Of What Value Is Wisdom For Its Own Sake?

..reposted from 11/17/09..

~At the moment I live in a mobile home park out in the SoCal High Desert. I am on SSI, a US Govt welfare program. Over the course of the past few years many on line have sneered at that, smug in their own bourgeois superiority. Given recent economic developments, I suspect no small number of them would now be happy to have my 'mean little life'. But I shall gloat over that some other time.

'Mean' as my 'little life' may be, as I type these words I sit at my lap top in a pool of light, both run by a steady and generally reliable source of electricity. I have potable water readily available. There is food in our refrigerator and we have both heat and air conditioning for use as the weather requires.

And I suspect that those of you now reading these words have all or most of these things readily available to you, as well.

It has taken me about seven minutes to type to this point.

One hundred and sixteen of my fellow humans have died of starvation as I did so.

Over the past day I and one of you, an educated white person from the middle class much like myself, rigorously debated the concept that I have devoted myself to for the last several years, The Pentavalent and its usage to create a New Matriarchy.

Roughly fifty thousand of our fellow humans died of starvation as we did so. Plus there were the rapes, war deaths, homelessness, and all the rest of the human suffering that we who reside here in the comfort of Modern Corporate Marketing Culture can ignore without much effort on a day to day basis.

The Principal Purpose of my Spiritual Path is to actively build a new social order that will end that suffering, starting on a small scale, but with the goal of transforming, well, everything. The Concept is Very Radical, many of the methods are tough, and some will be brutal. But as one wise old bastard said, “Those who wish to achieve things should do so without mercy.”

My friend's Path, as best as I can tell, is solely to seek Wisdom for its own sake, Wisdom which often cannot be shared, and to not to upset much along the way. I suspect they'll disagree with that assessment, but it certainly seems like that from over here.

And I really cannot take them individually to task for that. They have far more company in that attitude than I have in mine. They are comfortable and I am asking them – and have asked many others – to give up that comfort and work to deconstruct a deeply entrenched social order, one that can get pretty nasty when you mess with its paradigm.

So I will let them go about their business and will seek our members elsewhere. I do know where to look; among the Lost and the Broken. They have no comfort to give up. Along the way, some who are comfortable will join us, as they can see what I have seen and can no longer be

And so it is.... comfortable in that comfort. They are especially welcome.