Avoiding Civil War with Citadelization

The core tenet of citadelization is to “know thyself” so as to ensure each interaction with other humans is a well-negotiated win-win relationship.  Civil war can only come about by the systemic and sustained collection of poor choices in relationships that should have never been agreed to in the first place.  Over time, the win-win relationship that founded the human organization becomes compromised by pockets of self-interest no longer connected to the original agreement.  Then, a civil war must be fought or cancer and death set in.

One might say that these pockets of self-interest are citadels that cause the civil war.  It is just the opposite. Citadelization is a defensive strategy that atomizes internal reconciliation within each citadel. The human body stops a civil war in the mind and the heart with something called sleep. A collapsing civilization is a process of atomizing citadelization finally stopping when we reach a reconciled state recognized by life as a core function.  A cell, an internal organ, a human, a family, and a tribe are end-state examples of reconciled purpose with defensible boundaries. 

So blaming citadelization for the divisions causing a civil war is of limited consciousness. Civil war is always a result of being poorly reconciled and nature forcing a division or reconciliation. Think of a citadel as the perfect balance between repulsion and attraction, like a soap bubble is the perfect form to balance the competing atmospheric forces.  A tribe is forced together by outside pressures while an internal reconciliation, harmony, and teamwork push back to create their own secure space within.  When a large human organization has lost its purpose the internal reconciliation has collapsed and the civil war is the competing external pressures forcing the reestablishment of balance.  Don’t blame citadelization, this disease is the cure.

Citadelization is the disease and the cure which must be applied intelligently just like division and reconciliation are the disease and the cure which creates the self.  The idea and purpose of self is to be the ultimate citadel.  It is our minds and our hearts that are the doorways for the self to interact with life and to make relationships with which we have the possibility of success or failure. To extend ourselves, we must also have a secure center with the ability to close the doors.

Health is the level of reconciliation internally and peace is the level of reconciliation or harmony externally.  Civil war is the hard road to the rediscovery of health and peace.  The best way to avoid a civil war is to not violate the boundaries of established win-win partnerships. But the mind and the heart have different rules and missions that force the abandonment of our citadels and our secure sense of self. 

The United States gave its manufacturing sector to China for profit (seduction) and to create a larger reconciled human tribe (hope).  Seduction and hope are common, and often terrible, reasons to abandon harmony and peace.  Except that we humans have souls looking for experience and we live inside a greater and more powerful organization with its own needs and agendas.  So the more time we spend judging the world condition and our choices, instead of reacting to change with compassion and understanding, the more likely we are to fall into civil conflict.

Life is a continuous series of destabilizing events leading to a fall and a learning how to recover. It started with learning to walk.  This was our first and still counting three-body “problem” of finding lasting stability in an unstable environment as the masterwork called life.  Disease and civil war are more of the re-stabilizing forces while it is seduction and hope that destabilize.  Life has created our mind, heart, and body as the perfect vehicle for this biosphere to grow our souls. Forgive it all. Embrace it all.  Love it all.

We are all little soap bubbles who have temporarily found a balance of competing forces to create our sense of self.  How long we get to have these vehicles and these citadels of family, tribe and civilization depends on our ability to maintain the balance of competing pressures via using our own force of division and reconciliation to maintain our core.  And we must keep finding our sense of self at greater levels of being and action because we live inside the body of God and should own that fact.  

Civil wars are the hardest and greatest tests of self we will ever face.  Being atomized into citadels, having our egos dissolved into an open heart, or launching our minds into Eternity can be terrifying, humbling, and educating, by design.  Citadelization is the disease and the cure for civil war, the reboot that sends us back into life reborn a little braver, a little wiser, and a little more humble.