Saw this good quote today: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. … We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant”, Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945).
The link below, on Shin Bet nabbing Hamas members in the West Bank who are planning further attacks on Israel, illustrates why we must heed the military guy who warned that you can keep swatting down these eruptions of violence with military force but they will only continue to erupt until you go after the ideas that fuel them, meaning the “religious ideas”.
Grok’s comments (reposted from below) summarize my points on this:
“You’re correct that the major Western religions, Christianity, Islam, and including Judaism, preserve ideas that can be weaponized… The old theologies of the world religions perpetuate violence”. That is my buddy Grok commenting on my argument that bad religious ideas continue to be critical contributing factors to eruptions of tribal hatred among people, inciting the subsequent vengeful impulse to exterminate demonized enemies (“Satanic”) and leading to the resulting horrific violence of war.
This article illustrates the problem of never-ending eruptions of religiously-incited violence…
“Shin Bet nabs 60 Hamas members in largest West Bank anti-terror operation in decade: Security agency uncovers firearms, grenades; reveals that members underwent training, conducted surveillance with intention of carrying out major attacks”, Emanuel Fabian, June 29, 2025
And on the “freedom/liberal democracy” file…
Two brief and very helpful interviews: Wendell Krossa
(Note: As with all comment here on any particular religious tradition, this site recognizes that the main religions of Western civilization- Judaism, Christianity, Islam- all share the same core ideas/themes.)
I assume readers will have the maturity to understand that when Liz Truss uses the term “Islamicists” that she means a minority of Muslims on the radical fringe of that tradition. Those people are distinguished from the many Muslims, as moderates, who do not support death for “infidels” (a term for most anyone who disagrees with their extremism). Surveys used to show that some 15% of the world Muslim population supported violent jihad.
These interviews illustrate the “toleration of intolerance” problem in Britain today, notably in the enforced silence over the mass-rape of children by Pakistani men, and the stunning refusal of officials to acknowledge or deal with that horror. British officials actually threatened people who tried to expose that mass-crime (i.e. any who argued on behalf of protecting those children).
Gad Saad has labelled this pathologically destructive policy with regard to uncontrolled immigration and multiculturalism, “suicidal empathy”, a policy approach that allows people into liberal democracies who hate such societies. And as the Muslim man quoted in the Douglas Murray interview states, “We are not here to take part, but to take over”, to turn Britain into an Islamic theocracy.
These interviews focus on the threats to liberal democracies from Islamicists and far-left Woke Progressives today. Note the young British man (apparently Woke progressive) ignorantly stating that he would love to participate in a war against his own British democracy, to overthrow “Western Imperialism”. As Murray notes, that is the product of university education today that cannot distinguish between the overwhelming benefits of Western liberal democracy to the world, as different from the harmful elements of a long-past colonialism.
The young man’s comment that Western liberal democracies today are still “Western Imperialism” illustrates a common conflation of very different things. He reminds me of those who constantly scream “systemic racism everywhere today” and refuse to acknowledge the amazing learning and progress that our liberal democracies have made over past centuries and decades (confusing residual minority elements of some past issue, versus current dominant reality). Our societies are no longer racist as surveys show 95%-plus affirmation of mixed marriages, mixed neighborhoods, and mixed-pretty much everything. Liberal democracy has done well in protecting and promoting the freedoms and rights of every individual, equally.
“If this isn’t stopped, UK’s fall is irreversible: Liz Truss”, Rubin Report, June, 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bh0a-6Y6p4
“Douglas Murray shames YouTube star for supporting ‘anti-Zionist’ Zohran Mamdani”, Sky News Australia, June, 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMPIrlZ3KQU
Added note in above interviews- The assault on free speech by Woke state bureaucracies and far-left Progressive politicians in banning the differing speech of political opponents under loosely defined categories of “hate speech, disinformation, etc.”. Far-left governments in Europe are even imprisoning people for their online speech.
And another Shellenberger report:
The Shellenberger report below reminds me of how those whom we thought of as fellow liberal democrats, many on left/liberal side of our societies, have turned out to be small-minded tribal cultists, who outed themselves as intolerant totalitarians who over the past decade, are given to coercively bullying any who disagree with them, using the smears of “racist, Nazi, fascist, transphobe, Islamophobe, etc.”. The vilifying of any who disagree has been followed with censorship projects (now exposed more), and cancelling, destroying careers, jobs, etc. These tribal cultists include many in Hollywood, Democrats gone far-left Woke Progressive, and the many who control state bureaucracies and even the intelligence agencies.
There is no appreciation of the actual true nature of liberal democracy with these people.
“Obama’s CIA Director Plots Global Censorship As Germany And Brazil Intensify Their Crackdown On Free Speech: We are in a crisis of misinfo-phobia, not misinformation”, Michael Shellenberger, June 28, 2025
https://www.public.news/p/obamas-cia-director-plots-global
Shellenberger says “the Censorship Industrial Complex is regrouping around the world, plotting a return to power.”
He notes, for example, that “Brazil’s Supreme Court moved to expand its authority over online speech by forcing platforms to pre-emptively censor content it labels as “hate speech” or “anti-democratic,” terms that are so vague that they could be used to punish even mild criticism of government officials.”
He comments on the German situation where authorities are arresting citizens for spreading “hate speech” and “misinformation” online in “an escalating crackdown under laws that blur the line between public safety and political censorship.”
These crackdowns on the free speech of differing others is coming from the very people who spread lies/disinformation over Covid, Russian collusion, the Hunter Biden laptop coverup that interfered with an election, covered up the mass-rape scandal in Britain. These same people are again trying to silence people who expose their corruption.
Shellenberger, “Many elites are convinced they cannot maintain power without a sustained panic over misinformation and the tools of censorship that come with it. They believe that without narrative control, populist movements will surge, trust in institutions will continue to collapse, and their ability to govern will erode entirely. For them, misinformation is not just a challenge, it is an existential threat to the authority they claim to exercise on behalf of democracy. They see control over speech not as a violation of liberal norms, but as a necessary adaptation to a chaotic information environment. In this view, censorship is not a failure. It is a survival strategy.”
They cloak their fear of losing control over societies as defending the truth against the “disinformation” that is the free speech dissent of disagreeing others/opponents.
They fear the diversity of opinion in free and open liberal democracy that will undermine their totalitarian control of narratives and societies.
“One can see this irrational fear of misinformation crystallize among elites after 2016, as part of a broader panic over the rise of populism and the loss of control over public opinion. The fear was not simply of falsehoods, but of a public thinking for itself.”
Moving on: “Sometimes, war is the answer: The idea that diplomacy, if only conducted earnestly enough, can avert all conflict, is nothing more than wishful thinking”, Anthony Koch, June 24, 2025. See full article at this link…
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/sometimes-war-is-the-answer
Koch starts: “There are few modern orthodoxies as smug and self-congratulatory as the belief that war is never the answer. It is repeated like a secular prayer at academic conferences and political summits, on protest placards and by Twitter pundits.
“The idea that diplomacy, if only conducted earnestly enough, can avert all conflict, that violence is a failure of imagination and that all wars are pointless, cynical and avoidable is not wisdom. It’s wishful thinking posing as moral clarity. And it collapses under the weight of history.”
Koch continues, stating that war has often been “the final arbiter of irreconcilable claims.” He goes on to illustrate this critical point with the American Revolution that “occurred because liberty and imperial dominion could not share a continent.
“The American Civil War was not the result of insufficient compromise. It was the inevitable clash between two incompatible moral orders. No committee could reconcile slavery with freedom. The matter had to be settled by force.”
I would add to Koch’s points that the Liberal Democracy that we all should prize more than life cannot exist tolerantly with intolerant totalitarianism of any form (i.e. “far-left Woke Progressivism” as the latest neo-collectivism). Liberal Democracy that exists to protect the rights and freedoms of every person, equally, cannot peacefully coexist with the varied versions of collectivism now being pushed onto Western democracies, collectivisms that subject the rights and freedoms of individuals to dominating and controlling elites who, with the straight faces of true believers, claim to run collectives “for the people” (i.e. “for the greater good, common good”).
Kristian Niemietz in “Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies” has exposed well this lie of power- and control-seeking elites operating systems of expanding state manipulation and control on “behalf of the people.”
“Socialism in the sense which self-identified democratic socialists define it… a democratized economic planned collectively by ‘the people’, has never been achieved anywhere and could not be achieved. Economic planning can only ever be done in a technocratic, elitist fashion, and it requires an extreme concentration of power in the hands of the state. It cannot ‘empower’ ordinary workers. It can only ever empower bureaucratic elites.”
Hence, liberal democracy can never co-exist peacefully with any version of elite-controlled collectivism.
Koch states further that war is not the failure of politics but the reality that peace is often impossible till force has settled some matter. And generations before us have fought and died to provide the freedom and peace that we all value today.
“The western world, luxuriating in the long peace bought by sacrifice, has grown dangerously forgetful of this fact.”
The common-sense necessity of war at times is evident, for example, in Koch’s point that- “The Second World War resulted from the failure to confront aggression when it was in its infancy. Peace in our time gave us war in our streets. Hitler was not appeased, he was emboldened. And when the reckoning finally came, it did not arrive through dialogue. It arrived through tanks, fleets and firebombs. It arrived because it had to.
“Diplomacy, in truth, does not substitute for war. It follows it. Negotiation is not what ends conflict. Victory is.”
Koch warns that the failure to understand that peace is assured through the strength of liberal democracies to guarantee it, is now resulting in the pattern of totalitarians again becoming emboldened to challenge and assault Western liberal democracy.
He says, “Even now, the pattern repeats. The rise of revanchist powers — Russia, Iran, China — was not provoked by the West being too forceful. It was enabled by the West being too timid. Russia did not invade Georgia, Crimea and Ukraine because NATO expanded. It did so because the West shrank.
“Iran did not radicalize because it was cornered, but because we left its ambitions unchecked. And China threatens Taiwan not because it’s afraid of war, but because it no longer believes the West is willing to fight one.”
Koch bluntly acknowledges the reality of a world with too many bad actors, too many of our fellow humans unwilling or unable to restrain their impulse to dominate others, unwilling to “live and let live” as in liberal democracy. And unfortunately for the rest of us, we are then obligated to restrain the impulse of some to dominate others so the rest of us can live in the peace that protects our freedoms and rights, equally.
“War, in such cases, is not madness. It is realism. It is not cruelty. It is consequence. And those who think it’s obsolete are not pacifists — they are amateurs… The iron law of history is simple: peace must be secured, not assumed. And where irreconcilable visions of power and order collide, war is not a detour, it is the road itself.
“War is not always the answer. But sometimes, it is the only answer. And those who are too delicate to face that fact will be ruled by those who are not.”
National Post
Bombing producing “Bright”? Sometimes yes. Black outlines the good that will emerge from this necessary use of force against irrational terrorism that cannot be negotiated with.
“The world is brighter thanks to Iran bombing: The U.S. president has satisfactorily ended a potentially dangerous and enervating war”, Conrad Black, June 28, 2025
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/the-world-is-brighter-thanks-to-trump-and-netanyahu
Expert word-crafter Black craftily says that the many who hysterically predicted world catastrophe if the US bombed Iran, i.e. those “soiling themselves in lamentations of imminent world war”, are now disappointed at the ceasefire. The many possessed of TDS have been “struck mercifully dumb”.
He says, “Many will require tranquilization, therapy or even defibrillation in contemplation of this, but without incurring a single American casualty, President Trump has satisfactorily ended a potentially dangerous and enervating war; has dealt a shattering blow to the forces of terrorism in the world.”
He continues, noting that US timidity over past decades has emboldened the bullying totalitarians of our world- i.e. Hamas, and other Islamicists, North Korea, the leaders of Russia and China, etc. Hence, there is a broader message to others in what Trump has done.
“There is also a message for Russia in these events: the Israelis made short work of the military equipment Russia supplied to Iran and they appear to have destroyed the chief source of Russian drones. The crisp efficiency of the American air incursion should be taken on board by the Russian leader as a hint of what he might be facing in Ukraine if he continues to demand concessions that the appalling fiasco of his aggressive war has failed to produce on the ground.
“It is a much brighter political horizon than it was a week ago and we have Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the two bête noire of the fatuous western political press, to thank for it.”
National Post
More on violence incited by religious ideas… Wendell Krossa
While long-term we are obligated, as human, to restore the violent among us back into the human family, over the short-term present we recognize the irrationality of the belief systems that are held by some people that do not allow reasonable solutions like formally negotiated peace settlements to end violence/war. We understand that there are situations in life where only force will suffice to defeat aggressors and protect the innocent, especially from the hatred and violence of people incited by religiously-driven madness to exterminate all who differ from them. That is the unfortunate reality of what we are facing in varied areas of the planet today.
On the nature and outcomes of religiously-incited violence Bob Brinsmead has said, or quoted, “Men never do greater evil than when they do it in the name of God”.
As Douglas Murray notes in the linked podcast below, varied Western elites/leaders, with a kind of “banality of evil” stance, silently or not-so-silently affirm the anti-Semitism currently sweeping the world due to their own views of western civilization as a form of corrupt imperialism.
This is the “proxy” point that Murray appears to be making- i.e. that the anti-Israel crusades of today illustrate something larger going on in the background than just Islamic hatred of Israel. There are many others who, similar to Islamicists, view western civilization as a corrupt entity/force in the world. This view of the West is central to Marxism (old and neo), and also central to Woke Progressivism with its “Woke Racism” that views Western civilization as “systemically racist”. Hence, these otherwise disparate crusades find common agreement with the Islamic element today that is also protesting western liberal democracy.
Dave Rubin has also noted that these otherwise natural enemies (Marxists, Islamicists) are willing to join forces in common cause against what they view as a greater common enemy- western liberal democracy.
Here below, Murray probes what lies behind the contemporary anti-Semitism crusade- i.e. the hatred for Israel and the west in general. I would take this probing of contributing factors behind today’s hatred and violence even deeper to the great contradiction between Historical Jesus and Paul’s Christ, the two most prominent influences on Western civilization, along with Plato and Aristotle. For info on the prominent influence of these people on our current societies see Arthur Herman’s “The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization”, and James Tabor’s “Paul and Jesus”.
The Jesus message (“Q Wisdom Sayings”) focused on the ideals of universal inclusion, toleration and love of enemies, non-domination, and restorative justice, all features that would eventually affirm modern liberal democracy values. Note, for example, people like William Wilberforce (Evangelical Anglican and political independent) leading the anti-slavery movement. It appears that he was able to focus on the better elements of the Jesus tradition in his Evangelical religion, along with elements of common humanism reasoning about the value of slaves as equal fellow humans. His stance on slavery was contrary to the teaching of the Evangelical Bible that advocates, under Paul’s direction, for “slaves to submit to their masters”.
Wilberforce was much like Thomas Jefferson and Leo Tolstoy who were able to focus on the “diamonds of Jesus” as distinguished from “the dung of Paul”.
In the teaching of the Historical “Wisdom Sage” Jesus you have a major solution to violence with his precept- “No more eye for eye retaliatory violence but instead, love your enemy because God does”. Meaning, stop the eye for eye retaliatory cycles of vengeance and violence because the new God of Jesus was a non-retaliatory deity. That message was buried by Paul’s reaffirmation of the very opposite theology of a retaliatory God- i.e. “Vengeance is mine. I will repay”. Retaliation was re-affirmed in Paul’s Christ myth that became the inciting/affirming ideal, the grand archetype of Western consciousness and narratives.
As Harold Ellens said, that vengeful, retaliatory God image generates “dynamis” in human personality (“Dynamis is a form of energy that reacts to strong emotions”). If your God solves problems with violence, then so may you. This problem of inciting/validating archetypes is critical to the modern problem of violence.
I never tire of quoting the comments of this psychologist:
“Beliefs… exert much more influence over our lives… in the psychological sphere, (they) generate ‘dynamis’, or mobilize energy… (they) may result, for instance, in fanaticism and violence…
“There is in Western culture a psychological archetype, a metaphor that has to do with the image of a violent and wrathful God… Crystallized in Anselm’s juridical atonement theory, this image represents God sufficiently disturbed by the sinfulness of humanity that God had only two options: destroy us or substitute a sacrifice to pay for our sins. He did the latter. He killed Christ…
“an angry God, who cannot forgive unless appeased by a bloody sacrifice, has been ‘right at the center of the Master Story of the Western world for the last 2,000 years. And the unavoidable consequence for the human mind is a strong tendency to use violence’.
“With that kind of metaphor at our center, and associated with the essential behavior of God, how could we possibly hold, in the deep structure of our unconscious motivations, any other notion of ultimate solutions to ultimate questions or crises than violence- human solutions that are equivalent to God’s kind of violence’…
“If your God uses force, then so may you, to get your way against your ‘enemies’”.
In Paul and his Christ myth you get the reaffirmation of retaliation in the ultimate human ideal and authority- deity. Hence, the ongoing conflict in our societies between harsh retaliatory vengeance approaches to offenders and more restorative-type approaches.
Anyway, below is more discussion of this problem of violence and the contributing factors and what kind the balance can we negotiate between the extremes of harsh tribal vengeance that only fuels endless ongoing “eye for eye” cycles of violence and war versus the extremist pacifism that makes deals with irrational enemies who then abuse such appeasement efforts to re-arm and plan further extermination assaults. Include here the “pacifism” that, even after using some force to restrain violence and protect innocent life, then does not go after the core religious ideas that fuel never-ending eruptions of violence.
How do we negotiate our way through these things, as Simon Wiesenthal, for example, set forth in “Justice, not Vengeance”.
Here is the Murray interview noted above…
“Douglas Murray, How Democracies Battle Modern Terror”, Israel: State of a Nation with Eylon Levy, July 1, 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VM3DRujxc44
Moving along…
(The following comment is not formal essay, just blog-style running comment. That lowering of expectations is much like the Chinese of old who diminished expectations when they invited you to their home for a meal. They would start with an apology for the decrepit state of their humble abode and the poorly prepared meal they were about to serve you. Then, if things turned out better than what they had lowered your expectations to, well, surprise, surprise. And that is the imbibed/adopted Asian in me.)
What is this site about? Wendell Krossa
Among many issues/topics covered here- i.e. politics, economics, psychology, history, personal growth, decline/progress issues, liberal democracy versus collectivism, etc.- this site has long been absorbed with the contradiction between Historical Jesus (i.e. anti-sacrifice, non-religious, no conditions) and Paul’s Christ myth (pro-sacrifice, highly conditional religion) that buried the Jesus theology and message.
This site has expended decades of wrestling with what a wisdom sage- i.e. Historical Jesus- said about the nature of deity that no one before him, over the entire previous span of human history/prehistory, had ever stated so profoundly and clearly. He illustrated his theological insight in terms of a set of human responses to the failures of other imperfect people/offenders. Do these things because this is what God does, this is what God is like. If you do these things, you will be just like God.
Note in this statement of his overall message, the universal inclusion of everyone and equally so. All get the same divine generosity. Sun and rain, the two basic elements for survival in agrarian society, are given to both good and bad people. No discrimination, no tribal exclusion of enemies. No retaliatory punishment. Just unconditional treatment of everyone, equally.
The behavioral ideals and related theology in the teaching of Historical Jesus:
“Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you. If you love only those who love you, what credit is that to you? Everyone finds it easy to love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Everyone can do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Most will lend to others, expecting to be repaid in full.
“But do something more heroic, more humane. (Live on a higher plane of human experience). Do not retaliate against your offenders/enemies with ‘eye for eye’ justice. Instead, love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then you will be just like God because God does not retaliate against God’s enemies. God does not mete out eye for eye justice. Instead, God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Be unconditionally loving, just as your God is unconditionally loving”. (My paraphrase of Luke 6:32-36 or Matthew 5:38-48.)
Note particularly that the new theological insight of Jesus (his “stunning new theology of a non-retaliatory God”) can be summarized in his ending statement, “Love your enemy unconditionally because God does… Be unconditionally merciful just as God is unconditionally merciful.” That statement has upset, even enraged, uncountable numbers of people ever since it was uttered. Many take it as a denial of historical “justice” as some form of payback retribution or punishment.
But it has also inspired many others to reach for new heights of human maturity and heroism in response to the horrific failures of fellow humans. (Note again: It’s not an argument for dangerous pacifism. See material below.)
The new theology of Historical Jesus is a statement about the true nature of the Core of all reality, that which gives existence to all else, and therefore the true meaning of TOE (Theory of Everything).
Others across previous history (pre-CE era), in varied mythologies and religions, had projected more human features, like mercy and kindness, onto their deities- i.e. the Pharoah gods, the Hebrew deity, etc. But none had reached for the ultimate height of humaneness or love as “no conditions love”.
The Jesus insight on the true nature of deity demolished the very basis on which all previous religious traditions had been founded- i.e. myths of angry gods threatening punishment and death through natural world calamities (i.e. disasters, disease, predation), threat of apocalyptic destruction, and threats of after-like harm in hell. After terrorizing people with such threats, historical religious deities demanded sacrifices/atonement for human sin, unquestioning loyalty to religious belief systems, the requirement to fulfil religious rituals, and the demand to follow religious lifestyles as identity markers of true believer status in some religion, along with more conditions.
Conditional gods, and their supporting traditions of religious conditions, had formed the essential nature and function of all religion across previous history. The Jesus insight on God as unconditional reality was a devastating blow to all such religious conditions.
The Jesus discovery, if taken seriously during his time, would have ignited a revolution in human minds that would have ended conditional religious traditions as we have known them. But his breakthrough insight was given no opportunity to work its potential revolution on human minds and lives. A brief two decades after his death, Paul usurped the man and his nonreligious, unconditional message, confiscating Jesus to absorb him into his highly conditional and religious Christ myth that then deformed and contradicted the central ideas/themes of Jesus. Most egregious, Paul’s Christ distorted entirely why Jesus was killed.
Jesus, in the closest that we get to what he actually taught- i.e. the “Q Wisdom Sayings” material- said nothing about coming to offer himself as a cosmic sacrifice for human sin. To the contrary, he protested the sacrifice industry and the image of a threatening deity that demanded atoning sacrifices. And he was put to death for that protest. It is one of history’s greatest frauds that Paul took that anti-sacrifice person and turned him into the ultimate cosmic sacrifice for sin, and thereby buried his message with an entirely opposite theology.
This site joins others in exposing the fraud of Paul’s Christ and recovering the “diamonds that have been buried in dung” (Thomas Jefferson and Leo Tolstoy’s conclusion).
Understanding “Love your enemy”:
There is no higher ideal or authority for human existence and life than the nature of ultimate reality or deity. Theology (i.e. God) is central to what gives meaning to all existence and life. Theology, more prominently than other embodiments of human ideals, shapes human understanding, emotion, motivation, ethics/behavior, relationships, and justice. Everything.
That makes the image of deity that we hold critical to our wellbeing and development. As my friend Bob Brinsmead says, “We become just like the God we believe in”.
Continuing with “theology giving meaning to all else”…
Most everything in human narratives was subject to be redefined by the Jesus statement- “Love your enemy because God does.” That points to the highest reach of love, the ultimate in human maturity and heroism. That central precept and insight of Jesus was framed in terms of a “behavior based on a similar theological belief”.
Better than anything else in the history of human insight, his breakthrough on non-retaliatory, unconditional deity and the associated non-retaliatory, merciful behavior presented the potent answer to ending the destructive outcomes of cycles of eye for eye retaliatory vengeance that have devastated relationships, larger communities, and entire societies with the madness of violence and horrors of war. The Jesus teaching offers the would-be heroes among us the simple solution to cycles of violence and war- i.e. to courageously initiate breaks in such cycles by forgiving, by refusing the urge to vengefully retaliate in kind, and then to take life in some better direction.
But what does that actually mean- “Love your enemy”? It can’t mean the pacifism of some to “turn the other cheek” in the face of violence. While that may be a helpful response in some situations to de-escalate violence, in most situations we hold the more basic responsibility of love to protect the innocent from harmful assault. There are too many monstrously dangerous offenders in the world threatening innocent others to take the position that we should just stand down in the face of their bullying and violence.
Whether at the individual level of psychopaths in local communities, or the national level where totalitarian thugs dominate and control entire populations of people, denying them their basic rights and freedoms, the human longing for and struggle for self-determination, peace, and personal happiness has manifested in endless struggles for freedom across history.
And while the Gandhian nonviolent struggle worked against the sense of morality of the British, and also with Martin Luther King’s struggle, there are many other situations were that would fail. That was the conclusion of people like the German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who joined a plot to assassinate Hitler. There can be no “turn the other cheek” pacifism with other situations of bullying violence. Military or police force to defend the innocent is often the only reasonable choice.
Hence, we rightly celebrate the heroism of those who use force to gain freedom from such monsters in life. So, “love your enemy” clearly does not mean let the enemy abuse others without consequence. Any common-sense understanding of loving enemies has to include holding offenders responsible for their behavior, restraining violent people, and practically protecting the freedom and rights of all others.
Many people wrestle with the meaning and distinctions among these things. What do the human ideals of love, forgiveness, etc. mean in the face of offense, assault, and all forms of evil? How do we respond and act in ways that maintain our own humanity in the face of offenses from others, not giving way to hatred and excessively harsh vengeance, but still holding offenders responsible and restraining their violence in order to protect others. People wrestle with these human ideals and the responses/behaviors that should come from these ideals. I take these issues seriously because most of us want to achieve something of the status of mature humanity and succeed to the best of our ability to maintain some level of authentic humaneness.
What then is the proper distinction between vengeance and justice? Simon Wiesenthal wrestled with this (“Justice, Not Vengeance”) and he asked others for their input on his actions to pursue and hold Nazis accountable for their crimes, and his treatment of Nazis in particular situations (i.e. “The Sunflower”). He had lost many of his extended family to the monstrous brutality of the Nazis in the Holocaust, suffering the worst of horrors that any human can endure.
Note in the writing of Wiesenthal the incident of the Jewish father who revealed to him a large knife hidden under his coat. The father told Wiesenthal that he was going to kill the Nazi soldier who had shot his young son in front of him at the entrance to one of the extermination camps. Wiesenthal talked the man out of his plan, arguing, “Let’s not become like them.” Justice, yes. But not vengeful violence.
Historical Jesus offered us a singularly orienting idea or belief, an image of deity that orients our consciousness to the best of being human. That insight of Historical Jesus into the true nature of God as transcendently unconditional that best points to the height of truly humane love. His stunning new theology offered the highest and best of ideals to guide us through life, doing the least harm and the most good. His insight redefines the very best of ethics, justice, etc. It was not prescriptive of how to run a business or economics but offered a general archetype pointing to the height of human heroism and maturity.
Pacifist-like responses to violence, contrasted with the swing to excessive punishment, Wendell Krossa
Intro notes: This site appreciates the insights of people like Chinese sage Laotzi who stated that if you are attacked then yes go to war in order to defeat your attacker and defend your people. But after defeating your attacker then do not engage triumphalism and humiliate your enemy but seek restoration to friendship and family, just as the Allies did with Japan and Germany after WW2.
The pacifism noted here has emerged mainly from the woke left today.
As with varied issues across our history, we have tended to swing between extremes. We try one thing on one side and find that it doesn’t work so well. Then we swing to the opposite thing in an extreme reaction and find that also doesn’t work so well.
I see this in the problem of extremist versions of pacifism-like responses in the face of violence today. Is this swing to pacifism a reaction to the opposite extreme of excessive harshness in treating criminal offenders and excessive engagement in wars? We have just emerged from decades of tough on crime laws that led to historically record rates of incarceration, and decades of destructive and costly wars (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan).
How do we avoid the swings to extremes to find some sweet spot balance between such extremes?
Another-
We are obligated to maintain our own humanity in all situations.
I would argue that in dealing with all human imperfection it helps to hold an awareness of our own nasty impulses to tribalism, to domination, to justice as destruction of an enemy, impulses that carry people to sometimes recklessly cross human decency lines into harsh, inhumane treatment of offenders that should never be crossed even during the horrors of war.
It helps to acknowledge what Joseph Campbell cautioned us to remember- i.e. that while we are obligated to defeat our opponents in war, they are still family and after fulfilling our responsibility to restrain their violence by defeating them with force, we are then obligated, over the long-term, to seek their restoration into the human family, to bring them back into the family of nations. Just as the Allies honorably did with the Germans and Japanese after WW2.
Some level of self-awareness of our own tendencies to excessive brutality may help us check any excesses in crossing human decency lines during personal encounters with threatening offenders or “the madness of war” situations. Many are accusing Israel of such excesses in civilian deaths during their campaign to eliminate the threat from Hamas in Gaza. Others applaud Israel for its caution in taking steps such as warning civilians to vacate areas to be bombed, involving lawyers in approval of attack plans, and other steps that few other countries have been required to take.
And…
The real battle takes place inside each of us.
Critical to success in solving disagreements and conflicts among people, we remember that the real battle of life takes place primarily inside each of us. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s said- The real battle of good against evil runs down the center of every human heart. We should first conquer (keep in check) our own evil triad impulses to tribalism, domination, and destruction of others. Then we are better prepared to properly maintain our own humanity as we go out into life to resolve conflicts and end violence from others.
As Jordan Peterson also noted, we must win that inner battle first before we can properly and humanely go out to engage public battles with others.
Swinging to the extreme of pacifism. Its not love, Wendell Krossa
The comment below recognizes that we never let go of common sense while resolving eruptions of violence, while fulfilling the obligation to face down the bullies of our world in order to protect innocent others and ensure their freedom and rights are not infringed upon.
While love defines us as human, it does not mean abandoning common sense in the face of evil. Essential to any version of love is the primary obligation to protect the innocent from violence.
Insert qualifier: The examples of Islamic extremism are due to the public prominence today of violence from this tradition. But the larger point is that the very ideas/beliefs that incite and validate such violence are common to all the major Western religious traditions. Also, the fact is that Islam inherited its beliefs from Judaism and Christianity (i.e. “Ebionism” as an early movement within Jewish Christianity- See, for example, Joseph Azzi’s “The Priest and The Prophet”).
Judaism and Christianity had absorbed those beliefs from traditions before them in the pre-CE era. The line of inheritance goes back to the earliest human mythmaking. Just to clarify that the comment below is not isolating Islam alone as responsible for the problem of “bad religious ideas as contributing factors to violence”.
The mention of “Islamicist” violence below is not to pick on one religion but to simply recognize that this particular religion is most notably suffering outbreaks of extremist violence today while other major religious traditions have largely moderated the extremism that had dominated their past histories.
Moving along…
In dealing with religiously-incited violence (notable in Islamism today), we are dealing with minds have been subjected to religious belief systems that are dominated by Zoroastrian Cosmic Dualism mythology (origin around 1500 BCE). These people sincerely believe they have the Ultimate Reality and authority backing them, that they are serving the one true and good God, that they are being loyal to and manifesting the will of that deity, honoring his righteous anger at sinners/infidels, and fulfilling “justice” in exterminating the enemies of his “true religion”.
Religiously-incited warriors of God are infused with a sense of righteousness, justice, truth, and divine obligation. They are under the threat of hell for themselves if they don’t fulfill the will of their God, the obligation to unquestioningly serve that threatening God. Such a mindset is beyond reasoning with.
Note this example from the Netflix documentary “In Her Hands”. At one point they interview a Taliban leader who states that he “will not rest till Islamic rule is established across the whole planet.”
He says (calmly to his fellow Taliban), “We will not surrender to anyone. I have been put here to fight people. I have been instructed to kill people, to destroy people, to behead people. We are fighting for Sharia law.” He continued, affirming they would cut off people’s hands for theft, they would crush gay people under walls, they would stone adulterers to death. That would all be “in the righteous way”. The documentary then shows a woman taken into a large stadium and shot in the head before thousands of people as she knelt on the ground.
The documentary is the story of the only female mayor in Afghanistan and the threats on her life from the Taliban. They state that her very status as a female mayor is an “evil vice and God tells them to kill her”. The documentary reveals the horror of Islamic extremism.
A further intro note:
The articles posted above, “Sometimes, war is the answer” and “The world is brighter thanks to Iran bombing”, both on the necessary use of force to confront and end violent assaults from others, point to what I view as a fairly widespread misunderstanding and perversion of our primary human value- love. They illustrate the failure of pacifist-like approaches to irrational violence. That pacifism is a distortion of love.
Love is the ideal that most centrally defines us as human and not animal. But we have seen over the past decade, notably coming from far-left Woke Progressivism, a revival of the deformity of love that is best understood as “dogmatic pacifism” in the face of evil. Irresponsible applications of “Turn the other cheek.” That is not love by any common-sense definition of that ideal.
What is happening with this distortion and misapplication of love?
For starters, there appears to be a refusal on the part of many to see and embrace the real nature of evil and that it cannot be reasoned with or placated by pacifist-like responses/approaches. Kumbayah has its limits in the real world.
Most critical in contemporary pacifism is the refusal to understand the especially irrational nature of religiously-inspired violence of the type we see with Hamas, ISIS, and Iranian theocratic leadership, among other places.
Is the refusal of many to confront these particular manifestations of evil also partly due to the fear of being labelled with the “Islamophobia” or “racism” smears so common today? Smears that work to shut down any debate or discussion of the core religious issues involved?
With Islamicists in particular (a minority of Muslims, we hope), you are dealing with people who believe that God is on their side and they are fulfilling the will of their God by heroically destroying and exterminating the enemies of that God. These people are possessed with what they believe to be “righteous, just, and divinely-validated” hatred of enemies who are demonized and dehumanized as “Satanic”. Islamicists have locked themselves within the ultimate deformation of the hero’s quest- i.e. the quest as a manifestation of Cosmic and divine dualism, the ultimate Zoroastrian war of Good against Evil, brought to reality between differing groups of people here and now.
Critical to the religiously-based narrative of such people is the belief that they must initiate the final Armageddon battle with evil enemies and that will spark the descent of their Savior (the Mahdi) or God to finish the destruction/extermination of all enemies and the installation of a promised utopian paradise (the Caliphate in Islam). This same belief in salvation through destruction has also motivated Marxists, the Nazis, and varied religious crusades across the histories of Christianity and Judaism.
You cannot reason with or negotiate long-term peace deals with such people. Force, over the short-term, is your only option to stop them and protect innocent victims. Contemporary pacifist approaches simply do not work with such people.
Others have explained contemporary pacifism in terms of “the psychopathology of left-wing compassion” rightly termed “suicidal empathy” by Gad Saad. This psychopathology “virtue signals for moral status” (Jordan Peterson). People embracing such contemporary pacifist approaches refuse to acknowledge the horrifically destructive outcomes of their approach on many others.
Examples of deformed versions of pacifism today:
(1) Woke Progressives enacting policies of de-carceration of violent people in US cities who then commit further violence on innocent others, (2) people pushing for open borders with uncontrolled immigration and multicultural policies that do not require immigrants, legal or illegal, to embrace liberal democracy values and practices (i.e. for example, immigrants who hate liberal democracy and want to replace it with religious theocracy), and (3) those decrying the use of force against uncompromising threats like the Iranian theocracy leaders (the theocracy thugs as differentiated from the general population of that country).
Moving along to my main point… the above situations, notably with Iranian theocracy, illustrate the problem with pacifist-type approaches to evil.
The commitment to “salvation by extermination/destruction” generates a madness that cannot be reasoned with, Wendell Krossa
(Note that the belief in salvation by destruction is a central theme of religions like Christianity.)
We now understand somewhat more why contemporary Leftism (Woke Progressivism) in Western liberal democracies has produced such disastrous outcomes especially on issues like pacifism toward violent offenders, whether criminal or foreign adversaries. Progressives have embraced and instituted de-carceration/de-carceral approaches, freeing repeat violent offenders in urban centers to commit further violent crimes.
The varied justifications for these irresponsible approaches to violent offenders include leftist “social justice” arguments that such criminals are contemporary victims of a previous history of racism and hence must be freed from that still present “systemic racism and oppression” (the claim that racism still systemically dominates our institutions).
This is a simple-minded collectivist viewpoint (neo-Marxism) that categorizes people, like all collectivisms before, as belonging to either one of only two classes- victims or victimizers. However, with new elements like Woke Racism framing contemporary collectivism, the simple-minded dualism now categorizes people according to skin color. White=bad, oppressor. Brown/black=good, oppressed. And no matter any personal history of violence- “free the oppressed”.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-urban-criminal-justice-disaster
Add here also the pacifism toward open borders and uncontrolled immigration where immigrants are not required to embrace liberal democracy values and practices.
But even more dangerous than US urban pacifism toward violent criminals is to take a pacifist-like approach to the theocratic leaders of countries like Iran. The danger is in the refusal to understand the nature of religiously-incited commitment to violence toward enemies- i.e. that you are dealing with a kind of psychopathic irrationality far beyond what the West faced with the Russians in the Cold War, people who in some manner still valued life. With Islamic extremism, to the contrary, you face people who glory in death, who are death-cult fanatics, who prize martyrdom and salvation through the apocalyptic destruction of our current world. This worldview is horrifically portrayed in the New Testament book of Revelation.
These are minds possessed of the madness of a belief in salvation through destruction.
With this religiously-incited madness, we are observing what psychologist Harold Ellens noted regarding the power of religious beliefs to stir dangerous emotions and motivations, none more dangerous than when validated by the ideals of an angry God demanding the destruction and extermination of his enemies as the required path to a glorious salvation. This core belief still dominates major world religions.
To understand such madness, I would emphasize Bob Brinsmead’s comment that- “We all become just like the God that we believe in.” This is what Ellens is pointing to in these comments of his:
“Beliefs… exert much more influence over our lives than simple ideas… in the psychological sphere, (they) generate ‘dynamis’, or mobilize energy… (they) may result, for instance, in fanaticism and violence…”
“There is in Western culture a psychological archetype, a metaphor that has to do with the image of a violent and wrathful God (Romans, Revelation)… this image represents God sufficiently disturbed by the sinfulness of humanity that God had only two options: destroy us or substitute a sacrifice to pay for our sins. He did the latter. He killed Christ…
“The crucifixion, a hugely violent act of infanticide or child sacrifice, has been disguised by Christian conservative theologians as a ‘remarkable act of grace’. Such a metaphor of an angry God, who cannot forgive unless appeased by a bloody sacrifice, has been ‘right at the center of the Master Story of the Western world for the last 2,000 years. And the unavoidable consequence for the human mind is a strong tendency to use violence’.
“’With that kind of metaphor at our center, and associated with the essential behavior of God, how could we possibly hold, in the deep structure of our unconscious motivations, any other notion of ultimate solutions to ultimate questions or crises than violence- human solutions that are equivalent to God’s kind of violence’…
“Hence, in our culture we have a powerful element that impels us to violence, a Cruel God Image… that also contributes to guilt, shame, and the impoverishment of personality…”.
As Ellens concludes, “If your God uses force, then so may you, to get your way against your ‘enemies’”.
My takeaway conclusion from Ellens’ comments on the inciting and validating potency of beliefs? Be fully aware of the features that define, especially, your image of ultimate reality or deity. Ask yourself- Does my embodiment of ultimate ideals/beliefs, whether religious or secular, embrace monster-God features like tribal exclusion (i.e. true believers favored over excluded unbelievers), domination/subjugation (God as Lord, King, Ruler- humans created to serve the gods and their priesthoods), or justice involving the punitive destruction of demonized enemies?
Well, beware then of becoming just like the God that you believe in. These “evil triad” features will incite the evil triad impulses that are deeply embedded in all of us- i.e. the worst of our animal inheritance of impulses to tribalism, domination, and destruction of differing others. This principle of “behavior motivated by similar belief” applies also to materialist/atheist types and the nature of their ultimate ideals and authorities, despite any convincing of themselves that they hold “non-religious” beliefs.
Insert: I emphasize, particularly, the domination element among the “evil triad” impulses because it pairs with coercion which is a direct attack on the freedom of others. There must never be any tolerance of this bullying feature, anywhere in life. Liberal democracy, as the application of Classic Liberal principles (i.e. systems of common law, constitutions, and representative institutions that protect the rights and freedoms of all individuals, equally), was created to prevent domination of some by others- to prevent the modern era slavery evident in the manipulation and control of commoners/citizens by powerholding elites (the endless re-establishment of the elite/commoner divide).
Again, liberal democracy was created as a system of organizing human societies created that would protect the freedom and rights of everyone, every individual, equally. Individual freedom, that should be protected, is violated all through liberal democracies by little dictators in bureaucracies, by power-holding politicians at all levels of government, and even in the smallest societal unit- i.e. families. There are little dictators all throughout life.
The real dictators of life are those refusing to check their own impulse to dominate and control others. Often with a savior complex, the dictatorial types view themselves as especially enlightened ones, hence, they must intervene and take control to save societies from unenlightened others who disagree with them.
We saw this impulse to dominate others most horrifically unleashed during the Covid hysteria and lockdowns. Hard to believe that we actually lived through that “madness of crowds” hysteria a few years ago and we let the dictators among us take over to shut down the world. Our Prime Minister Mark Carney believes that the Covid-type lockdown was the model to follow in dealing with his climate apocalypse beliefs (stated in his book “Values”).
Moving along…
Also in the mix of contemporary Woke Progressive pacifism, in response to violence, there appears to be an element of “moral suasion”. Those embracing some version of suicidal compassion/empathy, framed according to dogmatic pacifist ideals, appear to imagine- “Let’s just be nice to aggressive opponents and violent offenders and that will persuade them to be nice in return”.
That approach will work with most normal people, most of the time. Initiate common decency toward threatening others in some negative situation and most will calm down and respond in kind. But those cursed with psychopathy, those who choose to be religiously-incited and validated, and those given to spreading totalitarianism are not persuaded by such pacifist approaches.
This moral suasion element appears to have been an element in the thinking of Presidents Obama and Biden, along other Democrats/leftists and Republicans, in their approach toward the Iranian theocrats. Hence, the dangerous deals negotiated with the theocrats that resulted in the releasing of billions of dollars to Iran over past years that enabled the funding of proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah.
The moral suasion element was also part of engaging the Chinese with trade in the previous globalism push and that also did not turn out well at all.
While I affirm the good intentions of any who desire mercy toward enemies and hold the hope of defusing violent situations and the restoring threatening enemies into the peaceful human family, practical reality, and the nature of religiously-incited evil, cautions us against pacifist-type approaches to such people.
Added notes:
There is interesting material available today on the virtue-signaling of leftist compassion, known as the “psychopathology of left-wing compassion”, empathy that manifests in virtue-signaling for moral status with a favored ingroup of similarly-minded people. These are narcissistic public displays of empathy that grant “moral superiority” status in society but have often been detached from common-sense reality and have had damaging outcomes (i.e. versions of what Gad Saad calls “suicidal empathy”). These are forms of empathy display where the proponents do not recognize or dismiss the horrific outcomes of the policies they implement.
We see this in socialist outcomes- i.e. claimed empathy for the poor that then engages revolutionary destruction of liberal democracy societies, replacing them with varied collectivist experiments that have an established record of failure, repeatedly destroying entire societies. See details on the history of the 24 Socialist approaches of the past century in Kristian Niemietz’s “Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies”.
Add the claimed empathy in “saving the world” that has been destroying societies with decarbonization. Or, as Saad has pointed out, the suicidal empathy of letting in waves of immigrants who do not share liberal democracy values and in fact hate such values and seek to overturn and replace them with totalitarian theocracies.
This same suicidal empathy manifests in arguments that you can enter ceasefires with groups like Hamas and in response to your kindness they will then disarm, start to behave like normal adult humans, and let Gazans live normal lives. Kumbayah wins. Based on their established history, that is delusional in the extreme. And as there is no safe way to restrain and incarcerate such people, the only options, unfortunately, are shooting to kill or bombing from a safe distance.
In the religious extremism that drives Hamas/ISIS, you are dealing with people fanatically committed to your extermination, to the destruction of your societies and civilization. They are in the ultimate “locked-in-a-reality-denying-bubble” mentality- i.e. people who believe sincerely that it is the will of their God to engage a righteous war against irredeemable evil enemies, “satanic” enemies that threaten their lives so they must exterminate those enemies in order to save themselves and their world.
And if they act heroically (i.e. engage suicide bombing, cars plowing through crowds, etc.) then God will grant them great reward and glory. We saw the outcome of this religious death-cult narrative with ISIS in Syria (2014). They acted on the religious belief that if they initiated the violence of the final Armageddon war (the history-ending battle), then the Islamic savior- the Mahdi- would descend, the Islamic God would descend and complete the project to install the Caliphate worldwide.
Add to that religious madness, the intensifying of the fever of zealotry with the enticement for young men that God would grant them sex slaves of any captured women, and then further- many virgins in the afterlife. Lust incited by religious beliefs to insane levels of mass-rape. So also Hebrew hero Moses told his soldiers that after murdering all the men in battles they could keep the women captives for their sex slaves (e.g. Numbers 31).
Similar glorification of martyrdom and death is found in the Christian scriptures (e.g. Stephen in Acts 7). And again, the general Christian belief in “salvation through destruction”, a dominant pathology illustrated in Revelation and in Paul’s varied letters in the New Testament (Thessalonians, Romans).
Gad Saad has nailed the true nature of the contemporary pacifism that I have noted above, calling it “suicidal empathy”. If we are nice to our attackers, no matter their state of mind or behavior, then they will be nice in return. As Nikita Khrushchev used to say, along a similar vein, well, if you are that stupid then we will let you hang yourself with your own rope.
This “go ahead and hang yourself” thing is also playing out in the climate madness where climate cult fanatics are pushing decarbonization that is destabilizing electrical grids with intermittent renewables, impoverishing the poorest people further with rising energy costs and general inflation, and more. When you block fossil fuel development, the result is rising energy costs (e.g. Britain, Germany, etc.) and that also inflates the 6000 “fossil fuel derivatives” that are critical to our societies. All while Russia, China, India, and other countries race on with fossil fuel development and use. Xi of China now replaces Khrushchev in affirming to the West- Go ahead and I will provide the rope (e.g. overreliance on renewables technology) for you to hang yourselves.
Further:
This site presses on to probe the long-term solutions to the madness of eruptions of violence between people, the critical need, for example, to understand the narrative themes that incite the animal impulses inside all of us and how such themes incite and validate often irrational violence.
This site explores how we change these contributing factors to violence at the most fundamental level of core beliefs, ideas that have long been embodied as “archetypes” in the human personal and collective subconscious (i.e. ideas in the back of our minds that we are often not even aware of but that influence us in our daily lives, shaping how we think, feel, are motivated, and respond/behave).
We have the alternatives, notably a stunning new theology of non-retaliatory, unconditional deity, presented by a long-ago wisdom sage who revolutionized how humanity understood Ultimate Reality and Authority, the core Ideal in narratives. That new theology would have functioned to counter our worst impulses to tribalism, domination, and retaliatory vengeance/destruction toward opponents/enemies.
It was a theology that would have overturned the core themes of the old narratives and given an entirely new orientation to human consciousness, an orientation that would have potently enabled us to maintain our humanity in the face of all this madness, to find our way to better approaches and outcomes that do the least harm and the most good in life. This is the point of making a clear distinction between the narratives/teaching of Historical Jesus as contrasted with Pual’s Christ- the embodiment of the very same themes that are driving Iranian tribal hatred and war to exterminate enemies.
This site advocates to start with change at the core of human narratives- i.e. with the Ultimate Reality and Ideal, and then all the rest will follow.
The stunning new theology of Jesus (Robinson’s term) would potently counter the worst features of human narratives across history, notably the core themes of Zoroastrian cosmic dualism that incites and validates tribalism enmity, hatred, and war, validating people in their belief that they are to engage some righteous crusade against evil enemies who they must defeat in order to achieve salvation.
We counter such dualism/opposition pathology with the new theology of Jesus who stated that God included all people, both good and bad, in a universal oneness- i.e. “sun and rain are given generously to all alike”. On this basis that all humanity is ultimately family, hence the precept to “Love your enemy”. As in restorative justice approaches. Yes, still hold everyone responsible for their behavior, as in restraining violent people, but once incarcerated, then treat humanely.
Add the Historical Jesus teaching against domination of others to counter that base animal impulse (alpha male/female). His teaching on this point eventually fed into contemporary Liberal democracy that protects the freedoms and rights of all individuals, equally, a humane society of equals not dominated by powerholding elites.
“The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. Whoever would be great among you must be your servant and whoever would be first among you must be your slave”.