Think Tankers' Brains Clogged with Medieval Gook

Anyone who believes that the Russian Federation and the DisUnited States of America
are not functioning in tandem (they've been doing so since Yalta, dummies!), will accept
that there is a Santa Klaus, Easter Bunny, guardian angels, that the vile containing St.
Gennaro's blood miraculously liquifies every year exactly on 21 st March, that there were
nuclear armaments aboard the Russian naval ships that kicked off the Cuban Missile
Crisis, and that Edwin Snowden is not a dupe of the Central Stupidity Agency. Would
it not be glorious if The One & Only & Last Think Tank was created and all these
spurious thinkers could masticate, all in unison, for the ultimate time, their flimflam,
and then burp it into the ionosphere for once and for all? Just think. . . If these think
tankers are so dull, imagine how intelligent the Russian and American sheeple are!
In the analyses of contemporary political, international and military punditry one finds,
constantly, a particular mindset that immediately distinguishes the intellectual proclivities
of the authors who scribe these often nauseatingly elongated commentaries. It does not
take more than a paragraph to ascertain what side of the political fence they are
grounded, and if you are a bit astute, you might even learn who is paying them to gurgle
their narrow-minded sentiments.
Two of the most standard mental inclinations unconcealed by contemporary doctrinaire
verbalists are these: the impression that reality is essentially dual in essence; and, that
the ends justify the means. Wherever and whenever one explores, in the chronological
records of Western Civilizations I & II, the who's, what's, when's, where's and why's of
the 20th and 21st centuries' goings-on, one comes upon the drab backflowing of these
two philosophical repetitiousnesses that cause persistent deep concern and anxiety for
many who are attempting to confront the reality, The Truth, of things.
The first, yet not foremost, of these cardinal claptraps is the notion that there has
percolated throughout Historyyou know whose History!the simmering of some
sort of first principle dictating to us that there is a two-fold approach to everything we
are involved with. Hot and cold. Happy and sad. Good and bad. Good guys and bad
guys. Heaven and hell. Go and stop. Either-or choices. Simple and direct. There is no
reference to the in-between components. No point of reference referring, for example,
to The Golden Mean of Aristotle. As if people habitually take ice-cold or scalding hot
showers without knowing to blend the two extremes in order to arrive at an at ease
tepidityas if think tankers must lead their subscribers to draw a conclusion from an
exclusively binary dimension. This dogmatical leading us on is worse when it passes
from the concrete into the abstract where it today is being employed by political savants,
foreign policy master hands and military operations' specialists. We pick up again on the
duple of their thought processesthe fingerprints of their minds: soft power-hard
power, friends-enemies, divide and conquer, Might is Right, Europe versus Asia, Europe
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versus Russia, spheres of influence, take no prisoners, cut economic ties between
Europe and Asia, Right and Left, Sunni versus Shia, the infantry is the Queen of Battle,
the artillery is the King of Battleor was!, ad infinitum. There is the obsession to be
righteousto come up with, as fast as possible, the most flawless solution to the most
tangled quandary. Their simplemindedness is embarrassingly unique.
The worse is now to come when an analysis of the think tankers' ethical posture is
contemplated. For their information, the ends do not justify the means and the means
do not justify the ends even though they wish they did!
This timeworn locution, the ends justify the means and/or the redundancy, the
means justify the ends, is the most well-propagated ethical shortcut known to
Philosophy, and it is being exalted continually today. Popes use it for God's good.
Bankers use it for Capitalism's good. Presidents use it for the Nation's good. Generals
use it for the Army's good. Lawyers use it for the Law's good. Journalists use it for The
Truth's good. The war criminal, Henry The Carpet Bomber Kissinger, an aficionado
of it, used this short, pithy statement with aplomb defying international law in Vietnam.
One ex-mayor of New York, Michael R Bloomberg, rationalized that the Big Apple's
crime rate decreased during his term because his police officers transgressed the
Constitution of the United States. One president of the United States, again brushing
aside the Constitution, has kept prisoners locked in cells for years and years without
having charged them with any crime. Can one think of an example where this
overexerted, tyrannical in nature expression has no clout among the establishment of
think tankers and then beyond them? Do we have here an ethical code in reverseone
flipped over?
Life is not a black and white affair even if authoritarian spokesmen and women would
have us believe it is. Rarely, rules might be bent to accommodate some unique but not
universal dilemma such as when a life or lives are imminently at stake. Nevertheless, it is
still thought, by the majority of human beings, that regulations are in fact made to be
brokenand, of course, they are! In Philosophy, situation ethics is robustly debated
with varying self-serving interpretations of it offeredthe majority of which decrys,
thank goodness, the use of immorality (Foolishness) to attain a final stage of
morality (Intelligence).
Here are two ethical brainteasers to consider: On onebeyond one's imagination
police television series in which the father of a police detective and his sister, a
prosecuting attorney in the same city, is coincidently the chief of police of that city, we
may see this ethical torment all the better. The family confronts various ethical
quandaries! The police detective is an emotional and frequently hotheaded character.
His sister, the lawyer, is a calm, cool and collected individual and definitely less
impassioned than her brother, but when they are embroiled in argumentation, the police
chief father brings them both to respect Shakespeare's famous saying: Upon the heat
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and flame of thy distemper, sprinkle cool patience. At the dinner table, this pietistical
family frequently rests its cases by passingthe hot potatoto the Lord above after
they have recited the Roman Catholic grace before meals. Yet one day, when the two of
them are out of their father's sight, they both come to verbal blows over the handling
of a hostage situation. The brother has admitted to his sister thatto save the life of a
little girl sequestered in an unknown hostage locationhe rammed the head of a
suspect into a toilet bowl until he told the detective the place where the young lady was
being held against her will. The prosecuting attorney is aghast at her brother's behavior;
however, he still inexorably insists he was right in doing what he did because he saved
the missy's life. The sister eventually throws up her arms in frustration and turns and
taunts her brother with this admonition: You just don't get it.
On another police television series, two detectives put a hood over a suspect's head,
drive him to a beach, and tell him that if he doesn't reveal his secrets to them, he will be
thrown off a cliff into the dark blue sea. There is no life-threatening premise here. The
defendant relinquishes all he knows to satisfy the two undercover police officers who
have cleverly left their badges on the front seat of their unmarked police car. When the
interrogation is terminated, the investigators push the individual off the cliff, only five
feet high, and the once-interrogated gent safely falls onto a pile of sand.
There are two trends at work here. In the first, some mortals will exclaim that the
police officer should not have crammed the one-in-custody's head into the toilet bowl
but most would be glad that he did! There exists a tension between what is done and
what should be done. The sister, the functionary representing the law, offers the idea
that there is an alternative to outright violence, to some course that does not pander to
the lowborn instincts of human beings under an enormous stress during a genuinely
difficult state of human affairs. But she also signals that it might be almost useless to
hope that the city's citizens might upgrade their conduct to reach that more sublime
stratum where dignity and courage are the norms. If she cannot convince her brother
to change his ways, how could she expect to alter the deportment of millions? They
just don't get it. They never will?
The law enforcers who have threatened to dump their captive into the sea, have
completely abrogated the principles of law set in place to protect all citizens belonging
to a determined societyincluding themselves. They have no qualms about stepping
out of bounds no matter what the existential situation might require of them. They
have given themselves carte blanche to interpret the law as they see fit. These defenders
of the law have voluntarily become criminals. They know it; they also know they can
get away with doing what they do illegally because, quite frankly, nobody knows what
they have done or what they might do. They just don't get it. They never will.
The two cases are pitiable. We view human beings caught up in double-bind settings
that are tormenting them. If we calculate that we bipeds have not been crawling on our
all four's now for about four million years, the fact that we have been in a the ends
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justify the means and a have your cake and eat it too dead end (We just don't get it!)
for all these millennia, is actually not a terribly remarkable compliment regards our
intelligenceour ability to rationalize. Further, the fight fire with fire mindset (fight
the criminals by being criminals) is additional proof that we also are in flight to
becoming even more uncivilized.
The concept of Justice, lamentably, more and more, every day, is enfeebled. Fiat jus titia
et pereat mundus? Throughout the world, Society is running amok with crime, greed and
corruption, and governments are at a loss trying to tame this freewheeling madness.
For decades, during the cold war, reactionaries employed the threat of using nuclear
arsenals to chasten human nature's propensity to use whatever means available to attain
its ends. But corporations that construct nuclear reactors have called this bluff. (Who
needs nuclear bombs when we have nuclear reactors?) A new paper tiger had to be
concocted: the more insidious Big Brother! The wordspeak is that every word we utter
or note down, every thought we possess can be observed, recorded, archived and
indiscriminately used against us at a later date. The hypocrisy is striking! The president
of the DisUnited States rallies to defend the excogitations of Justice, while at the same
time reactionary dupes (Manning and Snowden?) are let loose to let the world know
anyone might have his head dunked in a toilet bowl merely at the command Just do it!
Two reasons offer us the idea that things will only get worsethat our sense of a global
community functioning in peace and cooperation is only a pipe dream that will end in a
frightening reverie. The first is that people all over the world are migrating
exponentially to the cities where they expect a better, more prosperous life. (More toilet
bowl dunks?) The second is that the population of the world is estimated to be
8,000,000,000 in 2025 and 10,000,000,000 in 2050. The United Nations predicts that if
the world population continues to increase at its present rate, in 2300 there would be
134,000,000,000 people on our planet. Don't count on it.
We just don't get it, do we!
Have a nice nightmare...

Authored by Anthony St. John

Calenzano, Italy
6 April MMXV
www.scribd.com/thewordwarrior