Welcome to the home of the Radical Bleeding Heart!
You have questions, I know. Is this something you want to look at? Will you learn anything? Will this matter to you? How can you tell?
First, obviously: Are you a bleeding heart? A sob-sister? A do-gooder? Do you believe in compassion for others rather than contempt for the weak? Do you value peace over war? Kindness over cruelty? If those are your instincts, your sympathies, then you just might belong here.
Second, if you are put off by the word "radical" because you think it means "fanatic," you can relax. Fanatics are passionate idolators. To be radical, at least as the Radical Bleeding Heart is radical, is just to go to the roots of things. That is what radical means. It means to question everything, to accept nothing as certain and nothing as sacred. Fanatics are just the opposite. They are so certain that they possess the absolute and unquestionable truth that they often feel justified in committing the most vile and abominable acts in their quest to convert the world to their "truth."
A questioning radical is careful, cautious, thoughtful, open-minded and pragmatic. Those are the qualities that lead him to question and examine the ideas and assumptions that we are assured are undeniable truths. And that terrifies people. Certainty is comforting and reassuring. To have it taken away is like an earthquake; all the comfortable commonplaces you thought were eternal certainties crumble beneath your feet, and you lose your footing.
But if the assumptions we thought were certainties are in fact lies we can lose even more. If the ground you thought was solid is actually about to give way and plunge you down a cliff, much worse can happen than just anxiety. Our civilization is at precisely such a place now. What is more, the abyss is clear before us, plain and stark to all who are willing to see and accept the truth.
Yet most refuse. It appears that our minds are designed more to assimilate received dogma than to examine facts and evaluate them rationally. Why? If you are interested in the wherefores of human irrationality and what it might mean to order our collective lives rationally, you might want to follow this link.
But the more urgent task is to confront the actual abyss that confronts us this moment and dig beneath the clay obscuring those facts that might enable us to save our civilization. What are those hidden realities?
