Advice to Those Considering Going to War

It is good to successfully defend yourself, your family, your country, though it is often avoidable and usually regrettable that it is necessary. A person who successfully defends from an analytical viewpoint will, when recalling the experience at a later time be thankful or glad at the continuance of the pro-life activity or purpose, and will not regret the required vanquishing of others, but will not take joy in it either. So, when considering whether to participate in an alleged defensive activity it is recommended to:

1) Educate yourself thoroughly in the pro-life purpose that you would be defending.

• Will you be defending your country? If so, then make sure you understand what any country is, what your country is, what makes it weaker, what makes it stronger. A country is a large group composed of groups of groups, which are composed of smaller groups of groups. For a country to be strong the groups should be strong. For a group to be strong it must have a coherent set of policy that allows a purpose to be forwarded to reach a goal for which the group members have a self-determined desire to reach. This set of policy should be known, agreed on and acted from. This is a different thing from a social group, which is a lower and weaker form of group, and which may have little or no formal structure. Please make sure you understand the difference.
• Has the country been stronger at any point in the past? If so, when and why?

2) Verify that a defense is necessary and from who and for what reason

• Have you been personally threatened?

• Do you know anyone who has been personally threatened?

• Have there been reports of fellow citizens being attacked? If so, take an independent look at the evidence. Does it all make sense to you? Does it all add up? Are there any doubts or conflicting reports? Do not accept the conclusions of others. Make up your own mind regarding it on the basis of factual evidence rather than opinion. It is your life and your decision. Unlike other generations, Uncle Sam is not drafting—he is only taking volunteers. Keep in mind that the determination of right and wrong in the larger sphere depends on alignment or misalignment with the pro-life purpose line. This is what it is, not what you may wish it to be.
• Have there been reports of returning soldiers killing your fellow citizens? If so, are these isolated instances, or do they outnumber the count of those killed by the alleged enemy?

3) Observe the effects of participation in this defense on the lives of others.

• Defense of a pro-life purpose is good life experience. Are returning veterans more alive, more “with it”, or are they dispirited and more “out of it”? Of course, this will vary from veteran to veteran, so try to take the average case.

• Contributing to something in a positive way makes it easier to face up to it in the future. Are returning veterans more able to face up to and participate in American life, or are they less able to do so?

4) If, as Americans, we feel so strongly about democracy that we are willing to send our young men and women half-way around the world to fight and die for it, and ask other countries to join us in doing so, then why do we not feel strongly enough about it to educate them in the public school system about the Golden Age of Greece in which the first democracy was born and which was the common inspiration of the founding fathers of the American Revolution? It would not be a new thing to do so. This was a regular part of the school curriculum for much of our history, and still is in some parts of the country. If you have not studied it, please take the time to do so before you may be required to aim at another human being and pull the trigger in a cause you do not fully understand.

5) If there is no immediate threat, consider whether you may be able to help your country more by taking action in the “offensive” front rather than the “defensive” front, by helping to make progress in the pro-life direction— farther away from the Dark Ages towards higher levels of group causation. This is progress in a direction that an enemy would not want to see made, but there is more of a requirement for analytical thought, teamwork, ability to align data successfully and to think and act for yourself rather than always following a path determined by others. War is an activity where there are many opportunities to become spiritually “dirtier”, but cleanliness is required to make progress in the direction of higher levels of group causation. You can teach a “dirty” person to aim a gun and pull the trigger, but you will have much more trouble getting that same person to operate on a self-determined basis within a framework of policy in a group with a high level of causation. If you decide to try this “offensive” front, consider that you may also be able to have influence beyond what you can accomplish yourself . You may be able to influence others by promoting a paradigm or paradigms for group participation that go above and beyond what has been common until now. Ideally every generation should build on the success of previous generations and reach farther and stabilize their gains so that the following generations may start from a higher point. An enemy would want to see us pulled back to the Dark Ages and re-enslaved. We don’t have to go there again, but we need to progress on the “offensive” front as well as successfully defending ourselves from real threats.

A Useful Analogy

Building a group is like building a fire. The heat is the self-determined desire of the individual or individuals involved to achieve a goal by following a purpose line. If there is enough heat there will be a localized ignition—a spark or a flared match. This is analogous to an individual feeling strongly enough about something to take action.

For the ignition source to become a sustained fire it must be applied to a set of dry fuel that has been configured to receive it. This configuration involves gradient sizing as well as spacing that is not too close together and not too far apart. Until the flame has “taken hold” it must be guarded and “nursed” to protect it from external elements (wind, rain, etc.) that would extinguish it before it becomes strong, robust and easy to support. It is more of an art than a science, though scientific principles apply.

The size and heat of the fire is analogous to the level of group causation. The fire set, and the care and attention it requires is analogous to getting a group of people together and the care and attention required to put together a coherent set of policies that are arranged in a gradient from the most basic, fundamental, to the most particular, and the education of each group member in and the elicitation of self-determined agreement from each group member on this policy set.

Wind and rain are analogous to arbitraries from the environment that impinge on this policy set.

Fuel dampness is analogous to the aberration of the individual group member which manifests as resistance to or inability to learn and come into agreement with and act upon this policy set.

A civilization without the ability to build and care for groups with high causation levels is like a people who cannot control fire. They are only capable of a miserable existence and are subject to attack from the sub-human elements that cannot face up to fire. A people who had never been able to control fire might not even have been able to conceive of being free from this type of attack. They might not realize the inability of the sub-human elements to confront fire.

In terms of a civilization, sub-human elements may be wild, marauding animals, but they may also be those who cannot monitor themselves for and keep themselves out of the mob mentality.

Here’s to a warm future!

What Dad Can Do for his Teenage Daughter

Well, first off I have to say I do not have a teen-age daughter, so take this with a grain of salt. I am writing this from the viewpoint of helping girls become women who have value to the purpose of forwarding the purpose of civilization. This seems appropriate to me since women have traditionally promoted themselves as being civilizing influences.
First, I have heard it said that teenagers are living through a stage of their lives when their brains are still being “wired”. I would definitely use a good amount of salt here because I am pretty far from believing that people are their brains. Nevertheless, there may be some correlation that could be paid some attention to. First, ask yourself which gender is generally the more competent—men or women? Now, take into account that usually teenage girls tend to spend more time with their mothers at this stage of their life, and their mothers spent more time with her mother, and her mother spent more time with her mother, and her mother spent more timer with her mother, etc… Is there a pattern here? YES! All of this “extra time” is being spent at a time in their life when, supposedly, the teenage brain is undergoing its final wiring.
Maybe for the sake of future generations Dad could intervene in this cycle. Though there are probably many forms of intervention, here are a few of my suggestions:
1) Like the advertisement says, “Take her fishing”. I recommend taking her fishing on a creek or stream rather than a river or lake. The reason is that in a stream it is possible to predict not only WHERE the trout will be, but even where the BIGGEST trout will be. They will be in the best holes, and if you can teach her what kinds of things that trout like and what they don’t like, then she will have the basic tools to figure out for a particular stream where they may be. This will help her with her ability to align data from the general to the particular.
2) Have her make a fire without matches or lighter fluid. No, not all the way primitive with a fire drill or fire bow, but like her ancestors of 250 years ago did—with a spark from a flint and steel. Actually there are better spark producers than flint and steel you can pick up today at any sporting goods store, but the idea is for her to care for and grow the spark. If you don’t know how to do this already, please look it up on the internet before going into the field. Basically the idea is to land the spark onto a prepared “charcloth”, which is just what it sounds like, and nurse it along from there. Next time you do a barbecue you can make some charcloth by putting pieces of an old T-shirt of sheet into a small metal can and putting the can into the coals. You will have to figure how long to leave it there by trial and error. The cloth should end up to be uniformly charred black and still retain at least some structural integrity. Why is this so beneficial? Well the real lesson has only begun. To successfully nurse the spark into a flame there must be a prepared gradient of fuels beyond the charcloth from tinder, through kindling, twigs and larger fuel. So the lessons learned will be preparation, and a value of and judgement for gradients. These are analytical skills that are broadly applicable in other areas of life, and she will be able to impress future boyfriends.
3) Make sure she is not too easily impressed with the handling of force. This will allow her to more easily retain an independent perspective when dealing with men. There are many ways to do this. Hopefully she is already doing some.

• Sports, particularly team sports

• Sailing is great, since it requires the use of the mind to add up a set of forces in the moment in order to control the resultant to arrive at a destination in the future.

• Archery is good.

• Developing skill in working on cars, bikes or machinery is a possibility.

The idea is for them to be able to face up to and control the force involved. For this reason shooting may not be so good because the forces involved are usually more than most people can confront.

More On the Ideal Scene

The ideal of a civilization should be a positive-feedback activity or progression, i.e. the more progress is made in the right direction, the more “pull” or inclination would exist to go further in the right direction.
Individuals who were relatively deaberrated in the area of groups would value a group with a high level of causation for its ability to act as a servo-mechanism to forward whatever self-determined purposes he may have in order to achieve self-determined goals. He would also understand that the driving force of group causation is always the competent application of self-determination by the individual within the framework of a coherent set of policy. He would feel it strongly in his interest to have available in the public as large a pool of self-determined potential group members as possible, all of whom would have a firm grasp on the set of basic group policies which would underlie the particular policy set or framework of any given group. This would allow more chance of there being enough competent group members to "salute" any purpose he wanted to "run up the flag pole".
When you add this all up it means that there would be a self-motivated desire by the individual for others to increase competency and respect for the right to apply competency. So, above a certain level of deaberration there would be a mutual desire to have others do well, but it would exist above the personal level. It would exist in the impersonal band of formal group participation, and be independent of personal like or dislike. This then allows the individual, as the civilization becomes less aberrated in the area of groups, to asymptotically approach complete control of his personal life by dealing only from an impersonal "hat" viewpoint with those he does not want to be part of it, while at the same time increasing his ability to forward his self-determined purposes to improve conditions in the larger sphere. It would also offer a paradigm through which those who may not like each other could still operate effectively within a given system of policies by adhering to their respective impersonal "hat" viewpoints.