Preface

 What’s wrong with everyone?

This world has never been a better place for human beings to be born, to grow, to eat, to find shelter, to avoid violence and danger, and to love to a ripe old age, by any common measure.

Yes, many are not born, many have not enough to eat, many die young. Granted and acknowledged.

 But statistically, across the whole planet, things are better that they have ever been. 

Global literacy is higher than it has ever been, *and yet* the planet seems beset by intractable conflict.

It is regrettable yet understandable when impoverished people are in conflict over scarce resources such as food water and shelter.

It is a fact of history that despots have often used religion and jingoism to incite their other-wise ignorant people to fight wars of ambition.

And naked ambition has furnished novelists and historians with all the plotlines of murder and betrayal and avarice and war that that constitutes the tale of states and nations, kings and conquerors.

Yet for all that, there is a *specific* source of conflict today, relatively novel, remarkably widespread, largely unrecognised, amenable to specific remedy.

This *kind* of conflict is not being seen between the starving poor, or between warring infantrymen, It is not seen between the cloak-and-dagger of the irredeemably ambitious and greedy.

The specific kind of conflict I’m thinking about occurs on our university campuses, in our parliaments and houses of government, and increasingly on our streets with placards waving and voices shouting. 

This kind of conflict is battled out in our media, between different factions of the media. 

It divides families and friends. 

It divides boardrooms and professional associations and government departments. 

Back at the university it pits one faculty against another, one university against another.

These conflicting people are all well fed and well housed (at least by global and historic standards). 

These people have little reason to fear immediate violence or extrajudicial assault arising over the subject of their disputes (although, increasingly, the *manner* of their means of disputation is more likely to bring them grief that the *topic* of their disputation).

Yet here they are, university-degree educated, middle class, physically comfortable, baying like wounded hounds at their opponents proximal or distal, physical or figurative.

And here they are, refusing to even open a newspaper they identify as belonging to the dreaded “them”.

And here they are, “deplatforming” the dreaded “them”.

And here they are, censoring mere words, banning them from the common parlance, while mandating other words, as a tail wags a dog.

And here they are, having ostensibly graduated with honours in the wisdom of all the ages, of all the hemispheres, growling like Neanderthals for their “cause-du-jour”, while threatening all-but-assault at any or all who presume to disagree.

And here they are, taking their chauvinism (look it up) into our schools, our board rooms, our hospitals, our government departments, our offices, our corporations, our parliaments.

And here they are, thinking winner take all, thinking means justifies ends, thinking they know better than anyone else.

And we are so much the more alone.

So much the more isolated.

So much the more guarded, poor, reticent, reluctant, narrow.

So much the more vulnerable and fragile in the face of those cultures wise enough to have ignored  or denied this kind of conflict among their own people.

….

This book proposes that there was one man, who wrote one book, with one key idea: an idea that spread like the proverbial wildfire, an idea upon which so much of today’s conflicts relies and depends, and idea without which many of today’s conflicts could not occur, would not arise.

But one spark does not burn down a forest, *unless* the forest is ready to be burnt down by one spark.

This one man, this one book with its one particular idea, sparked the tinderbox forest at the right time and in the right place to burn it all down.

Understand the tinderbox forest, understand how it was crying for a spark, understand how specifically potent was *this* spark from *this* flint, and it is clear how the fire spread, and how its victory are now like so much ashes in our mouths.