Obergefell v. Hodges

Earlier today, the sixth of June in the two-thousand and fifteenth AD, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that, per the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, all American states are required to license marriages comprising individuals of the same sex and to recognize the marriage licenses awarded same-sex couples by other states. This decision is historic, to be sure, and has prompted extreme responses from every radical reach of every ideological spectrum. In the midst of all the chatter, there's been a lot of confusion on what, exactly, this ruling means.

Aletheia

Aletheia is a Greek word, loosely translated as truth, but which here is better understood as specifically referring to, “structured truth.” Etymologically, it is derived from the prefix a- signifying, “not,” attached to the root lethe, which translates basically to, “oblivion.” A more rigorous understanding of this term, however, requires a dive into Greek mythology. According to some (specifically Virgil in the Aeneid; Plato's "Myth of Er," from the end of the Republic, presents a different geography, but the basic meaning is the same), the souls of the dead in the Greek underworld were required to drink from the river Lethe before they could be reincarnated, because the waters would cause them to forget everything they had ever known. In this light, lethe is not only oblivion, but is the obliviation of Life and life's effects, and aletheia is its inversion.

For a still deeper comprehension of the meaning of “Lethe”, we can look also to the river personified as a goddess Lethe. She was said (in Hesiod's Theogony) to be the daughter of Eris, goddess of strife and discord, such that she symbolizes specifically the ruin born of chaos, as do her sisters, among whom number Pain, Lawlessness, Falsehood, and Famine. Insofar as these comprise a singular unit, Aletheia is the opposition to all of them. It is not just truth, but the truth opposite to suffering and chaos. This is ultimately what is meant when I call Aletheia “structured truth”.

On a different track, it is worth investigating the words which have been derived from Aletheia since its ancient Greek usage. Obviously, there is the Modern Greek αλήθεια, meaning “truth.” In English, however, we've taken a bit further a stretch; from lethe we have derived the' words “lethal” and “lethargic.” These intimations, that lethe is the untruth which is dead, impotent, inactive, demonstrate that Aletheia is the truth in opposition to all of these things. It is the truth that is neither dormant nor latent; it is the truth that gives life and structure; it is the truth that is illuminated, brought forward, and revealed.

There are, of course, many somewhat similar terms in general use already. The normal terms are generally, however, tied up in countless centuries of other religions' connotations. Revelation and theosis, moksha and nirvana, salvation and enlightenment all denote something similar to aletheia, and they each may serve to clarify that term for those who do not know it, but they should not be considered equivalent ideas. Even “revelation” and “enlightenment”, which come closest in intent, fail to capture the active, living nature of the truth that is aletheia.

Aletheia, after all, represents the entire unrealized, latent potency of humanity; it is everything humanity isn't, by default or at nature, but could be. The basic human state is destruction and decay; aletheia is their antithesis. Humanity at its core is lethargic and passive; aletheia inverts these traits. Aletheia is definitively the realization of everything that is latent in the nature of man. It is actualized human potential defined as such.

Aletheianism, then, is the system of thought which aims at this goal. It is a striving for wakefulness, and a casting off of veils and blinders. It is a staunch opposition to illusion, deception, and darkness. It is an endeavoring, an undertaking and an ascension, an illumination and a desire for illumination. Every man lives in a world which is beyond him, and in his efforts to resolve his uncertainty, or to place himself in that world, he invariably undertakes certain endeavors; he looks for a meaning in his life, an explanation for existence, and an answer to his own identity. He looks for Aletheia.

Joining him, and you, in that Endeavor,

Garrett L. Gray

Federation

Given that civilization is the system or process of incorporating individuals and groups of individuals into a stable set of interactions, the question of how we are to arrange individuals, or how we are to best structure their interactions, is clearly one of great import. Indeed, at base, the entire set of differences which distinguish any civilization from any other could be said to boil down to differences in the way differing constituent parts of that civilization interact with one another. How does the butcher interact with the farmer? How does the soldier interact with the civilian? How do the elders interact with the youth? This is a drastic simplification, of course, but the point is clear; if we must understand civilization (and, if we want to improve it, we must understand it), we must first understand how the parts of civilization should interact.

The Taxonomy of Persons

If the goal of civilization is to incorporate differing individuals and groups of individuals while neither denying or negating their differences nor preventing them from interacting constructively with one another, the first step in attaining this goal must be to understand the differences which obtain between individuals and between groups of individuals. After all, as previously asserted, no two individuals are identical, else they would not be two individuals. Similarly, if we are at all capable of discussing people in groups of more than one, there must be distinguishing factors

Imperialism

In the modern world, the common, or at least foundational, understanding of human society is that it is based in the active assent of its constituent members. This idea of the Social Contract was refuted in an earlier post, to the ultimate point that society is actually an organic affair, into which all men are born. After all, no person is born in a vacuum, and anywhere two people are gathered, there is a society of sorts. Human beings are social animals, and any attempt to explain this

Regarding Empires

In the middle of the fourth century before Christ, in a remote village in northern Greece, a young prince spent three years in rigorous academic study in the tutelage of one of the greatest philosophers of all time. During this time, the teenage boy was introduced to that era's most advanced ideas, particularly in the arenas of ethics, politics, warfare and history. He developed a strong and lifelong (though by no means

The Meaning of Life

Life is a natural process by which structures, or specific arrangements of real things, grow and replicate themselves. As the manifestation of the basic tendency of the universe toward order and regularity, it is the opposite of entropy and decay, and there is no more fundamental purpose or drive for any living thing. To live is to be a structure, and to rely on structures, and react to them, and to create them, and this is as true for human beings as it is for the amoeba. In the most literal possible sense, this is the “meaning of life.”