We No Longer Recognize the Village

It Must Be Burnt Down

Just to feel its warmth. Just to feel anything.

Monarchism, Minarchism, Anarchism, Fascism, Libertarianism, Socialism, Marxism, Feudalism, Leninism, Maoism, Liberalism, Conservatism, Feminism; -isms, -isms, -isms.

Words, words, words, words that kill.

Words do deeds the heat-oppressed brain can only form in perchanced dreams.

All the present world is dead, formed from the corpse of the past. The future is new-and-still born, changing and forming before our very eyes. What paths to take, what solutions may yet form are unknown to us, for they will not and can not follow the model of the past.

There exists a tendency in many of the well-read to read the biographies of great men, to uncover how they comported themselves, to make mimicry of their lives and put on a vaudevillian show for the unsuspecting unlearnt peons. Mistakes, all.

There exists no succor in the past. No guidance but that of avoidance: the lesson is not what to do, but what not to do. Old laws and melodies form bittersweet on pierced tongues, forked by new knowledge, new processes, new people. What value is there in our existing temples, in our halls of power, in the statues of the great but ill-remembered memories? No, we will find nothing in the past but torment and tragedy.

Is there anything at all the village can give to us? These present, confined, apportioned structures? To burn them provides a night of singular warmth but a winter of discontent, whereas to live in them is to be warm everlasting. Yet the wood rots. Foul stenches cling to the air. The fields go fallow, the farmer loses his crop, his sons die in war, his daughters sold for food tomorrow. What else remains in the village but collapsed roofs, broken windows, and empty homes? The village cannot be saved. It must be burnt down.

The purifying glow of flames cleanses all before its path. Fire is the essential ingredient, a beautiful tool, a gift of both destruction and creation, everlasting in its potential. For the village must be burnt for warmth but in that empty field, new possibilities, infinite in scope, appear. It takes imagination, bravery, to approach the broken, dilapidated village with a torch and not a knapsack, the latter merely hoping to brave out the winter amidst the broken shacks, praying for reform, praying for an easy fix. But no fix is coming. It is in the sinews of the brave and imaginative that a new village can be built.

And it must be built. 249 years have passed since our initial Declaration of Independence, 236 since our Constitution, and 160 since our Civil War. Our village, our nation, has long atrophied. What merits, what truths our lands once held our long gone. Our people are long gone, their bodies malformed into shallow alienated husks, barely minded or kept. Shall we bring them the waters of liberalism? The guiding light of some monarchism, some socialism, some other succor? No.

The village must be burnt.

Whatever we were, whatever we had, we must begin anew; a great national rebirth, a 5th Great Awakening, albeit this one civic, not religious. We must all come together in the toil to tear down what came before, so that we can then build anew: a new society, a new culture, a new government, a new peoples; a new village.

How do we get there? We must learn to think beyond the scriptures that form the firmanents of society, of the universe. Even essential concepts like T-symmetry and their component thermodynamics must be looked at with derision. We must grow beyond what confines us and build a village without bounds, beyond time, beyond space.

And it will be good.

That is our future: the next ten, ten thousand, ten thousand-thousand years.

We will get there with a first step, a mass rejection of our present society. We will elect, choose, as the body politic, a new form of society; we will burnt it all down, all the villages, from root to stem. In their ashes, new towers will rise across now-empty plains. We will abolish hunger, slavery, violence, and want. And when we have done this, we will spread our messages on a thousand wings to the rest of the world, giving them the everlasting fruit which we have cultivated.

But first! The village must be burnt, for we no longer recognize it.

Pick up a torch then, and join me as we set the old world alight. Let all our yesterdays light fools the way to dusty death. Out, out!