Ten Values-Secrets for Building Institutional and Global Harmony
By Robert L. Humphrey
(Continued)
DUAL LIFE-VALUE SUMMARY, CONCLUSIONS, AND FAMILIAR QUESTIONS
1. There is only one core value in human nature -- the Dual (self & species) Life-Value. All else is relative to that value; "good" if it supports the human species; bad if it doesn't. Test it in your own daily actions.
2. Nature, or almost automatic-conditioning, (take your choice) seems to give the edge to the species-preservation over self in those individuals who are competent to save other lives by fighting for them or else, for another example, by working themselves into early graves for their children. The latter activity, by parents, was taken for granted during the Great Depression because it was a necessity that was so easily seen -- to save the children. They get hungry fast. It still is taken for granted in the traditional villages of the world (where I have visited).
That is, the species-preserving side of this life-value (however it got there) is so strong that human beings will give their own lives to save others.
3. It is so strong that it can motivate people up to this species-protecting action even after they have denounced all of their cultural values (as Mercer had done just the night before).
4. Similarly, it can motivate individuals into action even after they have started to stress-out to the point of having lost interest in trying to save themselves (as the two young Marines -- and later, others -- had).
5. The stimulation and strong activation of this self-giving, species-protecting value creates feelings of happiness up through nobility. Hence, its "education" and activation is worthwhile and welcomed reliably. (Once activated, it was pleasing to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of previously Ugly Americans with whom I met in those long years of Cold-War programs.)
HUMAN NATURE'S POTENTIAL FOR NOBILITY
In closing this most important section on the activation of humankind's earthly moral/ethical values, I want to make certain I stress adequately the power that activating this Dual Life-Value provides. It seems to constitute the motivational base for a general peace-time education that can promote social problem-solving at any level: local, national, or international.
We found, late in our overseas programs -- after we had substantially perfected the values-based educational supplement -- that we could inspire most of the ugly Americans in a community, military or civilian,, to start living, to varying degrees, by the following mottoes:
Wherever I walk, everyone is safer; (or to at least this:)
Wherever I am, anyone in need has a friend.
And hardest, perhaps, this: From today on, every time I walk into my house, I will make it a happier place for every member, no matter what -- and I will do the same at my place of work. (And why not, if it makes one's own life happier as well as improving productivity?)
When I saw the movie, Star Wars,, and first heard the term "the force," it was a finger-snapper.
The poetic author had perceived this "internal life force" that is bigger than self. It also clarified for me the secret of "the great literature," from such men as Hugo, Tolstoi, and the author of The Tale of Two Cities. The poets, those great writers, have enjoyed the feel for life's most basic values. This is probably what humanity has always called wisdom. And that is why the books are recognized as great.
The Dual Life-Value, The Positive Life Force
In our classes we often refer to the dual life value or the positive life force also by a third name, the Balanced Life-Value. I am leaving it fluid to see what further experience and research suggest. You know it is not my intuitive theory. It is only my reading of human nature from experience. So it is best left open for additional readings.
AN ORGANIZED POSITIVE PROGRAM
Along this line of considering general guidelines and mottoes, here is the most helpful general concept that eventually clarified itself to us. Sometimes with a community, a group, or an individual that was mired down in terrible troubles, other than for stopping outright violence, we just turned completely away from discussing those negatives. The truth is, at first, as amateurs, we recognized those troubles as far too horrendous for us to even try to address. So, in place of trying to attack them, as hopeless, we simply started a positive program. Soon, we found that the demanding positive programs caused the negative problems to simply go away.
That is how we first learned for certain that every child, even those in wheel chairs, need a demanding physical education program. They need to be aware of their own muscle tone and their own possibility of physical improvement no matter how insignificant compared to anyone else. The trend here in America of killing off daily physical-education programs is a very deadly business.
For example, with one group of teenage boys and girls "into drugs," we decided against even a drug-discussion program of any kind. Rather, we started a remedial high school with a very demanding -- all positive -- day-long curriculum: a moral/physical competitive practice that brought butterflies in the stomach, every day, with the light sparring, STRIKE), also exciting, competitive fast- (imagery-) learning, exciting student acting (drama) in every class, student-choice reading in class, and weight-lifting with proud weekly measurement. From TV, our youth are now hooked on excitement (their own adrenaline), it seems. A female psychologist from San Diego State tipped us off to that fact.
That new exciting school stopped the drug use even including the few who were into heroin. (There were not enough of these to prove anything, but we took one of our few off of it for five years. He then reverted over love-troubles. My suspicion is that it takes a religious conversion to really stop that heroin, permanently, in most.) But we put several of the children into college, the military, good jobs, and marriage.
INFORMAL EN MASSE ACTION PROGRAMS
Action Programs. In the Far East, after some open Communist opposition arose, we learned to reinforce the basic morality message with these brief "get involved" action programs. We would ask an audience of 1,000 men to take a 30 minute seminar-break and walk around among the local people while role-playing the action of "running for mayor." Instead of ignoring those humble, earthy folk, we asked the Americans simply, (a) to nod to the local nationals with a quick give-away greeting, (b) maybe add a little "lip-smile," (c) (beyond belief) to salute their officers, and then (d) to come back to our speaker's podium and report their reactions, orally, good or bad.
The reactions from those previously hard-talking, unbelievably vulgar, mostly teenage American boys was nothing short of a quick little social revolution. Some were embarrassed about their strongly favorable reactions. Some just shook their heads in disbelief and wanted to shake my hand. Some spoke of a "new freedom." In the very first of those experiments, a young soldier was almost crying because a foreign officer had wrecked his bike from looking back in surprise while trying to return the salute.
Common-Folk Nobility. Later, on written questionnaire-responses, the men reported that once they built-up their knowledge and courage (with the self-defense skills) to live that way, it not only felt better than being "withdrawn," "ugly," or "not involved," it "did feel downright ennobling."
One, recalling my words from a Vietnam program, said, "It does take you beyond the Golden Rule because you are ready to risk your life protecting people who could not possibly defend you." Others said in various ways, It makes life exciting every day even though you don't usually act any differently. It is just that you are always watching, ready, and willing. That's exciting. It is by far the best life possible. Not uncommon was also this pleasing reaction. "I used to be a little ashamed of being a soldier, especially when I saw people avoiding me. Now I am proud. It gives me an excuse to be nice as you said as the protector/defender."
ABOVE THE RAT-RACE, BEYOND MATERIALISM
After forty years, here is my favorite response from a man in an ongoing training-program because it clearly revealed an escape from the rat-race (of insatiable materialism that apparently has helped bring down all the previous, great leading nations). I call this my program response from, THE LITTLE MORAL GIANT:
Hell, Professor, I don't even need to get rich anymore. I am secretly in charge now everywhere I go. I look after people if they want it. I am never out of place anymore even if dressed wrinkled. I am now above that foolishness. I walk quietly, but if something goes wrong, I am the reliable one present. I can't wait to get home and teach my son. You actually do become one of the moral giants walking the earth and it becomes a friendly place. This is no matter that you are not a stud and that you don't earn much.
Here is a biggest thing with me. The presence of a woman in a store, alone, you know, like passing you in the isle or passing me on the street used to be a problem. What to think or where to put my eyes and sexy mind. No longer. I see her and I pop my mind right onto your advice. Without ever looking at her a second time, I say to myself for her. O.K., little sister, you are safe now while I am in here. I also love your guess about the best legacy for the easiest dying. Make certain you leave the world a better place just because you lived. Man! professor, that is something else.
Interlude
That concludes the first four decisive Cold-War discoveries that gave us the foundation for our conflict-resolving moral/ethical programs. Developed gradually from operational research programs, they seem to be effective with individuals, groups, or institutions.
The other six crucial discoveries, needed either for success, or greater success, in one or more programs, but not all, I'll just summarize. Full presentation will be available soon on the Net in our corporate college program.
ITEM # 5. THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN NATURE IN TERMS OF VALUES
(Morality is defined here as self-giving for others mainly for the pleasure it provides to the giver.)
Human nature has these three main parts:
1. A mental/emotional control-system, (please find it on the chart)
2. a self-development/self-preserving side that contains our physical, mental, & artistic values, or felt natural-rights for development, (please find it) &
3. the species-preserving side that is made up, mainly, of the "self-giving" moral/ethical values, or felt natural-duties to loved-ones, including all humanity.
CHART OF HUMAN NATURE IN TERMS OF VALUES
|
MENTAL/EMOTIONAL |
|
|---|---|
|
SELF-PRESERVING |
SPECIES-PRESERVING |
|
SELF-DEVELOPMENT |
(SELF-GIVING) VALUES |
|
VALUES (FELT rights) |
(FELT duties to loved-ones, in-groups, etc.) |
|
A. PHYSICAL VALUES |
A. MORAL VALUES |
|
Life, Defense, etc. |
Love: "Greater love hath no man... that he lay down his life for a friend." Charity: I feel I must give; they Equality, Freedom, etc. need it much more than I. Honor/Loyalty: I gave my word. Courage: You will hurt them only over my dead body Work : ( to produce for Fast learning, Humor, the family & humanity.) Art expression, etc. Etc. |
|
B. MENTAL VALUES |
B. SOCIAL VALUES |
|
C. ARTISTIC VALUES |
|
|
ETC. |
|
THE SCIENCE OF MORALITY, ITSELF
The great moral values (love, charity, loyalty, honor, work, courage, etc.) are the various emotions that express, in various detail, the self-giving and self-risking species-preserving drive. This makes them all parts of human nature's scientific moral content as detailed expressions of the species-preserving drive.
The Science of Human Nature in Terms of Values
That chart shows the developmental needs for the happiest lifestyle. We never explain it else it gets boring as "too school-like." However, even the least scholarly dropouts enjoy discussing it in their own small groups to determine two things: (1) How does each entry on the chart help "the good," meaning human survival. And (2) how can each entry misfire and become bad, meaning life-destructive? We give one big example: The species-preserving drive, itself, has always been used by self-serving leaders to fool their citizens into aggressive, rather than defensive, wars.
Interlude
Like the species-preserving drive, other strongly life-supporting values (sub-values) have been corrupted by many persons for the exploitation of others. Most troublesome in many countries has been the false interpretations of political freedom and economic freedom. Even though it took, for me, the long comparison with other cultures, they are both terribly misused even in America.
ITEM #6. Human Equality and Political Freedom
Politically Correct "Freedom" -- Four Serious Fallacies.
1. Because we have always been a new nation with open frontiers and apparently unlimited resources, our people have had neither the time nor the need for much philosophizing, that is, not since the initial 1776 life-and-death struggle. Since then, freedom, almost alone, has been emphasized. And the high-lighting of freedom does not lend itself to talk of freedom's own basic roots, in human equality. If we are not equal in value, as lives, then slavery and exploitation for the less than equal, as with work and food animals, is perhaps justified.
Yet, that more basic "human quality" has always been an unspoken assumption (a strong assumption in our courts of common law).
2. Open frontiers with new distant land to settle also made "rugged individualistic freedom" the most useful philosophy. That, too, made the need for the philosophy of cooperation doubly difficult to emphasize -- even though we always used it almost automatically, locally, during the Great Depression to "pitch in" to help one another.
3. Now, however, the historically sudden closing of frontiers, the depleting of resources, and the multicultural crowding have changed that tolerable values-fuzziness forever. We now need a more natural (species-supporting) guiding philosophy of unity and cooperation. That cooperation and unity is assisted by more emphasis on the felt equal worth of each human life. That equality is above and beyond all measurable qualities such as strength, intelligence, or money. But remember, most of us need to feel its confirmed validity being acknowledged down, socially, to us in order, in turn, to admit its validity down further, socially, to others.
4. Perhaps the following is the most dangerous fallacy regarding the relationship between freedom and equality. It is much used for social exploitation. It is the assertion that freedom, our most vocal value, is downright incompatible with the belief in human equality that fosters respect and cooperation. This fallacy was strengthened by the fear of Communism.
Question: But doesn't the belief in "equality" mean equal sharing no matter who produces the most? No, that widely voiced assertion has come from two sources: One, the fact that a few small religious groups practiced such spiritual unity. But that was out of material indifference; not competitive desires. The second source was mere propaganda. In my walking travels though the world, including many Communist countries and Scandinavia, I never encountered one person who did not believe in extra material rewards for extra production. (I got tried of being laughed at for asking.)
The facts, as I find them, that refute those false negatives are these: (1) Jefferson did not dream up the idea of human equality as many Americans believe. He was a student of the Scottish enlightenment in which Francis Hutcheson established the meaning of equality as the equally felt value in each right to life. (2) Next, the French Revolution saw "liberty" as not only compatible with equality but also with fraternity.
License in Freedom's Name. The reason you need to know these arguments against the idea that freedom is incompatible with, and superior to, human equality, is this: Usually, I did not encounter it as a philosophical argument, but rather as a political one cited loudly to justify not freedom but rather license and exploitation of the weak, especially economically. It was used against the peoples of the Third World quite often, and it enraged them.
ITEM #7. Human Equality and Economic Freedom
There was a second strong ideological fallacy that was a favorite of the overseas ugly Americans and the local "robber barons." They used the fallacy to oppose my training of the common-folk Americans that all governments (ruling classes) should be more considerate of their own hard- working suffering peasants. We needed to foster that American democratic ideal in order to help enlist the peasants' opposition to communism and to encourage their friendship toward us Americans -- maybe even to hide us or protect us, at times, from the bad guys.
The Meaning of a Free Economy. This fallacy says that our non-Communist government is an entirely "free economy." The would-be exploiters would not even admit that corporate welfare, taxes, tariffs, interest-rates, or the creation of money by the government represented human control over the economy and therefore over the way wealth is distributed to a degree..
That idea, still fostered in America, results in placing the upper part of the economic system above the value of human life, itself. How so?
The falsely tagged "free-economy" rests on the proposition that so many unemployed persons are needed at its base. This use of unemployed human beings for an economy's base I surmise violates one of philosophy's most respected principles: Kant's categorical imperative against using people for means toward other ends -- other people's wealth in this case.
ITEM #8. Our Small-Group Social Nature
Natural Base for Racism. The most constantly troublesome sub-value in human nature is our small-group nature. It constitutes a natural base for racism and all ethnocentrism. This means, unlike we have believed, we do not have to be taught to hate; we are almost there by nature by being, emotionally, small-group beings. It is equally accurate to say that we have to be educated to rise above our small-group nature in order not to become ethnocentric or racist.
In other words, we also have to be taught not to hate. And remember, this requires good emotional development. Be careful there. That does not mean through the heavy-handed touch- feel approach once tried with disastrous results in the military. It means through good stories of courage and enlightenment whose intellectual content carry emotional impact toward the additional happiness of being able to adventure beyond the protective apron-strings of one's own race or class.
The up-side of admitting our small-group nature includes two facts: (1) When you encounter racists, you are dealing not so much with people who have become deeply unchangeably bad. They are persons who are bad (life destructive) more so out of lack of good moral education; our fault, as educators. So, that can be fixed through good moral and factual education. One of the most hard-core racists I ever met (one who invited me outside to fight, in Vietnam) became one of the strongest anti-racists educators in the programs. Why did he change?
I agreed to fight him in front of the class only if he would, first, hear me out through the week of lessons. He was a huge tough C.B. (Navy construction specialist). At the end of the week, he told the class that he could go back to Louisiana and start teaching some "good sense, the dual life- value that includes everybody in." (He was about twice my size, and half my age. So, I did some careful teaching that week.)
Here is that second virtue of admitting our small-group nature: It was, to me, the most startling discovery in this endless Cold-War study of racism/elitism. When you encounter a person who is (a) not one of our few truly dangerous or oppressive racists or elitists (only perhaps a 10% to 15% group), and (b) also not even still one of our average, local culture-bound Americans (the huge, perhaps 75% to 80% of us), in this third unusual high-type person, you have encountered one of the moral giants that the wiser old GIs call "something else." These fully enlightened ones, are truly the moral giants of this still primitive earth. They are people who have somehow, always quietly, started the exploration of the civilized-universe of the future. From the few elders in the coffee houses of France, Greece, Turkey, and Korea who have tried to describe this unusual, humble but strong, personality, it has reminded me of the role played by Tyrone Power in the movie, The Razor's Edge. I keep meaning to read the book.
ITEM #9. Artistic Education in Necessary Support of Moral Education
(This is not about art for art's sake; it is about development of the artistic brain for the sake of moral-character building.)
Academic Grade-Improvement and Confidence. The "mother lode" for confidence-raising in academics comes from a still little-known magic-like ability in the so-called artistic brain. That ability is to improve thinking and memory skills through imagery.
We taught this skill to our "hopeless dropouts" as apart of the daily curriculum. After a few months, we invited some college professors to our store-front school for demonstration of our holistic approach to education. We played party-games between the visiting professors and the dropouts. The professors chose the academic topics for some academic learning-speed contests: the periodic tables of chemistry, events with dates for a world-history framework, vocabulary words, et cetera.
After every "poor dumb dropout" in the school clobbered every visiting teacher, no one ever again persuaded those children that they were not smart.
Following is a news item on that school from one of the highly respected news reporters on the San Diego Union staff, March 2, 1964.
INDIAN TEACHERS FIND HOPE HERE
Martha Many Grey Horses' eyes sparkled yesterday as she watched a group of former...school dropouts perform educational tasks that would have made any teacher proud.
"This is what we need," she said.
They believe they have their answer at the National University's (the Humphrey's) school for dropouts.... "We have searched through many populations from India to Africa to find ways of addressing the problems...but found none until we came here...."
Students stepped forward to memorize a list of 21 disassociated objects called out by the audience and they repeated them without error.... (Try it.)
"This program teaches respect, it teaches confidence, gentility, enhancing life, and prosperity. It teaches how to live the good life with personal values. It is very good," she said.
(The Humphreys won the San Diego County's outstanding awards in both education and corrections for their schools. They then accepted the challenge to teach the system in Canada, for the Indian children. Despite the crushing opposition encountered there to school reform and to American school reformers in Canada, that program was evaluated, officially, as "the educational breakthrough of the decade...in Canada.")
ITEM #10. THE BIG LEAGUES OF LEADERSHIP AND THE BRAIN-SCOURGE OF BIGOTRY
After you have a handle on holistic education, in general, you must turn your attention back to the human inclination toward the small-group. Our ears, eyes, and voice boxes are most suitable for the small group. We are not herd animals. In large groups, we still tend to bunch-off into small groups of seven or fewer persons. (Check it out in any large standing crowd where there is not a front-stage attraction.)
Also for a million years of rural tribal existence, survival probably depended or strong allegiance to the local in-group and to strict obedience to the family and clan leaders.
Here, recall, is the downside of that. "Small groupism" converts too easily into narrow-minded racism and elitism. Hence, the ancient small-group characteristic that was probably helpful for all the isolated human groups (and thereby, the species) has long outlived its primitive usefulness. It has become a life-destructive, rather than a life-sustaining, forces. So, how do we now manage its hurtful expressions in racism and ethnocentrism?
That is, how do we solve that historic brain scourge?
The Universality of the Brain-Scourge
As a teenager in the Great Depression, I joined the foreign merchant marines before we went into WWII; then, the Marines for the war; then, the forty years of Cold-War struggles. I have been around the world slowly six time and lived for over a year in nine countries plus several months in as many more. This included time in some real jungles inhabited by natives with whispers about head-hunting in their past. No one could tell me how recently.
I did none of that travel for any respectable reason other than as a somewhat irresponsible wanderlust seeking answers to the human devastation of the Great Depression. It started with the excitement of hooking a few freight trains as an adolescent and became an obsession. A real handle on the glimmer of an answer was not forthcoming until Iwo Jima. But the constant travel among friends in low places had to made it clear that the answer to peace was not yet in.
One of the most troublesome lessons from those experiences is this: Except for a very small, maybe 1% who are attracted to opposites, we humans, all over this globe, prefer things that are "the same as back home, the same as us." We prefer people who look like us, talk like us, walk like us, and are like us.
Consequently, after fifty years of experimentation with diversity management, we have found that nothing short of this values-based, holistic education can overcome the brain-scourge of racism, elitism, and ethnocentrism. Accomplishing that goal, is the Big Leagues of Leadership for a satisfactory civilization.
That social sickness from the streets of Bombay to Knob Hill in America is similar to the common cold. Its germs are present in all of us from our normal small-groupism. What makes it worse than the common cold, though, are these three features: (1) it is a killer, (2) it is most easily stimulated to violence in many of the (insecure) poorest among us, but (3) its worst carriers are in our leadership circles who denounce it publicly, but exemplify its worst, elitist example. It is truly the killer-scourge of the earth as well as of history. Speaking from the experience of seeing its constant resulting threat of violence and suffering, globally, it is the syphilis of the mind -- the seedbed of most violence.
The New American Strategy for World Peace with Respect and Justice
If we Americans are going to solve our growing divisions and avoid possible national decline, and then, properly fill the leadership role for spreading real democracy -- that respects human equality -- it is best we start with the admission that we are small group beings. Then we can stop saying that we have to stop the racists, bigots, greed mongers, et cetera in order to build a peaceful future for our children.
Those obvious bad guys are not the basic problem. We good guys (with our deep, probably genetic small-group inclinations) are the problem. We are the failing leaders.
How can I say that?
Because when we managed to help those overwhelming masses of culture-shocked, troublesome, small-groupish good guys get themselves turned around to moral respect, physical competence, and artistic good humor, the bad guys shut up and we won the Cold War. It was a test on a global scale.
We now have to turn to ourselves, all of us good guys, again, and commit ourselves to rising to the role of the warrior/knights or humble moral giants and then lead America and the world accordingly. We cannot eliminate our small-groupism which looks terribly like racism and elitism.
As individuals, we have to rise above it IN A POSITIVE PERSONAL PROGRAM and show our fellow citizens and the world how to do that in action and few if any words. Each of us has to educate ourselves up to a point of at least a modicum of our genetic species-preserving nobility. This is safe. If the genetic-like tendency is not there, it will not activate. But if it is there, and does activate, we will feel better for it. So one cannot lose.
The Domestic Scene
As we feel we are ready to help lead, each of us most daring whites (the only race I can speak for) we must start arranging individual visits to, or friendship in, the black, brown, and Oriental- tan families, functions, and churches, if and when we find we are welcome. This, of course, is not as outside gawkers, but as inside guests with up-front admissions that we are trying to rise above the historic brain-scourge and its roots in small-groupism. It is similar to going abroad as our best representatives for overseas scholarships, the Peace Corps, and Marine embassy assignments. The only way is through us individuals at the grassroots. It takes courage even to think about it; doesn't it?
With the best (morally strongest) people -- rich or poor -- from our domestic racial groups, we can start regaining our unity, integration, and national strength in the way, and to the degree, that it works best.
No one, as yet, knows all the details to that answer. We have never before faced the depth of our small-groupism and its easy corruption into racism. I would suggest some primary guidelines:
1. One thing we know now is this: We will not solve it by dumping it on the backs of children. It is a grown-up problem.
2. It will not be served by pretending that there is not a huge cross-race sexual jealousy to contend with. That, too, must be dealt with carefully. I learned that the hard way by losing that huge (two-million-dollar) contract, mentioned above.
3. Second only to the hatred of our Ugly American name-calling in the Cold War, the strongest hatred toward us (voiced from southern Italy to Vietnam) was in our disrespect for "their women." So, as I mentioned, it was not new at Tailhook (which not personally, but culturally, probably showed a greater cultural weakness than Aberdeen. My foreign friends from the stronger cultures understand Aberdeen, but not Tailhook. One from a still tough culture, who loves America, and our Navy, told me that when he first read about it, he lost his breakfast).
4. We cannot guess, or reason, our way through these Big Leagues of Leadership: Race Relations. The Cold-War's proven approach gives us a chance.
Attitude studies for constant experimentation, we found, offers the only possible hope for success as the "end-game" in this Big Leagues of Leadership.
The plan below presents the mental reinforcement needed for a moral attack on the Brain Scourge. (Get professional help with the attitude studies if you can afford it, and be deeply concerned about "tact" else you cause problems rather than solve them with the responses to these studies. Research -- sometimes including thousands of pages of reading and hundreds of miles of walking in the different cultures, seeking an answer, sometimes to one troublesome cultural fact, took most of my time.)
I. Collect a list of prioritized reasons for dislikes from every group toward every other group in a targeted situation or area. Have enlightened representatives of each group conduct the studies with their own people. (Trying to get peace in the Middle East, Bosnia, or Los Angeles without this type grassroots, professional approach among the masses -- rather than still depending on flimsy agreements between leaders -- is like still relying on trial by drowning in legal cases.)
Get answers to these questions.
A. List the main things by order of importance that you dislike about the (blacks, whites, Mexicans, men, women, management, labor, etc.)?
B. List the things you like or admire most.
C. In order to promote better relations with you, personally, what can (they) do or stop doing, if anything?
D. In general do you like or dislike __them____?
E. In general do your friends like or dislike ___ them ___?
II. Through massive research of every kind: in the books, in the streets, from the elders, from every field such as history, literature, and especially geography, get two sets of answers:
A. Those answers that will provide understanding, explain away, or soften the historic lies about, and dislikes toward, those things mentioned above. (Explanatory stories should carry emotional impact.)
The memory device that I used for this exercise was the word RECTIFY. R stands for Find the Reason for the difference; E, for Stop the Exaggerations; C, for Compare it to your own culture to see if there are forgotten similarities; T, for Toughen up, don't let this make you into an ugly hater; I, for get Into their culture if it can be done honorably and see if you can learn to understand the difference, and Y, for You may be the problem if others can understand the difference and you cannot.
B. And collect those answers that might persuade the victims of the disliked things to change those things if possible, if honorable, and especially if those things perpetuate violence (such as questionable stories about who shot first a hundred years ago in Greece, Tennessee, Kansas, or Bosnia).
The World Scene
Overseas, while we have the world's leadership role, leading humanity toward world peace, I ascertain, is easier, there, than here at home. Here, the deepening racial divide and the new "hour- glass" economic-exploitation, together, will likely devolve also into an hour-glass democracy (meaning a dictatorship of the voting upper classes as is found in semi-democracies abroad, and that seems to be building here). Then, the increasingly disgruntled lower-class terrorism is almost inevitable. The new, giant historic factor, there, is that the lower classes now have access to the terroristic weapons. On the street corners, in the bars, and in some militia groups they are already listening attentively to strong political agitation including good words about the unibomber's thinking.
However, overseas, I found that our young military personnel are willing, able, and eager to serve the cause of peace with justice. And that produced exponential results even against the thousand-year-old ethnic hatreds (and lies).
Despite the braggadocio "killer-commando" self-image of a few, vocal, sadistic military personnel, the overwhelming numbers, according to my studies and testing from the podium, want to be warrior/knights. We educators have failed those still solid young Americans; not deliberately, of course, but because of our ignorance of the universal values. Neglected, they cause violence; well taught, they bring peace.
Even with the reduced number of soldiers stationed abroad, but well diffused around the globe, with proper moral/physical education, they can win-over, and help, the world's people who are hungry for, but cynical about, peace with justice. They can (1) assist the people (in locally desired ways as our Marine CAPs often did in Vietnam with medicine), (2) win over the children (which calls for the arts-for-fun involvement), and (3) with any high-type leadership, they can exercise the self-control against sexual misuse of poor women (as our CAP Marines did). If that, alone, happens, the combined tragedies of the Navy's Tailhook, the Army's Aberdeen, and the Marines' Okinawa will have their partially redeeming aftermath.
There would be these two additional global constructive results, among other lesser ones:
First, no dictator could ever get the people there to fight against us, again, and second, no war- crimes leader could ever hide from us again without their people, our friends, telling us where that rascal is hiding.
At Home for Abroad
Our minority neighborhoods and schools provide excellent opportunities for practice by our GIs for this winning, pacifying worldwide military strategy. Those men and women who cannot rise to the warrior/knight role cannot be allowed to stay in our new modern military. Each human life is too valuable to tolerate the arming of persons who are not, in their guts, the protector/defenders of life. Females, being the better-half, morally (according to my global observations), of this young human species can help us mightily in this role. (The best-kept secret of our Vietnam fiasco was this: The second strongest force that defeated us in Vietnam, second only to our general Ugly Americanism, was the Vietcong women. They did so through their intelligence system that exploited our lack of sexual discipline. Putting it nicely, they loved us into that defeat as a trade- off for spying and military intelligence. Our weakness morally, not militarily, is what allowed the insurgency from the North. The Vietcong knew every coming American military action, every vulnerable ammo-dump, and many of our individual family problems back home.)
Humankind's Highest Calling
We should put some money -- a lot of money -- into extra pay for those superior human resources -- our new warrior/knight soldiers -- for democratic peace. If these Cold-War findings are sound, then life is humankind's only basic, objective value. Hence, those men and women who agree to risk, and if necessary, give, their lives so others and democracy can live, are in life's highest calling.
Consequently, when any one of them is killed or maimed, his family or hers must be recognized, with more than lip-service, for the heroic role it represents on this new stage of human history. The robber-barons have had their century at the top of our social status. And look where it has taken us regarding the opening pages of this report. Now, it is time to place the real heroes and heroines up there at the top.
These Cold-War findings suggest America's possible pathway to eternal greatness through the first real leaders of peace with justice. As Kilroy might have said, There is a tide in the affairs of leading nations, and ours is now.
Appendix I
THE RELIGIOUS CONNECTIONS
Supporting Wisdom of Religious Insights for this Earthly Science of Moral/Ethical Values
This, obviously, is not a religious document. But teaching secular (non-religious) morality is highly spiritual. Consequently, religious questions are inevitable. And for me, as a once a year, Easter, Christian, I encountered some mind-boggling facts related to the stunning scientific vision of our formally uneducated ancient religious men. You may need them for discussions. I do on occasions.
Human Nature: Good or Bad?
How about the argument between different religions over whether human nature isbasically bad or good in a religious sense?
The scientific findings seem to be fairly clear. A human child similar to some animals, if fed, but left untouched and not educated by others, will become a bad (abnormal) actor indeed, and sick. To become a normal human being by any clinical definition, we humans need nurturing including even physical touching.
So, that particular issue of whether we humans are basically good or bad depends on where you start with the measurement of the human being's basic nature, before or after minimally necessary nurturing. With none, the "bads" seem to have it.
Now, second, according to my considerable personal religious conditioning as a child, this scientific species-sustaining values-activation is far short of the type faith ones needs to get to heaven. This earthy ethical morality involves only our horizontal spiritual relationships between one another. Religions are more concerned with our vertical spiritual relationships according to my early, religious experiences in the Bible belt.
Christ's Strongest Dictates for Earthly Human Relations
Some of Christ's commands for our earthly relationships, you know, have sounded a bit "far out" even to most Christians: "Turn the other cheek," and "Love your enemy," for examples. Surprising to many, agreement with those "far out" religious dictates are also unavoidably derived from the Dual Life-Value species-preserving value as I observed it in action. (During a discussion of this comparison in Korea, a wide-eyed young GI assistant commented, to the special amusement of the local chaplains, It is as if Christ had divine insights.)
The Old Testament's Eye for an Eye (?)
How about the Old Testament, with its "eye for an eye," and other statements of less than Christ-like generosity?
The crucial material in the Old Testament for comparison with the Dual Life-Value is right in the beginning in Genesis, with Cain and Able. Cain eventually answers his own key question, Am I my brother's keeper?
In some Greek and English translations, that answer from Cain, himself, is misleading or uncertain. He says he has found that he could not bear his punishment (from outside) which was social ostracism. However, now we have learned from Bill Moyer's discussion of Genesis, that Cain actually said, according to the original Hebrew, that I cannot bear my sin, my iniquity. That is an internal natural law penalty consistent with what I saw in the operation of human nature in combat. (Genesis 4:13)
Jeremiah 31:33 says this: "saith the Lord, I will put My law in their inward parts, and in their heart will I write it...." That means to me that the Bible says that the moral laws written in the Old Testament are also registered in human nature.
Secular Love for Your Enemy (?)
Referred to above, I ordered my few teenage enlisted Marines, at a deadly risk to us all, to accept the surrender of the Japanese prisoner rather than shoot him as he came out of a cave. (The risk was worth it for possible information that I did get about the caves out front.) After the men's initial anger, they began to view themselves as "better men" for having saved the man. One of them observed in a discussion with me that "I am amazed to know that Christ was right about loving your enemy. It had been bothering me thinking that He was stupid."
On another occasion, I encountered one four-man team of teenage Marines holding a high point. They proudly showed me the four stockings full of gold teeth that they had tromped from the mouths of dead Japanese. I confiscated the loots, told the men it was an atrocity, but that I would not have time to deal with it if they could throw the booties all he way over into the ocean and promise to do it no more.
They became sullen, but crawled out far enough on a chancy crawl to make sure they could made the throw. They did. They whispered a moment, on their stomachs, heads together there in the sand, and then came crawling back. I unsnapped my 45 holster-cover and waited to see if there was to be a confrontation with me as a "gook lover." I thought I heard the grumbled term as they had crawled away. And there had been a lot of gold in those stockings.
When they got back, one was crying. One thanked me on behalf of the others saying that they were all "pleased" that I had stopped them. They asked me why two previous lieutenants had not said anything.
Some "mean dogs," these American boys of ours. That term is an insult and exactly the wrong path for our nation. It can only lead to a faster Roman-type decadence. Besides, there is a better, safer way for the modern necessary peacemaking that is now baffling our military.
The military chaplains always helped me with these military secular programs. They ran the two outstanding efforts for me, late, in Vietnam. A chaplain, however, destroyed that message from Admiral Zumwalt that recommended this program for worldwide use all those years ago. He purloined it from the Naval Annex mail so the Chief of Naval Operations never received it. I traced the man down (too many) months later after we had lost the war. I promised to let him off if he would tell me his motive for his dangerous interference with the mails. He said simply that the Christian ideological approach had not worked, so none would. I didn't fully understand, but I left it there. I don't think he understood either. (He had left the pulpit.)
WE HAVE DUTIES TO OTHERS
AND DUTIES TO OURSELVES;
AND WE CAN SHIRK NEITHER.THEODORE ROOSEVELT, 1905