“Oneness”

MY NATION IS THE WORLD,

AND MY NATIONALITY IS WORLDLY
Anthony St. John

Of the definitions of “citizenship,” in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary

(Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition; Springfield,
Massachusetts, 1994) “the quality of an individual’s response to membership
in a community,” is the most apropos for this essay.

Most people wish to belong. We are social creatures and we wish to share
with others our experiences, beliefs, and opinions. It would be a gross
exaggeration to think that we can be mirror images of one and other, or that
it is possible to achieve a lasting peace among all peoples—some
8,000,000,000 at this writing—all of us holding hands attempting to be
content together.

Yet in a real sense that is exactly what we, somehow, may have to manage in
order to save ourselves and those who share a place with us on this planet.
We must find a “Oneness” that enables us to cooperate and find for
ourselves what is best for all of us and not just for a small,
authoritarian/privileged cult belonging to the whole of us. This will not be
easy; but, there is hope that it can be done. We must transcend what is today
commonly referred to as “politics” simply because political theorists
throughout the world are very much ineffective and self-centered—most
of them oblivious to the goings-on not only surrounding them, but those
beyond their own selves.

Throughout History property has been a symbol of wealth and power. Wars
have been fought over and again to obtain the material possessions of
others usually those existing next to us. Fences never were a guarantee that
our neighbors would be good to us and we good to them. Being walled up is
too difficult because so many people occupy our major planet. Experts say
that the Earth can sustain 10,000,000,000 inhabitants—not very many more.
Therefore, it is important to find a way for people to be owners of their
possessions yet at the same time make them realize that they cannot own
the whole world—even try to—simply because every living person is
entitled to live in this world, has responsibilities towards it, and the best for
all of us would be to come together, at least in this civic sense, attempting to
do what all of us are expected to do with a sense of “Oneness” for all of us.

“Oneness” means, also, the idea that we all share common basic human
characteristics such as eating, labor, sleeping, and sexuality. These make us
equal even though our social, religious, political, and economic affiliations
are enormously varied. “Oneness” is not an activity to make all of us
coequal. Rather, it is an endeavor to get us to unite, for all our benefit, so
that we are prepared, as a whole, to confront any potential disaster that
affects the entire world’s population. It is a plan B that makes us fit to face
together whatever possible dangers that make our biosphere vulnerable.
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” and it is best to do all that we can to
cooperate when forced to survive when and if it is indispensable to do so.
Every world citizen would be in agreement with this concept. It is an
instinct we all share.

I experienced this “Oneness” when I served in the Vietnam “War.” When I

soldiered in Vietnam (1967-1968) I met many Black soldiers from all over
the United States. Also, there were many White soldiers from different parts
of the huge United States. Unfortunately, many Blacks told me that they had
been given a choice, “jail or Vietnam,” for petty crimes they had committed.
Often the numbers of Blacks disproportionately outnumbered the Whites—
in an infantry company, on an average consisting of 120-125 men, 25-30% of
the “grunts” were Black although their “back home” population consisted of
12% of the United States population.

Yet, amongst us I never once saw any recrimination towards the Black
soldiers. We were in a state of “Oneness” because we knew we had to
depend on each other to overcome the threat of injury or death on the part
of the enemy’s determination to justly rid us from their country. Blacks and
Whites usually made friends among themselves. Even during a contact with
the enemy, if a soldier was injured, Black or White medics gave first aid to
White or Black soldiers. Many Black and White veterans, after the Vietnam
“War” met to jaw about their experiences on the Vietnam battlefield sharing
in that “Oneness” they had experienced as human beings—color had no
consequences for them.

Human beings come together to help each other during inundations,

hurricanes, and other types of emergency situations expressing their
instinctual will to live and help others to do the same. We cannot depend
any longer on the help of governmental entities, and it is easy to see
political personnel fleeing from the scene to save themselves during a
tragedy that Nature has blighted us with. If your community was beset with
some kind of tragedy, who would you depend on more? Your neighbors or
your politicians?

Today, most governmental authorities think of only their own affairs—

without any reference to a worldly perspective. They do not perceive beyond
their own inevitabilities that are often greedy and corrupt. They have no
interest in the exigencies of our planet. One once hope, the United Nations,
appears to be hopeless now, and is more troubled with its internal affairs
than it is in carrying out its mandate to unite all nations for the common
good of all. Its members are constantly called upon to resolve troubles—in
various parts of the world—mostly without success. “The Policeman of the
World,” the DisUnited States, has caused more hatred in this world for
others and itself than it has encouraged justice, hope, and brotherly love.
We have no choice but to rely upon ourselves.
“Globalization” was once thought to be a solution to this difficulty, yet it was
a fruitless attempt to create a “level playing ground” for all economies
throughout the world. Part of the problem was to make all nations
capitalistic models that would follow the examples of the so-called
“developed” nations exactly where today capitalism is suffering its greatest
setbacks perhaps in its 400-year-old history. The dichotomy (employer-
employee) of the “developing” nations, already knowledgeable about
capitalism—having been duped by it for centuries—were wise to the
“tricks” of this method of conducting commercial enterprise. When
“developing” nations were introduced to the phenomena of “globalization,”
they took to stealing and corruption just as they had learned from the
economic “biggies” who were experts at ripping them off for centuries. As
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) had once said: “The success of
capitalism is its ruin.” Too many laissez-faire economists spoil the broth.

When are we going to learn? It is not the economy. It is the human being. It
is unquestionably imprudent to think otherwise. Ever since 1601 when the
English East India Company dispatched its first outing to the New World in
search of ill-gotten gains—thus “inventing” capitalism—there has been a
knee-jerk reaction to the accumulation of wealth as if it were some
sanctified system, for the good of all, at the expense of workers sweating to
accrue it for their persons in charge, and an arrangement, while not perfect,
that is the best of all those available. Time and time again this pact has
systematically degenerated into chaos and has caused immeasurable misery
for hundreds of millions of people hoping to receive some “small change”
from this frequently greedy and corrupt, obviously flawed, unsigned treaty
coordinated between employee and employer—but by the employer.
Economic dodos even study these cycles of stupidity pontificating, with
colored pie charts, and factitious, “horoscopic” mathematical theorems on
how it is just and normal that fractures in the technique of administering an
economy and financing its stock market are a matter of historically
recurring routine. Will someone please tell me when this 400-year-old ruse
used deceptively to gain another’s confidence, this swindle, will pass into
oblivion for the good of all of us?
British philosopher, logician, mathematician, and public intellectual,
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) on various British Broadcasting Company
interviews available on YouTube, has offered some ideas for us to be rational
about saving ourselves from disaster: we need a world government, a fair-
and-square distribution of wealth, and we need to curb the overproduction
of the human race. BR was the Third Earl Russell, and throughout his long
life he experienced living in two centuries—two time periods that indelibly
marked our current manners of living. He went to prison for six months for
protesting against the First World War, and with Jean-Paul Sartre, co-shared
the The Anti-Vietnam “War” war tribunal. He is famous, also, for saying that
hope is rational. Bertrand Russell appealed to all formal philosophers to
concentrate more on mass psychology and leave the study of philosophy to
the academics. Since its publication in 1939, The Conquest of Happiness has
been a most precious example of rational thinking, and is constantly being
reprinted. Nevertheless, there is a flash of authoritarianism in his thinking
probably because he was raised as a child during the Victorian reign, and
because he himself was a lord among the British aristocracy earning
privileges the “commons” did not and do not overlap.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), French philosopher, public intellectual,

playwright, novelist, screen writer, and literary critic for the right of humans
to be free especially in his academic teaching and writings (Being and
Nothingness, et alia) was a force in promoting the existential philosophy (We
exist before we are.) Over the course of his life, he became a fierce
protagonist against colonial rule fighting for the idea that we all share a
“Oneness” common to each and every member of the human race.

Both Russell and Sartre were nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature,
but Sartre refused to accept it believing that what he was doing was what he
should and wanted to do. He could see no reason for being rewarded for
this accomplishment. Russell and Sartre started off as academics, but the
twentieth-century’s world wars convinced them to exist the Halls of Ivy and
reach out to help people all over the world to authenticate themselves and
live as “One.” By the time they both had become “popular” writing
antagonists, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) had sledge-hammered to
pieces formal, academic philosophy.

From a scientific perspective, Paul Erlichman (1932- ) and his wife

collaborated on the coming doom that could cause disaster for the world in
their 1968 book, The Population Bomb. They warned about the consequences
of population growth including famine and resource depletion. In 1960, the
world’s population was 3,000,000,000 and today it is 8,000,000,000. The
Erlichmans were somewhat off the mark, but we must admit that an
economic calamity is overtaking our planet, and millions and millions of
people are affected, the resulting chaos might result also in a climatic
“explosion” beyond even the imagination of the biologist Paul Erlichman
and his spouse. Some scientists, members of “industrial ‘democracy’”
themselves have been part in causing damage to this globe that succors us
—to a greater extent than the more thoughtful, non-belligerent-minded
philosophers.

* * *

Perhaps Erich Fromm (1900-1980) offered the best path for us to follow to
reach a way of living together without destroying ourselves and the
environment within which we thrive. In his publication To Have or to Be?
(Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.; New York, N.Y., 1976) he calls for a new
society and describes the characteristics of this novel way of living in
harmony and decries a “technological fascism with a smiling face.” A list of
some of the key proposals of Fromm:

1
A renunciation of the laissez-faire economy
2
The creation of a work atmosphere that is economically satisfying
and emotionally satisfying
3
Workers must feel that they are not dependent upon any bureaucracy
 4
The passage from the supremacy of natural science to that of a social
science
5
Our object should not be to control Nature
6
The elimination of pathological consumerism
7
Production should be aimed at a sane consumerism
8
It is the function of the state to establish the norms for a sane consumerism
9
The tastes of the consumer are those that must determine what is produced
10
The elimination of any technical fascism.
11
An industrial democracy should be sought after
12
An intervention eliminating decentralization on a vast scale must begin
13
The bureaucratic method must not be dominated by statistics
14
The creation of a Supreme Cultural Council, with the responsibility of
advising the government, politicians, and the citizens regarding their access
to precise, honest information
15
Scientific research must be separated from aiding and abetting industrial
greed and the military sectors

Fromm was a keen, rationalistic logician. He did not believe in a

“mathematical” solution to our dilemma—as did Russell. (It has been noted
that Russel concentrated so assiduously on his mathematical studies he
would stop breathing!) No, Fromm was a philosophical psychoanalyst whose
first concern was the state of mind of the human being during these
difficult times were are experiencing. H was a kind and gentle character, and
his writings are never overwrought with an excess of ebullience. He is
convincing and clearly outlines his proposals even asking himself if they are
viable. They are not words of some crusader.

Fromm believes that modern day men and women are being tortured by the
9-5 work style that leaves them exhausted longing for that couch, potato
chips, television, and even a nap before dinner. This so-called industrial
“democracy” has left millions of people robot-like—separated from Nature
and their own selves. Alienated individuals. Organisms who do not think,
who are unable to authentic themselves (Sartre).

Fromm considers that human beings are capable of escaping from their
prisons of conformity brainwashed to the thoughts and desires of their
leaders. Once they have reached an accord beneficial to both sides, all will
be more satisfied with life and they will reap rewards not thought of ever
before. The employer and employee relationship must be based on mutual
esteem and respect. The employee must be felt to be a part of the company
he labors for—not a tool of its requirements to produce more as fast as it is
possible. Some companies in the United States and Sweden have already
experimented with this approach; but, unless many, many more join in on
supporting—for now few have—this unique glide path will never lead to the
“Oneness” needed to save the world and ourselves from possible
obliteration.

CONCLUSION

It is not erroneous to say that at this very moment thousands and

thousands of children throughout the world have been told by their
mothers or fathers to go to their cities’ refuse dumps to scrounge for food
for their family “dinners” that evening. Among the waste, they examine what
is still available to eat or drink, and with some luck they gather enough to
feed their mothers and fathers, their sisters and brothers. It might be said
that the kids might even find a used—but still
working—cellphone/smartphone. They turn it on. Immediately they see a
publicity for a Mercedez-Benz two-seater that intrigues them to own and
possess one. Their friends tell them they are daydreaming, that they will
never have enough money to afford one. Their answer to them is this: “We
don’t need money. We will steal it if necessary!”

Authored by Anthony St. John

26 December MMXXIV
Calenzano, Italy
[email protected]

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