The World As It Is

The basic world situation at the end of this first decade of the third millenium is still largely what it was 10 years ago. The conflict in the world, the dividing line, is still between the East and the West. This is as it has been since Achilles slew Hector and the Persian hordes smashed into the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae in an attempt to extinguish the Freedom of the Greeks.

The East today is led by Russia and China and their alliance based on mutual antipathy and fear of the United States. The United States is still the leader of the West out of necessity if not desire.

All of the distractions that some claim are the great threats of the age, namely terrorism and "climate change", are the hobgoblin of minds trained to think presently and not historically. Terrorism is not a war, it is the prelude to a war between nations including the cyberwar already raging between the US and China. "Climate change" is the earth-centered, man-centered theory that holds that Man is the center of the Earth and the Earth is the center of the Universe. It ignores the fact that climate is change. Climate change has been occuring on the Earth since the beginning. Climates have changed, are changing, and will change. A climate without change would not be a climate but stasis, an impossiblity in climatology. "Climate change" is earth-centered because it ignores the corresponding climate changes occuring presently throughout the solar system related to solar changes.

The theory of anthropomorphic climate change or global warming is a pathetic, desperate attempt to blame human activity for earth changes that have been occuring for eons and are occuring presently in a commensurate fashion on other planetary bodies within our solar system. It is an effort to fulfill a political agenda backed by politicized science to advance and justify the regulation of human activity on a global scale. This attempt will fail.

So we return to the basic conflict in the world today of East versus West. This conflict is rooted in the basic differences in our conception of Man's relationship to his fellow Man (and woman). The Western conception of Man's relationship to Man is based on the mutually shared conception of the primacy of Reason in everyday relationships. This is clarified in the legal concept of the "reasonable person" as stipulated in Western jurisprudence.

In the East Reason is viewed as largely antithetical to freedom. As Dostoyevsky writes in "Notes From the Underground", should a man not have a right to conceive that 2+2=5?? In the East free will includes the will to evade reason, to move beyond or below reason, depending on your view. In the West, we generally see no conflict between Reason and free will. Free Will is in fact related to Reason in two ways. The first is that Man has the freedom to pursue knowledge through Reason, and second that Reason exists within each person allowing us to exercise freedom. Through shared Reason we are linked to the cosmos and each other and yet are still individuals by the path we choose to pursue Reason, to pursue our eudynomic bliss, to pursue our happiness.

This view of the harmony of Unity and individual existence that permeates Western culture is viewed as fantastic fantasy in the East. It is convenient individualistic tripe, from the perspective of the East. The East's view is that a choice must be made between Unity and the individual, between Unity and Freedom. This often leads to a choice between a subsuming Statism and a nihilisitic, destructive, atomistc individualism.

Look for the conflict between East and West to intensify in 2010 as many of the distractions fade into irrelevancy.