© mark mulligan, Seattle, Earth, Third Millennium CE
If every Learner on WeaponWorld
Cast off misgivings and worked to the same plan,
We could put together PeaceWorld in a single generation.
First things first!
World peace first!
“We are now faced
with the fact that tomorrow is today. We
are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.
In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing
as being too late. Procrastination is
still the thief of time. Life often
leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The ‘tide in the affairs of men’ does not
remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry
out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every
plea and rushes on. Over the bleached
bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic
words ‘Too late.’ There is an invisible
book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. ‘The moving finger writes, and having writ
moves on…’ We still have a choice today:
nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. This may well be mankind’s last chance to
choose between chaos and community.”
Martin Luther King, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community, 1st
ed., 1967, “The World House”, http://ww.forusa.org/nonviolence/MLK_WorldHouse.html
Caution: What follows is a pretty long book full of free ideas and inspirations that have been robbed from us. Relax; I’ve broken it into about a hundred chapters a little less troublesome. The whole thing is still a long and hard read (my fault). That’s really too bad. I would rather have gotten multi-media specialists to adorn this endless screed with stained glass and cantatas (at least as good as the Reader’s Digest Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary, set to an equally stunning soundtrack). Ah well, another project beyond my grasp in the absence of outside help… Where has it gone to hide, all this famous help?
From your favorite book, to the Bill of Rights, to the Space Shuttle Flight Manual, a text doesn’t grab the road until quite a few good people share its content. Until then, it is just another string of empty symbols and they are just another bunch of dreamers. If you want to launch liberty, liftoff – or World Peace, for that matter – you and many more will have to study the same basic text, give it voice and act on it.
No text is perfect; that means sifting through a lot of raw ore to come across the few rough diamonds worth buffing up and showing off to your friends. Impressed, they may rally to the cause and contribute to its crafting.
I may be addressing here your reading chore or mine of endless rewrites.
A revolutionary text is a lot like any other tool. It may seem awkward, at first, to your virgin mind, the way some new tool might fail in your untrained hands. Only repeated trial and error will make it work for you. Be patient and work hard. I assure you, this is worth it. You Learners I have waited for with so much impatience; here is what you were awaiting so patiently.
Those very few of us who crave World Peace more than we fear it, need to share a specific text. This one, perhaps, or another? Learners’ pages may be nothing more than rough drafts for some better plan.
We must ponder the same topics, debate the same ideas over and over again and more of us in time—to achieve anything useful. For or against, that doesn’t matter; sharing the same ideas and vocabulary, that matters. Until then, we are just miming divergent ideas and fantasizing at cross-purpose to no constructive end.
Look around you; the world is getting sicker every day. It misses the healing balm of untold voices preaching peace in unison and of our healing touch guided by a shared purpose.
Try not to interpret Learners with your inner voice alone; overdub instead the massive roar of millions of allied Learners. This text is powerless in their absence, no matter what ideas it intends to convey. With them, the ideals of World Peace will evolve from wishful thinking into down-to-earth reality. Once you reach my age, your grownup children will take for granted the fantastic assertions of Learners, whether or not they agree with them. Up to them, then, to come up with something better.
Wait and see. We are at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius: one of many cues. For the time being, study these pages carefully and share them with your friends, that we may best serve Peace.
Also, I’d like to remind every beloved Learner – global and domestic – that there are quite a few of us, here in America, who aren’t troglodytes and born-again Huns, despite current claims to the contrary.
If it were in my power, I would get experts to translate this text into every tongue, so that everyone could contribute to this project. If I could, I would get every government on Earth to sponsor a free translation web page that would render every major language into every native one and back again. A page you may have already paid for with your taxes, which your nation’s secret service could be using. So that everyone on Earth could engage in peaceful debate like civilized beings. But that’s another chapter.
As usual, when it comes to the human condition, Learners’ creative anarchy will have to overcome institutional sterility.
I would rather that many foreign language speakers (You!) took their favorite chapters from LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld, translated them lovingly into their mother tongue (as I have, in French and English) and uploaded them to the Web. Credit me as author (my name appears at the bottom of this page, the Title and Contact Pages, rarely if at all elsewhere in Learners) and yourself as translator. That way, your fellow citizens may contribute to this PeaceWorld project as welcome peers in the World Agora. Please do this for me, for yourself and for our common glory, but especially for them.
No one may be left behind, regardless of language skills. Fifty major language groups include 99% of the world population. I need about fifty gifted Learners, giving of themselves, to form the vanguard of this revolution.
Why wait? Start reading and translating these chapters for the sake of your compatriots! As in my case, this is the task you’ve prepared for all your life.
Please, thank you and you’re welcome, friend Learner.
I’m using the WWW to transmit this message to you; the same way Erasmus used the new printing press to transmit his. I am using you, Learner idealist; the same way Erasmus made use of every humanist on Earth to proclaim his dream. Let’s see how much we ‘trivial idealists’ could make the earth shake, once we rally.
One last thing. No need to spend a lot of time striving for literary perfection. What I ask from you is honesty, passion and haste. There will be plenty of time, later on, to arrange a perfect translation and defend it from reactionaries and their cant. Nothing but delay would detract from your glory as visionary pioneer and first benefactor of your people. Thus, upload your draft translation immediately, no matter how clumsy it may seem to you; then take your time to perfect it through many rewrites, as I am doing with the original text. There is so little time left, time is of the essence.
Tell me about your translation uploaded to the Internet, that I may note your work in my Table of Contents.
The secret to World Peace resides in the deliberate cooperation of all the world’s elites and proletariats acting together as Learners, rather than their discord fostered by warmongers on both sides of every issue.
I did not write this text, nor did you seek it, to stoke the WeaponWorld Jive Drive, distract you from your Learner responsibilities or reassure you that weapons elites should make every vital decision without your say-so. That has never been sane policy. Learners would include everyone’s decision, naturally.
The secret to World Peace resides in the world’s elites and proletariats acting together as Learners, rather than their discord fostered by warmongers on both sides.
In pursuit of why, how, and what to expect of PeaceWorld,
Please refresh the pages below – I try to update them often.
My blog: Escape from WeaponWorld
“We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.” Martin Luther King quotation. Invitation to read and translate Learners.
Summary of Learners: World Peace
Still working on the Summary. What a bored, stressed, aversive or overworked reader might find too much to handle today, a dozen generations of meticulous scholars may pore over, harvesting shortfalls.
We are trained as children against peace. Once Learners understand that fact, we may unlock and open wide the doors to Peace World.
Table of contents (you are here.)
Includes those to each chapter. A more fractal, quantum jumpy and fuzzy logic description of Learners than these squashed, Newtonian sentences. Also more easily translated into other languages.
I will wake again in darkness / Je veillerai tantot dans l’obscurite --- Chanson d’automne / Paul Verlaine / Autumn song --- By not loving you / En ne t’aimant point --- Ballade des pendus / François Villon / Ballad of the hanged --- The second coming / W.B. Yeats / Le second avènement --- Nobody is blocking world peace, but you / Personne ne bloque la paix au monde, sauf toi --- I have a rendez-vous with death / Alan Seeger / J’ai un rendez-vous avec la mort --- L’ame du vin / Charles Baudelaire / The soul of wine --- What questions about when? / Quelles questions sur quand? --- Blue Energy Water / L’energie bleue dans l’eau --- Go Find It / Va trouver --- Darkness, Darkness / Jesse Colin Young / Noirceur, Noirceur --- Grimpe / Climb --- Darkness, Darkness / Jesse Colin Young / Noirceur, Noirceur --- Go Find It / Va le trouver --- Global Atlantis / L’Atlantide globale --- Dover Beach / Matthew Arnold / La plage de Douvres --- What Is All This For? / Pourquoi faire, tout ça ? --- Come to me, Eureka / Viens-moi, Eureka --- I’m in hurry to get high/ J’ai hatte de me defoncer --- We are all the Grizzly Man / Nous sommes tous l’homme grizzly --- I cannot trust you if / Je ne te fais aucune confiance si --- An Irish Airman Foresees his Death / W.B. Yeats / Un aéronaute irlandais prévoit sa mort --- World Peace, Jobless Washer Woman / La paix au monde : lavandière désœuvrée --- The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower / Dylan Thomas / La force qui à travers le fusible vert dirige la fleur --- La peine que j’induis, je dois ressentir / The Pain that I Induce, I must feel --- We Win / Nous Gagnons --- Pavane pour une planète défunte / Pavane For A Dying Planet --- J’entends les oies / I Hear the Geese --- One Art / Elizabeth Bishop / Un art --- Prends sa place / Take its Place
Please provide a link from your site to mine, and email me.
We need a whole new political vocabulary. Our range of topics will be encyclopedic and our first treatment of these topics, insolently superficial, subject to mythic dismissal at every page turn.
Mein Fahrt, Quoting Hitler out of Context
Hitler understood that an ideology needs a simple message that everyone can understand and agree with. It requires step-by-step development. His intent was wrong; ours could be better. The mechanism remains, to use or abuse.
The Collective Superconscience
Do we share a collective superconscience? Do we pollute it with violence? Could we flood it with Peace?
Darwinian selection for better military states. Leadership in weapon and peace contexts.
Innate human evil or ultimate good? Nature, nurture and other good things.
Pick you constellation of political metaphors: historically pure or dreaming tomorrow. You choose.
Take a break. Contact me. This is hard.
Why are we in this mess?
Are we too cooperative or too competitive? Why?
Wars are not open and shut, warfare is eternal. Those who resist it best, die the fastest.
The science and craft of warfare in history and the present.
Sacrifice or celebration? Weapons religions promote sacrifice; peace religions, celebration. We should be celebrating Learners, not sacrificing victims.
What I Think of the Rapture, Man
Jesus never used the word Rapture; it is not in the Bible. Christ forbids Christians to pray in church and in public. See for yourself in Matthew 6-5. What are ‘Christian’ fundamentalists up to: disobeying His direct instruction, leading the faithful astray, turning the uncertain away in disgust and thus perverting Christianity?
What made perennial peasants and nobles revere these heretics, instead of their Catholic clergy, fully mature?
My attempt to rewrite the Cathari catechism lost during in opening phase of the Inquisition.
Identity, conflict and community. Adherents of different identity positions could become Learners. Their shared designation could shield everyone from human rights abuse.
Our constellation of political metaphors is full of weapon myths. We could replace them with peace myths.
A list of suggested does and don’ts (or at least not too often).
The Syndrome: government is bad, let’s make it slow and stupid. The cure: government is as good or bad as the nearest Mayor’s office. See to it that Mayor’s offices are better, more often than not.
The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
His social contract lacked the consideration (legal term) that would have triggered and guaranteed it: World Peace. Rousseau’s genius recognized the limits of communications during his day. Those faulty communications cancelled the influence of his social contract on international relations. Using technologies that he lacked, we could reduce that cyclopean wall into a puff of air.
The fatal oversight of Marx. Describing information politics without the weapon/peace antinomy would be like discussing orbital mechanics in the absence of gravity. Economics is just another sub-branch of information flow. It is infinitely renewable and exponentially profitable, and can be multiplied by millions of times, when set to chaotic and anarchic dialog mode instead of centralized and pro-government monolog mode, much less productive. An untapped abundance resides there, that Learners can liberate.
The development of the threat formula: Body Count times (Time over Distance) squared; instead of the armchair formula that accelerates thought (see below).
Walk a mile in the boots of an average grunt.
The links between crime, warfare and governance.
The two paths that Capitalism can take and their consequences.
America’s weakness and ultimate power.
One out of ten authors survives and one of ten of his works, among best-preserved historic writings. Did you know that the Iliad and the Odyssey were actually two thirds of a trilogy?
More book burning until now. Book burning is ecumenical in history and sickeningly omnipresent.
Are fascism and modern political philosophy too similar? Why?
The institution of righteousness. We have our precedent.
Failure to heed warnings until it is too late, typical of weapon mentality.
A partial list of lies by type.
Weapon mentality is lethal by design. It cannot help itself; that is what is does best. If you wanted to massacre everything, you have picked the right pet. Choose another more docile.
How do we get from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld?
Peace Mentality, Weapon Mentality
Superficial growth with deep roots, explosive growth from shallow ones. Concerning deep roots and fruitful growth.
The World Elephant is run by a cockroach mind; its muscular power, out of balance with its neurological awareness. It wanders around blind, breaks its limbs and starves in the produce section of a grocery store. That is our world. Graft an elephant’s brain into it and watch it dance. That dance would be our lifeline to PeaceWorld.
Education as Pathology vs. the Armchair Formula
Modern education is about triage and restriction. Learner education will honor every child with a doctorate at puberty, the way we treat prodigal musicians today. Accelerate information flow instead of rationing it. Turn the hierarchic ziggurat of education upside down, into a cornucopia of Learning: anarchic but self-filtering for quality.
The rules that regulate our communications by means of a constellation of political metaphors. Free speech and profit centers. More anarchic dialog bandwidth and less frequency of official monolog.
Information handling by peace technology.
Taichi Sakaiya wrote about perceived abundance and the objective value judgments that arise from it; he wrote about dearth and the knowledge value judgments that arise from it. Suggested peace technology applications of knowledge-value, balancing affluence and poverty, objective value and knowledge-value.
Laocracy as a direct and perpetual referendum alternative to indirect and sporadic representative democracy. A suggested architecture for the World Agora and its information politics. Sociopathocracy, rule by sociopaths over WeaponWorld.
For maximum justice.
How to list topics of passion and their adherents.
Some problems with large-scale governance.
Your picture is as valid as mine. Let’s build ours together.
On the benefits of extended travel.
Ancient Abundance & Little Green Men
Laughably unscientific speculations and outlandish hypotheses for you fireworks entertainment.
Peace technology applications of science and superstition.
A complementary replacement to his theory of evolution.
Amer-Ind as a universal travelers’ language supplemental to birth languages. On cultural ecology: its strangulation by corporate weapon culture and its appreciation on PeaceWorld.
On the fine art of verifaction: finding the truth on both sides of a conflict. On Islam. What if the two agreed perfectly?
Gandhi’s ideas on Satyagraha, conflict resolution and non-violence―gratefully lifted from Mark Juergensmeyer’s book.
A poem on Satyagraha and verifaction.
Try not to evaluate the economics of peace technology according to the econologic of weapon mentality.
What should we expect once we reach PeaceWorld?
Could we turn the Earth into a larger, better model of Victorian England? The Earth as a squireship. Factory towns fringing Earth orbit instead of the sea. Outer space, the colonies?
Is the living voice of DNA the voice of the serpent of Eden, the devil? Or is it the Holy Spirit that Jesus left us as a Comforter, pending His return? DNA is very old and very wise; our souls are saved already. Should we not tap into that titanic database to unearth answers to our worst problems? DNA in other incarnations has already survived them and turned them to advantage. Why not share them here and now in realtime?
More outlandish, pre-historic speculations for your dining and dancing pleasure.
We must have a thousand times more medics. Weapons impediments to public health, and peace technology applications to healthcare.
Alternative transportation hardware and the formal interdiction of nuclear war.
Good ecology as a constitutional right.
Another list of keywords: urban renewal, urban forestry, tectonic remediation, covered cities, elevated walkways, solar power. Grass roots surveillance of large-scale activities.
Your Rights or their Privileges?
The accord of rights on PeaceWorld.
The best means of population control is as many children and old folks as possible healthy and well cared for—and many fewer exceptions.
“The Constitution calls for a well-regulated militia,” … Harm Forces on Peace World.
Convivencia, learning to live together. Urban design and environmental protections.
Be kind
enough to translate your favorite chapter of Learners into your own
language, please? A more or less fatuous
list of personal suggestions. How dare
I? Because my sister asked me. Make up your own!
Sustainable development through peace technology, activism, social commentary, futurism, prophecy, politics, political theory, ecology and peace, idealism, urban renewal, global management, global federation, world vision we lack.
Litter control as a sidewalk sport. Garbage is for WeaponWorld slums, not PeaceWorld’s New Jerusalem. Recycling it should become a child’s game.
JE VEILLERAI TANTOT DANS L’OBSCURITÉ - a
CHANSON D’AUTOMNE
– Paul Verlaine
AUTUMN SONG - b
BALLADE DES PENDUS – François Villon
THE SECOND COMING – W.B. Yeats
NOBODY IS BLOCKING WORLD PEACE, BUT YOU
PERSONNE NE BLOQUE LA PAIX AU MONDE, SAUF TOI - f
I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH – Alan Seeger
J’AI UN RENDEZ-VOUS AVEC LA MORT - g
L’AME DU VIN – Charles Baudelaire
THE SOUL OF WINE - h
QUELLES QUESTIONS SUR QUAND? - i
THE PARABLE OF THE YOUNG MAN AND THE OLD – Wilfred
Owen
LE PARABOLE DU JEUNE HOMME ET DU VIEUX - j
VA TROUVER – l
DARKNESS,
DARKNESS - Jesse Colin Young
NOIRCEUR, NOIRCEUR - ll
GRIMPE - m
GLOBAL ATLANTIS – n
LA PLAGE DE DOUVRES - nn
À MOI, EUREKA! - p
NOUS SOMMES TOUS L’HOMME GRIZZLY - r
JE NE PUIS TE FAIRE CONFIANCE - s
AN IRISH AIRMAN
FORESEES HIS DEATH – W. Yeats
UN AERONAUTE IRELANDIS PREVOIT SA MORT - t
WORLD PEACE, JOBLESS WASHER WOMAN
LA PAIX AU MONDE : LAVANDIERE DESOEUVREE – u
THE FORCE
THAT THROUGH THE GREEN FUSE DRIVES THE FLOWER – Dylan Thomas
LA FORCE QUI DEPUIS LE FUSIBLE VERT DIRIGE LA FLEUR - v
LA PEINE QUE
J’INDUIS, JE DOIS RESSENTIR
THE PAIN THAT I INDUCE, I MUST FEEL – w
NOUS GAGNONS – x
PAVANE POUR UNE PLANÈTE
DEFUNTE
UN ART - z
ODE À LA VERITE ET A
LA NON-VIOLENCE
THE MENTALITY AND TECHNOLOGIES OF PEACE
MENTALITES
ET TECHNOLOGIES PAISIBLES
À
Maman, inspiratrice d’élégante simplicité,
Et à
Dad, feu chevalier sans peur et sans reproche …
To our libraries and their epic quest to appease The Hunger.
May those brave soup kitchens become banquet halls of Learning:
World Agora porticos to PeaceWorld.
I submit this work to the verdict of Ganesh.
The quest for Learners has led me across a Tartar steppe of blazing solitude with no end in sight. My awful trip has taken me from one oasis of fellowship to the next, somewhere beyond the horizon. I tarried at each stop, refreshed by a few friends’ tenders of confidence and support. Then I resumed my dismal trek.
In The Language Instinct, Peter Pinker says he never met anyone indifferent to his topic of passion. I cannot admit as much. Active indifference begot passive aggression, the moment I interrupted routine patter with Learners’ discontent.
I have a genius for raising ire. Sexual harassment would not have triggered so much confrontation. My wife, Linda, suggested it was not what I said that bought me so much trouble, but how I said it. Perhaps. This work would never have seen the light of day without the heartfelt support – if at times bemused – of my beloved manuscript widow.
I’m so proud of my family and friends: Learner role models all. Many others furthered this work in their own way, even if unknowingly.
I owe special thanks to the foreign volunteers and kibbutznikim (Israeli collective farmers) at Kibbutzim Evron and Dorot. And to our Arab and Palestinian hosts as well, whose Muslim birthright is Peace.
To our distant ancestors from those ancient domains: Hominids, Pagans, Jews, Christians, Muslims and all those in between: the ultimate survivors of God’s wrath.
The Americas – North, South and Central – form a triad jewel. Similarly, Israel and its neighbors form an antique necklace of infinite promise – unrealized, so far – that stretches and flows miraculously beyond its borders, in intimate contact with other nuclei of ancient civilization. Come ye together, every wise Learner, regardless of provenance and language! Every wise one singing in harmony of peace: Learners assembled on PeaceWorld…
I have known many blessings: Plutarch’s passion and Voltaire’s star-field enlightenment; Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, the Dupuy Brothers’ Encyclopedia of Military History, Carroll Quigley’s Weapon Systems & Political Stability, and Mortimer Adler’s How to Think about War and Peace.
I used to draw sanity supplements from The Nation magazine. Eventually, I had to turn it down, from its galling refusal to support my project or any other of significant social transformation, for that matter. Like other American “liberals,” its editors whine endlessly about things they refuse to change. They and their peers in The Progressive, Dissent, Z, Harpers, Utne Reader and other Anglo-Saxon periodicals that dare call themselves Leftist or Progressive, despite their stuffy, middle-of-the-road fainéantise (fainaionteez, “best do nothing” point of view). In the long run, meddlesome meliorists and atomistic progressives combine to approve the worst wreckage.
There are only two political parties in America: Conservative and Reactionary. Democrats who haven’t had a good idea in six decades or accepted anyone else’s in half that time, and Republicans who never met a bad idea they didn’t love.
The editorial formula of The Nation (if there is one, it is carefully concealed) implies surrender of the initiative to the reactionaries. Surrender, period. America’s political quagmire confirms my conclusion. Progressives are more responsible for the sewer backflow of American politics, than the reactionaries themselves. We could easily dismiss stupid reactionaries, but the subtle monopoly and sabotage of progressive ideals by “liberals” is a paralytic of fearsome potency.
With friends like those, who needs enemies?
Many people and publications have confirmed my conclusions, even if they ignored the subtext of their words, intentions and deeds.
Nature has revealed many heart-rending wonders to me. Each new revelation confirmed our entitlement to peace, abundance and justice -- to the God of Love’s benevolence, the Comforter Jesus promised us.
I am very grateful to Govind Naidu, Professor of Political Science at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. Into his lap the mails fluttered my unsolicited little manuscript. His thought-provoking reply galvanized this odd quest of mine. Apart from a few ephemeral phone calls, I was satisfied with his unique inspiration.
I owe undying thanks to Ted Fagin: affable neighbor, gentleman gambler, bibliophile, anarchist and Dog Soldier: the mentor I prayed for and now grieve. Cheerily, he set aside his terminal affliction and grave misgivings about the content of this book, to mentor me English. Thanks also to sister Leslie who lovingly landscaped the prose whose civil engineering Ted undertook, to Karen for beckoning me beyond my comfort zone, and to Jill for her spirit of Fairness.
Best friends Doug Dean and Paul Lackman plowed through rough drafts of this text, and offered many more suggestions than my few attributions suggest—Doug, from first drafts until his regretted demise (so painfully long ago), and Paul since.
Thanks also to countless thugs, hooligans, hypocrites and fascists out there (flaming, blaming or crypto-), for whom:
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
Who cares whether they wore battledress or class-A uniforms, TV pancake makeup or the ashes of mourning, institutional silks or the rags of dissent? Everyone is naked and mortal underneath. Their arrogant impunity raised low rancor to new heights of moral rankness. Without the awful fecundity of their malice, I’d never have found enough outrage to manhandle this project.
I’ve owed a great debt of gratitude to the kind souls at the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights (OCR) Seattle, with whom I’ve worked for so many years. And earlier, to the dedicated people at the Damage Assessment Branch, US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), also in Seattle. They would have been better served by someone less distracted, but found a way to tolerate my Learners daydreams.
I owe intense thanks to Alta Vista Bablefish online translation service, which provided me with the free means to turn an impossible dream, translating Learners into French, into an entertaining if challenging impracticality. My dozen or so Keyword pages, translated in as many languages, are also its result. Likewise, to Google Translation, for Arab, Farsi and Indonesian versions. In addition, I must thank Microsoft, Inc., and its Bowne Global Service auxiliary, for useful if sometimes cantankerous online translation services, in their Word 2000 package. Also, http://www.wordreference.com/fr/index.htm, where I found French translations I was too stupid to do myself; and http://www.touchon.net/annuaire-site-plans-dictionnaires.php for synonyms in French, likewise.
I’ll never get over the fact that I never found free translation services of fine quality in the major South Asian language groups or any from Africa. We are truly unimpressive when it comes to gathering together in peace. There remains much work to be done.
Learners speaks ill of current, entrepreneurial software companies. Software delivery should be a public utility renowned for its consistency, free service and ease of use. In the meantime, Mr. Bill Gates, thank you for having eased my burden.
And to Jean Bacon and son, whose book and translation of Les Saigneurs de la Guerre (The Greater Glory) lit my way through the skull-lined labyrinth of WeaponWorld. To all those in my Bibliography, who set stepping stones across the bloody, sucking quagmire of WeaponWorld, to PeaceWorld’s shaded grove.
To the lovely darling, Esmeralda Arana (whom I never met), who kicked my butt at just the right moment, if not in a direction she could predict.
I owe special thanks to Google. Its search spiders crawled every page of my work, keyword indexed the whole thing and sent me thousands of readers for free. Many fewer per day since I moved Learners to another URL, but thanks anyhow. Bad move; I could have kicked myself for moving it. Other search engines and webmaster links have sent me even more readers (especially Yahoo and MSN). Thanks to all of you, without whom this samizdat would have been known by none but me.
Thank you, www.freeservers.com, for hosting my site for so many years at low cost and tremendous levels of service.
Hardly any ideas proposed herein are all mine. Most Learner prescriptions unfold as part of the organic Tao, as arrogant reaction collapses under its own contradictions.
Mine all errors contained herein. Please address your comments to me. I welcome your corrections and thank you in advance for them. My feeble wit is inadequate to this task; that’s obvious. It may suffice the combined awareness of this world’s Learners gathered in the Agora of PeaceWorld; that is my hope.
Thanks also to the poets, above.
In my readings on government, I was constantly exposed to political theoreticians who wanted to “fix everything” and almost always failed. Here is why.
If you were an honest mechanic confronted by a machine that had broken down in the same way for thousands of years, the first question you would ask would not be “How do I fix this?” After all, that is what a thousand prior mechanics asked and answered to the best of their ability, all for naught. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here trying to fix it for the thousandth time; this problem would already be solved.
No, the questions to ask first must be:
· Why did the machine break?
· How did it break?
· Who broke it?
For example: if it broke because forces were applied to it, during the normal course of its operation, beyond its ability to endure; then it will not matter how many parts you replace; the machine will break again, either where it broke before or at another, weaker joint. If it broke because those who should have tended it, abused it instead; again, it will not matter what parts you replace. If because it was used for purposes other than those intended; again, no matter.
If you can answer those three questions accurately, you might find a new, unforeseen fix that would last; if not, never. You would have to answer them to your complete satisfaction before you could answer the last one: “How do I fix this?”
In spite of the thousand-year babble of reductionist meliorists (like Machiavelli, Marx and your local neighborhood liberal), around the theme of “How to fix” government; Learners seeks to ask and answer the three primary questions – deliberately and first off – in the hope that its readers may emulate it’s example and do a better job. Thereafter, we may “fix” our governance, once and for all.
I sent away for a free copy of the Bible in French on the Internet (www.bibles.ch). It must be an ample source of literary style and inspiration for cultures that adopt it, as the Koran (Qran) is for Muslim cultures, and the Vedas for Hindus. Never having read the Bible in French, (nor the Qran in what I’m told is the purest Arabic, nor, alas, the life of Buddha in Pali, nor the Gita in Sanskrit, nor …), it seemed that my rusty French might benefit. Even though I must admit that I’ve never found a version of the Bible in French as beautifully written as the King James version in English.
As long as we understand how much less we know than we don’t know, and as long as we can smell garlic cooking (per J.G. Ballard), everything will be alright.
You can find my modest summary of the Koran at the end of Learners’ chapter on Satyagraha—a fitting and timely blend of the best of these religious creeds, by my lights. God is God; what different names we use doesn’t matter.
My request earned me this answer.
“What did you intend to write???”
I replied something like this.
It’s not easy to weave a welcome mat for Learners: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld. So many ideas in so few words!
I foresee a new world soon provided with:
· one duly elected World Mayor’s Office with its enormous grass roots Administrative Council also duly elected, (note my italics: no Big Brothers need apply. It will be our public responsibility and private pleasure to replace them with worthy tribal leaders);
· one vigilant and humane Judiciary, controlled from beginning to end by randomly selected juries; and
· one well-run, superbly professional Police Force: the best warriors on Earth, hand-picked to guarantee peace.
All by themselves, they would govern this whole planet the way we run our best cities.
Nowadays, this planet resembles Mogadishu on a bad day:
· two hundred cruel, ego-freak gang lords,
· two hundred councils of senile elders bickering like spoiled children, and
· two hundred street corners, each with its gang of hoodlums and decrepit murderers playing bloody War with AK-47s, M-16s and worse.
Nowadays, the West (America, Europe, Japan...) is like Embassy Row in Mogadishu: occupying the least damaged, richest, most heavily armed neighborhoods of a city in ruins. I don’t know the layout of Mogadishu, so I might be wrong about its “best” neighborhood. My illustration stands.
Me, I’m a cheap stay-at-home and chicken to boot (thus no sainthood claimed here!). Learners’ sole intent is to instigate a more livable world that this author (and everyone else) might reincarnate into. There is no way to predict how the world will evolve in one’s absence; but PeaceWorld seems to be the obvious way to go.
From sheer selfishness, I’d rather live quietly in Seattle, Paris or Geneva (name your favorite city) – even as a poor man – than attempt some desperate survival in the millionaires’ district of Mogadishu or Grozny. Whether my planet or hometown, the children and I would be better off growing up in Geneva, than dodging bullets down some Mogadishu lane. That seems undeniable to me.
I could care less about sleek fat cats swaggering down Embassy Row. Those gangsters in sharp-dressed suits cut down and starve children by the million, then turn their back on them. They make me sick. Categorically worthless, like the rulers of the old regime in East Germany. Better leaders are out there; we have merely to identify and empower them honestly. Also diagnose and forbid the least desirable.
Simply put, I intend to transform this world from Planet Mogadishu into Planet Geneva. To get away with it, I will need your cooperation and that of millions more Learners (about six million, actually: one in a thousand people on Earth, ought to do the trick. Of course, the more the merrier!).
Imagine the prodigies that a generation of better-raised children could achieve! All the streets would sparkle with cleanliness and safety; all the parks, well-tended and inviting; all the artwork, ah, the artwork! And the scientific discoveries!
Mogadishu could become what it always meant to be: a local capital of commerce, piety and Learning; a tropical garden famous for its imperial parks and its thriving, cosmopolitan port; an inviting tourist attraction and center of abundance and wisdom—where the call to prayer would never again be interrupted by the disgrace of gunfire.
And the West? Embassy Row of Planet Mogadishu on a Bad Day? It would become the same district on Planet Geneva – just super-deluxe. The rising tide would lift all the boats at once, yachts and dinghies alike.
Yet my favorite Chinese philosopher among the known ones, Mencius, taught that it would be wiser to seek Humanity and Duty than a simple profit that may turn destructive. Humanity, Duty and Learning: those would secure a more certain abundance.
After all, what are our incentives today? Profit from WeaponWorld by perfecting it? Criminal expediency. Could PeaceWorld jeopardize our income without additional return, or be too difficult and dangerous? Cruel and gutless denial. Could it be that world peace would not arise until humanity 2.0 emerges, as perfectly suited for it as our version is not? Circular reasoning to dodge personal responsibility. Review our common motives here without mercy, the way a panhandler might count his handful of change under a drizzly twilight.
Of course, we’re going to need these other things, too:
· A brace of peace religions that comprehend and embrace each other passionately. Are you some religious fanatic preaching exclusion and brutality in the name of God? You’re fired!
· A World Militia on the Swiss plan, that would encourage each of us to defend our home, hometown and home planet against any Aggressor. It would stop armed crime and organized aggression in every community that signed up for it.
· A 1-800-my-rights telephone number direct to the World Court. Through it, every hate crime and act of tyranny would be investigated and every war criminal, arrested at the source and early. Especially if some local militia started acting like a loose cannon.
· A World Agora of information politics and Learning, operating upward from the grass roots, a hundred thousand times more delicate and responsive than the lashup we are used to, well-coordinated by computer and as reliable as municipal water.
· At least one advanced college degree for every child by puberty, the way we honor musical prodigies today. All children would be prodigies in at least one topic of their choosing, provided we encouraged the full range of their interests and never quashed them.
· Child rearing would become a sacred obligation. So would the ritual purification of water by filtering it through biomass or some other “miraculous” technology. There’d be many more, with so many Learners pursuing their topic of passion in the World Agora…
· A guaranteed public health service with enough food, clothing, shelter and medical care for everyone. Simply because. As I say further on, a practical charity. We’d be sharing the wealth of Geneva, here, and not the penury of Mogadishu―both multiplied to planetary scale. Enough to satisfy everyone's needs with a thousandfold left over.
· Free storefront mediation and arbitration services, faith-based or secular, for any pair holding a grudge or dispute. No civil dispute would go before a jury until it had been adjudged in this manner.
· Climax biome restoration in every available habitat; and
· Space exploration in earnest.
You know, all those things we make mighty noises about, yet sabotage in favor of our weapon technologies? Please note: “OUR weapon technologies, OUR responsibility”―no one else’s. If we agreed to play this game honestly, with all our might and that of God, it could turn out better than the fatal one we practice today, blaming others for the outcome of our sins.
In so doing, we lead a life of misery, stripped of civility, charity, true faith, serious education, useful infrastructure, high art, climax biome, good taste and dependable security. Indeed, we’ve stripped our conscience bare—both as individuals and communities. We are stripping the planet bare when we could be gardening Eden.
It’s time we grew back a new conscience and a healthier one.
The worst problem? Our culture honors weapon mentality more than that of peace. Most of our social habits should honor peace instead of merely rehearsing what it’s gonna take to survive another bad day on Planet Mogadishu. If we rendered full honor to peace, it would be better for us in so many ways we refuse to admit. We are frightened to death of peace.
Me, I’m eager to launch the project of world peace we fear most.
We submit more or less consciously to this mass-induced if disgraceful stupidity, because our societies evolved through Darwinian selection, to fear peace as much as cholera. Both are lethal to primitive cultures and both are banned by them.
Our culture trains us, from infancy under fulltime hypnosis, to shun peace and holy spirit as much as shit and piss. Social collectives and lone philosophers who chose not to train their children in this manner – who sought honest peace, true sainthood and real merit instead – got their throats cut by more militant communities both abroad and at home.
We are the worst weapon demons, and our societies, the most deadly weapon technologies, that five (?) thousand years of Darwinian selection could produce. Do you recall the Orcs in Tolkien’s fantasy? Well, the real-world Orcs, that’s us: so-called lovers of peace who never managed to set it up.
Our modern culture is only good at optimizing the following Threat Formula:
body count x (distance/time)2
Nuclear, biological and perhaps meteorological omnicide, that’s our ultimate cultural achievement and manifest destiny if we don’t transform ourselves on every scale: social, personal and spiritual. Otherwise, that’s all we’re good at and all we’re destined to accomplish.
Humanity = 0, Omnicide = -1. What a sorry score for such a carefully tended, wisely hardened, perfectly nursed species. We are perched on a blue-green planet that’s good for us in every way (even though probably not our planet of origin, given our biological cycle never comfortably 24 hours long), under a vast black firmament studded with diamond solitaires veiling much more abundance.
Come on, Learners! We can do better than that!
For the first time in history, we have all the tools we need for World Peace: global communications, mutual recognition and universal thirst for peace. For the first time, humanity (even if not yet willing) could recognize the Other as a worthy equal. All of us could start from the same page. But up ‘til now, we lacked those vital tools in common. All we require, at this point, is consensus, will, faith and guts. Have we got enough?
Have we had enough?
Note at the top of my list, new peace religions. I believe that standard Christianity is weapon-based and thus defective as a peace religion. The same applies to our other weapon religions; each requires a better role model to become truly peaceful. I ask you, what better role model than Christ?
Jesus often noted his disciples’ inability to understand. Our Christian faiths rely on the words of Apostle Paul, John of Revelation and St. Augustine. Somehow, the direct word of Jesus is lost in the background, decorative but overruled. We heed the words of men, not the Word of God. That which all of us should adore in pure faith, almost no one can stomach, so thoroughly has it been corrupted. We should compensate for this obvious want of faith
Jesus’ instructions were deliberately corrupted during the Roman persecution, the Nicene Council and the extermination of the Cathars. The Nicene Council erased every reference to reincarnation in the Bible. A permanent putsch of weapon reactionaries took over every creed calling itself Christian, in addition to other surviving creeds. This happened for the same stupid, inevitable reasons listed above.
I believe that Jesus taught us to live well and die one last time as clueless meat puppets. Seek to be reborn in Him, literally. Reincarnate into His Perfect Life and live it out. Learn from it exactly what was needed to be saved. Suffer a second death by taking up His Cross and go directly to Heaven with Him, (though His Mercy might spare us this last Agony).
Go read His words and see for yourself.
Otherwise we condemn ourselves to an endless series of purposeless reincarnations, circular abstractions, insignificant rituals, empty sins and futile deaths—apart from the one He taught us, pending our compliance with His clear and simple instruction. Inventory the content of your current life and see for yourself.
All religions would be just as valid – Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Vedic, Atheist, Deist, Pagan or other – if they allowed us a better life and didn’t get too upset if we opted to commit our souls, after dying, into the life of Jesus Christ, with a conscience somewhat less flayed by remorse. After this death, we would be perfectly free to choose Him and His pathway to Heaven, for the first time in our many lives.
I challenge you to find such a miraculous freedom to choose, perfect and divine, under any other circumstance. Certainly not among the officious and enslaving prescriptions of mere ape-men stuck on WeaponWorld: “Do me this, do me that, or be damned. By the way, allow us to snuff you and your benighted progeny unless you consent to kill them over there and theirs.”
Every weapon preacher of cowardly lies, brutality, exclusion, compulsion, betrayal and damnation by our infinite Loving God—that creature just refines suicidal weapon mentality devoid of faith, love and God. May God forgive him and may I find some way to ape God's infinite mercy.
Instead, we could have eternal temples of peace. Surely our Lord has enough mercy for every soul, with more to spare. I seek this apocatastasis, this universalism. The saints required to establish it are out of work all around us.
With no such faith – no real hope – no valid government – no true peace.
Know this, then. All the souls can save themselves: yours, mine, some latter-day Hitler’s, anyone’s. Thus toughened and fearless of anything on Earth, we must do our duty; thus armored, create Peace on Earth.
This summary will bother many people, especially those too well trained as children to fear World Peace and block it as adults. It will infuriate many more who expect their warmonger rubbish to be endorsed without opposition. It will bruise the stout egos of those who declare themselves eager for peace—as soon as everyone has reached their dizzying height of puritanical pacifism. It will confound those many pet pupils who have memorized their lessons repudiating peace and repeat them today like parrots.
This text is revolutionary by nature and at odds with orthodoxy; as am I. According to Learners, the most patriotic and admirable nationalist is no better than a jumped-up Crip or Blood who claims gangland supremacy by flashing his idiot gang signs. The devoted pacifist who claims moral superiority over the average guy will achieve no better result than he (since he is lying to himself—at least the average warmonger is an honest monster). Learners should expect fierce opposition from every philosophical quarter.
To achieve peace, we must understand how much we fear it, how much our institutions are averse to it and how completely our current thoughts and actions thwart it. Whether we call ourselves warriors or lovers of peace; whether we’re young or old, rich or poor, learned or ignorant, pious or not; whether our institutions appear benign and sacred to us, or just mediocre, or even infernal. Every institution, every cultural checkpoint, every down-home cliché will have to be taken by frontal assault and cleared hand-to-hand in this intellectual Stalingrad; no-one and nothing will be spared.
What will PeaceWorld look like, once the smoke clears? It will delight our Loving God who will bless it with miracles of approbation; unlike WeaponWorld, despised by God, who lets it survive through forbearance for our unforgivable blunders. We would become true servants of God: athirst for, drunk with and slaked by the peace of God; wisely caring for every child; regrowing Eden and leaping for the stars. Justice. Compassion. Peace. You could leave your door unlocked in perfect safety.
Think about that.
What if we stopped fearing peace? What if we understood it instead? Taught it to the children in pure truth, to revere peace and uphold it forever, on our honor, with all our might?
Once Learners rally, the heavens themselves will come to our aid.
This is a summary of Learners.
Out of all humanity, approximately three percent of men and one percent of women are sociopaths. One percent of humanity consists of psychopaths.
Depending the therapists’ preference, those suffering from psychopathy, sociopathy, antisocial personality disorder, and malignant narcissism are interchangeable: the psychopaths tend to be anarchistic lone wolves, whereas the sociopaths tend to belong to a subculture that promotes their vicious selfishness (like organized crime, prison, politics and the military).
Four or more percent of corporate chiefs are psychopaths and who knows what percentage of politicians and the military? What would be the proportion of preachers, more intent on their meticulous textual fundamentalism than more natural – and from their point of view, satanic – dictates of moral conscience?
The same proportions reside inside and outside of prison, even though psycho/sociopathic convicts are guilty of almost all the violent crimes being punished. Most other convicts are locked up for victimless or one-time crimes, by a clique of psycho/sociopathic cops, court officers, legislators and their cronies.
Is there a parallel between the fact that 96% of the universe is made up of “dark matter and energy” whereas only four percent is visible matter; and 96% of mankind is conscience-driven whereas four percent is not?
Such people can tell right from wrong in their behavior but derive no unpleasant feelings when they commit the latter. They have no conscience, no shame and no love for anyone. They do not know what those feelings are and look down on those bound by conscience. The truth is a matter of convenience for them, to be biased to their advantage. Especially the truth about themselves.
Many of them are charming and debonair when so inclined, manipulative and vicious when they can get away with it. They can “read” like a book the body language and facial expressions of the conscience-driven. They can fake emotions, seek pity and affection they never feel for others, and seduce their victims before they exploit, insult or injure them on purpose. They use people and discard them, the way you would use a Kleenex and throw it away.
They can commit sins without guilt, that we would find inconceivable during commission and very painful to live with, after. They get away with many evils because those around them cannot imagine such complex, belligerent and risky undertakings for such trivial reasons (like boredom, idle greed, one-upmanship or jealousy of those with superior talents).
Since their brains are not preoccupied by the infinite subconscious calculations of moral conscience and love (a little like those needed to stay upright on a bicycle, though a lot more complicated), they are burdened with a semi-permanent sense of drudgery and boredom they can only relieve by serial risky behaviors and elaborate manipulations (torture, humiliation and betrayal) of their conscientious inferiors.
They usually wind up in old age alone, broke and shunned by everyone, their family included. Many are slain or socially crushed by a powerful protector of one of their victims or by numerous avengers. Very few die in their bed surrounded by people who love them. They are pitiable, if very dangerous, moral amputees.
The craft of government consists in keeping psycho/sociopaths in check (that is, moderately well rewarded for doing as little damage as possible) for as long as possible. The tragedy of government is that they will take over the highest levels of government, eventually, as well as several ranks beneath, and ruin everything, more or less for no good reason.
From a peace mentality point of view, good government is peaceful, fair, generous and permissive. You may do pretty much what you wish, and not be interfered with by the government except under special circumstances and elaborate restraints.
Sociopaths thrive under such minimal constraints, and gradually assume the powers of wealth and political promotion. They recruit their sociopath peers as employees in organizations either dysfunctional or openly criminal. Eventually, they take over everything and eject the conscience-driven from every position of responsibility; their self-serving abuse rots out the rest of society.
The cumulative resentment of the vast majority of the conscience-driven will provoke bloody revolution. Following a bloodbath at the hands of elite sociopaths, the conscientious will discover the military advantage of a chain of command led by sociopaths, will adopt it and thus fatally compromise the ideals that drew them into the revolution.
After a series of psycho/sociopath-led oscillations of revolution and counter-revolution (this chaos their idea of paradise, allowing the greatest scope for their evil), the slate will be wiped clean, most of the minority of sociopath leaders will be exterminated, and so many more casualties will be induced that exhausted and disgusted conscience-driven survivors will take up once again the temporary craft of government. They will reward surviving psycho/sociopaths at minimal expense to do the least damage – and so on.
Given this sociopathocracy noted in Learners, if you are motivated by your conscience to seek good and reduce evil; no matter what race, ethnicity, country, religion, ideology or organization you belong to or reject: half your worst enemies will belong to your side and the greater half of your friends, to the other side. The only real segregation is between those driven by conscience and those without.
Be warned and pick you side carefully.
There are dependable psychological tests to identify them. Mostly, their brains react to emotional problems, the way most people’s (who have no problem with emotional situations) react to an algebra problem. The same brain volumes light up.
The easiest way to identify them is as schoolyard bullies and animal torturers during their naïf youth and as perfect innocents and shameless pity seekers when they are caught for serial adult misdeeds.
They are never wrong. It is always someone else’s fault, including their victims’ who deserve to be abused.
Their routine speech is that of weapon government, regardless of its provenance.
There is no cure for their disease, chemical or psychoanalytical. They do not wish to be cured. They consider themselves superior, and the conscience-driven inferior to themselves.
After advanced group therapy sessions deliberately targeting their affliction, they emerged with better techniques to simulate emotions they did not feel, thus duping their future victims with greater ease.
Track them down, identify them and exclude them from positions of authority, high and low. A 1-800 telephone number should be dedicated to their victims. They should be able to call up and turn in any sociopath who torments them. Investigators would then bring the suspected sociopath in for testing, the results of which would confirm or deny the need for this person to be restricted from positions of responsibility and authority.
Above all, never allow them to assume control of the hunt for sociopaths. If given the slightest chance, they will exceed all the evils of the Inquisition (another sociopath Paradise), hunting down the innocent and laughing about it.
On the other hand, they should be stroked and cozened once identified during childhood, and generously subsidized throughout their lifetime (thus neutralizing a great chunk of the merely lazy ones), provided constructive risk-taking outlets for their overwhelming boredom (demining and outer space exploration, for example) and otherwise peacefully neutralized in every way possible.
The last thing we would wish for: that they become antagonized against the rest of humanity, or scared for their life or liberty.
No other army would be more lethal, no insurrection more destructive, no terrorist group more alarming than that of psycho/sociopaths reunited (often, they are anarchistic individualists, and their organizations dysfunctional―see the civilian Nazis) because rejected by rest of us.
Their primary social utility is in war, when they find the most frightful atrocity easy, then move on to the next one. Unimpeded by moral conscience, they are more technically competent at killing and more imaginative with it. Organized massacre is their county fair. They get no bad feelings from the job of killing the enemy, not even from the multiplication of casualties on their own side to get that job done.
Sociopaths commit the first atrocities in war and then leave for the next ones, anonymous and unpunished. Meanwhile, the remaining conscientious in uniform (or peaceful villagers left behind) will be punished in revenge.
If those sociopaths are officious enough, normals will obey their insane orders and commit crimes unthinkable under other circumstances. This is how dirty war propagates on both sides.
Fear them like the devil. They and those under their control are responsible for most of the evil on Earth. In their absence, utopia would be just barely within reach.
Of course, sociopaths have made a special effort to bad-mouth utopia in every media they could seize control of, as well as insult idealists and pacifists until they became pariahs.
We have repeated their vicious lies like brainwashed idiots.
Beware!
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door: the Ruthless versus the Rest of Us, Broadway Books, USA, 2005.
Robert D. Hare, Without Conscience: the Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, The Guildford Press, New York, 1999.
http://www.bullyonline.org/workbully/serial.htm
http://www.alienview.net/conspire.html
“… Citizens seeking to introduce changes in
the form of their government, whether in favor of liberty or despotism, ought
to consider what materials they have to deal with and then judge of the
difficulty of their task. For it is no less arduous and dangerous to
attempt to free a people disposed to live in servitude, than to enslave a
people who [opt] to live free.” Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourse on
the First Decade of Titus Livius, Ninian Hill Thomson, Trans., Kegan, Trench
& Co., London, 1883, p. 376.
I’ve spent some thirty years, now, waiting for a worthy patron to discover Learners, publish it in untold languages and make our fortune; otherwise, that I might vanish quietly from this world without having to bother with the upshot of my intervention.
How amazingly lily-livered and chicken-brained well-connected people turn out to be, how many imaginary perils and empty distractions they give priority to, and how well they insulate themselves from important but unforeseen matters, guarded by an army of myopic gatekeepers! Either they don’t give a damn or they deliberately worsen an already bad situation, as long as their bank balance fattens…
Here I am still working alone after all these years; my oft rewritten and oft rejected samizdat self-published on the World Wide Web and treacherously ejected from it, only to arise from the ashes of denial. After decades of intellectual house arrest, forced to witness so-called activists and progressives congratulate themselves that the reactionary backlash has not grown too much during their watch (even though it has), and for avoiding the grim chore of studying Learners. Forced to witness churlish warmongers earn big bucks and public acclaim by publishing reams of best-selling martial pomp, and every government trip over itself to fulfill their least stipulation, while no one dares call them on their kamikaze swan song! I’ve grown weary and gray from this universal dismissal. How much better the world could be without so much avoidable misery!
As I review this text, its cosmic presumption stuns me. No special privilege entitles me to claim your time and attention; no lofty reputation, mighty patronage, personal charisma, business savvy, saintly complacency or literary merit. When I find decent work, I’m just another clerk and a distracted one at that. Nonetheless I must claim your careful consideration here. This may be the most important text you read; that’s up to you and your fondness for the status quo.
I’ve long dreamt of escaping from this madhouse and repatriating into Grace – somewhere out there beyond the white light – yet there’s so much love and beauty here. I’ve stayed up late nights, reviewing the same botched political experiments and muttering, “At least one of these ought to have worked out to spec!”
I still dare hope. Learners are a Nation among nations, a state of being within the State. In our own quiet way and once properly inspired, we will command enough talent and initiative to tackle any challenge. Once we Learners recognize ourselves and each other, realize how numerous we are and the commanding position we hold over the world; once we rally to these ideas, we will be unstoppable and destined for glory—no matter how wretched and powerless human isolates may be with their petty pecking orders.
Aghast, I understood King Ashoka’s torment. Standing back-to-back in this carnage of our making, we watched helplessly as millipede columns of weeping refugees crawled by, from the smoking wreckage of every horizon. Neither of us could escape our complicity in this disgrace nor could we stand by, idle and indifferent. We had to do something: lunge for the big brass ring dangling just beyond our wildest dreams; blow the doors off our fragile confidence, competence and self-worth; risk everything to reduce the atrocity of the human condition.
This text isn’t incised in stone. Dedicated specialists, amateur and pro alike, should chew over each one of its assumptions. Their debate may conjur a brilliant Learner Commonwealth. Our new mantra should be “What if the sky were the limit?”
Every cubic yard of earth, air, water and vacuum contains all the energy in the Universe (minus 1?). We must become clever enough to reach into this cosmic fire and warm our hands, but not burn our fingertips or the world. Otherwise we’re just dumb beggars stumbling parched and starving across a desert while untold abundance lies quietly locked underfoot.
We are sitting down together – you and I and everyone – to share a giant super-deluxe pizza. It stretches out to the horizon and beyond that to infinity. It is covered with good things to eat. It has mounds of perfect vegetables, creamy cheese, aromatic spices and deli delicacies: all the toppings of the world’s finest pizza. It’s got college degrees, fair housing and low infant mortality; enough abundance, justice and serenity for everyone; anything anyone could ask for and more of it than we could imagine much less find use for.
Too bad we only look down a one-degree slice of this pie, the sorriest of slices saturated with want, fear and pain. Stripped bare, burned to the third degree and unbelievably unappetizing; it’s been combed over at sword-point for ages. Across it, starving children cower in stoic tears, in bunkers, hovels and refugee dumps: poster children of our failure and guilt. We can’t distinguish anything but this WeaponWorld of ours: the napalm-blackened crust of a burnt-out world. Starving for something better, we scramble after its crumbs with microscopic compulsion.
The infinite leftover heaping with untouched goodies? It is beyond sight as far as we’re concerned. We’ve walled off the other 359 degrees of this cosmic pizza, blinkered as we are by long-revered cultural conventions. Our culture blinkers us at birth and more and more restrictively as we age. It has screened us from PeaceWorld and focused our attention on WeaponWorld. As a result, we dismiss this abundance as mere idealism, myth, dream, fantasy, utopia and science fiction.
Learners will learn to polarize those blinkers and show the whole pie to everyone. This festive bounty is certainly there for us to harvest on PeaceWorld. We just have to clear our vision, roll up our sleeves, get to work and make it happen. Then it would be harvest season, and most people would be too busy gathering and sharing this incredible abundance to cause further harm.
Two-thirds of a life ago, as I began testing the shaky legs of new-foaled opinions, my father challenged me thus: “It’s easy to condemn institutions,” this charming Bayard told me. I’ll always remember him as a chevalier sans peur et sans reproche: a fearless and blameless knight.
That’s a tricky combination, come to think of it. Harm would be easy to inflict by those armed with some illusion of fearlessness. “I don’t give a damn; let loose the dogs of war!” Only slightly more difficult to do good from fear of harmful consequences. The truest goal would be to do nothing but good, fearlessly. My valiant father strove for that during his lifetime, which made him a nobleman in the finest sense of the term. No lesser deed is worthy.
So you think yourself fearless? Fine. Do good without counting the cost, and prove it. A little trick you must play in your head. Can you do it?
The above paragraph may be the most important one for sociopaths who recognize their predicament and for their friends who see it in them. I suggest they reread this carefully. It may relieve their disease and pave the swiftest road to PeaceWorld.
“Condemn institutions? Don’t bother,” this gentle horseman told me, “unless you come up with better alternatives.”
I've knocked myself out, since, trying to conjure those fabulous alternatives. As a child of the greasy 1950’s, I found capital-R Revolution revolting: its runny blemishes more telling than its watery promises. Among its worst failures, after untold suffering, it offered nothing better than the inadmissible present with frequent backslides. Revolutionary dialectics (and all its theses) struck me as so much cheap talk—culture’s inflamed reaction to orthodoxy’s stunted mediocrity.
No Great Book On Peace exists, even though students cram Clausewitz’s On War in every college. Believe me, I’ve searched the stacks in vain, for On Peace.
Midway through my mandatory obedience training – once I’d gotten good and fed up with it – I began combing available libraries for a primer on the administration of world peace. You know, a real civics lesson for a serious world citizen? So what if it were nothing but science fiction and wild-eyed speculation? I’d settle for that!
All I found was On War and elementary textbooks on weapon management. There were countless histories, devout religious texts, pompous political screeds, literary soap operas and nut-cracking philosophical quibbles -- each sustained weapon mentality and diverted attention from what should have been our primary study all along: peace mentality. Otherwise they talked about feelings or sentiment or technicalities or meaningless abstractions or some such worthless trash. As my readings grew more voracious and less choosy, they led me to more and more ponderous, elaborate and boring affirmations of weapon mentality. A mountain range of useless trivia aside, I found very little else, to tell you the truth.
Avid for the peace primer I never found, I set about drafting its Volume One. I would never dare call it On Peace. Only a global consensus of Learners assembled in the World Virtual Agora, could begin to compose such a work in a thousand million volumes. Nowadays there are none.
Even if Learners fits all alone on a virtual library bookshelf under a non-existent call number (no Dewey Decimal number for peace, the Library of Congress prefix JX no longer used), its scribe – no matter how pride-scoured – cannot claim copyright for the ideals of peace. The gold dust of peace mentality may lie buried under mounds of weapon mentality dross, but hints of its color glimmer from all our masterworks. Where did Learners’ opulent forbears go? They vanished, replaced by weapon Classics we’ve studied all our lives.
This text reconsiders a vital choice between the mentalities of weapons and peace. Every moment we endure here on Earth, we connive with this evil or defy it, whether we admit this to ourselves or not. These days, weapon mentality dominates our thinking without serious debate. No wonder runaway weapon technologies harvest evermore victims, since everyone submits to weapon mentality without a second thought. Also no wonder that every progressive aspiration must shudder to a halt in this Sargasso Sea of weapon mentality. What surprise is there in that? This social defect is so prevalent and predictable, we shouldn’t even feel disappointed by it. Once our faith shifts from weapons to peace, we may yet thrive along with our progressive hopes. Until then, forget them and us.
Since you begin to grasp the central premise of Learners, you may reject it outright: a common enough gag reflex. “World peace? PeaceWorld? Shut up! I’m through!” If you value controversy in your mental landscape, ask yourself: “Why dismiss this topic without fair hearing? During my lengthy exam of other topics at school, why didn’t someone sit me down and make me think this through?”
I’ll tell you why. Emerging from infancy into frustrated adolescence, we mature sexually long before we do so emotionally and socially. Society exploits this offset development. It offers us a predictable life cycle, from adolescent rebellion to adult uncertainty and then the mid-life backlash of reactionary senescence.
Like Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, we may only plumb the depths of harsh asceticism, sensual pleasure, material wealth, self-revulsion and eventually, saintly complacency with our own mediocrity (by default). Forced to surrender our healthy conscience and replace it with passive-aggressive compromise and adherence at gunpoint to conspiracies of greed, we soothe our heartache with ignorance, apathy, drugs, alcohol, fanaticism, amateur obsession, professional compulsion, insanity, felony and self-destruction. From these escapisms, take your pick.
The reform-idealism of youth is everywhere subverted. Suppressing youthful idealism is a pseudo-skill each of us is called upon to master. Shouldn’t their creative drive be our first priority?
Do you remember when you were a bright young thing as pure as a glass of water? Recall the salvo of insults that met your first, childlike questions about world peace? No matter to whom you turned – to strangers or beloved, enlightened teachers or dumb brutes – you ran the same gauntlet of veiled insult, condescension and violence, if you persisted.
Think back. “World Peace? End poverty? Feed and care for everyone in perfect equity? Get real, stop dreaming, grow up! What do I need to do, grab you by the shoulders and shake?”
Ok. I’m summarizing years of systematic and very subtle indoctrination in as many lines of text. But you get my point.
On this WeaponWorld of ours, a so-called “happy childhood” is the rare one during which inescapable trauma and injustice are inflicted a little later, at random, by surprise and by strangers.
Did this ceaseless brainwash while you were young and impressionable—did it bring you up short? Was your conscience battered silent? Did you suspend disbelief to avoid rejection? Did you enslave yourself to it, regardless of its merit? Would it have mattered what race, nation or creed you sprang from? Did you ever have a choice?
“Crimestop means
the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any
dangerous thought. It includes the power
of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of
misunderstanding the simplest arguments that are inimical to [orthodoxy], and
of being bored and repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading
in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in
short, means protective stupidity.”
George Orwell, 1984, the New American Library, Inc., New
York, 1961, p. 174.
See The 1984 Syndrome.
We stopped short because Everyman silenced us the moment we started asking awkward questions. Our culture subverts pacifism and military decadence as obsessively as it controls human waste and waterborne disease. Both are lethal to a primitive society and both are suppressed. We are potty trained, as children, against peace and valid spirituality.
One arises from the other, don’t you think? In the absence of peace, wouldn't valid spirituality suffer? In the midst of war, don't our spirits turn into monstrous caricatures of themselves sneering at our hypocrisy? During what we dare call peacetime, is it not just as bad?
Are we ready to yell enough at this grotesque weapon cult? Have we ever been, will we ever be more ready?
As with our weapon religions and their relevance to God, it doesn’t matter how much mouth-jabber we devote to peace. We are just as averse to it as we are to excrement. As a result we face unlimited social contradictions and zero closure, resolution or clarity.
Sure, I understand your fear and loathing, but can’t let that stop me. You and other Learners, join me instead! We’re grownups now, apparently immune to childhood blame. Unplug your ears – there, that’s better – and pay attention. Learners retrieves painful questions we had to drop when we were kids, with or without our honest consent.
As this Aquarian Age dawns, it’s a sorry state we submit to. Snake oil democracy and chainsaw logic promote arrogant mismanagement. Fate’s idiot smile favors Conspiracies of Greed. Smirking predators gang-rape Blind Justice before our disbelieving eyes. They laugh all the way to their bank, congress, pulpit and academy; then come back for sloppy seconds. Over and over, our institutions legitimize the spastic slapstick of killer primates.
Absurd clichés jam our constellation of political metaphors, despite their spectacular failure—or hadn’t you noticed? Like nitwit kibitzers around a stalled car, we keep intoning “We’re just gonna need more Love, personal perfection, Christ in this world, Humanism, Science, Submission, Family Values, Free Markets – straighter politicians, fairer bullies and kinder Fat Cats.” In short, some purer dictatorship of fathead fatuity. Even more widespread and worthless: “Don’t believe in nothin’, little pal, but earning and spending your next buck. Be cool, be a steady fool, like us.”
Stupefied by all this barbarism, prophets, newscasters, technocrats and commoners bray disaster in four-part harmony. Others pray that swift Apocalypse deliver them pretty please. Stupefied by their panic, they worsen the necrosis of this world merely to hasten the Ending they crave.
Thus do we deny the obvious, the Miracle upon which our existence depends a thousand times a day. According to this Miracle, a far greater wisdom awaits us. It could replace typhoons of venom with windfalls of abundance. Fantastic plenty could bloom where wastelands now fester; full justice, salve ancient traumas and about-face mutinous legions back to civility.
Imagine that! Cast off your silly panic and start imagining the best that could happen.
Instead, weapon dissidents and weapon reactionaries croak contrapuntal duets of hoary dogma. They obsess over the hated Other and plot His impossible destruction. Others sit on their hands until everyone becomes an angel or until Christ returns to deliver us (whichever comes first).
Everything is improvised. No one has any idea what he’s talking about and no one has a workable plan except for more killing—sit still for it or stir it up worse. No one listens to anyone; the major perk of promotion to power, these days, is no longer having to listen to anyone; just issue insane orders unmindful of reality—the recipe for guaranteed disaster. Nothing else is tolerated.
We are only permitted two kinds of politicians these days: those who have quashed every good idea for generations (Democrats) and those who never met a nasty idea they didn’t love (Republicans). Like a village blacksmith lusting after a first-glimpsed motorcycle, they long to tease the world apart and reassemble it to suit their fancy. Yet their obsolete political vocabularies won’t let them comprehend the world’s most basic contradictions and opportunities. They want to fix a 1950 Harley-Davidson with Age of Pericles terminology and horse-and-buggy tools.
Only the absolute justice of our cause keeps it alive—not our necrotic thoughts and speech. Poisoned by gangrenous ideologies and rejecting them, we’ve grown so credophobic that we refuse to believe anything any longer. Force-fed meaningless commercial blather, we’ve tumbled our moral gyros. As a result, we’ve lost our last spirit toeholds and fallen into riptides of change.
But don’t despair. Heed Jesse Jackson and “Keep hope alive!” As with two post-war Germanys, reactionaries will hand over a basketcase for us to reanimate once it appears too late to salvage anything from the wreckage. Learners anticipates that handover—this time, of the whole world. Up to us to rebuild everything!
You might recall some movie where ruthless Evil secures every source of power, control and security. By midway through the story, the Good are dumbfounded. No one knows what to do next.
Then someone, perhaps Ruth, says, “Hold it, I have a plan.” Rather than turn away in despair, passive bystanders start paying miraculous attention. Inspired, they turn into heroes. By that time, for the sake of dramatic continuity, the camera has cut to the triumph of the Good.
This book itemizes the vital steps between ‘no plan’ and ‘plan in action.’ During this critical but no-fun stage, we should discuss our plan in detail, expose its inherent weaknesses, suggest better alternatives and coordinate timing and chronology. Let daring volunteers take on tasks that fit their special interests and talents. All you reductive meliorists out there, who’ve pounded the steering wheel in your a stalled car for the past few thousand years, start your engines! Shake awake all those who’ve abstained from sheer nihilism and cowardice.
I have a scheme and here it is, as follows. We are at this essential if boring stage of the procedure. Proceed accordingly and with dispatch, I implore you.
Some warnings before we begin. This book’s eccentric prose, exotic idiom and outlandish speculation will make very hard reading. We’re gonna make warfare illegal, here, across the planet—not bake a cake. You’ll find no easy sound bites in these pages, no quick fixes and none of the simplistic TV pabulum we’ve grown accustomed to. You may click back, now, if that was all you came here looking for.
Treat Learners as a rough guide, clearer than run-on Classics and straighter than Ivy-League obfuscations. After reading it, young prodigals may scout out this locked-down prison world while guards and convicts slumber. Evenhandedly, it beckons ecstatic Nobel laureates, berserkers with nothing left to lose, aimless idealists, madrassa dreamers, dissatisfied bonzes, Talmud scholars and Bible seminarians, prep-schooled sellouts and ghetto luminaries defying the evils that wriggle just beyond their own brown study. It speaks just as much to every Learner lost in a funhouse mirror-maze of weapons and peace, as to my childhood ghost haunting bygone stacks. I address these words in equal parts to next year’s applicants to War Academies and next year’s crop of middle school prodigies. The best among you sought the literature of peace in the library stacks of weapons administration, to no avail.
This book outlines what we were driven to discover and failed to find. California dreamin’, it surfs over riptides of chaos and undertows of paradox. Irritably, it tosses aside treasured concepts and reconsiders much-maligned ideas.
My message is very biased. Attacking sly platitudes, its arguments climb way out on shaky limbs—farther out than you may wish to follow. You’ll find no ‘detachment’, ‘disinterest’ or ‘balance’ here, as those terms are misused today. Given this topic’s infinite complexity, my writing numbskills and lesser erudition, your work is cut out for you.
What’s more, I’ll turn every rhetorical cannon against the weapon mentors who drilled me on them. Horrified and enraged, I’ll invoke any fallacy more useful than its ‘logically correct’ counterpart. I have no use for proponents of ‘logical analysis’ who dare permit children to starve to death and turn their backs when such awkward topics encroach on their blank spirit. In the same spirit, Learners will revive PeaceWorld by shamelessly appropriating every Madison Avenue fraud and taps bugle call that has lulled us to sleep up ‘til now.
If the dry logic of world peace is all you seek, read Mortimer Adler’s How to Think about War & Peace, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1944. Back during those heady days, President Roosevelt and his brilliant staffers anticipated a popular one-world government that would have criminalized warfare across the planet and guaranteed human rights for all – fifty years ago, with 150 million fewer war dead and a couple billion fewer dead of famine and preventable disease than we enlightened contemporaries are responsible for―and how many thousands of trillions of cash in vital assets and sabotaged ingenuity thrown away with our consent?
How dare you suggest it’s none of your doing! Quit lying to yourself, here at least. We are all 100% accountable.
Alas, American Weapon Party commissars made sure a failed haberdasher, Harry Truman, would grab the reins of power from Roosevelt’s dying hands. Hiroshima, my love? Truman and his small-town, small-minded cronies threw away the goodwill America had earned by liberating the world from fascism. Just like Bush and his rat pack did after 9/11. They’ve groomed a succession of politically correct mediocrities, since. Their parochial prejudices have allowed no alternative but another hundred and fifty million war dead and another half-century of bankrupt weapon management.
Still today, we waste precious time and talent pointlessly protesting their mighty warmonger initiatives. Let them protest, in absolute futility, our mighty peace initiatives—never again the other way around!
This text is a speculative entertainment and an impassioned rally cry, not some textbook drear. Neither fiction nor non-, it fits in somewhere between confession, screed and sketchbook of homilies, anecdotes and conjectures. As Margaret Atwood puts it, forecast journalism. There is no other text like it and I can find no political group that would adopt it as its own. Were that I could! I would not have felt so abandoned on this planet of unrepentant killer primates. I have no faith in my own generation (good for nothing but Bush the Lesser and his National Capitalist cronies) nor the one that follows; perhaps the following one… Learners will certainly arise as a political party in the future—perhaps after I’m gone, as with Marx, Rousseau and Erasmus.
“So it happens that beyond the imaginary demarcation line
between past and present, the writer still finds himself eye to eye with the
human condition, which he is bound to observe and understand as best he can,
with which he must identify, giving it the strength of his breath and the warmth
of his blood, which he must attempt to turn into the living texture of the
story that he intends to translate for his readers, in such a way that the
result be as beautiful, as simple, and as persuasive as possible.” Ivo Andrić, Acceptance Speech for the
1961 Nobel Prize for Literature.
"If humanity bears an eternal truth, it is certainly
that tragic hesitation of the man who will someday be called, for centuries
hence, an artist – facing the artwork that he experiences more deeply than
anyone, that he admires the way none other can, yet that he, alone on Earth,
wants to destroy sub rasa at the same time."
"So let’s understand this fully: if genius is a
discovery, it is upon this discovery that the resurrection of the past is
based. At the start of this speech, I
spoke about what a renaissance could be, what the heritage of a culture could
be. A culture is reborn when men of
genius, seeking their own truth, draw from the depths of centuries everything
that formerly resembled this truth, even if they don’t recognize it." André Malraux, Les Conquérants, (The Conquerors), Le livre de poche, © Bernard Grasset, 1928, pages 311-13.
“The leader carries all of our confusion with him as he attempts
to climb above society in search of a clear view that would indicate the right
way. There, on his imaginary mountain,
he stands alone, suffering the personal anxiety of freedom. He watches us dancing aimlessly below, half
struggling with mortality in our consoling maze. He can see we have a certain reassurance,
lost in our earthly eternity. But how is
he to get his own reassurance if he cannot make all of us and the structure
itself respond to his efforts?” John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s
Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Vintage Press, A Division of Random
House, 1991, p. 349.
Accept those parts of Learners you hearken to, then make something better happen. Dismiss anything you find that disconcerts your fancy—as conjecture, hearsay, heresy, what you will.
If this work inspires some new idea in your mind, let me know. I’d love to filigree new ideas into the next rewrite of this work (with proper attribution, of course). With a little luck, I may get to chronicle the real-world progress of this righteous endeavor … perhaps in future chapters of this samizdat.
Why do the terms ‘utopian’ and ‘idealist’ consign our highest values to the trash heap? When did reactionary chic make it unfashionable to do the utmost good?
We may be clumsy practitioners of peace, at first, but the love of good throbs in our veins. No word for this talent exists (kalotropism?) but it will not be denied much longer. Who knows; doing good may become fashionable once again, despite the mightiest efforts of the worst, to forbid and ridicule it.
Loudmouthed morality truants feign sophistication by aggravating our weapon neuroses. By rote repetition, they malign ‘do-gooders’ and ‘bleeding hearts’. Hiding their shameful shortcomings, they confabulate the pig-headed terminology and criminal line-up of reactionary correctness. They’ve built an assembly line of conmen and professional hypocrites who are (literally) politically correct enough to serve as stand-ins for legitimate leaders. Each candidate worse than his predecessors, while people of talent and genius are chased from politics and social commentary. They’re either gunned down in the street or crucified by the media.
Who are these malingerers? Do-badders? Flint hearts? Do a few stony hearts require a little lubricant bleeding to re-oxygenate their owners’ flat-lined conscience?
After so many tries, why don’t we have the best possible government? And don’t you dare suggest we have the best government already. Be honest with yourself here, if nowhere else. With all our schools, books and teachers, why aren’t there millions of peace mentors out there, enriching the abundance that is our due, filling the world with miraculous technologies, sacred wildlife, courtly love and random acts of kindness? Where are the superb replacements of young Andy Carnegie, the Roosevelts and Little Flower LaGuardia that the administration of excellence demands? Where have you gone!
If we considered this world one Great Academy – as Learners hope it shall become – most of its students major in some aspect of weapon technology and all too few take too few electives in peace. As the machinery of war grinds on without letup, only its most devoted slaves may evaluate its usefulness in public discourse.
Hardly anyone can list the great peace mentors; I know I couldn’t. Peace’s foremost practitioners have been unassuming gentlefolk. Female peace practitioners are as under-reported here as they are in general history. Compare this blitzed state of ignorance with our household familiarity with Genghis Khan, Hitler and like masters of mayhem. If peace were our first priority – not mass murder – this Learner deficit would cause us grave concern. Nothing of the kind concerns us, for we are first and foremost weapon slaves.
Your first appraisal of Learners may make you dizzy, its range of topics is so kaleidoscopic. We never studied them in the depth they deserved. Of necessity, our first review will be insolently superficial and subject to myth-based denial at every page-turn. Once this crisis has passed, we may render full justice to these exotic notions.
Read the first few chapters of Learners to take in its vocabulary: (“Intro & Vocab” to “Stop”). Then resume your random perusal in any of its three Sections:
Section I) Why we’re in this mess;
Section II) How we approach PeaceWorld; and
Section III) What results we may expect.
The first and harshest Section, “Why,” stretches midway through Learners. Why is so incendiary, its first-time reader risks burnout. Unlike more soothing texts, this one won’t overlook great evils we’ve been taught to regret briefly and then take for granted. This merciless inventory of error will seem wearisome at first, mind-numbing later and soon unbearable. Your subconscious will revisit every aversion therapy you suffered as a child to get you to quit. You’ll grow frustrated with this reading, then nauseated by it and soon enraged. You’ll have to brace yourself sternly to chugalug this bitter brew to its dregs. Take tiny sips of that sour mash and find more syrupy refreshment elsewhere, perhaps at the TV titty.
Just don’t give up. I might as well have entitled Why, How and What—Lamentation, Transition and Hope.
Bittersweet “How” lists unfortunate tendencies and proposes some countermeasures. Sweeter “What” sketches peaceful alternatives to the weapon technologies we submit to today—assuming global majorities grasp Why and How beforehand.
This text is intended for every Learner to come. Its discontent should have been our patrimony and was—since forgotten. I leave the Sections Who, When and Where to you, my beloved Learners. If you catch me fumbling my extraordinary mandate, that’s your cue to take up the burden of proof.
I may have found a hassle-free way to gatecrash heaven, merely by reincarnating into Jesus Christ’s lifeline the next time I die. I believe this painful redemption is open to all of us, no matter how heavy our Karmic burden. I repeat myself to emphasize this crucial concept.
This exotic doctrine might shut down fundamentalists’ idiotic diktat once and for all. Its universal acceptance would eject all those fundamentalist middlemen unworthy of spiritual discourse. By what right, wisdom or benediction do they claim to butt in there, anyway? It would put the Kingdom of Heaven within everyone’s reach in the afterworld, regardless of truth or error in this lifetime, entrust earthly cares to our own accountability and our salvation to the Lord’s direct tutelage.
Once you grasp this idea and its outcomes, no pompous bigot can lecture, weasel or torture them out of you. You will be completely free to save your soul, miraculously free. Or you may return to these endless lives as often as you wish, as a Bodhisattva—provided this lesson awaits you here the next time you come around and hasn’t been silenced by Godless fundamentalists and indifferent people, as so often in the past and present.
We may serve God or Mammon, but not both at once. Learners suggests how to serve this world gracefully and Grace in the next. If you dismiss the above-stated as some worthless, Bible-thumping crankdom (more fundamentalist babble), you missed my point entirely. And, my friend, that is your loss. Check out the “reincarnating” link above, and see for yourself.
If you take your weapons indoctrination too seriously, you may expect to sort religion from government as independent variables. Forget it. We are progressives insofar our faith (in whatever) induces fearless love in us, and reactionaries when we react (faithlessly) against the shadow of our fears and hatred. Our creeds and governments are one and the same. It doesn’t matter what phony drapes we use to cover the religious underpinnings of government, the same way prudish Victorians used to drape piano legs to prevent sexual excitation.
These assertions may sound like pure arrogance to you. I assure you, they’re as carefully thought out as any you’ll find in Learners. It’s up to you to discuss them once and for all.
One of Christ’s parables (the Parable of the Talents: Matthew 25-14) entrusts risk-taking coinage to each of His servants. The Lord intends us to manage our lives for the profit of our souls, not for mere risk-reduction. As stunt persons in this universal action feature, we’re here to take enormous risks. Safe mediocrity must be illusory, since everything kills us in the end. In our mortality reside our glory and salvation.
I’m surprised how little this epiphany alters what I must say in Learners. Even more surprising will be Learners’ grand exploits, once they’ve claimed grace in this world and Grace in the next.
At most, these meditations have turned my fortune or failure on this material plane into the blinding glare one gets off wavelets during tardy, sun-soaked afternoons. Transient and annoying at worst, they are beautiful, despite their ache, and soon to fade.
I gave up on free advice to “Live each day as if it were your first and last.” How hormonally unworkable! I look forward to each day’s end, now. My sorriest sleeping dream has turned out to be more interesting than the most spectacular and moving epic I’ve ever read in books or watched on the screen. I suspect that the after-death experience, properly negotiated, is at least that much better than life, or better yet. Good music, good lovin’ and a few good friends, along with some other things during this lifetime (like laughter, and great meals, and just helping somebody), they’re something else; they make the pain of living bearable. I counsel no-one to abandon them prematurely, no matter what fate our souls may have in store. It seems obvious that we have something important to learn here-and-now.
I had no choice but to write and rewrite – en deux langues (in two tongues) – this book, this whole book and nothing but this book. In the end, I can only justify my presumption by pointing out the depths of our moral bankruptcy … and of our craving for Peace.
“Your isolation is not so much the direct result of enemy
action as of the fact that when you travel this road your experiences are
shared by fewer and fewer people, until at last there’s no one to whom you can
make yourself understood.” Sarah Patton
Boyle, “Spit in the Devil’s Eye: A Southern Heretic Speaks,” from the October
20, 1956 issue of The Nation magazine © 1956.
The Nation Company, LP. Reprinted
with permission. Also found in The
Nation 1865-1990,
Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Ed., p. 214.
Secretly, throughout history, weapons and peace mentors have diced for our wealth, talent, faith, bodies, posterity, sanity and Holy Spirit—the whole caboodle. The first sought to protect us militarily from the Other and protect themselves from us; the second, to accept in peace the Other and ourselves.
You would find the same conflict between peace mentors and weapon mentors—whether among whites or blacks; Chinese, Argentineans, New Zealanders or Greenlanders; capitalists, communists, socialists or fascists (progressive or reactionary); among atheists, agnostics, deists, Christians, Muslims, Pagans, or Buddhists (whether fundamentalist or ecumenical); as much among stone-tooled jungle dwellers as among sky scraper tenants handling information technology.
No difference whatsoever when it comes to this universal confrontation. Nobody is better off, no-one is immune. Certainly not you or me, not the Pope or the Dalai Lama—despite all our prejudices of denial.
Is that fully understood?
This contest has cut right across every social divide we hold dear. Age, sex, race, class, religion, ideology, geography and politics—mere window-dressing. They’ve distracted us from our primary task: peace on Earth, once and for all.
The Weapon/Peace Dialectic regulates our political dialog across a rigid Cartesian coordinate system. Each of us and each of our nation-states must communicate with a forked tongue. Its two tines (one controlled by weapon mentors, the other by peace mentors) share three traits. They are:
·
Dialectical: parallel along the axis of understanding;
·
Antithetical: at right angles to each other's beliefs; and
· Antinomial: directly contradicting each other’s projected outcomes.
This thrice-knotted, forked-tongue garble induces the Weapon/Peace Antinomy: absolute disparity between methods used, goals sought and results achieved.
Let me offer this example. There are thousands more, and you may come up with your own, once you grasp the concept. My example will be the term “utopia.”
Along the first, dialectical axis, Utopia is a Classic text whose author, Sir Thomas More, described a “perfect” social order. Everyone agrees that his utopia is not an accurate historical representation, is irrelevant to present circumstances, and impossible in the future. What a perfect model! But this is the nearest that most scholars of the Western Enlightenment dare approach the idea of PeaceWorld. A handful of later texts are just as obscure and poorly thought out.
Both reactionaries and progressives agree that this is all the documentation they need, to judge the relative merits of weapon mentality versus peace mentality. Might as well cross the Rocky Mountains guided by a map of Pangaea.
If you’re interested, Lewis Mumford summarizes about two dozen principal texts in English (several thousand pages worth) in the first 150 pages of his book The Story of Utopias.
So far, so good. At least along the dialectical axis, everyone may share the same meaning in their words.
Along the second, antithetical axis, the word utopia signifies for weapon mentors, “that (place) which may never be.” Utopia is their preferred reference text, taught in every high school and college. It confirms their deepest conviction that peaceful and benevolent societies are impossible. For peace mentors, utopia means “that (place) which is not, but might be.” Utopia is a narrow speculation of theirs, upon which to build a brighter peace.
Don’t ask me why progressives haven’t published some better book since. Craven subservience to weapon mentors, flawed imagination, subconscious approval of the status quo or mere mental inertia: the ultimate reason for their failure is beyond my feeble reckoning of tolerance for evil.
Note how the two basic belief structures are set at right angles to each other, yet use the same (parallel) terminology.
Along the third, antinomial axis, weapon mentors use the word utopian like an adverbial clause: “When pigs fly and hell freezes over.” Any idea branded utopian can be dismissed by reflex, without further consideration. Peace mentors use it to describe a social scheme that intends to improve current reality, whether or not it might be valid and practical. In other words, the peaceful version of the word utopia signifies "something good we should strive for," whereas the weapon version means "a horror to be avoided like the plague…Not only useless but somehow poisonous."
Thus, along the antinomial axis, the ultimate intention on each side is headed in exactly the opposite direction. What was once a conversation is now a tug of war.
Nowadays, weapon mentality dominates every word, argument and intention; just as weapon technology dominates every aspect of our material lives. We seek to survive in peace despite this universal dominance.
We owe it to ourselves to clarify this antinomy. Our synchronization of meaning, definition and intent – and the clarity it may bring to public discourse – promise us more security, abundance and fellow feeling than we could imagine.
Our institutions and cultures retain a few peace remnants we should cultivate, and dominant weapon memes we should render vestigial. Until we clarify these ideas, they are equally suspect (including our favorites) and valid (including those we most despise). This book revalidates the ideas I believe are most auspicious and marginalizes the remainder.
In this book, we will use the words ‘weapon’ and ‘weapons’ interchangeably. Rather than use them simply as nouns, we will wield them as modifiers: weapon technology and peace technology. From now on, ‘weapon’ will precede words that begin with a consonant, and ‘weapons’ anticipate those that begin with a vowel. Let the grammarians scream.
The text below separates the weapon/peace antinomy into four word-pairs:
· Weapon mentality
· Weapon technology
· Peace mentality
· Peace technology
Weapon Mentality relies on fear, and fear rules our world.
“… [The English
historian, Thomas] Carlyle said that the great element
missing from our attempted entry into the past is Fear; he set himself to
re-enact it, and succeeded extraordinarily well. His syntax is designed to embody a distracted
groping for certainties in a fog of rumour and of events at best only
half-understood, in moods of acute anxiety, rage and sometime dangerous
exaltation.” John Burrow, A
History of Histories: Epic, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries
from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth century, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2008, page
362.
To secure its adherents from overwhelming dread, weapon managers develop threat deterrents they believe so ghastly that none dare challenge them. Alas, WeaponWorld preordains this challenge: “The best defense is a good offense.”
In this text, we’ll avoid terms like ‘war mentality’ and ‘warfare mentality’. War mentality is to weapon mentality what road rage is to defensive driving. Neither weapon managers nor defensive drivers prefer a violent collision. If a crash does occur, it’s because things got out of hand. More or less realistically, they believe their efforts will avert it.
Only rarely will we use terms like militarism or fascism as substitutes for weapon mentality. Much more widespread and subtle, this mentality infects ‘free’ democracies as readily as dictatorships. Indeed, free citizens of free republics are better weapon technicians than the slaves of a dictator. A people that calls itself peace-loving can manage its killing much more skillfully than another that shrieks for foreign blood.
If you consider yourself a peace lover pure beyond reproach – even though you’ve never bothered to sort your peace and weapon priorities – you’re actually a weapon fellow traveler and a pillar of the weapon status quo.
Like alcoholics in denial, we worsen our addiction to weapon mentality insofar we deny it.
Weapon mentality inflicts social distortions on purpose. Poverty, rigid hierarchy, injustice, inequality, underemployment, nurtured criminality, substandard education, malnutrition and professional arrogance—the list goes on and on. We mistake them as regrettable outcomes of stupidity, bigotry, insanity, greed, crime, honest error and disaster; we refuse to believe they are allowed to fester on purpose, to further the goals of weapon mentality.
Social reformers imagine they can improve things reductively, gradually and incrementally—problem-by-problem, identity position by identity position and topic by topic. Using the same scattered methods and reductive reasoning, they’ve failed for the last five thousand years.
The only solution to this problem is holistic, simultaneous and global peace mentality – agreed upon by almost everyone – followed by a cascading swarm of atomistic and reductive fixes. Long-term success is impossible in the opposite order, since each small fix will be paralyzed by the holistic, simultaneous and global counter-force of weapon mentality as worshipped these days.
A society, any society, measures itself against a Constellation of Political Metaphors its members agree to share. The one we share is crammed with Weapon Myths. Many common policies and beliefs of religion, law and morality constitute Weapon Mythology: popular rationalizations for our most irrational practices and institutions. Since the basic values of weapon mentality are insane to anyone with the slightest love for and understanding of peace, weapon mentors must impose their own mythic vocabulary and syntax immune to peace mentors' reasonable criticism.
For weapons managers to succeed, all they need to be is reliably incompetent at peace. Military technology is the only field at which they must excel (mercilessly graded by Darwinian selection on the battlefield); every other field of endeavor can be ventured with relative incompetence and still fulfill their requirements. Within those limits, the worse they manage peace, the better they will succeed at war. Weapons technicians rule because it is much less bitter to fail at peace and triumph at war, than to succeed at peace and lose at war.
A common weapon refrain is: “You’re not paid to think about such things; we are.”
Information proletarians are enslaved by their lack of valid information. Junk data, served piping hot and fresh to them every day, maintains their servile status. Most often, you and I fit in somewhere here. At other times, our loyalties sparkle between these meta-groups, rather like energy quanta between the atomic shells of a world-sized molecule.
As information proletarians learn, work and play, they produce wealth while sustaining themselves and their beloved. Much smaller groups (called Information Elites) seize most of this wealth in the name of Military Security and use it to defray the anti-profit costs of their Weapon Technologies.
These costs go well beyond mere peacetime expenditures for weapons and soldiers, far beyond that. When comparing the economics of a peaceful society to that of a weapons society, an accurate contrast would be between the wealth of Geneva and Mogadishu, or between the athletic performance of an Olympic runner loping his favorite race, versus that of a wounded soldier dragging his best buddy’s body and their equipment to the rear.
I’ve seriously considered opting for the terms Opinion Elite and Opinion Proletariat. Those terms emphasize the fleeting nature of these prejudices and the information elite's paradoxical lack of merit. Opinion elites believe that their prejudices are a cut above everyone else’s; opinion proletarians have convinced themselves that their preferences are second-rate compared to those of opinion elites. Well-entrenched in the media and schools, opinion elites fervently endorse this inferiority complex.
This may be the root cause why an overwhelming majority of progressives (based on reason) never overcomes a tiny minority of weapon managers (shamelessly based on sociopathic bullshit). Ah yes, I nearly forgot! That, and the knee-jerk reflex of reactionaries, to kill and torture a large number people at random, whenever they feel seriously challenged—either in the cellars of the secret police during mass unemployment, or in the trenches of a war arranged for that purpose alone, or both as often in succession as seemed required to renew the proletariat’s reluctant submission.
Info Elites and Weapon Managers are interchangeable among different nation-states, religious affiliations and political organizations. They include our rulers, their staff, media workers, judges, teachers, priests, politicians and other key misinformation and disinformation professionals―whether or not they know what they’re doing and why they are doing it. They consider themselves superior to their proletarian hosts – from whom they spring and upon whom they depend – the same way a precocious junior might scorn his humble guardians.
In the beginning, info proletarians chose their first elites from among themselves. Thereafter, info elites picked their replacements from the info proletariat. It didn’t matter whether they did so through princely privilege, democratic election, religious hierarchy, Soviet nomination, robber barony or whatever. It didn’t matter if the political setting was a kraal of mud huts, a stinking feudal barony or a continent-spanning, multi-ethnic, military-industrial Empire.
It never mattered whether weapon managers were enslaved or free, secular or religious, centralized or profit-oriented, plebian or noble, criminal or authorized, professional or amateur. Identical weapons elites emerged in any case, with remarkably similar mind-set, attitude and reflexive behavior. Their talk might have changed over time and under different circumstances – cynically, opportunistically and with prejudice – but their walk never did. Except, perhaps, for honor …
Learners must appeal foremost to warrior honor: the honor of my father, of every noble warrior, which cleanses him of his filth. Real warriors will instantly recognize honor and defend it against any crazy deviant lacking it, lethal as he may be. That honor will help create PeaceWorld and guard it fiercely from then on. Honor and Learning should become one. After all, one learns honor.
Information elites convince the information proletariat that their weapon management best suits everyone’s needs (an obvious lie). They employ:
·
Weapon
Mentors to broadcast this fabrication during pseudo-peace, and
· Weapon Sectarians to do so more forcefully in times of war.
The information elite is no smarter than the information proletariat from which it springs. Its members merely promote weapon mentality and themselves in the short term. They do so by censoring important information and drowning this censorship in a tsunami of babble and lies. Those smart and conscientious enough to criticize this poor bargain are marginalized.
This triage “in the name of obedience and loyalty” dumbs down those chosen (and self-chosen) to remain in power, collectively and automatically. After they have held sway for awhile, weapons elites drift onto the razor reefs of their own social contradictions. Quite predictably, they sink into ritual cruelty, institutional terror and routine corruption (see “Ritual Stupidity”).
Information elites can practice one of three broad categories of information politics. The first two categories simplify information content; the third complexifies it. Transitions between these categories are gradual and flexible; they can go backwards or forwards—they need not be categorical, abrupt or progressive.
1. Politicians (or Elites) of Misinformation broadcast as many lies as possible. This is standard behavior for tyrants modern and ancient. Anything not a forbidden truth becomes a mandatory lie. Misinformation politics creates top-down battle management systems that seem optimized for war. Think of Stalin and Saddam Hussein.
Broadcasting misinformation and discerning the truth become relatively simple tasks. In most cases of this kind of politics, the exact opposite of anything relayed through official monologue media is closer to the truth.
Misinformation politics breed paranoia, suspicion and terror. Nothing is as it seems and no one can be trusted. Under this claustrophobic compulsion, the information elite shrinks to a bare minimum and then purges itself beyond that. Brain-dead dogma becomes manifest reality, repeated mindlessly across every medium. Rather than merely manipulate mass opinion, misinfo elites fantasize that they can transform reality itself—as on paper, so in reality. They kill and terrorize their proletarian hosts until this fantasy replaces common sense.
Gangsters rule, while self-blinded misinformation politicians wage holy war against Learner creativity. Society runs on its own inertia and feeds off its last reserves, until it grinds to a halt and starvation looms. The end result is brutal foreign warfare and internal genocide to confirm official propaganda: the ultimate simplification of public reality.
We can rate misinfo elites by their ‘hardness.’ How hard does the elite make it for the info proletariat to survive? The harsher the tyranny, the worse the politics of misinformation.
‘Softer’ tyrannies are richer; they replace misinformation politics with disinformation politics. Disinformation is much more subtle and difficult to manage than misinformation.
As a weapon state matures, the defects of its misinformation politics become more and more blatant. Lying yields nothing but stolen wealth and its entropy into chaos—sustainable wealth grows from the truth and trust in its legitimacy. Thoughtful reformers attempt to weave a few strands of peace mentality (including a bit of information politics) into the rotten basketwork of weapon management. This conglomeration of opposites cannot very long hold together. Instead, it polarizes corrupt weapon managers against frustrated weapon dissidents, in a centrifuge of disinformation politics. Here we are, ruled by...
2. Disinformation Elites that include a mix of so-called populists and liberals with a hard core of reactionaries who rule in the end on every important issue. Together, they broadcast their endless semi-monologue through extensive hierarchies of corporations, governments and/or religions. Unlike politicians of misinformation, they permit carefully screened feedback in minute doses.
The key word in disinformation politics is "but." As in: "We hear your calls for reform, and understand that true morality, morale and efficiency dictate that we do things better; but …” there follows a long list of excuses why inefficient and immoral practices must remain routine.
“Please be more reasonable, ladies and gentlemen. What you propose would be impractical, too costly, subject to abuse by thugs, inconsistent with our most cherished and ancient protocols, etc., etc. ...” Ephemeral religious dogma, ideological gobbledygook, distortions of history, exquisitely written literary blather, commercial advertising, sports babble, arena violence, empty show trials, soap opera trivia, “scientific” data and “mathematical” conclusions that wind up being utterly false, the whole broadcast through monologue media—endlessly, from as many sources as possible, in lavish detail, with painful exactitude and at enormous volume.
Significant matters are lied about obsessively, usually by omission. This trancelike state becomes hypnotic and self-reinforcing. Producers and spectators alike refuse to distinguish obvious lies from the truth. Disinfo elites are just as vulnerable to their own disinformation as their host proletariat. Destructive activities increase, while real wealth evaporates. The populace ignores its greatest strengths and perils in favor of greater and greater elaborations of trivia. It is easily convinced of its imaginary wealth when it is on the verge of bankruptcy and vice versa. Public policies become arbitrary and vacillating, without moral or ideological basis. The regime improvises as it goes along, and its outcomes suffer accordingly.
Useless and trivial information becomes easier (cheap or free) to find and more profitable to produce, while the useful kind becomes harder to broadcast and acquire (more expensive, “unprofitable” and laborious). Belief in anything but rabid commercialism, faith in anything but naked greed and senile dogma, all but those are forbidden by universal consent and popular culture.
Disinfo elites turn into bloated Mandarinates. Through the active promotion of certified mediocrities and authoritative conmen, gifted Learners are relegated to info proletarian status and sub-creative frustration. These habits of deliberate misunderstanding, consensus oversimplification and social mediocrity are only reversed in times of war when many frustrated talents are recruited into revitalized weapon cadres.
I recall seeing a photograph of workers leaving an American naval shipyard at the end of the workday, back during World War II. An enormous sign was posted over the entrance: “Tell us your good ideas!” No such sign would have graced a similar factory gate at the same time in history, had it been between two wars.
Just as a slap in the face will stop a fit of hysterics – and a deep kiss, likewise – mass trauma is the usual method to halt this delusional state. Without warning, disaster and warfare strike because no one bothered to address important issues preemptively. Everyone is SO SURPRISED when their sand castles crumble simultaneously. Afterwards, disinfo elites declare war—a much simpler task than promoting additional abundance and fellow feeling. Mass murder becomes once again the norm. By then, it’s too late to adopt peaceful politics of information, since the requisite wealth and unstressed, unpanicked populations went to waste.
Learners – by the way – is the kiss.
Rarely, peace dissidents manage to overcome this social inertia and spread the good news that everyone should share Learning even-handedly. If info elites begin to pay miraculous attention to this idea and start broadcasting it, they work themselves out of the job of restricting information flow. At that point, info elites and proletariats merge into an Information (or Learner) Commonwealth.
3. Politicians of Information would generate truth and lies on every topic without prejudice or favor, for Learners to sort out among themselves. A Learner Commonwealth would emerge through unrestricted public discourse and extensive dialogues between self-selected info-jurors. They would pursue their topics of passion without regard to wealth or status—since those would be theirs by right in an Information Commonwealth.
Many statements that appear to be lies are just more complex elaborations of the truth. Whether through literary fiction, new ideologies, academic postulates, inventions, discoveries or reinterpretations of ancient dogma, the truth prevails because it is more profitable in peaceful settings. People revalue information that seems more important to them than the expensive artifacts and mythmaking about military security.
Taking the opposite tack, misinformation societies opt for nothing but lies and terror. The truth becomes least profitable, because it will get you killed on the spot. No such choice remains in disinformation societies, where white noise drowns out everything else—until the World Trade Towers come tumbling down in controlled demolition. Everyone scrambles to resume the reassuring chatter of fallacious normalcy, thus exposing their necks to the next chop and doing nothing to ward it off.
In politics of information, expanding communication systems become more interactive, complex and adaptive. People engage in many more dialogues across new media, rather than submit to top-down, monologue propaganda from ‘superior’ elites. They are more interested in their topics of passion than in the mass media’s trivial disinformation.
TV is a monologue medium, as are radio, print media and non-interactive web pages. You know, all those worthless corporate and bigot propaganda web pages that have no Contact link?
I cannot benefit (nor suffer, more likely) from the interactivity of Learners until you choose to contact me. You may do so from the Contact Page link at the bottom of any chapter of Learners. Let me handle, in the meantime, the feeding frenzy of viruses and spam that swarms to my door, in the hope of rarely welcoming some thoughtful Learner’s constructive response. Yours, perhaps? The one message in a thousand that might make worthwhile all my otherwise fruitless efforts among these thoughtless simians?
I can use all the help you could send me, battered as I am by witless criticism, criminal negligence and stupid attacks. I've received a few such messages already (desperate or cheerily supportive), for which I am most grateful.
The Greek Agora, Town Hall meetings (unscripted… Gotta add that, now that Nixon’s and Bush the Lesser’s disinfo technicians have scripted, rehearsed and packed audiences routinely), telephones and postal or electronic mails are examples of dialogue media.
It is a question of how rapidly the Armchair Formula can be satisfied. Dialogue media can carry at least ten times more useful interactions across the same bandwidth, than monologue media. The sum of useful communication equals real wealth (divided by the sum of useless and/or noxious communications?). I’m talking ten, a hundred, a thousand times more hard cash available to everyone without inflation.
“Your intent is noble, but your appeal misguided. If you talk to these emperors about profits,
and in their love of profit they stop their armies – their armies will rejoice
in peace and delight in profit. Soon
ministers will embrace profit in serving their sovereign, sons will embrace
profit in serving their fathers, younger brothers will embrace profit in
serving their elder brothers – and all of them will have abandoned Humanity and
Duty. When these relationships become a
matter of profit, the nation is doomed to ruin.
“But if you talk to these emperors about Humanity and Duty,
and in their love of Humanity and Duty they stop their armies – their armies
will rejoice in peace and delight in Humanity and Duty. Soon ministers will embrace Humanity and Duty
in serving their sovereign, sons will embrace Humanity and Duty in serving
their fathers, younger brothers will embrace Humanity and Duty in serving their
elder brothers – and all of them will have abandoned profit.
"When these relationships become a matter of Humanity
and Duty, then the sovereign is sure to be a true emperor. So why mention profit? Mencius, translated by David Hinton,
Counterpoint, Washington, D.C., 1998, p. 219.
(Next quote).
It is up to each of us to create a Virtual Agora of massive political dialog that spans the globe. The World Wide Web is the startup prototype of this Learner Virtual Agora. Insofar it spreads, we’re in luck.
With insignificant outside threats and lots of surplus wealth (very rare), some mature societies would allow Learners to complexify information politics.
As complexity induces more turbulence, it risks bursting the levies of social convention intended to contain and regulate it. Thus, information politicians must renew more and more sophisticated vocabularies and communication habits. Otherwise, the roar of chaotic argument risks once again to degenerate into misinformation politics.
The latest temptation of info elites to censor the Internet from the top down, and of proletarians to cripple it from the bottom up (with viruses, hacking, flames, spam and other info litter) is nothing more that the pathetic denial of an ever-expanding information universe. Think of a colicky baby who turns his face away from his strained peas. Bewildered individuals and groups attempt to re-simplify their life by lashing out against the newest complication they consider vulnerable to their abuse. Poor jerks.
In pursuit of abundance, advanced practitioners of disinformation politics tend to disarm unilaterally and thus provoke more military aggression.
Other societies evolved up to information politics, but were destroyed militarily and disappeared from the historic record. Many budding peace societies were annihilated and rendered ‘prehistoric’ because their top-down managers promoted internal wealth and peace, while hungry outsiders remained, restless, militant and jealous.
We can note this tendency in the United States, where military casualties used to be political poison. This public aversion to military casualties in particular and to militarism in general, tempts aggressive outsiders and internal militarists to inflict more damage. As their assaults grow bolder, better-coordinated and more destructive, their survivors revert to politics of misinformation and overt weapon tyranny: tempting options in an overly militarized world where kneejerk panic trumps rational thought.
Weapon Technology includes the mechanical hardware and flesh-and-blood wetware of warfare: military forces (Weapon technicians), intelligence gatherers, national security agents, secret police, weapons industrialists, weapon workers, their capital plant and enormous inventories of weapons themselves. Today, there is a personal fireharm for every ten inhabitants of Earth, and two or more bullets cast every year for each of them. In case one of those misses.
Weapon Managers discriminate against anyone and anything they can blame for their frequent policy failures (since they are, by definition, the worst peace managers): the poor, women, non-heterosexuals, children, liberals, ethnic/religious minorities, migrants and immigrants, primal myths, human nature and nature itself. Sophisticated weapon managers recruit reactionary candidates from among abused minorities; that way, they can pay lip service to pluralism while they stimulate social abuse.
“The more justly constituted the society, the more admirable
its political form, the more war [weapon mentality] threatens to weaken its
institutions and to pervert them. And it
is also true that the best form of government is that least adapted to the
exigencies of war.” How to Think
about War and Peace, Mortimer J. Adler, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1944, p
42.
Weapon managers get Battle Elites (about a 10% minority among weapon technicians) to do the jackals’ share of their dirtywork. Educated officers or enlisted slaves: it doesn’t matter. Half genetically damaged and half the products of childhood neglect/abuse fears, battle elites thrive on both sides of battlefields, riot zones, jailhouse bars and Belsen wire. The remaining 90% of weapon technicians serve as logistics and morale supporters for battle elites on their side, and as easy prey on the other. Finally, as firepower multipliers (artillerists and such) on both sides. Whether in peace or in war, battle elites do the killing and the rest do the dying.
Battle elites cannot bring their aggression under control. This makes them valuable assets on the battlefield and costly nuisances anywhere else. Everybody shares some battle elite traits, though most of us keep ours under strict control. Call it good manners, good taste, conscience, civility, delicacy, decadence or mere cowardice. Most of us are not hard-wired to thrive on the battlefield and in bar fights, the way battle elites are.
I seem to have made a special Karmic vow to someone who must be very influential to me. I’ve promised not to kill or torture anyone, this time around, if I can help it. Incredibly, I’ve pledged this lifetime to PeaceWorld instead. Was I an elite genocide during past incarnations? Most probably. I’m not proud of it, quite the contrary. What a wasted opportunity for fast-buck wickedness and a rocky row to hoe instead! Indiscriminate killing would be so easy, this time around. There’d be no end to the killing (with seven billion live targets), until everyone had been pitchforked into the meat grinder. Genocide is fantastically well subsidized on this planet—instant gratification for wholehearted marauders.
As for my preaching of peace, I wish myself luck before this esteemed assembly. And beg your pardon for this abuse, dear reader, if you are already an honest Learner.
We may split battle elites into two groups:
· The Dirty Dozen: born warriors, gunmen, bullies and social outcasts who often outgrow their aggression with maturity and loving-kindness properly administered.
· The Himmler Subgroup: primarily civilians, ostensibly good parents, spouses, neighbors and administrators—and quite often, brilliant cowards. Charming and seductive as long as it suits them, they look forward to wreaking havoc on a world of Others they have been raised to despise. They seek to climb the highest rungs of power, from which they may get away with as much mayhem as possible, shielded by their rank.
Just as a shark retains rows of spare teeth in reserve, info proletariats nurture Info Proto-Elites eager to overthrow the current info elite. Proto-elites are a motley crew of ambitious clerks, students and subalterns – employed by authorities or not – but covertly dissenting from them. These frustrated rebels only cohere clumsily once their elite’s failure rate maxes out.
Eric Hoffer’s book, The True Believer, analyses Proto-Elite leaders. Unfortunately, he indulges in the sorry habit of biographical reductionism: reducing the complexities of global social movements into a simple inventory of their leaders’ personal idiosyncrasies.
Herodotus treated history and current events as cults of personality, as have many historians and journalists since. Everything happened because some poor slob and his flunkies – officially designated Leaders – made it happen exactly in the manner they foresaw.
“By the mid-4th century, there existed a large and well-known
body of Greek literature that had as yet no convenient name—it was not yet
called Historia – but was generally described as the “writings of the deeds
of war” or “inquiries about the deeds of war’ : it included Herodotus,
Thucydides, the several continuations of Thucydides, which went under the title
Hellenica (Affairs of Greece) (only Xenophon’s survives), and the
accounts of the western Greeks by the lost Syracusan writers Antiochus and
Philistus, which went under the title Sicelica (Affairs of
Sicily). It was taken for granted that
this literature was the source of knowledge for anything about war, diplomacy
or interstate relations. P. 85.
“But what of the historians?
The 5th century had bequeathed two major narrative
styles, the linear epic style of Herodotus and the antithetical realistic style
of Thucydides, which were associated with two different views of the world—the
encomiastic Herodotus world of moral achievement and cosmic law versus
Thucydidean pessimism and irony….” Doyne Dawson, The
Origins of Western Warfare: Militarism and Morality in the Ancient World, Westview
Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1996, p. 95.
Those narratives are about as accurate as the next one that follows. I’m driving my car and in absolute control. So I’m going to flip every car in a hundred-car pileup on a freeway in the fog, into carefully preplanned slots, thus making sure that my car and those that follow come out the other end without a scratch. Sure, buddy; it could happen!
Yet that would be a rather simple problem, compared to running an entire country. See the leadership section in my chapter “Identity Politics.”
After millennia of crushed dissidence, progressive organizations have been hopelessly Balkanized, which means chopped up and rendered piecemeal. Many social activists worsen their political impotence through mutual ostracism, special interest bickering, petty private grievances and nit-picking ideological puritanism. Thus do much more pragmatic, disciplined and cohesive weapons elites defeat them in detail.
Rejecting holistic transformation, weapon dissidents surrender to endless hairsplitting, moral compromise and hopelessness. Indifferent to genuine peace and progress that they believe quite beyond their grasp, they turn into conformist adherents to a ‘loyal opposition.’ Tough luck for those who challenges their turbulent conformism! They are emotionally invested in token resistance against a thriving weapon state that strengthens itself from their feeble resistance.
Recall that body builders push and pull their muscles, like taffy, against resistance. In roughly the same way, weapon states exploit their weapon dissidents. Thus, the clichéd yammer of weapon dissence makes its weapon state stronger, more subtle and more difficult to bring down.
On occasion, a breakthrough peace movement manages to dissolve its weapon state. This lopsided relaxation of weapon technology is usually fatal for the society involved, given the presence of well-armed outsiders. So success at peace has never been encouraged in the past. Today’s fashionable ‘community activism’ is a continuation of thousands of years of ineffectual (indeed, inversely effective) weapon dissidence.
My mailbox erupts with rival solicitations for a charitable contribution, each appeal more heart-rending than the last. None asks for more than a check that magically disappears with the promise that it will support some worthy cause, probably with more solicitation mail.
On the other hand, our institutions vacuum fortunes from our wallets to deploy the means, justify the motives and develop the opportunities for mass murder. The beneficiaries of thousands of years of successful propaganda, weapon managers think holistically and plan monolithically. Their international transactions and expenditures are pseudo-voluntary, free spending and largely independent of outside influence.
Just like during World War I, the leadership on both sides has more in common with each other, during their minuet of death, than with their own info proletariat lined up for the next massacre. If we disagree with their goals, we will be marginalized into a political minority voiceless and trivial (by definition, not by numbers). No matter how many of us there are or how sensible our proposals, thanks to our historical incoherence and hysterical paralysis.
Thanks to thousands of years of defeat, rejection and Balkanization (and the rare, absolutely lethal success), standard-issue weapon dissidents have become divisive, elitist, holier-than-thou, miserly, exclusive, reductive and atomistic. They are satisfied with ritual bonding in adversity, moralistic self-indulgence and existential despair. Thus do we honor our long tradition of abject defeat. Most of us would rather keep things that way indefinitely. We would rather not alarm ourselves by grabbing real, transformational power. The prospect scares me, too. So what? As if we had any other choice but successful transformation, at this stage in history.
Thus – every hour on the hour – the media announce fresh weapon triumphs and peace tragedies. Progressives cannot hope to navigate the political mainstream until they’ve rallied around a hyper-complex platform of inclusive, cooperative and mutualistic reforms. In other words, until they’ve maximized Learning planet-wide.
Some text – this one or another perhaps better? – may catapult to world power its international, interdenominational and interethnic adherents of every age, sex and class. This could happen much more readily than you might think. Like other hidden truths, it is just a question of time and numbers: the time it would take to spread understanding and the number of those who understand.
Like a vampire caught out in daylight, weapon mentality cannot survive full exposure to the truth.
This transition could be as unforeseen, swift and exhaustive as the U.S.S.R.’s perestroika. Every modern-day leader – suddenly rendered powerless, clueless and numb by the collapse of political power – could abandon his office spontaneously and simultaneously. In the absence of an organizational framework like Learners, this transition could become horribly destructive—simply put, the mafia will take over the world and the worst political horrors will roll out like clockwork.
Many independent ideologues and anonymous polemicists are hard at work at this task, each one bringing different insights and talents to bear. But it is almost impossible for us to broadcast our findings—especially among weapon dissidents. Paradoxically, they are more closed to new ideas than weapon managers who will adopt novel improvements (reluctantly, but assuredly) into their robust and self-confident management schemes. The shaky ground progressives must negotiate does not permit them this kind of open-mindedness, at least until they change their mind deliberately. May dissidents experience a change of mind and allow our best ideas to be heard, seriously meditated and rebroadcast! Unlike Americans today.
As our civilization polarizes between luxuriant minorities and restless majorities, as reason and rights fade from public discourse, raw greed becomes the final arbiter of more and more new policy. But even shifty greed must find its rightful place. Well-regulated Cooperatives of Plenty shall welcome private enterprise – that wellspring of innovation and abundance – provided every citizen gains the same basic benefits thereunder.
Despite their inflated privileges, info elites are just as vulnerable to mistaken information – both self-inflicted and out-sourced – as are info proletarians. In order to guarantee dependable benefits for themselves and their dearest (as opposed to rickety perks they must defend at gunpoint), information elites must find new ways to generate sustainable abundance, adopt harmless rituals that redirect fearful aggression, destructive diligence and the most harmful ideas.
Among the tools info elites use to organize their partisans, greed is second only to fear. Learners won’t tempt info elites to abandon their Conspiracies of Greed until our shared vocabulary and purpose outsmart hysterical avarice. Learner doctrine must be clear, concise and immune to prejudice, cupidity and panic. There must be a plan or a series of plans for which most people would volunteer because they saw a better chance to benefit cooperatively (or merely survive) within the plan, regardless of their origin and status.
The belief is obsolete that people can be punished into better behavior. The more penalties beyond the necessary minimum, the more resistance—automatically. Weapon managers are the only ones who could profit from this tailspin of coercion and defiance.
“… The primitive wisely knows that the
wealthy man is not the one who accumulates surplus but the one who gives it
away, that to be rich is to divest oneself of riches. This
wisdom becomes difficult to sustain in the context of Neolithic stock keeping
and agricultural surpluses; with the devising of metal coinage in the cities,
however, we are in danger of losing it altogether. Can
hard currency, being noncorruptible, perhaps be safely hoarded without
corrupting its possessor, unlike the shit from which it has symbolically
evolved? Can a hardened culture thus outwit its lowly
origins and the limitations they propose?
“Probably not. The original heap of
stones piously proclaims the hope that by gathering together we may build
something durably human. When it is superseded by a
heap of golden coins secreted in the rich man’s treasury, culture is almost
certainly in trouble. The heap of golden coins is a
frozen swarm, unmoving; the rich man, though apparently post-magical, will be
tempted to fetichize this swarm, secretly to believe that his possession of it
has alchemically transformed him from human baseness into imperishable purity
that will live forever – in which case he will have by-passed the bowel … Thus
the worship of filthy lucre is not, as many suppose, the worship of shit but
its denial; and a denial of such fundamental realities will ultimately poison
everything in its attempt to find utterance. Not only is it clear that hoarded
coin sooner or later does rot the soul (just as retained feces and fetuses rot
the body) but a money-worshipping culture forsakes the chief virtue that flows
from gift-exchange: its magical capacity to restrain greed and forestall war.” Taken from The Origins of the Sacred: the Ecstasies
of Love and War, by Dudley Young, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1991, p. 207.
Peace Mentality sustains our souls. Like a spiritual physicist, Mahatma Gandhi revealed that its nucleus was the fusion of Truth and Non-violence. Our souls sparkle around this nucleus like electrons around a vast atom. Every moment of every day, a still, small voice whispers to us “Love fearlessly.” Tirelessly from across the cosmic void, it repeats itself at celestial amplitude. We have but to listen and obey.
Even though peace mentality burns bright in idealistic young minds, it gutters out in middle age and is soon extinguished in many unlucky souls. Almost everyone would pick peace mentality over the weapon variety on an even playing field. However, our opportunities for peace are as fleeting as our weapon practices are diverse, forceful and tempting. Given so much negative conditioning, only an enlightened few manage to become able practitioners of peace.
Peace technology pays its own freight and that of weapon technology. Despite the countless setbacks imposed by weapon priorities, peace mentality inches forward; it transcends life and death—much less the shameless narcissism of disinformation politics.
Peace Technology includes:
· our flight from misery (above and beyond any “Constitutional” pursuit of happiness);
· our run at abundance, health, human rights and sustainable agriculture;
· our worship of nature and supernature;
· our quest for learning: play, entertainment and enlightenment;
· our pursuit of:
o
Peace
enforcement,
o
Sound
philosophy,
o
Valid
enterprise and
o
Useful
professionalism, as well as other life-giving activities.
Without such exemplary modifiers (in italics), we needn’t consider these things essentially valuable. After all, they easily revert to organized bullying, wordy nonsense, greed satiation and naked elitism: giveaway symptoms of weapon mentality.
Peace mentality has one Categorical Imperative: raise the children well. Everything else takes back seat to this effort or impedes it. They say, “It takes a whole village to raise a child.” Raising healthy children requires every adult’s cooperation. The goal is not to raise many children indifferently, that is a weapon requirement. Peace management would demand that every child be cocooned in optimal surroundings. Their health and Learning should take absolute priority, as would the civil rights of their mothers.
“Young children all know love for their parents. And when they grow up, they all know respect
for their elders. Loving parents is
Humanity, and respecting elders is Duty.
That’s the secret. Just extend it
throughout all beneath Heaven.” Mencius,
translated by David Hinton, Counterpoint, Washington, D.C., 1998, p. 240. Bibliography
It seems obvious that all social good flows from cherished children maturing into good citizens. Logically, we could conclude that the opposite is also true: that bad citizens proliferate when more children are abused. At gut level, we delight in children’s happiness, suffer heartache when they come to harm, and sigh intense relief when they are delivered therefrom. One needn’t be a parent to feel these things, nor particularly sensitive.
If you believed in reincarnation, you would have to be crazy to support any social habit that did not pamper every child without exception—you’d be signing your own torture warrant during future incarnations. Totally bonkers… Another reason to make conviction in reincarnation universal.
Those who resist this empathy are deeply disturbed; so is our whole society, since it flouts this elemental truth. We let children perish by the millions, let billions more become stupid adults through malnutrition and neglect.
We should make good these deadly scandals, and that quickly. This travesty would be unthinkable on PeaceWorld, unheard of. It would cause government meltdown, trigger a complete overhaul of leadership. Ex-leaders would withdraw in disgrace from public service, paralyzed with shame. Fat chance that current weapon-leaders would live up to such peaceful ideals. The best of them might, under ideal circumstances. Once we’ve convinced ourselves, they must be likewise convinced or replaced.
An amusing political homily drones like Muzak in my mind. Humans cleave to three broad categories of political behavior. Regardless of other allegiances, we fit in among Ex-Herbivores, Ex-Carnivores and Omnivores (oft-reincarnated herbivores and carnivores who have learnt the futility of their old ways).
Ex-Herbivore: “Hey, there’s plenty of good grazing out here. Grass ain’t brain food, so let’s just make lots of babies and munch away―what we do best.
"We live in the present. If we got an itch, we scratch it. Our universe is in that scratching. Anything more―that’s just too complicated for us.
“Gee, our carnivores are pretty nasty. They hunt us, kill us and eat us. But they do chase off other carnivores who might be worse. Who knows; things could be worse. Anything that really scares us, well, our blind stampede will make it disappear, won't it? Why bother to vote? We just want to be happeeeee.”
Ex-Carnivore: “Behold this beautiful body of mine: powerful, lean and hungry. My mind ticks over, deadly and remorseless. I live in the future when my darkest needs will at last be satisfied.
“I am an expert at magical thinking. As long as I carry out a precise series of steps in exactly the correct order and with perfect timing, I may feast to perfection and indefinitely (which must be paradise and proof of my selection as God’s favorite). No one may stop me, and I will kill anyone who tries. If I fail, it is through lack of self-perfection. It doesn’t matter how many times this recurs; I must succeed in the end or die trying.
This obsessive-compulsion can be carried out by a lion during his hunt, a hierarch during his cult devotion (bloody or otherwise), a tycoon during his stock market transactions, a science doctrinaire during his laboratory tricks or an author ruminating his prose. My results have been more or less similar in terms of satisfaction and I have reincarnated in all these spheres of action and more of the same nature. My universe is centered on the repeated sacrifice of prey and my self-perfection in so doing. Nothing else matters, and neither God nor I need have any mercy on anyone less obsessed.
“My sires taught me to use this money, these fancy institutions and novel gadgets to satisfy my hunger. Anyone slower, weaker and more ethical than me is fair game; anything I can claw down is my sacred property, to dispose of as I please. If I don’t claim it, some hungrier carnivore will.
"End of discussion, time to pursue happiness.
“I know! Let's run for Congress!”
Ominivore: “Salads are fine in their place. My peers and I can neutralize any piddling carnivore at will. It’s fun―plus it's good eats!
“We coordinate the past, the present and the future to improve our odds of personal happiness. We’re not so much interested in everyone else's pursuit of happiness—that’s their business. We are interested in accelerating their flight from misery: a political duty that carnivores keep forgetting in their wild pursuit of personal happiness.
“Through natural selection, we have evolved to learn. The more complex our information universe, the more we owe it our wealth. This wealth could serve to distract ex-herbivores and divert ex-carnivores until they grasped the fundamentals of Learner civilization.
“After five thousand years of bloody compromise, we’re just hitting our stride and that’s exciting! This information potlatch promises to supplant the rigors of the stalk and the rights of spring. Everyone merits abundance and security… The best, most obvious way to secure our own.
“You, fated ex-herbivore bereft of imagination! Look up beyond your cud. Hey, you, shifty ex-carnivore! Your aggression betrays your weakness. Go ahead, take a lunge into your next charge. It will fail, sooner or later, as it always has.
Both of you! Join us in peace!”
But this is mere EZ listening. Learners shall take a much closer look at the physiology of social behavior and public responsibility, discover better models and clearer explanations of human motivation.
“Paul MacLean tells us, ‘We are the possessors of a triune
brain – not one brain but three, each with its own way of perceiving and
responding to the world.’ Richard M. Restak, The
Brain: The Last Frontier (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979). In ascending order on the phylogenic scale,
they are: (1) reptilian (central core), (2) paleomammalian (limbic system), and
(3) neomammalian (cerebral cortex). The first of
these, the reptilian, is the most primitive; MacLean has also labeled this the
“R-complex.” It is comparable to much of the brain
found in [fish and] reptiles. And it
includes the hypothalamus. Surrounding
the reptilian R-complex is the next level, the limbic system which is
associated with the brain found in early mammals...
“In effect, we appear to have been ‘pre-wired,’ at least
partially, by the reptilian brain to be ritualistic, to be in awe of authority,
to develop social pecking orders, and perhaps even to develop
obsessive-compulsive neuroses ...
“We appear to have been pre-wired in the case of the limbic
system as well, to respond emotionally to threats to self- or
species-preservation …”
Dennis J. D. Sandole, “The Biological Basis of Needs,” Conflict:
Human Needs Theory, John Burton, ed., 1990, Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1990, p.
71.
Of course, the scientific community has done its best to neutralize this theory, stating that non-mammals have other brain structures that serve similar fuctions. They cite cephalopods and birds (but not reptiles) that display surprisingly advanced brains capacities. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=one-world-many-minds. But this theory remains useful to illustrate various mental priorities in humans.
Once our models of human awareness improve, better estimates of human motivation and better treatments for violence-, greed- and fear-driven deviants will help us love one another fearlessly—at last!
Debra Niehoff reviews criminal correction in her mindful book, The Biology of Violence, The Free Press, New York, 1999, “Picking Up the Pieces”. Herself the victim of a violent crime, (as I have been, at gunpoint, and as you are likely to have been in this sorry day and age, just like every past one), she downplays violence as a criminal deterrent and suggests more thoughtful methods of behavior modification. Her research reveals that police terror and penal brutality do not so much suppress criminality as increase it. This is a constant striving of weapon mentality: to increase criminality and aggression.
We live on a man-made WeaponWorld bereft of God’s Peace, mutual welcome and care. Could we be here to remake this planet into God’s own PeaceWorld, filled with them? The God I believe in loves Peace and abhors War among the children. God will reward faithful Learners eager for Peace, as genuine offspring and true saints. That reward will translate into miracles.
Let’s say you were neither an atheist nor devoutly religious – unlike them, neither doctrinaire nor closed-minded – and sought to prove the existence of God solely for your satisfaction. There would be no better way to do it, than to rebuild WeaponWorld into PeaceWorld and witness God’s self-affirmation by showering us with miracles of approbation. After all, we would be doing what God always taught us to do instead of what God forbade – despite the aberrant commands of thousands of years of weapon fundamentalists and ideological liars: “Kill, lie, rob your neighbor and despise him, pray in public. We order you to obey the commandments of mere men and practice that which God has forbidden.”
Those miracles would be God’s substitute for our perfectly scientific, perfectly orthodox, perfectly serial disasters. We could pour into PeaceWorld all the sanctity we had pent up in our hearts, and benefit from miracles of wisdom, kindness and love. Every Learner could become a brother and sister on PeaceWorld―so much so that we could hardly imagine it.
It would be like acting our part in a play, except that all the props, costumes and lighting would conform more closely to Peace and improve with time. Furthermore, the play’s director, writers, cast, producers, sponsors and audience had changed their mind – that WeaponWorld was not so hot – and that we’d be better off on PeaceWorld.
Every Learner could assume – with greater success, charity and fellow feeling; more easily, cheaply and safely; suffering from a lot less fear; using exponentially greater artistry, passion and devotion – the bearing of God’s massed saints: athirst, drunk and fulfilled with the Peace of God. Until God secured His Peace.
We are all Learners, from birth to death. As political, moral, spiritual, pragmatic human beings in love and in family relationship with everyone else – for better or for worse – we are the Chosen Ones in this space-time continuum. Of God, Allah, Fate or Nothing? Whatever you choose to call it. I call it God, and us, God’s, which includes everything above. Does that bother you?
Instead, we have chosen to dawdle as WeaponWorld slaves. Caught up in a tap dance of perpetual war and ephemeral peace, we improvise as we go along, paying homage to two opposite sets of values: weapon mentality and peace mentality. Suffering from this mass schizophrenia and hostage to it, we have become nothing more that asocial sheep and incompetent wolves … God’s spoiled children, instead of God’s saints.
What an inexcusable waste!
Everyone has his own trip, right? You yours, me mine, each and everyone theirs : each a carefully crafted custom job, for better or worse. Hitler and his henchmen had theirs, too. Some new tyrant might smash ours like docked yachts in a hurricane. History has warned us.
Haven't we grown cagey enough to recognize the worst gangsters and shut them down? Don't we have all the creeps of history to compare them against? Is there anything new they could try, that we couldn’t read through?
Learners will tap into everything known. That will make them smarter. Smarter people, fewer mistakes; fewer mistakes, less pain; less human pain, greater productivity. A quick investment for unlimited profit. Could we have enough Humanity and the Duty, per Mencius, to see this through? Have we got the guts to attempt what I’m suggesting? Where could we find the guts; in the faith that our souls are saved in Jesus, perhaps?
Could it be we’ve grown too cagey for our own good? Today, we find it easier to believe in nothing—to trust in no new ideology, whatever the cost. Fanaticophobia is such a sorry habit. “The opposite of illusions is not disillusion but the truth.” A Course in Miracles, Foundation for Inner Peace, p. 438.
So here’s my agenda, in clear and simple, for your consideration.
First Things
First! World Peace First!
I’ve been shouting this from the rooftops for decades, so far unheard, drowning in the meanders of denial.
You may have noticed three things happening all at once, for the first time in history.
· There’s a truly global communication network out there. Instead of a conglomeration of alien and alienating nation-states, we are fast becoming One World. Me Tarzan, swinging my message along the jungle vines of this World Wide Web, to get it out to you.
· Like-minded Learners throng this planet. Regardless of provenance, religion and ideology, each of us craves peace. Exquisitely trained and ready for anything, we outnumber the tyrants and their accomplices by thousands to one.
· Finally, we’re teetering on a cliff-edge of omnicide ("Kill everything!") that’s nearing more scary every day.
Why not exploit this cracked-open, triple-pane window of opportunity, recruits and crisis? It was sealed shut in the past, since essential peace components were missing. Every prior effort at peace was doomed to fail in their absence, and did so often that we have convinced ourselves that all such efforts are useless, with or without those essential components. That window of opportunity will close once again, when the evil twin weapon components of those peace efforts carry out their final mission. We only have this current, fleeting opportunity.
In order to exploit it, we will need to share one ideal and organize our creativity around it. An ideal not on the tip of everyone’s tongue, yet adoptable after careful consideration. One that embraces the best and worst of who we are; that would brace us to fear, exclude and censor nothing and no one. It would shield us from ice storms of recrimination, blame games, aggression and untruth. Finally, it would allow us to forgive everyone and everything, including ourselves and the worst we’ve done in the past—as cultures, religions and individuals.
Allow us to forgive ourselves and repent for our unholy ways? Could we find what it takes? Could we wrap our minds around that?
Learners will call that high ideal “PeaceWorld.”
For the first time, we have every means, motive and opportunity to make it happen. Once we go for it, the volume of our peace song may drown out the bad brass band blare of WeaponWorld.
Quotes from:
http://sunsite.org.uk/packages/Online-Book-Initiative/Adolph.Hitler/unpacked/mkv1ch04.html.
[Author’s note: a neutral academic web page now
offline. I’d rather not refer you to an
alternative pro-Nazi one. My family
fought the Nazis tooth and nail. I despise them. But this is WeaponWorld and I must harvest my
quotes where I can find them. Your
reading of Learners will require a broadened outlook on your
part].
“In every case where there are exigencies or tasks that seem
impossible to deal with successfully, public opinion must be concentrated on
the one problem ... Only in this way can
public interest be aroused to such a pitch as will urge people to combine in a
great voluntary effort and achieve important results.
“This fundamental truth applies also to the individual ...
He must always concentrate his efforts to one definitely limited stage of his
progress, which has to be completed before the next step be attempted … This
systematic way of approaching an objective is an art in itself and always calls
for the expenditure of every ounce of energy...” Hitler, Adolph, Mein Kampf, Vol. I, Chap. 10.
“… all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare
essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped
formulas. These slogans should be
repeated persistently until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea
that has been put forward.” Vol. I, Chap. 6.
“The more the militant energies of the people are directed
towards one objective, the more will new recruits join the movement, attracted
by the magnetism of its unified actions, ...”
Vol. I, Chap. 3.
“Any Weltanschauung, though a thousandfold right and
supremely beneficial to humanity, will be of no practical service for the
maintenance of a people as long as its principles have not yet become the
rallying point of a militant movement.”
Vol. II, Chap. 1.
Shouldn’t America remain the political lighthouse of the rest of the world? Or must it degenerate into the world’s latest bully Centurion? Why not nourish and pamper that legendary idealism, and transplant it into the fallow loam of the Old World for permanent cultivation? All the Old World has managed to cultivate, up to now, have been the weeds weapon mentality.
America has always served as a pragmatic test bed for lofty new ideals. Its citizens have taken the most radical, most risky ideologies and transformed them into pragmatic working models of downstream abundance. Across the world, idealists, entrepreneurs and common folk alike have fallen in love with our splendid results and beaten a path to our door. That’s what we are most admired for and what we’re best at.
Yet, when we start mimicking tired Old World tyrants, its residents begrudge us our second-hand despotism and strike back hard. With good reason—those gladiator-movie clichés never worked in thousands of years of bloody trial, as everyone knows perfectly well.
It’s time we cultivated PeaceWorld: our one true calling. Every other alternative is mere death by the sword.
“To these three forms of law, a fourth links up, the most
important of all. It isn’t engraved in
marble or bronze, but in citizens’ hearts.
It is the real constitution of the State, which grows stronger every
day; when other laws grow old or expire, it revives and replaces them. It sustains the people in the spirit of their
institution; it substitutes, unawares, the force of habit for that of
authority. I speak of morals, customs
and especially opinion: that overlooked part of our politics, but upon which
all the rest depends; that part which preoccupies a great statesman in secret,
while he seems to focus on personal regulations. Those are but the girdle of the dome, of
which morals – born more slowly – end up forming the unshakable key.” Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Du contrat social,
(The Social Contract). Book II, Chapter 11.
I may try to invite you into PeaceWorld, but can’t cram you inside. All I can do is suggest the melody and trust that you will choose to harmonize.
What PeaceWorld may repay us is immaterial—no matter how much we may long to bask in its glory. Our conscience somewhat revived at last, the glory of our favorite God, reverence for long-dead ancestors, the welfare of posterity and our military honor as guarantors of Peace, all demand it of us.
That should be enough.
Every child is subjected to aversion training against peace. As a result, we grownups refuse to sort our information politics into their weapons and peace components, and reject world peace in our lifetime.
I cut correspondence short with a so-called "progressive" who concluded, quite pleased with himself, that World Peace would never happen until at least forty years from now: the time it would take to eliminate his responsibility for it, since he would be retired or dead by then. According to him, people are just not ready for it; they're not graced with the superior morality he sees himself obviously endowed with…
I won’t name him, out of mercy. After all, his is a general malpractice, not an exceptional one. In most cases, these days, the responsible party is not named for fear of his reprisal or that of his supporters. The moment the weakest party would be harmed, Learners should mercilessly call out the responsible party by name, regardless of the consequences, as long as those weakest were shielded from further harm.
In a PeaceWorld Agora, infinitely more elegant than WeaponWorld, anyone responsible for human suffering would be stripped of power. Guilt and regret for one’s misdeeds should become a preventive measure—no matter how much that costs in the meantime. The current practice of disguising one’s failures in anonymity should be forbidden, as much on the Internet as during institutional misdeeds.
For example, the 2006 murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the courageous journalist who served steadfastly as the conscience of the Russian State – whatever the cost – should be laid at the feet of Vladimir Putin whose birthday was the day of her murder, and of his murderous crony, Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Russian Chechen State.
The following human rights workers, poets, journalists, lawyers and judges have been murdered in Russia, most without serious investigation or follow-up arrests.
· Nadezhda Chaikova, 1996
· Galina Starovoitova, 1998
· Igor Domnikov, 2000
·
Yury Shchekochikhin, 2003
· Paul Klebnikov, 2004
· Ivan Safronov, 2007
· Magomed Yvloyev, 2009
· Vyachsla Yaroshenko, 2009
· Stanislav Markelov, 2009
· Anastasia Babourova, 2009
· Natalia Estemirova, 2009
· Serguei Magnitsky, 2009
· Edouard Tchouvachov, 2010
· Rouslan Akhtakhanov, 2011
Many more state-sponsored murders went unnoticed by the Western Press. Russia will never regain its slava (glory) until it becomes as deliberate in protecting their replacements as it was impulsive in sacrificing those listed.
Dispatching these national treasures and discouraging their imitators by acts of sheer terrorism would be unthinkable for legitimate leaders of these states. On PeaceWorld, this disgrace would have gotten them thrown from office without appeal. Yet on WeaponWorld, they thrive from their inconceivable transgressions. They are not alone on WeaponWorld, on the contrary. Almost every current ruler would lose his war crime trial before the World Court.
Compared to most of those I've reached out to, this guy was rather optimistic about the likelihood of world peace. This is how this planet’s grim burden of weapon stalwarts sorts itself. An overwhelming majority which asserts that world peace is impossible, worthless and evil; and a handful which maintains that it might be worthwhile but quite unlikely in the near future when they would be personally responsible for it. Let someone else do the work!
How convenient for him babbling his platitudes! Needless to say, he won’t lift a finger to help me in the meantime. Neither he nor his do-nothing ‘progressive’ cohort, good for little more than wringing their hands and whining about how nasty people and current events are.
Take you time, Bubba: the next forty years or the last five thousand; your results will be the same anyway. Weapon mentality will always prevail against you and your progressive hopes, because you will never step forward to champion peace, despite all your fine talk.
World peace will break out, one way or another. Either our military insanity will kill most of us off and a few survivors will default to peace, or Learners will rally and make it happen judiciously: by design, voluntarily and soon.
Reactionaries won’t touch this topic because it betrays their prime personal motive and motivator of others: fear. Fashionable progressives (equally fearstruck) dismiss this topic as talked to death and thus neatly support the reactionaries—despite all their fine talk.
This text studies the mentalities of weapons and peace as if they were discrete, coherent and self-willed entities (memeplexes). Their schemes contend, grow strong or weak over time and influence mass thought. Peace and weapon mentors are spokespeople for invisible but potent forces. Their actions, words and beliefs are constructive and destructive reflections of the collective superconscience. A few more thought-constructs may help us clarify this concept.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau spoke of the general will, which prescribes the greatest common good for all: the sole legitimation of government. Under the general will, everyone could restrict their personal will, yet still come out ahead in the long run, since that is what the general will does best.
Western philosophers consider that it grows from the bottom up: from the individual to the heights of government power. The Chinese and their oriental disciples talk about the “Mandate of Heaven” prescribed by Confucius (Kong Fuzi, K'ung-fu-tzu), which alone renders legitimacy to government by virtue of its ritual harmony with cosmic law. It grows from the top down into individual depths.
Each is considered mandatory for good governance by its supporters. I suspect that they are basically identical. Cosmic law, government authority and individual freedom: all three would have optimal frequencies that harmonized best with the others. Detune this optimal resonance at any of the three levels and suffer corresponding disaster as the system shook itself apart. Without the general will, we would sink into chaos; without government power, things would fall apart à la Democratic Republic of the Congo; without the Mandate of Heaven, mass rebellion would become compulsory.
The central tuning fork of this harmonic system would be government.
Freud spoke brilliantly of the subconscious. Personally, I am unaware of it (just kidding). Nowadays, everyone realizes they are fitted out with a set of subconscious impulses.
Carl Gustav Jung talked about the collective unconscious from which spring strangely consistent archetypes and synchronous phenomena. Every culture reveres its own memory of spooky super-coincidences. Jung said the collective unconscious contains the sum of every forgotten thought and those in the future. Meanwhile each conscious mind holds a careful selection of current thought. Or receives and converts it like a fine-tuned antenna?
Might some psychotics have their antennae tuned to slightly different frequencies? Could this be why primal societies valued them instead of marginalizing them, the way we do today? Because they were tuned to alien FM stations instead of AM reactionary talk shows, and their outlandish output could turn out to be handy in a pinch?
Where do these ideas come from? I submit that the Collective Superconscience distributes them.
The collective unconscious would be more like a storage battery: transitory and mutable, restricted by current modes of thought and pinched human geographies. Whereas the collective superconscience would act more like a fluid (a physics-defined plasma?) circuit board that operates in parallel with human communities and diagrams where their currents would flow, accumulate and disperse—burning out certain circuits and allowing others to grow in size and complexity.
Let’s hope our few peace circuits multiply and intertwine luxuriantly, and our many weapons circuits short out without effect. I believe in miracles at the hands of our Loving God. The rest is up to us.
Emile Durkheim evoked the collective conscience as an intangible social framework from which criminals stray, rather like the out-of-bounds lines of a ball game. These transgressions (“How could he do that!”) reinforce normative rules most people live by, that bind us more closely together.
World peace could grow up in this manner.
Noam Chomsky proposed a Universal Grammar: that we are hard-wired, somehow, with language skills. Just don’t use this text as his example! Jung talked about racial memory: the ability of a people to retain facts about its past. Hinduism and other religions mention akasha: a universal etheric field that imprints a record of past events, per The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Elizabeth Knowles, Ed., Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 17.
I am just skimming these topics; humanity has barely scratched their surface and forgotten what it knew about them in the past. Future Learners will study them in depth. There is a fantastic potential here. Scientific breakthroughs might eclipse everything we’ve discovered up to now: vaccines for our cultural disease and shortcuts through our technological maze.
Other researchers study morphic fields that bathe living tissue in auras, rather like those captured by Kirlian photography. Morphic fields might explain the peculiar way germ plasm achieves unlikely symmetry and blueprint speciation.
During billions of years, chemical reactions frothed in a primordial stew of organic molecules transfixed by lightning bolts. From this shocked broth emerged entities more and more complex until, eons later, the sea bottom was littered with—player pianos! Imagine how much simpler this scenario would be, compared to the evolution of life. I can’t recall the author of this anecdote (J.B.S. Haldane?). His example involved IBM Selectric typewriters: splendid tools, soon to be forgotten. But this illustration fits in here too well here to pass up—even without proper attribution.
Without these morphic fields, the dominant lifeform on Earth might have been a fifteen-foot layer (so sunlight could shine through it) of translucent slime wrapped around the globe. Such a layer might not have left any trace after its disappearance and might have lived almost forever on Earth (intermittently or continuously), without our noticing.
Something else promotes a far richer, more mobile and adaptive diversity within a finite toolkit of inheritable traits. After all, slime mold and humans share the same four DNA nucleotides and 64 codons formed from them, whose shifting patterns and assembly codes distinguish every Self from every Other.
Some unknown field must cloak every organism―keep it alive, whole and distinct from the rest of the world, yet that attach it and us to the world in profound ways.
The greatest Jewish Learner of the Kabbala was
called Isaac Luria, (Yitzhak Lurya יִצְחַק
לוּרְיָא, Yitzhak Ben Shlomo
Ashkenazi, and Yitzhak Ashkenazi. He is
also known as Ari אֲרִי
and He-Ari ("The
Lion") from the acronym for Ashkenazi Rabbi Itzhak ("The Ashekanic
Rabbi Yitzhak"), thus Arizal with "ZaL" being the acronym for
Zikhrono Livrakha ("of blessed memory" or literally "let the memory
of him be for a blessing"), a common Jewish honorific for the deceased,
and known as Ari Ha-Kadosh ("Ari the Holy"). I name him so completely for two reasons: 1)
in honor of his humble genius ; and 2) so that search
engines point those interested in him to this text.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Luria
Translating on behalf of Learners in the most simplistic terms I can find, Luria posited the principle that God created the Universe by making room for it outside of His Perfection, somewhat the way a man would inhale sharply to make room for someone passing him down a narrow corridor.
According to Luria, some kind of trauma took place during this transition, which induced the dichotomy between worldly good and evil. The Divine Light that had formerly filled all things, flowed from Adam’s eyes, nose and mouth: a Light the material world could not handle. Three upper vessels of the Universe cracked and seven lower vessels shattered in a shower of Holy Sparks. Those elements that resisted this shattering became Evil, while those that took part remained Good.
I believe that the conflict between good and evil is a fusion reactor that powers the material Universe and the DNA of life perched on it. No good and evil, no power from their conflict, absolute zero everywhere. Which may be the point of the exercise?
According to him, every time another human being obeys a commandment of God, he ‘repairs the world’ and raises another spark from the depths of evil to the heights of good. Jewish ritual life is intended to raise the utmost good, no matter how trivial the act of obedience. Correspondingly, any deviation from the commandment of God drops another Spark to lower levels. Thus, the practicing Jew carries out an existential struggle equivalent to the myth of Sisyphus, bearing Holy Sparks upwards to the Light despite a cascade of downward ones showering on him and his burden. And God has a cosmic need for humanity to restore His Holy Order.
What might that mean for the rest of us? That we should obey the commandments we understand best from any God of our choosing, to restore the Holy Sparks of God to their proper place. The foremost among them, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you;” including, among its subsets, “Thou shalt not kill;” and governing every religious law we know – be it from an honest Pagan, Kantian, agnostic or atheist – would best be served by working hard for World Peace.
http://www.pasarel.org/main/kabbalah/kabbalah.htm
http://www.wordtrade.com/religion/judaism/kabbalahR.htm
Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, in Secrets of the Soil: New Age Solutions for Restoring our Planet, Harper Collins & Row, 1989, assert they’ve discovered devas. These devas identified themselves as spirit architects of various plant, animal and other living communities—in other words, communicating forms of the morphic field we are talking about.
New-Age naturalists admit to having communicated with them at Findhorn and elsewhere. By their account, more and more abused by humanity, these devas have withdrawn to their last brambles of wilderness to await our mechanized self-destruction. Apparently, they would rather communicate with sensitive naturalists among us and rebuild a mutual framework of understanding and cooperation; the one we’ve spent the last few thousand years trying to rip out.
This, provided we reciprocated with love. Love, in this context, means pragmatic care, empathy and forethought at which our species excels; not the vapid sentimentality, reductive positivism and dogmatic hypocrisy we mistake for the real McCoy these days.
Forswearing the devil’s bargain of near-term abuse and long-term annihilation, Learner and deva mutualists might build a stronger partnership. Let’s assume we chose to heed them and follow their best-practice advice. Peace technology Genetic Architecture could generate unheard-of abundance while avoiding transgenic catastrophes and unintended consequences. Otherwise, if Genetic Engineers persist with their double blind fumblings, they will merely spawn even deadlier weapon technologies and ‘unavoidable’ disasters as their fallout. The omnicide that threatens to engulf us will become inevitable.
Rupert Sheldrake sails fearlessly beyond this thought horizon. In The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance & the Habits of Nature and A New Science of Life: the Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance he postulates the existence of morphic resonances. Among other things, they make it easier to do whatever has already been accomplished.
For example, randomly
selected students find it easier to solve crossword puzzles the day after
they have been published in newspapers and many other people have solved
them. The same students take
significantly longer to solve the same kinds of puzzles before the public
gets to see them. Unpublished, control
puzzles are no simpler or harder to solve over time.
Or just recall the four-minute mile: a routine accomplishment among Olympic runners these days, though once thought impossible.
I am pretty sure the writing of this text (especially in French) became easier for me – indirectly – as strangers read it and noticed my errors, even though they never told me about them. I am persuaded that our delicate minds are bundled in mysterious and imperceptible assemblies.
In short, good habits become easier to accomplish after they’ve been practiced elsewhere—and bad habits, more difficult to abandon, the longer and more often they’d been indulged in.
Up ‘til now, humanity has practiced obsessive-compulsive warfare; from now on, we must practice an equivalent peace. Willing co-conspirators with WeaponWorld, we’ve bleached the term “world peace” of its emotive power, let weapon mentors cheapen it into the punchline of a stale joke. From now on, warfare should become a topic of sick jokes, and peace, waged in deadly earnest.
As another example, periodic solar flares kindle auroras in polar skies; sometimes they fry electrical grids and satellites, curdle the albumin in our blood and turn passive crowds into angry mobs. One cannot escape their effect except sixty feet or more below ground. Collate the dates of solar flare maxima on Earth and outbreaks of mass violence; you may find a correspondence for yourself.
What appears to be the ‘undifferentiated vacuum of space’ through which our solar system drifts, is actually a pea soup fog of subatomic particles/wavicles precisely attuned to the minute disturbances of distant celestial objects: electromagnetic, gravitational and no doubt more subtle emissions we haven’t registered yet. This varying mix and quantum flux of space-time and beyond, reaches down through our protective atmosphere and planetary magnetic shielding, and has crafty effects on our thoughts and behavior.
Five thousand years of astrologers have barely scratched the surface of those effects. For three hundred years, astrophysicists haven’t even bothered to notice them. Such intellectual sloth disguised as ‘the scientific method!’
It was not for nothing that Newton burned out like a candle during the last few years of his life. He was trying to reformulate astrology into a rigorous mathematical science—minus half the planets, many asteroids, etc., undiscovered until after his death. A hero’s project worth dying for, even if left unfulfilled. Likewise, Johann Kepler and a succession of equivalent geniuses lost in the depths of time. This mathematical guideline would have eclipsed mere Newtonian physics and cubed the value of their legacy. It should become accessible to Learners the moment we devote enough time and scientific attention to it.
Just as genetic adaptation and human myths sway to unfelt breezes, so I believe we interact with ethical fields that surround us, even (especially!) when we refuse to notice them. Often, these fields corrupt entire peoples, tempt elites into perilous self-indulgence and terrorize those few who choose to resist them.
This took place in Assyria, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda and around your nearest mass grave site (you’d be surprised how near to your location). Monstrous misbehavior – unthinkable in other circumstances – became the norm. At other times, public compassion and grace propelled entire nations to greater heights of social complexity.
We may be lucky and clever enough to witness a new wave of global enlightenment. God knows, we’ve witnessed a glut of the bloodier kind: enough to leave everyone involved dead or sickened by it.
All these trends are visible effects of the collective superconscience. We have chosen to let these invisible forces stampede us where they will, and declared them nonexistent by popular fiat. If we were slightly smarter, we would search them out fearlessly, cultivate the most useful ones and redirect the worst along their least toxic axes. This topic is just beginning to be studied under the title Noetics. See Rupert Sheldrake, above and elsewhere.
Finally, this text invokes PeaceWorld: the antithesis of the compulsive, trial-and-repeated-error WeaponWorld in which we have trapped ourselves in redundant morphic resonances of post-industrial warfare, perfectly replaceable on PeaceWorld. Instead, we should think of it as a planetary theme park, carefully crafted to enchant its active architects as much as its passive occupants, leaving no one outside unwillingly.
I repeat: that is up to us.
Weapon mentors have obscured peace mentality and publicized weapon mentality throughout history. Recorded history is nothing more than the glorification of weapon states. If pure peace civilizations ever existed, they disappeared, erased from history and therefore ‘pre-historic.’
Weapon managers hold that too much peace technology reduces (much less attractive) weapons efforts. They believe that popular hopes for evenhanded prosperity will outstrip their ham-fisted methods of social control, if peace managers allocate too many resources to non-military goods and services. They fear that peace softens the people, makes it less pugnacious in war—more ‘sophisticated, cosmopolitan and decadent.’ Minimal peace technology is their only acceptable alternative to open revolt and warfare.
Emphasize the word ‘minimal.’ Peace accustoms people to resolving their differences quietly; too much aggression disturbs them. Weapon mentors protest: “If we let this decadence go unchecked, weapon barbarians will overrun us.”
Martial poverty and hierarchical brutality are the flip sides of peaceful abundance and pacifistic vulnerability.
Francis Fukuyama’s infamous prediction in his End of History may come to pass in a manner he least expects and desires. The Thousand Year Reich of National-Capitalist weapon mentality that he venerates will collapse under its own contradictions—either in omnicidal holocaust or Learners’ peaceful transformation.
Let’s assume we were exploring a distant planet. It would be much like Earth, except its climate would be so tropical that hurricanes would gust past 300 MPH from time to time. Our expeditionary vehicles would have to anchor themselves to bedrock so raging winds wouldn’t blow them away. Scrooge-like interstellar logistics, however, would dictate that our vehicles be featherweight, nimble and fuel-efficient.
Stationary or featherweight? This paradoxical requirement forms an antinomy, a contradiction along every dimension of the problem. Solving both problems in the same design will produce a gas-guzzling monster that would tumble away at the third serious gust.
The weapon/peace antinomy is entirely comparable.
Picture us in a lush, green jungle otherwise empty. Let’s release two lizard varieties into it: mottled green ones (weapon technologies) and Day-Glo ones (peace technologies). Day-Glo lizards are fat, vegetarian and friendly; cammo ones are fast, venomous and mean. While they interbreed with equal fervor, Cammo lizards develop a cannibal taste for Day-Glo flesh and eggs.
After a few thousand years, how many Day-Glo lizards will survive? How much Day-Glo DNA will persist among Cammo lizards? Cammo characteristics will mark every survivor.
The dominance of weapon mentality is not chiefly a dark conspiracy among a few psychopathic evildoers – though this too can happen – any more than sharper fangs would be among surviving lizards. Like them, we all conspire with the prevailing paradigm: in our case, weapon mentality. Unlike them, we could stop conspiring with WeaponWorld or transform the context of our conspiracy into PeaceWorld.
It’s that simple. We would simply need to make up our minds during the same generation, all of us with but few holdouts. For the first time in history, we have all the communication channels, peace infrastructure and mutual recognition we would need to do just that.
The problem is—do we have the guts?
Let’s look for a more sizzling illustration. Suppose the atmosphere had a slightly higher concentration of oxygen. Fires would ignite spontaneously and burn super-hot.
Firefighting would be The Elite Preoccupation: the dignitary’s duty and poor man’s obligation. Everyone – from toddlers to the elderly – could act out basic fire drills in their sleep. Babies, brought to life by the touch of a red-hot iron, would begin learning fire management during their first few breaths of life. In medicine, the most talented healers would be pyrologists who treated burns.
Schools, the media and popular culture would hyper-refine this blazing reality in hypnotic cycles of rote repetition. Hundreds more terms would describe ‘fire.’ Literature and mythos would bristle with uplifting tales of firefighting heroes.
Traditional firefighting technologies would engulf national budgets; they’d distort land development, planning and architecture. Compulsive taboos would smother every high-energy technology from kitchen matches to nuclear power. Masonry, cold metalwork and cave sculpting would replace all carpentry. Asbestos, its health hazards ignored, would be worth its weight in gold. Root crops might replace stemmed plants that grew too vulnerably above ground.
Their governments (each with its favorite method of fire management) might claim they devoted only a small fraction of the Gross National Product to Fire Management. They would fail to mention the fortunes that went up in flames during intermittent firestorms; and these titanic sums wouldn’t begin to cover the hidden costs and personal sacrifices their citizens had to accrue.
Periodically, the very real threat of conflagration might tempt these people to backfire most of their infrastructure preemptively. They might even sacrifice each other in trembling forfeiture to their pyromaniac God(s) and ideologies. The hellfires of religion would burn bright and cold in fanatical imagination―even more so that they do in ours…
As alien observers, we’d trip over social contradictions and overhead costs that locals would find perfectly normal.
From now on, consider me a distant observer alienated from this world, as many Learners must see themselves. This planet’s military anarchy has nothing to do with us Learners except to cast us as observers and desperate fixers castaway on a world of killer primates. Learners: I invite you to save your soul, no matter what may transpire from this mess—a humble gift to my brother and sister Learners with our back up against the wall.
From our perspective, this world would seem warped, and its natives swayed by compulsions we would find horrific. They, however, would find everything perfectly normal.
Slightly more enlightened natives might decry the most extreme demands of firefighting orthodoxy. For instance, they might politely suggest that human sacrifice should happen less often. But no argument would budge smug majorities from the familiar comfort of their prejudice; and the most sophisticated resistance would come from native ‘progressives’ immunized from positive transformation by their intensive study of cliché arguments of the past.
Assuming you could prove that the atmosphere’s oxygen concentration had subsided and that all their prejudices and practices had become obsolete, they’d still resist transformation anyway, out of lazy habit, imaginary fear and mental inertia. The fear of fire would distort their social arrangements – and nobody would care – the way the fear of military aggression perverts ours. Just as they’d cling to their firefighting reflexes, we cling to our war fighting reflexes.
Yet another example. Suppose you were the chieftain of a barbarian horde that had just overrun an ancient civilization. To begin with, you would ignore your victims’ cultural achievement. Even if you were cunning enough to order the scribes interrogated and their books translated to you in private, you’d still discard most of this useless claptrap. Your frustrated curiosity might make you look foolish in front of your lieutenants; knowledge of soft city ways might harm your warriors’ fighting spirit; traditional native culture might draw popular opposition into guerrilla liberation bands.
You would thus ensure that this written culture disappeared along with its literate cadre—by neglect and by design. You’d terrorize, enslave and overtax the locals until they lost the will to educate their children for anything but your plowfields and barracks square. Learning its literature, religion, history and mythos would become capital offenses. This is how nomad conquerors distanced themselves from their victims through ignorance and apartheid. They made this the spirit and letter of their law. Of our law.
Warrior clans dominated urban civilizations as long as they retained simpler nomad ways. Irrigated croplands were inhospitable to nomad herds, and soft city habits induced military decadence. Therefore, farmlands were laid waste, irrigation systems breached and great cities razed on a regular basis. Only a small, portable fraction of urban wealth would have been looted; only those books that served weapon mentality would have been preserved. The remainder was burnt to ash and washed away in blood, including priceless peace archives, technologies and technicians we've forgotten.
Our societies enshrine weapon mentality at great peril to themselves. Inferior standards of living, astronomical taxes and cults of repression engender militant bigotry, institutional arrogance, escalating insanity; which result in exploding penal populations, tidal waves of corruption and super-stratified class hierarchies.
Society reacts to these irritants much the way a disturbed bee colony would. Goaded by these contradictions, proletariats gestate new proto-elites eager to revolt. Our attack reflexes are sent into overdrive.
Battle elites usually hire out to protect the info elite, but only so long as this guardianship brings them great profits. Once matters begin to fall apart for the info elite, more and more battle elites will side with the most vicious proto-elite (revolutionary cell) they can find.
Warfare provides a vast outlet for popular discontent. With surprising ease, info elites can shift responsibility for social evils from themselves to declared enemies internal and external. An info proletariat at war submits to its elite until it is convinced it has won or has bled dry. Passively witnessing government assaults against harmless minorities and outsiders, the info proletariat becomes disgusted, terrorized, relieved, fascinated, unified, regimented and finally inspired to commit greater crimes against humanity.
Foreign attacks against a ‘civilian’ population strengthen its will to resist. It doesn’t matter whether these attacks are mounted by stinking cavalry hordes, gleaming bomber streams or wild-eyed terrorists. Such assaults raise the proletariat’s tolerance for the failings of its elite.
This siege mentality reduces opportunities for effective dissidence. Info elites often galvanize this passive popular support by organizing domestic terror and international adventures. They hold unarmed combatants (civilians) hostage by controlling their relatives in the military and vice versa.
This is standard practice in America. Since almost no one has a taste for war, useless wars are initiated (as profitable for weapon ghouls as they are harmful to the troops and costly to their relatives), then skeptical civilians are condemned for refusing to provide moral support. We are told we must “support our sacrificial troops, if not the war itself.” If you are against the war, you are against the troops; if you are against the troops, you are not patriotic and may not criticize the war. Deadly circular logic.
What if they gave a war and nobody came?
Carroll Quigley’s unfinished thesis, The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis, (New York, the Macmillan Company, 1961), makes excellent historical reading. From pages 50 to 62, he contrasts:
· “Instruments”: social organizations that fulfill their mandate effectively, with
· “Institutions” whose members adopt illegitimate goals.
Some institutional leaders abandon their instrument’s mandate through personal weakness. Others focus overmuch on their own contribution. “The purpose of military discipline is to spit shine shoes and salute superiors; that of military training, to eliminate accidents.” Often they yield to laziness, mediocrity, neglect, greed, simony and inferior precedent. At other times, they refuse to accept new training, equipment and circumstances. Others, often the most powerful, are merely corrupt.
Besides, the largest chunk of most problems is solved with the first few increments of energy used to resolve it. The remainder of the problem demands more and more effort. Solving the last few details requires infinite energy, like pushing an object to the speed of light with a Newtonian mass driver.
In order to achieve the most progress, we needn’t solve most problems down to their last detail. Instead, we should redefine each problem so as to reapply the first, most efficient increment of energy to resolve it. Then redefine the problem, resolve that efficiently, and so on.
As social instruments decay into institutions by failing at this redefinition, their leaders mismanage more and more effort with less and less valid results. Instead, they ignore new breakthroughs and compound past errors. They give more importance to packaging and intent than to content and results.
Three outcomes arise from this “tension of development.”
· Failing institutions resort to reaction. This reactionary outcome spirals antagonists into vicious cycles of injustice, dissent and suppression.
· They reform themselves into viable instruments. Emergency leaders take over from ineffectual timeservers and their new instrument becomes more honest and competent.
· New instruments assume real power by circumvention. They leave former institutions as hollow husks that fulfill ceremonial, cosmetic functions only. For example, parliament overrules a degenerate monarchy and limits it to leading annual parades and pageants; or a Roman emperor bullies the Senate while honoring it with many traditional distinctions (as did the almost-emperor Marius).
Weapon managers affirm that international corporations are the most disinterested form of social organization. They’ve concluded that stable government requires public disinterest more than any other attribute. I wonder who funded their research?
For this situation to endure, corporations must assume all the rights of an individual: freedom of speech and assembly, plus immunity from liability unless proven in a court of law, plus a million times more wealth and power than any individual—without corresponding vulnerabilities or responsibilities. Finally, a continuous and unlimited lifespan instead of our common mortality. In other words, they must become organizational monarchies. Long live King Cola!
By their estimate, the most vital social assets are an apathetic, poorly educated and motivated electorate—and the shadow-puppet political infrastructure needed to groom it. Just another attempt by reactionaries to resimplify our political landscape back to medieval norms.