, and it is about this extremist group (and cult may be the better word) that I want to make the following points.

First, as far as I can tell, for the first time in our history, most of those who lead, or conspire to lead, are less enlightened, less knowledgeable - not only of the facts but of what it means to be human - than those whom they would lead. Knowledge is power, of course, and in its reach, perhaps only love extends further, though political office is also power, which may be why those who lack the former are so often drawn to the latter.

Second, most of our politicians act precisely as we teach our children not to act – they boast of accomplishing what is not theirs to claim or what is instead more deserving of disgrace, and they will blame their opponents for actions which their opponents never took. Compare the statements of any of our more fanatical politicians to a child’s defense against the accusation of not sharing with another child and the differences would not only be small, but would favor the child.

Third, and even more troubling is this - to the extent that politicians are lead to their decisions by their ravenous hunger for re-election and the consequent need to win over the disturbingly large number of voters who, out of fear, rage, greed, or hate, can only be awakened to brief public service by words designed to provoke the ignorant to vote, then it is also true that our politicians are led by the ignorant, and thus the rest of us by both, and the fact that the majority is composed of people of intelligence and compassion does not and cannot change this, though it should reveal to this majority that intelligence and compassion are not enough by themselves – you must also have the knowledge and the devotion (which is another kind of knowledge) that will be needed to elect politicians who possess the intelligence, and the compassion, and the knowledge, and the devotion to lead us where we already know we want to go.

If not, then we will continue to be led not only by ignorance, but by the money which contributes so generously to conserving that ignorance, and thus will we be led by the most tenuous of all that is real and by the most tenacious of all that is abstract. But we would ask of our politicians: what is it like to hold a position of public trust and yet feel the need to betray the truth, to obscure, to ignore, to forbid the truth in order to succeed, and what, to such men, can success mean if a devotion to the truth, the guarantor of freedom, is not a living part of it?

Their ignorance is staggering. It is a nightfall, not only of the mind, but of the heart, driven by the most primitive and unyielding of human emotions and, like a black cloud of insects carrying a fatal disease, it is delivered through a blanketing swarm of thoughtless words.

It is an ignorance nearly as intricate as the knowledge it willfully rejects, layer upon sedimentary layer of differing causes, differing alibis, differing resentments, differing targets, all flowing from a single commanding fear – that to learn is to threaten what they need to believe and to expose themselves as villains, rather than as the heroes they would dream of being, if they could dream at all. It is a well-practiced, even an articulate ignorance, able to speak in sentences at length in public, and forever unaware that some who listen know exactly what they are and will devote themselves to their opposition.

As one specific example of my many objections (as polite a word as I could find), I would point out to the more self-serving of our politicians that removing the regulations which prevent industry from polluting our air would simply amount to a new regulation, one which prevents us from preventing industry from polluting our air – either one would be the result of government action, so do not expect us to believe that you represent a righteous opposition to an authoritarian government and do not permit yourself the illusion that you are liberating anyone, and if you cannot act out of love for the people of whom, by whom, and for whom our government was established, do not be surprised at the ferocity of our opposition and of our intention to liberate ourselves from you - in pursuit of your own destiny, you cannot have ours.

As another example, the following now seems the extremist politician’s standard formula for answering a difficult question on a publicly sensitive subject during an interview with a credentialed broadcast journalist: immediately mention the subject of the question so that, by answer’s end, the question will be remembered as having been answered, then “pivot” by accusing their opposition of ruinous mistakes made on this same (or strategically similar) subject, and “pivot” once again by citing the great victories won by their noble cause - then just keep talking about their mistakes and your victories for as long as possible in order to prevent another question, offer a constant smile to suggest a confidence so supreme that all doubt has fled in terror, while keeping their voice calm unless a slight raising (to convey explicit contempt) or lowering (to convey implicit warning) will serve as emphasis to their point, all the time adopting an air of imperial indifference, thus marking the question as foolish, the questioner a fool, and the politician as a righteous defender of all that is sacred.

But the formula is easy to master, and once you commit to memory the lists of all your victories and all their mistakes (which, to their eyes, are victories), anyone could learn to answer difficult questions in a way that leaves the majority of viewers in a state of vaguely satisfied confusion – a triumph only if the defeat of Reason is reason enough to deceive. It seems that we need politicians, as opposed to elected leaders, only because the system in which they work enlists them in order to work at all, however poorly.

Yet what if we had a system of government that instead enlisted women and men of authentic conscience, whose sole ambition was to assure the well-being of all, who would ask for the honor of serving others without the need to ask for money from others, not because they would be wealthy, but because their dreams for us would be known to us, women and men who would delight in telling the truth at every moment and whose wish was not to gain power for themselves, but to give power to those without?

If we oppose the shameless obedience to wealth, the ravenous hunger for celebrity, the grotesque self-interest, the unreflective longing for unassailable power, the need to reshape fact into fairy tale and truth into advertisement, and the thoughtless allegiance to ideology rather than to those they should serve, we would then be half way to the ancient dream of a world that is meant for all. Yet fail to oppose that obedience, that grotesque subservience, and we learn, as many already have, that past a certain far point of political thought and action, in the dark corners where the fanatic paces back and forth in search of chaos, what we would find there is no longer a philosophy, but a pathology.

And of politics and advertising (its Rasputin), I ask, could it be that the taunting theatrics of the modern ad, the gleaming machines promising our ecstasy, the communion we are offered with useless things and toxic food, the engineered beauty and contrived good cheer, the tawdry song and dance of our tireless consumerism, the thoughtless manipulation of opinion and desire, and the demand that hope should hope instead for pretty objects above all else, could it be that this parody of lived experience has led to a politics that now prefers marketing to governing? If so, the model is based upon the corporation, not the constitution, and nothing good could ever come of this.

Perhaps I am naïve, yet it seems clear to me that both the original and the enduring purpose of government, of the law, of principles, of ethics, of rules of any kind is nothing less than to protect us, and because these standards of human conduct often include other species as well, they are ultimately meant to protect life itself, to prevent harm whenever possible, and by doing so, to promote the safety and welfare of all that lives. With this in mind, I find it profoundly troubling to listen to our current political leaders debate the value of proposed legislation because, in almost every case, the two sides will defend their positions based upon either one of only two considerations: the economic costs or the human costs.

Though the defenders of the latter must, of present necessity, also give thought to the economic costs of any given proposal, the defenders of the economic costs rarely discuss the associated human costs unless a passing reference offers some strategic political value, and if the mention of money is thought insufficient to win the argument, the Champions of Wealth will then deploy other sanctified words like “freedom” or “faith” or “family” (and to each we should reply: “which” and “for whom”), though these words are used only as cover for an action that will inexorably lead to their own gain, and our next loss, and so it also seems clear that these standards of human conduct are, in effect, now being rewritten to permit a profitable cruelty by the same heartless fanatics (a redundancy in the service of emphasis) who have already purchased the political authority to proceed without regard to the human consequences of their actions.

If nothing else, please note that based upon the public record of each – a record to which we all have access - the primary mission of one political party can reasonably be portrayed as defending the rights of people, while the primary mission of the other can reasonably be portrayed as defending the rights of money, and I would remind the supporters of the latter that these two missions are neither morally equivalent, nor could ever be.

We are being led, though “corralled” may be the better word, by men whose kind I have gratefully never known, unless some have somehow kept their utter lack of empathy well hidden. We have empowered thugs, and the word is not too strong. They are thugs who have swaggered their way to power by pretending to uphold values whose human meaning they will never know, their faces lit with a cruel, sneering delight at the thought of denying to others the rights which they themselves enjoy, their voices shrill with the pleasure felt at the thought of converting into law their contempt for anyone of lower rank, a standing based upon whether we possesses the money, social status, and political power to raise us high enough to be noticed by those who do. They will not notice us, but we will watch them, and if they discount us, as is their intent, we will raise ourselves until it is they who must look up.

For now, watch for those leaders who will answer the questions asked of them, not those they wish had been asked, and whose answers will withstand honest scrutiny and will not, by their length, prevent all further questions, whose voices will not grow strident nor their eyes narrow with contempt when challenged, who will inspire, rather than provoke, who will know when events require their solemnity, and whose smiles are sincere and reserved for issues worthy of our own, for these are the leaders worth our attention, if not yet our full devotion.

And at the intersection of politics and language (a dangerously busy intersection since politics is language at its most public yet least patrolled) there is, among others, the ailing word “hypocrisy”.

It is a word originally meant to convey a morally indefensible divide between one’s stated principles and one’s actions, but it has been used so often for so many issues by so many politicians that it has been hollowed out and now seems to refer only to a political strategy designed to assure individual career longevity and internal party solidarity, so that the act of accusing the other side of hypocrisy is simply part of the dues a politician pays to remain in good standing with their party, and this means that even when the charge of hypocrisy is demonstrably true, this word no longer has the power to reveal the morality tale for which it was created, while the act of making such a charge is itself now often just another act of hypocrisy, and thus has another vital word been rendered nearly impotent.

But for the typical American citizen who is at best only marginally informed and at worst either demonstrably uninformed or disturbingly misinformed (which is to know less than those who know nothing), distinguishing between the two political philosophies which compete for that citizen’s brief attention and continuing loyalty can be a complex challenge. After all, the public representatives of both philosophies seem rational, sincere, and passionate, they are familiar with the issues and articulate in their policies, they draw large crowds when speaking in public, maintain a coven of veteran advisors, and have the backing of corporations that fund their quests, and of news organizations that support their policies.

Because they will often use the same words spoken in the same style and in the same tradition, it is not always easy to distinguish between the elected representatives of The Opposition and of The Alliance. They will all speak of freedom and hope and devotion and of a brighter future for everyone, and if you listen without knowing the speaker, it can be difficult to know whether they are guided by compassion or egomaniacal self-interest. Start half-way through many contemporary political speeches, and you may struggle to learn whether they are for you or against you, though this may be the point.

The words they use are not an advertiser’s words, which are shorter, more universally understood, and thus less prone to differing interpretation, yet the typical politician is an ad-man through and through. If he comes to you from a position of vain indifference, his actions will not reflect the true meaning of his words, while if she is one of the honest and genuinely caring few, her efforts will be honorable and on our behalf. But understand that it is only possible to believe that “both sides do it” if you are listening to just one side.

So how does the well-intentioned but unsophisticated voter decide which philosophy would best serve the best interests of their families, their country, and their world?

First, I am not concerned here with the fanatics, for they are beyond the appeal of other possibilities, nor to those whose anger, fear, or hatred would lead them to vote for whichever candidate offered the subtle pledge of either public vengeance or private vindication. But for the rest, for those who carry no prejudice into the discussion of national and international issues but who do not yet know how to distinguish those with a dream from those with a strategy, how do they learn which politicians and news organizations they can trust, follow, and support? Other than using multiple sources of information to learn all we must about the issues and those who would lead us, and learning all we must about ourselves so that any secret bias is kept from dominance, there are other points to be made.

First, it is true that politicians sometimes use the word love in their speeches, though using this word and leading on the basis of what this word signifies are not, of course, the same thing. When needed for strategic emphasis, the typical politician may talk of his love for our country or his love of the freedom which our country’s original governing philosophy represents, but I am not usually persuaded to believe that he is referring to love as I and others so gratefully know it.

Second, the idea of our country is, by itself, no more than an abstract concept if its mention does not explicitly include every one of our citizens and residents, and every one of the living ideals upon which our democracy was founded, while the word freedom, like many other sacred words, has been asked to carry new meanings within its spacious realm, some of which point away from freedom itself and instead towards tyranny, and though there has been much talk of freedom recently, if I understand what is being said, it almost seems as if nothing more than freedom itself is needed to assure our happiness, though I would ask: freedom from what or from whom, and freedom to do what and to whom?

The great psychologist Victor Frankel made the point that because America has the Statue of Liberty on its east coast, it should, in order to do justice to liberty, have a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast as well. In this way, this nation would be bordered not just by two oceans, but by two principles neither of which can exist without the other, lest freedom become mere anarchy and responsibility become mere obligation. Daring to define it, I would offer that freedom is the ability to travel your own path without either fear or opposition, as long as you do not diminish the freedom of another, and as long as the other is following this same sacred rule.

But a freedom that is unconstrained by any law, ethics, tradition, or moral consideration would be little more than another word for chaos, and the politician who would claim that it was a love of freedom which lead him to keep his own countrymen from having affordable health care, from voting without obstacle, from having equal influence upon legislation, from equal pay or living wage, from having the protection of sane gun laws, from clean air and water, from a climate that will not kill our children, and from knowing the truth, is a heartless, thoughtless, dangerous fool who should have power over no one – after all, the greatest tyranny is the use of freedom by some to reduce the freedom of others.

These leaders do not see the desperate need, and if they do, they don’t believe it, and if they do, they don’t accept it, and if they do, they do not care. When we are confronted by a tyranny of any kind, and thus by a loss of hope, of freedom, of fellowship, of sanctuary, we must remember that love is our deliverance – just remember as well that sometimes love will decide that it has come time to fight for that deliverance.

And if a politician were to protest that he was acting from love, that it was his love of freedom which inspired him to take these actions, then I would reply that freedom without responsibility is always a tyranny of the self because responsibility is always about others than yourself, as is the love which is, to the eloquent sheep who have such power, no more than an old, if useful technique for keeping that power safe from those whom they claim to represent, because power of almost any kind, but especially power based upon wealth, fame, or political office, will always become an extension of the ego of those who possess that power, and too often, if the ego thus enlarged is wounded, its power will be used to wound.

I do not worry that I am wrong about this, but I do worry that were we ever to demand that those who lead us love us, the typical politician would simply defend himself by using the word love until its meaning had flickered towards extinction, though what better reason for revolution than to prevent this alone. If our leaders, instead of leading, continue to follow those among us who, because of their grudging and unexamined resentment, feel entitled to act against the common good, revolution will become a moral obligation, and as long as it is non-violent and has that common good as its only goal, then it is a revolution which must be considered rational, desirable, and, may it be, inevitable.

But I have not yet made the larger point, and because of its central importance here, I want again to borrow the words of better minds and wiser hearts than mine.

Every man has in politics a right to think and speak and act for himself. I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading? A man who can read will find rules and observations that will enlarge his range of thought and enable him the better to judge who has and who has not that integrity of heart and that compass of knowledge and understanding which form the statesman – John Adams

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government, and whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights, and if a civilized nation expects to be both ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be – Thomas Jefferson

A nation, like a person, has a mind – a mind that must be kept informed and alert, that must know itself, that understands the hopes and needs of its neighbors – Franklin Roosevelt

Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, are necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties - Massachusetts Constitution of 1780

We believe that an informed citizenry will act for life, and not for death – Albert Einstein

Of all the points that I would want to make on this subject, these quotes describe what I consider to be one of the most important arguments that I will offer: we cannot, as a nation, enter this vaunted 21st century and make our way towards the universally celebrated future which this nation was so thoughtfully designed to assure if we are dragging behind us the many dangerously uninformed and misinformed citizens who, along with their rapacious political masters, now keep us from the destiny which is our destiny to fulfill.

Because I feel certain that we cannot enter the future which our scientific and social progress now allows us to imagine while also burdened by the proud ignorance of so many, I wonder whether this bizarre and threatening era represents the barricade which that future has erected in order to prevent this ignorance from interfering with its arrival, because the future will always insist upon its time, and yet a future that is no more than the continuation of our brutal past is simply the past made immortal by a present rendered impotent. But do not let the past discourage you, do not let it color your present, and do not let it predict your future - let stand what is, and move on from there.

I offer an imagined example: there will almost certainly come a time when the technology of virtual reality will offer the experience of a world to match our own in all its vital details, and the synthetic yet lucid and deeply felt reality of that artificial world will allow us to build a kind of second life there, and if that life is better, happier, more hopeful than the one that we have built for ourselves, it could lead, for some, to a life spent in that second world to the fatal exclusion of the original, to a kind of death by vivid dream.

However unlikely this scenario may seem, to entrust a future whose technology has the power to engineer a perfected illusion, whether by device or prescription or hypnotic broadcast, to a population hobbled by incomplete or inaccurate knowledge and by prejudice and entrenched myths, is to trade destiny for fate – history will require that we become more human, or it will assure that we become less, and the latter is the path to our ruin – not, I believe, in any future so distant that we must leave its description to the imagination of our writers, but in this, our 21st century.

Many had spoken about the 21st century as if it was a new land full of bright promise and invulnerable to the nightmares of the preceding ten millennia, as if we only needed to cross over its border with history to arrive home at last. Not so, of course, and yet our wish to make the 21st century an enduring refuge from horror has made the new millennium a many-faceted symbol. It is the doorway through which we hope to escape the twenty medieval centuries that came before, it is the bloodless battlefield on which we strike the fatal blow against the empire of greed, arrogance, and cruelty that ruled the world ‘til then, it is the place where the raw materials of technology and hope will be used to build a human paradise for all, and it is the time when we learn at last what it means to be human and to acknowledge our debt to the past that we can now pay to the future.

But we are being held back. Tens of millions of Americans believe that our world was made on Sunday, October 23rd, 4004 BCE, and tens of millions of Americans believe that our climate is not changing because of human activity, and tens of millions of Americans believe that the theory of evolution is demonstrably false, and tens of millions of Americans believe that tens of millions of other Americans, no matter how desperate, should be denied help from a government that they do not believe works for the common good, thus hoping to prove what is false with what is cruel.

So, what came with us when we entered the 21st century? What followed us through the door as the speeches, the fireworks, and the eager crowds celebrated the passage of the most lethal millennium in our history, as well as the hope that hope itself would now be granted substance enough to become instead a faith?

What entered with us, celebrating, too, though for differing reasons, were those who soon enough would make this new century seem no different from the last: sociopaths, fanatics, violent psychotics, malignant narcissists, zealots, and “true believers” (an odd title since what they believe is rarely true). They are a sentient form of darkness that has been with us from the beginning, and their remorseless cunning has traveled with us, unchanged, from a brutish past to the fragile civility of this moment, shadowing us as would a predator.

But I say again that what opposes us, what opposes life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (and I would add, of love, too, though love is the truest happiness) is not the other political party, the other gender, the other class, the other generations, the other religions, the other philosophies, but those whose conscience was either never bred, or never born. Still, we need to know more about those who would have us know less, and so I choose one group from among our list of villains, one who may have been born with the seed of conscience, though because that seed was then planted in poisoned ground, conscience grew instead into a barbed and twisted vanity.

With this, the fanatic will now have another moment upon another stage, though its light will not be flattering here, nor should it ever be, because the fanatic is someone who has anointed himself, though never to a position that he deserves, or that we ever could afford or ever should allow, and so I begin with three quotes written for his own useless review.

A fanatic is someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject – Winston Churchill

It is a poised and confident ignorance that both marks the fanatic and renders that mark invisible to the rest of us, for we assume that ignorance will always appear in disagreeable form, yet I have seen a pleasant face whose eyes were lit as if by a benevolent passion, only then to learn that behind those lustrous eyes there was little more than a howling wasteland of resolute hostility – Unknown

A fanatic is someone who is convinced that their personal identity - the deepest and most elemental foundation upon which one’s entire sense of individual existence depends - is under imminent and unrelenting threat of annihilation, and because the fate of the universe itself appears to rest upon the preemptive destruction of that threat (which is calling into aberrant being a world where it is the darkness that is radiant, and where the gods can only watch with a sullen impotence), the fanatic journeys with bizarre elation towards the imagined lights of oblivion, for here and now, few exist but he, and all foretold reunion awaits him in a place where he has never been, and none can ever go – Unknown

To the fanatic, he is the most passionate of men, committed to a noble cause, guided by a light that no one else can see, and though he stands alone, he valiantly struggles against an enemy that is without honor, without mercy, and assured of victory unless the fanatic can persuade enough true patriots to take up the fight, and so he assumes the role of savior, a role for which his talents serve him well, though they are talents which, while real, are tragically misspent.

He is often a gifted speaker, unafraid of presenting his views to large, unruly groups (though they are carefully chosen in advance for their capacity for riotous applause), he is well dressed according to the fashion of his audience, and he will moderate his obsession with making the world over in his own image by appearing as a humble man who is simply determined to make life better for those who feel left alone in the dark - as long as they follow him towards the utopia just over the horizon, which is, despite his claims, always a greater darkness, though to the blind, there is darkness everywhere.

In the end, the fanatic is just an infant made dangerous by a man’s knowledge of how to avenge himself against whomever is not inhumanly perfect in their response to that infant’s constant and conflicting need for our slavish attention.

Yet I have been fooled by the fanatic. I have heard speeches whose words seem right, speeches given by men whose voices resound with a righteous certainty, voices whose melodic authority will fling each word as if it was meant to penetrate the skin. My youth and my wish to contribute to a noble cause lead me to see these fanatics instead as Generals preparing an army to war for the end of war, and to see us, his citizen soldiers, as patriots against tyranny.

However, the truer metaphor would be theatrical and would portray me as more foolishly hopeful and trusting, and so I took too long to walk out on their braying monologues, and yet a fair review would quote the blood-price of my admission and my far too charitable applause as the still finer act because what had for a time seemed worthy of ovation was merely an amateur’s failed audition upon an empty stage, while the show’s truer stars sat in the velvet rows before them.

Though my devotion to these men was brief, it was troubling, but though troubling, it taught me much, if differently from their intent. In part, my devotion reflected a faith in them that I had kept past reason, since for them faith was a worthless passion valued only for its power to blind us to the truth of their indifference to the truth, and from that moment on, I forever reserved that faith for those who earn it with their wish to return our own with theirs.

The rest was my longing to be free and to free others in turn, a worthy passion and one so strong that when I thought I had found someone who made an answer to this longing seem possible at last, I then lowered the sword and shield of my caution - as the young will do when hope is made their sentinel – and did not raise them again until it was almost too late to protect myself against their predatory vanity.

The fanatic is arguably the most dangerous among the leaders of The Opposition for he combines the narcissist’s egocentricity (where others exist only for the admiration they offer) with the sociopath’s lack of conscience (where others exist only for the advantages they offer) and then to this adds a story, one that is often well told, seemingly coherent, and provides just the right enemy for those uninformed listeners who will always want to make external what is too painful to keep inside. This can work because the fanatic knows how to create an enemy in order to shift the darkness within them onto others in the urgent, if unacknowledged, hope that fighting this enemy will finally purge them of their darkness, though in the end, it will only serve to make this darkness more powerful and more pervasive, and by doing so, they will instead welcome what they had wanted to expel, and make of themselves the truer enemy.

Ultimately, this is a matter of the experience of personal emptiness (of which I will say more later), and there are two forms from which we can suffer: one is the hole in our hearts if we were not loved and do not then learn to love despite this loss, and the other is the hole in our minds if we are not broadly educated, whether by our schools, our families, or ourselves. The fanatic suffers from the first and enlists the second, but neither have that broader awareness, that sense of inner companionship needed to see the world without the prejudice of fear, and like hope, fear is a prophetic emotion, foretelling what will be, and it is always learned so perfectly that once fear takes hold, it can feel too commanding to overcome, and even too needed for its counsel to want to overcome, and each fear will then bear a host of lesser premonitions, the dreads and worries which will faithfully obey the fear that bore them, like slavering dogs pacing around their master, ready for the hunt.

But it is our job, our duty, our commitment, our responsibility as citizens of this country and of this world to be informed. If you call yourself a patriot but are unfamiliar with the available facts and differing positions regarding the most critically important issues confronting us, then you are betraying the country you have claimed to love, and have promised to defend (and of such a promise was the first hope born), though to our patriots I offer a suggestion: patriotism not for our country, nor for any, but for all, a patriotism which humanity asks that we pledge instead to humanity because our most formidable opponent is not in another land alone, it is here and kept strong by what we do not know though could choose to learn, and having learned, then act upon, while noting that to choose not to act is to risk losing the right to choose.

But here I want to cite two other passages from earlier in my talk: first, “our press is now too often owned by men indifferent not only to the ethical demands of professional journalism, but to anything other than profit and propaganda”, and second, “a single man of great wealth and great power, calling himself a journalist, establishes an empire of newspapers and television stations whose scandalous but profitable objective is to speak to the fear, anger, prejudice, and intolerance of an audience now so demonstrably misinformed that they have become a threat to their own country”.

First, of the latter, a question: treachery is one of the most serious accusations one could make, and so I wonder aloud whether it would rightfully apply in the following case: if a large “news” corporation, for reasons of profit and ideology alone, had the conscious goal of providing incomplete, misleading, or brazenly dishonest stories to viewers who had been lead to believe that these stories were “fair and balanced” news, and if this corporation used this strategy so effectively for so long that its viewers were found to be the most thoroughly misinformed of all, and if, as a consequence, those viewers, by virtue of both their number and their artificially provoked anger, put democracy at risk with their votes for ignorant, heartless scoundrels, then could this corporation’s actions justifiably be described as treachery?

As one gives this the thought which it deserves, remember that corporations do not govern, they rule, and that more than one scholar has shown that our country is, by well-established definitions, no longer a democracy at all, but also that treachery is defined as a “violation of allegiance, or of faith and confidence”, at best, and at worst as, “an act of perfidy or treason”. “Some are saying” that I would vote “yes” on both – and they would be right because this corporation has, without rational doubt, greatly damaged trust in journalism, in government, in truth, in facts, in ourselves and in each other, and whatever the opposite of patriotism may be, it is precisely the charge of which I now proudly and passionately accuse them.

With all this in mind, perhaps the first action that would make ours a more well informed and thus more humane society is to make these points as clearly, as loudly, as factually as possible, though to accomplish this, we would need to rely upon a press already diminished by the grotesque self-interest of those who, with no shame felt or shown, would freely call themselves the guardians of the fourth estate, though the only estate they would ever faithfully guard is their own.

It is astonishment in the form of horror we should feel at the realization that ethical reporting is being carefully replaced by allegation, conjecture, and paranoid speculation, and that our country, built of and by and for the truth, is in danger of being swept away by an unrelenting storm of lies and strategic exaggeration (which, since it is not the truth, is another form of lie). Journalists of great courage and devotion still struggle to find the truth and to tell its story honestly and without bias because of their love for the truth and for those who suffer from its want (and I would not be here if they did not), but they must now compete with media celebrities whose salaries and stardom are valued more than the work, often dangerous, that is required to separate fact from rumor and truth from accusation.

What worries me as much as the decline of principled journalism is the keenly felt possibility that we could reach the point at which we drown in the lies that now only lap at our feet. Where facts are for the mind, the truth is for the heart, though when the heart has been hollowed and blackened by a life without love and by the desperate torment which then can fill this emptiness, the truths to which that heart is drawn may seem the ones that once had sheltered us, but are now in the keeping of words meant only to deceive rather than to liberate.

There is a special kind of fear, an existential fear, the kind that moves towards madness, in just the thought of fake news, for it is not difficult to imagine finding ourselves talking with someone who would not only quote fake news in defense of their position, but who would claim that the facts which we had carefully gathered as refuge against uncertainty were instead the “real” fake news (and fear becomes terror at the pairing of “real” with “fake”). How could we then hope to share what we know to be true, to have the kind of conversation that would allow for the possibility of a changed mind, even if it was our own?

Yet even more disquieting, unless we devote far more time than most of us are granted to the task of getting our news from multiple differing sources in order to assure that we uncover the truth at last, how could we keep ourselves informed and thus safe from news that is not news at all, but instead a grotesque and dangerous fiction meant to distract from the truth the way a magician distracts his audience from the secrets behind his tricks with words and wand and pretty assistants, a black magic meant to make the truth itself disappear in a silent, gagging billow of smoke – and do not doubt that an “anti-factual” world would be a dying world, exchanging our destiny for dust.

It seems to me that there is ultimately only one reason that could account for a man’s support of our current flirtation with tyranny - what he does not know. If a man takes his news from sources which fail to honor the well-established rules of journalistic ethics, whether from a rank indifference to those ethics or from a fanatical devotion to ideological fantasies (though these may be the same), or if that man is unfamiliar with history, our governing philosophy and its founding documents, as well as the verifiable details of current events, then his support is based either upon the acceptance of deliberately and maliciously produced myths (with my apology to mythology) or upon simple ignorance. In the latter case, he may be guilty of nothing more than having not yet learned where the truth can be found – a failure of curiosity, perhaps - though he still could be assigned some responsibility for adding to the destructive conflicts which now so clearly threaten us all.

If a vital part of patriotism is the possession and defense of authentic knowledge, then those who author and publish willful and inflammatory fictions, and those who accept them, are conspirators against democracy, and precisely what kind of man, pray tell, would want to claim this as his contribution to history?

We near a time when the glib pretension, the baseless charges, the formulaic responses, the malicious assumptions, the perfected insincerities, and the strategic underplay and overplay whose balance is delusion will be broadcast from so many points to so many people that the truth will seem an oddity, a breach of peace without defenders, an uncomfortable sound requiring the white noise of well-rooted fabrications and perhaps a few ads if tranquility is to be restored.

So, now a moment of political science fiction for you, a poli-sci-fi story meant to provoke imagination to foresee the merciless future which many of our present leaders, stuck in a gloried past that never was, would have us build for them, and I offer this because I recently watched the host of a program devoted to politics interview a guest who represented a position at extreme odds with his own, and it was their brief though deeply troubling exchange (a better word than conversation in this case) which leads me to wonder just how fatally poisoned the air could become and how ruinous to hope it would be were that guest’s confrontational strategy to become pandemic, because that strategy was not guided by a thoughtful devotion to a belovéd cause, but by the determination to give the well-informed and gracious host no chance to reply, or if he did, to accuse him, falsely, stridently, contemptuously, unrelentingly of putting words in her mouth, no matter what reply he offered.

If such malicious arrogance were spread across all the instrumentalities of modern communication and into our homes and communities, the following portrait of our future would pass quickly from fiction to foretelling.

Imagine a world in which it has been so long since you last heard an established fact quoted without its immediate denunciation as a conspiracy against reason or religion, or so long since you last heard an intelligent opinion openly discussed without contemptuous response, that your measure of truth, and thus of guidance through a darkening world, could be nothing more than the least fraudulent among all the news you had to hear, and unable to voice an opinion that differs to any degree from official doctrine without forced exile from the company of others, courage turns inward and makes a fortress of thought as the last barricade against catastrophic unanimity.

Try to feel what it would be like to need to create a refuge within you and to call for the retreat to its sanctuary of all that you held dear, of all the truths which had once secured your sense of identity and hope (one a thing of the past, the other of the future, but both entwined), and of all the inward strongholds you had built against the loss of freedom, and by this retreat, hold the last ramparts against the loud, ceaseless rush of lies that pour from every program, every ad, every leader, every acquaintance, all the time keeping secret, even from yourself, the proud though desperate refusal to conform to a world without honor, while the well-rehearsed but vacant smiles of the Ministers of Deceit (where minister may have two meanings) are broadcast from every device at every numbing moment.

But imagine, if you dare, were we to reach the moment when we no longer know where the truth is kept, when fragmentary information, authorized deception, sanctioned uncertainty, exaggeration, embellishment, and the deliberate suppression of the truth renders the discovery of the truth impossible. Imagination grows reluctant to complete this story, though grant me that it would be the purest form of insanity, and if a madman is someone who has detached himself from our shared reality, what would it mean were that reality instead detached from us? It just could be that this story’s end would then foretell our own, because without the truth, we are just primitives scouring the brush for scraps while listening for predators.

I concede that mine is ultimately not much of a story, and it is far from the strangely entertaining horrors of cinematic apocalypse, but let your own imagination continue the story to places where it will require courage to go on, or to cite a better tale than mine, it now seems that 1984 just could be more a part of our future than of our past.

But of apocalypse (a word that once meant to reveal), I offer a guess about why it is that conversations about politics and religion, far more than any other subjects, can so often arouse aggressive passions – it is, I believe, because politics is the set of rules by which we are governed while we live, and religion is the set of rules which, we are told, decide our eternal fate upon our death. Thus, are these two subjects literally a matter of life and death, and the discussion of their offerings so often an assurance of confrontation, and if the apocalyptic was ever to descend upon us, it would be the fusing of these two that would summon it.

This is why the two should never be allowed to be joined. Because politics is by its nature a public matter and religion private (though a privacy claiming public obligations), they should be kept forever apart in the public realm which is my interest here, and this makes politics both the provocation and the necessary process for any revolution that would establish a functioning democracy for everyone - and those last three words, democracy for everyone, should be a childish redundancy rather than a form of emphasis, though the very reason to stress this truth (already under stress of another kind) is also the reason to make some contribution towards remaking our world on behalf of all who live upon it rather than of those upon it who would tell us how to live.

It is ultimately rather simple. Our lives are governed by a system (a word which, like bureaucracy, is strategically vague in its assignment of responsibility) which defines success as the acquisition of wealth and power, or more precisely, wealth and therefore power, and this system is designed to attract those whose ambition is too rarely guided by moral and ethical considerations. That most of us would define success by the love we have for others and the actions, often valiant, that we take to protect and enrich the lives of those we love, is a truth that is too often obscured by our almost hypnotic fascination with the glamour of wealth and by our understandable fear of a power that is not ours to wield.

But this is, and always has been, a world in which the ruled dare not question the system in any fashion that would catch the attention of those who rule, and to imagine a world where it is the diseased who reign over the healthy would not only serve as a fitting metaphor, but as an act of private rebellion which is, in many places, still best kept from wider public view.

Here you might object that in this country, it is we the people who rule, and though the rutted track of our history seems to suggest that this has often been at least partly true, most of today’s most powerful, encouraged by the worshipful legions of our misinformed, and armed with information provided by the science they publicly disavow, are now methodically eroding our democracy, which one recent academic study has found to be an oligarchy, a country governed by a wealthy, powerful, and, I would add, merciless few, and any nation which travels from democracy to oligarchy within a single generation is one whose downward momentum plunges towards sociopathocracy, a nation ruled by those for whom conscience would be the only extravagance they could not afford, a nation therefore clearly in need of revolution.

It needs to be said again that this revolution must be non-violent at every moment of its determined course, and the only thing that I would want fired at its opponents is the truth, or the unyielding demand for the truth because we are being put to sleep, a restless, dreamless sleep with a lullaby of outrageous lies, told as if they are instead self-evident truths, spoken with a solemn authority by politicians and broadcast personalities who look us in the eye and without a blush tell us what they are well paid in both salary and celebrity to tell us, mixing grimaces of outrage with radiant smiles in well-practiced imitation of authenticity, their voices as smooth and deep as a prophet’s, and growing strident only when challenged with the truth, and yet if we listen carefully enough, we will learn that they lie in such a way that the truth is somehow told. Still, too often too many of us will permit ourselves to believe them anyway.

We believe because it is comforting to have our fears given external focus, thus obscuring their truer source, and we believe because surely no one who addresses millions every day would lie to millions every day, and we believe because to doubt them would be to doubt that hard-won sense of ourselves we have worked a lifetime to fortify against uncertainty, and we believe because to question such prominence would be to question our own secret dreams that one day we will do something to make our names last at least a little longer than the marble upon which they will soon enough be carved.

But success is love, both joyously given and as joyously received, and if, as one great philosopher claimed, hell is other people, then I would make the counter-claim that other people are the only heaven I have ever known or would ever ask to enter. This is success, this is truth, this is triumph, this is joy, and this is our mortal share of immortality. Yet, though deeply felt, what I have just sought to portray is not really quite so simple, after all, and in trying to make it so, I have made errors of the kind we must never allow, lest we become those whom we would oppose.

First, by “the system” I was referring to institutions which protect those who value money and the political power it can purchase more than the health and happiness of those who treasure something more than treasure alone. For some, however, “the system” gives a name to the nameless forces that keep them from their dreams, while for others, it refers to the set of laws, mostly rational, by which the world is organized, and so the meaning of “the system”, if left unclarified, ranges from invisible bureaucracies beyond appeal, to the flawed yet perfectible rules of human governance.

Second, by the “wealthy and powerful” I meant to specify those who care about little more than building immortal monuments to themselves by purchasing and ruthlessly keeping political power and influence, if there is any longer any difference between them, though I made no further distinction and spoke of them as if each one was the same as all the rest.

But they are not. There are some who have power yet little wealth, and this power is vast when it derives from moral intelligence rather than from wealth alone, and there are others who possess great wealth but use it to lessen misery or to oppose the use of wealth to gain an influence which The Opposition could never secure in a better world than ours.

Third, by “politicians and broadcast personalities” I was referring to the worst of each, though there are politicians and journalists of unquestionable integrity, and this must never be forgotten, in part because it just might be these precious few who will lead us towards a freedom we have known only when, in our purest and most perfect moments, we watch our children at play and to the music of their laughter, compose our dreams for them.

So, for those already held captive by their prejudice (the most ruinous and entrenched of our illusions), my carelessness might have added other groups to all the others that have found their enemies, and any complete list of such groups would ultimately include every one of us, a fact we might one day use to our shared advantage, and so, it is these three errors especially, but any others I may have made whose amending I must leave to those who see more clearly, though when they have, I would say to them: take the lead and tell us what you see, and by doing so, astonish us.

But of all the horrific facts I quoted as introduction, one of the most staggering is this: “off-shore accounts are found to hold more than enough money to build housing, clinics, and schools for every person in the world who does not now have access to any one or all of these”. The estimated amount held in these secret accounts ranges from 21 Trillion to 32 Trillion dollars, and even the lesser of the two would be enough to assure that everyone on the planet would have the essential basics needed for a secure life, and I ask you to imagine with me a world where all of our children are in school, all of our sick receive care, and no one must huddle against a stranger for shelter against the night.

But numbers, like words, are now so often used without the reverence they deserve that our understanding of both their meaning and their power have been diminished, and so I offer the following brief tutorial: if you were to count without stopping at the rate of one every second, it would take more than eleven and a half days to count to one million, an ordeal, no doubt, and yet to count to one billion would take more than 31 and a half years (nearly half a lifetime), while counting to one trillion would take nearly 32 thousand years (meaning that you would have had to have been born into a Cro-Magnon family in the middle of an ice age to be nearing the end of this labor), and counting to 32 Trillion would take more than one million years.

I don’t expect that this tutorial will, by itself, awaken you to the enormity of this story, but it is a lesson that should at least provoke imagination to envision the sharp-clawed little demons that would begin cheerfully tunneling against sanity when counting just to one million, and by this lesson, bring the heart into our assessment of this story, one which, by the way, was given far less coverage by the press than justice and reason would have asked.

These accounts are held by large corporations as well as by wealthy individuals whose estimated number represents just one percent of one percent of the world’s population, and it is at precisely this moment that many of you may predict that I am about to call for the confiscation of these Trillions and their redistribution to every place on Earth where the poor suffer for the want of what this money could provide them. But I am not. This is partly because it could not happen, partly because it would not happen, and the rest is my conviction that there is a better, a more rational, a more practical resolution to the ten millennia of our rule by those whose power, whether derived from wealth or enforced by weaponry, is used only to secure more power, and with little regard for those who have none.

That resolution is revolution.

I have tried to find a way, I have tried to find the words, I have even tried to find the numbers that would not only catch and hold your attention, but would inspire your devotion as well, and yet the one idea that may have a chance of keeping you from your next distraction and of awakening you from the dream that was formed in another heart than yours is revolution.

This is not, however, why I chose it as the theme for this talk, this protest, this dissent. I hope for revolution because I see no other way to remove from our path the one obstacle that prevents our collective progress, and the one conspiracy for which the gathered evidence is overwhelming: the collaboration between political power held by those without imagination, and wealth possessed by those without compassion, a dominion whose scale and significance should horrify you as well.

Sometimes, however, fewer words have more power than many, at least when the subject speaks on behalf of the words unspoken, and so we can ask again of those who horde their treasure: what is it you love more than the people you could protect, but do not? In this case, at least, we know the answer: money, but now ask yourself: what does it say of a man who loves money more than those who are dying for its want?

In only partial answer, I would say this: I am neither anthropologist nor historian, though it seems to me that we could reasonably divide the Time of Man into historical eras defined by either the strategies of group survival or the established system of commerce that was dominant at its time: thus first, the Age of Hunting, followed by the Age of Farming, after which the Age of Trade, and finally the time in which we now live, the Age of Money, while noting that each Age past the first includes the ones that had come before. According to this, we could ask: is there a rationally compelling reason that our current age could not be replaced, as the others were, by something both new and better?

Each of the first three Ages had its tragic flaws, though each allowed us to keep ourselves alive long enough to arrive at the next. But the Age of Money is different. Other than acquisition by theft or conquest, it was difficult in the Ages of Hunting, Farming, and Trading to acquire so great a surplus of meat, grain, or commodities that immense power was then conferred upon the holder – these were the Ages when most power was held by those who possessed both a merciless ambition and the most soldiers.

In the Age of Money, however, power is held by those who possess a merciless ambition and the most cash. Where the difference between the two is weapons and money, the one a threatening reality and the other a regulated abstraction, the Age of Money seems the far better world, but for whom and how many? As you would answer, remember that at this moment, the five richest people in the world now own more wealth than the poorest 3,600,000,000 of us, while the poverty of the latter is largely a consequence of the wealth of the former.

Keep in mind that in each of these four Ages, women and men of conscience could do little more than hold out against threat and deprivation until the next Age could overtake the last. Yet I have faith that free women and men of conscience are the ones who will build the next Age and design it so that no one would ever again be left behind by the forward motion of human progress. And perhaps if we give this next Age a fitting name, its greater human value would become apparent, and so I would offer: the Age of Transcendence, the time when history was divided into the darkness that came before and the light that will come after, a light that would shine upon all, and would only grow brighter, and would never go out.

This is just another wish of mine, though please note that the word transcendence comes from two Latin words meaning to climb beyond, and is this not precisely what the vast majorities of our race throughout all of human history have spent their lives working valiantly to accomplish, if too rarely with success? May their labor, which is ours as well, not have been in vain.

Of money, a final thought to ease the tug of conscience telling me I have not quite said enough, and so I say to you that money should not be the principle foundation upon which our daily interactions with each other and our relationship with our world should be based, for although there are luminous bastions where love is ascendant, the shadow cast by money hangs over us all, while for many, its worship by others can be lethal, while life and death, it seems, are now just another form of currency. As my son, whose moral intelligence is beyond question, has said to me more than once: “if I was rich, I would not be rich”, and if you do not understand his point, then neither will you understand my own.

But if you do, allow imagination to wander freely and without fear among the more human possibilities.

Now, while soon onto a subject that is to love as the light to dawn, I must first begin with another of my opening points, and thus begin in darkness: “under the empty claim of virtuous action, a major political party conspires to return women to a position of legally enforced subservience, neither their bodies nor their destinies any longer their own”.

I feel that women are, in certain crucial ways, superior (though without also believing that I am, as a man, inferior as a consequence – illogical perhaps, and yet utterly rational), and my admiration for their strengths of heart and mind and body and soul borders upon a reverence – in truth, there are moments when I feel that to have pleased a woman is like having done something to have caused a god to stop, take notice, and smile, and I have long been convinced that the world would be a far better place if the ladies were to lead us until the men had gained – as they can and must - the emotional intelligence and respect for life which is native to a woman.

That there is nothing in the universe more powerful than genuine love is a truth that she has known for millennia and kept against ruin, and so I, for one, would willingly go wherever she might lead.

The men have had their chance, their time to rule, and so I have often spoken to others of a world where women have won the leadership of every government and every corporation, and when this is greeted by the grotesquely cynical response that then the world would go mad one week each month (a response I have heard more than once), I reply with a knowing smile “better one than four”, a mildly clever reply perhaps, yet useless in the face of such impenetrable ignorance.

So, I ask you now to imagine a world without women.

Left only with this nightmarish thought, however, the story would quickly end when we grasped the simple biological fact that the planet would then begin to heal as the last of our kind nodded off and dissolved into its widening pastures, so let’s complicate this dark tale by adding that the men, despite the absence of their better halves, have found a way to produce sons without needing the heroic gallantry of women.

Left alone with only other men for company, without beauty, without love, without a standard set for kindness, gratitude, patience, and humility, or any passion grander than a brute allegiance to their tribe, imagination – not accustomed to failure – grows blank when trying to conjure a guide as magical as a woman who could lead them towards a world that would be worthy of her lost example. Women know many things we men have yet to learn as well, and perhaps one of the most deeply human is that there is, after all, a resolution to the inescapable solitude of human individuality, and that it is found in the divine refuge of intimacy.

Love, romance, laughter, dance, both sleep and silence when they are shared, the adoration of beauty as well as the reverence for mystery which is its kin, the private idioms of glance and touch, and the reverie of inward monologue (an intimacy with oneself without which all outward forms are incomplete) – these are the gifts for which she lives in thankfulness, even as much as for life itself. And what man, proud of his battle scars, would not rather jump from the battlements onto the back of a boney steed and ride off into the fatal delirium of war than face the dangers and agonies of childbirth?

I believe as well that women have, for want of a better word, a profound sense of interiority, perhaps because of the vital fact that they can conceive, carry, and bear a child, whether they ever do so or not, and I feel that it is important for the men to note that this is something they can never know, and I wonder whether this sense of interiority becomes the model upon which a woman’s typically greater sensitivity to emotional truth – whose roots are always deep - is then based, or the example from which it is learned, though whether this is true or not, it is surely true that emotion, whether outwardly expressed or not, is a language of its own.

A case in point: I have known women to express their deepest feelings in a code that women have used for centuries, if not millennia, a code meant to convey emotional complexities while speaking of subjects having little interest to most men, a code based upon ordinary words whose subtle new meanings derive more from glance and tone than established reference, a code used when a woman wants another woman to understand a truth while in the company of a man who never would, a code no man I know has ever mastered.

But I do not want to master that code on behalf of men – rather, I want the men to master themselves so that women never again need to use a code at all, because, as you know, a code is only necessary when in the presence of those who might otherwise stand against you.

Men often seem to live on the surface of thought, tragically separated from the broad realms that lie below and unaware of what lives in their hearts, which are, after all, just as human as a woman’s, and this inward separation could be one of the reasons for the greater sense of unacknowledged emptiness with which men too often live, yet if their will and their awareness permit, men are just as capable as women of the profound experience of self that gives constructive meaning to one’s world and allows room for the possibility of love, the guarantor and guardian of this sense of interiority, an experience which is ultimately the sensation of life itself and the consciousness of the humanity of both others and ourselves, and this is something that men can always learn, if they so choose.

I also feel that, where history is cause, there may be more women who are proud to be a woman than there are men proud to be a man, and this may be one reason why a woman’s pride is seen by many men as an indefensible sense of entitlement which threatens their own, though these are the men whose pride has been, by too much pride, too wounded to permit their reverence for a woman. But there have been many great men these past ten millennia, if not enough, and yet it is, I believe, far easier for a woman to rise to the occasion of the need for greatness – a man requires history and genius, a woman only requires a good man, though sometimes just his opposite is enough.

It is her time now.

Yet of men and their struggle to discover their true depths – of their struggle to be men - I would add this: just below the surface of thought - in other words, just below the language of the word, lies the language of the image, and though, while awake, we rarely give to the image the time we give to the word, the language of the image is its equal because intimately bound to the language of feeling (for images are to feeling as words to thought) and what our feelings speak, the images will speak as well, and when we learn them as a single language, then will thought transcend the word, until the word can find or form the name to grant its return to brief dominion, though of the name and its elusive magic, remember this: a name is not an attribute of the language of the word alone, for an image is a name for that of which it is an image.

And there is power in a name, for when you give something a name, you give it life, and then you can call upon it again and again, or command it to go away and await your summons, though having a life of its own, that which has a name will not always obey. Yet something without a name can have a kind of life as well, and like a ghost, it will often hover nearby, waiting for us to see it and hoping we are not too startled when at last we notice to then grant it substance by giving it a name.

But whether by name or image, we men could profit by more time spent in the realms below and beyond the word – or better, more time spent in both and in equal share – until they are made whole, and, like a woman, each man is made whole as well. For now, however, it seems that men want their opposite in a woman, something softer than themselves, perhaps as a kind of redemption, while women hope for someone just as gentle as they – may the ladies find their gentlemen, and in doing so, find the fair destiny which they would out-wait history to embrace.

Yet despite her majesty and her greater mastery of what it means to be human, there are men who, on behalf of their masters, are willing to diminish her freedom and thus her power to make this a better world even for those whose desperate need for the approval of either their god or their public blinds them to the gifts she has been waiting millennia to offer us.

I would ask these men whether they are afraid of learning that the way of life they have defended at such high cost for so long would be revealed as a moral obscenity compared to the world which she would still gladly help us build, and so afraid that they would rather regulate a woman’s freedom than risk proving that their own lives have been spent upon nothing nobler than keeping those who might oppose them too frightened, too misinformed, and too busy guarding their lives against ruin to take a stand against them.

In sum, I would ask these men: precisely what, brave gentlemen, frightens you when you think of a woman who is free to act as she wishes and to pursue the destiny of her own choosing, and why have you worked with such depraved tenacity to transform that fear into law and to spread it to whomever still may suffer to listen and to obey? And I would say to them that it is their refusal to accept the benevolent authority of The Feminine, their unconfessed envy of a woman’s power, and their insistence upon unchallenged dominion that has given shelter to the enemies of progress and made the name of Man another for inhumanity.

I would also say to the men that if you long for the sunlit refuge of magic, or if you want to know whether there is any magic left anywhere at all, you need not search, because the great guardians of our magic – and the finest magicians in all the world - are everywhere around us, though surely you already know this - surely you know that women, and the children they bravely and gratefully bear for us, are the ones in whose gentle hands all the brightest magic ever known or needed is forever safely held.

And of women and men, I remind the latter that almost every one of us is larger than almost every one of them – and this is a simple fact known to everyone past their childhood, yet for most women, this simple fact can be deeply troubling, precisely because for most men, it is not, and part of this revolution, which must be more a revolution in consciousness than in governance (since the latter follows from the former), requires every man to learn that their greater physical strength must be only for the protection of women and our children until the day comes when our sanctuary is at last no longer needed and we then can soothe ourselves in theirs instead.

If I were asked to offer just one moral prescription in the hope of progressing towards a cure for all the world’s many agonizing disorders, it would be “women and children first”, and though this seems, at best, almost absurdly simplistic, and even foolishly antiquarian, as would any single prescription, imagination suggests that were this to be faithfully and universally applied, the world would quickly begin to recover, not only because all women and children would then be safe and free and cherished, as sanity itself would demand, but because this could only come to pass if each man devoted himself to its fulfillment, and by doing so, become the man that all men are surely meant to be.

It often seems that men cannot manage their world unless it is their assigned task to compel other men to do so, and it is clear that most men could learn much of much value from most women if only they were to allow women to teach them what it truly means to be more deeply human, and it is to this latter subject that I now turn at last, though not before I stress that if men did not secretly believe that women possess a greater magic than they themselves have yet to master, why have so many men in so many places sought to lord over her, and why they still do not know that the restraints they have placed upon her, whether by law, tradition, or religious text, keep her not only from her own bright destiny, but from ours as well.

Understand that we will have secured the world for our mortal paradise only when we have made a world in which every woman is honored by every man, though until this comes to pass, accept the possibility that men are simply not yet as evolved as women are, while here, too, we can ask: what is it, gentlemen, that you love more than the women you could protect, but do not - and before you answer, remember this: she will love, even when she is not.

There are more than one million associations, foundations, and institutes in the world and yet as far as I can tell, there is not one whose specific mission is to study the question of what it means to be human, arguably the most important question we could ever ask, and the vital importance of an answer to this question, however incomplete and provisional that answer would be, is made more urgent now because of the emerging conflict between an imperial ignorance provoked by wealth and armed with a fanatical intensity, and a world longing to be free of all that keeps us from a destiny whose extraordinary brilliance we still cannot fully imagine, though at times we may sense this as it strains towards our admission, like a memory that loiters near the threshold of awareness, not yet ready for its recall.

But what does it mean to be human? The long but ultimately useless answer would include everything that everyone who has ever lived has ever done, thought, felt, and imagined. Beyond being unknowable, this would mean that every act of cruelty is equally as defining of our shared humanity as every act of kindness, thus turning the answer, whose supporting evidence is far too inclusive to gather, let alone to comprehend, into little more than a slogan, something like “if you do it, it is human to do”, and by this trick, make the question itself seem unimportant, or too discouraging in its scope and implications to pursue.

But the greater flaw with this answer is its focus upon our past, from the beginning of human time until now, and though the past should always serve as one of our guardian lights, however dim or flickering, it is upon the future and who we are capable of becoming that our answer should properly be based. To the question of what it means to be human, no answer we might offer now - perhaps ever - could remain true for long, and certainly not for all time, for we are the ones for whom no single truth is true, except that we are human.

So, we shrink the answer by expanding the question to ask: what could it mean to be human? What are the human qualities that we would want to keep, and which to leave behind, and what are the qualities we do not now possess but can nevertheless imagine and, in time, attain? One clue to an answer is the fact that there have always been people of such extraordinary moral courage and intelligence that we can, by using their examples, have a sense now of what our destiny could be, as if these women and men were emissaries who have traveled back to us from the most joyously astonishing future we could hope to achieve.

Of those living now, I would first nominate Aung San Su Kyi, Desmond Tutu, Malala Yousafzai, and Thich Nhat Hanh, while noting that there are many, many others whose names have not yet risen above the horrors that they are so bravely struggling to end, and many whose names will never reach us but who have given their own destinies, and often their lives, in the effort to make that future present.

I also feel that it is important to note that the four I have named represent Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, and how profoundly meaningful it would be if this simple fact could bring the same lasting peace between two of these great religions that these four people, and many others, have worked so bravely to offer to us all.

Please also note that two of them are women and that, as I believe the two men would agree, there are none anywhere who are braver than they, though many who are as brave.

But to return to the necessary work of fashioning a preliminary answer to the question of what it means to be human, I would begin, of course, with love, though I admit that I am also tempted to end with it as well. It has a power that makes wealth and celebrity seem trivial by comparison, it has a royal entourage of kindred passions including compassion, devotion, conscience, benevolence, and courage, it cannot be made to waver or to fade, and only imagination, when unbound by fear, is as powerful as love, though I have sometimes wondered whether they are, in greater truth, twin siblings born of something even more fundamental: life itself and the deeply felt awareness that without others and our commitment to them, life is only a lingering brevity, a diversion taken between the indistinguishable gasps of our first breath and our last, a packing of our bags for the longer journey.

For now at least, the pursuit of an answer to the question of what it means to be human may require nothing less nor more than imagination’s resolve to set off on a well-stocked expedition into the future, for we are, both as individuals and as a civilization, a vast and deeply hopeful potentiality only now beginning to rouse from its millennial sleep – as a race, who we could be, and who, I have faith, we will be one day at last, is immeasurably nobler and more human than who we are today – onward towards that inward trek shared outwardly with all.

As I hinted before in a moment of playful solemnity, love may be a radically advanced form of consciousness more than just one emotion among the rest, a form so undistorted by prejudice of any kind, so willingly vulnerable to an unguarded experience of the world, so alert to beauty and truth, and to all the joyous compensations for mortality, that those who truly love must represent a level of human development which would, were everyone to love, then assure the ecstatic destiny which the millennia of our agonized labor against inhumanity has so unquestionably earned.

If nothing else, know this: love is not blind – love will see our imperfections with the greatest clarity, though also with understanding, and the knowledge that our imperfections are just strengths that have not yet been brought to light and made ready to act on our behalf.

There is, of course, more to being fully human than love alone (though love, by its nature, is never alone, nor, because of it, are we). But aside from hoping that the question of what it means to be human will soon be given a focused, organized, and public forum, I will mention here only one other issue related to this question which I feel is essential, and though it has the unhappy status of being one of love’s many opposites, it is not commonly recognized as being one at all, though it is, I believe, central to a more comprehensive answer.

The attention given to the human brain by our biological sciences, especially by our genetic, neurological, and cognitive sciences, has already yielded discoveries of great value and meaning, and one day its findings will surely be considered one of the great intellectual triumphs in the history of science. But though I want the associated research to continue without interruption, its revelations to increase, and its knowledge to spread, I offer two warnings.

First, I fear that many of the scientists engaged in this research are guided mostly by the working assumption that everything about us, even our most intimately personal experiences, including love itself, are no more than the ultimately predictable result of the underlying mechanics of our biochemistry.

Yet if we believe that each human action is derivative of processes beyond the reach of reflective self-consciousness, and each feeling, thought, and dream a result of the binding rules of cause and effect, then we begin to lose faith in the ideas which are both the foundation of any free society and the source of our belief that we are capable of fashioning our own destiny even in ultimate defiance of the natural laws that gave us life. If we are machinery, however fragile, poorly operated, and doomed to malfunction, then we will offer our reverence to the machine.

But we are not, and though the scientists who study us may not yet have the conceptual framework that would allow them to account for the exquisite complexity of human experience and our capacity for transcendence, the forces that threaten the classical view of humanity which portrays us as animals in laborious motion towards a kind of mortal divinity, may not come as much from science, but instead from careless reporting and our careless reading of it.

And this is my second warning. For every article I have read which narrates the triumphant discovery of the genetic cause of a human behavior (discoveries which are often later shown to be premature, if less publicized), I have heard many declare with a strangely causal assurance, as if quoting the merely obvious, “it’s all chemical, you know” when told a story of some singular act, even if it was not brutish, but rather sublimely human.

“Well, I don’t know that it’s all chemical, and neither do you”, not that I offer this as a part of the conversation, though I usually ask, with a practiced innocence born of both courtesy and curiosity, for the factual basis of their claim. But to watch a person making such a claim on behalf of our chemistry, you will often notice that after the assurance, which is dignity’s disguise, their eyes will look down a moment in reflection, and this is the moment when they begin to understand the implications of their claim.

If we are to be relieved of responsibility for our errors by assigning them to the mindless workings of a brain held captive by its neurophysiological processes and neuroanatomical structures, then we must also surrender all credit for the actions which correct our errors and bring joy to others. Too often have I heard even love discussed as if it were an illusion, or a passing squall of hormones set loose by the instinctual need to mate, a lust adorned with ritual.

As the classical view of humanity begins to warp under the pressures of an unfinished science and its incomplete or inaccurate coverage, it is interesting to note where we turn to be reminded of that more honoring view. Some keep refuge in religion where at least the freedom of the human will is preserved, though most of their followers would claim that the mistakes we make are ours alone, while our triumphs are to the glory of a distant master, and this, too, would take from us our true humanity.

Yet there are still places where the language, the symbols, and the images which speak of that humanity are maintained against the current habit of assuming that we are a catalog of poorly interlocking parts, a noisy mechanism set to self-destruct. The most enduring of these places are the arts in general, but film and literature especially, our dreams and inner dialog, and most ironically, our politics.

Film should be the most obvious case. I have never met, nor, I confess, could I even imagine, someone who is not enthralled by movies, and there are, I believe, two primary reasons for this. First, a movie is an act of imagination outwardly displayed and shared with others, and though it represents the imaginings of another, it is nevertheless a dream set upon a screen, one which, if the movie is a work of art, will feel as though it is somehow our dream as well. Even more than this, a movie, if it is the product of a creative and humane intelligence, will find its sequel in our daydreams while we continue its story as it becomes – literally – a living part of us, as all great art will do.

Watching a movie with others may now serve the same purpose that once was true for books read alone before a fire. They are the most recent chapter (itself a literary metaphor) in a verbal history that began with story-telling, a tradition that gave us the myths to which films often return for inspiration. Once stories could be printed (no mere transfer since the form itself gave new canvas to imagining) they became the dominant verbal form, and once stories could be filmed, movies became widely ascendant.

To this history of verbal forms, film adds a shared visual component that may serve to rouse a further wonder as did those earlier fires around which the very first stories were told. At its best, we learn from film what it means to be human, perhaps more effectively than from any other modern form, especially in an age in which the arts are too often without either their audience or their artists.

Second, unless a movie is so poorly written, acted, directed, and filmed that we cannot in any meaningful way relate to the story it tells, it will represent both the validation and the enshrinement of the classical view of humanity – the theatre is where we go to hear the language and to watch the images that underwrite human freedom and dignity, where we go to find ourselves and to be reminded of who we might have been and who we could still be, and the story we are then told will serve as one of the answers to the question of what it means to be human.

Please also note that every movie ever made, perhaps every story ever told, tells the tale of a struggle against some form of inhumanity, and even if that story is set in comedy (which is tragedy performed for the innocent), that struggle is, as is ours, one that will not end until the end of inhumanity itself. And please note, too, that everything human is a story – all that we tell others, all that others tell us, all that we know, all that we learn, all that is, and all that we are, is a story – everything, and thus, for us, are stories everything, too.

The less obvious case is politics, perhaps because it can be as discouraging as the belief that our destiny lies in our chemistry. Yet if you can bear to listen to what the typical politician says as he pleads for your vote, you will hear him deploy the words that have always been used to portray and to defend the classical view of humanity, words like hope, family, loyalty, courage, freedom, and even love. That he uses the vocabulary of human exceptionalism for strategic purposes alone makes two points: first, that we hunger for a reason to believe again that we are beings midway on an epic journey from a brutal past to a glorious future, from beast to deity, and second, that most contemporary politicians, especially on the national stage, may serve our most cherished images, if not those whose images they are.

But we are human, after all, and what is finally most important is not the partiality (in both meanings of this word) of science and its reporting, but the effects that our thoughtless acceptance of its presumed implications has meant to our self-image as human beings, and part of what I would want our revolution to offer is the shared effort to answer the question of what it means to be human, of what it would mean if everyone was free to imagine without constraint, and what it could mean if we were to assure that love, rather than power, is the bond that links us all. If this were to come to pass, then please grant that such a moment would be astonishing in the most joyous sense of this essential word.

But I offer this of Man (where this word refers, with deferential emphasis, to Woman as well), a brief tale of the kind we might tell to someone new to Man and to our history: in some, there lives a full humanity; in some, there is a humanity that has never learned to know itself, though, unaware, it still awaits its teacher; in some, there is a humanity buried beneath the rubble of a painful life, rubble that love and time could clear away; and in some, there is no humanity at all, only the pretense of an outward semblance of humanity. These four groups are, in their order, The Awake, The Sleeping, The Unborn, and The Undead.

Of the latter, the name suggests that we are, to recast drama as horror, in a kind of zombie apocalypse, though it should be argued that we always have been, while hope lies in the truth that there are now more who are fully awake than ever before, and like a prince waking with a kiss his princess from her dreams, The Awake will one day help bring both The Sleeping and The Unborn to full life again, while leading The Undead away – or so I still believe and will forever hope. If nothing else, know that The Awake want only to love and teach, The Sleeping need only to learn of themselves, The Unborn need only others to love them, and The Undead need no one, and want only money, power, and freedom without moral constraint.

This is, of course, too short a tale, and yet it contains praise and warning enough to begin one day the longer story.

Before I move on, I would strongly recommend that if an institute for the study of what it means to be human is ever to be established, it must not be with money offered by those among the wealthy who have already proven to our lasting dissatisfaction that their devotion to humanity does not extend beyond their own, and I would also ask that its founders consider calling it the World Institute for the Study of Humanity, whose acronym is WISH, a word utterly appropriate to its mission.

To end, for the moment, my discussion of our humanity, I feel that I must add this: when you look at a man as if he is not human, you will, at that very moment, appear to him as no longer human, too, because, at that same moment, you are not. When you can at last recognize your own humanity, you will then have become fully human and will never fail to find that same humanity in everyone you meet.

But now, having previously mentioned science and journalism only in passing, and in the latter case, with some discontent, I want to round out my view of both before beginning to move towards the end.

Earlier, I said this: “despite the irrefutable sum and scope of data and overwhelming scientific consensus, climate change, the greatest threat we have ever known (other than ourselves, for we ourselves have caused it), is declared a hoax by wealthy men and their elected valets, men incapable of even the elementary conclusion that without science, their wealth would consist of little more than a few extra goats”.

If ignorance is the confident possession of information that is at odds with the established facts, then, as I have said before, we are being led by the ignorant, and although this should be so well established that it seems almost another act of ignorance to think it needs restatement, the point here is not that the ignorant are leading us (with our bizarre approval), but where they are leading us, which, in this case, is to our doom, at least if they were to remain in power much longer, and this, by itself of course, is reason enough for revolution.

But I have already spoken of power and ignorance and politics (and note again how nearly synonymous each of these is to the others), and so I can instead now talk about science, one of the antidotes to each.

The findings of science are often controversial, even among scientists themselves, and the theories constructed to explain those findings are sometimes later disproven or shown to be incomplete, yet the further work which then leads to the abandonment or to the improvement of a theory is also a victory for science, and thus for us all. It is, I believe, the scientific method, and the women and men devoted to the truths which science has the power to reveal, that will one day build the foundation upon which a worldly paradise will then be built.

There are now, however, far too many who look upon science with suspicion, and even contempt, and though this, too, is based upon ignorance, I may be able to bring some light to a few of those who are now huddled in a dusk which they mistake for dawn, and so I offer the following brief tutorial on science, and as you listen, please keep in mind that science itself is a revolution, one which has won many victories for everyone, but which needs to remain free to win more.

What science is not. First, although the two are often in a forced marriage of convenience, science is not a bureaucracy. Science requires freedom – to think, to imagine, to experiment, and to pursue the truth based upon empirical evidence, and please note that empiricism is simply the perception of that which is shared, unlike, for instance, delusion or hallucination. Bureaucracy, however, reduces freedom on the premise that rigid control through policies designed to account for all possible human error is the only way to protect the public it serves – a noble cause, yet often counter-productive and very expensive in its neurotic vigilance against that error.

Second, science is not a religion, and I believe that whoever believes that it is, or thinks that science is the enemy of religion, does not understand that they are both a reflection of the passionate longing to understand, as well as a devotion to mystery (and we are fed by mystery as much as by the substance of its resolution), and the divine capacity for wonder, one of the greatest gifts we possess but whose name has now become, for many, no more than another word for a kind of skepticism, while wonder itself, deprived of its name, drifts into mere potentiality and waits to be born again. Perhaps most importantly, no religion can prove that its god exists, and no science can disprove that any god exists, though please note that in each case, the definition of proof belongs to science.

Lastly, science is not a conspiracy. The highly trained women and men who devote their lives to scientific research are not plotting to take over the world, and though they have, in many cases, developed new languages in order to better describe the new truths they find, the symbols they use and the old words to which they give new meanings are not meant to keep us out, but rather to draw us closer to what they have learned, hoping that a renewed sense of wonder will overcome our fear.

And to those who think that climate change is a conspiracy, I would point out that there are, by one estimate, as many as 200,000 scientists associated with climate research – climatologists, paleo-climatologists, geophysicists, glaciologists, mineralogists, oceanologists, and geologists, among others - and that at least 97% of them are now convinced, based upon an immense collection of carefully gathered data, that man-made climate change has begun and will continue until we act both decisively and globally.

If you believe that this is a hoax, that some dark power has persuaded 194,000 scientists to abandon their methods, their ethics, and their sanity, then I ask you, in fact I dare you to offer us the data which would support that claim, one which would be amusing if it were satire, but which is instead a lethal form of ignorance. There are many, though not enough, who trust science to provide the truths upon which we can rely for our progress and for the wonder and astonishment which those truths so often provide as well.

But those who do not should not remain unchallenged, and when they openly ignore or reject scientific discovery and in doing so, threaten our progress, they should be asked this one question: do you have any evidence for your position? This may seem a childish tactic, yet you can only credibly deny the findings of science with evidence that is drawn from science – anything else would be like claiming that a rifle and a kiss must be the same because they are both not trees.

What science is. First, science is philosophy with a method, a system of empirical inquiry which assures that its discoveries will provide truths worthy not only of our trust, but of our wonder, and I ask you look to around - at home, at work, at school, as you drive, as you walk, as you dream, as you suffer the diverting taunt of watching television or the imperative torment of listening to the news, and as you do, ask yourself what the world you know would be like without science.

The honest answer would be indistinguishable from an expression of profound gratitude because without science, life would be, as one philosopher imagined, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Yet this grim portrait is the life that many hundreds of millions of us must still endure, and though science alone cannot change this until we have changed ourselves, it is one of the most powerful allies we have in the struggle to rid ourselves of ignorance, disease, superstition, and all the many forms of misery which the name of misery cannot hope to name, of lives so intimate with suffering that to survive, they must ally themselves with their own want and struggle towards that place within them where pain becomes almost just a subtlety, a small detail, one star among the rest in a sky that is ignored for the broken ground.

But I believe I know where science seems to offer its illiterate opponents the chance to attack the reliability of its findings, and it is in the matter of proof. There are two and, it has been argued, three different forms of proof. The first could be called absolute proof and belongs to the realms of mathematics and symbolic logic where such proof, once verified, lies beyond rational challenge. The second is experimental proof and belongs to the applied sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology, and though it can provide compelling demonstration of a theory’s validity, it is not absolute and could, theoretically, be shown incomplete or even false.

The most successful theories in the history of science, quantum mechanics, relativity, and evolution, are examples of experimental proof because each of many thousands of experiments and applications performed over time by many thousands of scientists in differing fields have achieved the same results, though such proof does not usually ascend to the same level of irrefutable certainty as mathematics and symbolic logic provide.

The third could be called consensual proof and applies to those cases in which there is a near unanimity of scientific opinion based upon multiple independent analyzes of large volumes of data studiously collected from all available sources. In these cases, conclusive experimentation is usually not possible either because of ethical constraints or because the scale of the phenomenon studied renders experimentation impossible, as is true with climate science, although experiments using small-scale reproductions of larger systems and rigorous mathematical calculations are both employed in the associated research.

However, if you think that mere consensus based upon mere data is unimpressive, no matter how great the consensus and how vast the data, please note that it cannot be proven in any absolute sense that smoking causes lung cancer or that fatty diets and lack of exercise cause heart disease, and if you still insist that human-caused climate change is a hoax, then please, to all the world present your data, the sources of that data, your analysis of it and the statistical and mathematical basis of that analysis, and keep in mind that scientific theories are predictive, and though human-caused climate change is a theory that cannot be proven beyond all doubt, proof enough just may lie in the fact that climate science has already begun to make predictions that are starting to come true, predictions which foretell a ravaged world.

But we are haunted by proof. More to the point, we are haunted by our ravenous hunger for proof, and by its seeming rarity. Other than the irrefutable conclusions not only of mathematics and symbolic logic, but of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Evolution, the comfort we secure from proof seems too seldom felt. It is, of course, human to want certainty and each of us, I believe (though I am not certain), is in a constant, if mostly unconscious, search for the refuge that proof will offer.

This searching can be so relentless that in the absence of proof, we will often decide – again, unaware – that belief alone is adequate, and if the fear aroused by the failure to extract proof from doubt is strong enough, it will raise belief to the status of either faith or conviction (the latter having banished the doubt that faith allows), yet because belief is a form of hope, there is risk in deciding that what we hope to be true is true after all, for we may then act as if we are on higher ground while mired in swamplands.

The anxieties of being human - and of being human at this time - prod us to seek out those truths which are beyond refutation and which will shield us from the vulnerabilities of disquieting uncertainty, though it is only authentic knowledge, whether gleaned from science or gained through experience, that can raise mere opinion to the status of truth, and by doing so, give us our footing and a better form of hope. Unequivocal proof may not be as common as we would want, but an enlightened and justifiably confident certainty – of both intellectual and moral truths - is a human possibility available to us all, and for now, this is enough.

Nevertheless, The Opposition will continue to fight to protect its power, using the truth against itself and disguising their deceit with a few innocent facts while convincing those who would be the innocent victims of the approaching storms and droughts and plagues that it is the scientists and not the Oligarchs who are the conspirators, though perhaps nowhere else does rebelling against The Opposition seem more just and more urgent because in this case, the revolution has already begun, though it is nature herself who is the rebel, and humanity the authoritarian power to be removed.

If nothing else (though more is required), know and never forget that science is one of the shepherds of astonishment. Science has given generously to our world - it has brought us knowledge, comfort, meaning, wonder, and more than one form of freedom, and one day soon, I believe, it will also bring us extraordinary new forms of beauty as well.

I am not referring to the kinds of beauty that science has already offered, the discoveries that bring joy (which is beauty felt), or theories whose elegance becomes a form of art, or the images from deep space whose beauty has long awaited our astonishment. I am referring instead to the better world that science will help us build, the one we will rightly call a paradise, and though it will take more than science alone to accomplish this, it will be science that builds the infrastructure of paradise, and then, upon that lasting ground, we will, like children at play, follow beauty towards transcendence.

I am convinced that our future will bring not only scientific progress (which, if we survive, is assured), and not only moral progress (which we must first assure in order to survive), but also our aesthetic progress, and also that a world in which we are at peace with ourselves and in harmony with our technology will be beautiful beyond current imagining, beautiful beyond current meaning and sensibility, and even to an older adult it would be experienced with the same benevolent intensity of creative wonder as an infant must look upon her first dawn or twilight, magic everywhere, and the boundaries between self and world intangible, and though my finest effort just to stumble my way towards the dimmest sense of this future is doomed to failure, it has lead me to believe in a form of beauty that has the power to transform a world, as the beauty of a woman or child can transform, at last, an aging boy into a man.

I am also convinced that the experience of beauty is both a fundamental human need and therefore a fundamental human right, that the simple phrase “a love of beauty” is an irreplaceably enlightening redundancy, and that beauty is the way the universe has welcomed life to its lifeless shores, as if to say “behold beauty…now live!” Imagine a sterile universe (though you cannot), a universe empty of life, and then wonder: what worth, what purpose, what meaning could the universe have if it did not welcome life?

It would be worse than nothingness, it would be the most hideous of possibilities and the most grotesque of absurdities, a silent desolation without anyone there ever to weep for it, or, at its end, to record that end with tragic gratitude.

But if I am right about this, or even just partly so, then this is one more reason to encourage science to pursue the truths we will need if we are not just to survive, but to progress. Onwards towards paradise - though first, towards a revolution whose most fundamental principle may be the urgent calling to believe in – and to build - a heaven for the living, not the dead.

Of science, I would say in sum that for anyone who wonders why, when I spoke of what science is not, I did not mention art (the other great defining human enterprise), I would first point out that art is the expression through a symbolic medium of one’s unique vision of the world, and because we all have such a vision, we can all express ourselves in one creative practice or another.

Yet few of us are artists - if I produce a work of art, at best I will reveal only myself to the world, though when an artist creates, she reveals the world to itself, and so art deserves our most thoughtful attention and our deepest gratitude because it is not an occupational category, it is, in greater truth, a moral one. This said, it could still be argued that the arts teach us about ourselves, while the sciences teach us about the universe, and yet the more we learn, the more we understand that the two are nearly one, and the distinction, simultaneously both trivial and essential, is like the difference between our most vivid dreams and their fulfillment - though only once they are fulfilled.

And of technology, which is the public face of science, I believe that the internet is well on its way to becoming the most liberating technology in our history, and because I believe that its ascendance is matched – not coincidentally – by the re-emergence of a moral tyranny which desperately wants unregulated control over anyone whose final enlightenment could lead to that tyranny’s lasting exile into the past, I also believe that these two cannot co-exist for long, and any increasingly successful effort by the latter to reverse our moral progress would, by itself, assure revolution, though I fear that the longer we wait to take our stand against this tyranny, the more likely that it would not be an uprising made of peaceful protest alone, and this cannot be allowed lest we become those we must overcome.

I remember as a very young boy seeing a cartoon in which a ghost tried to walk through a wall while carrying something he had taken from the room he had entered, only to be stopped dead, because though ghosts may pass through walls, objects cannot, and this has become for me a visual metaphor to help illustrate the intention of our fanatics (men who may be metaphor-immune) to return us to a darkness which would extinguish what little light we have already brought into this world, and the far brighter light they know we would bring once we are free of them at last.

Ultimately, they cannot succeed, they cannot carry us back to a time that never was, or into a future that would make a cruel reality of their cold-blooded dreams, but if we are not soon rid of these ghosts of horrors past, they may well learn to do more than just come unhindered through our walls.

My larger point is this: despite its complex social, economic, cultural, and of course technical challenges, modern technology has advanced to a point where we can now imagine that once those challenges are responsibly met, technology will not only help liberate us from the ancient curses upon us – disease, madness, inequality, prejudice, ignorance, and war – it will also, as it has even now to visible extent, bring us meaning and wonder and beauty as well, and help create a world where love is unopposed.

But technology’s power to enslave is still as great as its power to liberate, and a powerful few have already demonstrated this power with a propaganda campaign meant to deliberately misinform its viewers by disguising itself as news, and by doing this so successfully that its viewers are now more poorly informed than even those of us who do not watch, read, or listen to any news at all. Technology is already its own revolution, though we will need another of another kind to assure that a more advanced technology will be free to offer everything that it will one day have the power to provide.

The most beautiful of our imaginable futures, the one which almost every one of us would want, is a melodious clamor of creative transformation, filled with light and laughter and love, and so inseparable from our most exquisite dreams that it will be an irreversible triumph over every ghost that haunts us now, which is still every ghost that has ever haunted us, and it is because of the contrast, disorienting in its scale, between that future and our own time, which is merely the least horrific chapter in our history, a contrast for which I can find no analogy, that I proceed here, and I know that to get to that future, we need to squeeze through the narrow passageway of present time at the same moment that those who would oppose us are trying to push past the rabble and get there first.

But only one can break through, and which shall it be - those who would free everyone and everyone they would free, or those who would free no one but themselves. May love, imagination, and astonishment guide your answer.

Earlier, I also said this: “the field of psychology fails to confront ascendant pathologies that would command every aspect of every life according to a form of thought that should only be found in the darker dreams of troubled children”. Quite a dramatic statement, I concede, and not entirely fair, I confess, though I did not change it because this statement contains enough truth to begin my argument, and enough error to complete it.

I have spoken here of greed, arrogance, and cruelty, of sociopaths, narcissists, and fanatics, and of those to whom love is as alien as thought to stone, and what all of these share, aside from a magisterial depravity, is their membership among those human conditions that are studied by psychologists - studied by, though not often enough treated by, and for two reasons.

First, those who suffer from any of these pathologies do not suffer. They are typically quite content with themselves (and I did not say “happy” because the truest happiness can only be found by those who love), and so rarely, if ever, will they seek therapy, and second, more rarely still would any known therapy succeed, and so it is instead we who suffer from their pathologies. But though we have not yet learned how to treat them effectively, we have learned how to test for them effectively, to learn in any given case whether a person has a character flaw which makes more likely their willingness to act from self-interest alone.

From this, there are three points to be made.

First, a century ago, the new field of modern depth psychology emerged from one of history’s most remarkable gatherings of creative genius. They were not alone. The first half of the twentieth century, despite the slaughter that has come to define it, also brought us extraordinary advances in science, philosophy, art, and literature, and these were all, by any definition, revolutions in creative thought and human possibility, and yet, with the exception of science where the revolution continues, the forward thrust of intellectual and artistic brilliance has slowed and we now wait for the return of the lightning-crossed air that will breathe new life into history’s advance towards wisdom.

The world’s current population is three times what it was at the mid-point of the twentieth century, and yet authentic genius, revolutionary by definition, is far more rare than it was a century ago, and this troubling scarcity may cost us most in the case of psychology because it is the field of study that studies us. Meaningful progress has still been made in this field, and many have been helped because of it, though its advance has slowed, and there seems no sign of a new revolution in the study of the mind, and although the cognitive sciences, which dream of replacing psychology, have revealed much of much value, the first meaningful answer to the question of what it means to be human remains to be written, and may not be authored by someone who calls themselves a psychologist at all.

Second, as I said a moment ago, psychology has developed diagnostic tests which are, when properly administered and professionally analyzed, remarkably accurate in revealing emotional pathologies, and more than one government agency in more than one country uses these tests to screen applicants for highly sensitive positions. The best of them, which has been amended and revised several times since its creation nearly three-quarters of a century ago, is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI, and because of this effective tool, I now offer you my first concrete suggestion for improving the world (aside from trying to incite you to love genuinely and to imagine freely): let us publicly urge anyone running for elected office to take the MMPI, to have it professionally analyzed, and to reveal the results to those whom they would represent.

By “urge”, I would include inspire, encourage, invite, advise, propose, and even dare. We should not, however, require this by law because this could end either with a tyranny of testing or with corporations administering this test whose financial or political self-interest might work against the goal of revealing who among us should never hold elected office. Besides, how fascinating it would be to listen to the reasons a politician would give for not taking the test or for not revealing its results. But the larger point should be this: wouldn’t you want to know if the person seeking your vote is a sociopath or narcissist? If not, I would ask instead: would you take this test, and if not, why not?

Even the most elementary lessons psychology already offers can be redemptive, and I give them summary, though imperfectly, with this thought: much that is deliberate is not conscious, and much that is not conscious can be revealed to deliberation, and though with this I have reduced a century of courageous work and humane revelation to a bumper sticker, it is, I believe, still capable of casting light.

For instance, if you hate our government, perhaps it is because there was once, or still is, someone of authority in your life who hurt you and you are unable to get free of either the person or the pain, government can be made a symbol of that hated authority and the object of your anger, thus absolving the villain and making a scoundrel of a still mostly responsive and democratic authority.

Were such surrogate hatred of our government to spread far and deep enough among us and the government to be weakened too much for too long by a paralyzing struggle between unassailably entrenched ideologies, precisely who, or better, precisely what do you imagine will step in to fill the hole where democracy once had taken hopeful root. Sociopathocracy may be, as a word, utterly new, but those who would build the sweat-shop planet this word describes obey a form of thought older than any word. It is unquestionably past time for that form of thought first to have its power over anyone taken from it forever, and then to be bred from our stock by evolution’s greatest, if perhaps unintended, gift – genuine love. So, if you want a better world than ours, know yourself better than could another.

But now I have a suggestion for psychology itself, and this is the third point I want to make: explore the mystery of our sense of personal identity whose true nature eludes us but which is surely a crucial part of learning what it means to be human.

It is a vital mystery, and if you would ask me what it is, I could say only that it is the core of our sense of self, part shadow, part light, the rest a crystalized astonishment; born before words could build their wall, it is the primordial entity who secures our bond with ourselves and thus all others, the boundary stone which marks the place where the world must end and we begin, the first contract between awareness and of those things we accept to be aware, the other within us who speaks only the cryptic imagery of dreams and who shepherds us past the animate dark, an inner mirror into which, like an aging beauty, we will glance for reassurance, a vigilant mood which does not think but to which thought attends, and that does not feel but for the heart is its own, made of the tougher substance of wounds dealt though healed, and of childhood’s magic, dark and bright, and no matter how well-lit and exquisitely fashioned the personal world we build upon it, our sense of identity is that world’s enduring foundation, forever set into the dark earth of early childhood, and once established, lies undisturbed by what we do above, unchanging, immune to loss, and keeping us whole, and of the great assembly who have a living presence within us – our nobility, our commoners, our scoundrels – this sense of our personal identity, that great abiding presence, is the first to come to life, and the very last to die.

It is both us and it is not.

In other words, I have no idea what identity is, and neither do you, though every one of us is at one with our own and yet would stutter to describe it. But I feel certain of this – our sense of identity is able to endure sorrows that would break our hearts, sicken our minds, and wound our bodies, and not even rage or hate or fear can do more than lead it to settle more deeply into the ground that was our inward nursery, and it is, I believe, our sense of identity which allows us to survive and to move beyond our sorrows.

Yet there is one circumstance which threatens identity, something other than the far extremes of madness or disease or of losses too great for any to bear, and that threat is humiliation. I am not even certain whether this word is meant to portray the feelings that accompany the experience of humiliation or its effect upon our sense of identity, though it is the latter which interests me here, and I would ask psychology to study this subject with a greater intent and intensity than it ever has before because experience suggests that it is the underlying motivation for violent acts committed not only by individuals, but by groups, by countries, and even by entire cultures.

The nature of our sense of personal identity is visible in the light of the people, groups, institutions, and ideas with which we identify, and these then become so central to our existence that we will forever remain alert for the symbols by which to grant them external life and thereby make them tangible and worth defending at almost any cost.

Of myself, I identify with my son (for whom there can be no symbol, though he himself is one) as well as with others, with certain philosophies and institutions, with my country (for which there are many symbols), and with humanity as a gifted, restless, brave, playful, anxious tribe of individuals none of whom chose to be born, all of whom will die, and each of whom lives, almost constantly, with a longing for something that has never yet arrived – add to this that some will learn to love and some will learn to kill, and we have sketch enough to begin a later portrait.

But that portrait would remain incomplete if humiliation – its experience, its meaning, its consequences, and its resolution – is not made a part of it because humiliation is, I believe, the single greatest cause of violence in all its human forms, except the one we too often need for protection from the others.

Identity is, without rational – or even irrational – doubt, immensely powerful, and for any who are endowed with reflective self-consciousness, as many humans are, identity is the mirror which thus reflects, and it is so entwined with the awareness of our individuality that identity could serve as its own definition – I am that I am.

Yet though powerful, identity is not always strong, and if I’m right, the following just might be how a violent extremist is made: inflict humiliation upon him while he is still too young to have finished crafting his sense of personal identity by infusing it with the enduring symbols of those with whom he identifies, and then inflict humiliation upon any of the people or groups whose symbols have become an intimate part of his identity.

Once this is done, the only way he can avoid the abyss, the only way to escape the threat of the dissolution not just of his beliefs, but of his being, is to take action against whomever is perceived to have inflicted that humiliation. Violence which, to the sane, is but madness, could then be seen as an act of literal self-preservation which, though grotesque in its expression, might best be prevented from recurrence by humiliation’s most powerful opposite (need I tell you what that is?), though the first step is surely to gain the greater knowledge of ourselves and of each other that still eludes our mastery.

If just one of the braces holding together a man’s sense of personal identity begins to fail, he must quickly act to find a cause if he is to shore up a self-image in danger of collapse, and this desperate effort, guided only by fear and shielded from reflection, will always focus most intently upon whichever ideology promises to secure his threatened manhood - but if, with sincere determination, we offer even such a wounded man the faith that he belongs to a greater and more human cause, he could be dissuaded from his fate, which, of course, is ours as well – his responsibility then would be to accept our offer, though first ours would be to make it.

Yet if nothing else, I feel certain that humiliation is the agonizing reminder that we have not been loved – it is a kind of death, and though symbolic and unmourned, it is nevertheless felt as an annihilation of identity – it is death burdened by awareness.

Yet what if the thing with which someone identifies most is death itself?

I ask this because I sense that, for some, death will begin to take command when their sense of identity proves too weak to assure that life remains the stronger force, and once this descent into oblivion is complete, death will come alive within them and take dominion, and I wonder, too, whether this might cast a light on some of history’s most horrific acts – after all, if a man has given himself over to death, that others live may seem a taunt worthy of his vengeance, as if he is saying: I am lonely death – join me.

But there is hope because there is, at least in some, a place within that cannot be fully portrayed by reference to any of the terms of modern psychology - it is a kind of theatre of one’s self, a playhouse where we gather with the members of our cast of characters whose totality is our own to rehearse, to reflect, to recall, to redress, to rebel. It has a felt depth and, like a stage, conveys a greater space beyond, it is lit, often brightly and with a many-colored radiance, and offers passionate dialogue and restorative silence, and where at differing times we are either hero or villain, yet always both director and audience – it is the place where we dream awake, where love, imagination, and astonishment reset the scene and recast the story under brightened lights and a drawn curtain - it is our truest home, and I would counsel faith in this theatre within, for our destiny lies in the script and we are the playwrights.

Before I move on, two final points. First, my apologies to psychology and to all of its many excellent students and practitioners, and my great thanks for all that they have learned and for all whom they have helped, and I would ask them to understand that my impatience is with the current pace of new learning which, if I underestimate its progress, would earn my further apology but also my suggestion that they ally themselves with the best of our remaining journalists to make that progress better known. I should also add that social psychology has begun to shed light on a number of crucial issues that are of great relevance to our time, including some that are central to what I am trying to say here, and for this, I am very grateful as well, as we all should be.

Although the work done by the social sciences, including social psychology, is of the first importance, psychology itself must always concentrate upon the individual, upon his experience of the world, upon his finest possibilities, and upon whatever stands in the way of his destiny, because all that is most deeply human, all that we treasure and all that we oppose, all that we would carry forward and all that we would cast away, will forever begin with the individual, and the actions of the group and the influence of others are ultimately only a reflection of this truth, and if the best work is now being done by the social sciences, it is surely because the individual is both far too complex to permit quick mastery of the labyrinth of personal identity, and also more complex than any group of which we are a part, except perhaps for family which is, or should be, the one place where the group is equal to the individuals of which the group is made, though I believe that we have already begun the journey towards an eternal age, distant yet visible, when all of humanity will work, and play, as one great family, indivisibly united by genuine love, creative intelligence, and benevolent purpose.

But we are still far from home. So, to make another suggestion of another kind, if I could add just one to psychology’s inventory of disorders, it would be the experience of emotional emptiness, even though it might then be given a name that misses the point, perhaps something like Affective Deficiency Syndrome - whose acronym would be “ads” – ironic since, for the careless watcher, most of our ads can empty an hour of its meaning with an almost mechanical efficiency.

But I feel strongly that this experience of emotional emptiness is crucial to the understanding of what it means to be human because of what breeds this emptiness and what this emptiness then can breed in turn. This experience is the awareness that there is a place inside of us which, while vacant, still tells a kind of story, and though it speaks in muted whispers in a language known to none, if we listen carefully, as if for a predator’s footstep, and come to know this storm-swept emptiness and to rebel against its occupancy within us, we then may learn the meaning of its presence and what it takes to end this void by filling it.

This emptiness, this deeply felt abyss forms, I believe, for one reason only – when love is denied to a child.

But the ways we then try to fill this emptiness as adults, whether by work or play, are many – drugs, money, violence, religion, food, hatred, cars, guns, knowledge, solitude, music, politics, sports, anger, television, and of course sex, though sex is a special case because although the intimacy would be enough and the sensuality would be enough, sex offers even more: beyond its comfort, and even its mercy, it offers an ecstatic alteration of identity so blissfully and transformatively alien that it offers a glimpse into the future of human consciousness, and though that glimpse is brief, it is a kind of perfection which, while it lasts, endures, receiving its own place and form of remembrance, and foretelling a new and far better world, so watch for this realm just beyond the zenith of your pleasure lest pleasure’s blinding arc obscure it.

In truth, any chosen form of work or play, any dream could be put to the task of filling the abyss, though when it is, when that dream enters that abyss, it is the dream that is most often changed, and changed from dream to discontent. For relevant example, aside from a few who may offer supportive remarks (and assuming that any will have listened), the commentary posted below this video will surely be written mostly by those whose own sense of emptiness drives them to try to fill it, however briefly, with the bitterness, anger, resentment, hostility, and contempt that many use to soothe the dull throb of their inner desolation.

We will sense the abyss most when alone, especially in silence, or when bored (a lesser form of emptiness far more easily filled), or in a moment of loss or indecision, but what will most arouse this emptiness from its dormancy and make of it a restless entity is a stretch of time without desire, without a plan or purpose, and if unscheduled time is the twin of unpartitioned space, then for any who live with this feeling of emptiness (which is not, please note, the same as being empty), time can feel as would open spaces for the agoraphobe, and once this feeling of emptiness is met with empty time, then can violence follow.

But though it is compassion, which requires a faith in time, that leads some to act on behalf of others, it is emptiness that drives some others towards action on behalf only of the dead. A symbol acquires a living status as it gathers to itself all the inward forces for which that symbol stands, and for anyone who lives with the emptiness that can arise from having been unloved, that emptiness can become a symbol for death - the ultimate emptying - and when that symbol then comes to life, death then comes to life, too, and a monster awakens from its infancy to act.

But here are three quotes which give a better portrait of this haunting sense of emptiness, and though this word is only found in one of these quotes, and even there refers to another kind of emptiness, its message, I feel, still well applies:

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this: man's inability to sit still in a room – Blaise Pascal

All of you undisturbed cities, haven’t you ever longed for the enemy – Rainer Maria Rilke

In all our searching, the only thing we’ve found to make this emptiness bearable, is each other – Carl Sagan

There are some, perhaps many, who are so emptied of life that even depravity, the definitive thrill for the heartless bored, can, in time, grow tedious, and faced with nothing left to fill the void, they pursue a broader power over others by seeking to become our saviors, and whether in the form of a politician, a CEO, a servant of a god, a commentator, a troll, the wounds they will inflict, though seeming minor next to the headlines of the day, will then be felt by many. Yet even such power, however great, will not appease this emptiness.

I would only add that this emptiness cannot be wholly filled by another’s love, but only by loving that other, and I would ask that if psychology does not make love and its loss a central value in its search for human truth, what is it doing to fill its own brief share of time?

Fully understanding this experience of emptiness as well as the mysteries of identity is, I am convinced, crucial to meaningful human progress and to the final abolition of suffering - therefore, to the students of human psychology I would plead: we worship the wrong powers and we are not well, and so we await your genius with a patience made fragile by a sense of urgency that now swells by the quickly passing hour. After all, surely you would not want us to ask: what is it you love more than the people you could protect, but do not?

It seems that we all begin either with love or in emptiness – one serving as midwife for all that is best in us, the other conjuring darker, older, more primitive, and less human qualities, yet though love can never be lost to emptiness, have faith that emptiness can, by love, be changed instead to love.

But please note that history has produced other unforeseen and nearly miraculous gatherings of genius like the one that gave us the foundation for contemporary psychology, which is to say for enlightened self-discovery, and one of these was the gathering which, more than two centuries ago now, gave birth to this country, a labor whose presiding attendant was revolution. It is well past time for another.

The revolution of which I dream will not be a revolution in thought, or thought alone, but a revolution in being, and to give you a sense of how revolutionary this revolution must be, I want to draw upon another one, a revolution set too deeply in the future to set in motion now, though which just might provide a lesson in how great are the changes that we need, and thus how great are the changes which, one day, must come.

In doing this, however, I must offer a thought with which almost everyone will disagree, a thought so difficult to believe that your skepticism should not only be absolute, but met with the contemptuous laughter which follows upon an encounter with the ridiculous, with eyes either widened in surprise or narrowed in suspicion, and perhaps even with a dark astonishment.

First, we accept, though mournfully, that money is the primary operating principle by which the world is run (and badly) and of this there should be little doubt for anyone beyond a certain young age who wasn’t raised by wolves. There are other forces and factors at work, of course, and these even include love, devotion, conscience, and imagination, though only lovingly sheltered children would believe that those are the brightest lights by which we make our way. So, being true, what will be your reaction when I tell you that one day, perhaps not all that long from now, money will no longer be the principal currency of human interaction?

As you are deciding how quickly you should dismiss this thought (almost as if you feared the Oligarchs would know if you were to allow it entrance), please keep in mind that I could have made this prediction without its strategically humble preface, but I understood that if I had, your disbelief would surely have been so great that even if you desperately wanted this to be true, it would call into question the value of everything that I have said to this moment and everything that I will say from this moment on, and I concede that I waited until I was nearly done with my talk to offer this thought, hoping that for those few who may have traveled with me this far, I may have earned enough of your trust to speak of this without losing your attention as a result – I may be wrong in that hope, though as Lincoln said “to sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men”.

Yet despite the risk I now take, and with Lincoln at my side, I have faith that one day, probably far beyond my time, though perhaps within my son’s, we will at least begin the struggle to find a way of accomplishing for this world what we must without consigning most of us to the hopelessness, fear, hunger, violence, sorrow, and disease which has always been the consequence of our grotesque fascination with money, and which, to anyone watching from another world, would be the most powerful and the most revealing of all our transmissions.

But here is a thought-experiment to help you with this: imagine that something does all of the physically dangerous and intellectually meaningless work we now must do ourselves, that it protects us from harm, grows our food, builds and maintains our homes, infrastructure, and devices, and all the brute labor needed for civilization’s advance is safely and reliably completed on our behalf, and we are then free to use our creative and moral intelligence to pursue our destiny.

Now, when you have traveled with this thought as far as imagining permits, ask yourself what could accomplish this for us, and why in such a world there would be any need for money at all. There might still be villains made for a time, though what power could they gain that would keep us from the paradise which then, for the first time in our history, we all would know in our hearts was ready at last to be built, because in such a world, power would no longer come from wealth as we know it now, but from the greater resources of love, imagination, and creative intelligence.

I have an answer to the question of what this something could be, though I will keep it to myself, partly because the overwhelming majority of you who find this entire point to be a self-evident absurdity would think of this answer as proof that my own thinking is undisciplined and self-indulgent (and perhaps, at times, it is), but mostly because I want you to carry this thought-experiment as far as your own imaginations permit and then to decide for yourself.

Understand before you begin that if your imagination is not guided by love, your answer will be as foolish as you believe my question to be, though I offer this as a taunt to clarity: has there ever been a needless death for which money could not be held answerable to a rationally defensible extent, whether by its dominion, its strategic withholding, its willful misappropriation, its diversion to our petty diversions, or by our tragic indifference.

The question is rhetorical. Play detective and you should find that somewhere within the story of every death by unnatural cause, money or its want will make its villainous appearance, and then decide instead what world it is you want.

Keep also in mind that in any country whose primary goal and national priority is money (rather than, for instance, its citizens), one of the methods used by the typical elected official to protect the wealth that keeps him in power, while also assuring a bright future for his own accounts, is to embed this corrupting gluttony into laws with names which are either happy in their sound or strategically vague in their meaning, and which can successfully be described and defended as both pragmatic and humane as long as the voters are too frightened, too misled, too busy, too tired, or too angry to think for themselves and who thus hold - as if their own - the last passionately stated opinion they have heard, and so I say again: decide what world it is you want.

For now, consider this: a system founded upon money, made of money, sustained by money, defended with money, and ordained for money is a gleaming atrocity, an exclusive hotel for a clenched handful of affluent clients, surrounded by superfluous multitudes who can only crane to squint into arched windows tinted to shield its patrons against reminder, an opulent fortress already beginning to shudder under its own dead weight.

Now I quote again one more of my earlier points: “morally indefensible laws are passed whose sole purpose is to reduce or prevent the voting of targeted racial and ethnic minorities, of those who have already given and lost too much”. Silence tempts me - though only briefly.

There was a recent fifty-state review of all documented cases of in-person voter fraud, the kind which is, according to many of our politicians and the conspiracy theorists whom they suckle, the only kind for which preventive legislation is needed, and this review showed that the incidence of in-person voter fraud represents 0.000007% of the voting public, while another study, using more data across more time, showed a 0.000003% incidence of such fraud, or one in every 32,258,064 ballots cast.

So, unless you are a fanatical ideologue and thus contemptuous of any fact that does not justify your indifference to the truth, you must agree that in light of these facts, any action which makes voting more difficult, if not impossible, for our own citizens is nothing less than horrifying.

Yet I worry now that any who at first had armed themselves with a renewed awareness of the vitally important meaning of the words love, imagination, and astonishment may be experiencing what many of us will sometimes feel when confronted with a seemingly endless report of disturbing news – a momentary weakening of our capacity to understand the darker world in which many others must live, and if so, I ask that you dwell with care just once more upon a truth which is, I concede, profoundly troubling to accept, and that truth in this case, as with others of which I have spoken, is the erosion of our freedom to direct the course of our own destinies, and this loss is knowingly, if not consciously, the result of the bizarre longing felt by many of our elected officials to take any action, no matter how morally scandalous and rationally unfounded, which assures the fulfillment of their poisonous dream of a world in which only their own tribe will be free to prosper without the risk of either government interference or significant public dissent.

Decreasing the number of days when we can vote, the number of places where we can vote, and the chances that all our votes will matter equally, while simultaneously increasing the requirements we must meet in order to vote at all is arguably the greatest internal threat to our democracy since the civil war, a carnage which lead to the defeat, though only for a time, of the same militant arrogance now stirring from its latency, and this threat is the work of men who neither feel nor think as we have every right to expect of our elected and appointed leaders.

Some of these men have defended the laws restricting our right to vote by stating, with rehearsed indignation, their great concern that our current system is vulnerable to pervasive fraud, statements often accompanied by statistics drawn from the thinnest of air.

Yet the only fraud is the one committed by these elected officials who guard what is not under attack, and attack what poses no threat except to their dreams of a world where only their dreams will come true, and I would suggest to each of them that if you are tempted to vote against reason and the common good because you might then be voted out of office by someone more radical than you, then is it not far better to be honored by history for your defeat than condemned by it for your victory?

I also worry now that if you are among the great throng who are ignorant of the details needed to bring light to the most challenging problems we face, whether that ignorance is self-imposed or brought to you by the immaculate celebrities who are paid to keep the shadows safe, you might decide that rather than learning more and fighting back, you will decide instead that I am just another conspiracy theorist, a man seeking the strange glory of infamy by daring history to uncover what I seek to obscure, all the while acting as though I am the gate-keeper through which the truth must pass before it can reach its restless audience.

I am not, though I would understand if some of our more devoutly misinformed might think this since the thought that our democracy has already been wounded by a relentless and continuing attack from a relatively small, though highly organized and well-funded group of fanatical ideologues with a carefully developed strategy which includes impassioned denials of its ultimate purpose, could seem a paranoid fiction, but if you doubt this, then either you have been studiously ignoring the world beyond your home (for which I could not blame you, though it is a dangerous comfort), or you are one of the fanatical ideologues who wants to deny the right to vote to those who would surely vote against you.

In this case, as in the others, love is nowhere to be found except in our opposition to those for whom love is just the debt of obedience which they are owed. Though of those who support this theft of so precious a right, we can ask again: what do you love more than the people you could protect, but do not?

Yet by now you may long for the thrill of a conspiracy theory as reward for listening to these tales of inhumanity (though they are tales that you should already know), something to distract you from the horrific, just as you might welcome an ad for soap while watching the nightly news, some modest extravagance to restore your mood in preparation for the tales that still await you, and so I offer you this:

Imagine it is true that funding for our schools from kindergarten to college is deliberately reduced, depriving many of our students of the resources needed for learning, or that the cost of school is so great that they cannot afford to learn at all, and that much of the news to which we listen is deliberately poisoned by an ideology that wants only an unaccountable power and uncountable wealth, and that voting is deliberately made more difficult, perhaps impossible, for millions of our fellow citizens, and that prohibitions on guns in public, even in schools and churches, are deliberately removed, and that money, the human equivalent of talons, is deliberately converted into speech, thereby granting more of the latter to those who possess more of the first, and that corporations - the primary source of that money and thus of that speech – are deliberately granted personhood, and that these mutant humanoids have been deliberately conceived to work only for the reason of greater profit, rather than for the greater profit of Reason, and that our government, designed to teach, to protect, and to assist, and increasingly capable of each, is deliberately made to seem at best, incapable of any, and at worst, an enemy of the freedom that it was designed to assure.

The ultimate result would be an emotionally illiterate and intellectually vacant horde without a guardian authority to stop them or to defend those who would oppose them, and the final lesson is simple: the priority of government is people, while the priority of business is money – mix the two and money will win, and the people lose.

So this is my conspiracy theory, one which might provide a riveting headline for some of the papers that line our supermarket check-out aisles (a gauntlet that could appeal only to a sociologist or the utterly bored, though it should astonish us all), a headline something like “Secret Society of Sociopaths Plot Government Takeover”, though I leave it to you to decide just how fictional this is, while adding that I have stressed the word “deliberately” here not only because it means to act knowingly, but because if you were to hyphenate its first two syllables, it would form the word de-liberate, meaning to take away one’s freedom.

But of course there is no such word, and even if there were, surely this conspiracy theory is no more than an absurd fantasy and could never come to pass here in the land of the free, though we all should note well that freedom without responsibility would be anarchy because responsibility is always born for others than ourselves. I am convinced that our greatest uncertainty, our greatest confusion, our greatest fear arises from the belief, widely felt if rarely voiced, that there is no single fundamental source of moral authority that is invulnerable to rational counter-statement and which could, with universal equality and acceptance, unfailingly serve us all, and for all time.

In the public realm, every harmful action has its articulate defenders who will disguise injury or injustice as morally necessary acts on behalf of a righteous cause and portray their critics as thoughtless radicals, and every benevolent proposal will be confronted by passionate opponents who quote virtuous tradition in their implacable resistance to constructive change, and the most troubling aspect of this reality is that no matter your position, your politics, your philosophy, your faith, you will judge this reality to be just as self-evident as those who would oppose you – for each side, moral clarity is too often theirs alone.

Many, perhaps most, would claim, sometimes violently, that there is a single fundamental source of moral authority, whether it is the Bible, the Torah, the Qur’an, the Bhagavad-Gita, the laws and constitutions of the world’s democracies, the arts, the sciences, philosophy, psychology, our reason, our dreams, or even the semi-divine powers of human intelligence (which may be the extent to which we have conscious access to our mind’s full range of latent powers), and every one of these has provided us with moral truths worthy of our reverence and our observance.

Yet not one of them can attend to every human need, and not one of them can answer every moral question, and so I would ask: is a single fundamental source of moral authority a realistic possibility? I have an answer, though fitting the complexity and ambiguities of the question, it is both “yes” and “no”.

The “no” reflects the surely obvious truth that truth is not always obvious. For many, the truth, no matter how radiant its message or comforting its lessons, will be heresy to those whose path is lit by a differing truth, and it is difficult to imagine how any one source of moral guidance could serve every one of us under all circumstances, no matter how singular or extreme - or more precisely, it is difficult to imagine this without picturing a world in which everyone has been trained from birth to wear a pleasantly vacant smile and watch an endless loop of sitcoms when not at work in their hushed and softly lighted cubicles. We are far too complex for a stone tablet bearing The One Commandment.

The “yes” reflects my faith in two related human gifts and their power to free us from the destructive consequences of greed, arrogance, and cruelty. First, although not one of the sources of moral wisdom I cited above could serve every one of us as a reliably secure foundation for principled action, I believe that together they could because they represent the gathered totality of human knowledge and the incarnation of wonder, that transcendent state which descends upon us (or is it we who ascends?) when imagination has reached the far distant boundary which both marks the limit of its great powers and its unrelenting call to press onward anyway.

Bringing them together may sound like a guarantee of global conflict if you are now imagining an international conference at which representatives of each realm of knowledge would debate all the others. But if you welcome every child and every adult into a system of education that is biased towards none, whose teachers live the subject that they teach, and which assures that every child becomes a willing student and is given full access to all the sources of knowledge, then the moral truths which are a part of that knowledge will become universally available, and each student would then be free to choose those sources which speak most clearly to them, and because all knowledge is self-knowledge, the outcome would be, in time, nothing less than global liberation.

Please note, however, that this idea is far from new – its roots began in ancient Greece, its first flowering took place in the late Middle ages, and only started to fade away in the 20th century, which may be one reason for that century’s deservedly legendary reputation for slaughter.

The other gift is love. It should not be surprising that I would offer this, but how is an education which explores all that is known, and concedes all that is not, related to love, as I suggested earlier? Because each represents a broadening of human awareness so great that to the rut of ordinary consciousness, it would arrive as a kind of welcomed dilemma. These are the two enchanted paths, both secured towards the same bright clearing, parallel at first and yet later chancing to cross again and again, until each, nearing their destiny, overlays the other, making one where once were two.

So, if we ask the question: what most profoundly deepens our humanity and increases our awareness of the humanity of others (though each will assure the other), while also broadening our vigilance against inhumanity and, with ironic simultaneity, bring us the greatest joy, what better answer could we give than love and knowledge? Yet if for some bizarre reason you don’t agree, keep this quote in mind, if mind you have, while strutting or stumbling through your day:

History becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe – H.G. Wells.

But before I end this talk, a thought about endings: once you get to a certain age, if you look back upon your life and set your gaze widely, it is like looking down from an open window upon an extravagant party where a great throng is celebrating something that is still not quite clear, most of them invited but others slipping through the gates, many behaving with impetuous abandon, some intent upon a playful revelry, a few engaged in passionate conversation, and the rest happy just to be there at all.

Yet the party must end, and as it begins to quiet and thin, evening turns to night, and those who remain are the watchers among the scattering crowd, the ones who had gathered there first and sobered nicely before the finish, learning much - and these are the ones who will stay and gather round their host as the last of the lights begin to blink and turn off.

With this metaphor as preface, I ask: what is the second greatest power in all the world, the one which seems to rival love, the one which can come to a kind of life and will fill the abyss that forms within us when love is nowhere to be found? It is death - the great insoluble mystery, the one which makes all others visible to wonder, and so I would also ask: how many of us would need to have this word revived from disuse or ignorance, though it may be that the only way to speak its name is silence.

But it may not be death itself which frightens us as much as our understanding, dimly felt though constant, that when death seems close, it will tear away the illusions we have crafted against our end, and fill that hole, deeper than a grave, with the irrefutable truth of who we have been, of who we are, and of what we have done and left undone. But if so, this means that even now, with death seeming far off, we know this truth already.

Though death offers no facts except finality, it offers countless truths, and for those who love genuinely, the one with which we struggle most is the riddling fear that the time must come when we will never again see those we love most dearly. We have been given just this briefest life, this bright streaking across a darkness that seems to gasp in admiration before swallowing our light forever, a brevity we would not mourn for ourselves alone, but for those we love, for those whom we could not ever, ever relinquish to eternity, asking for the mercy of an unfading remembrance, if nothing more, asking that they do not pass into rude oblivion without the mercy of safekeeping by some eternal diarist.

Yet I have faith in life enough to have faith in death as well. The universe is too beautifully and gracefully organized and welcoming of life, its scales so vast that the numbers by which we portray them seem instead a form of poetry, its symmetries so elegantly fashioned and so exquisitely balanced that it would be an atrocity against reason to conclude with a brave if fragile certainty that the universe would have given us the divine gifts of love, imagination, and astonishment, and with them make inevitable the dream of life without mortal limit and of love without final parting, only then to take all of this away after a few score years, just as we are arriving at self-mastery and ready to teach the young all that we have learned.

So, I counsel faith – in life and in yourself, yet I also counsel defiance towards whomever would oppose that faith, a defiance founded upon the truth that love is stronger than death, and will outlast its dominion.

Yet just as I reached the moment when I would end this talk, and with the triumph of love over death, I heard a story on the news that has asked for its mention here, and it is this: our country has paid another to keep the recent exodus of desperate young children from reaching our borders, turning them back and forcing their return to their native country, and the coroner of one city in one of these countries reported that in just one week, he had seen the bodies of five of the young children who had tried to find their way to safety, but had been denied this fundamental human right at the cost of their lives, and though a desolate silence tempts, I instead must ask whether the $80,000,000 we paid for this monstrous service would have been enough to find refuge for these children in those of our homes where they would have instead found love.

But they were aliens.

I must wonder in bleak astonishment if our fear of aliens, whether from another country or from another world, reflects our awareness, vague but nagging, that if we were to classify humans as the animal endowed with conscience, there would then be among us, as there have always been, those who are human only in appearance, aliens not in place of origin, but in the inhumanity of their intentions, though of this news of the fate of alien children (as if any child could ever be anything less than one of all of us), I add only that if you are not astonished by it, if you are not horrified by it, if you are not driven to near madness by it, then you are not only alien, you are, in the most vital sense of the word, as dead as those young children.

When I heard this, I cried out (though to an empty room) and then, without another to divide the horror by its sharing, I cried, though these tears, I knew, were different from all others I have spent upon horror. These are ancient tears, shed when the first imperfection entered my world, recording the memory of the first betrayal of a child’s expectation of magic, gathered then but kept ‘til now, when I was ready to grant their wish, and by doing so, weep for our loss at long last, and I am again a child at defiant play in muddy pools. Yet I am also an adult willing to play with fire, willing on behalf of his own child, and so I came here, wanting love’s rebellion against history and the hideous sense of censorious decorum of those who would repeat it.

Now my ending, though of a different kind, one which, if you are among the few who will have traveled this far with me, is surely a welcomed if not happy ending, and with it, I ask a final question, one that gives summation to the more troubling of my observations and their litter of thoughts (where “litter” means progeny and not debris, or so I hope), and it is this…

Are the lulling, almost narcotic instrumentalities of modernity, the cumulative pressures of guilt and despair following upon ten millennia of unflagging barbarity, the sense that our poets, the guardians of love’s true meaning, have been rendered mute by the counter-lyrical blare of modern commerce, the bullying advertisements that have, by a differing violence, captured nearly every line of sight and frequency of sound, the distracting hungers aroused by devices too rarely put to a creative human purpose, the congenial and, for some, the oddly comforting narcissism of our leaders, the loss of an emotionally nurturing complexity in our use of language (for which the child-like writing of our emails and text messages could serve as both epilogue and eulogy), bureaucracies that have become living but unthinking entities irreconcilably separate from the people of whom they were once composed, a growing disdain for knowledge passing into a virtual celebration of ignorance (and where virtual adds an ironic second meaning), the recasting of the extremist from fool to hero in a tragic farce authored by illiterates and played before a captive audience, the willful indifference, perhaps contempt, felt for the artistic and intellectual brilliance of their cultures by a West that is now felt to offer little more than a gleaming emptiness and by an East that is now thought to produce nothing more noble than cheap commodities or a violent zealotry, and a need for immortality grown so desperate, so defining of identity that a god’s self-chosen ones, grasping a weapon that only a god should keep, would end our world to gain their heaven and impossible to stop until we learn that our own obsession with celebrity is simply the counterpart to the terrorist’s willingness to die for his cause - have all of these (and the unnamed, and perhaps unnamable) now begun to gather into a sentience that is in some fashion unlike any peril we have ever known, one more difficult to articulate and thus to recognize, more difficult to confront, and more difficult to overcome?

And with this, we can now ask once more of our overlords, what is it you love more than the people you could protect, but do not?

For as long as I can remember, I have had an unshakable faith in humanity, a faith that one day we will, as a single family, round some now unforeseen and far distant corner and find that we have arrived home at last, a home in which everyone, without exception, will be free to pursue their destiny and to have enduring shelter against ruin - fires burning against the cold, lights against the dark, and love against its loss, and despite the fact that nearly everyone with whom I have shared this faith has found it to be a foolish, taunting daydream without hope or substance has not lessened this faith by even the slightest degree.

And yet.

And yet I wonder how long it will take to make real this dream, perhaps the oldest dream of all and the one dream that everyone who has ever lived must have summoned at least once while hoping that one day it will come true, a dream whose abandoning would be imagination’s most tragic defeat.

Even after listing the world’s great horrors - poverty, prejudice, disease, cruelty, hatred, ignorance, insanity, despair, and war - there is, I sense, something beyond these now, something for which I do not have a name (though others might), and if I had to describe it – and I feel that I must try – it is a kind of collective global pathology of the human spirit which has already begun to effect those individuals who are most vulnerable even to the unspoken call, the felt incitement to commit acts of violence, acts taken without any moral justification beyond references to political or religious principles despite the clearly visible truth that there is no rational correspondence between those beliefs and the acts then committed in their name.

This pathology may be a kind of widely shared emotional fatigue or discouragement so pervasive that for those who find hope difficult to conjure, the future collapses into the past, the death of others becomes a reprieve, while our own is a kind of contraband there to tempt us.

And why not, some would ask. It is not hard to feel overwhelmed by our condition: politics without honor, power without conscience, wealth without compassion, journalism without ethics, leadership without courage, religion without love, and an adolescent nation struggling with a kind of voluntary dementia, unwilling – and perhaps soon unable - to remember all of the defining moments, horrific and heroic, in its unequal history, and stumbling towards a darkening future in which we squabble over who betrayed that glorious past which never came, and driven inwards by that one thought which, were we to linger too long upon it, could bring any of us to the borderlands of madness: what might have been.

Ours is still a world in which our most treasured human gifts - courage, curiosity, compassion, and all the others which these imply – will lead those who possess them to act, often innocently, against the interest of those who will then ignore, mock, harass, persecute, imprison, banish, or kill these better citizens in order to protect their self-endowed right to spread a darkness that will give cover to their own.

In other words, ours is a world where the qualities we should admire most are the ones that most endanger those who would offer them – wander from the weary crowd and you risk confrontation with those who guard it for any signs of rebellious humanity. After all, it is clear that we are not so much lead, as we are ruled.

And who is responsible for the dictatorial brutalities of our age? It is not Muslims nor Christians nor Jews nor Hindus, but the heartless ones among them; it is not black nor brown nor red nor white, but the heartless ones among them; it is neither the young nor the old, but the heartless ones among them; it is neither the learnéd nor the illiterate, but the heartless ones among them; it is not the men, but the heartless ones among them; it is not the rich, but the heartless ones among them; and it is not humanity, but the heartless ones among us.

By now, it should be self-evident, that those without a heart, without love and imagination and the capacity for astonishment, will want something very different than those who are endowed with the brazen gift of benevolence; they will want something from the world, rather than for it, they will want something for themselves, rather than for another, they will want our obedience, rather than our thoughtful attention, they will want power over others, rather than the power to relieve others of their suffering, and they will want their own facts, rather than accept the gathered knowledge that has brought us to a place still better than we once had known, if still far from what we dream of even now, so look for what our leaders want - not in what they say, but in what they offer, and what they take.

The increasingly irrational claims of The Opposition leadership, their fabricated rumors of conspiracies against the natural order, their bizarre and groundless accusations of treachery, their smug declarations of moral superiority, their unaccountable contempt for established facts, and their wretched ignorance of the boundless reach and power of love, reflect no more than the echoing, haunted emptiness of their philosophy and their dim if keenly felt understanding that our progress would diminish their authority, and the more threatened they feel by the possibility of that loss, the crueler will they become, though even now, their hearts, or what remains, are set against the rest of us, including those whom they once had called their own, so protect yourselves with the sense of horror that is the only fitting response to what they have to offer us, and then reclaim our world in the name of what it truly means to be human.

What is the invariable theme of human history? It is not yet love, though love has kept us from extinction and given courage to resistance. It is not genius, though genius has flared with frequency enough to allow our progress, halting and uneven as it has been. It is not hope, for had hope been unfailing, there now would be no need for its assurance. It is madness...it is madness.

If I knew a stronger word than this, I would use it. If I could create a stronger word, a word to hold a crimson lightning ready to jolt us into humane awareness, a word that would astonish us all, that would break down the wall we have built between those truths we shut away and how we would feel if that dark gave way to light, I would use it, but it is this very madness which keeps it safe from its naming and allows it to settle instead into the less disturbing realm of the merely troubling, for while a good thing without a name still has power to do good, a dangerous thing without a name has still more power to wound.

I ask again for a new word - just one for now - a word which, when spoken, will grant its speaker the power to express a vital truth without fear of misunderstanding, and when heard, will offer its listeners an unmistakable grasp of that truth, a word whose rhythm and cadence express a solemn though lyrical certainty, and whose meaning is so elegantly crafted, so clear and specific in its conscious intent that combined with its poetic flourish, it will be shielded against misuse, and all temptation to diminish its authority by either political revision or commercial exploitation will be kept far off, a word whose beauty, purpose, and dominion will have been set in shining armor.

Like light through falling ash, may that word help disperse this madness.

Those of us who are not engulfed by madness are encircled by it. Those we love may be close by, but those who do not love us, who do not love anything remain too near and too intent upon our ruin. Make that new word soon that it will make sense of our story, give it archaic roots so that the unbroken thread of this story will ground it in the past where this madness began and by its novelty reveal its lasting hold upon us.

But have faith that we will win, that word or not, though if not this word, I also ask again whether could there be a single truth that would guide us towards a world that excludes no one, that abandons no one, that forgets no one? It feels as though there must be, even though ten millennia of searching have passed and no such truth has ever been found. There have been moments when we believed that we had found this fundamental truth and then enshrined it within a philosophy, religion, or ideology, only to learn in time that it did not work beyond its time, or did not work for everyone, or did not work at all. I may have seemed to suggest this myself when I said before that we are the ones for whom no single truth is true, though there my intent was different.

Yet perhaps there is a truth that would provide for those who do not now have what each of us deserves – enlightened governance, the freedom from want, and the opportunity to decide our own destinies – a truth that would also serve those who have what they need but want others to share in their bounty as well. I suggest for this truth: humanity, by which I mean everyone with a heart, everyone who loves or who has the capacity to love and is thus also endowed with compassion, imagination, conscience, patience, and courage (for genuine love requires our bravery), and all the benevolent qualities that are most defining of our humanity, these are the ones who must somehow replace the heartless, and lead us towards a better world than ours has ever been.

But just to distinguish those without a heart from the rest would be a difficult task because they have always adorned themselves with an outward show of the human qualities that will give them camouflage, though I believe that very few of them would ever understand that they are missing those strengths of heart and mind which are vital to our full claim upon humanity. Yet even once they were known, how do we replace them without earning the violence which is theirs to unleash, and then keep them from ever again having power over others? Remember that the vastly greater share of power (and of money, its patron and defender) is held by those whose only ambition is the use of that same power for their own self-serving purposes.

I have no objection to your longing for power, nor would anyone except those who have too much. Without exception, every one of us wants power – every one of us. But I ask: what kind of power do you want, and what is the source of the power that you want, and for what purpose will that power then be used?

There is a vast and irreconcilable difference between power that is wanted for the sake of others than ourselves, the power to guide, to shelter, and to free, and the power that is wanted by the heartless to glut the ravening emptiness within them and to use against whomever might dare to challenge their dominion if only by the wrong kind of silence (for to the tyrant, the rebels are the quiet ones), so I do not question your longing for power – I only question what you intend to do with that power and whether it brightens the world for others, or brightens it only for you, for if you have wealth and influence but no love in your heart, then you are impotent - yet if you love, then you are already the master of your world, however alone you may be.

Now bear witness to this: to end a democracy, only these are needed: diminish the quality of public education; permit the ownership of the majority of news organizations to fall into the hands of a few; restrict voting rights for those who might oppose you; ensure that the major share of any increase in national income is siphoned to the wealthy; create a propaganda machine disguised as journalism and give it both undeserved power and reach; make certain that the people are entertained in return for their losses and that they do not understand what they have lost; place the interest of corporations above the interests of the people; remain in a state of constant war; offer the rapacious the clearest path to government and corporate leadership; using repetition, celebrity, and the empty promise of reward, indoctrinate the poorly educated; make the police the enemies of those who are most in need of the police; divide the people and then turn one faction of citizens against another; and give money the authority that once was held by clear and honest language.

Yet all of these could be reduced to no more than this: money for a few, scarcity for the rest, knowledge for a few, uncertainty for the rest, influence for a few, futility for the rest, security for a few, anxiety for the rest, or more simply still: unchallenged power for a few, vulnerability for the rest. But note that not only are these an assurance of tyranny, they are also, in time, an assurance of revolution as well.

Because we do not have enough time to evolve beyond our current conditions before we would inflict upon ourselves a new and even greater chaos, I believe that only revolution on a global scale would bring lasting human progress, a revolution in our system of education, in our system of government, in our commerce, in our priorities, and in the awareness of ourselves and of each other, because those in command of us will not give up their power until an even greater power is finally brought to bear.

It will not be without a prolonged struggle, it will not be without moments of uncertainty, and it will not be without a response from those who will oppose us, but our unrelenting insistence upon the primacy of the rule of love is the only path before us that is traced in light.

We spend our lives held fast between two infinities – one spread out before us, the other an inward expanse, and these twin infinities - the Universe and the Self - are kindred not only in their scale, but in their nature, different perhaps only in the direction we need set out to travel them, one an outward quest, the other opening within, and with either we can be forgiven moments when these vaulting spaces press down upon us with their haunting intricacy, their almost oppressive beauty, their command to explore, their unsettled interplay of bright and dark, and the sense that with each we are often both intimate and estranged.

We are bounded by restless immensity, and we can all be granted a kind of heroism for the struggle to keep our balance as we attend to the unrelenting summons from each – forgive yourself for those moments when you are staggered by realms whose dimensions are forever beyond your final comprehension – forgive yourself for everything.

I have faith that, with faith in ourselves and the grateful awareness of our common destiny, there will be, one day, a last needless death, a last descent into madness, a last day of hunger, a last betrayal, a last act of indifference, and the last hesitation to embrace another - every one of us then, without exception, led forward and bound to greatness by the love of all for all. I know that some of you will scoff at this, emboldened by the vain confidence that you are right to find this prediction a self-evident absurdity, a still-born thought conceived in a narcotic dream, a dreary paradise of human perfection, a failure of heroic realism.

But these are the same accusers who would call someone of authentic compassion a bleeding heart – although, without knowing it, they would be doubly right, for in this world, a compassionate heart, somewhere within, is always bleeding.

I read recently of a news personality (which is not, of course, the same as a journalist) who refuses to accept the philosophy of those who work for constructive social change on the grounds that theirs is a position based upon “theory, feelings, and fantasy”.

I would first reply that theory, if it is that and not instead unfounded speculation, reflects both the possession of knowledge and the disciplined longing for more, and also that fantasy is undeniably imagination’s finest act, and so it seems that this news personality – a woman, alas - objects to basing her world-view upon knowledge and curiosity and imagination, and yet as bizarre as this is, her position is made grotesque by her opposition to feelings as a guide, to which I would say: everything that is human begins and ends with how we feel.

Tell me what actions, what thoughts, what intentions, what dreams are not born in feelings, and what is it that leads us towards or away from others, and towards or away from ourselves, if not our feelings, and who except the poor sociopath – if even he - does not live out their lives guided by how they feel, for better or for worse? I myself am here because of these three passions: love of my son, anger with many, fear for all, and without these, I would a useless thing.

What is devotion without feelings, what is faith, what is joy, what is thought, what is meaning, what is courage, what is hope, what is love? I would ask her for an answer but she has already offered it – she bases her philosophy (if that is the word, though from everything can a philosophy be woven) upon “facts, logic, and reality”, and so I would ask which facts and which logic, and what is it like this reality in which you live, what is a reality without knowledge, curiosity, imagination, and feelings, and how can it be anything other than a cold, lightless, empty place, one that I would have called haunted except for the fact, except for the logic, except for the reality that you can only be haunted if you feel the determined purpose of the ghosts who haunt you – she has my deepest sympathy and the hope for her redemption.

But it seems that for many of us, our broadcast media, including (and perhaps especially) its vivid and melodic ads, has, by its tightly programmed rhythms, made ours an episodic era, and so the time we spend at home can begin to feel as though it alternates with dulling regularity between the melodrama of life spent with others and the breaks we take from our roles to attend to our clapboard castles or to indulge in the hypnotic offerings of the very media which has set the pace and pattern of our actions.

If this seems a cynical view that ignores the glories of home and family, it is not and it does not, yet what are the stories that we now so often make of our lives, the stories that we would tell, the stories that we are, but a methodical commerce between the theatre of our human interactions and their grateful intermissions.

Yet our revolution offers hope for this as well, because there is, I believe, no greater incitement to benevolent passion than the creative abyss of unscheduled time, for if you have not allowed this world to empty you, what would await you within those unscripted hours is you, while the rulers of the world prefer you both exhausted and entertained. And if you feel that this call for revolution is too incendiary, I would reply that because it would be no more nor less than a bloodless, though surely not quiet, revolution in human affairs and in our relations with each other, only an extremist would think this extreme.

So, what of us, and what of our redemption, and what of the places within us that still refuse welcome to the truth? Whether revealed in historical event, artistic expression, scientific discovery, or imagined possibilities, we are endlessly fascinated by loss, by catastrophe, by ominous prophecy, and by mysteries that would thrust either shadow or light upon the world were our most urgent questions to be answered, and I wonder whether this fascination is born of our shared intuition that there is something precious that is missing from the world, something which, were we to find it and make it ours, would transform the world forever.

That ark, that grail, that impossible light in the sky, that foretold apocalypse, that shadow in the sea, that oddly blinking star, that sourceless hum, that haunted forest, that thing without a name, that unremembered dream, that footage found, that ocean trench, that ancient crater, that unexplored chasm – with what within us do all these seem kindred? I will wonder, too.

But in truth, we are so far from the truth, that when we finally glimpse it, the truth will at first appear as something too differing to comprehend - a looking into a mirror that is broken by the image it reflects. But the mirror is flawless, and such are the truths which, by their revelations, astonish, and which require an authentic courage for their acceptance. And yet they are also the most generous truths, yielding wisdom and its serenity once they have re-made us – they are, in noble sum, the guardian truths – welcome the discomfort they will offer, and never forget what still could be.

The sacred moment when we allow ourselves to imagine the far better world which even now we could bring to immortal life, is also the moment when the obstacles that stand in our way are made clear. It is the smug and willful narcissism and utter indifference to need shown by just a fraction of us which we have somehow come to believe are instead the signs not only of true success, but of an admirable mastery that we must both emulate and follow, and so we find ourselves stuck in the dark-ages with our devices, ancient miseries barely lit by our shiny new things.

Yet nothing about that far better world is so different, so mysterious, so unattainable that we cannot see how very possible it is, and I ask you to imagine it without the restraint of either envy or fear, and when you do, the brilliance of that world will then reveal the darkness which still keeps it just a dream.

Further, I both celebrate and caution that the Age of Greed, Arrogance, and Cruelty is coming to an end – these may be no more than the first days of a long struggle – or the closing years of a far longer one - and many of the actions taken will not succeed, but those who rule the world cannot win, unless by victory you would mean the moment when they learn at last that they are human, after all, and thus no more nor less than one of us, and with this in mind, I offer three final quotes:

To The Opposition about The Alliance: “you have not convinced a man because you have silenced him” - Albert Camus

To The Alliance about The Opposition: “perhaps everything that frightens you is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants your love” - Rainer Maria Rilke

And to them both and thus to us all: “nothing that is human is disgusting unless it is cruel or violent” - Tennessee Williams.

May these one day serve the human purpose for which they once were written, though as we wait, it may have value to note that while The Opposition needs legends, The Alliance wants visionaries, and because the first is focused upon the past, while the latter is looking towards the future, this is a difference with vital implications for us all.

Although we must grant that some who govern us are endowed with conscience and compassion, and work bravely on our behalf to establish justice for everyone, the ones who rule, rather than govern, the ones who stand in the way of all progress but their own – the psychopaths, narcissists, violent psychotics, fundamentalists, partisans, zealots, and fanatics – have an unaccountable power, because while they represent a fraction of humanity (is it even 1 percent?), they make life for all the rest immeasurably more difficult.

Further, every reputable scholar, every accomplished scientist, every honorable journalist, every established expert, every principled leader of whom I have record has affirmed that the current administration and its ruthless and fawning congress is a significant and continuing threat, not only to this country, but to our world, and of the most powerful of them, I would say, without fear of error, that his inner world is small and dark, empty of little more than an indistinct chatter, and caught between the insatiable hungers of an unloved child and the fear of a certain kind of light, and assuming - quite safely - that he is not simply a gifted actor portraying a dangerous fool in a tragic satire skillfully written, he is instead the parody of a villain from a badly written political melodrama which borrows from every clichéd speech in the vast repertoire of formulaic scripts, a talentless actor who has forgotten his lines and stands smirking before a worshipful and well-armed audience, and anyone who has been brave or bored enough to have followed me this far should know - and should know anyway - that the power which motivates the majority of our leadership is not love, and I am convinced that only a revolution can change this, a revolution in our awareness of what it means to be fully human, because those who oppose us do not love us, and so to win, we need first to love each other.

It is true that these tyrants who lord over us have their armies of thugs and bullies, assuring their own security, but those who simply want to live free from want and fear, and free then to devote themselves to their families and communities still far outnumber their masters, and so I say: were those without power, without hope, though with a dream of lasting peace and liberty to rise up to demand that justice, we could not, if we are both peaceful and unyielding, lose that most human of struggles, and once we had won, history would look back with astonishment upon the millennia that had proceeded our triumph and wonder why we had waited so very long.

For now, however, there is simply no rational alternative to massive and unrelenting global protest, with countless peaceful rallies in our streets, calls to our representatives, letters to our newspapers, petitions to our governments, strikes and boycotts against the most ruthless of our corporations, with our tears, with our appeals, and with our demands.

Without such passionate and unwavering and universal protest, democracy will continue its procured retreat, and tyranny its imperial advance, and the speed with which our despair and self-doubt would then increase does not permit us the luxury of the reluctant progress which has, until now, kept us just a child’s faltering step ahead of a catastrophe whose first signs only the future may notice have already appeared, and though we would survive the indignity of a forced acquisition of wisdom, we would not if all we do is dig our private burrows ever deeper, and so for now, the most essential word to keep in mind and heart just might be: together, a word that needs no rescue from obscurity.

In the Story of Humanity (half each of novel and textbook), most of the long chapters of that heroic novel must still be read as tragedy, and this fact alone is yet another; but looking through that textbook one lesson at a time, starting with the very first, there is great hope in the unrelenting forward advance of our knowledge, and in the freedoms which that knowledge has offered us, and one day, perhaps, the novel and the textbook will be joined together to become the Song of Humanity, a ballad filled with tales of celebration and shared progress, and no notes false to love.

But to honor imagination’s debt to astonishment, and ours to both, I remind you of our sacred responsibility to every child whom we have ever allowed to die; to every woman ever hunted, beaten, raped, mutilated, enslaved, or murdered; to every good man ever worn down by the cost of devotion imposed by a merciless world, or killed in defense of those he loves; to every leader of conscience ever silenced or imprisoned; to every nation ever ruled by another; to every truth ever obscured, to every fact ever dismissed, to every name ever lost to memory, to every act of courage ever betrayed, to every noble cause erased from history; to every loss of freedom and human potential, to every defeat of reason and good will, and to every better future willfully delayed – and for all these we say: this far and no farther, this far and not a bloody inch past and not a damned hour more; and we say as well: on behalf of the more than seven billion of us now alive, on behalf of the more than one hundred billion who came before us, on behalf of the more than nine million species of life in this world, and on behalf of the world itself, never forget that the only thing which stands between us and the shared progress towards a credible utopia which is our birthright and our destiny, is a small yet ruthless fraternity of corrupt and morally degenerate men to whom we are superior, not only in our number, but in our humanity.

To those who have been shielding themselves from the truth too well - and at this deeply troubling moment, it is easy to understand, though impossible to champion, such strategic withdrawal from reality – I ask you to have faith that ours is a time which is teaching us anew how to be astonished, and no matter how difficult these lessons may be, we should be grateful for the return of our capacity for astonishment because it restores both the clarity of our thoughts and the greater meaning of our humanity.

Therefore, be astonished by the truth that many who are now in power are engaged, often consciously, in the monstrous effort to transform not just our opinions, but the way we think, and that some of them, cursed with a kind of acquired sociopathy, emotionally stunted and empty of anything more than a lust – almost sexual in its dogged tenacity - for a power that can be neither questioned nor challenged, are sealed so tightly against both reason and compassion – an empty vault closed to all - that nothing human is allowed to enter, while we, to them, are meant only to serve in servile and destitute silence…

Some compare the present to the past, and if they find the present to be worse, they will seek to change the present by working to return us to the past, but if they find the present to be better, they will find little reason for any change. Others compare the present to the future, and if they fear that the future will be worse, they, too, will find little reason for any change, but if they believe that the future will be better, they will seek to change the present by working towards that future.

Therefore, the ones who will work for change are those who find either the past or the future to be better than the present, though because history reveals that, despite the enduring obstacles and the uneven pace of our progress, we continue to advance towards a better world, it is those who believe in a better future who will be the true agents of that progress, and whose broad knowledge of our history and deep faith in our humanity will allow us, one day, to arrive at that better world at last.

The only power that can save us from us rests with us – no god, no pantheon of gods, no alien civilization, no discovery, no revelation, no petition, no prayer (those plaintive appeals to an imagined incarnation of justice), and no bright distraction will rescue us from ourselves if we ourselves do not; yet a crisis, if it is threatening enough to awaken the sleeping among us, can then incite a revolutionary solidarity among the majority which will, once established, overwhelm the tyrannies that have kept us from our destiny – that crisis has now arrived.

Yet if now there are, by sheer number, more brutes swaggering towards the nearest camera for their stammering audition before a spent legion of silent viewers, there are also more who are ready to oppose them, and who are raising their children to love genuinely, imagine freely, and to seek the joy that can be found in the brighter realms of astonishment. We can win our world away from those who now would claim it as their own, though that triumph, won through revolution, will be celebrated only by our children, and perhaps only by their own, because it will not be won while we, their adoring but mortal guides, still live, though we can travel on, our happiness complete, knowing we had helped to build a road towards the only paradise worth dying for.

Still, I am sentimental (a will to remembrance that pleads to share), and as I share with you my hope that I am wrong in the darker share of my assessment, that a father’s love and his labors against our loss have made of worry his finest gift, and of the day’s news a false prophecy of lasting night, I sign off forever with the hope for a creative and humane revolution, and the assurance that all I want, all that you must want, is an end to our governance by greed, arrogance, and cruelty, and instead by nothing less than love…

Or, to put all that I have said here another way: to those who have power but no heart I would say, you are hurting our world, and thus my son, too, and all whom I love, and all whom I will, and that you are not permitted to do.

Thank you so much - now speak up…act up…rise up - but do this for each other, and do this with love…

#father-son #revolution #love #imagination #astonishment #politics #words #protest #humanity

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