(Please, consider my arguments-for your sake and everyone’s.)
Dear friends,
Please open your eyes. The human situation is becoming increasingly grave: the peace or order (hierarchy) maintained by the US/NATO is now in question. And preventing war has never been something that opposing sides can do independently-this has always been true in the past. But now, more than ever, we must seriously reflect on this reality, especially now that nuclear weapons are involved.
So first, I earnestly beg you: stop assuming and spreading the idea that the cause of war is economic interest. Today, we can and must put an end to war-and that perspective is fatalistic. It treats war as inevitable, and thus prevents us from addressing it properly. Instead, it leads us to participate in it, feeding the flames.
Saying that war is caused by the economy implies we can support or oppose war based on what we might gain: that one side’s victory might bring us more property, possession, or rights, and therefore we are encouraged to support that side, while the other side’s victory would mean our loss of goods and rights.
I urge you to reflect and tell me if you truly think I’m wrong:
Isn’t it absurd to claim that war-the waste of weapons and destruction, especially when it could mean human extinction-is caused by economic interest? That supposed interest, the pursuit of private gain, is a consequence of the weapon. The weapon, whose purpose is harm, must be obviously private; it is the only essentially private thing-it seizes by force and deprives others of freedom and property. Everything else becomes private in relation to the weapon: seized, deprived, and reorganized for its service. Even goods are inevitably developed according to the weapon’s needs (or rather, if you like, in opposition to other weapons). Weapons appropriate everything. Information is shaped by their interests, ideologies bend to them, and even the interpretation of history is filtered through their lens.
So even if we continue to believe that private interest causes war and sincerely wish to stop war by focusing on that contradiction of private interest-as many on the political left do-we must still focus on the weapon itself. If we dismantle weapons, we dismantle private interest along with them. (How could there be ownership or dispossession without violent enforcement?) It doesn’t work the other way around. Criticizing private interest and military spending over education or healthcare, etc., without understanding its connection to the weapon ultimately leads to this: we end up demanding more power, ultimately more weapons, so that power (decision-making) and property change hands within the world’s hierarchical system. This results in submitting to the same logic-developing goods in service of weapons, never in service of human wellbeing. (Isn’t that what happened to the Soviet Union?)
The truth is, we are not even allowed to publicly question our weapon -not even theoretically-in its institutionalized form: the state, which claims to be the guarantor of all goods. This is why both left and right operate under the same economic ideology, and why we are forced to accept war: the activity, service, and function of the weapon.
Indeed, this was the very dilemma faced by ancient cosmopolitan thinkers. Their attempt to dissolve the weapon-the state-in favor of human unity, if not done universally and simultaneously, led only to loss: of property, of rights-or else dependence on another weapon for protection. This isn’t speculation-it’s a documented philosophical debate among Roman Cosmopolitan intellectuals.
But today, we humans can communicate and understand one another. Our goods, rights, and property can be guaranteed by a shared system of justice-one that, if needed, could be enforced by a police force. (This could even be a temporary role for the state, just now non-sovereign-able to aim at harming others.) But massive armies and weapons of mass destruction are absolutely unnecessary. Those only exist to deter other weapons, one evil to prevent a greater one. Even the idea of “the police” is just a symbolic reassurance. If we unite, make inclusive decisions, and refuse to serve the weapon, then even if property remains privately held, it would no longer develop in service of violence, but in service of wellbeing and human harmony. That too is an economic interest for all. Human behavior would shift to support community-through understanding or mutual care. Even if it takes some time to change our mentality, this would contrast sharply with today’s state of absolute war and generalized hatred, where indeed possession means dispossession of others.
In fact, when the common good becomes the goal, private property becomes irrelevant. The real problem today is not ownership itself, but the fact that private property can be and is used as a means of harm.
We may think-or rather, we must admit-that we are freer than in the past, but in reality, people today are more subjected-consciously or unconsciously-to the totalizing power of the state than ever before. In the past, there was a clearer understanding that human unity was humanity’s destiny and salvation.
For example, few people know that Alexander the Great was a cosmopolitan-a fact well documented by Plutarch, his most famous historian. Alexander made this explicit and demonstrated it through actions, such as marrying princesses from the lands he conquered. There’s even a legend that Aristotle, irritated with his former pupil, may have had a role in his death. Aristotle, besides being a supporter of slavery and a misogynist, was a Greek supremacist. (For those interested in Plato’s totalitarian vision of the state, Karl Popper offers a great summary in The Open Society and Its Enemies.) However, those are our masters.
The idea or form of peace and human concord-well understood in antiquity-is cosmopolitanism: human unity and coexistence (both in the East and the West, which clearly testifies to its rational foundation). However, this idea is not transmitted to us today. Aside from the fact that it was impractical in a disconnected world, cosmopolitanism is contradictory-and even harmful-to the function of the state as the institutionalized weapon, whose function is war.
This is why the thinkers we are taught about are Plato-whose Academy was funded by the polis to counteract the social impact of Socrates’ condemnation and execution-and Aristotle, whose Lyceum was also state-funded.
And yet, the Roman Empire was cosmopolitan. All of its intellectuals-or at least all the ones I know of-were cosmopolitans. (I invite the reader to correct me or let me know if you’d like me to name them.) Today, however, they are presented only as Stoics. Their subjective virtue is praised, while their inescapable cosmopolitan moral vision is deliberately hidden. But their so-called “subjective virtue” was rooted in the understanding of the Logos, which ordered the world toward peace and human concord-just as Mozi in ancient China believed, expressing this idea as “the Will of Heaven.” These Stoic cosmopolitans had to resign themselves to the tragedy of their time: the political impossibility of inclusive decision-making in a world that was still largely unknown and disconnected. (The same thing happened to Mozi, as he makes clear at the end of The Canon and the Explanations.) And it was the knowledge of that logos what made the world bearable for them.
And yet, it was precisely this widespread cosmopolitanism within the Roman Empire that ultimately led it to grant citizenship to all its inhabitants. Even when modern historians of Spain often credit Catholicism for the civilizing mission of the Spanish Empire, contrasting it with the predatory behavior of nation-states, disregards its authentic truth: universalism. They deceive themselves when they believe that human dignity, equality, and non-discrimination are products of Christianity. Christianity merely represents or symbolizes these ideals (to operate alongside the empire), but their true origin and value is cosmopolitanism, which understands that the Logos resides equally in every human being and does not need revelations or ideologies.
This is why, friends, the time has come for simple truth. Let us stop imposing new or old ideologies-each person is free to believe what they wish. What we must now propose is simple human unity-without any additional content or conditions. Let us be open to others, regardless of their beliefs or narratives, appealing only to human coexistence and inclusive decision-making. So we will only realize what we all already know, that aiming at harming others, serving and developing weapons, is not good, and we pay for it. That is all we need for peace.
As the cosmopolitans clearly saw-and this is something Eastern and Western cosmopolitans agreed on-once we cease serving the weapon, only what is useful and beneficial to all truly matters. Ideologies or doctrines lose their relevance, as they tend only to justify or preserve privilege, rights, discrimination, and differences-and thus the dispossession of others.
This is why Mozi’s work-the Eastern expression of cosmopolitanism-can be reduced to a single doctrine: “impartiality must replace partiality.” Everything he wrote points back to that. And Western cosmopolitans said the same. Plutarch tells us that the essence of Zeno’s “admired Republic”, which has now been “lost”-Zeno being the founder of Stoicism-was simply this: “Human beings should not live under separate systems of justice.“
So, friends, I invite you to support me-at no cost beyond your own sincerity-in sharing this message with the world. Let us promote a reform of the United Nations to make it truly sovereign and at the service of humanity. No one would lose; we would all gain. All it takes is for someone to propose it-and the universal transparency of its decisions would be its guarantee, since nothing should be done without everyone’s agreement.
And you’ll notice: just as the sovereignty and independence of each state-as armed units-inevitably leads to rearmament, war, and hatred, the simple recognition of our interdependence and our common purpose-the common good (there is no other good but common)-leads us to see that we need one another, and therefore must respect and care all for one another.
Thank you