Given insecurity is the cause of all human conflict, the only possible path to reducing war and conflict is promoting sanity and peace. Perhaps with the best intentions, thousands have tried for a great many years at this, but mostly with all the wrong assumptions about human nature.
You cannot gain peace and reduce violence by political action. Fixing politics will not bring peace. The problem is not bad politics but the existence of politics at all. Nor do I imagine we can simply stop that, either. We can’t go back and start over unless Jesus comes back, and His brand of starting over means this current world and reality itself will be gone. Barring that, we need to work for peace some other way.
Peace is merely the result of sanity. Sanity is defined in part as people breaking free from pretty much all human culture. Yes, you read that right. Stop being, or trying to be, this or that kind of person. Just be yourself, utterly individual, radically and completely leaving behind all the conforming you know. Granted, that’s a tall order, but that’s what it takes. You aren’t going to do this through some single great leap, but as a commitment to pull up out of this foul human existence and rise to another level. This calls for dismissing all loyalties on this plane, and embracing something at the cosmic level.
Nobody can do it for you, but when you see someone able to make peace everywhere they go, you realize something there is well above understanding. If peace and sanity do not find you, if they do not awaken in you a desire for them when you encounter someone like that, peace is not available for you. So long as you make peace an objective, a goal, something which must be planned and which requires organization and leadership, it will never happen.
When this radical peace and sanity is your commitment, the very nature of the cosmos itself tends to support that pursuit. People will find themselves drawn to cooperate in ways they can’t understand, in ways which aren’t entirely conscious, and the very air, water and ground around you — down to the smallest particle of matter — will also cooperate. By no means should you be silly enough to expect absolutes; but it remains unmistakable. Reality recognizes sanity and peace, and is crying out to support it. There will remain factors which inhibit that support, but it’s there, and peaceful souls can sense it.
It’s nice when I can run across people who want to share these things, talk about them, spend time with me because of them. What a relief to not have to play games, just be yourself and know it’s good enough, justifies acceptance in itself. But more important is that we carry that with us all around this insane world. The biggest favor my readers can do me is simply indicate in some way they get it, and are doing their own thing to make peace and sanity painfully obvious in their world.
I am a pacifist, a peace radical, but by no means a peace activist. Activism of any sort places you under control of another, because it requires surrendering part of your sanity to pursue someone else’s choices for you. Activism is politics, and politics always and inevitably leads to conflict, if only internally among those who feel the only way to get things done is by concerted action in pressure groups. Internal conflict cripples your intentions. Sure, you can steer some political responses, but you can’t change anything that matters. Participating in any way is surrender to insanity and conflict. People who don’t love peace and sanity won’t appreciate your yelling demands, and you’ll be just one more enemy, another source of conflict. You don’t make peace by creating conflict.
So I sincerely press for leaderless resistance to insanity and conflict, which can’t be called “activism.” Peace and sanity can only exist where no two of us do exactly the same thing, except by accident, and then only in appearance. Yes, there are some strong common grounds of action which our tortured reality wants to see, but that’s another discussion. You have to want it because of something within you, drawing you on your own terms to something which escapes full explanation. It has to be utterly voluntary, every step of the way, every breath, every heartbeat. It has to drive you; it drives me.
