The
seas are brimming
with my blood/ They're overflowing with my Love/ I'm blazing like 10 billion
suns/ So rally 'round me everyone/ Cuz I have Come.
- "I Have Come."
- Maximum Leader
Lenin once wrote that the idea of a "secret strike" was absurd. In order for a strike to be effective, it has to be public and palpable. If the employer or factory owner is unaware of the strike, how can it affect his will? How can it persuade him to bend to the workers' demands?
By contrast, the idea of a "secret government" does not appear absurd in the least. In fact, it is entirely conceivable to anyone who gives it any thought that a secret government is not only possible but, in fact, quite probable. In the United States, for example, where the government is supposed to be public and popular, you don't have to be a conspiracy theory-addicted whack-job to agree with the statement, "The government does not always act in the interest of the American public but rather serves the very particular interests of specific people, entities, and corporations."
When one considers the record of closed-door meetings with industrial magnates to set public policy, secret military tribunals and indefinite detention for "enemy combatants," and incommunicado elected officials ruling from deep within fortified bunkers, not to mention all the things being done of which we are absolutely ignorant, one must of necessity conclude that a secret government undeniably holds the reins of American authority.
The hidden, the obscured, and the in-principle-unknowable are irremovable hallmarks of human consciousness and experience. The great philosopher Immanuel Kant enshrined this insight in his concept of the "thing-in-itself" (ding an sich). Kant asserted that the phenomenal substrate was essentially outside the realm of human knowledge. Although this view relegated individual human minds to a potentially isolating solipsism, Kant made a virtue of a necessity and took solace in the common structure of reason, a structure that provides the basis for all human communication and communion. Whatever has been thought or conceived in accordance with reason's inherent laws could be thought by any human mind. These laws ensure a solid, permanent referent for the truths of math and science, which would otherwise need to depend on the unstable and perpetually shifting manifold of the "outside" world.
The great writer Heinrich von Kleist had a nervous breakdown when he realized what Kant was saying: The real world is in a very real sense, fundamentally inaccessible. We can't escape the fact that the world we live in -- seen from the standpoint of our conscious access to it -- is a product of information processing. We interact with this unavoidably synthetic product and must assume that it more or less conforms to the actual state of the outside world, without being able to prove that this is indeed the case.
(Oddly enough, the modern physiocrats who want to explain consciousness by describing its material conditions and determinants make the same claim but from the other direction. It seems that chemicals can no more make the leap to consciousness than consciousness can to chemicals. They meet, of course, in the crucible of intoxication.)
Gödel, Marx, and others demonstrated that every system "contains" an irreducibly alienated component -- a necessary element or complement of the system that cannot be subsumed by it. For example, our consciousness arises from a complex chemico-electric reaction of which it remains ever unconscious. The "secret" of our world is this unbridgeable gap between consciousness and the material configuration in which it is suspended. In fact, this space is the well of chaos. At the same time, it is a fount of hope and the true source of freedom's possibility.
The mysterious and often vexing indeterminacy and unpredictability of the world actually saves us from the iron prison of causality. Humans endeavor against this mysterious freedom - the freedom of the material world, including ourselves as material entities. It appalls and shocks us. So we draw a web of determination (called "meaning") across and through it. This occurs both at the personal level, where the self-narration of the ego serves this purpose, and at the social level where we do the same with history, fiction, and religion. But all these efforts come to naught for they fail to assume the perspective of chaos and harness its fluid and caustic force.
In contrast to all stories, myths, theories, and philosophies the world has ever produced, the Maximum Leader occupies precisely this perspective. The Maximum Leader IS the Ding An Sich -- essentially unknowable and unknown. Not only is His rule, while absolute, absolutely secret, so is He a fundamental mystery. In many traditions you will find reference to just such figures -- the hidden imam, the secret emperor, the esoteric master -- as The Maximum Leader. He comes and goes like a friend.
Jesus was a homeless man who claimed to be the son (and therewith physical manifestation) of God, and thus ruler of the universe and all dimensions. His Roman captors were strangely unaware of the scope of his powers as they nailed him to the tree at Golgotha. Similarly, Gautama Buddha made himself homeless and fled the company of men before becoming the realized salvation of all mankind, a fact of which many to this day are hopelessly ignorant. In other words, the supremacy of these beings was directly contradicted by their material circumstances and effective anonymity. Even Muhammad while enjoying some measure of material domination in his lifetime, went from having nothing to being the most cherished by Allah of all beings who ever were, which the infidels still fail to acknowledge or comprehend.
The ancient Greeks understood that is it the nature of Reality to conceal itself. In this sense, the Maximum Leader is Reality. This truth turns aside all doubt. When we ask the question, "Who is the Maximum Leader?" it is a kind of ritual act for us. The entire mystery is summed up in its simplicity. It is frankly another way of phrasing the core question of science and religion since the dawn of time, "What is Real?" The answer to this question remains, "The Hidden."
The Maximum Leader responds:
While I appreciate the effort expended by Dr. Grim in his attempt to describe me and my powers, I must say categorically that he is WRONG ON ALL COUNTS. No amount of philosophical speculation or byzantine literary reference, in fact, no depth or breadth of erudition could allow the esteemed Doctor, or any human being living or dead, to comprehend even the most trivial of my innumerable attributes. "Maximum Leader is the Ding an Sich." Please! And while claims about "being Reality" may have brought martyrdom down on Sufi mystics like Al Hallaj, today such claims seem painfully limiting if not ridiculously absurd.
In the conflict that will engulf not only this country and this world, but the entire universe and all possible universes, there will be one cause, one objective, one battle, and, ultimately, one victor. When all is said and done and everything that ever was, will, can or could be, has been transformed beyond all recognition for all eternity, here and everywhere all at once forever, then and only then will the answer to the question which has haunted every society -- animal, mineral, or vegetable -- which has ever existed anywhere, the question that rings in every ear and on every page of every scripture of every creed, race, and religion, the question that thunders at the crack of doom and roars from the unfathomable chasm of Being itself, be crystal clear to every eye and unquestionably true to every mind.
It is with patience and reverence that We await that hallowed and harrowing moment when the smallest child and the most aged elder will be able, in the blink of an eye, without thought or reflection, without hesitation or regret, to answer that aforementioned question, "Who is the Maximum Leader?"
Thank you.
The Maximum Leader
About Maximum Leader:
Maximum Leader is a family of brands devoted to entertainment and self-improvement.
The Maximum Leader is the flagship brand of Maximum Leader. Dr. M. L.
Grim is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Maximum Leader.
features | archive | editor's note | letters | contributors | contact us