Preface
I have spent my life dealing with criminal and socially accepted aggression, have been involved in the combat arts since 1976, and, since that very same year, have read over 2,000 books on the subject of humans harming and threatening other humans. I have wanted to write this book for twenty years and have put it off until now for reasons unimportant to this discussion.
40,000 Years from Home is, among other things, an experiment in serializing a nonfiction book, to be posted as free content on this site. This book will be, in part, a dialogue with thinkers past and present. More than anything it is the culminating act of a lifetime of dissident curiosity concerning the comprehensive nature of Man’s use of force against Man. I have tried and failed to separate in my mind the subjects of war, hunting, civil violence, religion, ideology, politics, and combat sports. This will not be another litany of weaponry and tactical innovations.
As I write and post this book I will strive to approach the subject matter according to the following dictum which I adopted gradually during the 1990s, and has taken me to unexpected heights as a fighter and trainer:
Philosophy amounts to theory, and all untested combat theory has failed the test of combat. Therefore, philosophizing shall be eschewed as the whining of women, the fantasizing of youth, and the excuse-making of old men.
That is the only absolute I shall permit myself in this journey through our past to our present. In combat experience is king, and everything else is subject to his rule. This extends to training and weapon fabrication as well. Weapons built through an experimental process are more reliable than those that are exclusively the product of the imagination and the workshop. Examinations of arms races past and present bear this truth out over and over again.
Author’s Notes
Sources will be noted in the text. I intend to write this book in three parts, but the research is ongoing, so that may very well change. Any comments that aid in the development of the discussion posted online will be incorporated in the marketed version at the end of each chapter along with my response. The entire draft of the book shall be posted online as free content. When 40,000 Years from Home goes on sale it will effectively be a second edition, with amplification notes, additional supplementary interludes, and appendices drawn from pertinent book reviews.
I would like to thank the readers of jameslafond.com for their interest and support. In large measure you deserve much of the credit for the volume and nature of the work made available on the site.
Contents
1. The Adults Must be Crazy
2. Punch Buggy Red
3. White Privilege
4. 40,000 Years from Home
5. The Bones of Our Collective Soul
6. Blinded by the God of Things
7. The Cause Uncaused
8. A Canadian Hobbes on The Planet of the Apes
9. Go Tell the Neanderthals Monsieur Rousseau
10. The Other Modern Humans
11. The Freedom Instinct
12. Meet the Neighbors
13. Doing Time in the Prehistoric Big House
14. The Killers of Blue
15. Unnatural Selection
16. Sticking it to The Mom
17. The Eternal Us and the Internal Them
18. History Unwashed
19. He Who Greets by Fire
Dedication
For my late irate Uncle Bernie, who served as a rifleman in Korea, and was ‘shot in the ass by a goddamned yellow man’. You sure got my attention.
