All my life I have had one thing that I could do really, really well, I could write; but lately writing for me is like pulling teeth; and, I know why.
It is because I have practiced telling the truth so long that I have begun to be really good at it; and, the truth is something no one wants to hear.
But the truth, or, more accurately telling the truth is the only way the human species can extract itself from the mess its in.
What I say is true, there are only two types of culture that are possible; culture that relies on coercion to motivate the other to act; or, culture that relies on positive reinforcements to motivate the other to act.
There will never be a culture that exclusively relies on one or the other, as there will never be a perfect human being; every design for sentient existence will be a mixture, a mish mash, a potpourri of these two types of culture; which does not mean that their application does not have diametrically opposed effects on the human units of these ‘conscious and unconscious premises for thinking and action.’
The most we can hope for is to change from relying on coercion to motivate action as we have done from the beginning of the human story, and, for a bare majority in every social system to be educated to relying on positive reinforcements.
But there will always be some people who will continue to rely on coercion; just as there always were some people and some situations down the long march of human history in which positive reinforcements were applied which produced elements of cooperation.
We will never achieve a culture that is one or the other; the most we can hope for is a culture in which positive reinforcements, instead of coercion, is emphasized.
To create an analogy which most human beings can appreciate, I would refer to the fact that an absolute ruler may have had five hundred wives; but one is his favorite, engenders a deep emotional attachment, and, with that single individual he used positive reinforcements to cause her to act.
But this essay is not going to be about the transcendent enterprise which has been my magnificent obsession for upwards of thirty years, it is selfishly and solely about me.
I once asked myself why I entered politics when I had so many choices of career?
I wondered why I needed the love of a million people to be happy?
And, now I know the answer to that question, for all of my life I have been a square peg in a round hole; and, the thing I have most wanted all my life, was to be popular, to fit in.
During my childhood years, and, during my years as a teenager I always felt left out; and, I used politics to attempt to gain the acceptance that I had never experienced.
I am constrained to report that it was during my stay in Israel that I felt most at home, when I arrived on Kibbutz Hagoshrim it was as if I was coming home; here I found a type of social organization that I took to like a duck takes to water.
I have never, in the twenty four years I have spent in the USA, met anyone who I thought was intelligent, whom I thought was culturally in tune with me.
In Israel, where I lived for just three and one half months, I met several intellectual giants, Shimon Zuckerman, Yehuda Don, Yair Levi, Haim Beniamini, Zamani Jali and, Tami Novak, individuals who I felt were culturally more like me than any individual I had met before; or, any I have met since.
I choose this task, to tell the human species truths that they hate to hear; but I am ideally suited for this task because I can tell the truth despite what my personal preferences might be, however negative and replete with misery and suffering the consequences may be.
I am going to state what I think will result in the common good despite my personal preferences or interests.
If I had my ruthers, what I always yearned for, I would tell human beings the convenient lies that would make me fit in, that would make me a round peg smoothly sliding into the round hole of social conformity and harmony.
I would be happiest living on a Kibbutz in Israel sharing the up and downs, the dangers and abiding happiness inherent in that design for human existence.
But life is replete and redolent with consummate ironies and ultimate paradoxes; and I am the victim of one such because I find myself having to tell inconvenient truths to individuals who cannot accept them, who can never value them because they have been conditioned to an intellectual and emotional diet of soft, easily digested, convenient lies.
I find myself having to ask individuals whom I consider the most civilized, efficient, productive and intelligent on earth to confine themselves to living in boundaries that will limit and lame the very positive impact they could make.
I find myself in the wholly invidious situation of having to do tell inconvenient truths, to continuing interminably to tell inconvenient truths, when objectively and intellectually I am aware, and am almost reconciled to the fact that, I am engaged in an exercise in futility; but having to engage in this enterprise anyway because it is the only way I can think of to having my species avoid destroying the civilizations they have constructed with the weapons of mass destruction they have invented.
I most meaningful thing to me that Jesus is reported as saying, is, “Father, forgive them they know not what they do.”
The next most meaningful statement was his reference to throwing pearls before swine, lest they turn and rend you.
Because of the process of evolution - the human species, or, any sentient species, must be trapped in the ultimate paradox and consummate irony of human existence; they must become agents of coercion based culture as an absolute necessity for survival, and, having survived they must renounce and totally reject that culture to survive the weapons of mass destruction that is the inevitably product of that design for sentient existence.
I bear the burden of this knowledge every day, and have borne that burden for about a decade.
This constitutes a recipe for insanity, or, at least should precipitate a nervous breakdown; and, I would question my sanity but for the fact that the projections I made about future events were mostly accurate, the revelations that Scott McClellan is making to sell his book are things I conceived of long ago; except that I predicted that President Bush would not seek a second term in office because of the mess he had made during his first term.
And, what I would list as the greatest achievement and the pinnacle of civility that I have attained from practicing the discipline of truth, is, that looking back on the periods of abject poverty, the ubiquitous, the unrelenting and potentially pernicious loneliness I have experienced during these past thirty years; I am certain that given it to do over again I would not, could not have do anything else; and, my only real regret is that I could not, and, most likely will not find a way to pierce the gloom and miasma of delusion that is the inevitable consequence of the practice of coercion based culture - though I will never stop trying.
