The Madness of Power for Its Own Sake
Those who have the power and technological means to satisfy their greed, hate, and vengeance can bring about as much destruction in a single day as would have taken a century in the past. They can demolish the most formidable?seeming systems at one go and exchange them for others. They can ruin the most established ideas, place restrictions on long?held beliefs and, supported by the mass media, represent right as wrong and vice versa. In no period of human history have such moral values as personal honor, religion, family life, and decency been mocked and condemned as relentlessly as they are now. In consequence, we live in an epoch of confusion and chaos. Light and darkness, purity and pollution, virtue and vice, and hope and despair exist side by side or one within the other. In no previous period of history have collapse and reform happened on such a scale or at such speed. Those who would oppose this flood of chaos cannot find the opportunity to express or present their alternative standpoints.
Among this age's most visible characteristics are that right is consistently sacrificed for the sake of might, selfish interests replace all other considerations, racial discrimination has a pre?eminent role in determining social attitudes and relations, and force is resorted to as the single means to resolve national and international differences. Power must have its due place in the scheme of things, but if it is considered the single or most effective means of solving problems, why are we endowed with such faculties as reason and compassion? All past social revolutions and military movements that were not based on belief, knowledge, moral values, and sound reasoning failed to endure much beyond the lifetimes of their leaders.
Power, when used to serve the cause of right and sound reasoning, may do some good on the way to resolving problems. However, power always has been a means of destruction when driven by ambition and greed, of coarse feelings and ideas. The madness of disposing and increasing power drove Alexander to military ventures in Asia, brought Napoleon's genius of to ruin, and made Hitler the most accursed of the human race. Despite these lessons, right and intelligence remain under the dominion of power.
Behind the chaotic whirl of damnable ideas and events lies the abuse of power and the over?rating of its usefulness. As a result, human values, reasonableness, and respect for right have been replaced by the resort to force. It seems that chaos will continue until those few who have great power submit to the cause of right. Only then will the many, freed from chaos and confusion, see the world and events taking place in it clearly and without any barrier before them.
If they are to survive in a world in which only the mighty have the right to live, oppressed peoples must free themselves from this minority and bring that power under the dominion of right.
While learning lessons from the past, we should know how to prepare a desirable future for ourselves. If we are to have hope the future and not sink deeper into a darker whirl of new, greater confusion, we need altruistic souls who live for others, who prefer others' happiness to their own. Only those willing and able to sacrifice themselves for humanity's well?being can save humanity from today's chaos and confusion.
When the light?diffusing ideas, united with love and altruism, are shared by the majority of humanity, the global "storms" now blowing, along with the resulting pain and suffering, will end. When the ideas of heroes of love and altruism, combined with just discipline and balanced freedom, are a determining factor in the global balance, worldwide social crises and massive problems arising from international relations will be solved, and the balance between joy and sorrow, happiness and misfortune, will be reestablished.
Humanity expect from us the believers great efforts to help it realize world peace and harmony. Every attempt and effort made to attain this goal, every movement to support right and truth, is a most blessed step taken toward God. Every such step, regardless of size, will play a part in the new, expected global reform. Such steps may be thought of as drops, fallen into our present, from the blue ocean of the future. In that future, humanity will enjoy true happiness. We live now upon the dream of that blessed time to come. Yeseren Düsünceler, Izmir 1996, pp. 155–58
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