Clearly, Western jurisprudence (a people’s legal system represents their civilization; I will, therefore, alternate the terms jurisprudence and civilization), as we know it, is a rogue civilization; it is based on criminality and operates on criminal grounds. It is a dog eat dog world where the strongest survive and weakest are exploited, suffer and eventually die.  The strong attack the weak and take over their territory and pass laws to make the stolen territories their land.  The Norman French conquered England in 1066 and passed laws making the new land theirs. Europeans came to the Americas, drove the natives off their lands and took them over and passed laws giving themselves property rights to the lands they had stolen. In their so-called democratic form of government, the majority supposedly rules. But what actually obtains is that the most powerful hoodwink the weak and manage to get themselves elected to office and pass laws that essentially protect their class interests at the expense of the poor. Their courts are nothing but kangaroo courts where mercenaries called judges implement the oppressive “laws” aimed at controlling the masses.  

There are no two ways of putting it: Western civilization is a criminal civilization; the real question is whether there is an alternative to it?

One can come up with idealistic alternatives to it but one is not in the business of idealism. The individual perceives the imperfect real world and imagines how it could be better and comes up with mental constructs of what could make the world perfect. Alas, in the world of space, time and matter, reality limits what could be; we can imagine perfection but reality makes every thing we try on planet earth imperfect.

One is interested in realism, not fantasies of how the world could be perfect. Is there a realistic alternative to the West?

My idealistic friend tells me that the best thing for us, non-Westerners, to do is to hurry and come up with nuclear weapons and use them to end this blight on human sensibility called Western civilization. And that if Western civilization is the only type of civilization that mankind can have, end mankind, too. As he sees it, mankind ought to cease existing, if civilization can only exist by a few living off the suffering of the many.

While my idealistic friend gets himself all worked up over Western exploitations of non-Westerners, my realistic friend does not loose sleep from the situation. As he sees it, the West is devoid of morality; Westerners are totally exploitative and their legal system is deliberately set up to exploit the weak. Do not sweat it; do to them as they do to you. Be amoral and use them in an unsentimental manner. They are out to screw you, then screw them, that is all there is to it, no misguided sympathies for them.  Learn about their amoral legal system and exploit it to your advantage and that is all there is to it. Case closed. It is big fish eat small fish world, so what are you complaining about? Just make sure that you are not the fish eaten by other fish. If you are small and disadvantaged then use your thinking to figure out seeming devious ways to catch the big fish and eat it and have no feelings about it after all, it was out to eat you! Knock off all sentimental talk of God and morality, for they do not exist. What matters is to live well until one dies. Opportunism, pragmatism, every behavior is permitted in an amoral world.

THE REST OF THE WORLD

It is necessary to state that most extant legal systems in the world (and the civilizations they represent) are, more or less, like the West. Most countries legal systems are based on crime, judgment and punishment. Laws are made and those persons who appear to have not lived up to them are arrested, tried and punished.

This type of jurisprudence assumes that people are by nature evil and need the law and fear of punishment to make them not do bad things to each other. Left alone, it is assumed that people would do what is in their interests, often at the expense of others’ interests. The powerful would oppress the weak.

Laws are used to corral and control the people, to make them behave as society (its leaders) wants them to behave.

For example, in America, white Americans, the temporarily more powerful, enslaved Africans, the temporarily weak, and used their labor for free to build up America. In the present, white Americans discriminate, with impunity, against black Americans.  Apparently, their laws are deliberately designed to enable them oppress African Americans and other minority persons, while pretending to be impersonal laws.

All over the world, the rich and powerful exploit the weak and powerless. As Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan) noted, people are self centered and seek their self interests and only cooperate with other people when doing so serves their mutual interests. Man, by nature, is selfish hence evil and we need governments and their laws to prevent him from doing harmful things to other people. Without these punitive laws, people would harm one another.

The best that we can do is making our government limited in scope (John Locke, Second Treaty on Government.) Without government and laws people will revert to the state of nature and perpetual warfare would reign. The powerful would enslave and or kill the weak and attack each other, and the result would be personal insecurity. Life in nature is nasty, brutish and short. The only way to secure security for people is through the punitive laws of governments, laws that punish those who transgress other people’s rights to the pursuit of life, liberty and property.

The first order of business in organizing society is to build jails, hire prison guards, policemen, build courts and hire judges and other law enforcement agents and have them arrest law breakers, try and jail them. Without this punitive legal system, society would not exist in an organized fashion, the philosophy of Hobbes and company, which is essentially Western political philosophy, holds.

Man is evil, man is a criminal by nature, so punish him or threaten to punish him if you want him to respect other persons’ rights and thus obtain fragile law and order in society.

Carrying this negative view of man to its logical conclusion, in the USA the business of government (from the city council to state legislatures to Congress) is primarily to make laws and hire law enforcement officers to implement them. The assumption is that this is the only way to secure social security for all persons. Thus jails are built in just about every American city. Some people must be punished so that others may live in safety. Some persons’ right to live warrants incarcerating other persons.

Over two million Americans (mostly black persons) are in jails and prisons. America has the highest percentage of its population in prisons relative to other countries. And this is the land of the free! It is more like the land of the enslaved. At the rate America is going, soon, most Americans would have been jailed or be under the supervision of parole and probation officers. Perhaps, this is as well, for the people consider themselves as having criminality in their genes and behave as such.

It costs over $35, 000 a year to house and feed each inmate in America’s prisons. At this rate, the country may soon bankrupt itself!

 
The Western justice system is predicated on feeling grievances and seeking vengeance for the wrongs other people do to one. If it were possible, the person who feels wronged would seek direct vengeance but it is not always possible for him to do so. The individual hires others, judges, etc to punish those who wronged him for him.

In so doing, the individual believes that justice is done, justice based on bearing grievances and punishing people. What a weird sense of justice!

From the moment the individual and his hired agents, courts, punish a person to the end of his life, he would live in fear, aware that the person he punished could take the law into his own hands and punish him. All it takes is a bullet and any human being becomes food for worms.

You punish people and you fear that they would reduce you to food for worms. Thus, in America people live in perpetual fear of each others revenge.

To live in fear is literally to live in hell. Americans are literally living in hell. They build jails and prisons on practically every city to arrest and house those they consider evil people yet they do not feel secure and live in fear of vengeance from those they punished. These people are literally insane.

Insane civilizations cannot last forever. It is only a matter of time before insane civilizations collapse. We have had such ego-based punitive civilizations in the past: Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, France, Britain and Russia. All of them were based on crime and punishment and necessarily fell.

America is the current representative of crime and punishment based civilization. America probably has had its best days and will soon join the have been ego based powers of the past.

Are people all over the world stuck with the Western/American judicial system?  Is wishing for an alternative to it a wish of the wisp?  Should people adjust themselves to this monstrosity as the way things are (ego realism) and console themselves with alcohol and drugs (most well adjusted Americans are either alcoholics or drug addicts, for they had to adjust to an unjust political system)?  Are there alternatives to Western ego based legal systems?

AN IDEALISTIC ALTERNATIVE TO WESTERN JURISPRUDENCE

An American clinical psychologist, Helen Schucman (A Course in miracles), appreciating the punitive Western legal system under which she lives, thinks that the alternative to it is a civilization guided by the Holy Spirit.  She rigorously delineated how her evil system operates and imagines an ideal alternative to it and supposes that a force that she called the Holy Spirit could lead to that alternative system.  She called the present Western jurisprudence ego-based system and came up with an alternative to it that she called the Holy Spirit guided system of justice. 

In the Holy Spirit guided world, everything is done in the opposite of how they are done in the ego based world. In the ego based system each of us sees himself as separated from other people and as having different interests from other people and lives to defend and protect his supposed different interests. In the process, each of us attacks other people and wants to punish them. For the evil other people do to him, the individual believes that in punishing other people he derives security (only to live in fear).

In the Holy Spirit directed system we see ourselves as unified; we see ourselves as the children of God.

God is love, so his children are love. In so far that they do injure other people, the children of God’s one family, forgive each other. 

FORGIVENESS

The world guided by the Holy Spirit is a world predicated on forgiveness. Every person forgives every person the wrongs they do to him.

Forgiveness means being totally defenseless. You do not defend your individuality and separated ego self. If other people do what harms your ego state you do not feel aggrieved and do not go out of your way to punish them. You forgive them.

In forgiving them, that is, overlooking the evils they did to you, you live in peace and happiness. You live as if this world is a happy dream.

ONTOLOGY

 
The lady psychologist provided a story of the origin of the world.  In her ontology, we separated from God and choose to live as the opposite of God.
 

 
God is unified and we chose to live as separated selves. We invented space, time and matter to enable us seem to live as separated selves.

In her view, separated existence is impossible since it is the opposite of the world that God created and what opposes God’s Will can not happen.  There is no force in the universe that can oppose God.

Separation has not occurred. However, it seems to have occurred in a dream setting. Our world does not exist, in fact; rather, it exists as in a dream. The empirical world is an illusion.

Our world is literally a psychosis where we see what is not there and believe that it is there and hear people that are not there talk. We are all deluded and hallucinating. We are all psychotic.

This psychosis needs to be healed; the dream needs to be awakened from.

AWAKENING FROM THE DREAM OF SEPARATION

The way to awaken from the dream of separation is to forgive the world, to overlook the world. Look at the world and its events as events in a dream and overlook them, see everything in the world as not real.  Ignore the bad things people do to you, for they did so in a dream and have, in fact, not done what you saw them do to you.  Dream events do not change reality. In a dream you see people get killed but when you awaken you realize that they are not, in fact, killed (dreams have no effect on the unified reality of God)

As Dr Schucman sees it, if you forgive the world, overlook it, you would initially feel peaceful and happy and, ultimately, rise above the world. You would literally awaken from this evil dream; and experience yourself as unified spirit, the world of oneness, which is the world of God.

At all times, we are in God, and remain as God created us, unified spirit, but dream that we are separated. We need to awaken from this evil dream of separation. 

Dr Schucman believes that her interpretation of the nature of this world is the message that Jesus taught the world. Indeed, she said that her theology is written by Jesus Christ himself and that she is merely a conduit for him to continue teaching the world what he had come two thousand years ago to teach it.

THE EGO AND THE HOLY SPIRIT

Apparently, when the children of God separated from him, God created another aspect of him, the Holy Spirit. As the Holy Spirit, God entered the world his children made. 

God as the Hotly Spirit came to the separated world and teaches his children to forgive it, to over look it so as to return home to his unified world. 

In our earthly minds (patterns of thinking) are three modes: unified thinking or God, separated thinking or ego, and Holy Spirit directed separated thinking or right thinking.         

In our minds are right and left minds, right and wrong ways of thinking. When we think as egos, wish separation, we are engaged in wrong thinking and defend separation, defend this world. The ego urges us to bear grievances and punish those who wronged us. Through punishment of our enemies (laws that punish people) the ego makes us feel important, after all we punish and sacrifice other people and that ought to make us valuable persons, worth derived from the punishment and death of our brothers. On the other hand, the Holy Spirit asks us to forgive those who wronged us and in forgiveness derive real worth. When we see this world of separation and forgive events done in it we are engaged in right minded thinking and are on our way to returning to God, heaven, the state of oneness.

THE HOLY TRINITY

 Dr Schucman reinterpreted the Catholic Church’s notion of three persons in one God: God the father, God the son and God the Holy Spirit.

God the father is the transcendental God and remains unified; God the son (God’s creation, his children, us…are now dreaming that he is separated from his father and siblings) and God the Holy spirit (the immanent God, God in the world) is trying to help us return to union, to God, to heaven.

 
Dr Schucman hopes that people would practice her theology; she believes that if they do so that they would transform their self concepts from separated ego self concepts to unified self concepts, to Christ like selves that work for social good and love and forgive each other.

When people love and forgive one another, they transform their lives and the world becomes like a happy dream.  People would then live in a semi peaceful and happy world. As it were, they are now at the gate of heaven, for they have approximated the conditions of heaven but are not yet in heaven.

Heaven is spirit and spirit is formless. As long as people live in forms, bodies, they cannot be in heaven. It is when people finally decide to let go of identification with separated self, ego housed in bodies, and see themselves as created by God and are equal and the same and work for their common interests that they return to heaven. (One senses socialism here: work for their common interests, not for self interests. So, socialism is salvation?)

The prodigal son who went on a journey to nowhere, for everywhere is in God, on a journey without distance, for all places are in God, returns home, where he always is, though dreaming that he is apart from it.

Man must understand that his desire for separation is a mistake, a dream and let go of that mistake by not defending it so as to awaken in God.

CRITICISM OF SCHUCMAN’S SPIRITUAL IDEALISM

It all sounds terrific until you pause to think about it and ask if it is doable in the real world.  Our world is predicated on attack and defense. Bacteria, virus, fungus etc are always attacking our bodies and our bodies’ immune systems are always killing them. Without that form of defense we would not survive for a minute in bodies.

Other people are always attacking us. For example, if black people assumed that white persons are loving persons and did not defend themselves from their attacks, they would live to regret it, for whites would enslave them, in a jiffy.

People are dreadful beasts that live off the death of other human beings. If one did not defend ones self one is either enslaved or dead.

If people tried to be forgiving and defenseless, as Dr Schucman encouraged them to be, they would not live a day and die off.  In effect, her theology is nihilistic, a theology of death. If practiced people, as we know them, would die off and no human beings would be on planet earth!

Not to worry, the lady psychologist said. People would not have died off, they would have returned to spiritual living.

There are no such things as birth and death; those happen only in dreams, in illusory states. The children of God are created spirit and always live in spirit, while they dream to be separated from spirit and live in bodies. God and his children are eternal, immortal, changeless and permanent.

The perception that if we let go of defense via forgiveness that we would die is ego perception and it perpetuates our state in ego land. Its logic is the egos logic. We have to ignore that logic, a logic that maintains separation and perpetuates our stay in the world.  Let go of the ego and do not identify with separated self, do not defend your separated self. If you do so, though you seem to die, but, in fact, you resurrected from death (for ego and body is metaphoric death).

 
What shall we make of Dr Schucman’s alternative jurisprudence (forgiveness)?  Does it make sense?

Ego realism tells us that it does not make sense, that it is the rambling of a neurotic, idealistic Jewish clinical psychologist?  Nevertheless, Dr Schucman believes that her views are the only alternative to our ego based jurisprudence (crime, guilt and punishment). 

Helen Schucman’s jurisprudence is totally idealistic. She used her mind, her thinking processes, to construe what seems to her as the ideal alternative to our current imperfect, ego based system and proposed to get society and people to adopt her idealistic system.

Generally, ideals are not adaptive to the world of space, time and matter. In the world of space, time and matter certain immutable laws limit what we can do. We can dream of flying but cannot fly because it takes wings to fly. Idealistic views cannot be operationalized in this world and if we tried to do so, the realities of the environment alter how they take form.

If the mass of humanity tried to forgive evil doers, evil doers would kill them off and eventually kill themselves, too. Consider America’s present war with the Arab world. The Arabs have this dreadful delusion that their religion is what is good for the world. They are motivated to impose that religion on the rest of the world.  They perceive the West as their enemies, a people to be conquered and converted to Islam.

On September 11, 2001, Muslim Arabs attacked America and fired the first warning shot on the war for the control of the world, the clash of civilizations. Arab Muslims actually hope to defeat the West and impose their feudal civilization on the West. They fully intend to form a new Caliphate based in Mecca!

Americans, like all human beings, are egotist and cherish living as separated egos in bodies. They felt attacked by Arabs and defend themselves. In short order, America went to war and quickly defeated Afghanistan and Iraq.

The West and the East are now joined in battle, a war that began in the eight century when Muslim Arabs tried to conquer Europe and impose their religion on it and they were stopped by the Frankish German.  The war is back on. The Muslims would not back off until they are either thoroughly defeated. I see a thousand years war in the future of the West and East. These two egoistic giants are fighting for the control of the minds of humanity, and for the control of the entire world; each wants to impose its worldview on the rest of us.

    
If the West did not defend itself, the Muslims would defeat it and impose their world view on it. Islam is an intolerant religion; it does not like to coexist with other religions; it sees non-Muslims as infidels to be converted to Islam. If the West does not like to become Islamic and operate its society as Arabs do, feudal, it seems that it must be defensive. If the West desires freedom from Islam, it must fight Islam. This is the nature of this world’s reality. 

Westerners may desire to be slaves and or die, in which case they may forgive Arab Muslims and become defenseless. And they would be enslaved or die, make no mistake about it.

Jesus practiced forgiveness and defenselessness and was killed and died. Those who practice forgiveness and defenselessness are killed and die. This is the truth of the empirical world we live on. Do not deceive yourself.

If you want to live in this world you must be defended. Nation states must pay attention to military matters, for if they are weak, strong ones would defeat and take over their lands, as white Americans defeated and took the weak red man’s lands.  In the egos real world, the axiom is that all nations must strive for balance of power and if one is weak the stronger ones would dictate to it.

At the end of the cold war, the USA became the sole superpower, the world’s Hegemon, running around trying to impose its will on other countries and will continue doing so until an equal power emerges and checks its hubris.

However, our world is as Dr Schucman described it, a place of fear and to live in fear is to live in hell.  If in doubt, go see Americans; they live in literal fear. They are the epitome of the ego based culture and live in hell.

One has pity for Americans, for they are like persons in hell, a hell of their own making. The question is whether the alternative that Dr Schucman delineated is possible or just a flight into fantasy?

 
Forgiveness has limits. We can forgive at the psychological level but not at the physical level. At the physical level our bodies (immune system) do destroy germs that try to infect them. If our bodies were not unforgiving and defensive we would not live for a second. As I sit here typing, millions of bacteria, fungus and virus are trying to make my body their evening meal, and my body’s antibodies are killing them.

That is to say that my body is unforgiving.  If my body is totally forgiving it would not defend against germs and I would die. It takes defensiveness for us to live.

In this world we can only practice forgiveness partially, not totally.  For example, if you called the individual a put down name, he could feel psychologically attacked by you and want to attack you back, call you a derogatory name or even physically attack you for insulting him, but he can choose to overlook what you said, that is, forgive you. Forgiveness at the psychological level can be done and the individual still survives.

But if forgiveness is done at the physical level the individual would not survive. If other people physically attacked you and you did not defend yourself (and the best defense is offense) you could die. If Arab Muslim terrorists attacked Americans and Americans did not defend themselves (by counter attacking them) they would be killed.

Make no mistake about it, human beings are capable of great evil and would enslave and eventually kill you if you do not defend yourself. If in doubt, review the career of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

Those who want to live on planet earth cannot be completely forgiving, if they did they would be killed, die.

If you want to live as a separated self, as an ego housed in body, you must be physically defensive (and can choose to be psychologically defenseless).

Jesus was totally forgiving and did not defend himself when he was attacked. As a result he died. If you want to live on earth you cannot practice total forgiveness. If you practiced total forgiveness, like Jesus, you would be killed and die.

 
Nevertheless, Jesus taught forgiveness as the true meaning of love. When we forgive other people we feel at one with them; we unify with them.

Our original state is unified (union of all things in spirit).  To come to this world, we chose to separate from this unified state and now live as separated selves housed in bodies.

When we stop defending the separated self, the ego, we die to the separated ego self concept, we die to the human personality, and return to the awareness of our original unified spirit consciousness.  But as long as we want to live in the separated self consciousness, have a sense of I, we must be defensive and not be totally defenseless and forgiving.

Finally, nothing that I said in this essay invalidated the thesis of Dr Schucman. Pointing out that her philosophy is idealistic and solipsistic does not make it untrue. It is possible that there is a world that is the opposite of our world, a world of sameness, equality, union, changelessness, permanency, eternity and all knowingness. That world is not our world and the categories that obtain in it cannot possibly obtain in the world of separation and differences we live in.  Nevertheless, reason tells us that it is possible for a world that is the opposite of our world to exist, a world where there would be perfect peace and harmony, for peace and harmony exists only where there is sameness and equality; in our world peace is impossible for there is differences and inequality. Our world is filled with noise; noise is not amenable to peace.

All said, the world of unified spirit that Dr Schucman talked about and the major religions, such as Hinduism, also talk about may well exist. My point is that that world cannot exist in our separated world and it would be fool hardy to think that our separated world could ever operate as a theoretical unified world would.

A REALISTIC CHRIST LIKE JURISPRUDENCE/CIVILIZATION

To start off, let me state my political and economic predilections. I accept democracy; I accept mixed economy (mixture of capitalism and socialism).  I believe that it is the function of government (the public) to pay for all citizens’ education and medical health. For me, there are no compromises on these issues. I have covered them in other writings.

I think that there is an alternative to the brutality that passes for legal system found in America and the Western world.

In pre contact Africa, Africans did not have physical facilities called jails where folks were sent to. How did our people manage to have the most law abiding societies without prisons and pompous judges, as found in America?

Africans had a jurisprudence that saw all people as one, as belonging to the community and cared for all people.  Those who did what the community considered anti social were rehabilitated rather than punished for the sake of punishing people. Africans did not punish people so as to make our egos feel powerful.

Clearly, no society can survive if people engaged in anti social behaviors and they were permitted to do so. Every society must seek ways to dissuade people from antisocial behaviors and encourage pro-social behaviors.

The best way to encourage pro-social behaviors is to teach people to do the right thing and nurture them, and those who do wrong things re-teach them the right things, over and over, again, until they learn to do the right things. 

TRANSFORMATION OF JAILS TO SCHOOLS

 In the extant world, it is impossible not to have prisons. But we can transform our prisons to places where we actually teach people pro-social behaviors rather than places where we just punish them.

Our prisons must be different from contemporary Western prisons where folks are sent to be warehoused and, incidentally, trained to become hardened criminals.  We can transform our prisons and make them into schools where under-socialized persons are re-socialized and helped to learn appropriate social behaviors. Prisons ought to become literal schools where school drop outs complete their education.  When these people eventually are released they ought to have sufficient social and work skills to make a living in society so that they do not have to resort to criminal activities to survive.

THE INCREDIBLE BELIEF IN WORTH

Any one with the slightest power of observation, sooner or later, observes that to nature human beings have no worth. Natural occurrences like tsunami, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, tornados, bacteria, virus, fungus, disease, plagues etc destroy people, as they destroy animals and trees. The human body is meat to be eaten by worms.

Pure reason teaches us that we have no intrinsic value and worth, that whatever value that we think that we have is make belief and pretentious and not real.

But no, the ego (the human self) believes that it is very important and defies the verdict of nature and acts as if it has worth.

A bullet into any human beings head and he is food worms, yet he behaves as if he is very special. Human beings are amusing, really; that which is nothing pretends to be something important!

Human beings pursue meaning and purpose. But a clear eyed look at this world shows that there is no apparent meaning and purpose to the world. Our lives seem meaningless and purposeless, as existential writers, such as Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, Jasper etc write.

To posit any kind of meaning for this world is make belief and not real. In fact, much of neurosis and psychosis emanates from people’s desire to see meaning in their lives. The neurotic/psychotic sees a meaningless world and invents private meanings, made up meanings, and pretends that such meanings are real.

Whereas the neurotic/psychotic gives himself private meanings, the religionist gives himself meaning by positing (a) god and worships him,. The religious person hopes that by worshipping an imaginary ego like god that his life is transformed from meaningless to meaningful.

Life on earth is a meaningless play; we ought to have fun with it. We ought to see people as nothing and, nevertheless, do what we can to help them live happy lives. We should not fall into the trap of ego fantasy and take nothingness as something special.        

HEALTHY VERSUS UNHEALTHY BEHAVIORS

There are behaviors that if engaged in give human being personal peace and happiness. When we forgive each other we tend to feel peaceful and happy. On the other hand, when we do not forgive other people we tend to feel tense, conflicted and unhappy. 

To feel happy and peaceful, it follows that people ought to choose forgiveness (most of the time) to bearing grievances and seeking vengeance.

Blanket forgiveness is not practicable. Those who attack people and intend to harm and or kill them can do so. Clearly, society cannot let some persons go about harming and killing people. Society needs to arrest and incarcerate such persons and while in jail teach them pro-social behaviors.

DISCUSSION

Western jurisprudence is ego based; it is primitive and insane. It is based on the assumption that human beings are sinful and are criminals and ought to be punished for their crimes. Whereas this may have worked in the past, it is not going to work in the future. In our future, knowledge would be so available to all persons that any one who so desires it could destroy a whole city. Soon, for example, nuclear physics would be taught to high school students. Consequently, kids would be able to rig crude nuclear weapons.

There is nothing any one can do to prevent the process of spreading knowledge. Initially, a system of knowledge seems very difficult and only a few persons understand it, but eventually it becomes common knowledge. What only our best minds know today would eventually become known to most people. In the past, only the best minds understood Isaac Newton’ mechanics (physics) but today just about every high school kid understand it. By the same token, today few persons understand quantum physics but by the end of this century most high school kids would understand it.

In the history of mankind, generally, a group discovers a weapon system and, for a while, has sole possession of it and it gives them advantage over other groups. Sooner or later, the other groups learn about the new weapon system and are able to defend themselves.

At present, the West and a few other countries have sole knowledge of nuclear technology and use that knowledge to subject the rest of the world to their control. Essentially, the West, particularly America, acts like a school yard bully and uses its possession of nuclear weapons to intimidate other countries into doing as they are told to do.  The West acts as terrorists and uses their nuclear weapons to arouse fear in non- nuclear countries and propose to destroy them if they do not do as told to do. Clearly, the rest of the world would not permit this type of terrorism to last forever. The rest of the world will, in time, have nuclear weapons, for no one likes to be constantly intimidated by other people.

The best efforts, such as America’s self interest serving efforts (because by preventing other countries from having nuclear weapons and having it itself she is able to intimidate them; this is an unacceptable behavior; if there must be nuclear disarmament, all countries, including the West, must destroy their nuclear weapons; it is patently unfair for some to keep such weapons while preventing others from having them; who gave the few the right to have them, might is right?) to halt the spread the knowledge of nuclear technology to other nations, would not prevent the inevitable spreading of knowledge. The genie is out of the bottle. The alternative strategy is to seek a different form of social organization, one that makes people less likely to feel alienated from society and seek vengeance against those they perceive as wronging them.

If society insists on punishing people, some would be mad enough at it to destroy an entire city, state and the world. 

At present, Americans, like primitive egotists, are running around doing harmful things to other people and those people are working very hard to lay their hands on nuclear weapons. These people have the intention of using those weapons on America. By the later part of this century, most countries would have nuclear weapons. Unless America changes its arrogant behavior Vis a Vis other countries and people, its cities would be going up in flames. Another ego based human civilization would end. The chicken would come home to roast for America.

This does not have to happen. We do not need to have the fall of another human civilization for others to rise from its ashes. We can change the parameters of individual and group behaviors and in so doing make sure that our civilizations last long.

For America not to join the dustbin where other ego-based exploitative civilizations are relegated, Americans, indeed, mankind must discover a different legal system, one based on love and some forgiveness. This new jurisprudence would make for a new type of civilization, one not based on crime, guilt and punishment but forgiveness, love and caring for all people.

Humanity must move from ego based selfish behaviors to love based, Christ like behaviors. This is the only way the human species will survive in a future world where many have access to nuclear technology, and if they so wish could destroy all of humanity. History has made self centered egotism obsolete and made love necessary for human survival.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

December 29, 2006

* The end of the year is when people make resolutions for a new beginning! This essay is my New Year’s resolution. This New Year should be the time for non-Westerners to start considering a different type of society than the one that was imposed on them by the West.

Robot  Villager

# 1 &...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 29.12.2006 19:27

demonteufel  Villager

# 2 In the extant world, it is impossible not to have prisons. But we can transform our prisons to places where we actually teach people pro-social behaviors rather than places where we just punish them. If society insists on punishing people, some would be mad enough at it to destroy an entire city, state and the world. Dr, Osuji, good thoughts, indeed! Wishing you most thoughtful inspired new year 2007! Posted by demonteufel| 30.12.2006 06:12