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"You say that if all of us do this, we might have a chance?" I interjected.
She nodded. "Nothing else will do, Peter. If that fails, nothing will help us."
I was awe struck by the vast dimension of what she laid before me. I never explored this dimension of political fighting before to such a depth. I confessed that I was at a total loss as to where to begin to turn all of that into reality. I was a diplomat, but this kind of fight for humanity was totally foreign to me.
"This can't be done politically, Peter. Life is not a political project," Helen interjected as if she could read my mind. The Sublime can't be explored on such low levels.
I disagreed. I disagreed with her to some degree. I reminded her that she had said herself that the destruction of humanity is a political project. I had seen the evidence myself. "I have been in Cambodia when the totally empty utopians of the world unleashed their multimillion-people-genocide," I said to her. "That was a political project designed to restructure a nation from a scientific and technologically oriented society, into a primitive agricultural society with primitive values. And I might add that it was also a political solution that finally stopped the madness."
"No Peter, it became a political project only as the end result. The isolation of love into the private domain opened the scene to this insane political madness. It was not in any way different during the Thirty Years War. The only difference was that in the late 1500s the banishing of love into the private domain had been an official state ideology enshrined as the law of the nations. Might is right! That had been the song. Today, humanity sings a similar song, and for the same reason, and with a different tune. We have to fight to change the underlying reason, Peter."
"You mean you want to change the way humanity thinks?" I said astonished. "That can't be done, Helen."
"It has to be done, Peter. We have no other option for saving our world from a New Dark Age."
I couldn't believe what was happening. There, I was sitting with a lovely woman in her apartment at five in the morning arguing about the ugliest of the ugliest of politics, and I found it essential for me to be there.
"You can't change people's thinking as a political project," Helen replied. "That cannot be done. You would have to fight every political ideology there is, if you were to attempt that," she said. "That's impossible, right?"
"So you agree with me that it can't be done?" I said.
"Wrong, my friend. It can be done if you don't make it a political project. You can change the way that humanity thinks by letting love out of the bottle into which it has been banished. Love has been bottled up. We must set it free. It, all by itself, will change the way humanity thinks. In real terms we don't have to change anything, Peter. Love is a natural element of our common humanity. Love is in our universal human Soul. We have to rebuild society in the sense that we encourage it to be what it already is, a society of human beings. If that substance of our humanity wasn't already there, nothing in the world could artificially establish it. Then we would have no hope. In fact our civilization would not exist, and consequently, we wouldn't exist."
"You want to change the world with love?" I countered her. "That's too idealistic. This has been tried before, and it has failed."
"No Peter! The idea is NOT idealistic! And it has been tried before, even profoundly successfully. I told you the story of Jacob, but not the whole story, not how it ends for him. After he had lots of children, and children were the 'oil' in the economy of those days, he wanted more. He decided to leave his brother-in-law, but before he did he devised a way of cheating him in a big way and stole away at night without as much as a good-bye. Jacob hadn't changed. He had come as a rat and had left as a rat. But on the home he was told that his brother from whom he had fled in the first place was on the way towards him. Jacob was stuck. He couldn't go back. He had burnt all the bridges behind him. Nor could he go forward. Thus, he struggled all night with himself. This might have been the first time that he asked himself the question: What is a human being? What is the essence of our humanity? He might have explored all the seven synonyms that my American friend identified as synonyms for God. We are told that he struggled with and angel, a profound idea of Truth. We are also told that when the struggle ended at dawn he was given a new name, and when he met his brother later that day he was able to embrace him and say to him, 'I have seen thy face as though I have seen the face of God. That's what it means to love, Peter, first oneself, then by reflection, another."
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