David
WAR - The Final Stage of Social Level Power Control

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WAR - The Final Stage of Social Level Power Control (Audio)
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I first came across Dennis Kucinich when he ran for president in 2004. He stood out as someone whose policy ideas I mostly agreed with - especially his unique proposal for a Department of Peace. It was a proposed cabinet-level office devoted to projecting some of America’s best values into the world: democracy, justice, human rights and peace.

The vision of a department promoting peace was simple but profound: a world where countries appreciated their uniqueness and worked to resolve disagreements democratically and peacefully.

The idea wasn’t unique to Kucinich; it went all the way back to Benjamin Rush, one of the Founders, who dreamed of a Peace Office to balance the War Office. But Kucinich made this old idea feel alive again. One that wasn't merely tied to religion as Rush had done.

Recently too, Kucinich received some recognition for that advocacy; The Washington Post credited him as a kind of Bernie Sanders before Bernie was on the national stage. Knowing about this proposal - albeit long distance aspirational - gave me hope that America could still be guided by important intellectual values that promote Human Rights.

But now President Trump along with Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth has almost completely undercut any progress Kucinich made in this more peaceful direction. America hasn't just stalled or slipped backward in theory - she's gone sharply in the opposite immoral direction.

Hegseth - with Trumps direction - has sought to symbolically rename the Department of Defence back to the Department of War. At first glance, it may seem like a small and symbolic change in rhetoric. But rhetoric from an administration with real power is never merely symbolic. It carries weight. It shapes how America or the administration acts, and how the world understands those actions.

Because why do people want to attack America? Hegseth and Trump probably think the answer is simple: “They’re evil”.

But evil doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. Something produces it. And if something produces it, maybe it can be stopped - not only with weapons, but also with prevention rooted in thought, morality, and understanding. In times the threat is real, there are also far more humane ways to respond - by capturing and providing people their habeas corpus rights rather than extra-judicially taking their lives. Under the law even, lethality is only ever an absolute last resort.

All this concern with legality or defending America, though, is now out the window. In its place, a new moral framework is taking shape - one where intellectual morality no longer guides social values. Instead, raw social-level power becomes the standard. This shift doesn’t just abandon defence - it replaces it with a philosophy that prizes dominance over principle.

This renaming of “Defence” to “War” celebrates this grotesque direction. It signals that the Trump administration appears to no longer want to protect through principle or restraint, but to project force with little regard for law, human rights, or deeper moral reasoning.

This is more than a change in rhetoric then - it’s a philosophical shift. It shows America stepping deeper into an unthinking embrace of social-level control. And the more that control spreads, the more intellectual morality withers. As intellectual morality withers - the social level gains further dominance seeking more power through unthinking force. The greed of social level power knows no bounds.

A war state is the final stage of this social level driven transformation - seeking power and dominance no matter the immoral cost - and America is increasingly becoming just that. Intellectual Morality be damned.

On days like today, it’s hard to be hopeful for the moral trajectory of the world. I worry deeply about what the next few years of this administration will bring. But I still hope that America’s laws and judicial system - designed to protect intellectual morality - will withstand the continual attacks from a President very clearly driven by a very different set of lower values.

If only folks knew of a better metaphysics - a better way - maybe then things could or would be different. With a strong and intellectually grounded moral compass, America could look not to a Department of War, but to a Department of Peace - much like Kucinich proposed years ago - and celebrate a very different set of higher morals.

While we watch aghast - it is the profound potential of this moral philosophy that provides hope.