Tag Archives: Books

Excerpt from my upcoming book: ENDING WAR

Who shapes our worldview on war?

Human beings have very specific ideas about what the world is supposed to look like.  Some of these ideas are so ingrained that we never even stop to question them.  Our political systems.  Our geopolitical systems.  Our education systems.  Our social lives.  The way we work.  The way we love.  We accept that the world is the way it is because that is the way it is supposed to be.  But have you ever asked yourself where we get our ideas about what the world is supposed to look like?  Are the systems we have the only possible systems we could have on the planet?  The truth of the matter is that the way the world works today is the result of ideas that come from human beings.  There is nothing to say that these systems are necessarily the best systems or the only possible systems.  Neither can we say that these systems come from God because they seem to contradict everything we know about God’s nature.  Our world is based on a competitive model in which the winner takes all.  This is not the only way that our world could be structured.  We could have a world that is based on co-operation, whereby we see ourselves as being in the same boat, therefore needing to cooperate with each other in order to survive and thrive.  Unfortunately, we have been brainwashed into believing that being competitive is the only way human beings can exist.  From the day we are born, our parents pass on these attitudes to us.  They do their best to prepare us to exist in a competitive world by doing whatever they can to give us a head start.  In this way, they are already telling us that we will need to fight to survive.  When we go to school, it is the same thing.  Our education system is structured in a way that teaches us to always compete with each other.  We are taught to see our fellow students as competition that we need to beat.  We are taught to see ourselves in comparison with others. not as human beings in our own right.  We are taught that we are not good enough unless we are ahead of others.  We are taught that our worth comes from scoring the highest grades and being at the top of the class.   If, God forbid, we do not perform well, then we are taught that we have less value than those who are at the top.  This same attitude extends to the workplace where we are taught that to get ahead, we have to be better than everyone else.  We have to work harder than anyone, produce the best results and do anything to please our bosses.  If need be, we should be willing to step on others or ride on their backs to get ahead.  Outside of the workplace, we are taught to compete with others in society; to buy the latest cars, live in the best houses and wear the most fashionable clothes.  This is done not to live our best lives but to keep up with or outdo our neighbours.  We want our marriages to be picture-perfect and our children to attend the best schools, all so that we feel that we are better than others.

Our world is based on a competitive model in which the winner takes all.  This is not the only way that our world could be structured.  We could have a world that is based on co-operation, whereby we see ourselves as being in the same boat, therefore needing to cooperate with each other in order to survive and thrive. 

I hope you can see where I’m going with this.  We have been brainwashed into believing that life is a competition against others.  Instead of living life in ways that make us happy, we drive ourselves almost to death in order to be better than others.  We live life in comparison to others and in the process, we lose ourselves.  Where does this idea about life come from?  What happened is that over time, we allowed the most aggressive people amongst us to be the ones deciding how the world should be structured.  These people see life only as a competition and they somehow managed to get the rest of us to look at life this way.  They deceived us into looking at life the same way they look at it and into structuring the world in a competitive rather than cooperative way.  The most aggressive people captured our collective psyches and instilled in us the idea that human beings are supposed to compete with each other over scarce resources.  The very idea that the world has scarce resources comes from these same aggressive beings.  Every day we are told that the world is running out of resources to support human beings.  The truth, however, is that we have a distribution problem, whereby the world’s wealth and resources are hoarded by a few, meaning the rest have to do without.  If these resources could be distributed equitably, we would not have people going hungry or living in poverty in certain parts of the world.  The idea that the world has limited resources is a false narrative created by the most aggressive among us who would prefer that no one questioned the fact that they have amongst themselves almost 90% of the world’s wealth.  These are the same people who meet every year at Davos for the World Economic Forum (WEF) and pretend to come up with solutions for the world’s problems.  This is akin to a meeting of wolves trying to solve the problem of sheep getting eaten during the night.   Or as someone once said, it is like attending a fire fighters conference where no one is allowed to talk about water.  It is no surprise therefore that the kind of solutions these people come up with include dystopian scenarios in which we own nothing, have no privacy and are happy about it.  This is simply an expression of their disdain for humanity, that they could come up with such ideas and seriously put them forth as solutions to the world’s problems.

When it comes to war, our worldview is equally shaped by aggressive people holding leadership positions in policy making institutions.   How else do you explain the fact that even though most people do not want to go to war and are innately anti-war, we continue having wars on the planet?  How do you explain the fact that even though most of humanity is horrified by the idea of nuclear war, we seem to be marching closer and closer to a nuclear confrontation between nuclear-armed nations?  The people driving the agenda are lost in a delusional worldview in which having the most powerful and destructive weapons equals being the most powerful nation on earth.  These lunatics who have zero ability to reason intelligently are the ones driving the agenda and they keep taking us closer and closer to annihilation.  It is no exaggeration to say that the people leading our world are mentally ill in the literal sense of the word.  They are psychopaths and narcissists who should be locked up in mental health institutions or at the very least under psychiatric care, not the ones making the most important decisions on earth.  How humanity allowed such a situation to exist is something we will have to grapple with for a long time as we start waking up to the reality of our situation. 

The people driving the agenda are lost in a delusional worldview in which having the most powerful and destructive weapons equals being the most powerful nation on earth. 

The ideas we hold about war come from the war industry which is run by the most aggressive, war-like people on earth.  The same primitive ideas our forefathers held about fighting for land and resources are still held by these people today, at a time when we should long ago have transcended such ideas.  The days of fighting others for land and resources should by now be part of our forgotten history, together with things like making fire from sticks.  In our modern world, no one should be thinking about stealing land and resources, and in all fairness, most people on earth don’t think like this.  But those who run the global agenda still do.  They are like toddlers in adult bodies, fighting each other over toys.  We can therefore conclude that the ones running the world have the lowest consciousness among humanity.  These people are driven by greed for power and profits, the same way wild animals are driven by the urge to kill prey for food.  Instead of using their God-given intelligence to temper this desire with reason, they foolishly follow their lower instincts and they drag the rest of humanity along with them.  They spread their ideologies through think-tanks that push their aggressive ideas to the rest of the world.  They lobby politicians to pass laws and policies that favour their war-mongering.  They buy up the mainstream media and use it as a conduit for their narratives.  And they brainwash us through the entertainment industry that glorifies war and violence.  This, in a nutshell, is how they infect the entire human race with their primitive worldview.

5 Classical Novels to Read in Your Lifetime

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Have you ever heard the expression ‘Leo Tolstoy is the author everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read’?  There’s a very good reason for that.  Leo Tolstoy’s books such as Anna Karenina or the equally popular War and Peace can seem really daunting when you consider just how thick they are.  I’m talking 1000 pages or more.  But I assure you it is well worth every minute you will spend reading and chances are by the time you are done you will be left craving for more. 

Anna Karenina is my all-time favorite book by far.  I loved it so much I simply didn’t want it to end.  The closer I got to the end of the book, the more anxious I felt because I just wanted it to go on forever.  Leo Tolstoy is quite simply in a class of his own – he cannot be compared with any other author, at least not in my books.  His writing is simple yet engaging, his characters so compelling that you are left wondering how he could come up with such interesting characters.  The novel has a myriad of characters, and yet each of them has a well-developed personality that is different and distinct from all the others in the book.  One is left wondering how Tolstoy could keep track of all those characters and their personalities without mixing everything up.  Even characters who only appear briefly are well developed and one can only marvel at Tolstoy’s genius in what he accomplishes in this novel.  The protagonist, Anna Karenina is such a fascinating character that the reader is simply amazed at Tolstoy’s profound understanding of human nature.  Simply put, Leo Tolstoy is a genius and you really have to read this book for yourself to understand what I mean. 

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

I’m a big fun of Jane Austen; I started reading her books in my early twenties and I loved them so much that I eventually read most of her books and I kept copies which I hope my kids are going to read one day.  Pride and Prejudice was the first book I read by Jane Austen and it was the one that made me fall in love with her writing.  You may have heard of the dashing and aloof Mr. Darcy, but did you know that this is a character from Pride and Prejudice?  This book is so well loved that today we have modern movies that have been made based on this book.  To know more about the compelling Mr. Darcy and his romance with one of the five Bennet sisters, go ahead and buy yourself a copy of the book, and maybe you will fall in love with Jane Austen like I did.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

I read Jane Eyre in my younger years and I read it again a few more times after that simply because it was such a fascinating read.  It’s such a dark and terrible tale, but not in a bad way at all.  It’s just that, the topic of madness and old castles and dark nights and people using candles which flicker in the howling wind is so…fascinating.  Welcome to the crazy world of Mr. Rochester and his insane wife who screams at night, much to Jane Eyre’s terror.  I don’t want to spoil this for you, but it’s a captivating story, dark but in an interesting, old English countryside kind of way if you know what I mean.  I’m pretty sure you don’t, so just go ahead and read the book and you will understand what I mean.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

This is an interesting and weird read.  I mean, the plot is so weird yet so captivating that you just keep reading, and reading, all the time wondering how it’s all going to turn out.  It’s a tale of a young man who gets lost in an ideological quagmire which he unwisely decides to test in real life with disastrous consequences.  The book is very well written, with interesting descriptions of how Russian society worked at the time.  It was one of those un-put-downable books for me, and I’m sure it will be for you too.

1984 by George Orwell

The expression ‘Orwellian’ which denotes a brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda, surveillance, disinformation and denial of truth actually comes from George Orwell’s book 1984.  This is the story of a dystopian society in which the government controls everything including people’s thoughts and this is taken to such an extreme that it seems comical and unrealistic at first.  But a closer look at many societies under totalitarian dictatorships will show you that it is not so far-fetched, at least in terms of how far such dictatorships are willing to go in their effort to control their citizens.  The novel seems to be a warning of some sort, probably a warning against accepting unfettered control by a government towards its citizens.  It makes for a very interesting read and the fact that it has political undertones should not put you off because the way it is written is almost like an allegory.  It’s the story of how one man woke up from this nightmare and how that turned out.