Maladjusted

"Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in modern psychology. It is the word “maladjusted.” This word is the ringing cry to modern child psychology. Certainly, we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. In order to have real adjustment within our personalities, we all want the well‐adjusted life in order to avoid neurosis, schizophrenic personalities.

But I say to you, my friends, as I move to my conclusion, there are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good‐will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize. 

I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. 
I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. 

I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. 

I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self‐defeating effects of physical violence…

In other words, I’m about convinced now that there is need for a new organization in our world. The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment‐‐men and women who will be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos. Who in the midst of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, 

“Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Martin Luther King, JR on Creative Maladjustment

Full transcript Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr:

President Miller, Dr. Clark, members of the faculty and members of the student body of this great institution of learning, ladies and gentlemen, I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here and to have the opportunity of being a part of your lecture series. I think I should say in the beginning that I owe you and this University a great apology. I am so sorry that I was unable to fulfil my commitment on the second of December and I can assure you that was because of health circumstances beyond my control, but I am very happy that we could rearrange this date and I want to express my appreciation to the committee and to the University for extending the invitation. It is always a rich and rewarding experience for me when I can take a brief break from the day to day and hour to hour demands of our struggle in the South to discuss the issues involved in this struggle with college and university students. So again, I say I am very delighted to be here.In line with the theme that has been selected for this series, I would like to use as a subject from which to speak a social justice and the emerging new age. Some time ago the former prime minister to England, Mr. Harold MacMillan, was taking a trip through Africa. He stopped at one point to make this significant statement, “The wind of change is blowing in Africa.” Certainly, we can enlarge that statement by saying the wind of change is blowing all over our world today. It is sweeping away an old order and bringing into being a new order.Now we are all familiar with this old order that is passing away. We have lived with it and we have seen it in all of its dimensions. We have seen the old order in its international dimensions in the form of colonialism and imperialism. As you know, the vast majority of the peoples of our world live in Asia and Africa. For many, many years, people of these two continents were dominated politically, exploited economically, segregated and humiliated by some foreign power. But even there we notice change has taken place. I can remember when Mrs. King and I first journeyed to Africa to attend the independence celebration of the new nation of Ghana. We were very happy about the fact there were now eight independent countries in Africa. But since that night in March, 1957, some twenty‐seven new independent nations have come into being in Africa. This reveals to us that the old order of colonialism is passing away, and the new order of freedom and human dignity is coming into being.

But not only have we seen the old order in its international dimensions, we have seen it in our own nation in the form of slavery and racial segregation. We all know the long history of the old order in America. It had its beginning in 1619 when the first slaves landed on the shores of this nation. They were brought here from the soils of Africa. Unlike the Pilgrim fathers who landed at Plymouth a year later, they were brought here against their wills. Throughout slavery, the Negro was treated in a very inhuman fashion. He was a thing to be used, not a person to be respected. He was merely a depersonalized cog in a vast plantation machine. The famous Dred Scott decision of 1857 well illustrated the status of the Negro during slavery. For in this decision, the Supreme Court of the United States said in substance that the Negro is not a citizen of this nation, he is merely property subject to the dictates of his owner. It went on to say that the Negro has no rights that the white man is bound to respect.Living with the conditions of slavery and then later segregation, many Negroes lost faith in themselves. Many came to feel that perhaps they were less than human, perhaps they were inferior. But then something happened to the Negro. Circumstances made it possible and necessary for him to travel more. The coming of the automobile, the upheavals of two world wars, the great depression. So his rural plantation background gradually gave way to urban industrial life. His economic life was gradually rising and even his cultural life was gradually rising through the steady decline of crippling illiteracy.All of these forces conjoined to cause the Negro to take a new look at himself. His religion revealed to him that God loves all of his children and that all men are made in his image. That the basic thing about a man is not his specificity but his fundamental. Not the texture of his hair or the color of his skin but his eternal dignity and worth. So the Negro could now unconsciously cry out with the eloquent poet. “Fleecy locks and black complexions cannot alter nature’s claim. Skins may differ, but affection dwells in blacks and white the same. If I was so tall to reach the poll, or grasp the ocean with a span I must be judge by my soul, the mind is the standard of the man!”With this new sense of dignity and this new sense of self‐respect, a new Negro came into being, with the new determination to struggle, to suffer and sacrifice in order to be free. With this reevaluation of the heart of the Negro of his basic intrinsic nature, we could see something of a gradual decline and a gradual end in the old order.Then some else happened to bring about a gradual end to the old order in the United States, the Supreme Court, as I said, had rendered in 1857 the Dred Scott Decision. In 1896, our nation rendered another decision which was known as the Plessy versus Ferguson Decision. Here the doctrine of separate but equal was established as a law of the land. Then in 1954, the Supreme Court of our nation came out with another decision. It examined the legal body of segregation and pronounced it constitutionally dead. On May 17 of that year, the United States Supreme Court said the old Plessy doctrine must go, that separate facilities are inherently unequal and that to segregate a child on the basis on his race is to deny that child equal protection of the law. As a result of this decision, we’ve seen numerous changes in our nation. To put it figuratively in biblical language, we’ve broken loose from the Egypt of slavery and we have moved through the wilderness of legal segregation and now we stand on the border of the promised land of integration. The old order of segregation is passing away. The new order of freedom, justice, and human dignity is coming into being. There can be no gainsaying of the fact that the system of segregation is on its deathbed today. The only thing uncertain about it is how costly the segregationists will make the funeral. The old order is passing away. The new order is coming into being.

Now whenever anything new comes into history, it brings with it news responsibilities and new challenges. I would like to mention some of the challenges that we face in the world and in our nation as a result of this emerging new age of social justice. I would like to start on the world scale by saying more than ever before that men and women are challenged to develop a world perspective.The world in which we live is geographically one. Now we are challenged to make it one in terms of brotherhood. Now it is true that the geographical oneness of this age has come into being to a large extent through man’s scientific ingenuity. Man through his scientific genius has been able to dwarf distance and place, time and change. Our jet plans have compressed minutes into distances that once took months and weeks and days. I think Bob Hope has adequately described this new jet age in which we live. He said “It is an age in which it is possible to take a non‐stop flight from Los Angeles, California to New York city‐‐a distance of some three thousand miles‐‐and if on taking off in Los Angeles you develop hiccups, you will ‘hic’ in Los Angeles and ‘cup’ in New York City.” You know it is possible because time difference to take a non‐stop flight from Tokyo, Japan on Sunday morning and arrive in Seattle, Washington on the preceding Saturday night and when your friends meet you at the airport and ask when you left Tokyo, you will have to say, I left tomorrow. Now this is a bit humorous but I’m trying to laugh a basic fact into all of us. It is simply this, that through our scientific genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood. Now through our ethical and moral commitment, we must make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will perish together as fools. This is the great challenge of the hour. This is true of individuals. It is true of nations. No individual can live alone. No nation can live alone.Some time ago, it was our good fortune to journey to that great country known as India. I never will forget the experience. I never will forget the marvelous experiences that came to Mrs. King and I as we met and talked with the great leaders of India, met and talked with hundreds and thousands of people all over the cities and villages of that vast country. These experiences will remain dear to me as long as the chords of memories shall linger. But I must also say that there were those depressing moments, for how can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes millions of people going to bed hungry at night? How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes millions of people sleeping on the sidewalks at night, no beds to sleep in, no houses to go in. How can one avoid being depressed when he discovers that out of India’s population, more than 400,000,000 people, some 380,000,000 earn less than ninety dollars a year. Most of these people have never seen a doctor or dentist. As I notice these conditions, something within me cried out, “Can we in America stand idly by and not be concerned?” Then an answer came, “Oh, no, because the destiny of the United States is tied up with the destiny of India and every other nation.” I started thinking about the fact that we spend millions of dollars a day to store surplus food. I said to myself, I know where we can store that food free of charge, the wrinkled stomachs of the millions of God’s children that go to bed hungry at night.

All I’m saying is simply this, that all life is interrelated, that somehow we’re caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality. John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms. “No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of a Continent, a part of the main.” He goes on toward the end to say “Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.” It seems to me that this is the first challenge. This emerging new age.There is another basic challenge. We are challenged to get rid of the notion, once and for all, that there are superior and inferior races. This notion still lingers around in various quarters in spite of the fact that certain intellectual disciplines like the anthropological sciences have said to us that there isn’t any truth in this. Great anthropologists like Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and the late Melville Herskovits and others have said that through their long years of study there is not truth in the idea there are superior and inferior races. There may be superior and inferior individuals academically within all races, but there are no superior and inferior races. We have learned there are four types of blood and these four types of blood are found within all racial groups, and yet, the notion still lingers around there are superior and inferior races.Now there was a time when people used to argue this notion on the basis of religion and the Bible. It is tragic how individuals will often use religion and the Bible or misuse religion and the Bible to crystalize a status quo and justify their prejudices. So it was argued from some pulpits that the Negro was inferior by nature because of Noah’s curse upon the children of Ham. Then the apostle Paul’s dictum became a watchword “Servants be obedient to your masters.”Then one brother probably studied the logic of the great philosopher Aristotle. You know Aristotle did a great deal to bring into being what we now know as formal logic. Formal logic has a big word called the syllogism. The syllogism has a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. And so this brother decided to put his argument of the inferiority of the Negro in the framework of an Aristotelian syllogism. He could say all men are made in the image of God. This was his major premise. Then came the minor premise. God is, as everybody knows, not a Negro; therefore, the Negro is not a man. This was the type of reasoning that prevailed and it still gets around. I read just the other day where someone in Mississippi said that God was a charter member of the White Citizens Council. 

These ideas still linger. But on the whole, the Biblical justifications have passed away. The arguments are now on more subtle sociological cultural grounds. The Negro is not culturally ready for integration, the argument goes, and if you integrate the schools and other facilities, you will pull the white race back a generation. And the Negro is a criminal, you see. These arguments go on ad infinatum. The people who set forth these arguments never go on to say that if there are lagging standards in the Negro community, and there certainly are, they lag because of segregation and discrimination. Criminal responses and other things like this are environmental and not racial. Economic deprivation, social isolation, ignorance, poverty breed crime, whatever the racial group may be, and it is a tortuous logic to use the tragic results of segregation as an argument for the continuation of it. There is a need to go for the causal root, to grapple with the problem at that point and to get rid of the notion once and for all that there are superior and inferior races. There are too many things alive in our nation and in our world to disprove this notion that has existed all too long. Then we’re challenged after working in the realm of ideas, to move out into the arena of social action and to work passionately and unrelentingly to make racial justice a reality. In other words, there is great need to develop an action program in order to remove all of the vestiges of the old order.

Now in order to do this, we must answer and deal with one or two myths that are still disseminated and often block powerful social action in order to grapple with the evils of society. One argument is the myth of time. This myth says in substance that only time can solve problems that we face in the area of human relations. So there are those who say to individuals struggling to make justice a reality. Why don’t you wait and stop pushing so hard. If you will just be patient and wait 100 or 200 years the problem will work itself out. Well this argument still goes around. The only answer that one can give to this myth is that time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. I’m convinced that the people of ill‐will in our nation have often used time much more effectively that the people of good will. It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and violent actions of the bad people who will bomb a church in Birmingham, Alabama but for the appalling silence of the good people who sit idly by and say wait on time. Somewhere along the way we must see that time will never solve the problem alone but that we must help time. Somewhere we must see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels on inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co‐workers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social stagnation. We must always help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.Now the other myth that gets around is the idea that legislation cannot really solve the problem and that it has no great role to play in this period of social change because you’ve got to change the heart and you can’t change the heart through legislation. You can’t legislate morals. The job must be done through education and religion. Well, there’s half‐truth involved here. Certainly, if the problem is to be solved then in the final sense, hearts must be changed. Religion and education must play a great role in changing the heart. But we must go on to say that while it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also. [APPLAUSE] So there is a need for executive orders. There is a need for judicial decrees. There is a need for civil rights legislation on the local scale within states and on the national scale from the federal government.

The late President Kennedy, great late president of our nation, who faced the tragedy of an assassin’s bullet, just a few months ago stood before this nation and said we face a moral issue in the area of human relations. Every American must be treated as a person. He went on to say that equality of opportunity must be a reality for every American if the American dream is to be a reality. Immediately after that, he recommended to the Congress of our nation the strongest package of civil rights legislation, the most comprehensive ever presented by any president of the United States. Now the challenge is before the Congress of our nation to pass this legislation, to pass this legislation because it is a moral issue, to pass this legislation because it is a necessity to make democracy a reality for all people of this nation, but we still see delaying tactics. We still see evasive schemes being used. We still see southern congressman tying up basic legislation in a particular committee, in this instance, the Rules Committee. We still see the possibility of the filibuster ahead in the senate. There is a great need at this hour for all people of good will of this nation to get together and say that this legislation must be passed and that it must be passed soon. I’m convinced that if it is not passed, this ugly sore of racial segregation on the body politic of our nation will suddenly turn malignant and we will be inflicted with an incurable cancer that will totally destroy the soul of American society. So that is a great opportunity ahead. As President Lyndon Johnson said in his first speech to the nation as he addressed Congress a few days ago, “The greatest tribute that we can pay to late President John Fitzgerald Kennedy is to pass, and pass soon, the Civil Rights legislation that he recommended and then go out to implement this legislation after it is enacted.” There is a need for legislation, as I said, in every state in our union. 

For this problem is not just a local sectional problem, it is national problem. De facto segregation in the north must be grappled with, with as seriousness and concern as de jure legislation in the south. We must come to see that quality of opportunity and employment must be a reality in northern communities as well as southern communities. There is need for legislation to make all of this a reality. There is need for legislation to make housing open so that there would be no discrimination in this area. For as long as there is residential segregation, there will be de facto segregation in every area of life. So the challenge is here to develop an action program.

Now I would not want to leave you with the impression that there is not a great role for the Negro himself to play in the area of action if freedom is to be a reality. This is why in the movement, in the south and over the nation, we’ve tried to say in figurative language that freedom is not some lavish dish that the federal government will pass out on the silver platter while the Negro merely furnishes the appetite. If freedom is to be a reality for the Negro, he must be willing to sacrifice and struggle for it and suffer when necessary. This is what we’ve tried to do in this whole struggle and this nonviolent revolution which is taking place in our nation.I would like to say just a few words about this philosophy and method of nonviolence since it constitutes such a prominent place in our whole struggle. I am still convinced that nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice. There is power and real power in this method. First it has a way of disarming the opponent. It exposes his moral defenses. It weakens his morale and at the same time it works on his conscience. He just doesn’t know how to handle it. If he doesn’t beat you, wonderful. If he sets out to beat you, you develop the quiet courage of accepting blows without retaliating. If he doesn’t put you in jail, wonderful. Nobody with any sense loves to go jail. If he puts you in jail, you go in that jail and transform it from a dungeon of shame to a haven of freedom and human dignity. Even if he tries to kill you, you develop the inner conviction that some things are so precious, that there are some things so dear, some things so eternally worthful, that they are worth dying for. If an individual has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live. When one discovers this, there is power in this method. It disarms the opponent, and he just doesn’t know how to deal with it. I’ve seen this so many times in our struggle in the south. I’ve seen the opponents as they sought to block the advance of the nonviolent movement and whenever sporadic outbreaks of violence took place, they were very happy. They were not happy when there was an absolute commitment to nonviolence because they don’t quite know how to handle nonviolence. It has this power. It has this way of disarming the opponent.There is another thing about this method that is very important. It give the individual a method of struggling for moral ends through moral means. One of the great debates of history has been over the whole question of ends and means. There have been those individuals from Greek philosophy right on down to Machiavelli right on up to the present day who argue that the end justifies the means. I think this is one of the great weaknesses of communism. Right here, the argument that it doesn’t matter about the means. Any method is justifiable in as much as it brings about the end of the goal of the classless society. This is where the nonviolent movement would break with communism or any other system that argues that the end justifies the means because in the long run of history the end is pre‐ existing in the means. The means represent the ideal in the making and the end in process. It is a wonderful thing to have a method of struggle that says you can use moral means to gain moral ends.For there is another thing about this philosophy that says you can stand before an unjust system and resist it with all your might and yet maintain an attitude of active good will toward the perpetrators of that unjust system. 

So it goes on to say that the ethic of love can stand at the center of the nonviolent movement. Now when I talk about love at this point, people always have questions to raise. They begin to say, what do you mean, love those who are bombing your home and those who are oppressing you and using any method to keep you in the state of injustice, the state of slavery. How in the world can you love such people? Well let me rush on to say that when I speak of love, I’m not talking about emotional bosh. I think in so many instances, this whole idea is misunderstood. It is absurd to urge oppressed people to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense. I’m not talking about an affectionate emotion at this point. I think the Greek language comes to our rescue at this point, there are three words in the Greek language for love.

There is the word “eros.” Eros is a sort of aesthetic love, a yearning of the soul for the realm of the divine. Plato used to talk about it a great deal in his dialogues. It has come to us to be a sort of romantic love. So we all know about eros. We have experienced it and read it in all of the beauties of literature. In a sense, Edgar Allen Poe was talking about eros when he talked about his beautiful Annabel Lee with a love surrounded by the halo of eternity. In a sense Shakespeare was talking about eros when he said “Love is not love which alters when an alteration finds or bends with the removal to remove. It is an ever fixed mark which looks on tempest and is never shaken. It is a star to every wandering bark.” You know, I can remember that because I have quote it to my wife every now and then. 

That’s eros.The Greek language talks about “philia” which is the sort of intimate affection between personal friends. This is a significant love and on this level, you love people that you like, people that you have dealings with, people that are friends. This is friendship.

Then the Greek language comes out with the word, “agape.” Agape is more than romantic or aesthetic love. Agape is more than friendship. Agape is creative, understanding, redemptive good will for all men. It is an overflowing love that seeks nothing in return. Theologians would say that this is the love of God operating in the human heart. When one rises to love on this level, he loves every man. He rises to the point of loving the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed that the person does. I believe that this is the kind of love that can carry us through this period of transition. This is what we’ve tried to teach through this nonviolent discipline.So in many instances, we have been able to stand before the most violent opponents and say in substance, we will meet your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws because non‐cooperation with evil is just as much moral obligation as is cooperation with good, and so throw us in jail and we will still love you. Threaten our children and bomb our homes and our churches and as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hours and drag us out on some wayside road and beat us and leave us half‐dead, and as difficult as that is, we will still love you. But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory. This is a nonviolent message. It has brought about many amazing changes. It has brought about integration at lunch counters in more than 350 cities in the South since the sit‐in movement of 1960. It has brought an end, almost, to segregation in public transportation all over the south since the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and 6, the nonviolent freedom rides in 1961, and many changes are still taking place.

There is another thing about this attitude. We’ll help those of us who have been the victims of oppression, and those of us who have been the victims of injustices in the old order, to go into the new order with the proper attitude, an attitude of reconciliation. It will help us to go in not with an idea of rising from position of disadvantage, to one of advantage, thus subverting justice. It will not cause us to substitute one tyranny for another. This is why I have said all over this nation that we must never substitute a doctrine of black supremacy for white supremacy. For the doctrine of black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy. God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown men and yellow men but God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race, the creation of a society where all men will live together as brothers.I think with all of these challenges being met and with all of the work, and determination going on, we will be able to go this additional distance and achieve the ideal, the goal of the new age, the age of social justice.May I reiterate the problem will not work itself out. May I reiterate that it is not a sectional problem. No area of our country can boast of clean hands in the realm of brotherhood. It is one thing for a white person of good will in the north to rise up with righteous indignation when a bus is burning in Anniston, Alabama with freedom riders or when a church is burned or bombed in Birmingham, Alabama killing four, unoffending, innocent beautiful girls. When in Jackson, Mississippi a Medgar Evers is shot down or when in Oxford, Mississippi, some fifteen or sixteen thousand troops are necessary for our courageous James Meredith to go to a university of that state. A white person of good will in the north must rise up with as much righteous indignation when a Negro cannot live in his neighborhood, when a Negro cannot get a job in his firm, when a Negro cannot join his professional society, when a Negro cannot join his fraternity or her sorority. In other words, if this problem is to be solved there must be a sort of divine discontent all over this nation.

There are certain technical words within every academic discipline that soon become stereotypes and cliches. Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in modern psychology. It is the word “maladjusted.” This word is the ringing cry to modern child psychology. Certainly, we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. In order to have real adjustment within our personalities, we all want the well‐adjusted life in order to avoid neurosis, schizophrenic personalities.But I say to you, my friends, as I move to my conclusion, there are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good‐will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize. I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self‐defeating effects of physical violence. But in a day when sputniks and explorers are dashing through outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can win a war. It is no longer the choice between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence, and the alternative to disarmament. The alternative to absolute suspension of nuclear tests. The alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation. This is why I welcome the recent test‐ban treaty.

In other words, I’m about convinced now that there is need for a new organization in our world. The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment‐‐men and women who will be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos. Who in the midst of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” 

As maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln who had the vision to see that this nation would not survive half‐slave and half‐free. 

As maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery would scratch across the pages of history words lifted to cosmic proportions, “We know these truths to be self‐evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator certain unalienable rights” that among these are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” 

As maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth who could say to the men and women of his day, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you. Pray for them that despitefully use you.” 

Through such maladjustment, I believe that we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice. My faith is that somehow this problem will be solved.

In spite of the difficulties of this hour, I am convinced that we have the resources to make the American Dream a reality. 

I am convinced of this because I believe Carlyle is right. “No lie can live forever.” 

I am convinced of this because I believe William Cullen Bryant is right. “Truth pressed to earth will rise again.” 

I am convinced of this because I think James Russell Lowell is right. “Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne; Yet that scaffold sways the future, And behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, Keeping watch above His own.” 

Somehow with this faith, we will be able to adjourn the councils of despair and bring new life into the dark chambers of pessimism. 

With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation to a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

This will be a great day. 

This will be the day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God, Almighty, we are free at last!” 

Thank you.

Brexit: What Next?

How Flatterers should be Avoided.

 

Machiavelli's The Prince (1513)

Chapter XXIII: How Flatterers should be Avoided

I do not wish to leave out an important branch of this subject, for it is a danger from which princes are with difficulty preserved, unless they are very careful and discriminating. It is that of flatterers, of whom courts are full, because men are so self-complacent in their own affairs, and in a way so deceived in them, that they are preserved with difficulty from this pest, and if they wish to defend themselves they run the danger of falling into contempt. Because there is no other way of guarding oneself from flatterers except letting men understand that to tell you the truth does not offend you; but when every one may tell you the truth, respect for you abates.

Therefore a wise prince ought to hold a third course by choosing the wise men in his state, and giving to them only the liberty of speaking the truth to him, and then only of those things of which he inquires, and of none others; but he ought to question them upon everything, and listen to their opinions, and afterwards form his own conclusions. With these councillors, separately and collectively, he ought to carry himself in such a way that each of them should know that, the more freely he shall speak, the more he shall be preferred; outside of these, he should listen to no one, pursue the thing resolved on, and be steadfast in his resolutions. He who does otherwise is either overthrown by flatterers, or is so often changed by varying opinions that he falls into contempt.

I wish on this subject to adduce a modern example. Fra Luca, the man of affairs to Maximilian,[*] the present emperor, speaking of his majesty, said: He consulted with no one, yet never got his own way in anything. This arose because of his following a practice the opposite to the above; for the emperor is a secretive man--he does not communicate his designs to any one, nor does he receive opinions on them. But as in carrying them into effect they become revealed and known, they are at once obstructed by those men whom he has around him, and he, being pliant, is diverted from them. Hence it follows that those things he does one day he undoes the next, and no one ever understands what he wishes or intends to do, and no one can rely on his resolutions.

A prince, therefore, ought always to take counsel, but only when he wishes and not when others wish; he ought rather to discourage every one from offering advice unless he asks it; but, however, he ought to be a constant inquirer, and afterwards a patient listener concerning the things of which he inquired; also, on learning that nay one, on any consideration, has not told him the truth, he should let his anger be felt.

And if there are some who think that a prince who conveys an impression of his wisdom is not so through his own ability, but through the good advisers that he has around him, beyond doubt they are deceived, because this is an axiom which never fails: that a prince who is not wise himself will never take good advice, unless by chance he has yielded his affairs entirely to one person who happens to be a very prudent man. In this case indeed he may be well governed, but it would not be for long, because such a governor would in a short time take away his state from him.

But if a prince who is not inexperienced should take counsel from more than one he will never get united counsels, nor will he know how to unite them. Each of the counsellors will think of his own interests, and the prince will not know how to control them or to see through them. And they are not to found otherwise, because men will always prove untrue to you unless they are kept honest by constraint. Therefore it must be inferred that good counsels, whencesoever they come, are born of the wisdom of the prince, and not the wisdom of the prince from good counsels.

[*] Maximilian I, born in 1459, died 1519, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. He married, first, Mary, daughter of Charles the Bold; after her death, Bianca Sforza; and thus became involved in Italian politics.

The Obama Doctrine : "Don't Do Stupid Shit".

"Who exactly is in the stupid-shit caucus? 

Who is pro–stupid shit?"

"The truth is, actually, Putin, in all of our meetings, is scrupulously polite, very frank. Our meetings are very businesslike. He never keeps me waiting two hours like he does a bunch of these other folks...

He’s constantly interested in being seen as our peer and as working with us, because he’s not completely stupid. He understands that Russia’s overall position in the world is significantly diminished."

Obama’s theory here is simple :

Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.

Over the past year, John Kerry has visited the White House regularly to ask Obama to violate Syria’s sovereignty. On several occasions, Kerry has asked Obama to launch missiles at specific regime targets, under cover of night, to “send a message” to the regime. The goal, Kerry has said, is not to overthrow Assad but to encourage him, and Iran and Russia, to negotiate peace….Obama has steadfastly resisted Kerry’s requests, and seems to have grown impatient with his lobbying. In recent National Security Council meetings, Obama’s strategy was occasionally referred to as the “Tom Sawyer approach.” Obama’s view was that if Putin wanted to expend his regime’s resources by painting the fence in Syria, the U.S. should let him. By late winter, though, when it appeared that Russia was making advances in its campaign to solidify Assad’s rule, the White House began discussing ways to deepen support for the rebels, though the president’s ambivalence about more-extensive engagement remained.

Obama would say privately that the first task of an American president in the post-Bush international arena was “Don’t do stupid shit.” Obama’s reticence frustrated [Samantha] Power and others on his national-security team who had a preference for action. Hillary Clinton, when she was Obama’s secretary of state, argued for an early and assertive response to Assad’s violence. In 2014, after she left office, Clinton told me that “the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad … left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.” When The Atlantic published this statement, and also published Clinton’s assessment that “great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Obama became “rip-shit angry,” according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how “Don’t do stupid shit” could be considered a controversial slogan. Ben Rhodes recalls that “the questions we were asking in the White House were ‘Who exactly is in the stupid-shit caucus? Who is pro–stupid shit?’?” The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit. (Clinton quickly apologized to Obama for her comments, and a Clinton spokesman announced that the two would “hug it out” on Martha’s Vineyard when they crossed paths there later.).

‘Friday, August 30, 2013[:] ….While the Pentagon and the White House’s national-security apparatuses were still moving toward war (John Kerry told me he was expecting a strike the day after his speech), the president had come to believe that he was walking into a trap—one laid both by allies and by adversaries, and by conventional expectations of what an American president is supposed to do. In Situation Room meetings that followed the attack on Ghouta, only the White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough, cautioned explicitly about the perils of intervention. John Kerry argued vociferously for action.”

[Samantha] Power sometimes argued with Obama in front of other National Security Council officials, to the point where he could no longer conceal his frustration. “Samantha, enough, I’ve already read your book,” he once snapped. …Biden, who ordinarily shared Obama’s worries about American overreach, argued passionately that “big nations don’t bluff.”

[Cameron of the UK and Saudi Ambassador Jubeir demanded an attack. But Germany’s Merkel was opposed and refused to take part. When the British House of Commons also refused to go along, Obama paused.]

Obama also shared with McDonough a long-standing resentment: He was tired of watching Washington unthinkingly drift toward war in Muslim countries. Four years earlier, the president believed, the Pentagon had “jammed” him on a troop surge for Afghanistan. Now, on Syria, he was beginning to feel jammed again.

The prime minister of France, Manuel Valls, told me that his government was already worried about the consequences of earlier inaction in Syria when word came of the stand-down. “By not intervening early, we have created a monster,” Valls told me. “We were absolutely certain that the U.S. administration would say yes. Working with the Americans, we had already seen the targets. It was a great surprise. If we had bombed as was planned, I think things would be different today.” The crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who was already upset with Obama for “abandoning” Hosni Mubarak, the former president of Egypt, fumed to American visitors that the U.S. was led by an “untrustworthy” president. The king of Jordan, Abdullah II—already dismayed by what he saw as Obama’s illogical desire to distance the U.S. from its traditional Sunni Arab allies and create a new alliance with Iran, Assad’s Shia sponsor—complained privately, “I think I believe in American power more than Obama does.” The Saudis, too, were infuriated. They had never trusted Obama—he had, long before he became president, referred to them as a “so-called ally” of the U.S. “Iran is the new great power of the Middle East, and the U.S. is the old,” Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, told his superiors in Riyadh.

Amid the confusion, a deus ex machina appeared in the form of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. At the G20 summit in St. Petersburg, which was held the week after the Syria reversal, Obama pulled Putin aside, he recalled to me, and told the Russian president “that if he forced Assad to get rid of the chemical weapons, that that would eliminate the need for us taking a military strike.” Within weeks, Kerry, working with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, would engineer the removal of most of Syria’s chemical-weapons arsenal—a program whose existence Assad until then had refused to even acknowledge.

This was the moment the president believes he finally broke with what he calls, derisively, the “Washington playbook.” I have come to believe that, in Obama’s mind, August 30, 2013, was his liberation day, the day he defied not only the foreign-policy establishment and its cruise-missile playbook, but also the demands of America’s frustrating, high-maintenance allies in the Middle East—countries, he complains privately to friends and advisers, that seek to exploit American “muscle” for their own narrow and sectarian ends. By 2013, Obama’s resentments were well developed. He resented military leaders who believed they could fix any problem if the commander in chief would simply give them what they wanted, and he resented the foreign-policy think-tank complex. A widely held sentiment inside the White House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. I’ve heard one administration official refer to Massachusetts Avenue, the home of many of these think tanks, as “Arab-occupied territory.” [Leon Panetta was another hawk.]

He described a relationship with Putin that doesn’t quite conform to common perceptions. I had been under the impression that Obama viewed Putin as nasty, brutish, and short. But, Obama told me, Putin is not particularly nasty. “The truth is, actually, Putin, in all of our meetings, is scrupulously polite, very frank. Our meetings are very businesslike. He never keeps me waiting two hours like he does a bunch of these other folks.” Obama said that Putin believes his relationship with the U.S. is more important than Americans tend to think. “He’s constantly interested in being seen as our peer and as working with us, because he’s not completely stupid. He understands that Russia’s overall position in the world is significantly diminished. 

Obama’s theory here is simple: Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.

Right after Obama’s reversal, Hillary Clinton said privately, “If you say you’re going to strike, you have to strike. There’s no choice.”

Here is Prince Turki’s attempted defense of the Kingdom:

‘A top Saudi Arabian intelligence chief said on Monday that President Barack Obama failed to appreciate all that the kingdom has done to stabilize the Middle East, fight terrorism and support American priorities, hitting back after the president called Middle Eastern governments “free riders” on US initiatives. “You accuse us of fomenting sectarian strife in Syria, Yemen and Iraq,” Turki al-Faisal, a Saudi prince and former ambassador to the United States and Britain, wrote in an open letter published Monday in the English-language Arab News. “You add insult to injury by telling us to share our world with Iran, a country that you describe as a supporter of terrorism.” Al-Faisal’s letter was a response to comments Obama made in a much-discussed interview with The Atlantic magazine in which Obama referred to the Saudis and other allies as “free riders” who push the United States to act but contribute little themselves. Obama has long been cooler toward the Saudis and other Arab allies than his predecessor, but his willingness to forcefully criticize them stunned many in Washington’s foreign policy establishment.’

Diogenes : Pre-Modern, Post-Modernist Deconstructionist and Complete Dick

"Deconstructionists are like the cynics and skeptics of the ancient world in that they, like Diogenes and Pyrrho, refuse to profess or affirm a doctrine of their own, but only negate the ideas of others. " 

- Tarpley

“Plato had defined Man as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture-room with the words, ‘Here is Plato’s man.’ In consequence of which there was added to the definition, ‘having broad nails.’”

 Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers in Ten Books, Book VI, 40, page 43 of the Loeb Classics edition, vol. II

"Derrida is the sort of philosopher who gives bullshit a bad name." - Foucault

"Deconstructionists are like the cynics and skeptics of the ancient world in that they, like Diogenes and Pyrrho, refuse to profess or affirm a doctrine of their own, but only negate the ideas of others. " - Tarpley

No mo' po-mo.

Challenge to Deconstructionism by Webster G. Tarpley 

[Excerpts, from the August 9, 1993, issue of "The New Federalist" ] ^^^^^^^^ 

Currently, education and intellectual life in the United States and many other countries are being destroyed by the triple plague of political correctness, postmodernism, and deconstructionism. After the collapse of Marxism in much of the world, the forces of evil in philosophy and epistemology are now increasingly arrayed under the banner of deconstructionism, which offers a place of regroupment for fascists, communists, irrationalists, and bankrupt ideologues of every sort. If you were wondering what the face of the enemy looked like after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this is it. 

The leading purveyor of deconstructionism, the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, is now unquestionably the most celebrated and influential academic philosopher in the world today. As I will try to show, the continued intellectual hegemony of deconstructionism in schools and universities amounts to a death sentence for human civilization as we have known it. Deconstructionism in the academy and in government is a direct threat to the lives of a very large portion of the 5.3 billion human beings now inhabiting this planet. 

1. The modern campus is now the bastion of euphemism and absurd circumlocution. Karl Marx had demagogically promised that his philosophy would change the world; the deconstructionists only want to change all the names. There is no more right or wrong, good or evil, only appropriate and inappropriate. 

Language is supposedly being purged of ableism, ageism, borealocentrism, ethnocentricity, Eurocentricity, hegemonism, heightism, logocentrism, lookism, phallocentrism, racism, sexism, scentism and smellism. 

Nobody is fat; they only possess an alternative body image. 

The bald must be called "follicularly challenged" or "differently hirsute." 

To be dirty is to be "hygienically challenged," to be tall is to be "vertically endowed." If you're old, you become "chronologically gifted." 

It will be noted that this supposed rebellion afflicts language with all of the horrors of the worst Pentagon bureaucratic prose. Think of "collateral damage" when targets were "serviced" during the Gulf war, killing innocent civilians. "Ethnic cleansing" is a politically correct term for genocide. 

Thus, political correctness offers no hope to the homeless, but it demands they be called "underhoused," "involuntarily undomiciled," or "houseless." The jobless become "non-renewed." 

Political correctness is radical nominalism, in which the verbal signs take the place of ideas and things. As always, this radical nominalism is never very far from paranoid schizophrenia, where the victim believes that by changing the name or sign, he has altered reality itself. As the experience of Baroque Europe (Lyly, Marino, etc.) shows, such ways of talking go together with the collapse of civilization. 

2. Political correctness insists that everything in human affairs can be reduced to race, sex (or "gender"), socioeconomic class, and choice of sexual perversion (sometimes called "sexual orientation"). 

*The New York Times* now recognizes a minimum of five sexes - yes, five - the coprophiles and sadomasochists are insisting on their rights. 

The pessimistic P.C litany is all strictly determinist, denying humanity any freedom: You are, they say, what your race, sex, class, and [sexual orientation] make you. 

You are a slave to that; there is no freedom... Here there can be no imago viva Dei to express the creative faculties that all human beings share. 

3. Countries that permit deconstructionists to assume power over the government (and this has gone quite far in the U.S.A.) are not likely to survive. 

Political correctness attempts to define a "canon" of what is to be studied, seeking to purge the Dead White European Males (DWEMS) in favor of Rigoberta Menchu, Franz Fanon, Jean Genet, or Antonin Artaud 

[BR -- Note, Artaud wrote an interesting essay titled "Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by the Society," which I previously posted in 2 parts. I may do a rerun of the Artaud essay in the future]... 

This [elimination of DWEMS] is a demand to wipe out the progress made by science in western continental Europe, especially Germany, France, Italy, Holland, etc., since the Italian Golden Renaissance of the 1400s. 

If Nicholas Cusanus, Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, Leibniz, Monge, Gauss, Pasteur, Riemann, Cantor, and other Platonics were wiped out, we could no longer maintain the survival of the 5.3 billion human beings of today. Without the scientific achievement of these DWEMS, the relative potential population density of the world would fall back to the levels of the 1300s, to the time of the Bubonic Plague. We might go all the way back to the Roman Empire. Most of the 5.3 billion who manage to hang on today would be doomed. 

-+- Postmodernism -+- 

Many people who observe the lunatic pageant of the modern campus may conclude that the professors and administrators are all crazy. So they are. But there is a definite method in the madness, a philosophical system or doctrine which dictates the specific policy demands of political correctness. 

One generic name for this is postmodernism, which claims that the raving irrationalists Voltaire, Rousseau, and the rest of the enlightenment were the Age of Reason, but that now the Age of Unreason is upon us.

[Deconstructionism] began its triumphal march through American universities in 1966, when Derrida appeared at Johns Hopkins University to tell American academics that the structuralism of Levi-Strauss was dead and that the future belonged to deconstruction. Derrida is now stronger in the U.S.A. and the Anglo-American sphere than in France, and dominant in much of Ibero-America, Francophone Africa and the Middle East, and eastern Europe. If you want tenure, an endowed chair, a foundation grant, government financing, you have to learn to talk the pedantic deconstructionist gibberish. 

Deconstructionists are like the cynics and skeptics of the ancient world in that they, like Diogenes and Pyrrho, refuse to profess or affirm a doctrine of their own, but only negate the ideas of others. 

Deconstruction is very eclectic. Derrida's world of ideas can be compared to a great sewer into which empty the various gutters and waste waters of the past two or three centuries. Each of these channels contributes to the great Cloaca Maxima of deconstruction. Note that we are here reviewing the disastrous state of human knowledge as we go towards the year 2000. 

-+- Hatred of Reason -+- 

Deconstructionism is an attack on Judaeo-Christian western European civilization powered above all by rage. Derrida hates and resents reason and creativity, which he identifies with the "epoch of Christian creationism and infinitism when these appropriate the resources of Greek conceptuality." (*Of Grammatology*, p. 13). Western European culture is guilty of logocentrism, says Derrida. The western cultural paradigm always aspired to be based on reason. 

This must be rejected. 

The western cultural paradigm also gives priority to speech, to the spoken word, with most literature made to be read aloud or even sung, from Plato's dialogues to Dante and Chaucer to Shakespeare and Schiller. This is the hated "phonocentrism" which Derrida also wants to get rid of. Derrida delves into Plato in an attempt to show that the overtones of the Logos are exclusively paternal and male dominated, giving rise to the further charge of phallologocentrism, which soon enough gives rise to the notion of "phallocentrism" assailed by the maenads of feminist literary theory. 

[Derrida concludes that] the real problem with the West is that our culture is entirely permeated by what he calls "metaphysics. "... For Derrida, metaphysics evidently means anything that cannot be boiled down to sense certainty. Derrida sees "metaphysics" as the principal enemy to be destroyed. Under the heading of metaphysics he lumps God, the self or soul or individual, causality, substance, essence, action, and most other concepts of any importance. They must go, for reasons that are never remotely explained. 

For Derrida, the author is dead, by definition. He never existed. The human self and ego have collapsed into an X marking the spot where they once were... 

All that Derrida will talk about is a text, a written text of black on white, with punctuation, type faces, paragraphs, margins, colphons, logos, copyrights and so forth... 

Everything is a written text in the sense that every thought, utterance or "discourse" is a story that we tell each other about something which exists in the most detached way in a written form. Therefore, says Derrida, there is nothing outside of the text. Everything is a text. There are no more works of art. All black writing on white paper is a text -- Shakespeare, the telephone book, Mickey Mouse, the racing form... all are texts, each one equivalent to the other. 

-+- Deconstructionism's Targets -+- 

Deconstructionists can target any of the written documents which are constituve of civilization itself. Take theology... Deconstructionist theology is quite a feat, since the ban on metaphysics means that this will be a theology without God. 

[Deconstructionist theologian Mark C. Taylor overcomes this difficulty as follows:] 

"One of the distinctive features of deconstruction is its willingness to confront the death of God squarely if not always directly...it would not be too much to suggest that deconstruction is the 'hermeneutic' of the death of God." Taylor calls for "the death of God, erasure of the self, and [an] end to history." 

Since deconstruction sees all writing as the same, it can also be unleashed in the field of law, with devastating effect. Listen to Clare Dalton of the Critical Legal Studies group at Harvard Law School: "Law," she writes, "like every other cultural institution, is a place where we tell one another stories about our relationships with ourselves, one another, and authority."... 

Sanford Levinson, professor of constitutional law at the University of Texas at Austin, chimes in: "The death of 'constitutionalism' may be the central event of our time, just as the death of God was that of the past century..." 

The Clinton White House is redolent of deconstructionism and political correctness. The Clinton Cabinet is dysfunctional, but it certainly respects the distributive requirements of race/sex/class/sexual [orientation]... Donna Shalala of HHS helped to promulgate a code on offensive speech at the University of Wisconsin... 

Vice President Gore's favorite book is reportedly Thomas Kuhn's *Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, which has become a manual for New Age paradigm shifters. We appeal to all of those who share our regard for the potential of the human mind to join us in exposing and defeating the deconstructionists.

The War of the League of Cambrai, Paolo Sarpi and John Locke

Webster G. Tarpley, Ph.D.
From ICLC Conference panel titled: “The Axioms of the American System,” Feb. 18, 1996; appeared in New Federalist, March 18, 1996

Every person, whether he knows it or not, is a philosopher. Each of us necessarily develops a theory of how the world works. This theory is expressed as a set of axioms. The axioms are self-evident ideas that are recognized and accepted by everybody in sight. The axioms define human nature, the content of history, the workings of economics, the purpose of government, the goals of life. Today’s American population operates according to axioms which are false, oligarchical – and suicidal. A dictatorship or a monarchy can get by with slaves or subjects, but a republic demands educated and capable citizens. Without citizens, a republic cannot survive. The most dangerous force in American life today is public opinion itself. In today’s crisis, public opinion rejects out of hand all the urgent measures needed to promote national survival. This public opinion is stupefied by television and spectator sports and crassly manipulated by the news media. This depraved public opinion reflects not so much the admitted failure of political leadership as the degradation of the intellectual life of the average citizen. In the face of this kind of public opinion, world civilization as we have known it cannot long survive.

Is there a remedy? It must be to uncover the false axioms, uproot them, and replace them with the truth. History and philosophy are two powerful weapons in this fight against false axioms. The crisis of the citizen needs to be seen in a long historical perspective – we need to look at the five hundred years since the Italian Renaissance opened the modern era.

Before the Renaissance started about 1400, there was a discouraging sameness in most known forms of human society. Some were better, some were worse, but they were generally two-class systems: ruling elite and mass. The mass made up 95% of the population. They were peasants, serfs, and slaves, almost always laboring on the land, almost always illiterate and benighted. Their lives were nasty, brutish, and short. Over these peasants and serfs commanded a feudal aristocracy. Monarchy is bad enough, but most of the pre-Renaissance societies were something worse: they were small ruling classes called oligarchies. The aristocrats had military retainers, priests, scribes, and lackeys, making up at most 5% of the population. Under these conditions, world population potential was measured in the hundreds of millions, and even these were decimated by frequent plagues and famines.

Now and then a good ruler might appear, and did appear, along with excellent philosophers and scientists. But the oligarchy was always present, waiting to drag the society down again. Usury, constant warfare, slavery, racism, Aristotelian philosophy – these are the trademarks of oligarchy. Oligarchs come in many forms: the Roman senate, the barons of the dark ages, the Russian boyars, east European magnates, the French frondeurs, the princes of the Holy Roman Empire. Most of these feudal aristocrats were very ignorant, brutal, and crude. The medieval feudal aristocrats were easily manipulated by the Venetians, who had inherited the methods of Babylon, Rome, and Byzantium. From about 1000 AD until about 1600, the leading center of oligarchy in Europe and nearby Asia was Venice.

The first sustained breakout from this 2-class model came with the movement starting with Dante and Petrarch and culminating in Cusanus, Leonardo, and the Italian Renaissance of the 1400′s. The high point of the early Renaissance was the Council of Florence in 1439, convened under the sponsorship of the Medici rulers of Florence. In addition to briefly re-uniting the Christian world, this council embraced the theology of the filioque. In political terms filioque meant that each and every human being is made in the image of God, similar to God, by virtue of possessing God-like qualities of intellectual creativity in the form of a human soul. Therefore the dignity of the human person had to be respected. The human mind was capable of scientific discovery, and also capable of creating the modern nation-state.

The impulse from the Council of Florence reached around the world with Columbus and the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci, the Medici envoy who gave his name to the new continents of the Americas. The same impulse of human progress reached into France, where King Louis XI used Florentine methods to create the first modern national state. This was a matter first of all of breaking the power of the turbulent feudal aristocracy. This was done with taxation, which also financed the beginnings of the modern administration. Louis XI had a social base in the commercial and manufacturing classes of the cities and towns – the origins of the modern middle class. As King between 1461 and 1483, Louis promoted industry and commerce, protected the rights of labor, enacted public health statutes, built infrastructure, drained swamps, and built up a national army. The population and prosperity of France increased accordingly. France was the first nation to reach the take-off point into the modern age.

French military power also grew. This was soon noticed by the new Tudor regime in England, as well as by the rulers of Spain. It was clear that the future belonged to the larger nation-states that were smart enough to imitate the methods of Louis XI. If the Louis XI model were to prevail everywhere, there was the hope that the oligarchs as a class might be crushed. The momentum of the Renaissance art, science, and statecraft might overwhelm all resistance and become unstoppable.

The Venetians, who had been waging their own war against Florence and the other Italian Renaissance states for a century, studied events in France carefully. Venice was essentially a city-state with an inland empire in northern Italy and a marine empire in the Mediterranean. At first the Venetians thought they could survive as a great power by playing off the new nation-states one against the other. As soon as Louis XI was dead, the Venetians invited his unworthy and inferior heir Charles VIII to conquer Milan. The French conquered Naples, Florence, and Milan, but their presence also drew in the forces of Spain. It was a time of rapidly shifting alliances. Before long, the main powers had all been antagonized by Venetian perfidy and geopolitics. For the Venetians had been filching territory on all sides, grabbing for every fly that flew by them.

What followed was the War of the League of Cambrai, the great world war that marked the opening of the modern era. If Venice had been destroyed in this war, the European oligarchy would have been deprived of its command center and is likely to have perished. Without Venice, we would have been spared the wars of religion, including the Thirty Years’ War; we would have been spared the British Empire and most of its wars, including the American Civil War and the two world wars of this century. The same goes for most of the depressions and economic crises of these years.

At the heart of the League of Cambrai was the joint commitment in 1508 by King Louis XII of France and Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor, to divide the territory of Venice between them. The King of Spain joined in because he wanted to take Venetian possessions in southern Italy. A little later Pope Julius II della Rovere also joined the League. Julius II della Rovere was a professional soldier and an oligarch. He was called the papa terribile; his portrayal by Rex Harrison in the movie The Agony and the Ecstasy is much too kind.

But now the Venetians, the masters of geopolitics and encirclement, were faced in 1509 by a league of virtually all the European states with the exception of Hungary and England. In Venice, the Council of Ten assumed emergency powers. The program of the League of Cambrai was to expropriate all Venetian territory except for the city itself in its lagoon. By this time Venetian wealth derived more from its land possessions than from its ocean trade, so a loss of the land empire, or terrafirma, would have been a fatal blow. Among the French there were those who wanted to go further: the French general Bayard, whose courage is proverbial in France until this day, proclaimed his desire to destroy the Venetian oligarchy because of their opulent contempt for God and Christendom.

In the spring of 1509, a French army of 20,000 soldiers left Milan and crossed the Adda River into Venetian territory. On May 14, 1509 this French force met and destroyed an evenly matched Venetian mercenary army. The Venetians gave up Verona, Bergamo, Brescia, Vicenza, and even Padova, retreating into the natural fortress of their lagoons. The entire Venetian land empire had been lost in a single day. In one battle, Venice had dropped off the list of European great powers. The Venetians called it a “second Cannae.” The Florentine secretary Machiavelli exulted that in one day the Venetians had lost the fruits of 800 years of aggression. The Venetians were able to retake Padova, but had to defend it against the German Emperor and 100,000 troops. The modern era had indeed begun.

Only twice before had the Venetians been in such dire straits. They had been besieged in the lagoons in 810 AD by King Pepin of France, the heir of Charlemagne, and again by the Genoese during the war of Chioggia in 1379.

To multiply the catastrophe, a few months before, the Venetians had received news of the naval battle of Diu in which an Egyptian fleet supported by Indian princes had been wiped out by the Portuguese navy. The old Venetian monopoly in the spice trade with the east was now a dead duck.

At first the Venetians, now under siege in their lagoons, were totally isolated. Then it turned out that they did have a friend: the new King of England, Henry VIII. Advised by Cardinal Woolsey and the Cecils, Henry VIII urged Pope Julius to betray the League of Cambrai, and ally with Venice. When Julius first found that Henry VIII was supporting Venice, he was furious. Julius told the English ambassador: “You Englishmen are all scoundrels.” But soon it was clear that Julius was not so far from Henry’s position. Henry also offered the Venetians a loan, and signed a friendship treaty with them.

Julius II della Rovere now switched sides, and by February, 1510 Julius was the ally of Venice in exchange for territorial cessions and some bribes. In the summer of 1510 the French and Imperial forces reached the lagoons a second time, but their flank was attacked by Julius, and Venice was preserved. Julius II must bear the historical responsibility of permitting the survival of Venice and thus of oligarchy into the modern world.

1511 brought a third Franco-Imperial offensive, which once again reached the shores of the lagoons. Now Spain followed Julius and joined the Venetian-Papal alliance against France and the Empire. Henry VIII also joined this Holy League as a pretext for attacking France.

In the spring of 1512 came a new shift: the Emperor Maximilian decided to join Venice, the Pope, and Spain against the French. The Venetians took advantage of this, re-occupying their battered land empire for the third time.

In February, 1513 Julius II della Rovere, who had made possible the survival of oligarchy into the modern world, finally died. About a month later the Venetians, desperately maneuvering to avoid being despoiled by their nominal allies, sealed an alliance with France. Venice now faced the attacks of the Spanish general Cardona. From the top of their bell towers the Venetians watched as the Spaniards burned the towns along the edge of the lagoon, and fired their cannon toward the city itself. Venice was on the verge of perdition for the fourth time, but Cardona had to retreat.

The war dragged on through 1514. In September, 1515 the French and the Venetians finally won the key battle of Marignano. After that only Verona remained in the hands of the German Imperial forces, and Venice and the Emperor Maximilian finally signed a peace in 1517. In the same year of 1517, a desperate Venetian wartime operation masterminded by Gasparo Contarini bore fruit when Luther nailed his theses to the door of Wittenberg cathedral. From this point on, religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in Germany and elsewhere would begin to relieve the immediate pressure on Venice. Venice was 5 million ducats in debt. For 8 years Venice had been devastated by the endless maneuvers of huge armies. Only the wars of religion, reformation and counter- reformation, saved Venice from being finally crushed.

Venice had survived. There remained the question as to how this small and weak state could hope to impose its oligarchical axioms on future humanity. Part of the answer was the metastasis of the Venetian oligarchical cancer to take over a large modern state. For this the Venetians eventually chose England, the power that had been most friendly during the late war.

But the roots of Venetian and Byzantine influence in England were much deeper. The Danish Viking invaders who opposed Alfred were instruments of the Byzantine Empire, whose influence reached Scandinavia along the Varangian way through Russia. The Norwegian army that invaded England in 1066 was commanded by a Byzantine general, Harold Hardrada. During the 1200′s Henry III of England was bankrupted by loans masterminded by the Venetians. When Edward III started the Hundred Years’ War against France around 1340, he was an instrument of Venice, since the Venetians wanted to prevent France from interfering with their wars against Genoa. The Wars of the Roses had been fought by factions manipulated by the Venetians, who viewed Wat Tyler’s rebellion and Wycliff’s Lollards as a dress rehearsal for Luther. Venetian factions were dominant at the court of Henry VIII. So the Venetians moved their family fortunes and their characteristic world outlook to England.

But the move to England and the creation of a British Empire were only part of the answer. As long as the forward motion of Renaissance science continued, the Venetians, the British, and all the others would be forced to imitate it and duplicate it, on pain of being militarily defeated. But the irrational domination of oligarchs could not coexist with continuous progress in science and technology. The Venetians could not simply attack science from the outside. They needed to seize control of science and corrupt science from within.

This task fell to the Venetian intelligence leader Paolo Sarpi, who lived from 1552 to 1623. Sarpi became one of the most famous persons in Europe through his role as Venetian propaganda boss during the Pope’s Interdict against Venice in 1606-1607. Sarpi authored the assassination of King Henry IV of France in 1610. And, with the help of his assets at the court of Frederick V in Heidelberg, Sarpi was decisive in starting the Thirty Years’ War, which killed half of the population of Germany and one third of the population of Europe as a whole.

Yet, Sarpi’s most lasting achievement is the launching of the European Enlightenment, including both the Bacon- Hobbes- Locke- Newton- Berkeley- Hume English empiricism and the Descartes- Voltaire- Rousseau- French Encyclopedia school. Sarpi was one of the greatest corrupters of science and philosophy.

Sarpi was a Servite monk of modest origins who rose to be number two in his order. Early in life, he became an admirer of William of Ockham, one of the stupidest of the medieval nominalist philosophers. Sarpi was also a follower of Pomponazzi, the Venetian professor who argued that man has no soul.

Sarpi lived in Rome and knew the main personalities of the Counter- Reformation, including Carlo Borromeo, Roberto Bellarmino, Pope Sixtus V, and the future Pope Urban VII. Sarpi soon became a creature of the Contarini and Morosini families, who were committed to the Venetian metastasis into northern Europe. The Contarini- Morosini faction, called the Giovani party, became dominant in Venice during the 1580′s. Sarpi became, in the words of the papal nuncio, the boss of half of Venice, and ran a salon for Calvinists and libertines which the Vatican attacked as an “academy of errors.”

The leading British authority on Sarpi is H.R. Trevor-Roper, now Lord Dacre, who calls the friar an “indefatigable polymath” or master of all the sciences. In reality, Sarpi was the chief corrupter of modern science, the greatest charlatan of all time. It is his doctrines which are taught in the universities today.

In astronomy and physics, Sarpi was the case officer who directed the work of the Padua professor Galileo Galilei. Galileo wrote that Sarpi was a mathematician unexcelled in Europe, and contemporaries recognized that Sarpi had been the adviser, author, and director of Galileo’s telescope project. Galileo’s observations were done from Sarpi’s monastery. The telescope itself had been invented by Leonardo. Galileo was until the end of his life a paid agent of the Sarpi group.

Sarpi also tried to build up a reputation as an expert on magnetism, which fascinated him because of its magical overtones. In this he was praised by G.B. della Porta, the author of Magia Naturalis. Sarpi was also famous as a mathematician, and probably wrote a treatise of mathematics which was lost when his monastery burned in 1769. Sarpi had studied the French mathematician Francois Viete. In anatomy, the Venetians attempted to prove for many years that Sarpi had been the first to discover the valves in human veins, and even that he had been the first to describe the circulation of the blood, well before Harvey.

Sarpi wrote A History of the Council of Trent, and his influence on historiography has been immense. John Milton is the English author who praises Sarpi at the greatest length. Milton used Sarpi as a major source, and praised him as the “great unmasker” of the papacy. Edward Gibbon, the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was the leading historian of the British Venetian Party during the eighteenth century. In his great tome, Gibbon wrote: “Should Rome and her religion be annihilated, [Sarpi's] golden volume may still survive, a philosophical history and a salutary warning.” Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, the Venetian Party historian of the nineteenth century, was also an admirer of Sarpi. For today’s Lord Dacre/Trevor- Roper, Sarpi was simply the greatest among all Catholic historians. So Sarpi was indeed a prodigy among oligarchs.

But what of Sarpi the philosopher? Sarpi never published a work of philosophy, but the Venetian archives were found to contain his philosophical manuscripts, the “Art of Thinking Well” (Arte di Ben Pensare) and the “Thoughts” (Pensieri), which were published in 1910 and again more fully in 1951. Here we find that Sarpi created the basis of modern empiricism. His method was to assert that scientific truth was to be found not in Aristotle, but rather written in mathematical characters in the great book of life. The way to get this truth was to use sense certainty, exactly as Aristotle had recommended. Many of Aristotle’s specific conclusions could be junked, but his method and thus his overall domination could be preserved.

Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes both understood Italian. They and their protector, the Earl of Devonshire, corresponded with Sarpi and his group, with Hobbes doing the translation. Hobbes visited Venice in September, 1614 and probably met Sarpi. Bacon’s inductive method is simply a bowdlerization of Sarpi.

Hobbes belonged to the Sarpi networks all his life. The plan for Hobbes’ career as a writer emerged from his meeting with Galileo in 1636, when Galileo suggested that Hobbes write a book of ethics according to the mathematical- geometrical method. All his life Hobbes went around blathering that motion was the only thing that mattered. One of Sarpi’s Pensieri reads: “From the weakness of man derives his characteristic of living in society, but from man’s depravity derives the need to live under a supreme authority….” [405] This, along with Sarpi’s favorite theme of church-state conflict, is the substance of Hobbes’ Leviathan. When Hobbes lived in Paris during the English civil war, he rubbed elbows with Venetian assets like Mersenne, Descartes, and Gassendi. Hobbes and Descartes quarreled, but also partied together.

Then there is the question of Locke. Lord Macauley and other English writers treat Sarpi as one who anticipated Locke. In reality, Locke was a plagiarist of Sarpi. And for this we have the testimony of no less a personage than a mid-eighteenth century doge of Venice, Marco Foscarini. The doge writes that Sarpi’s “Art of Thinking Well” is “the original from which Locke copied.”

Locke’s first book argues that the mind is a blank slate without any inborn or innate ideas. This meshes exactly with Sarpi, who with Aristotle and Pomponazzi tries to show that nothing enters the mind except through the senses. The corollary of this is that there is no human soul.

“Every body which moves operates on what it touches,” is Sarpi’s point of departure. Sarpi “shows how external objects operate on our senses, distinguishing between the object which creates the sensation and the sensation itself.” The sensations we feel are not qualities of the objects, but phenomena of our intellect. The senses deliver the sensations through the nervous system. Then discursive reasoning or the active intellect comes into play with ideas of number and size. The discursive reasoning orders, combines, and compares sense-ideas which have been stored in memory.

This is all closely parallel to Locke’s second book. In “Art of Thinking Well,” Sarpi writes that “knowledge by experience is of greater certainty than knowledge through reason, and no reason can ever manage to equal experience.” Locke’s second book states that all our knowledge is founded on and derives itself from experience. Experience comes from sensation or from reflection, reflection on the sense impressions already stored in the brain. Sarpi also discusses reflection, distinguishing between cognition and later reflection on that same cognition.

Sarpi admits compound ideas, made up of more than one simple sense impression, and so does Locke. Sense impressions in general do not err, says Sarpi, although sometimes impaired vision and the like will cause distortions, and discursive reasoning can become confused. Locke’s second book has similar remarks, with a discussion of color blindness. Both devote space to methods for fixing mistakes in processing sense ideas.

Sarpi argues that the intellect orders ideas according to notions of genus, species, and essence. For Locke, “all the great business of genera and species, and their essences… amounts to no more than this: That… men… enable themselves to consider things in bundles….” [II.31] From these bundles, Sarpi goes on to definitions and then to axioms (ipolipsi). Locke prefers to address axioms as maxims, and he argues that they are of limited utility, serving mainly to win debates. Sarpi is even more pessimistic, asserting that knowledge is actually harmful, and that animals are better off in their natural ignorance than we are.

Sarpi and Locke also agree on the value of syllogisms, which they also consider to be quite limited. Sarpi warns that syllogisms can often be perverse in form. Locke, wanting to show that he is fully modern and in no way a scholastic or schoolman, also denies every claim made for the syllogism – although he hastens to add that this does not in the least diminish the prestige of Aristotle.

Sarpi ends with some notes on language, saying that words were invented not to identify things, but rather the ideas of the speaker. Locke reproduces this argument in toto, stating that “…all words… signify nothing immediately but the ideas in the mind of the speaker.” [II.32] Sarpi regards words as sources of confusion and errors, as does Locke.

Most of Locke’s modern editors and biographers make no mention of Sarpi. But the catalogue of Locke’s library shows a lively interest in the Venetian. Locke owned Sarpi’s works in 6 volumes, Sarpi’s histories of the Council of Trent and of the Inquisition, Sarpi’s Italian letters, his history of Pope Paul IV, plus Micanzio’s first biography of Sarpi, for a total of 13 books

Sarpi uses 22 pages, while Locke requires just short of 1000. But there is no doubt that Sarpi, whatever his obscurity, is the founder of modern British empiricism and as such the chief philosophical charlatan of the British Empire and the English- speaking peoples, including many Americans today. In this way, Sarpi has become the most popular and influential thinker of the modern world. The dead hand of Paolo Sarpi is reaching out of his sarcophagus once again, threatening to throttle world civilization.