The Insanity of our Times

Dr. Robert D. Crane

Posted Dec 1, 2005      •Permalink      • Printer-Friendly Version
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The Insanity of our Times

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  The term “Flogging a dead horse” was imported almost four hundred years ago from England.  One universal definition of insanity is repeating the same failed action over and over. It is flogging the dead horse—- a striking portent of incipient paradigm change.  Signs of this insanity are the desperate struggles of so-called democratic capitalists
to maintain concentrated economic power in the illusion that this will promote political democracy.  This clearly is insanity, which is why the ideologues in academia and think-tanks, including the Neo-Cons, have become so desperate in trying to justify it.

  The good news is that the extremes of insanity produce general chaos, which brings to bear the principal teaching of chaos theory, namely, that chaos is the mother of paradigmatic revolution.  In my view,/ justice is the default mode of human existence, not a rare and ephemeral exception./  But, unlike Rousseau, I do not believe that just
societies will evolve automatically toward progressive states of tranquility, or that, in Tailhardian fashion, we humans will evolve spiritually so that we can just sit back and watch the processes of history unfold.  In chaos theory all processes of nature gradually move toward chaos, perhaps in part as a result of the second law of thermodynamics, but this chaos hides the fact that underneath it lurks a coherent stability that cannot be avoided forever.  Every field of science reveals that at some point the disorder and “insanity” of what appears to be the natural order suddenly explodes and produces an entirely new order, which, in turn, merely reflects the underlying coherence of much deeper processes.  The old paradigm of human thought, based on survival of the old labor theory of value in an era of exploding capital intensivity, is producing insane levels of chaos in
every aspect of human life.  This, in turn, produces terrorism and counter-terrorism, which are merely a reaction to the runaway chaos that within the old paradigm has no counter and no cure.

  Now comes the good news, according to chaos theory.  The time for a basic paradigm shift has arrived.  It must start at the spiritual level, as it always has in the history of civilizations, but for actualization it must express itself eventually in institutional change deliberately aiming at justice.  Of course, justice, by my definition, is nothing other than the Will of God, which humans can never master or achieve but must always seek. 

  The insanity of the Neo-Cons, which, of course, is my favorite subject, is to beat the dead horse of democratic capitalism, which can only destroy them and everyone else in the process.  And, of course, Norm Kurland no doubt is quite right that it is a waste of time to continually beat the dead horse of Neo-Conservatism.  Instead we should
focus on The Just Third Way as a strategy, and perhaps the American Revolutionay Party as a tactic, all in pursuit of the primordial and perennial paradigm that lies at the heart of all the world religions.

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