Injury

See Harm — Medium http://buff.ly/1cw7HbV

Not long ago I launched an idea called Triadic Philosophy. It is summarized in Triadic Philosophy 100 Aphorisms available at the Kindle Store.. It grew into several more books. Injury is the penultimate text in a successor work in progress called “The Collapse of Leadership”.

This is a good moment to review the various subjects covered in terms of the fundamental thesis of this work which is that we are in the midst of a formidable collapse of leadership. We have seen it in terms of

Thoughtlessness
Selfishness
Judging
Gangs
Exclusion
Binary Games
Rights

and

Harm

Now these very titles can be taken as exemplary of the values that would bring any leader down. Leadership based on these behaviors is not worthy of being seen as exemplary. A leader whose objective is truth and beauty and who wishes to do good does not exclude, sees things as requiring careful thought, is sensitive to universal rights and is not in the business of doing harm or creating a basis for harm to prosper.

But this text is an effort to predict a sea change in which even leadership that is seen as exemplary will be called into serious question.

We have begun to wonder for example whether the structure of most of the legal systems operating in the world is not harmful. And we have concluded that a commercial and economic structure that supports the nation state as the arbiter of good and evil is at best an oxymoron.

And then the obligation to reject war itself has been flagged as a sort of litmus test for all leaders.

We might say:

If your options allow for inflicting injury and harm, then your leadership is mired in the past. You are somewhere in the tradition of Tamerlane. You are at home in the binary narrative of Herodotus. You are not among a minority in history that has cottoned to values that refuse to will harm as a stratagem for living.

It is clear enough, as well, that when we consider inflicting injury, we are dealing at the most elemental element of existence.

Power. Or Brute Force. What Peirce called a Second!

We can inflict injury in two fundamental ways. The first generally trumps the second.

The first and most potent and visceral form of injury is physical, the product of force which is greater than the power to avoid or resist it. It is the triumph of strength. It is intimate, personal and generally private.

It is the substance of abuse.

The intentional inflicting of injury is, of course, the province of gangs and mobs and armies. And those who manage lethal drones. But its nature is best understood by its most intimate expressions. It is the fruit of physical superiority.

This willingness to injure is a universal tendency.

You have to be taught to hate and fear, a song says. But that is not entirely the case. We are instinctively wired to defend ourselves and if we are the strongest our defence will inflict injury.

The second form of injury is that promulgated by words. This is best appreciated by your memory of arguments, conflicts and humiliations that rested not on physical but mental causation.

And of course history itself has been plunged, in part by words, into the most injurious of conflicts.

The sea change advocated in this text is nothing less than the overcoming of the “will to power” that has operated from time immemorial to make absurd the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” There is no greated unresolved double bind than the conflict between brute force and the command to shelve it.

But the fact is that we have progressed. We can look this in the eye. We are free to decide. On these foundations, we can build a global willingness to make the inflicting of physical and mental injury taboo, eliminating it from the menu of responses deemed permissible, whether by states or individuals in acts ranging from honor killings and FGM to outright assault.

Here’s a starting point:

To accept and pay taxes to support militarism and war is becoming unconscionable. It cannot stand. Leadership today that does not see this is leadership well on the way to collapse. We must make the moves needed to address this evil.

We can do so by rejecting the binary logic of war and peace in favor of a triadic resolution of all conflicts. This process is outlined in Changing Your Heart and Mind: Triadic Philosophy in A Nut Shell.

We do not need to become conscientious objectors. We can say what we wish about executions and wars. We simply do not believe in having these events on our dance card. We inform the government so at tax time. We go as far as we wish in pressing this. We message in favor of rejecting the evil of injury. The obscenity of war.

How this gets done is a community issue that will be resolved going forward. That it will get done is a certainty, based on the premises of progress itself. How leadership will involved is an open question. We can expect support from some in some quarters. We can also flag injury when we see it being inflicted by leaders. We can say they are persons in thrall to evils they should know enough to avoid.

We can become in short warriors against injury from whatever source universally.