LETTER FOR MR. MORRIS BERMAN

MR. BERMAN:

I liked your last interview as well as your trilogy, the two last books honestly I didn’t like as much though, maybe too political? Any way I found them interesting , but the trilogy really cleared many things for my existence. About your interview I’d love to say the following:

The belief in the new virtue of a citizen is that of one who pursues his self interest and is successful in an opportunistic environment which he reads that way, this archetype systematically turns to be a hero. This leaves to bad reasoning and an illusion that the individual is the basic unity of society that cannot think in terms of community but in the philosophy that a real man does it on his own. This makes high pressure and high stress be thought as fabulous, because it builds the individual who pursues his self interest.

This analogy can be done with the US in relation to the rest of the world, slogans of truth and democracy that subjugate others for a good cause, their cause. US people want to live an illusion with the way they relate with the world, because they live it as individuals. Like father like son… in God we Trust, that’s it. US people trust in God, not in the way others say they see them. So in other words they can’t see themselves as others see them. God is more important than “the other”, and God is an image of an ideal-self that each one must trust before anyone else: the enemy.

That belief can’t see the boomerang effect, because abstract belief is more important than feeling another in presence seeing the whole picture. One narrative it their way to read life, US people (I don’t like to say Americans or north Americans because I am Chilean and Canadian) can’t see themselves from outside, because they are built with the idea that they have the need to take-self-action always tending toward a centre closer as possible to God's salvation, as long as the steps through functioning with others is correctly done (values under way), assuming a role that must be, causing no chance of a pause to feel a sensation more than see, oneself from a margin or circumference.

This sensation could cause a fear that now cannot be even imagined, because the system or “American way of life” shows a fact (you call dominant tradition) that anticipates this sensation (you call paradox), this anticipation configures the following image: To be a winner pursue your self interests, work on them and everything starts to make sense like magic. This illusion according to manipulated statistics is a common feeling, so I don’t think US ‘ers are afraid of feeling themselves traitors or guilty for disagreeing with a religious moral cause, but instead feel loser’s for not playing an active part of this “functional system” (something very practical) that could fulfil the collective American dream (utopia), or I’d rather say each ones separate American illusion? Here is a paradox: the centre of an illusion is less alive than being in the margin of a reality, that the rest of the world is living as an effect not a phenomenology.

I remember once I sent you a essay in Spanish that talks about two-Europe’s and two-Americas, in it is something I quote that Nietzsche said: “The dissertation of God only exists because of his antithesis”, fear makes the illusion, the enemy causes our actions and the construction of our world, or our illusion? The cosmos is sometimes a need, it’s just a necessary portion of chaos we know and believe in to survive, and if it works… well that can seem even better. But Bush turns the speech around and says something like: “There is few chaos left in the world that we must convert with the truth that comes from the absolute, the cosmos, God in who we trust, the God all mighty who created the free world we represent on earth.” (The chosen ones?)

I believe that life is spectator of a mystery, and not the seek of salvation or evolution that heads toward heaven, transmutation or inlighting. As you quote in The Reenchantment of the World: “There are some who hate life but are afraid of death”. (William Morris) Why feel threatened? Why make the US ‘ers feel threatened just passing through life? Easy: It’s the only way to sustain the American way of life. So I ask you: Is terrorism the price of the empire, or the empire is reinforced with terrorism? The chicken or the egg? I agree that the republic was based on the rejection of something else, a negative identity. Self-centred people that “live in a vertical city on the top of the hill” can’t see who they are, because they don’t contact others, instead grab on to the illusion that avoids contact, that avoids putting “another” in first place and himself really at the side, unless this means to persuade another by making him part of my illusion, falsely equal that attenuates my suspense, by spreading my way of life in the unknown I don't want to know, opposite to the first attitude that steps aside "horizontally". Black and white are inverted.

Manichaeism this way can have two readings, were evil is simply not wrong, its just different. Moral rigidity is an aggressive thought that hides the purpose of material greed, to build and defend an illusion, a city of God, a cosmos for insecurity and suspicion of the real and live world below.

Once you wrote about an experience that you had in Colombia, you called a contact with the “real gold”. I agree with that story, I think human warmth or fondness for another can’t be replaced by a mental fantasy or fear of another, warmth is the action of feeling a mystery within and between another, fantasy is a controllable thought that becomes addiction and forces reality to become one’s illusion because of fear or worse tedium for that same contact, body that imagines inside but can't touch outside. With all this, in my poor English not very practiced, all I ask US leaders and obviously the corporations that they secretly represent, is to let the world outside turn and be honest with their people inside about this