Of Fear, Hatred and Survival !
by Dr. Robert Crane

   Last week, I was taken aback when I mentioned to someone who has absolutely no background in public policy of any kind that the best solution to bring equality to all the peoples of Iraq would be to privatize the oil so that every citizen of Iraq, Shi'a Sunni, and Kurd would own equal shares of stock.  This person immediately objected that no Shi'a or Kurd would want to share any oil with the Sunnis because naturally every Shi'a and Kurd would want to keep it all for themselves.  I then was equally surprised that I had never even thought of this.

   In a world full of fear and hatred, how does one get people to even think of justice.  I'm sure that no lion ever thought of being fair to tigers, when the only rational approaches would be to fight or to flee or to ignore.  The default mode in the world today is simply to ignore, and if that does not work as a means to survive then to fight.  Isn't that what Neo-Conservatism is all about?  Where does justice fit in?

   Unfortunately, in the modern world for both persons and civilizations, but not for other species, elevating survival to the highest of goals is the surest form of suicide.  As an eleven-year-old in 1940 I wrote the first 150 pages of a projected 1100 page book (to be longer than Gone With the Wind, which I had just read), entitled "From Savagery to Civilization."  From the process of writing this book, I concluded that elevation of survival to an ultimate goal and false god inevitably must end in mutual self-destruction.  This is what happened in my book, much as I wanted the group of shipwrecked settlers to build on the best of what they inherited, so the book ended in a scenario much like The Lord of the Flies.  This was very disappointing, but it taught me a lesson that my experience has confirmed ever since.

   Unfortunately, even religious people usually are motivated by survival in the sense of going to heaven or avoiding hell.  These are primitive goals in life, though adequate for most purposes.  The problem is that, without a higher purpose of seeking to know and be what God created one to be and therefore to reach the highest stage of freedom (and justice to oneself), one must regress to the law of the jungle, with the only difference from lions and tigers being that humans can justify this as acting on behalf of God.

   This combination of fear and arrogance is the primary cause of both poverty and mental illness.  This attitude vertically toward God and horizontally toward one's fellow human beings constitutes the twisted rope or elephant that all religions warn against as the source of both personal and community self-destruction and as the ultimate barrier to enlightenment.