Isilion

While reading an entry in The Arthurian Encyclopedia about a poem called Alliterative Morte Arthure I came across this:

Though the poem celebrates the heroic virtues of courage against odds, of loyalty to leader and fellows, of desire for fame, the poet appears at the same time to be ambivalent, even ironic (it has been argued), about war in general. Perhaps he is simply displaying the medieval ability to hold conflicting viewpoints in tension without their invalidating each other. (Empasis added)

And I remembered I read once the genius is the ability to hold two mutually exclusive thoughts in your mind at one time. I make no pretense at genius, but I will allow I might be a bit medieval. I grew up in the Sixties and early Seventies. Like most of my generation at some point, I considered myself some sort of happy revolutionary. We were going to create a world full of peace and love where everyone and everything would be free. Again like most of my generation, with the passage of time those dreams and visions faded as reality set in.

One of the things that managed to stick was my sense of myself as an environmentalist. I have a sense of the Earth as a living thing comprised of all that is alive and the places where life exists.

All political systems are dependent upon the generation of mass-minded thinking, to persuade each of us to lose our sense of individuality and responsibility in the collective herd. We condition our minds to accept identities for ourselves, to think of ourselves not as self-directed, self-responsible beings, but as members of various groups, whose interests are not only mutually exclusive, but antagonistic. Whether we identify ourselves by race, religion, nationality, lifestyle, ideology, economic interests, gender, geography, or any other category, we put ourselves into a state of conflict with others. Political systems then promise to protect us from “them,” and most of us are too dull to recognize that our alleged “protectors” are the very ones who induced us to play the games that now threaten us! If you haven’t yet figured out that the events of 9/11 and their aftermath are but extensions of the decades-old politicogenic conflicts manufactured by political systems, then you have been watching too much cable television!

http://www.lewrockwell.com/ozymandias/

http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer-arch.html