How do you change the minds of men

And not like Walter Lippman. Propaganda and media control are not the issue. They've been long perfected.

But how do you change the minds of men, so that they see what they are doing?

The facts! Right? Wrong. The facts don't work. The facts have been tried. They just bounce off. This many dead. That many unemployed. This big a deficit. That amount of profits. It doesn't have any effect.

The facts aren't real. They're just numbers. When a fact is said, its not easy to imagine its reality. When you hear about that many dead, you don't immediately conjure the image of the bodies, the crying loved ones, the blood, the screams. You could conjure up that image, but you would have to really think about it to do it. Most people don't think that hard. And most of the time the facts are coming at you so quickly that before you can the next fact is already on top of you, clouding the memory of the first.

The reality is not the facts. So what is it?

The reality is emptiness.

If we could just grasp that, it would change everything. Because suddenly all of the bad things would not be worth doing. Because it wouldn't matter. The profits wouldn't matter. And the politics wouldn't matter. And the amount of economic growth wouldn't matter. And we'd look at all these things and giggle, because we'd see they're all so silly and we'd think of how silly we were to think they mattered.

'But they do matter! Look at what is happening. Look around at the world,' shouts a good soul from the crowd.

That's confusing the cause with the effect. The effects of these bad things matter because they are hurting people and they are hurting the world. But these bad things that we say are the cause and that they matter because they are the cause are not the cause. We are the cause. And we are the cause because we can't see they don't matter.

To change the minds of men we don't need to be convinced that this way or that way is right, or be forced to do as we do, or to be as we are. We just have to show us the emptiness of reality, the emptiness that's right there in front of us when we look at it and admit the truth that we know we're all going to die.

Once we understand that, the rest is old, dead skin. It will wither with time, and fall away. And what's left, will be beautiful.

- posted by Sigurd11/03/2004 06:07:00 PM