Those not involved in such contracts are, by definition, not citizens, and are neither obliged to treat others with the empathy of petition (to follow the laws of that institution) nor can they be guarded by such from harm, because they have chosen by exclusion to live in an anarchic state apart from social man. These men will not last long, either in death or resignation to the system at large, for a man not interested in his own social cultivation is in fact, by the very nature of things, no man at all.

Man has found it exceedingly difficult to live permanently in anarchy, for in his natural state he has an innate desire to design social contracts with others to ensure his and their livelihood. The closer one is to his brethren, the more he feels a natural bond to them, and the more a state of anarchy feels contrived and alien to him. At present, the only perpetual anarchy men have been able to achieve is that of the world stage, where each government represents a systemic Leviathan-man composed of all men in his boundaries, and for whom diplomacy and war are both bred from the very human hopes and fears that play out on the individual level as conversation and barbarity (but where one man only has a club to defend his fears against others, the Leviathan has a multitude of clubs, all beating in synchronicity to the drumbeat of collective war.)

In any other sense, fighting at the anarchic, systemic level is no different from fighting in those anarchies we see on the individual level during transitions between governments. This occurs in that murky fog of revolution that leads to riot and tumult when the sense pervades, during a changeover wherein the national flag is not completely in the hands of one leader or the other, that the flag is owned by nothing and therefore ceases for a moment to represent anyone.

This need for contract denotes a feeling of common purpose shared by all men, though they may not understand the contents of such purpose. When order becomes too overbearing, he chases increasingly apparent manifestations of anarchy, but recognizing that anarchy requires no order, and places no demand on self-regulation, man places on himself a wholly new and unnatural demand for order: that of apathy. In the unnatural state of social man apart from the order of social contract, he forces himself to lose the natural state of his own mind; in other words, man in the absence of state takes absence from his own mind.

This contrived apathy (for words such as apathy and anarchy at this point can be used interchangeably,) leads ironically to an empathy with all other men in the same nothing-state. In the very pursuit of their goal apart from each other, the citizens of nowhere find that they share the common bond of nothing, and its familiar discontents of constant fear and want for order. Again familiarized with one another, they awkwardly approach each other in the midst of violence and together sign contracts which place an increasing number of regulations and demands on themselves. This is born from the learned understanding that man has an innate want for order because he recognizes that apart from order he exists in too much fear to pursue worthy goals.

Hobbes and Locke, then, were both only partially correct in their diagnoses of man in the state of nature, but when synthesized paint the whole picture of man. For life of man in the state of nature is not merely, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” as Hobbes suggests; nor is it simply an extension of his God-given rights of “life, liberty and property,” as Locke purports. Instead, man in the state of nature is as complex as man in any other state, carrying on a Hobbesian natural existence only when he has not accomplished what desire was put into him by nature’s God — namely, the creation of social contracts. Hobbesian man is therefore only natural man in a state of psychological regress, a psychopathic entity necessitated by what psychologist Erik Erikson would call the fundamental failure in the [socio-political] formative state of basic trust versus mistrust. This is because, unrecognized by Hobbes, man in the state of nature creates states.

Tens of thousands of protesters swarmed the streets of Tehran and at least two other Iranian cities Friday, audaciously turning an annual rally in support of the Palestinian cause into the first major demonstration against the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in six weeks.

“Not Gaza, not Lebanon, I’ll sacrifice my life for Iran,” chanted the protesters as they stretched out along the capital’s wide boulevards.

This article is just so well-written, and so full of real, personal accounts of the anti-government marches that took place Sept. 18, which was supposed to mark this year’s iteration of an annual rally for the Palestinian cause. The student-led protests questioning the validity of Ahmadinejad’s presidency and the usefulness of anti-Israeli sentiments are even more astounding because they go in the face of three consecutive months of beatings and imprisonment for anybody recognized as sympathetic to their cause. Some of the state police apparently support their cause as well, according to AP, with one officer encouraging an opposition demonstrator, “Come on, don’t be afraid. Be brave. We die once, and this is worth it.”

When ever an event such as this one comes along and allows me to empathize with someone clear across the world, who may not share my heritage or skin color or religion, it reminds me how silly all these manufactured borders are which separate our common humanity. Absolutely a must-read.

I wish my Iranian brethren the best in their opposition to an invalid, out-of-touch regime.

I am so incredibly disgusted by the perpetuation of that one relevant sin of a sentient species — what I call “uneducation.”

Hendrik Verwoerd, architect of South African apartheid, would surely be proud to see the vestiges of his Bantu education system thriving in schools wherein children are hungry to learn and teachers behave like children.

Of course, you can’t put all the blame on them as the majority were taught under the Bantu system, which, according to this article, Verwoerd described as being a vital stripping down of knowledge so that black students not learn of “the green pastures of European society in which [they are] not allowed to graze.”

Regardless of justifications and excuses, this is an atrocity and must be solved.

Don’t get me wrong, I know it’s in our nature to eat meat. I have no problem accepting that killing animals for consumption is a part of our human fabric. I don’t subscribe to the belief that all meat is murder and that death isn’t an inevitable part of life, be it through age, disease or the food chain.

In more primitive times, a man fought for his family’s meal. He took a branch and a stone to his potential meal and understood the hunter-hunted dynamic. Sometimes he may have even fallen prey to what he thought would be his capture. Cave drawings from this survival era show a bond between man and animals he hunted that exemplified our ancestors’ respect for this sacred rite. We’ve come a long way since then. Our technology allows for efficient mass-slaughter so that no family has to lose a member in the quest for a day’s meal.

But there is a consequence. Children are raised to consume animals and their byproducts for years before they understand where their meals come from. And by the time they’ve reached such cognizance, they are so well-adapted to the expectation that their meal isn’t a cow, but an unrecognizable red block, neatly wrapped and sold in quantity at their local market, that it hardly matters anyway. We’ve lost the earlier respect for our food that primitive man knew so well.

Of course we all eventually figure out that the red block is only the final part of a process, but it’s easier to ignore the more gruesome aspects of our carnivorous instinct through the guise that civilized society need not concern itself with such matters.

Hence my point: if we really want to consider ourselves civilized, we must recognize that with our technological advances comes the responsibility for a new kind of ethical concern for animal welfare.

I’m not suggesting that farmers blanket cows in down and leave chocolates on their pillows, just that we all recognize a simple fact: we farm our meals like vegetables without recognizing that they are capable of perceiving pain. We shave down our chickens’ bills to make them easier to ground, we suspend our calves in dark boxes to keep their meat tender, we crowd our fish in concrete vats rife with disease and pollution from their own excrement. In the transition from primitive to advanced, we’ve maintained the vestige of barbarity.

I’m no animal-lover; I’m a proud egalitarian. But in my exaltation of man above beast, I think its impossible to separate the two when our actions, in the face of our advanced understanding of an animal’s perception of pain, are so barbaric. When we know that we are causing prolonged and unnecessary suffering in the process of our normative predatory function, we are no longer hunting but instead consenting to a culture of cruelty.

What’s more disturbing than the price tag of war are the virtues we forsake to afford it. In the so-called War on Terror, the American people are expected to believe that a forced, relentless presence in a country which does not wish to host us will set the foundation for peace.

Global military expenditure reached $1.2 trillion in 2006 (the United States is responsible for about half of that spending.)  Meanwhile, 30,000 children die each day due to poverty. Less than one percent of what the world spends every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by the year 2000, but it didn’t happen.

This war is just a continuation of past wars, and continues on into the inevitable, fanning the flames so that they’ll singe at the heels of our children and theirs. Instead of coming closer to peace, it ensures a persistence of slaughter that only evolves as our exponentially increasing global military spending finds grander, more elaborate ways to kill each other off.

Our defense model has to be restructured if we want to competently fight the hostility and resentment that is at the root of all terror. Instead of a foreign policy which threatens to crush our enemies, we could maneuver ourselves into a position of fostering positive relationships that could potentially diffuse powder keg countries interested in our continuing aid.

Case-in-point: the approximate price of a B-2 bomber is $2 billion. If we produced just three less of these war planes per year, we could double the entire world’s contributions to basic education.

Instead of supplying their armies with weapons and training, we could supply countries vulnerable to insurgencies with increased education and the provision of basic needs. Less hungry, less thirsty, and more educated, a people might become less anxious for a fight and more inclined to diplomacy.

I’m fresh out of the military and entering this strange, familiar world where I’m coming back into poverty like amnesiacs ride bicycles. I’ve come to realize that no matter what I achieve in my life, there’s always going to be a part of me that’s just doing all of this to compensate for my own perceived lacking. When you grow up poor, the word survival takes on new and important meaning (I remember a conversation with my mother when I was 12 in which she told me that she was surviving so that I could have a chance to live when I grew up.)

Capitalist culture demands that we invest ourselves in consumerism. Unfortunately for those at the lower rungs, this means equating one’s self-worth with their bank account balance. There will always be those more introspective nights where the seeds of worthlessness take root and force me to dwell; they are a part of my foundation, cultivated for so long during my childhood in the type of place America tries to pretend doesn’t exist. I can’t help but feel ignored when ever I turn on the television and listen to politicians talking about representing the middle class. It’s always seemed to me like they skipped over a few economic brackets to get to that talking point. I think that’s one of the major reasons I’m so passionate about politics and public policy.

In this brave new America, with its vast government of unchecked authority and an educational institution in which the systematic dumbing down of the constituency is the aim, the self-taught man has become an enemy of the state.

(Psychoanalysis: When isolated and introverted, men of change are reformists. Given into gritty confidence, those same men adhere to revolutionary principles. It’s a matter of reason versus urgency, gradual versus abrupt change. The extrovert becomes confident in his ability not only to sway man on its right path, but also that he will be able see the full distance of man’s new path within the course of his own life.)