View From the Top > Esteemed Reader

-Sunshine proves its own existence.
-a proverb

One lie will keep out forty truths.
-another proverb

There is a special privacy in the space between ears. And in the area of feeling, between the throat and solar plexus. Or so we think. In actuality everyone is transparent. A known quantity. Or quality. Our most closely guarded secrets, deepest confessions, are almost always already obvious to others. We are, after all, broadcasting at least the gist of our privacies even in every even ordinary interaction.

So why the insistence on deceit, or at least the facade of opacity? There is a tacit agreement between all of us that "I will pretend I don't see yours if you will reciprocate the pretense of ignorance." Great lengths are taken to reinforce the illusion that we aren't what we obviously are. We chew on empty calories of falseness with vain hope that nourishment will come. And we follow that vanity to the grave, even insisting, like hopeful children about Santa Claus, that some unearned brilliant heaven will follow this mundane life. This heaven is even pictured with all the amenities of the dreamed-for life on earth: Pleasures are based on living as a food-tube, as an alimentary canal with sex organs; life is lived at the level of the worm (about which belief the obvious silliness is made apparent by the fact that the food-tube dies with us; it is the first organ system to go-even every executed inmate first shits his pants, so how could it persist?).

But a glorious afterlife is the least of our illusions. There are so many illusions related to this life-to ourselves and to what we refuse to acknowledge. And it is the insistent ignorance about ourselves that makes us (via tacit collusion) available to swallow the lies propagated by those who would capitalize on our insistent ignorance. The emperor is obviously naked, and yet we praise, almost with a singular voice, the beauty of his garments. We allow ourselves to follow nonsensical rhetoric to an equally senseless though sufficiently satisfyingly conclusion.

Like the spoutings of a presidential administration bent on initiating a new world war: the ultimate criminals, usurpers of the highest office, perpetrators of every kind of crime against humanity, against nature-criminals even in the world of business-have the audacity to point out others as "evil-doers" and justify destruction on a huge scale. It is the arch-absurd. And yet we swallow it. We follow the rhetoric and even formulate opinions on its basis, not quite noticing that the conversation is within the context of an obviously fallacious premise.

Anyone with half-open eyes can see that war does not lead to peace. Not that peace is even a stated objective of the evil-doers in our government. No, their interest is a war that will go on for a long time. Forever! if they have their way. And what for? To protect our "American Way of Life?" Perhaps. If it is characterized by unbridled consumption. And perhaps the objects of our consumption, to which we are sufficiently addicted to justify annihilating and inflicting enormous suffering on the milliards of victims of our terror, are the lynchpin enabling us to swallow the lies, sold to us wholesale with inscrutably obfuscatory marketing and packaging.

But perhaps we can ask ourselves, honestly, what motivates these illicit power-possessors to pursue an agenda that will inevitably be destructive to all? That will pit us in an interminable battle against an unknown and ever-shifting enemy. Is it a perpetual program designed to keep the "defense" contractors' and oilmen's pockets lined; to open ever-new markets for our corporations' "goods"? Or is there an Hegelian schema for world-domination afoot? Probably all of these.

But there is a basic truth about which every even novice (like myself) student of history will agree. War does not lead to peace. Only peace leads to peace. And with the abundant resources our nation possesses we have the power to effect peace on a huge scale. Instead of spending trillions showering the world with troops and bombs, we could be inundating the world with goodness. We could be engendering goodwill instead of hatred. Kindness transcends all cultural differences. And without doubt, that kindness would prevail. Ah, if it could be so.

But at least on a small scale, on the level of the solitary activist, our demonstrations must embody the peace we hope to effect. Conflict and pugilism, rage and embitterment yield nothing but more of the same. Our resistance to ignorance and lies must be founded in wholeness, in healing, in an embodiment of the amity we hope for.

Wholeness and veracity must begin with us. With truth about who we are and what we see; even in the minutia, sacrificing pride and vanity on the altar of peace. We don't realize the significance of such seemingly insignificant sacrifices. They are far-reaching. As the flap of the wing of a butterfly can stir up a hurricane, so can an heroic relaxing of egoic tension have far-reaching effects for humanity. Objectively, a conscious act of openness is bigger than the most decimating incendiary.

With a basis in practically- (not ideologically-) based peacemaking, we will be in a position to step through the doorway that the impending mass-destruction offers. Look deeper. Don't swallow lies. And don't blame the liars. We can, counter to our conditioning, cultivate an abhorrence of emptiness and falsity. We can allow our lives to become paradigms of truthfulness, and in many small ways begin to accentuate and underscore what is.

-Jason Stern