Who are you?
That’s the one question that matters most. Not in the sense of some static answer, because that would never work unless you are dead. Rather, it’s the query of who you are in this moment.
Nobody says you can’t change radically into someone else altogether, but that it’s rare and frequently quite damaging to try for the wrong reasons. And any reason ginned up by human intelligence is always the wrong reason. We shouldn’t go looking for peace as an end in itself. Peace has to come as a side effect of having opportunity to be yourself. Until you find yourself, you cannot find peace. Please note that the process is naturally painful; we are fallen creatures.
Anything that smacks of one world government will kill you and kill peace. This is why globalism is an implacable evil. The only way you can surrender to a global government is to die, to stop being who you are. The only way a single world government could arise is by the most egregious use of force, violently suppressing all the variations that are the essence of human existence.
You cannot take away our traditions and cultural memories. If you could, they would promptly reform. With the second generation, we would be back where we started with all the necessary variations that come with living in our fallen world. If you do not adapt to your environment, you’ll die. And if you adapt, you will develop traditions and customs and values that match your existence in that environment. Even shared family values and customs will produce nothing more than boundaries within which individuals vary highly as each one seeks his or her own path to sanity. The result is a culture with a built-in variability, a living thing that moves and changes with the aggregate membership.
The concept of efficiency in resource use is a very ugly myth, a damned lie from Hell. It’s just as bad as one person hogging all the resources to deprive others. Not only is it inherently impossible, it’s wholly undesirable. There is nothing the least bit harmful about duplication of effort and reinventing the wheel. That’s how it works; that’s the nature of humanity. We do not serve the resources; we do not worship the creatures, but the Creator. The resources serve us, and our greatest need is finding our individual selves as God intended.
Nor is it possible to transfer resources without destroying their value entirely. You cannot change the outcomes that way. The outcome always arises from the process of human striving. It’s the experience, not the stuff one aggregates, that makes us who we are. It’s not a question of labor investment, but of laboring to change the soul. That’s because this life is of no inherent value to the soul except as a means to change and internal growth. All Creation is but a tool for the Creator’s glory, and His glory is always in our best interest — by definition.
Meanwhile, we read where pockets of immigrants coming into Western countries are an infestation of criminal presence. Has it been any different from Western colonists invading the lands whence these immigrants came? Was it not an infestation of criminal presence in those foreign lands? You cannot export and import culture without provoking moral evil. People have to be free to adapt to their abode, and adopt whatever foreign influences they can see as adding to the adaptation. The immigration conflicts are simply colonization coming back at us. The only difference is the particular flavor and means of violence used to suppress native resistance.
If you have your character handed to you, imprinted by some external force, you cannot be yourself. If you don’t have an environment with adaptive cultural limitations, you aren’t safe to discover yourself. If someone attempts to take away all the cultural limitations, they would have to do it by force and, in the process, imprint a whole new culture that attempts to deny it is one. God save us from a world of impetuous snowflakes demanding free access to universal publicity of their private likes and dislikes. That is the greatest tyranny of all, demanding that you also conform to that same snowflake culture that might be utterly foreign to you.
The demand for recognition and nonrecognition at the same time is surely one of the reasons for the outbreak of mass self-mutilation in the Western world in an age of celebrity. A person who treats his face and body like an ironmongery store can hardly desire or expect that you fail to notice it, but at the same time demands that you make no comment about it, draw no conclusions from it, express no aversion toward it, and treat him no differently because of it. You must accept him as he is, however he is, because he has an inalienable right to such acceptance. As a professional burglar once asked me, how could I expect him to give up burgling when he was a burglar and burglary was what he did?
Take your damned culture elsewhere, and leave me to mine. I know who I am. Neither of us has any moral right to demand tolerance up close and personal; we cannot abolish the meaning of “safe distance.” Social and national boundaries are a gift from God.
