The Battleship And The Top Hat Piece

The world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or state of society or mode of action in history, to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Every thing tends in a wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should see that he can live all history in his own person.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those words in his 1841 essay, History. Emerson is a forefather of our modern skeptical era. He understood what it was like to be living in a capitalistic society where religion deals the cards, and corporations have all the aces. The politicians get the joker award, and the people get another tax increase. The issues facing this country and many countries are the same issues Emerson experience on a smaller scale. There is a mode of history in our person and we can’t seem to shake it. The history of war defines our society and the societies that exist all over the planet. War is in our genes. But we always think the genes of someone else is causing our propensity for war.

Emerson said people live history in their own person. And we live to experience that history in war. We say we don’t like war. We fight against war with peace and other soulful gestures. But the act of butting peace against war is still war. So deep down, in a strand of our DNA, we create it because our destructive tendencies never end. We don’t like to say we like war. But we commend the brave who wage the big killing battles. And then we condone the small battles we wage against our neighbors for the sake of, as Roman’s used to say, “coin.”

We live to buy and sell our dignity to the highest warmonger. Because we are reflections of those warmongers. But the real warmongers don’t visit battlefields or military sites. They sit in bank vaults with royal blood flowing out of their kingly Western Civilization veins. We carry the kings in our history. They are in our DNA. We all have a slice of kingness, but some folks got chucks instead of slices and they act like the kings did then. They hide the gold, and cry, “a bad roll of the dice” made them not share the real wealth of freedom.

We immerse ourselves in this rigged Monopoly game because the big Battleship piece we use reminds us we have to fight and make war to win. And our Top Hat piece reminds us we can hide our love for war under our self-created ego-driven quest to pass Go. It’s all for the sake of freedom and capitalism. But freedom has never been free. So just like the board game, we play in fun but fight to win. And in order to win, we cover our self-responsibility with political favors.

We spend a lot of time praying for peace, so we ask our political chieftains to bring down our foes. We have an interest in those aggressive decisions, but we can deny we do. Our beliefs give us power and wars give us the emotional drama to physically see those beliefs. We physically live our history over and over again.

We live in a self-created duality in order to expand. Our history expands with us. Our beliefs are in the jaws of a violent and destructive history, and we are living that history one violent current event after another. The ancient sages said the only way out was within, and that is the lesson now. We try to get rid of war by stopping it with warlike negotiating. So the war never goes away. The thought where the war concept was first created is still in our belief system. That ancient thought created the action of war and another thought can stop it. Pushing the delete button in our belief system is not an easy task because it is deep in the valley of other beliefs. But once we bring that thought out of history and in the present, we can change it. Our choices will determine how we change that old thought, and how we change what we experience.