Civilization on Trial

In essence, fighting and struggling to preserve and sustain one’s own efforts towards creativity and freedom is virtually synonymous with fighting and struggling for the preservation of the system as a whole. John Adams, one of the original ‘Founding Fathers’ of the United States, put it all into perspective when he wrote the following in one of his many letters to his wife: 

“The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”

As mentioned before, the collapse and decline of a system does not necessarily emerge out of physical or material conditions. Rather, the conditions for the collapse and decline of a system arise out of political and social problems, and in our day and age, these political and social conditions for the potential collapse of our system arose out of American foreign policy in the 21^st century. In order for a system to thrive, it needs complexity and creativity, and in turn freedom and liberty are the pillars and the principles which uphold a system based on complexity and creativity.

And when the complexity and creativity are gone from a system because of the cowardice of the majority of people to do the right thing, the system will in turn either collapse or fall into a state of decline. Also, the characteristics or symptoms of a loss of complexity and creativity such as bigotry, bias, and racism are innate in all of us, but we overlook such characteristics in ourselves because we are focused more on the biases and flaws of others. Thus, in order to rectify the system and to restore the complexity and creativity which the system needs, we must first rectify ourselves before we attack others for their biases and flaws.

Through the course of my literary and philosophical journey over the course of about the last decade which began immediately after I finished my graduate studies, I could have easily fallen prone to the extremism, populism, and ‘voluntary separatism’ of many other racial and religious groups given the political and social context and circumstances which had fostered such conditions and psychological attitudes as a result of American foreign policy. But fortunately, the literary and philosophical journey enabled me to rectify any of the inherent biases or flaws I may have had which would have made me prone to the plague of extremism, populism, and voluntary separatism which everyone else was falling for in droves. 

Creativity and the desire for freedom could have been eclipsed and overtaken by conspiracy theories and rabbit hole ideas had this literary and philosophical journey gone awry and off-track as a result of the political and social conditions fostered by American foreign policy. And now, the complexity and creativity of the system is not only being eclipsed by political and social conditions emerging out of the failures of American foreign policy, but the loss of complexity and creativity is also compounded and exacerbated by yet another front, namely, the extraterrestrial realm, and it is a realm whose complexity and creativity will always exceed ours here on earth.