In my study of Chinese culture I came to understand a lot of things about my own culture too. My ancestors from my father’s side were sinti Gypsies, and on my mother’s side they were simple Dutch laborers. i also learned that mass migrations in the last 3000 years or so caused that as a rule all Europeans are of mixed origins if we take scientific theories and hsitory serious (so that the idea of nation and race is a silly abberation), and and that there was only one war in the last 1500 years, namely the crusades, that were initiated by an insecure Europe inventing itself based on the Roman Empire. it is still going on. It is still raging because people are afraid to see others are the same as themselves. Islam and Chritianity and other more minor Semitic cultures are all of the same stem, so they together are one 5000 year old culture with a half forgotten history when other players were dominant. The crusades are a civil war. The EU is only half of the west, it should include the region all the way including IRAN and Saudi Arabia. It should be called the Western Union, because these Eastern states are still the West.

A few years ago I was investigating what was the influence of Laozi on the West and discovered people study him all the way back to the 17th century and his influence, like that of the Yijing, is inmense. Capitalism for instance is founded on the Islamic Sharia law on making profits, but it was Laozi’s Wuwei that created the concept of Laissez Faire in Capitalism indicating the measure of government influence. It freed the middle class from the constraints the state puts on it and caused modern consumerist societies from China and Russia to Europe and the America’s, from Iceland to Eastern Island, from the soil into the genes. The crusades also created Romanticism and the idea of personal freedom, and the abandonment of forced marriage.

Philosophers, social scientists and politicians usually talk about rational motivations to appeal to the masses, but they lard them with irrealist aspects that appeal to the underbelly of the people that motivate these to give them mandate to rule. This also reveals who really created modern society. Were this Kant, Hegel or Marx? I don’t think so. The real history is not in the motivations of our leaders, they just follow social trends. The real history is being made by the people who shape society’s trends. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Nihilism, Aleister Crowley’s theatrical experience and Carl Gustav Jung’s surreal internalization of values in the mind are of bigger importance then Industrialization and the invention of the Heisenberg principle and Schrödingers Uncertainty Principle. Modern history is the history of exploitation of personal weaknesses, the history of the need to be addicted to some stimulant, the need to alter our physique by practice, chemicals or operations.

It is in this world that society produces people who are developing understanding and wisdom, like a cock in the field of poisonous plants that help us forward as individuals, and offer people actually happiness. Laozi calls them Sages: they travel up and down between the divine and the people, invisible and unknown.  And that was his critique on the social heroes of his time. Maybe today I am too philosophical, too radical. It would be nice to personally know such a person and to learn from such a one what to do with life.