on the road

Once I had the chance to venture westward out of the bewilderness of southern New Jersey, I came to realize that there was a tangible difference between in disposition with the people in hospitable Albuquerque, NM.

One day a friend from the school I was attending, his brother and I crossed the Rio Grande as well as the roadrunner inhabited tumble weed plains that lie between us and the Sandia Mountains, a range in the Rockies. The mountains were compelling, bearing a sublime grandeur when viewed from afar, which is transformed into a rugged yet inviting terrain in the foothills. Off we went, and inspired by the natural surroundings and invigorated by the mountain air, in a state of rambunctious exuberance to see that greener grass (or bronzer sand) on the other side, I led the entourage over one boulder after another in a relentless charge to the top, until reaching a an impassible agglomeration of natural obstructions that would have given pause to a mountain lion, at which point a somewhat reflective Michael made an adage-like pronouncement to the effect that “sometimes you have to go backtrack down the mountain a bit before you can make your way up to the top”. It was something of an epiphany—don’t always have to go it the hard way--and it dawned on me that my new friends knew the mountains well, and I was visiting from the flatlands. At any rate, we paused to take in the vista, and catch our breath before resuming the quest for a more welcoming route up among the bolder, crevices, and desert flora.

That was a memorable moment of respite, but it wasn’t long before I was launched again into a relentless charge to the top, , where I was somehow sure a better vantage point awaited my arrival.

Once again I’ve arrived at an impassible juncture, so to speak. That is to say, I intend to convey certain aspects relating to matters at hand here in the ancient capital city Kyoto, which relate to foreigners I’ve met here whose incongruent actions lead me to believe that they may be members of secret societies. However, in order to make the issues I am trying to flesh out more readily apparent and intelligible, it appears that I should first backtrack a bit down the mountain, and throw a little light on the path that leads up to the high ground. I propose to do by examining two public policy actions that have had a major impact on American society, and which were implemented by two individuals holding public office who were publically known to be members of secret societies.

The aforementioned individuals had come to hold the office of the presidency of the United States. In my evaluation, both (ab)used their position in public office to implement policies that promoted a private agenda at the expense of the public interest, as defined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If my evaluation is accurate, there is a very high probability that their action could be construed to violate of the oath of office the individuals in question took upon assuming said office.

I will examine the so-called “Faith-based initiatives” promoted by GW Bush, and the perhaps even more taboo, though increasingly problematic topic of the recognition of the explicitly “Jewish” state of Israel by Harry Truman. It would seem that these secret society types have embraced a strategy of using religion as a tool to be employed in a divide and conquer strategy, deploying it both targeting the subjectivity of the individual, and the collectiveness of society. Anything relating to the issue of ‘Religion and the State’ with respect to the United States, as it were, must preliminarily offer an interpretation of James Madison’s most prominent contribution to the Constitution: the First Amendment.

These issues fall within the continuum of scholarly work I have been intermittently pursuing on the subject of ‘Modernity and Identity’, in a conceptual framework I starting laying out approximately 20 years ago.

When dealing with secret societies and the like there is inevitably a dimension of conspiracy, as that is the reason that current incarnations of secret societies exist, for the most part. They generally do not exist for mutual protection against an oppressive illegitimate authority, but either to acquire public authority and use it to advance their private interests, or to subvert public authority so that it cannot function to check their depredations. Public authority in a democracy is the democratic decision making process.

One obvious recent manifestation of the first of these strategies are the deregulation of the finance industry promoted by lobbyists for the financial industry employing illegitimate means, as well as individuals from financial firms recruited into administrations eager to make it look like they were on the ball with the economy. People have been enticed into voting for these people even though they didn’t understand one concrete aspect of the economic prophecies being put out by this self-serving group of people.

The second strategy is rather more complicated to thresh out, but I intend to address that strategy in the course of sketching a general outline of a problem that has come into focus of secret societies attempting to subvert the open society that our forebears built, and we inherited.

This blog will present a cursory framework dispersed among chapters following a course of development in a historical continuum. The theoretical framework and chapters are to form the basis of a more fully developed theoretical treatise (or other type(s) of work(s)) in the not-too-distant future. This is copyrighted material, with all rights reserved.

The fundamental issues I address were first addressed formally and collectively by the Ancient Greeks. So to start with, I’m going to outline aspects of the civilization cultivated by the ancient Greeks which, though fundamental to informing Western civilization that eventually succeeded it, have become obscured. There is no doubting that the road to modernity starts in Ancient Greece.

The genius of the Ancient Greeks is manifold, and inspired. The achievements made before the demise of that loosely federated group of city states served as the foundation upon which a distinct form of civilization, Western Civilization, as we know it today, was to be built. What was it that set the Ancient Greeks off on a new path? In the Ancient World, religion served as a predominant organizational principle around which societies were organized, and that probably hadn’t changed much since primitive times. Though humankind gradually had developed codes of conduct, such as that of Hammurabi, Confucius, the social systems as a whole continued to be premised on intangible principles, and rule by decree under divine-right monarch.