Means And Ends

I have recently spoken in these pages, of my electronic journal, of our confusing 'them' with 'us' - confusing our human bodies with our souls, the sparks of divinity that 'inform' them, inhabit them, for a time and season (and then 'all change').  I would like to elaborate on the point a bit.  The point, of confusing means with ends.

The phenomenon - and pattern - is endemic in life.  In the case of the above example: to the very illusion of life itself.  As if imagery - form - were the real thing.  Precisely as we have become enamored of money in and for itself, instead of seeing it as the means to an end that it was intended to be, should be, and would better be.  (Before we leave it behind, in getting to a purer state of being.  Our purer state of being.)  The end simply of exchanging goods and services with one another.  And then there's the example of sex.

We are talking about addiction, here.  Of having our eye taken off the ball, as it were; and thus, sinking deeper into matter.  Into the pull thereof.  Away from the kingdom of heaven, and its pull on us.  More subtle (for being more rarified in nature).  And thus, not in the forefront of our awareness.  Of our awareness of our surroundings, that is to say.   For it is 'awareness' that will liberate us, from our prison.  The prison of our senses.  The prison that we have become addicted to.

And are now to liberate ourselves from.  In large part, by groking the difference between 'ends' and 'means'.

In the little booklet that I referred to in my letter to David Horowitz,1 he quotes Dostoevsky as saying that "if God does not exist then everything is permitted," and goes on to say of the point: "What he meant was that if human beings do not have a conception of the good that is outside themselves, then they will act as gods with nothing to restrain them."  And the pages of his little treatise are full of examples of that, where 'radicals' have relativized 'right' and 'wrong' to such an extent that they have murdered millions in search of their paradise.  Their kingdom of heaven on Earth.

What does it take to understand that a pure-intentioned end justifying any means to that end automatically renders it impure, tainted, undeserving; unholy?  It is axiomatic.  Why can't that truth be seen, by those who would engage in that sort of process???

Because they are not actually interested in a pure end.  They are interested merely in power.  For power's sake.

Not good enough, ladies and gentlemen of the far Left.

Or the far Right, who would impose their own version of a totalitarian state on mankind.

We now must navigate between those two hazards - of the rocky shoals of Scylla on the Right and the whirlpool of Charybdis on the Left; between fascist totalitarianism and socialist totalitarianism, in the form of their respective New World Orders.2

'It' - life, and all its chancings - is on the table, now.

May we wake up, in time, and go neither to the Left nor to the Right.

But Up.

And we can't get there by immoral means.

For that End is not made up of such a quality.

It's axiomatic.

Or should be.  For anybody who has eyes to see.  Really.

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footnotes:

1 I got the title a bit wrong.  It is not 'Rules For Revolutionaries'.  It is 'Rules For Revolution'.  And to be more precise, it is: 'Barack Obama's RULES FOR REVOLUTION: The Alinsky Model'.  


2 It's actually the same one; with the same nest of vipers at the top of the pyramid of power.  But that's another story.