Begun at 5 a.m., 3 October I980 
  
After a lifetime largely spent in seeking complete freedom of self-expression I find myself being driven to the conclusion that a book is the only possible way for me to steer clear of editors and communications controllers of various kinds who have acquired the right to suppress or alter or otherwise restrict me in the pursuit of my own version of how human society should be arranged and conducted. 
  
So, if you, dear reader, happen to be a fellow truth-seeker of any sort and have been finding yourself in a similar predicament from time to time I hope you may be able to recognize the importance and the cogency of my general conclusions concerning what human beings ought to be trying to strive towards - as a social group - who now chance to be living on planet Earth in this Solar system of Sun and other planets in the galaxy called the Milky Way. 
  
I am merely mentioning these things because I happen to think that it is necessary to remind ourselves of the general setting in which I conceive my truth-seeking to have been done. 
  
I fully realize of course that the Milky Way is only one of many similar or dissimilar galaxies scattered throughout the extent of the vast volume of space we call the Universe. And I am suitably overawed by the magnificence of the things and articles which are greater than ourselves as well as being mystified by the apparently endless series of diminishing things and articles and forces which are there for the magnifying glass and the microscopes to reveal to us. The macroscopic and the microscopic alike are apparently infinitely mysterious and it seems to me that we human beings hang marvellously suspended between the one and the other as we pursue the course of our few short years of consciousness of it all which we refer to as our lives. 
  
But the basic question which I think a natural truth-seeker who is healthy and vigorous wants to pose to himself or herself, after having had a time of looking and wondering about the macroscopic and the microscopic as well as the obvious is simply this: "What is the ultimate significance of life and living things in this universe around us?" 
  
For a start it seems obvious to me that there something very short-sighted and mentally crippling about educational systems which are linked to establishments of local groups around the world which teach their new recruits to wave flags at each other and, when national interests - those holy goals of the nationalistic mentors of social behaviour - come to cross-purposes with the interests of other nations we find the flag-waving transforming itself into weapon-using and all the controllers of press and other media of human communications suppressing all mention the wider aspects - microscopic and macroscopic well - so that the selfish needs of the holy NATION may be served as the short-sighted ones think it ought to be. 
  
This is why I have become bitterly opposed to the smaller forms of nationalistic establishment thinking of all kinds.  
I am opposed to British nationalism - with its silly God, Queen and Country ideology - but it isn't only British establishment thinking that offends me. 
  
Nationalistic chauvinism is by no means confined to Britain although the British Imperialists of the history books have had a great deal to do with spreading the notions and principles of a world filled with competing nations. The people outside of Britain have not been very clever nor truth-seeking either when they have allowed the rubbishy notions of selfish nationalisms to sweep them all into positions where power-grabbers like Idi Amin and Stalin and Ayatollah Khomeini - not to mention Mrs Thatcher and Messrs Breffinev, Carter, et al.!! - have exploited the ease with which people can be turned from truth-seeking to wealthgetting for greedy national groups and then pretending that they are doing it all for Jehovah or Allah or other figments of the fertile imaginations of power-seekers the world over. 
  
Now, when I, in my present spirit of full freedom of self-expression for the GREATER TRUTHS of our human existence, write things like that about holy Gods and Flags and National Leaders; you may be beginning to understand why I could not find the freedom of self-expression I needed in the pages of establishment newspapers nor from the minions of nationally appointed controllers of TV and radio broadcasts. 
  
One of the great truths which I have uncovered for myself during my many years of attempting to say what I really wanted to say through the established press and broadcasting media and even during my time as teacher is that there is a very effective establishment control of human thought which is proof again everything except really dedicated and purposeful truth-seekers who are really determined to defeat the people who are content to try to please the establishment representatives and to respond to t carrots and whips which the establishment people employ to sustain the dominance of establishment thinking. 
  
Only a deep-down rebel against all the small nationalistic establishments will be able to realize the insidious way in which nationalistic establishments sustain their control over human thinking within the borders. 
  
Deep-down rebels are the only people who will sustain their opposition to establishment thinking sufficiently long and persistently to learn the truths which I hope to reveal to you in this book. It real requires the actual suppression of thousands upon thousands of active efforts to display the consequences of non -establishment purposes to bring one to the realization of how establishment thinking keeps people ignorant of all the ideas which would tend to force change upon any establishment. One must make effort after effort to state a new point of view - especial where general principles are concerned - finally to realize how a nationalistic establishment works to keep people ignorant and acquiescent in the workings of establishment ideology. 
  
And of course millions of people, men and women alike, never even think of the possibility that nationalistic establishment may be A BAD THING. Such conformists tend to believe everything they read in their favourite newspaper and are so lacking in native original curiosity and doubt that they grow into a habit of accepting nationalistic establishment thinking at its own evaluation and accustomed to interpreting social events in accordance with the basically short-sighted and extremely dangerous principles of nationalistic establishment thinking. 
  
It all starts in the schools where the first thinking years of every person in any nation is subjected to carefully thought-out influences, such as national loyalty oaths or more subtle religious ceremonies which cunningly confuse the minds of the young into accepting the lie that the nation 'serves God' when it is really only being greedy for itself. 
  
That this judgement is true can be seen from the fact that even in a nation like Britain, which pretends to be Christian and even teaches its children that the greatest teacher the world has ever seen, Jesus Christ himself has said, "No man can serve two masters - one cannot serve God and Mammon equally" - the children can be persuaded to think that even if a nation seems to be an un-ideal thing a 'holy nation' cannot be very wrong. 
  
But it IS wrong for any child to be taught that the nation is more important than the universe and that a Christian nation is BETTER than an Islamic nation or an Atheist nation or vice versa. 
  
All sectional nationalisms are WRONG and can be seen to be WRONG only when the supremacy of universal loyalty being given FIRST PRIORITY in every mind has been really and truly accepted as being RIGHT for all human beings. This 'wrongness' of any form of limited or localized nationalism rests of course in the fact that every form of nationalism implies addiction to a purpose for political thinking which logically puts every 'nation' against every other 'nation' - and the fact that war has happened between Iraq and Iran proves that a common religion cannot prevent international war.