LEVETT JEFFREY: When evil strikes

Jeffrey Levett, Honorary President, World Philosophical Forum

Sequential Letters: Before and After

· Before the Greek Prime Minster’s visit to the White House and President Biden

When evil strikes, when your mind is clouded, when you are

At a dead end or in the middle of the road and you do not know which way to turn,

Reach back for knowledge, supplies and water from the resources of Ancient Greek Letters. Elytis

Dear Mr. President Biden Greetings from Greece!

I, Jeffrey Levett, Honorary President, World Philosophical Forum, Greece, 2022 approach you once again with two thoughts: that philosophy should be tried as an instrument in decision making at all levels of society, practical, educational, diplomatic and that its revival will benefit Greece and global society. An investment in it will cost less than a bundle of cruise missiles. Though classical philosophy marked the cradle of European culture, surprisingly, it has not yet found a proper place either in its land of birth or in Greek society or in the international community. For one fleeting moment the United Nations came close to giving philosophy the recognition and responsibility it deserves. It came in the name of Ban Ki Moon when he emphasized civic education as more important than literacy and numeracy and called on all peoples from all countries to invest in Global Citizenship. Here in Greece there is great admiration for classical philosophy but little action!

The World Philosophical Forum founded in Athens, 2009 by the Russian philosopher Igor Kondrashin, now in Moscow and benefited from his support has made several appeals for its revitalization. Philosophy has the power to inspire and to move the world and humanity away from all consuming disaster and lead it to a brighter future. It has the competence to add meaning to life and insight to complex matters.

You Mr. President have a unique chance to give philosophy a leg-up in Greece and enable Greece to add an extra influence to world affairs. Mr. Kyriakos Mitsotakis the Greek Prime Minister will soon be your guest. Jeffrey Levett, International Gusi Peace Prize Laureate

· White House Response

Dear Dr. Levett, The prayers of the world are with the brave and proud people of Ukraine as they defend their country against an unprovoked and unjustified invasion by Russian military forces. Russian President Vladimir Putin has chosen a premeditated war that has already brought catastrophic loss of life and needless human suffering. Putin is the aggressor, and he must be held accountable. Throughout our history, we’ve learned this lesson: when dictators do not pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos.

The United States is leading the world with our allies and partners to respond in a united and decisive way. Russia’s economy is reeling because of our powerful economic sanctions, and we are providing security, economic, and humanitarian support to the Ukrainians in their fight for freedom. With extraordinary unity and resolve, the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security. May God bless the people of a free and democratic Ukraine, and may God protect our troops. Sincerely, Joe Biden

· WPF to White House post Prime Minister’s Congressional Address

Dear Mr. President Bidenopoulos, Greetings from Greece! I, Jeffrey Levett, approach you once again with an additional thought and one more invitation, for you to visit the World Philosophical Forum founded in Athens, 2009 when in Greece. In Greece there is great admiration for classical philosophy but little enthusiasm for action and even less for its support. Mr. President you will have a unique chance to up the action and give philosophy a leg-up in Greece. With all due respect perhaps the First Lady, Mrs. Bidenopoulou can take on that task and enable Greece to add an extra influence to world affairs. Greece has phenomenal cultural attributes to export.

Unfortunately, Geneva did not move the world and humanity away from all consuming disaster. Most solutions to existential issues have partially failed and philosophy has been pushed to the sidelines by the international community. Philosophy is as yet an untried and poorly supported instrument in world affairs with the power and prestige to inspire and influence and lead humanity to a brighter future. It has the competence to add meaning to life and insight to complex matters. While classical philosophy marked the cradle of European culture, it has not yet found a proper place either in its land of birth or in Greek society or in the international community. While the world struggles to manage threat, as the earth runs down and humanity gasps for breath between disasters it remains a grand perhaps.

An investment in philosophy in Greece will cost less than the wing tips of a Raphael and an F-35 and provide additional defense against ongoing social dementia. The referred to incredible faster than sound technological instruments of defense come close to war whereas philosophy, is a peaceful ally of man.

A step in the wrong direction and the biological future of complex systems that prop up human consciousness can breakdown. To stem the ongoing madness empathy must be cultivated. With Deep Respect, Jeffrey Levetopoulos, Honorary President, World Philosophical Forum, Greece

· WPF on the Ukraine

We are all Ukrainians: Safe passage for the Ukraine, safe passage for Humanity

Wayfarer do go tell, of voices, you have heard from those who fell…that every shred of good that comes with life, was freely given by those now dead. Wayfarer, tell, what you have heard, through tears and from the many voices from the ground. S. Rotas, Voices from the earth

Mentor mine: you educate me but do not keep the rules. Alexander the Great to Aristotle

Golgotha gets steeper and the number of Stations to the Cross increase to reach salvation increase exponentially. Human rights – for life, safety, shelter, health are being consistently violated in the Ukraine by the leaders of the Russian Federation as well as in many other parts of the world and we share the indictment of Russian aggression as a breach of the basic norm of international law. Russia is not the only one. As a permanent member of the Security Council, it is charged with upholding peace but has flagrantly abandoned the principles of the United Nations Charter. Russia threatens to use nuclear weapons as non-nuclear countries have growing ambitions to acquire them, has diminished the status of its own people and is squandering a tremendous cultural heritage.

Logic tells us that longer war goes on more damage is done and more profit results. Logic tells us that the more guns there are in homes more deaths occur on the street, in homes, in supermarkets and the more miles driven by a fleet of vehicles on a given network of roads more accidents will take place. The more arms produced the higher the likelihood of conflict. The manufacturing cost of arms used in four months in the Ukraine carries a colossal economic price tag (read human lives and profits) as well, an approaching gigantic loss of neutrality and inestimable burdens on future populations.

While Russian claims include that the invasion was to erase fascism (denazyfy) its soldiers behave like fascists, on the battle field, on the streets. Russia’s traumatic experience fighting Hitler cannot justify today’s brutal militarism in the Ukraine. A recent Russian Nobelist was attacked while on a train. Continuation of war further undermines Russia’s political, economic, and moral foundations. The fallout of effects to the rest of the world is already great and will spiral to enormous killing children by inequality and poverty.

Since the end of WWII thousands of actions have been taken, numerous declarations written signed by towering individuals but the world has not pulled back from manufacturing armaments, which make enormous profit. What else is there to do is a plague of a question? Since the 24th of February 2022, thousands of articles, interviews, statements have been given, useful yes and helpful yes to an understanding of conflict in the Ukraine but in removing mankind from the danger of destruction, no! Even the wings of the butterfly of hope have been clipped and the Box of Pandora is wide open. We can’t go home again and tomorrow there will be no green grass.

To survive the world must reconsider world government and the available instrument of philosophy. It is an untried option of the several already used which have contributed to the present social dementia. Philosophy can inspire and move the world and humanity away from all consuming disaster and lead it to a brighter future. It has the competence to add meaning to life and insight to complex matters. Supranational sovereignty with a basis in classical philosophy is surely better than what we have now or where we are heading. We are living at a time when the unexpected should be awaited, when uncertainty and mindlessness characterize a significant portion of our current moment in history and when reason is overwhelmingly rejected. We call this social dementia! The horses of the apocalypse gallop over the world today as they have always galloped driven by social dementia. To rein them in will take a significant change in the universal mindset necessitating a youth driven antiwar movement worldwide and a return to applied practical classical philosophy. After their gallop over the European continent, 1914-18 they were followed by the collapse of financial systems and the deployment of cruel ideologies.

In the early days of the Soviet Union Nikolai Vavilov a brilliant geneticist, plant geographer and man of public health looked to a future in which world hunger would be eliminated. He travelled the world on what he called a mission for all humanity collecting and storing seeds at the Institute of Plant Industry. Ironically, he died of starvation in the Gulag eating frozen cabbage and moldy flour before being tossed into an unmarked grave. Vavilov was an opponent of Stalin’s favored scientist, Lysenko who rejected Mendelian genetics and promoted quack theories to improve crop yields were applied following on from famine and a significant loss of productivity resulting from forced collectivization in several regions of the Soviet Union. With millions of children growing up in conflict zones, in horrific violence and with extremely limited food, the invasion of the Ukraine has and is making things much worse.

Geneva 2021 was a fantastic chance to avoid the dangers that threaten humanity. It left no signposts to the future. In its aftermath, the Ukraine is being destroyed, its people brutally killed and displaced, its children deprived of any tomorrow while its knock-on effects take our world to the brink of annihilation.

In WWII Kiev was destroyed as part of the Soviet scorched-earth policy while close by Babi Yar saw the largest massacre of the Holocaust.

The second line of demarcation is the level of destruction and human suffering among Ukrainian civilians. Even legitimate resistance to an aggressor is at some point becomes intolerable. The risk of escalation of war in the Ukraine to a nuclear conflict rests squarely on Russia as it pushes the world towards a more aggravated state of social dementia, while the sheer number of globally stockpiled nuclear weapons ups the risk. Global empathy is sapped and shrouded in a pervasive madness not completely of today’s choosing. The adverse economic fallout from the war and sanctions will take on unmanageable proportions in many countries that depend on food and energy imports.

As social dementia depletes consciousness, danger to democratic society grows to threaten human existence. Social dementia is the shame of the civilized world; its greatest tragedy were the death camps in WWII, a Nazi policy instrument for mass killing of Jewish, Slav and Roma populations.

World War I was expected to be short-lived, it wasn’t! WWI was the war to end all wars. It didn’t. It was a war of horror, abominable trench and chemical warfare; killed, maimed, crazed and demented. George Barnes first British minister of pensions rose to speak to men with war casualties (1917). British victims of war trauma and patients at Britain’s largest limb fitting center were assembled on the lawn waiting with crutches, eye patches, head bandages, in wheelchairs, with empty sleeves and trouser legs and in silence. With tears streaming down his cheeks the minister stood for a long while and left without saying a word.

WWI left societies without women. As it began organized propaganda emerged as a means of changing British sympathies from German (the humbled power) to French, (the defeated power). It did! It was a demonstration of the plasticity of the brain and an example of massive behavioral modification. As youth was lost poetry that moved evolved they grow not old as we that are left grow old.

Human brain en-cephalization has developed in such a way to create both phenomenal ways of thinking, music and poetry age shall not weary them nor the years condemn and with neural centers and networks that enhance craving for power and profit; from unsanitary conditions, ripping up the earth and from armaments. It has given rise to intelligent technology, an overwhelming rejection of reason and heart wrenching sentiment; at the setting of the sun and in the morning we shall remember them.

As the world is being driven by positive feedback of authoritarianism, decision making in politics is shifting to lower cortical levels and empathy is losing out. In the absence or limitation of education the brain can be molded in destructive ways. The result is social dementia and the solution is practical classical philosophy. But who gives a damn?

Human brain en-cephalization has developed in such a way to create both phenomenal ways of thinking and other neural centers and networks that enhance the craving for power and profit. It has given rise to intelligent technology and an overwhelming rejection of reason.

Nothing though can compare to potential devastation posed by nuclear weapons. They are the greatest hazard to life on earth. The risk of absolute disaster is close to one or close to certainty. Should a button be pressed, by accident or intent, time will have run out on humanity; any planning of disaster preparation and the protection of people and society for tomorrow will have no meaning. At the dreaded moment, millions of years of evolution will unravel and human consciousness and culture will disintegrate with no further need for the olive branch.

In collecting opinions as to when the Ukraine crisis began and whose fault it is, answers given include American, 1914, 1918 and 2014. WWII ended, in 1945, with a spirit of forgiving surfaced and prevailed but not of forgetting. Now with war in the Ukraine neither are emergent, in 2022. But we must remain optimistic. Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification. Romans 14:19

References

https://www.meer.com/en/69580-voices-from-the-ukrainian-heartland

https://www.meer.com/en/68807-scholasticism-is-alive-and-well-living-with-social-dementia

https://www.meer.com/en/68386-message-from-the-world-philosophical-forum

https://www.meer.com/en/67529-urgently-appealing-to-the-united-nations-cop26

https://www.meer.com/en/66935-is-philosophy-on-the-ropes

https://www.meer.com/en/66077-springtime-begins-in-saken

https://www.meer.com/en/65161-the-worlds-kitchen-bidens-plates

https://www.meer.com/en/64882-an-appeal-to-mr-vladimir-putin

https://www.meer.com/en/62682-reaching-for-a-non-breachable-who

https://www.meer.com/en/58063-a-decade-of-windmill-tilting-athens-2009-19

https://www.meer.com/en/57533-societal-dementia-now-and-then