The kind of “issue” we are
concerned with is a matter that gradually or suddenly disrupts one's life style and requires analysis and decisionmaking as to the best way to resolve it so life can proceed with the matter incorporated. Such issues are matters
that disrupt or interfere with the satisfaction of the expected wants (i.e.,
desires and appetites) of existence at the group level of a culture.
An issue becomes “vital” when its adverse impact on want satisfaction
threatens to become general and seems to exercise a pervasive control over a
measurable decline in the group’s welfare; such a threat to vitality is
heightened in its perceived seriousness, when the real need that the want has
supplanted becomes clear as the vital force behind the want. While wants are
many and taste or fashion driven, “needs” are indispensable to human existence
and are categorically delineated as air, water, food, and shelter. Thus a vital
issue is critical both in terms of its threat to expected want satisfaction and
its potential for unraveling cultural sophistication to fundamental need
levels.
The interaction between needs and wants is mankind’s most
self-defeating event. It is at the need level that humans instinctively seek the aid
of the Creator as their ultimate source of security; but as basic needs are
fulfilled, any surplus of security encourages the development of innovative
ways to gratify more empowering appetites and the human will-to-power begins to
supplant the will of God. As American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson noted,
the more secure mankind becomes materially, the more captive it becomes to
things of the world and thereby loses sight of its true meaning and spiritual
destiny. To the extent that mankind lives beyond the level of basic needs in
the world of manifold wants, it denies its own purpose in creation.
Due to their subjective level of want or appetite
fulfillment, vital issues are difficult to analyze for their fundamental cause.
Nevertheless their criticality in adversely impacting the stability of Western
culture has made them a major study at the higher academic levels. Since the
Second World War, certain European scholars, collectively referred to as
Continental Philosophers, have developed the specialized field of semantical
deconstruction that today is widely applied throughout Western academia in an
attempt to trace the effects of vital issues to their fundamental cause.
Because vital issues deal with human bondage to false gods,
it is crucially important to strive to perfect our understanding of them, for
it is in such understanding that true freedom can be achieved. As shall be
shown this endeavor to understand the root cause and meaning of vital issues
leads to the discovery of new, great themes. One finds early on that there is a
root cause and effect relationship between the abuse of basic needs in the
pursuit of immediately gratifying, self-indulgent wants; and that out of this
avoidance mechanism comes vital issues that one must contend with or deny and
ignore, with consequent penalties and sufferance.
The neglect of basic needs in favor of more
immediate though superficial, even titillating wants, is what Thorstein Veblen
called “conspicuous consumption”—that immediate fulfillment of sensate appetite
(prevalent and sometimes epidemic in a market economy) that drives the
relationship between supply and demand.
Proportional to the deferral of basic needs to want
satisfaction, vital issues arise. Such issues become vital to human welfare in
proportion to the extent that they put mankind in bondage; therefore such
issues vitally impact the range of human freedom; and adversely impact human
vitality accordingly.
Veblen’s “conspicuous consumption” is what Nietzsche called
the herd instinct of democracy—that form of government in which the mass
society becomes captive to the federal power center. Under democracy, the basic
needs of existential life become abandoned to the wants resulting from the
illusion of freedom and the pursuit of happiness; and in this illusive state of
existence in bondage emerges the aforementioned vital issues.
Vital issues include:
-Terrorism
-Military
Security
-Economic
Security
-Healthcare
-Education
-Energy
-Global
Warming
-Environmental
Quality
-Abortion
-Political
Preemption
-Religious
Belief
-Crime
Each is explicated by Ho Logos Press in its books, which feature new, great themes.
