What is self evident is that extant governments are predicated on the assumption that human beings are fearful persons and that if you threaten to harm or kill them, or jail them that you would arouse fear in them and out of fear of injury they would do as they are asked to do. That is to say that extant governments are terrorists; they use fear and intimidation to make people do what otherwise they may not like to do.

          (In the USA , the terrorist governments would threaten to garnish your pay or take away your job, car or driver’s license, and or jail you, and if all those fail, kill you; you must do as you were told to do, right or wrong, or the terrorist state punishes you. I am sure that what obtains in the USA obtains elsewhere; I am using the USA as an example because I live there.)

          The issue is not whether governments are terrorists or not but whether they would always be terrorist or whether it is possible to have a different form of governments, ones not based on threat of coercion?

         Apparently, extant human beings see themselves as criminals, as people who have done something wrong and could do it again, and that they need to be punished. They apparently do not believe that they could be non-criminal in behavior so they try to checkmate each other by having the state apparatus of punishment ready for them, and any one who seems to stray out of line is apprehended and punished.   

         Extant society is based on mutual punishment. This mutual punishment is based on the assumption that people are criminals and prone to criminal behaviors and that we ought to prepare for their criminal behaviors.

      But are people criminal in nature? Have they done something bad in the past and must they always do something bad in the present and future? 

        Empirically, people do, do bad things. As Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan) pointed out, people do kill each other and certainly do steal from each other. As Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations) pointed out, people appear to be self interest oriented and do mostly that which serves their self interests, sometimes at the expense of other people’s interests. 

        An objective appraisal of human behavior would seem to suggest that people are inherently evil and it is rational to assume that since in the past people behaved harmfully towards other people that they could do so in the present and future and that therefore we had better anticipate their harmful behaviors with threat of punishment.

         But is empirical evil the only basis for the assumption of human propensity to evil or is there another dimension to it? 

         The Christian religion teaches that human beings committed an Original Sin and that to live in this world is to be sinful hence  people needing punishment. As the Christian Church sees it, God created people and placed them in the Garden of Eden where all their needs were met. However, they were forbidden to eat of the fruit of a particular tree. They disobeyed God and ate that fruit and God drove them out of the Garden of Abundance , and cursed them, saying that they would have to work for their daily bread.

      The above biblical story is literal but there is a metaphorical interpretation to it. The Gnostic interpretation of the Christian mythology of the origin of the world, the story of creation, is that God created his children to be part of him and that they chose to separate from him. In the act of separation they committed what amounts to a sin or error and therefore now see themselves as sinful and fear that God would punish them.

       Fearing God’s punishment, they fled from God (unified state). In the meantime, they believe that they are sinful and capable of sin and punish each other for each others past sinfulness and present sins. From this perspective, human beings believe that they are sinful, are criminals, for they disobeyed their father God by separating from him and expect to be punished by God.

        However, without waiting for God to punish them, they punish themselves. The children of God are part of God. If God punished them he would be punishing himself. God is not insane and does not punish his children since that amounts to punishing himself.

         God does not punish himself and does not punish his children and his children know so hence do not wait for God to punish them.  The children of God know that he would not punish them but since they are masochistic and want to be punished for their alleged sin of separation they punish themselves on behalf of God. 

        According to Gnostic Christianity, human beings believe that they are separated from God hence are sinful and punish themselves for their alleged sinfulness. But to God they have not separated from him hence are not sinful and he does not want to punish them.

       The human belief in sin is really a belief in the reality of separation; their self punishment is really an attempt to make separation seem real in their minds.  Sin and punishment makes separation from God seem real in their awareness, even though in truth they have not separated from God; they are still as God created them, unified with him and each other.

          We do not have to embrace Christian mythologies, traditional or Gnostic, to proceed with our discourse. The real question is whether we can have a society that is not predicated on sin and punishment, a state that does not  aim at punishing people for their presumed wrongs (in the past or in the present and future).

        I actually see the state and those working for it as children and pity them. I see them as children because they have the misguided sense that they can intimidate people, and I know that they cannot intimidate me hence cannot get me to do what it wants me to do.

        (If I were the cynical, antisocial personality type, I could, in fact, manipulate the system and those working for it since I see them as made up of a bunch of terrorists and criminals; creatures at a lower level of being. Generally, I see people as, more or less, like cattle, not given to serious philosophical thinking. This type of perception can lead to one of two paths: mysticism where one helps people to grow up, the path I chose, or the path of using people to achieve ones goals in a heartless manner, the path Adolf Hitler chose. Hitler, in his Mein Kampf, made it quite clear that he had contempt for human beings, for he did not believe that they do think and know what is good for them; he believed that only he knew what was good for the people and that he ought to impose his view on the people. The man did not feel guilt and remorseful from using the people in a callous manner to achieve his fascistic goals, for he believed that he was doing the right thing for them, the right thing that left to them they could not understand or do for themselves. This is the foundation of his dictatorship, the belief that he knows what is good for other people. The communists had similar belief that they knew what was good for the people and used brutal force to impose it on the Russian people and killed those who saw things differently.)

         For our present purposes, the salient point is that most people are not like me, philosophical and reconciled to death hence not prone to the fear of punishment. Most people see themselves as separated selves living in separated bodies and fear harm of their bodies and death of their bodies and therefore are easily intimidated by terrorists: individual, organizational and state terrorists. 

         As long as the individual believes he a separated self housed in a body, and he wishes to live as such, he will be prone to feeling fear of those who could harm and or destroy his body and end his separated existence.

         It is only if the individual looks death in the face and say to it: I welcome you, I do not fear you; and look at his body and say to it: you are flesh, meat that would die and rot, I will not permit your vulnerable reality to make me kowtow to those who threaten to harm me, can he be freed from intimidation from terrorists.

         I would estimate that 99% of the people are afraid of injury and death hence can be intimidated by individual or state terrorists.  Given this fact, we cannot not have a terrorist state.

          As long as most people are fearful the state must always manipulate their fear and in the process become a terrorist state.

       It is the people’s egoist nature, their desire to live as separated selves hence fear the end of their separated lives that makes it possible for the state to be a terrorist state and terrorize them. 

          If people were not prone to fear and intimidation there would be no terrorism in this world.

         Those of us who have looked death in the face and accepted it without begging it to permit us to live cannot be intimidated. Do you want to kill me?  Go ahead and kill me, now. (The choice is mine whether to do to you as you want to do to me, kill you. Fair is fair; if you want to kill me, you must accept possible death from my hands. Whether, in fact, I choose to exercise my choice is a different matter. Just so you know, if you attacked me, chopping off your head is not more important than swatting a mosquito that perches on my skin and sucks on my blood.)

        If we are to change our terrorism based governments we first have to change the people; we have to make the people less fearful of harm and death. Until people accept their death and do not fear it they would be prone to instituting and having terrorist governments.

        Folks like me who have accepted their existential nothingness (purposelessness, meaninglessness, worthlessness and valuelessness) cannot be intimidated by the state.  We look with sympathy at those who are easily intimidated by the state but yet we know that they welcomed such intimidation by their fear of harm and death.  They are not victims; they are responsible for the terrorist state they live under. For them not to have such a terrorist state they have to change their basic psychological structure.  How so?

        They must begin by understanding that once born in flesh we must die. Every thing that lives in flesh must die. Give or take, a hundred years and people die. All that people are really doing is protecting their lives for a hundred years before they die.

         If death is inevitable, so, why fear it?  Embrace it and live fully today for tomorrow you will die. (Carpe Dien is a nice stoic philosophy to live by.)

        Fear of the after death world is a useless fear. The fact is that none of us knows what would happen to us after we die. 

       In so far that pure reason is our guide, we can say that before manifesting on earth we were in an undifferentiated non-material state. We separated from that unified state and manifested in body. We invented space, time and matter and live in it and as long as we are in it seem separated from each other. When we die our bodies dissolve and that which gave us a sense of separation and boundary dissolves. We return to the abode of undifferentiated state, to unified state.

       In unified spirit state there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object; there is just one spirit self, a nameless, undifferentiated self (which people call God). 

       It is not necessary to understand the nature of unified spirit other than to say that it is one self and, as such, there is no self that is apart from it.

        We all return to an undifferentiated state where we do not have a sense of I, as we do on earth. There is no human personality in spirit, for spirit is not in body.

        People ought not to fear what happens to them when they die. They’re not going to be punished by God.  God is not separated from his children; God is in his children; God cannot punish his children, for to do so is to punish himself. 

       Death means return to undifferentiated unified state; death is rest in peace, as opposed to the conflict that characterizes our differentiated world. 

         Where there is separation there must be conflict; there can only be peace and harmony where there are no differences, and no separation.

          If you look death in the face and accepted it and accepted your earthly vulnerabilities no human being can intimidate you and no government can control you through terrorism.

        It is your fear of harm and death that makes governments able to intimidate and control you; you gave governments the power to intimidate you, and can take that power away from it. What the individual gave the government, the power to intimidate, he can take away and not be intimidated by it.

         If you eliminate your fearfulness you would remove the power to intimidate you that criminals (in governments or on the streets) have over you.

       Terrorist governments and states are based on the people being fearful and easily intimidated; such governments are usually composed of the most aggressive segment in society. Those who are not afraid to assert their will to power and do not mind killing people and use coercion to gain power will always rule the fearful and timid.  The most criminal among human beings rule them. What were European kings but heads of street gangs that used force to get the people to serve them? I see those in governments as criminals.

        Consider the rule of white Americans in North America . Europeans used brute force to break native Indians down and expropriated their lands. (The Indians had expropriated the land from animals, so they were not exactly innocent.) 

       The Europeans used force to obtain their North American lands and used force to establish the type of government they desired; a government that relegated African Americans to second class status (made them the worker bees for the white population). As long as the Europeans are powerful they would rule North America .

         However, if history is anything to go by, we know that power is ephemeral; it is here today and gone tomorrow. We have had powerful empires in the past, including Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, Germania, France, Britain, Russia, China, Japan, and Mongolia. Those great empires are today in the dustbin of history. Power is a temporary phenomenon, so we can assume that sooner or later the USA would exhaust its motivating aggressive energy, falter and join the fallen powers of the world. 

         One thing that is certain in this world is change: everything changes. Powers come and go; empires rise and fall, so the USA must inevitably fall, when her time comes.

       It is doubtful that the USA would survive as the sole superpower through the twenty first century. China is already knocking at her door and the European Union is making some noises for power to be shared.

        Nothing is permanent in a changeable world. Terrorist states and terrorist governments come and go and are replaced by other terrorists states and governments; this would continue to be so until human beings overcome the fear that bounds them and make them amenable to terrorist rule.

         One is often tempted to see those from powerful states as ones enemies, but one should never fall into this temptation. Africans who consider themselves oppressed by the West are tempted to see Westerners as their enemies. But if you actually interacted with individual Westerners, say Americans, you would discover that they are as decent as any one else. Their government and state are obviously terrorists, but the individual American is a descent human being.  The individual American would go out of his way to do what he could to help you. 

        The individual’s decency has nothing to do with state terrorism. The very nature and existence of the state makes it terrorist.

       The state and government came into being to use power to coerce people into doing what they may not want to do: respect other people’s rights. The state is, ip so facto, oppressive and abusive. At best the state and government could become a velvet dictatorship (as in America ) but it must necessarily be dictatorial if it is to get self interested human beings to obey the laws that protect social interests.

       The state and government arose to control and intimidate human beings into obeying laws and must be intimidatory hence terrorist.  At best the state and its government is a positive terrorist, and at worst a negative terrorist, but terrorist it must be.

        Look at your government as a terrorist organization, a necessary one, and always work to keep it decently terrorist but never make the mistaken assumption that the government can be anything but terrorist. The greatest illusion, delusion really, is to see government as ones friend. Government exists to control you, if not abuse you. Therefore, make sure that your government does not abuse you more than is necessary. If it goes way overboard, work to overthrow it, and replace it with a less oppressive government, for government human beings must have. Without government, chaos reigns in the land and people revert to the state of nature where life was nasty, brutish and short.

          As long as human beings desire to have separated selves, and live in bodies that make separated selves seem possible, they would fear whatever threatens their desired separation.

        As long as people desire differentiated states they must fear death, for death returns them to undifferentiated state. 

         As long as human beings are prone to fear, those who do not hesitate harming and or destroying them, be they individuals, organizations or states, would always control them.

         State terrorism is here to stay with us. The most that we can do is for the individual to reduce his personal fears, by relinquishing his desire for separation and accepting undifferentiated state.  If you overcome your fear of harm and death no one can terrorize you.

        Since the bulk of humanity lives in fear, despite your personal victory over fear of death, there would still be state and other forms of terrorism.

         If you have overcome fear hence not subjected to state and other forms of terrorism please have pity on humanity, for its willingness to accept terrorism because it wants to live as separated beings.

        While pitying the people, however, you must accept that they are not victims, for they brought their terrorized state to themselves by seeking separated existence and seeking personal interests at the expense of other people’s interests.

         As Buddha correctly observed, you must have compassion for all humanity, knowing that they brought their suffering to themselves and that despite your pity that you cannot change their suffering, for their suffering is changed, one individual at a time, when a human being voluntarily gives up his desire for separated, ego, living and accepts undifferentiated living in unified spirit.

        Human suffering ends when the individual dies to the ego and awakens to living in unified state, what Christians call the Christ state, the state of love and forgiveness, which is the state of peace and happiness.

         The answer to the question I began this essay with: can there be a non-terrorist state, is that as long as human beings are prone to fear, because they want to live as separated selves housed in bodies, there will not be states and governments that are not terrorist. Non-terrorist states and governments can only obtain in a world where people are not fearful. That world is not likely to be here on earth for if people were not fearful they probably would not live on earth (they would perhaps live as non-physical, undifferentiated unified spirit). Thus we are stuck with terrorist states and governments and terrorist organizations and their individual members. One must be prepared to live with this reality and not naively expect ones government and those who work for it to be any thing other than terrorist. The individual, if he evolves to a point where he personally overcomes the desire for separated self housed in body would not live in fear of the extinction of his separated self  and the body that houses it hence would not be subjected to state and other forms of terrorism. Thus, if you want to avoid state and other forms of terrorism strive to overcome your desire for individuated existence and the fear that maintains it.

       Salvation from fear and slavery to what fear maintains, separated self housed in body, is obtained one at a time; mass salvation of the people is not yet feasible, for the mass of humanity desire to live as separated selves hence must live in fear and must be subject to terrorism, state and non-state terrorism.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

March 3, 2007