© mark mulligan,
If every Learner on WeaponWorld
Cast off misgivings and worked to the same plan,
We could build 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 of free ideas and inspirations we’ve been deprived of. Rest assured, I’ve divided it into about a hundred chapters more palatable. Despite the demands of Web orthodoxy, it’s got no pretty pictures, no MP3s, no hooks, gimmicks or come-alongs. The sum of these chapters is long and hard to read (my fault). That’s really too bad. I’d rather invite multi-media Learners to contribute a groundbreaking mix of Internet images and music to adorn this long screed with the splendor of good stained glass and cantatas. Ah well, another project beyond my reach without outside help…
From your favorite book, to the Bill of Rights, to the Space Shuttle Flight Manual, a text doesn’t become influential until many good people agree to share it. Until then, it is just another string of symbols, powerless, empty and ignored by the world. If you want to share liberty, launch liftoff – or World Peace, for that matter – you and many others must agree to study the same basic text, give voice to it and act on it.
No text is perfect. That means refining lots of raw ore to come across a few rough diamonds worth polishing 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 like any other tool. It may seem awkward, at first, to your virgin mind, the way some new tool might seem in your untrained hands. Only frequent trial and error will make it familiar and useful to you. Be patient and work hard. I assure you, this is worth it. You Learners I’ve been waiting for so impatiently, here is what you were waiting for so patiently.
Those of us (too few at present) who crave World Peace more than we fear it, need to share a specific text. This one perhaps, or another? Learners’ chapters/web pages may just be rough drafts of 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 them, that doesn’t matter; sharing the same ideas and the same vocabulary, that matters. Until then, we limit ourselves to 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 many voices preaching peace in unison and of our healing touch guided by this shared purpose.
Try not to interpret Learners with your inner voice alone; overdub instead a massed roar as if from millions of allied Learners. Without them, this text is feeble, no matter what message it intends to convey. With them, the ideals of World Peace will evolve from wishful thinking into down-to-earth realism. Once you reach my age, your grownup children will take for granted the fantastic assertions of Learners, whether they agree with them or not…
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 serve Peace as best we can.
Also, I’d like to remind every beloved Learner –
global and domestic – that there are quite a few of us, here in
If it were in my power, I would get experts to translate this text into every language, so everyone could contribute to this project. If I could, I would get every government on Earth to sponsor a free translation web page from every major language into every native language and back again. One you’ve already paid for with your taxes, which your nation’s secret service uses daily, no doubt. So everyone on Earth could engage in peaceful debate like civilized beings. But that’s another chapter.
As usual in human existence, creative Learner anarchy must make up for institutional failure.
I would rather 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, as best I could, many quotations in French and English) and uploaded them to the Web, crediting me as author (my name appears at the bottom of this page and the Title Page, nowhere else in Learners) and themselves as translator—so that their fellow language speakers may contribute to this PeaceWorld project as welcome peers in the global Agora. Please do this for me, for yourself and for our common glory, but most especially for them.
No one should be left behind, regardless of his or her language skills. Fifty major language groups embrace 99% of the world population. I need 50 gifted Learners giving of themselves, to form the vanguard of this revolution.
What are you waiting for? Get reading and start translating these chapters for the benefit of your neighbors! Just as it was for me, this task is the one you prepared for all your life.
Thank you, friend.
I’m making use of the WWW to transmit this message to you, the same way Erasmus used the printing press to transmit his. I am using you, Learner idealist, the same way Erasmus made use of every humanist on Earth, to translate and disseminate his dream. We shall see what world-shaking deeds we ‘trivial idealists’ may achieve once we rally.
One last thing. No need to waste time achieving literary perfection before you upload your translation of chosen chapters of Learners to the Web. What I ask from you is honesty, passion and haste. There will be plenty of time later for you or someone else to create a perfect translation and defend it from those who would misinterpret it with reactionary intent. None of this would detract from your glory as visionary and first benefactor of your people. For the time being, upload your draft translation immediately, no matter how clumsy it may appear to you, then take your time to perfect it through many rewrites, as I am doing with the original text. There is little time left; time is of the essence.
Tell me about your translation uploaded to the Internet, so that I may link to your work in my Table of Contents.
I did not write this text, nor did you seek it, to
stoke the
In pursuit of why, how, and what to expect of PeaceWorld,
VERSION FRANCOPHONE ENGLISH
Sorry for these clumsy machine translations. I’m looking for expert translators in every language, who’d work free for the sheer glory of it. Know any?
Please Refresh the pages below – I try to update them tri-monthly.
My blog: Escape from WeaponWorld
“We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.” Martin Luther King quotation. Invitation to read Learners.
Summary of Learners: World Peace
Still working on the Summary. What a bored, stressed, aversive or overworked reader may find too much today, a dozen generations of meticulous scholars may pore over, harvesting shortfalls.
We are trained as children against peace. Once Learners understand that, we can unlock the doors to Peace World.
Table of contents (you are here.)
Includes keywords to each chapter. A more fractal, quantum jumpy and fuzzy logic description of Learners than these squashed Newtonian sentences.
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 avenement --- Nobody is blocking world peace, but you / Personne ne bloque la paix au monde, sauf toi --- I have a rendezvous with death / Alan Seeger / J’ai rencart 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 –- 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 --- One Art / Elizabeth Bishop / Un art
We need a whole new political vocabulary. Our range of topics is encyclopedic. Our first treatment of these topics will be insolently superficial, subject to mythic dismissal at every page turn.
Mein Fahrt, Quoting Hitler out of Context
Hitler understood an ideology needs a simple message everyone can understand and agree with. It needs step-by-step development. His content was wrong. Our content 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 about 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 the most, die 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; that word 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 would make eternal peasants and nobles revere alike these heretics, instead of their fully mature Catholic clergy?
Attempt to rewrite the Cathari catechism lost during the opening phase of the Inquisition.
Identity, conflict and community. Adherents of different identity positions could become Learners. That shared designation could shield everyone from human rights abuse.
Our constellation of political metaphors is full of weapon myths. We could fill it with peace myths.
A list of suggested does and don’ts (or at least not too often).
The Syndrome: government is bad; 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.
The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
His social contract lacked the consideration (legal term) that would have triggered it and made it automatic. Rousseau’s genius recognized the limits of communications obtainable in his day. That brick wall of poor communications prevented him from publishing the effect of his social contract on international relations. Using technologies he lacked, we could turn that cyclopean wall into a puff of air.
The fatal oversight of Marx. Describing information politics without the weapon/peace antinomy is like discussing orbital mechanics without gravity. Economics is just another sub-branch of information flow. Information flow is infinitely renewable and exponentially profitable. It can be multiplied by millions of times when adjusted to chaotic and anarchic dialog mode instead of centralized and pro-government monolog mode, much less productive. An untapped abundance sits here, that Learners can liberate.
Developing the threat formula: Body Count times (Time over Distance) squared; instead of the armchair formula that accelerates thought (see below).
Let’s walk a mile in the boots of an average spear holder.
Links between crime, warfare and governance.
The two paths that Capitalism can take and their consequences.
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? That there is another lost epic?
More book burning into the present. Book burning is ecumenical and sickeningly omnipresent in history.
Aren’t fascism and modern political thought too similar? Why?
The institution of righteousness. We have our historical 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 want to massacre everything, you’ve picked the right pet. Choose another one, more docile.
How do we get from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld?
Peace Mentality, Weapon Mentality
Superficial growth with deep roots, explosive growth from shallow ones. Deep roots and fruitful growth.
The World Elephant wanders around blind, breaks its limbs and starves in the produce section of a grocery store. That’s our world. Install an elephant’s brain in the elephant and watch it dance. That dance is 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. Accelerate information flow instead of rationing it. Turn the ziggurat of education upside down, into a cornucopia of Learning.
The rules that regulate our communication through constellations of political metaphors. Free speech and profit centers. More dialog bandwidth, less frequency of official monolog.
Information handling in a peace technology.
Taichi Sakaiya wrote about perceived abundance and objective value judgments that arise from it. He wrote about dearth and 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 fir the World Agora of information politics.
Jury duty 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.
What would a complementary replacement of his theory of evolution look like?
Amer-Ind as a universal travelers’ language supplemental to birth languages. On cultural ecology: its strangulation by corporate weapon culture and its cultivation 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.
Do not judge the economics of peace technology by the econologic of weapon mentality.
What should we expect once we enter PeaceWorld?
Could we turn the Earth into a larger 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
More outlandishly pre-historic speculation for your dining and dancing pleasure.
We must have a thousand times more medics. Peace technology applications to health care.
Transportation hardware alternatives. Regulating nuclear war once and for all.
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 distribution of rights on PeaceWorld.
The best form of population control is many children and old folks, as healthy and well-cared for as possible—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; would you? A more or less fatuous list of personal suggestions. How durst 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.
Litter control as a sidewalk sport. Garbage is for WeaponWorld slums, not PeaceWorld’s New Jerusalem. Recycling it should become a child’s game.
Hey, buddy!
This could be the most important read of your life.
Go back and pick a chapter to review.
Learner friend, it could only do you good.
À Maman, toujours ma muse inspiratrice,
Et à Dad, chevalier sans peur et sans reproche …
To our public 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 beckoned me across a Tartar steppe of blazing solitude with no end in sight. My awful trip has brought me from one lush oasis of fellowship to the next somewhere beyond the horizon. At each stop I tarried awhile, 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 sparked so much confrontation. My wife, Linda, suggested it was not what I said that bought me 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 parents, family and friends: Learner role models all. Many others furthered this work in their own way if unknowingly. I owe special thanks to the foreign volunteers and kibbutznikim (Israeli collective farmers) of 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 lands: Hominids, Pagans, Jews, Christians, Muslims and everyone in between: the ultimate survivors of God’s wrath.
The
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 take sanity supplements from The Nation magazine. Eventually, I had to turn away from its exasperating refusal to support my project and any other of significant social transformation, for that matter. Like other American “liberals,” they whine endlessly about things they refuse to change. They and their peers in The Progressive, Dissent, Z, Harpers, and other Anglo-Saxon periodicals that dare call themselves Leftist or Progressive despite their stuffy, middle-of-the-road fainéantise (fainaionteeze, “best do nothing” attitude). Meddlesome meliorists and atomistic progressives consent to the worst wreckage in the long run.
There are only two political parties in
The Nation’s political recipe (if there
is one, it is carefully concealed) is a formula for surrendering the initiative
to reactionaries.
With friends like those, who needs enemies?
Many people and publications confirm my conclusions, even if they ignore 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 benevolence of the God of Love, the Comforter Jesus promised us.
I'm very grateful to Govind Naidu, Professor of
Political Science at the
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 had undertaken. Also thanks 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. They 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”
Did it ever matter whether they wore battledress or class-A uniforms, TV pancake makeup or the ashes of mourning, institutional silks or rags of dissent? Everyone is naked and mortal beneath it all. 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.
Lately, I owe 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 so many years.
And earlier, to the dedicated employees of Damage Assessment Branch, US
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), also in
I owe profound thanks to Alta Vista Bablefish online translation service, which provided me the free means to turn an impossible dream, translating Learners into French, into a entertaining if challenging impracticality. My dozen or so Chapter Summary and Keywords pages, translated in as many languages, are also its source work. 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 my stupidity would not allow; and http://www.touchon.net/annuaire-site-plans-dictionnaires.php for synonyms in French, likewise.
I’ll never get over the fact that I found no free
translation services in the major South Asian language groups or any from
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 easing my burden.
And to Jean Bacon et fils, 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 the Bibliography, who set stepping stones across the blood sucking quagmire of WeaponWorld, to PeaceWorld’s shaded grove.
To lovely and beloved Esmeralda Arana (whom I never met) who kicked my butt at just the right moment, if in a direction she could not 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. Other search engines and webmaster links have sent me even more readers (especially Yahoo and MSN). I listed as many of them as I could on my LINKS page. Thanks to all of you, without whom this samizdat would be known by no one but me.
Thank you, www.freeservers.com, for hosting my site for so many years. Thank you, www.my100freemb.com, for doing so today.
Hardly any ideas proposed herein are mine. Most Learner prescriptions unfold as part of the organic Tao as arrogant reaction collapses under its own contradictions.
Mine all the errors contained herein. Please address your comments to me. I welcome, prize and anticipate your corrections. Thank you in advance for them. My feeble mind is inadequate to this task, that’s obvious. The combined understanding of world Learners gathered in the Agora of PeaceWorld may suffice. That is my hope.
Thanks to the poets, next.
JE VEILLERAI TANTOT DANS L’OBSCURITE - 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
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
GRIMPE – m
GLOBAL ATLANTIS - n
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
ODE A LA VERITE ET A LA NON-VIOLENCE
THE MENTALITY AND TECHNOLOGIES OF PEACE
MENTALITES ET TECHNOLOGIES PAISIBLES
I sent away for a free French copy of the Bible on the Internet (www.bibles.ch). The Bible must be a rich source of literary style and inspiration for cultures that adopt it, as the Koran (Qran) would be 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 my rusty French might benefit.
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.
My humble summary of the Koran is at the end of Learners’ chapter on Satyagraha—a fitting and timely blend of the best of these religious creeds, I find. God is God; the name we use doesn’t matter.
My request earned me this answer.
“What did you intend to write?”
I replied something like this.
It isn’t easy for me to weave a welcome mat for Learners: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld. So many ideas in so few words! Anyhow, it’s well on its way in English. I’m just translating it into French to sharpen its reasoning and to catch up my French friends who don't read English. May they forgive my awful prose and grasp my message despite it.
I foresee a new world soon to be 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 collective responsibility and personal pleasure to replace them with tribal leaders more worthy);
· one watchful and humane Judiciary, controlled from start to finish by randomly selected juries; and
· one well-regulated, superbly professional Police Force: the best warriors on Earth, hand-picked to guarantee peace.
They would govern this whole planet all by themselves, the way we run our best cities.
Nowadays, this planet looks like
· 200 cruel, ego-freak gang lords,
· 200 councils of senile elders bickering like spoiled children, and
· 200 street corners, each with its gang of hoodlums playing bloody War with AK-47s, M-16s and worse.
Nowadays, the West (
Me, I’m a greedy stay-at-home, self-centered and a
coward to boot (thus no sainthood claimed here!). LEARNERS’ sole intent is to help create a
more viable world that its author may reincarnate into. There is no way to predict how the world will
evolve in one’s absence; but PeaceWorld seems the obvious way to go. Out of pure selfishness, I’d rather live quietly in
I could care less about all those sharp, sleek fat cats strutting down Embassy Row. Those gangsters in expensive suits cut down and starve children by the million then turn their back on them. They make me sick. They’re just like the old East German leadership, categorically worthless. Better leaders are out there; we have merely to find and empower them in all honesty.
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 (about six million Learners, actually: one in a thousand people on Earth ought to do the trick. Of course, the more the merrier!).
Imagine the prodigies a whole generation of better-raised children could achieve! All the streets would be spotless and safe; all the parks, well tended and inviting; all the artwork, ah, the artwork! And the scientific discoveries!
And the West?
Embassy Row of Planet
Yet, my favorite Chinese philosopher, Mencius, taught that it is wiser to seek Humanity and Duty than a simple profit that can turn destructive. Humanity, Duty and Learning: these would secure a more dependable abundance.
After all, what are our incentives, nowadays? That we might profit from WeaponWorld by perfecting it? Criminal expediency. That PeaceWorld might jeopardize our revenue without additional return, or that it might be too difficult and dangerous? Cruel and gutless denial. That world peace won’t 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 other things, too:
· A set of fully peaceful religions that comprehend and embrace each other passionately. Might you be 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 halt armed crime and organized aggression in every community that signed up for it.
·
A 1-800-my-rights telephone number
direct to the
· A World Agora of information politics and Learning that operated from the grass roots, a thousand times more delicate and responsive than anything we are used to, well coordinated by computer and as trustworthy 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 choice if we encouraged their interests early 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
· Free storefront mediation and arbitration, religious or non-denominational, available automatically to anyone with a grudge or dispute. No civil dispute would go before a jury until it were judged in this way.
· Climax biome restoration in every available habitat; and
· Space exploration in earnest.
You know, all those things we make mighty noise about and then carefully sabotage in favor of our weapon technologies? Please note: “OUR weapon technologies, OUR responsibility”—not someone 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 our sins.
In so doing, we lead a life of misery: stripped of
civility, practical charity, true faith, real education, high art, climax
biome, good taste and reliable security.
In fact, we’ve stripped our conscience raw—both as individuals and as
communities. We are stripping the planet
bare when we could be gardening
It’s time we grew back a new conscience and a healthier one.
The worst problem? Our culture honors weapon mentality rather than peace mentality. 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. Honoring peace would be so much better for us in so many ways we refuse to acknowledge. We are frightened to death of peace.
Me, I’m impatient to launch the world peace project 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 cultures train us, under fulltime hypnosis from infancy, to shun peace and holy spirit as much as our shit and piss. Social collectives and lone philosophers who failed to train their children in this manner – seeking honest peace, true sainthood and real merit instead – got their throats slit by more militant communities nearby and at home.
We are the worst weapon demons and our societies are 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 manage to set it up.
Our modern culture is only good at optimizing this Threat Formula:
body count x (distance/time)2
Nuclear, biological and perhaps even meteorological omnicide, that’s our ultimate cultural achievement and our manifest destiny, if we don’t transform ourselves utterly on every scale: social, personal and spiritual. Otherwise, that’s all we’re good at and all we’re destined to accomplish in the end.
Humanity = 0, Omnicide = -1. What a sorry score for such a carefully cultivated, wisely hardened, perfectly nursed species. We are perched on a turquoise blue planet that’s good for us in every way (even though it might not be our planet of origin, given that our biological cycle has never been 24 hours long), under a big, black sky studded with diamond solitaires hiding much more abundance.
Come on, Learners! We can do better than that!
For the first time in human history, we have all the tools we need to build World Peace: global communications, mutual recognition and universal thirst for peace. For the first time, all of humanity is capable (if not yet willing) to recognize the Other as a worthy equal. Up ‘til now, we lacked those vital tools in common. Now, all we need is consensus, will, faith and guts. Have we got enough?
Have we had enough?
Note, at the top of my list, the adoption of new peace religions. I believe that standard Christianity is weapon-based and therefore defective as a peace religion. The same applies to all current weapon religions; all of them need a better role model to become entirely peaceful. What better roll model than Christ?
Jesus often noted his disciples’ failure to
understand. Our Christian religions rely
on the words of the Apostle Paul, John of Revelation and
Jesus’ teachings were deliberately corrupted by Roman persecutions, the Nicene Council and the destruction of the Cathars. The Nicene Council wrote out every reference to reincarnation in the Bible. A permanent putsch of weapon reactionaries took over every creed calling itself Christian and every other surviving religion. This happened for the same stupid, inevitable reasons described above.
I believe Jesus taught us to live well and die one last time as clueless meat puppets. Seek rebirth in Him, literally. Reincarnate into His Perfect Life and live it out. Learn from His life exactly what we required to be saved. Suffer the second death by taking up His Cross and then go directly to Heaven with Him.
Go reread His words and see for yourself.
Otherwise, we must condemn ourselves to a long series of purposeless reincarnations, circular abstractions, frivolous rituals, empty sins and futile deaths—apart from the one He taught us, pending our compliance with His clear and simple instruction.
All religions are just as valid – Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Vedic, Atheist, Pagan or other – if they let us live a better life and if they don’t get too upset that we would 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 absolutely free, for the first time in our many lives, to choose Him and His pathway to Heaven.
I defy 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, let me snuff you and your benighted progeny unless you consent to go kill them over there and theirs.”
Every weapon sermonizer who preaches cowardly lies, brutality, exclusion, compulsion, betrayal and damnation by our infinite, Loving God—that creature merely 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 churches of peace. Our Lord has enough mercy for every soul, with more to spare. I seek to unearth this apocatastasis, this universalism. The saints we need to establish it are unemployed all around us.
With no such faith – no real hope – no valid government – no true peace.
Know this, then. Every soul can save itself: yours, mine, some latter-day Hitler’s, anyone’s. Thus toughened and fearless of anything on Earth, we must do our duty. Thus armored, we should create Peace on Earth.
This summary will bother many, 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 officially endorsed without opposition. It will bruise the stout egos of those who declare themselves eager for peace—as soon as everyone reaches their dizzying crest of puritanical pacifism. It will confound many pet pupils who have memorized their lessons repudiating peace and who 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 most devoted pacifist who claims moral superiority over the average guy will achieve no better result than he (since that pacifist 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 perfectly understand how
much we fear it, how much our institutions are averse to it and how completely
our current thought- and action-processes thwart it. Whether we call ourselves warriors or lovers
of peace; whether we’re old or young, rich or poor, learned or ignorant, pious
or not; whether current 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
What will our PeaceWorld look like once the smoke
clears? It will delight our Loving God
who will bless it with miracles; unlike WeaponWorld, despised by God, who lets
it survive through infinite forbearance for our unforgivable errors. We would become true servants of God: athirst
for, drunk with and slaked by the peace of God; caring wisely for every child;
regrowing
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 and with all our might?
Once Learners rally, the heavens themselves will come to our aid.
This is the summary of Learners.
“… 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 waited for some thirty years, now, for some worthy patron to discover Learners, publish it in many languages and make our fortune; otherwise, that I might vanish quietly from this world without having to bother with the upshot of my intervention.
It's amazing how lily-livered and chicken-brained well-connected people are, how many imaginary perils and empty distractions they must give priority to, and how they insulate themselves from important but unforeseen matters with armies of shortsighted subordinates.
Here I am still working alone; my oft rewritten and oft rejected samizdat self-published on the World Wide Web. After decades of intellectual house arrest, forced to witness so-called activists and progressives congratulate themselves that reactionary backlash has not grown too exponentially during their watch, and for having avoided the obnoxious chore of studying Learners. Forced to notice churlish warmongers earn cash bonuses and distinction by publishing reams of best-selling martial pomp, and every government trip over itself to fulfill their least stipulation, while no one dare 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 preventable 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, once properly inspired, we command enough talent and initiative to tackle any challenge. Once we Learners recognize each other, realize how numerous we are and the commanding position we hold over the world; once we rally around 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 own making, we watched helplessly as millipede columns of weeping refugees crawled past us 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 that 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 Learners
text isn’t incised in stone. Dedicated specialists, amateur and pro
alike, should chew over all of its assumptions.
Their discussions may shape a brilliant
Every cubic yard of earth, water, air 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 therein, yet not burn our fingertips or the world. Otherwise, we’re just ignorant beggars who stumble parched and starving across a desert while untold abundance lies quietly locked below our feet.
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 exquisite 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. It’s stripped bare, burned to the third degree and unbelievably unappetizing. It’s been combed over by 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 see 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 partitioned the other 359 degrees of this cosmic pizza, blinkered as we’ve been by long-revered cultural conventions. Our culture issues blinkers to us at birth, which grow more restrictive as we age. They screen us from PeaceWorld and focus our attention on WeaponWorld. As a result, we dismiss this abundance as mere idealism, myth, dream, fantasy, utopia and science fiction.
Learners can polarize those blinkers we wear, and show the whole pie to everyone simultaneously. This festive bounty is certainly there for us to harvest on PeaceWorld. We just need to clear our vision, roll up our sleeves and make it happen. Then it would be harvest time, and most people would be too busy gathering and sharing this incredible abundance to cause further harm.
A half-lifetime ago, as I began testing the shaky legs of my 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 knight both fearless and without blame.
That’s a tricky combination, come to thing of it. It would be easy to inflict harm when armed with some illusion of fearlessness. “I don’t give a damn; let loose the dogs of war!” It’s only slightly more difficult to do good from fear of harmful consequences. The truest goal would be to make use of that total fearlessness to do nothing but good. My fearless father strove for nothing but that in his life, which made him a nobleman in the finest sense of the term. No lesser behavior is praiseworthy.
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 that those people reread it very carefully. It may contain the cure to their disease and the swiftest road to PeaceWorld.
“Criticize institutions? Don’t bother,” this gentle chevalier told me, “unless you can come up with better alternatives.”
I've knocked myself out, since, trying to come up with those famous alternatives. As a child of the greasy 50’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 more than the inadmissible present with frequent backslides. Revolutionary dialectics (and every thesis they sprang from) became cheap talk to me—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 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. All of them sustained weapon mentality and diverted our 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 picky, 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, its scribe – no matter how pride-scoured –cannot claim copyright to the ideals of peace. Golden peace mentality may lie buried under mountains 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 had to study all our lives.
Learners
reconsiders a vital choice we must make 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. Today, 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. It’s also no wonder that every
progressive aspiration must shudder to a halt in this
Since you begin to grasp Learners’ central premise, you may reject it outright: a common enough gag reflex. “World peace? PeaceWorld? Stop talking. I’m through!” If you value controversy in your mental landscape, ask yourself: “Why dismiss this topic without fair hearing? During my intensive study of other topics, why didn’t someone sit me down and make me think this through just as thoroughly?”
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 in our own mediocrity (by default). Forced to surrender our healthy conscience and substitute it with passive-aggressive compromise and adherence at gunpoint to conspiracies of greed, we soothe our heartache in 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 nourishing that creative drive be our first priority?
Do you remember when you were a bright young thing as pure as a glass of water? Do you recall the salvo of insults that met your first, childish inquiries into world peace? No matter to whom you turned – to strangers or beloved, to 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 equality? 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.
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 become enslaved to it regardless of its merit? Would it have mattered what race, nation or creed you sprang from? Were you ever given 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.,
See The 1984 Syndrome.
We stopped short because Everyman silenced us whenever 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, doesn't spirituality turn into a monstrous caricature of itself sneering at its own hypocrisy? During what we dare call peacetime, is it not just as bad?
Are we ready to say enough to this grotesque weapon cult? Have we ever been, will we ever be more ready?
As in our worship of weapon religions, it doesn’t matter how much hypocrite mouth-jabber we make about peace. We’re just as averse to it as we are to excrement. As a result, we face infinite social contradictions—and zero closure, resolution or clarity.
Sure, I can understand your fear and loathing, but I can’t let that stop me. You and every other Learner, join me instead! We’re grownups now, supposedly immune to childhood blame. Unplug your ears – there, that’s better – and pay attention. Learners retrieves painful questions we let 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 seems to favor Conspiracies of Greed. Smirking predators gang rape Blind Justice before our disbelieving eyes. They laugh all the way to the 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 gathering 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 vacuity. More widespread and worthless: “Don’t believe in nothin’, little pal, but earning and spending the 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 nothing less than swift Apocalypse come deliver them, pretty please. Stupefied by their panic, they worsen the necrosis of this world merely to hasten the Ending they crave.
Thus, 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 plenty. Fantastic abundance could bloom where wastelands fester, full justice, salve ancient traumas and about-face mutinous legions back into civility.
Imagine it! 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 are satisfied with sitting 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—either sit still for it or stir it up worse. No one listens to anyone else; the major perk of being promoted into power is no longer having to listen to anyone, just issue a string of 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 like (Republicans). Like village blacksmiths 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 understand 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 habits of thought and speech. Poisoned by gangrenous ideologies and rejecting them, we’ve grown so credophobic that we refuse to believe in anything any longer. As a result, we’ve lost our last spirit toeholds and fallen into riptides of change.
But do not despair.
Heed Jesse Jackson and “Keep hope alive!” As in two post-war
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 transform themselves into heroes. At that point, for the sake of dramatic continuity, the camera cuts 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 our 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 your steering wheel in stalled cars for the last few thousand years, start your engines! Shake awake all those who’ve abstained from sheer nihilism and cowardice.
I have a plan and here it is, as follows. We are at this essential if boring stage of the process. Let us 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 across the planet, here—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.
Even handedly, it beckons ecstatic Nobel laureates,
berserkers with nothing left to lose, aimless idealists, madrassa dreamers,
dissatisfied bonzes, Talmud scholars and seminarians, prep-schooled sellouts
and ghetto luminaries defying evils wriggling just beyond their own brown
study. It speaks 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
This book outlines what we were driven to discover
and failed to find.
My message is extremely biased. Attacking sly platitudes, its arguments climb way out on shaky limbs—farther 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 merely turn their backs when such awkward topics encroach on their meticulously blank spirit. In the same spirit, Learners will revive PeaceWorld by shamelessly appropriating every Madison Avenue fraud and taps bugle call by which we’ve been lulled 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
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, grabbed the reigns of power from
Still today, we waste precious time and talent protesting their mighty warmonger initiatives, pointlessly. Let them protest in absolute futility our mighty peace initiatives—never again the other way around!
This book 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 work like it and I can find no political group that would adopt it as its own. 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.
"We consider that the
basic value of the European artist during our greatest eras, from the sculptors
of
"If humanity enfolds an eternal truth, it is certainly this tragic hesitation in the man who will be called an artist for centuries hence – facing the creation that he experiences more deeply than anyone, that he admires like no one else can, yet that he alone on Earth wants to destroy underground 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 opening 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.
Accept those parts of Learners you hearken to, then let something better happen. Dismiss anything you find herein that disconcerts your fancy—as conjecture, hearsay, heresy, what you will.
If this work inspires some new idea in you, 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 subsequent 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 among us, to forbid and ridicule it.
Loudmouthed morality truants feign their sophistication by worsening our weapon neuroses. By rote repetition, they malign ‘do-gooders’ and ‘bleeding hearts’. Hiding their own 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 more unsavory than his predecessors while people of talent and genius are chased from politics and social commentary. Otherwise, they’re gunned down in the street or crucified by the media.
Who ARE these malingerers? Do-badders? Flinty hearts? Perhaps a few stony hearts need a little lubricant bleeding, so that their owners’ flat-lined conscience may re-oxygenate?
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 billions 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 superb replacements for young Andy Carnegie, the Roosevelts and the Little Flower LaGuardia that the administration of excellence demands? Where have you gone!
If we considered this world one
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.
Learners may make you dizzy at first, 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 mythical denial at every page-turn. Once this crisis is past, 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”). Thereafter, 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 readers risk 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 then 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 be nauseated by it and finally enraged. You’ll have to brace yourself sternly to chugalug this bitter brew to its dregs. Take tiny sips of this sour mash and find more syrupy refreshment elsewhere, perhaps at the nipple of TV.
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 book is intended for every Learner to come. Its discontent should have been and was our patrimony—forgotten since. I leave the Sections Who, When and Where to you, beloved Learners. If you catch me fumbling my extraordinary mandate, that’s your cue to take up the burden of my proof.
Recently, I may have found a relaxed 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 idea.
This exotic doctrine may shut down fundamentalists’
idiotic diktat once and for all.
Its universal acceptance would eject all those fundamentalist middlemen
(unworthy of the task) from spiritual discourse. By what right, superior wisdom or benediction
do they claim to butt in there, anyway?
It would put the
Once you grasp this idea, no pompous bigot can lecture, weasel or torture it out of you ever again. 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 it has been so many times in the past.
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 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 shadows of our fear and hatred. Our creeds and governments are one and the same. It doesn’t matter what phony drapes we use to cover the religious underpinning of our governments, the same way prudish Victorians used to drape the legs of their piano.
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 each of us, his servants, with risk-taking coinage. The Lord intends us to manage our lives for the profit of our souls, not for mere risk-reduction. As stunt people in this universal action movie, 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 the grand exploits Learners accomplish once they claim 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 sun-dappled late afternoons. They are transient and annoying at worst, beautiful despite their ache and soon to fade.
I’ve given 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 or watched on the screen. I suspect that the after-death experience, properly negotiated, is at least that much better than life. Good music, good lovin’ and a few good friends, plus some other tricks (like laughter and good meals) during this lifetime, 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 – this book, this whole book and nothing but this book. In the end, I can only justify my cosmic presumption by pointing out the boundless 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
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 group wanted to protect us militarily from the Other and protect themselves from us; the second wanted us to accept the Other and ourselves in peace.
You'll 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 jungle dwellers using stone tools 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—they are mere window-dressing. They’ve distracted us from our primary task: creating 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 speak with a forked tongue. The two tines of this fork (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 and forked-tongue garble induces the Weapon/Peace Antinomy: an absolute disparity in methods used, goals sought and results achieved.
Allow me to offer you an example. There are thousands more, and you can 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, describes a “perfect” social
order. Everyone agrees that his utopia
is neither an accurate historical representation, nor relevant to present
circumstances nor possible in the future.
Nonetheless, this is the closest that most scholars of Western
Enlightenment dare approach the idea of PeaceWorld. There are a handful of later texts just as
obscure and poorly thought out. Both
reactionaries and progressives agree that this is all the documentation they
need, to judge the merits of weapon mentality versus peace mentality. Might as well try to cross the
In case you’re interested, Lewis Mumford neatly summarizes about two dozen principal texts written 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, everybody can agree on the same meaning of 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 fundamental conviction that peaceful and benevolent societies are impossible. For peace mentors, utopia signifies “that (place) which is not but might be.” Utopia is a narrow speculation of theirs upon which to build a better peace.
Don’t ask me why progressives haven’t published some better book since. The ultimate reason for their failure – craven subservience to weapon mentors, flawed imagination, subconscious approval of the status quo or mere mental inertia – is beyond me.
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 the word to describe a social scheme that intends to improve current reality, whether or not it is valid and practical. In other words, the peaceful version of the word utopia means "something good we should strive for," whereas the weapon version means "something horrible we should avoid like the plague… Not only useless but somehow poisonous."
Thus, along the antinomial axis, the ultimate intent 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 try to survive in peace despite this universal dominance.
We should 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 can imagine. Our institutions and cultures retain a few peace remnants we should cultivate, and dominant weapon concepts we should render vestigial. Until we clarify these ideas, they are equally suspect (including our favorites) and valid (including those we despise most). This book revalidates what I believe are the most auspicious ideas 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’ precedes words that begin with a consonant and ‘weapons’ anticipates those that begin with a vowel. Let the grammarians scream.
The text below breaks down 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. To secure its adherents from overwhelming dread, weapon managers develop threat deterrents they believe are so ghastly that none will dare challenge them. Unfortunately, WeaponWorld preordains this challenge: “The best defense is a good offense.”
In this text, we’ll avoid using 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, it infects ‘free’ democracies as easily 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 screams for foreign blood.
If you think you are 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 enforces social distortions on purpose. Poverty, rigid hierarchy, injustice, inequality, sub-employment, nurtured criminality, substandard education, malnutrition and professional arrogance—the list goes on and on. We mistake these deliberate social degradations for regrettable outcomes of stupidity, bigotry, insanity, greed, crime, honest error and disaster. We refuse to believe they were allowed to fester on purpose to further the goals of weapon mentality.
Social reformers think 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 cascading swarms of atomistic and reductive fixes. Long-term success is not feasible in the opposite order since each small fix will be paralyzed by the holistic, simultaneous and global counter-force of weapon mentality as currently worshipped.
A society, any society, measures itself against a Constellation Of Political Metaphors its members agree to share. Our constellation of political metaphors 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 and understanding of it, weapon mentors must impose their own mythic vocabulary and syntax immune to peace mentors' reasonable criticism.
A familiar 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 of the time, you and I fall in 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 every weapon and soldier, way beyond that. When comparing the economic performance of a peaceful society to that of a weapons society, an accurate comparison would be between the wealth of Geneva versus that of Mogadishu, or between the athletic performance of an Olympic runner in top shape running his favorite race versus that of a wounded soldier dragging the body of his best buddy and their equipment to the rear.
I’ve seriously considered opting for the terms Opinion Elite and Opinion Proletariat. Those terms would emphasize the fleeting nature of these prejudices and the information elite's paradoxical lack of objective merit. Opinion elites believe that their prejudices are a cut above everyone else’s. Opinion proletarians convince 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 the overwhelming majority of progressives never overcomes a tiny minority of weapon managers. Oh yes, I nearly forgot! That and the knee-jerk reflex of reactionaries to kill and torture a large number people at random whenever they begin to feel seriously challenged—either in underground cells of the secret police during periods of mass unemployment, or in the trenches of a war arranged for that purpose alone or both as often in succession as required to renew the proletariat’s unwilling 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. 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 never mattered if 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 doesn’t matter if weapon managers are enslaved or free, secular or religious, centralized or profit-oriented, plebian or noble, criminal or authorized, professional or amateur. Identical weapons elites will emerge in any case, with remarkably similar mind-sets, attitudes and reflexive behavior. Their talk may change over time and under different circumstances – cynically, opportunistically and with prejudice – but their walk never does. Except, perhaps, for honor …
Learners must appeal foremost to warrior honor: the honor of my father, the honor of every good warrior, which cleanses him of his filth. Good warriors will instantly recognize honor. They will defend it against any crazy deviant deprived of 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.
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 during 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 by drowning this censorship in a tsunami of worthless babble and lies. Those smart and conscientious enough to criticize this poor bargain are marginalized.
This triage for obedience and ‘loyalty’ dumbs down those who agree to remain in power, collectively and automatically. After they hold 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—and 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 misinformation 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 as 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 apparent. Lies yield 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 hold together for very long. 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 topic. 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. We understand that true morality, morale and efficiency dictate that we do things better; but …” followed by 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 or subject to abuse by thugs; it wouldn’t be consistent 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, all are 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 process 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 but 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’s on the verge of bankruptcy and vice versa. Public policies become arbitrary and vacillating, without moral or ideological foundation. 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 useful information becomes harder to broadcast and acquire (more expensive and time consuming). 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 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 a photograph of workers leaving an American naval shipyard back during World War II. An enormous sign was posted over the entrance: “Tell us your good ideas!” No such sign would have graced the same factory gate at the same time in history if it had been between two wars.
Just as a slap in the face will stop a fit of hysterics – 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 get leveled simultaneously. Then disinfo elites declare war—a much simpler task than promoting additional abundance and fellow feeling. Mass murder becomes the norm once again. By then, it’s too late to adopt peaceful politics of information since the requisite wealth and the unstressed, unpanicked populations went to waste.
Learners – by the way – is the kiss.
Very rarely, peace dissidents manage to overcome this social inertia. They 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 generate truth and lies on every topic, without prejudice or favor, for Learners to sort out among themselves. A Learner Commonwealth emerges through unrestricted public discourse and extensive dialogues between self-selected info-jurors. They pursue their topics of passion without regard to wealth or status—since wealth and status are 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 expensive artifacts and mythmaking about military security.
Taking the opposite tack, misinformation societies
opt for nothing but lies and terror. The
truth is 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
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 trivial public disinformation set before them by the mass media.
TV is a monologue medium as are radio, print media and non-interactive web pages. You know, those worthless corporate and bigot propaganda web pages that have no Contact link?
I cannot benefit from the interactivity of Learners until you choose to contact me. You can do so from the contact page link at the bottom of any chapter of Learners. I’ll handle the feeding frenzy of viruses and spam that swarms to my door in the meantime, in the hope of welcoming some thoughtful Learner’s constructive response on occasion. Yours, perhaps? The one in a thousand message that makes all this worthwhile?
I can use all the help you can send me, since I'm battered by witless criticism, criminal neglect and stupid attacks. I've received a few such messages already (desperate or cheerily supportive), for which I am very grateful.
The Greek Agora, Town Hall meetings (unscripted… Gotta add that, now that Bush the Lesser’s disinfo technicians have scripted, rehearsed and packed their audience routinely), telephones and postal or electronic mails are examples of dialogue media.
It’s 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 can. The sum of useful communications 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,
It is up to 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.
Mature societies – with insignificant outside threats and lots of surplus wealth (very rare) – allow Learners to Complexify information politics.
As complexity grows more turbulent, it risks bursting the levies of social convention that contain and regulate it. Thus, information politicians must renew evermore sophisticated vocabularies and communication habits. Otherwise, the roar of chaotic argument risks degenerating into misinformation politics once again.
The current 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 forms of info-littering) is nothing more that a pathetic denial of an expanding information universe. Think of a colicky infant who won’t eat his strained peas. Bewildered individuals and groups attempt to re-simplify their lives by lashing out against the newest complication they consider most 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 have 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 trend in the
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 one personal fireharm for every ten inhabitants of Earth and two or more bullets cast every year for each one of those inhabitants.
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; this way, they can pay lip service to pluralism while stimulating 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 which is
least adapted to the exigencies of war.”
How to Think
about War and Peace, Mortimer J. Adler, Simon
and
Weapon managers get Battle Elites (about
a 10% minority among weapon technicians) to do most of their dirty work. 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
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 else this time around, if I can help it. Incredibly, I’ve pledged to devote this lifetime to PeaceWorld instead. Was I an elite genocide during prior incarnations? Most probably. I’m not proud of it, quite the contrary. What a wasted opportunity for fast-buck wickedness and what a rocky row to hoe instead! Indiscriminate killing would be so easy this time around. There’d be no end to it until everyone got pitch-forked into the meat grinder. Genocide is fantastically well subsidized on this planet—instant gratification for wholehearted marauders.
As for preaching peace, I wish myself luck before this esteemed assembly. I beg your pardon for this abuse, dear reader, if you consider yourself 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 to wreak havoc on a world of Others they’ve been raised to despise. They seek to climb the highest rungs of power from which they can get away with as much mayhem as possible shielded by their rank.
More than half the ‘legitimate’ leadership of today’s world may consist of clever type 2 sociopaths.
Neither type of sociopath has any sense of moral right and wrong. Unlike normal people, when they’re made to think about crimes and misdemeanors in a controlled laboratory setting, they register no additional activity in their brain centers that generate a sense of conscience.
In any case, type 2s develop special social feelers
such that they only cross the line of unacceptable behavior when they know they
can get away with it. They seek
promotion and bonuses by torturing people, smoking the
Now, these “special antenna” are very interesting. They usually consist of subservient partners whom each Type 2 sociopath cultivates by sparing them from his usual mistreatment. One way or another, these particular sociopaths are smart enough to realize that at least a few people must accompany and counsel them, who can wave them off their worst misdeeds. Their subservient partners have their own co-dependency problems (since they are attracted to sociopaths and feel empowered by proxy by the misbehavior of their idol.) However, they remain equipped with a working sense of right and wrong, and serve the sociopaths by restraining their otherwise uncontrollable urge to hurt everyone they meet (they do not “meet” anyone; they confront them for dominance.) These beta personalities may be partners, subordinates or sexual mates, so long as they display a proper amount of reverence and loyalty towards the alpha sociopath who must remain dominant at all times. Sooner or later, the sociopath will betray his subordinate and/or abuse him beyond repair – after all, that is his nature. At that point, the sociopath will go looking for another slave to fulfill this role, and his partner will go find another sociopath to serve. This happens subconsciously and appears to be a standard mode of behavior for these types of people. Don’t ask me why or what for. Studying their mind and activity is like visiting a snake pit.
Type 2s are no doubt equipped with other psychological talents and resources that I am not trained to notice or particularly interested in.
Anyone not a sociopath but surrounded and supervised by them, soon falls into their vicious trap—or gets fired and replaced by someone more compliant. Our info elites are filled with them. Compared to these sovereign and international sociopaths, the most monstrous serial killer is just a spoiled child.
I believe there is a cure and permanent relief for these sociopaths. It’s up to them to take this cure. No one can force them to take it, only they can. It is hard, but it will relieve them beyond belief. And that is all they really seek: deliverance from their moral vacuum more excruciating and enduring than the phantom pain of a post-traumatic amputation. It’s that pain which induces them to commit their crimes and it is that pain we must address in order to reduce their criminality. Punishing these people for their crime is like spraying gasoline on a fire.
Type 1 sociopaths never develop these special feelers. Their brutal temper tantrums give them away almost immediately. In peacetime, their serial violence usually lands them in jail or in the shadier areas of the criminal enforcement system (prison guards, small town sheriffs, military police and such). Rarely promoted into the information elite, they belong with the Dirty Dozen. They are on standby for combat where some of them make the very best soldiers and the rest, the very worst. In either case, they are as a group more resistant to combat fatigue.
Since we support a vast majority of sociopath leaders and their insane decisions with our apathy, we should consider ourselves weapon fellow travelers: honorary members of the Himmler subgroup and loyal fans of WeaponWorld. Join the club—it’s enormous and unbelievably inclusive.
But don’t you dare call yourself civilized until you’ve turned into a Learner worthy of that name.
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. He reduces the complex dynamics of social movements into a simple inventory of their leaders’ personal idiosyncrasies. Herodotus treated history and current events as cults of personality; so did many other historians and journalists, since. Everything happens because some poor slob and his flunkies officially designated as Leaders made it happen exactly the way they foresaw.
“By the mid-fourth 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 fifth 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,
Those stories are about as accurate as this 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 and make sure 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 section on leadership in my chapter “Identity Politics”.
After millennia of crushed dissidence, progressive organizations have become hopelessly Balkanized. Many social activists worsen their political impotence through mutual ostracism, special interest bickering, petty private grievances and nit-picking ideological puritanism. Thus do they allow much more pragmatic, disciplined and cohesive weapons elites to defeat them in detail.
Rejecting holistic transformation, weapon dissidents revert to endless hairsplitting, moral compromise and basic hopelessness. Indifferent to real peace and real progress that they believe are quite beyond their grasp, they turn into conformist members of a ‘loyal opposition.’ Tough luck for anyone who challenges their disorderly conformism! They are emotionally invested in token resistance against a succession of thriving weapon states that strengthen themselves through their ineffectual resistance.
Remember, body builders push and pull their muscles like taffy against resistance. In roughly the same way, weapon states exploit weapon dissidents. Thus the clichéd yammering of weapon dissidents renders their weapon states stronger and more subtle.
On occasion, a breakthrough peace movement manages to dissolve its weapon state. This one-sided 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 bursts with rival solicitations for a charitable contribution, each appeal more heart-rending than the last. None of them demands 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. Benefiting from thousands of years of propaganda success, weapon managers think holistically and plan monolithically. Their international transactions and expenditures are pseudo-voluntary, free spending and 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 massacre. If we disagree with their goals, we are automatically marginalized into a political minority that is voiceless and trivial (by definition, not by numbers). It does not matter how many of us there are or how sensible our proposals, thanks to our historical incoherence and hysterical paralysis.
Because of thousands of years of defeat, rejection and Balkanization (and the rare, totally lethal success), standard-issue weapon dissidents are divisive, elitist, holier-than-thou, miserly, exclusive, reductive and atomistic. They satisfy themselves 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 it that way. We’d rather not scare 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 point in history.
Thus – every hour on the hour – the media announce fresh weapon triumphs and peace tragedies. Progressives cannot hope to divert the political mainstream until they rally around a hyper-complex platform of reforms that are inclusive, cooperative and mutualistic. In other words, until they maximize Learning planet-wide.
Some text like this one or another better, may catapult to world power its international, interdenominational and interethnic adherents of every age, sex and class. This may happen much more readily than you might think. Like other hidden truths, it's just a question of time and numbers: the time it takes to spread understanding and the number of those who understand.
Like a vampire caught out in broad daylight, weapon mentality cannot survive full exposure to the truth.
This transition could be as unexpected, swift and comprehensive as the U.S.S.R.’s perestroika. Every current leader – suddenly rendered powerless, clueless and numb by the collapse of petroleum resources – could abandon his office spontaneously and simultaneously. In the absence of an organizational framework like Learners, this transition could become terribly destructive—simply put, the mafia will take over the whole world and the political horrors you feared most will roll out like clockwork.
Many independent ideologues and anonymous polemicists are hard at work at this task. Each of us brings different insights and talents to bear. Yet it is almost impossible for us to broadcast our findings—especially among weapon dissidents. Paradoxically, they are much more closed to new ideas than weapon managers who will adopt new improvements (reluctantly but surely) into their robust and self-confident management schemes. The shaky ground progressives must negotiate does not permit them such open-mindedness until they change their minds deliberately. May dissidents change their mind and allow our best ideas to be heard, seriously meditated and rebroadcast!
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 equal basic benefits thereunder.
Despite their hyper-inflated privileges, info elites are just as vulnerable to mistaken information – both self-inflicted and out-sourced – as are info proletarians. To ensure 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. They should 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 which most people will choose because they see a better chance to benefit cooperatively (or merely survive thereby) within the plan, regardless of their origin and current status.
The belief is obsolete that people can be punished into better behavior. The more penalties, beyond the minimum required, the more resistance—automatically. Only weapon managers 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,
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, it repeats itself at celestial amplitude from across the cosmic void. We have but to listen and obey.
Even though peace mentality burns bright in idealistic young minds, it gutters in middle age and is extinguished in too many unlucky souls. Almost everyone would pick peace mentality over the weapon variety on an even playing field. However, our opportunities to practice peace are as fleeting as our weapon practices are diverse, forceful and tempting. Given so much negative conditioning, only an enlightened few become skillful practitioners at peace.
Peace technology pays its own freight and that of weapon technology. Despite the countless setbacks that weapon priorities impose, 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 search for learning: play, entertainment and enlightenment;
· Our pursuit of:
o Peace enforcement,
o Sound philosophy,
o Worthwhile 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 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 alert 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.
“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 evident that all social good flows from cherished children maturing into good citizens. Thinking logically, we could assume that the opposite is also true: that bad citizens proliferate once 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’re 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 good reason to turn the belief in reincarnation into a universal one.
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 must make good these deadly scandals and that quickly. This kind of 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. Perhaps the best of them would under ideal circumstances. Once we’ve convinced ourselves, they must be likewise convinced or replaced without hesitation.
An amusing political homily drones like Muzak in my brain. Humans cleave to three broad categories of political behavior. Regardless of other allegiances, we fit in among Ex-Herbivores, Ex-Carnivores or Omnivores (oft-reincarnated herbivores and carnivores who’ve 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 bad. They hunt us, kill us and EAT us. But they DO chase off other carnivores who must be worse. 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: “Look at this beautiful body of mine, powerful, lean and hungry. My mind ticks over, deadly and remorseless. I live in the future when my darkest desires will be satisfied at last.
“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 can 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 I fail, I must succeed in the end or die trying.
This obsessive-compulsive ceremony 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 the same in terms of satisfaction, and I have reincarnated in all these spheres of action plus many more of a similar 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 increase 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 carnivores keep forgetting in their wild pursuit of personal happiness.
“Through natural selection, we’ve evolved to learn. The more complex our information universe, the more we owe it our wealth. We could use this extra wealth to distract ex-herbivores and divert ex-carnivores until they grasp 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, lunge your next charge. It’ll fail sooner or later, as it always has. Both of you! Join us in peace!”
But this is mere EZ listening. Learners shall scrutinize the physiology of social behavior and public responsibility much more closely. They’ll uncover better models and better methods 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.
As our models of human awareness improve, better estimates of human motivation and better treatments for violent, greedy 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,
We live on a man-made WeaponWorld bereft of God’s Peace, mutual welcome and care. We’re here to remake this planet into God’s own PeaceWorld full of 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 – equally closed-minded – and sought to prove the existence of God solely for your own satisfaction. There would be no better way to do it than to rebuild WeaponWorld into PeaceWorld and witness God’s self-confirmation by showering us with miracles of approbation. After all, we would be doing what God always taught us instead of what God forbade – despite the aberrant commands of thousands of years’ worth of weapon religion 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 forbids.”
Those miracles would be God’s substitute for our perfectly scientific, perfectly orthodox, serial disasters. We could pour into PeaceWorld all the sanctity we had pent up in our hearts; benefit from miracles of wisdom, kindness and love. Every Learner could become a brother and sister on PeaceWorld, so much so that we could barely 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. Plus, 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 more success, charity and fellow-feeling; more easily, cheaply and safely; less fearfully; using exponentially greater artistry, passion and devotion—the bearing of God’s massed saints athirst, drunk and fulfilled of 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 affiliation with everyone else, for better or for worse, we are the Chosen Ones in this space-time continuum. Of God, of Allah, of Fate or of 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've 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’ve got yours, I’ve got mine, everyone’s got theirs : each of them a carefully crafted custom job, for better or for worse. Hitler and his henchmen had theirs, too. Some new tyrant might smash ours like yachts in harbor during a hurricane. History has warned us.
But 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 to get away with, 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. Do we have enough Humanity and the Duty, per Mencius, to see this through? Have we got the guts to do 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 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’m shouting this from the rooftops so far unheard, drowned in denial’s meanders.
You may have noticed three things taking place 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. Tarzan-like, I’m swinging my message along the jungle vines of this World Wide Web to get it out to you.
· We like-minded Learners throng this planet. Regardless of our 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 getting scarier and closer 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. All our prior efforts at peace were doomed to fail in their absence, so often that we have convinced ourselves all such efforts are useless with or without those essential components. That window will close once again when the evil twin weapon components of those peace efforts execute their final mission. We only have this current, fleeting opportunity.
In order to exploit it, we will need to share one ideal and harmonize our constructive activities with it. An ideal that’s not on the tip of everyone’s tongue, yet that everyone could adopt 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 should shield us from ice storms of recrimination, blame games, aggression and untruth. Finally, it should 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 of our unholy ways? Do we have what it takes? Could we wrap our minds around it?
Learners will call that ideal PeaceWorld.
For the first time in history, we have every means, motive and opportunity to make it happen. Once go for it, the volume of our peace song may swell even louder than 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 alternate pro-Nazi websites. 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.
“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
Yet when we mimic tired
It’s time we cultivated PeaceWorld, our truest calling. Any other alternative is mere death by the sword.
“To these three forms of law, a fourth one links up, the most important of all. It isn’t engraved in marble or bronze, but in the hearts of the citizenry. 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 institutions; it substitutes, unawares, the force of authority with that of habit. I speak of morals, customs and especially opinion: that overlooked part of our politics but on 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 invite you into PeaceWorld but I can’t cram you inside. I can only suggest the melody and trust 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.
Everyone submits to childhood aversion training against peace. As a result, we refuse to sort our information politics into their weapons and peace components, and we reject world peace in our lifetime.
I just cut short my correspondence with a so-called "progressive" who concluded, quite pleased with himself, that World Peace would never materialize 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 equipped with the superior morality he's obviously endowed with…
I won’t name him, out of mercy. After all, his is a general fault and not a particular malpractice. In most cases today, the responsible party is never named for fear of his vengeful 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 consequences.
In a PeaceWorld Agora infinitely more wise and selective than our WeaponWorld, everyone directly responsible for human suffering would be stripped of that power. Guilt and regret for one’s misbehavior should become the major preventive measure—no matter how much that might cost in the meantime. The current practice of disguising one’s bad results in anonymity should be forbidden as much on the Internet as during each institutional misfortune.
For example, the 2006 murder of Anna Politkovskaya,
the brave journalist who acted as a steadfast conscience of the
The following human rights workers, journalists and
lawyers have been executed in
· Galina Starovoitova, 1998
· Paul Klebnikov, 2004
· Ivan Safronov, 2007
· Magomed Yvloyev, 2009
· Vyachsla Yaroshenko, 2009
· Stanislav Markelov, 2009
· Anastasia Babourova, 2009
· Natalia Estemirova, 2009
Many more state-sponsored murders went unnoticed by
the Western Press.
Destroying such national treasures and discouraging
their imitators by sheer terrorism, that would be unthinkable for the genuine
leaders of these states. On PeaceWorld,
this disgrace would have turned them out of office without appeal. On WeaponWorld, of course, they flourish from
their inconceivable transgressions. They
are not alone, on the contrary, across WeaponWorld. Almost every current world leader would lose
his war crime trial before the
Compared with most people to whom I've outreached, this guy was rather optimistic about the eventuality of global peace. Right now, that’s how this planet’s grim burden of weapon stalwarts sorts itself. An overwhelming majority that claims world peace is impossible, worthless and evil; and the handful that maintains it’s 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 cohort of ‘progressive’ companions, experts at nothing but hand-wringing and whining about how nasty people and current events are. Take the next forty years, Bubba, or the last five thousand; your results will always be the same. Weapon mentality wins every time because you never show up to champion peace despite all your fine talk.
World peace will occur, 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 in a rational manner: peacefully, voluntarily and soon.
Reactionaries won’t broach this topic because it betrays their prime personal motive and motivator of others: fear. Fashionable progressives (equally fear-driven) dismiss this topic as talked to death and thus neatly support the reactionaries—despite all their fine talk.
This book examines the mentalities of weapons and peace as if they were discrete, coherent and self-willed entities (memeplexes). According to Learners, their schemes contend, grow strong or weak over time and influence mass thought. Peace and weapon mentors are spokespeople for invisible forces much more potent. Their actions 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. This general will prescribes the greatest common good for all and is the sole legitimate justification of government. Under the general will, everyone may allow their personal will to be diminished yet still come out ahead in the long run since that is what the general will does best.
Western philosophers consider that it grows up from the bottom, the individual, to the heights of government. The Chinese and their oriental disciples talk about a “Mandate of Heaven” prescribed by Confucius (Kong Fuzi, K'ung-fu-tzu), which alone can render legitimacy to a government by virtue of its ritual harmony with cosmic law. It would grow from the top down to individual depths.
Both are considered mandatory for good government by their respective supporters. I suspect they are fundamentally identical. Awareness of cosmic law, of governmental authority and of individual freedom: all three would have optimal frequencies that harmonized best with the others. Detune this optimal resonance at any level and suffer corresponding disaster. Without the general will, we would sink into chaosism; without the Mandate of Heaven, our 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 (I’m kidding). Nowadays, everybody knows they come equipped 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 these spooky super-coincidences. Jung said the collective unconscious contains the sum of every thought that’s been forgotten and every thought in the future. Meanwhile, each conscious mind holds a careful selection of current thought. Or receives and converts it, like a fine-tuned antenna?
In this case, might some insane people have their antennae tuned to slightly different frequencies? Could this be why primal societies valued their crazy people instead of marginalizing them the way we do? Because they were tuned to alien FM stations instead of run-of-the-mill AM reactionary talk-show hosts, 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 local human geographies. Whereas the collective superconscience would act more like a fluid (a physics plasma?) circuit board operating in parallel with human communities and diagramming where their currents flow, accumulate and disperse—burning out certain circuits and allowing others to grow in size and complexity.
I hope our few peace circuits will grow luxuriantly and our many weapons circuits will short out peacefully. I believe in miracles from 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 in this manner.
Noam Chomsky proposed a Universal Grammar: that we are somehow hard-wired to learn language skills. Just don’t use this text as his example! Jung talked about racial memory: the ability of a people to retain information from its past. In Hinduism and other religions, there is mention of akasha: a universal etheric field in which is imprinted 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 the surface of these topics and forgotten what it knew about them in the past. Future Learners will study them in depth. There is fantastic potential here. Scientific breakthroughs might eclipse everything we’ve discovered up to now: vaccines for our cultural sickness 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 may explain the peculiar way germ plasm achieves unlikely symmetry and blueprint speciation.
During billions of years, chemical reactions took place 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 the illustration fits too well here to pass up—even if I must include it here without proper attribution.
Without these morphic fields, the dominant life form on Earth might be a fifteen-foot layer (so sunlight could penetrate it) of translucent slime wrapped around the globe. 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 throw a cloak over every organism. A cloak that keeps it alive, whole and distinct from the rest of the world, yet that attaches 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 for Learners in the most simplistic terms, Luria posited the principle that God created the Universe by making room for it outside of His Perfection, somewhat in the way a man would inhale sharply to make room for someone to pass down a narrow corridor.
According to Luria, there was some kind of trauma during this transition, which created the dichotomy of worldly good and evil. Divine Light that 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 were cracked and seven lower vessels were shattered in a shower of Holy Sparks. Those elements that resisted this shattering became Evil, while those that took part remained Good.
I have a hard time subscribing to this interpretation since I believe that the conflict of good and evil is the 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 this whole exercise?
According to Luria, every time another human being obeys a commandment of God, he ‘repairs the world’ and another spark is raised from the lower levels of evil to the upper ones of good. Jewish ritual life is designed to raise the utmost good, no matter how trivial act of the obedience; and, correspondingly, any deviation from the commandment of God drops another Spark to lower levels. Thus the practicing Jew is carrying out an existential struggle equivalent to the myth of Sisyphus, bearing Holy Sparks upwards to the Light despite a cascade of downward ones showering him and his burden. And God has a cosmic need for humanity to restore His Holy Order.
What might this mean for the rest of us? That we should obey the commandments we understand best from any God of our choosing, in order to restore Holy Sparks of God to their proper orientation. 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 or 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 have identified themselves as spirit architects of various plant, animal and living communities—in other words, communicating forms of this morphic field we’re talking about.
New-Age naturalists have admitted to communicating 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’d rather communicate with sensitive naturalists among us and rebuild the framework of mutual understanding and cooperation we’ve spent the last few thousand years trying to rip out.
This provided we reciprocate 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 eventual annihilation, Learner and deva mutualists might form a stronger partnership. Let’s assume we chose to heed them and followed their best-practice advice. Peace technology Genetic Architecture could generate unheard-of abundance, avoid transgenic catastrophes and unintended consequences. Otherwise – if our Genetic Engineers persist with their double blind fumblings, they’ll merely spawn 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 would 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've been published and many 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 over time.
Or just recall the four-minute mile. It is routine today among Olympic runners, though once thought impossible.
I am pretty sure the writing of this text (especially in French) became easier for me – indirectly – as more people read it and noticed my many writing errors, even though they never informed me of them. I am persuaded that our delicate minds are tied together 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.
Up ‘til now, humanity has practiced obsessive-compulsive warfare. From now on, we must practice equivalent peace. Willing co-conspirators with WeaponWorld, we've bleached the term “world peace” of its emotive power. We’ve let weapon mentors cheapen it into the tagline of a stale joke. Warfare should become a topic of stale jokes from now on, and we should wage peace 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 60 feet or more below ground. Collate the dates of solar flare maxima on Earth and outbreaks of mass violence; you’ll find the correspondence for yourself.
The ‘undifferentiated vacuum of space’ through which our solar system drifts is actually a pea soup fog of subatomic particles/wavicles. These are precisely tuned to minute disturbances of distant celestial objects: electromagnetic, gravitational and perhaps more subtle emissions we haven’t registered yet. This varying admixture and quantum flux of space reaches down through our protective atmosphere and planetary magnetic shielding. It has crafty effects on our thoughts and behavior.
Five millennia of astrologers have barely scratched the surface of those effects. For the past three hundred years, astrophysicists have not bothered to notice them at all. Such intellectual sloth disguised as ‘scientific method!’
It was not for nothing that
Just as genetic adaptation and human mythos sway to
unfelt breezes; so I believe we interact with ethical fields that surround us,
even (especially!) if we don’t notice them.
Often, these fields corrupt entire peoples, tempt elites into perilous
self-indulgence and terrorize those few chosen ones who resist them. This happened in
These trends are visible effects of the collective superconscience. We can choose to let invisible forces stampede us where they will and declare them nonexistent by popular fiat. If we were slightly smarter, we’d search them out fearlessly, cultivate the most useful ones and redirect the worst ones 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 book invokes PeaceWorld: the antithesis of the compulsive, trial-and-repeated-error WeaponWorld in which we are trapped by redundant morphic resonances perfectly replaceable on PeaceWorld. Instead, we should think of PeaceWorld as a planetary theme park carefully crafted to enchant its active architects and passive occupants alike, leaving no one out unwillingly.
I repeat: this is up to us.
Weapon mentors have stifled peace mentality and stiffened weapon mentality throughout history. Recorded history is nothing more than the published glorification of weapon states. If pure peace civilizations ever existed, they disappeared, erased from history and thus ‘pre-historic.’
Weapon managers believe that too much peace technology reduces (much less attractive) weapons efforts. They have concluded that popular expectations for equitable prosperity will outstrip their ham-fisted methods of social control once peace managers allocate too many resources to non-military goods and services. They fear that peace softens the populace and makes it less pugnacious in war—more ‘sophisticated, cosmopolitan and decadent.’ Minimal peace technology is their only tolerable 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 on unchecked, weapon barbarians will overrun us.” Martial poverty and hierarchical brutality are the flip sides of peaceful abundance and vulnerable pacifism.
Francis Fukuyama’s infamous prediction in his End of History may come about in a manner he least expects and least desires. The Thousand Year Reich of weapon mentality he venerates will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions—either in omnicidal holocaust or through 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.
Let's imagine ourselves removed to 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 primarily 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, with only a few holdouts. For the first time in history, we have all the communication channels, peace infrastructure and mutual recognition necessary to do just that.
The problem is—do we have the guts?
Let’s look for a hotter illustration. Suppose the atmosphere retained a slightly higher concentration of oxygen. Fires would ignite spontaneously and burn super hot.
Fire fighting 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 fire fighting heroes.
Traditional fire fighting technologies would engulf national budgets; they would distort land development, planning and architecture. Compulsive taboos would choke 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 boast 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. 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 fanatics’ imagination… even more so that it does 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 an observer alienated from this world as many Learners must feel themselves to be. This planetary chaos has nothing to do with us Learners except to cast us as cut-off observers and desperate healers of this killer primate world, with our backs against the wall. Learners: I invite you to to save your soul, no matter what transpires from this mess—a humble gift to my brother and sister Learners trapped here.
From our perspective, this world would seem warped, its natives swayed by compulsions we would find horrific. They, however, would find everything perfectly normal.
Slightly more enlightened natives might decry the most extravagant demands of fire fighting orthodoxy. They might politely suggest that human sacrifice need happen less often. But no argument would budge smug majorities from the familiar comfort of their prejudice. And the most sophisticated resistance to radical change would come from native ‘progressives’ self-immunized from positive transformation by their intensive study of every cliché argument 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 all their social arrangements – and nobody would care – the way the fear of military aggression perverts ours. Just as they’d cling to their fire fighting 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 attract popular opposition into guerrilla liberation bands.
Thus, you’d 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 brought on 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 be 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, exploding penal populations, tidal waves of corruption and super-stratified class hierarchies.
Society reacts to these irritants rather like a disturbed bee colony. Goaded by these contradictions, proletariats gestate new proto-elites eager to revolt. Our attack reflexes go into overdrive.
Wars provide great outlets 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. A passive spectator of government assaults against harmless minorities and outsiders, this 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 increase 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 inviting domestic terror and organizing international adventures. They hold unarmed combatants (civilians) hostage by controlling their relatives in the military and vice versa.
This is standard practice in
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 mandates effectively, with
· “Institutions” whose members adopt illegitimate goals.
Some institutional leaders abandon their instrumental mandates 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 personal 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 energy. Solving the last few details requires infinite energy, like pushing an object to light speed with a Newtonian mass driver.
In order to achieve progress, we needn’t solve most problems down to their last detail. Instead, we should redefine each problem so as to reapply the first and 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. They ignore new breakthroughs and compound errors of the past instead. 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.
Learners insist it is not disinterest we really require – or so much fine reasoning – as passion.
“The heart accepts a
conclusion for which the intellect subsequently finds the reasoning. Argument follows conviction. Man often finds reasons in support of
whatever he does or wants to do.” Gandhi
quote from Young India (weekly newspaper), Navajivan, 1919-32. Taken from Raghavan Iyer’s The Moral and
Political Thought of Gandhi, Oxford University Press,
Human disinterest does not exist. Our perceived self-interests tug us where they will, including mass extinction. When we abandon our real needs and succumb to mortal panic, we submit to short-term greed, arrogance, cowardice, denial and sadism—actually schadenfreude. Suffering from serial hierarchies of vicious Corporals, the German people coined this term to describe the shady delight some people take in the misfortune of others. Such people are happiest when they hurt people bad or gloat over their suffering at third hand.
Russians have an equivalent term: zloradtsvo. The Nineteenth century Russian philosopher, Pyotr Chaadeyev, wrote:
“We are exceptional people; we are among those nations that, as it were, are not members of mankind but exist only to give the world some terrible lesson.”
This lament could be applied to every weapon nation.
Tsar Nicholas I had him officially declared insane and placed under house arrest (no exit, no visitors; think about that) until he recanted. Pyotr was the first of many Russian political prisoners on psychiatric grounds.
I suspect that any linguistic group would coin such a term after a recent experience of tyranny. Now that corporate tyranny has become commonplace throughout the world, a more accurate Anglo-Saxonism might be shadism.
Sadism is sexual arousal from another’s pain: a perversion that preoccupies only a jaded few. Unlike it, shadism is taught to each of us surprisingly early and often. Through infinite rehearsal and painful repetition, we have become expert shadists: equally at home as its addicted victims and expert tormentors. We administer Hell on Earth because we’ve been brought up to admire fearful hatred and begrudge fearless love—in slavish submission to what’s been taught to us so often.
It’s time we invoked our better nature and nurtured it in a global peace of our own devising.
“Evolution is always experimental. All progress is gained through mistakes and
their rectification. No good comes
fully-fashioned ... but has to be carved out through repeated experiments and
growth. The same law controls social and
political evolution also. The right to
err, which means the freedom to try experiments, is the universal condition of
all progress.” A Gandhi quote from Raghavan
Iyer’s, The Moral and Political Though of Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford
University Press,
One of weapon mentality’s most corrosive myths is that we are innately evil. According to this myth, we are stricken by some ill-defined but primeval sin, surrounded by evil because we are full of it. According to this myth, no good can come from our corrupt efforts at improving the world. We might as well capitulate to public evil and seek marginal and fleeting self-improvement instead. Marginal, in reality, because we backslide with horrific ease, and fleeting because we die soon anyway and our personal upgrades disappear with us.
This “No good…” idea is ridiculous if you think about it. My foot doesn’t need to be the World’s Most Beautiful Foot, nor do I need to waste my entire life manicuring it, to kick trash off the sidewalk.
Just like this sentence, so difficult for me to write and for you to decipher, doesn’t need to be perfect. Honest error, if admitted and allowed, can always play a valid part in the overall plan. Perfection is not necessary; excellence is required.
The main difference between reactionaries and progressives? The former believe that everyone is innately evil, while the latter hold people to be essentially good. Go ahead, ask anyone that question, then about his or her voting record. See for yourself.
My experience leads me to the opposite conclusion. Almost everyone does the best he or she can, under most circumstances—often heroically and at great sacrifice. Sure, some people are rotten to the core, but they are very rare on the ground. Sure, I bear my share of immorality stripped of honor. Also sure, everyone fails, from time to time, and commits shameful acts. But, on the whole and more often than not, we’re pedaling as fast as we can.
Look; if evil were so predominant, we’d be run over almost every time we crossed the street! That is not the norm except in war.
The essence of sinful error, or of any other human weaknesses, for that matter, is that we can straighten them out through gradual stages of learning and self-correction. We are experts at this task. In other words, progress involves voluntary evolution: personal, institutional, cultural, psychic and genetic; each evolutionary facet interdependent, synergistic and holistically vital.
The concept of original sin blunts our eagerness to improve the world. It’s not a matter of abandoning it in favor of merely improving the world, but of clarifying both concepts.
Much as dinosaurs once did, we have come to a crossroads without realizing it. An ‘ideal’ environment sustained them for ages. Then minor changes began to flicker and the die-offs began. They didn’t have enough time, weren’t flexible enough, couldn’t trade tons of bone, sinew and armor plate – painfully accumulated over eons – before extinction overcame them.
We humans retain some advantages over dead owners of those monster bones. Our greatness resides in part on our ability to love one another: a trait we share with other pack-scavengers. Another critical human talent may be our provision for the young, the sick and the helpless. Heightened levels of care may be the true measure of our greatness.
In some troubled souls, mistrust and ‘realism’ have replaced compassion. This degeneracy pegs us lower than some dinosaurs that guarded each other and their young.
Each of us, no matter how abused and abusive today, received some loving care earlier on, in order to survive to this day. Is it possible that most felons are felons because they weren’t handled lovingly enough, early enough? Some people suppose that the most accurate predictor of criminal behavior is prior abuse of the prospective criminal as a child.
Mischief is easy; any fool can do serious harm without breaking a sweat. Conversely, human nurturing takes lots of hard work. Reducing care to economize, that's about as stupid as starving to death to save on grocery bills.
If we could tabulate the amount of potential violence on Earth into one sum representing X energy, then our wealth would equal the care we expend in 1,000’s of X, minus the one wasted in untruth and violence. The sum of human care must always dwarf that of harm, lest we perish. Today, kinetic care is dangerously level with our weapon potential.
Think about that. How many mothers’ hugs would it take to equal the energy of one hand grenade, one nuclear detonation or all of those we’ve buried in silos and submarines blown up together?
Basically, our greatness resides in how well we share Learning. Remember, each generation must relearn the sum total of human knowledge. Only then may we add our own little contribution. Anything not relearned by someone must be forgotten and disappear, or sink into the collective superconscience.
Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar postulates that a whole sub-universe of information is hardwired into us and comes online as we mature. This programming doesn’t initialize, however, until benign external stimuli activate internal software. To become fully aware and sane, we must be nurtured with tender loving care.
Unlike those doomed dinosaurs trapped in extravagant suits of armor, our elastic, reprogrammable brains give us the means, motive and opportunity to shed our liabilities and redefine ourselves virtually overnight. It might be messy and it might not work all at once, but the possibility remains: learning how to do it better.
Learning dwarfs lesser preoccupations like sex, predation and genetic survival. These fabricated human motivations are current champions of scientific prejudice. They serve Conspiracies of Greed, the same way Social Darwinism and Predestination once served them, as weapon myth propaganda, to justify their wickedness. Unlike these secondary drives we’ve magnified beyond proportion, Learning is the real foundation of self-awareness and PeaceWorld.
Until recently, historians busied themselves collecting biographical tidbits of micro-history. They simplified vast upheavals of climate, resources and civilization by dissecting the lives of a few key bosses. Humanity’s opulent transactions were reduced to the whims of a few courted egomaniacs and the muffled sobs of countless victims. Historians, beginning with Herodotus and ending with today’s pundits, wrote: “King (President, Caliph, Dictator, etc.) X decreed A, B and not C. His Dukes (Ministers, Secretaries, Viziers, Satraps, whatever), 1 though 6 with the exception of 4, revolted against his policies, thus provoking...” an unending crisis of biographical reductionism and gross simplification.
Accepting this simplification is about as sensible as reducing the 16 million person-years of human genius, hope and labor we accumulate every day, into a few wisps of newsprint and vapid newscast.
I hate biography. Art transcends life, it records dreams into culture. Shoddy dreams, not for very long. Magnificent and terrible dreams, lovingly and virtually forever, compared to our brief lifetimes. Art takes life’s little irrelevancies and transforms them into a holism greater than the sum of its parts.
Biography reverses this process. It turns cultural dreams into a long, obsessive chronicle of nit-picking primate politics, pecking order torture, the growth, displacement and destruction of meat puppets, and the mindless tide of their body fluids. Disgusting.
Setting this gloss aside for a moment, the info proletariat raises the leadership it requires through a process of organic hyper-democracy somewhat akin to a bee colony’s. Our intimate involvement in this procedure makes it seem more complex and subjective.
During the last few decades, dissatisfied historians have consolidated massive compendiums of correspondence and anecdotes into macro-histories. In so doing, they’ve attempted to chronicle the life and times of entire peoples over la longue durée (lah low+ng duray, the long haul). Preliminary attempts have been made to analyze history from multi-disciplinary perspectives: epidemiology, meteorology, geoseismicity, biogeography, ecology, memetics, psychohistory, herstory and sociobiology, among others. The more interdisciplinary these studies, the more novel and enlightening their conclusions. They’ve helped us drive out a whole packet of absurdities put forward earlier and concrete-embedded in our spirits these days.
This breakup of old beliefs leads to fearsome uncertainty. We hesitate to believe in much of anything any longer. Nothing is easy to decide—not enough data points and not enough time to collect them. We could rewire the world so there would be plenty of time: time enough for those who shared peace to collect their thoughts more leisurely and come up with better decisions on every scale.
As our point of view broadens, personal idiosyncrasies dwindle to irrelevance. Mere individuals merge into the crowd and social behavior becomes easier to track. Near-identical patterns, stresses and energy flows emerge on different scales of space-time—as predicted by chaos theory.
The shoreline dynamics of a seaside beach would be more difficult to track if we attempted to follow the path of each grain of sand (especially ‘exceptional’ ones). On the contrary, we should study the lowest common denominators of surf, wind and tide. A deeper understanding of world history would require that we remove ourselves from comfortingly reductive contexts: the self-referential, biographical, nationalistic, piously sanctimonious, and human—even the life-as-we-know-it and linear-entropic.
Recent photos of delicate Earth have been taken from outer space. They suggest a new perspective shift that reveals life-as-we-know-it as mere luminescent pond scum writhing across a smallish, blue porcelain marble sealed in a thin glaze of gas and water, orbiting serenely around a perfectly ordinary star. This perspective shift may allow us to isolate significant aspects of history, provided we pay due reverence to a universe aglow with sacred intent.
Remarkable things come to light at this scale of vision. Decisive incidents resonate with equivalents from the past, influence current events and distort future probabilities. Accidents of individuality, chronology and locality (that teachers love to make their students cram) lose their illusory significance except as convenient place markers and shortcut jargon.
Carroll Quigley focused his historical vision on continental scales. Such diverse writers as Ryszard Kapuscinski, Rian Malan, Antje Krog and John Del Vecchio have sought this level of reverence in their reportage.
On the other hand, many butcher geniuses have abused this scale of vision. For example, either shun Hitler’s Mein Kampf or don full biohazard shielding before you crack it open. The man was certifiable. He wanted to replace the Jews: the Chosen People of biblical God, with Good Germans. In so doing, he would have had to kill 1) every Jew on Earth, then 2) everyone else who’d recall the Jews from their Biblical/Islamic/western history readings.
Such collective insanity was not exceptional. A hundred and fifty generations of weapon mentors have invoked man-aping gods, hyperactive heroes, raw might, econologic, dialectics, national honor, bloodline purity, scientific positivism (“I’m positive you’re wrong”), post-modern nihilism and any other heady superstition they could dream up to arouse it. Nazism was merely one of their most spectacular failures at social engineering. There have been many more, before and since. They’ve failed so consistently because they ignored the key, sacred context. Proper worship of it would have cancelled their sickly ambitions and favorite genocides.
Inducing a dizzying sense of moral detachment and loss of empathy, they’ve argued more and more convincingly for fatalistic determinism (as revealed in Elias Canetti’s cheerless Crowds and Power) and Nazi mercilessness. Their fear-driven visions were pathetic attempts to simplify the scary complexity of reality by squeezing all life, beauty and reverence from it.
These deluded people may have failed us in the past. But that’s no reason to become credophobes and stop believing in anything, the fastest way back to fascism. Whatever the risk, we must cultivate our gift of vision.
I doubt that anyone who studies a little history can use words like ‘humanitarian, humane and human’ as analogues for ‘kindly, compassionate and just-plain-not-stupid.’ Typical mass human behavior is weapon-based. So far, massed humans have failed to earn the honorific “civilized.” Clustered humans never adhered to the good until they had exhausted every evil.
That’s not surprising. Veterans, athletes and professionals don’t become real experts until they’ve screwed up every other alternative several times in a row. Then they must accept, at gut level, a better way to do things. They need to practice it, despite repeated errors and inconsistencies, until it becomes automatic. Just the way humanity will find its ultimate success at peace, despite and because of its billion-times-repeated weapons errors.
Celebrate Olympic athletics! Celebrate the deep thoughts of the PeaceWorld Agora.
Human bloodthirstiness is less justifiable than a
hungry predator’s.
No nation or creed can claim clean outcomes. Every surviving culture has been the masterpiece of maniacs, tyrants, genocides and their weapon mentor apologists. The bovine mass of humanity has tolerated them and their bloody fantasies like maggot flies that only needed an occasional tail lash. History has exalted civilizations with the bloodiest hands. It has erased from collective memory every society of exceptional peacefulness.
Our weapons institutions peddle their monolithic and categorical world-view across a vast range of multi-media. In pathetic pursuit of flawless certitude, weapon mentors attempt to suck all truth, beauty and mystery from life.
Despite the whine of chainsaw logic, its patent certainties are obvious lies any child could see through. Indeed, young ones see quite clearly through this adult hypocrisy. That’s why we spend so much time and effort breaking their spirits and their ideals while they’re tender and fragile.
All of us witness these contradictions every day. Many official truths are obviously inferior to their rejected counterparts. Our social creeds are so obnoxious, none of their adherents need seduce all parties. We find it easier to insult, terrorize and murder the Other—or tolerate those who do so on our behalf.
We could clean house the moment we chose to reject this century-long brainwash. Once we adopt Truth and Non-violence as our primary inspirations, the term ‘Learner’ might reflect our enormous hunger for good (our kalotropism) and we might re-earn the title ‘civilized’.
We should defy two more myths that are typical of weapon mentality.
According to the first of these subtle delusions, each of us must fulfill impossible ideals of personal sainthood. We cannot hope for widespread improvement until we’ve turned ourselves into proper saints, first. Every hint of personal weakness confirms our Kosmic Korruption.
One may not criticize the current state of affairs without convincing his audience he’s a bona fide saint, first. If the authorities can make some accusation stick against him, he’s unfit to comment on social issues. Since everyone has something to hide, no one may comment except as a friend of the authorities who will shield him from public attack. Anyone who defies those authorities is at their mercy. How convenient for weapons mentality!
Thus global improvement is impossible until we’ve
all become angels. In the meantime,
let’s just sit on our hands and wait for Jesus to bring the
In John 14, 2-3, Christ said, “In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am, you may be also.” Amen, brother.
In the meantime, it’s obviously up to us. I always come back to Jesus’ Parable of the Talents. The Master left us a sum of money. When He returns, He will be happier with those who have increased it, rather than with those who buried it in order not to lose any. It is not a question of saving one’s soul by doing nothing else; but of taking enormous risks to earn more for God.
Meanwhile, no healthy outlet is permitted for our frustration. It is allowed to fester within us until WeaponWorld can Heimlich-maneuver it out of us in warfare. This behavioral repression multiplies with regulatory density, as more and more meddlesome officials adjust the details of our lives, and less and less room remains for risky self-expression. Walled in by our own incapacity, we prickle with self-loathing. Cursing the faults of others, we plot futile revenge. Bitterly, we resent growing intrusions on our limited time and assets in this material world. As inspiration and satisfaction become more remote and theoretical, real obligations and penalties skyrocket around us. Perpetually unfree, we double and redouble the coils of our enslavement. Mischief becomes extremely tempting; it seems to offer some relief from this endless round of obligation and compromise. The routine expectation of mischief provides more official reasons to grind us down. Sooner or later, we begin to yearn that a vast maelstrom come sweep everything away and resimplify our lives.
Life never makes things simpler, death does. Get used to it.
Countless young bulimics, addicts and attempted suicides – their nerve ends raw and aglow – convey the same unheard lament. “I’m not good enough for this!” Good enough to do what? Cope with the infinite demands of empty moralism, or handle weapon mentality's hyper-refined evils?
As we pre-stupefied adults ripen into ‘maturity’, we suffer analysis paralysis from orthodoxy’s ad hominem (“to the man”, appealing to prejudice) brainwash. We, in turn, chastise our idealistic juniors for daring to skip the only approved track: absolute weapon mentality. We’re convinced that peace mentality can never be ‘realistic’ enough. We’re supposed to grow up and abandon it.
Grow up and embrace peace. I dare you.
To tell you the truth, we are the best people we can be: the ultimate sentient masterpieces of God, DNA and the Universe. Get used to it – there is nobody better than you – nobody can take your place and do a better job. There should be no need for radical self-improvement until our radically improved institutions support such private efforts without contradiction and denial. Would success be possible otherwise? Even after a thousand billion reincarnations?
The second unfortunate weapon myth absolves our institutions. Unlike individuals, current institutions are sacred, error-free, opaque to analysis and exempt from improvement—except every few centuries, during brief periods of bloody revolution.
Even in the most advanced countries, the approved method of expressing public disapproval for gross institutional blunders is a protest march: perfectly dumb, bovine and trivial (if not detrimental). If the topic in question is of any importance, this rally will culminate in a police riot: more propaganda headlines in favor of blundering institutions.
For example, the 1999
True, some pimply hooligans broke a few plate glass windows, set fire to a garbage dumpster or two and wrecked a few cars—so as to play the video game Black Flag Anarchy in real-time. That damage couldn’t have totaled more than a couple hundred thousand 1999 dollars, tops. I was there, before and after, and saw it all. Afterwards, I called the newspapers and challenged them to itemize the famous “millions of dollars of damage.” No one bothered to return my phone call and no one itemized that damage in print, that I could find.
Nonetheless, the 1999
Is this how our vaunted media commit current events to historic memory? I can only conclude: “Shoot, what a sophisticated system of political feedback!” See Learning to Dance for the Learner alternative.
“Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.” Of course, this biblical quote might also mean that Caesar owns nothing and is owed nothing. After all, what authority can Caesar claim when compared to God’s? The opposite meaning jams our senses. Weapon mentors worship Jesus’ torture rack and drown His sacred ideals in blood: symbolic or all-too-real, take your pick.
What more can we expect from weapon Christianity—that venerable relief program for smug desperadoes? Other world religions are not far behind in stealth hypocrisy. Religions of abnegation do weapon mentality a great favor, they alienate the best people from practical politics and into spiritless isolation and pseudo-mystic contemplation. The only religions more despicable than those that encourage people to give up on the real world are those that encourage people to simplify the real world with more violence.
Yet the essential goodness of these religions allowed them to survive, despite their errors and hypocrisy compounded in support of WeaponWorld and worsened by it. Good politics and religion would flourish within PeaceWorld; each acting to reinforce the good in the other and to curb its ill effects.
Government officials love to administer weighty oaths. The nastier the institution, the more rumbling its oaths of allegiance and the more often they must be invoked. Hitler was an enthusiastic organizer of mighty oath-taking ceremonies. They bound his people more closely to him—to their ultimate destruction. It’s easier to get people to murder each other, if you’ve made them swear an oath to do it.
Every weapon society glorifies suicidal self-sacrifice. Prism propaganda contradicts “live and let live” principles everyone knows are preferable. Paul Lackman points to Japanese kamikazes and mass suicides of World War II. But all the sacrificial tendencies of weapon mentality should be included. They are all essentially interchangeable.
In what state of mind would you have to be to drop a heavy bomb on a bustling city? Picture yourself flying over a major city. See it clearly? Now, drop your bomb. You would have to be nuts. Either a bitter terrorist made desperate by a lifetime of suffering and humiliation; or a talented, dedicated and courageous military pilot fulfilling your military obligation in exchange for the opportunity to gratify your love of flying.
The outcome would be the same: a flaming wreck of body parts and debris where humanity once flourished, for us to clean up afterwards at tremendous expense and with broken hearts. A total waste in any case. As if there was no poverty in the world; as if we had so much surplus wealth and good fellowship that we could waste it this way.
Modern culture reveres noble warriors who endure torture with stoicism, seek privation and make defiant last stands against overwhelming odds. Cold bloodedly, they must violate basic laws of humanity. They are hallowed because they’ve stepped beyond the morality of common sense. One way or another, our institutions induce mass suffering without opposition. Sufferers are dehumanized and distanced from the mainstream. By definition, individuals are expendable, and institutions, irreplaceable.
The dictates of peace management are exactly contrary. Every individual is a precious dynamo of good and evil. We should develop and modify new instruments to magnify their good traits, and channel the evil ones into semi-harmless games and theatrics.
Despite the holy interventions of Moses, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed, the ratio of good to bad human acts has never seemed to change throughout history. Good Pagans were just as upright and proportionately numerous back then, as good church people are, today. Vicious Pagans were just as obnoxious and numerous as today’s religious/ideological extremists. The human sacrifice they demand today, through jihad and holy war (religious or ideological), are continuations of bloody-handed sacrifices they practiced face-to-face in the past. Just as many non-believers, devout atheists and situational ethicists straddled their fences back then, as they do now, uncertain which way the wind blows.
So we’ve never changed the ratio of good and bad human acts. None of our saints have, none of our Prophets have, none of our Saviors; and I doubt that anyone else will manage it in the foreseeable future. Big deal.
We can, however, shift the quality of our behavior toward the good (or bad) end of the ethical spectrum. For example, we could strengthen the Bill of Rights and shift our society towards better ethics. Or we could revert to genocide and slavery and shift more people and decisions toward evil.
Thomas Jefferson enslaved himself to the abuses and hypocrisy of slavery. Suffering from that burden, he was a lesser man than the most bigoted cracker would be once slavery was abolished. In the same way, we can remain exactly the same people we are today, and still become better practitioners of Good. Just replace our weapons institutions with more sensible instruments of peace.
Valid instruments invite criticism and transformation. There is nothing irreducibly good about our institutions. We merely adopted them for the time being. They deserve no more devotion than fairy mushroom rings growing among druid oak trees. Institutions that go unchallenged overlong tend to become riddled with self-serving parasites and authoritarian nitwits. They fail more and more spectacularly over time.
You, me, everyone is directly responsible for progress. A healthy conscience makes no exceptions—unlike our sickly institutions that mass-produce exceptions. Whenever an institution becomes so inflexible that it facilitates evil, it should be exposed to instant serial correction. Evildoers should be banished from institutional power, the moment they begin improvising on the theme: “We weren’t responsible. We were just following orders, policies, profit guidelines, the competition, etc.”
“Few things are more revealing about man as warrior than his tendency to slough off responsibility for the suffering and tragedy he inflicts. … Why can men do together without conscience things that would torment them unendurably if done singly? …
“Seated in our living rooms, remote from action and passion, most of us like to believe that we shall never yield again to abstract hatreds. … Historically, our record for stemming the tide has not been good …
“Perhaps even worse, few of us
ever know how far fear and violence can transform us into creatures at bay,
ready with tooth and claw. If the war taught me anything at all, it convinced
me that people are not what they seem or even think themselves to be. Nothing is more tempting than to yield
oneself, when fear comes, to the dominance of necessity and to act
irresponsibly at the behest of another.
Freedom and responsibility we speak of easily, nearly always without
recognition of the iron courage required to make them effective in our lives.”
J. Glenn Davis, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in
The day after Nazi conquerors ordered Danish Jews to sew a yellow star onto their clothes, the King of Denmark took his morning ride wearing a yellow star. Many of his subjects followed his noble lead and thus restored their defeated nation’s honor.
It turns out this is a magnificent legend. King Christian X took his morning horseback rides downtown without escort quite often during the Nazi occupation, to stay in touch with his people. The Germans never imposed the yellow star on Danish Jews, but on Jews elsewhere.
Few non-Jews wore that badge anywhere.
The fact remains that almost every Danish Jew was
hustled off to
When you confront the common dilemma of following regulations or giving someone a helping hand without harming others, do the latter with conviction. If you oversee such people, protect their obligation to do good. If these decisions were commonplace, many protective regulations would become redundant. If criminal employees of some institution won’t clean up their act, they cannot claim our support. Without our support, their pet institutions would collapse—regardless of the level of terror they might inspire.
We live on an incredibly shoddy world stage. Look at it! It’s begging for dramatic improvement.
Sir Lawrence Olivier’s revenant ghost could recruit his favorite actors into a troupe of brilliant workaholics obsessed with thespian perfection. These worthies could take years to rehearse their scenes and months longer to perfect their costumes. If they staged their Falstaff in a closed garbage dumpster, however, their performance would be flawed, no matter how intrepid their delivery.
I've been told by some jokers at my expense, that such a scene would be worth watching. As a sad lesson in morality, perhaps? I would rather watch this Lear played close to perfection on an excellent stage.
Misguided by weapon mentality, we’ve wasted lifetimes fine-tuning our personal perfection amidst a global concentration camp. Once our pursuit of learning, abundance, justice and wilderness turns this garbage dumpster WeaponWorld into a PeaceWorld worthy of our brilliance – and only then – our quest for self-perfection may bear fruit. Until then, we waste precious lifetimes on feel-good palliatives and throwaway sainthood, simply to feel better about ourselves despite our utter failure.
The proof resides in the last few thousand years of history. Misreading the instruction of our Prophets, we’ve zealously pursued nothing but personal sainthood. Despite this ceaseless quest, we’ve bungled our social schemes, achieved moral bankruptcy and invited military disaster into our homes to spoil the weekend feast.
That's nothing to joke about.
When our institutions encourage evil, (the way slavery would), they lead us to worsen the common lot despite our best intentions. Once our institutions will direct us to do good more often, without compromise and free of paradox, we will behave better without needing extraordinary self-improvement. We will discover who we really are: beings perfectly adapted to live together in peace and harmony despite our transient weaknesses. We will find our personal sainthood surprisingly advanced, once our institutions perfect themselves.
These inauspicious reversals of personal and institutional priorities arises from common distortions of our historical perspective. From this familiar perspective, our institutions seem like monolithic granite outcrops carved and polished during centuries of painstaking trial and error. On the other hand, each mortal life seems as ephemeral and transient as a raindrop on a hot tin roof. It seems reasonable to endow our institutions with categorical attributes of permanence and perfection, and our perishable selves with nagging demands for never-ending self-improvement.
Learners would reverse these attributes. Our institutions are frail and ephemeral
stopgaps we’ve jury-rigged during these last few centuries just to get by. Human traits have taken millions of years to
adapt us perfectly to this world and to each other. We may transform our institutions in a matter
of weeks, months or years. But the chore
of changing (improving) human nature would be like grinding down
The problem remains: how to improve our institutions peacefully and therefore with near-universal consent? We must recruit all those who have given up in despair, and seek the consent of those who fantasize they’d have something significant to lose in the transformation.
How do we avoid adjusting everything—with, by and for the sword?
There remains one alternative to the pitfalls of the weapon/peace antinomy: that is PeaceWorld. We must infuse our constellation of political metaphors with a superior vocabulary and dialectic. We must walk our talk for the first time in history, relegate weapon technology and weapon mentality to vestigial status.
“Human beings do not live in
the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as
ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular
language which has become the medium of expression for their society … The fact
of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built
up on the language habits of the group.” Edward Sapir, “The Status of
Linguistics as a Science,” Language (
“We are being taught by all
the foregoing to assume as closely as possible the viewpoint, the patience and
the competence of God.” Buckminster
Fuller, Critical Path,
During the second world war, every European faced
the same choice: defy the Nazis or embrace their creed. Today, it’s up to you. No time is left to duck key issues (a
favorite human pastime) and nowhere is left to run and hide. From
But first, you will have to heave some mental ballast overboard. The mental attitudes you should consider ditching have three levels. Each level includes the former and makes it worse. You can choose to be:
· Nescient: “I can only trust those ideas I’ve heard at least a hundred times before. Those concepts are least likely to bring me trouble. Nothing else matters.”
· Credophobic: “I don’t believe any of this bullshit they’ve shoveled into my brain so often, but I can’t afford to believe anything else.”
· Fanaticophobic: “I can only trust those who repeat familiar ideas. Anyone who testifies otherwise is obviously a fanatic, a crank case or a snake-oil merchant. No one can con me; I’m way too cool and classy for that.”
These days, almost everyone has become a fanaticophobe.
You can refute those attitudes and put up with the social ostracism that will come with your refutation. Strike out on your own, for a change. Make up your own mind to take valid risks. Only you can unplug your ears to outlandish new ideas (“Only you can prevent forest fires…”). This takes guts and mental discernment.
Do we have what it takes? I believe you do, if you’ve read this far.
The prevailing orthodoxy bids us attend a “New World
Order” based on international corporate paternalism. This book calls these World Imperialist
Contenders, Wimps. Current events
reveal ongoing Wimp control exercises.
Our spiritual hollowness, the environmental holocaust we witness against
our will, and the rise of militant chaosism – both micro/criminal and
macro/military – reveal the corporate econologic that drives them. Televised thought-control beams industrial
quantities of
From now on, when you think of corporations, think of capricious, enduring, licentious and dangerously stupid monarchies. Learners will deal with multinational corporations the way European republicans dealt with monarchies. Primitive, violent overthrow just provoked a more violent backlash, but intelligent and gradual substitution brought permanent improvement.
On the other hand, old school troglodytes believe that a few ‘chosen ones’ should ‘return’ to some dreamland of uncertain provenance, while the rest of us surrender to Wimp servitude. Hypnotically, these Prisms imprison themselves in their favorite ‘ism’. Be it individualism, libertarianism, ‘strict’ constitutionalism, nationalism, Nazi national socialism, communism, radicalism, anarchism, racism, tribalism, religious fundamentalism or some other simplistic cure-all; it just means getting together with imaginary superiors and sacrificing imaginary inferiors—that’s all it means to them. By their Prism shall you know them.
The title Prism fits many miscreants. It applies equally to military autocrats, politburo absolutists, religious fanatics, government-paid and extra-governmental terrorists, ethnic genocides, crime barons and their secret brothers in the secret police, military-industrial extortionists, reactionary politicians and their know-nothing supporters—as well as you and I on a bad day. In search of soothing simplicity, such activists dehumanize their enemies by turning them into philosophical abstractions, the better to kill them off.
In The Warriors: Reflections on Men in
Professional soldiers prefer to fight competent and courageous enemies; they hold lesser adversaries in contempt. Paradoxically, their enemies are to be despised and destroyed with professional efficiency as long as they resist, but treated honorably once they surrender. When civilians are tortured and destroyed, as they must be in war, (and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise), this must happen with ceremonious reluctance on the part of professional warriors.
Racist warriors turn their enemies into sub-humans. There is no room left in their attitude for mercy, human decency or redeeming values—which adds a mechanical drudgery to war’s other insults.
The enemy of religious and ideological crusaders is not only subhuman but an Incarnation of Evil. He is in unimaginable revolt against God, the Leader or some other lofty principle. Killing him is not only a crusader’s filthy obligation, it is his divine calling. Expect even less mercy from such mass murderers.
In addition, compared to the glory of the abstraction they adopt, everyone’s well-being and survival are irrelevant, be they of opponents, innocent bystanders, partners and even themselves—even if the adopted ideal forbids such aggression. For example, Shias and Sunnis fight each other, even though they are both practicing Muslims and therefore formally forbidden to do so in the Koran. Mohammed would not have been pleased, had he known of this disgrace. May Learners never be so debased! You murderous cowards will have no acceptable excuse, this time around.
On the other hand, irredeemably reasonable people consider their opponents fellow human beings, victims of forces beyond our control—especially during warfare. Contradictions between their healthy attitude and the brutal requirements of combat make this attitude (and sanity) difficult to maintain very long on the battlefield, where hesitation often leads to casualties and defeat. Jesus or survival?
Professional soldiers dislike are particularly critical of attitude. From their point of view, scorning the enemy simplifies the dangerous task of killing him and subduing his survivors. Thus, they prefer reflexive contempt (despite its mercilessness) to any undermining sense of fellow feeling. Since it’s hard to keep things straight while thinking two opposite thoughts, they feel equal contempt for anyone outside their military clan.
In This Thing of Darkness: a Sociology of the
Enemy,
· Naming: a false characterization of one individual as a model of an abstract evil category.
· Legitimization: validating this lie by subverting official findings.
· Myth-making: creating false history to confirm the lie.
· Sedimentation: embedding these legends into the next generation’s memory, as part of a group bonding dynamic.
· Ritual: the traumatic, theatrical extinction of victims, often by ritual torture and by entangling their family members.
· We might add a sixth element, Martyrdom: the sacrifice of minor bigots to horrified authorities after the above-described Ritual, and their canonization by senior bigots who got clear away. God, how they do love to feel sorry for themselves! Especially once they’ve gotten away with some unbelievable atrocity.
These habits are no doubt twisted versions of peace-equivalent ‘mixing bowl’ rituals. With a few minor rewrites of the theatrics involved, we could probably use them to promote mutual respect and social tolerance. Like most weapon rituals, they could be converted to the uses of peace with a little finagling.
It is interesting to note that the most warlike tribes during the most chaotic and deadly periods of intertribal warfare adopted prisoners of war into their tribe to replace its horrific battle casualties. Thus, the worst, most deadly bigots also became experts at the art of turning bitter enemies into blood brothers. Life is paradox.
Today’s best-organized fanatics look forward to an ultimate Prismatic orgy of violence. It would climax with the planetary, pan-toxin gangbang we’ve been preparing for, these last few decades. The bio-chemo-nano-nuclear-scalar extermination of us, the hated Others, as well as the fearsome Other Within. Each of us denies our part in this upcoming disaster. It could never have happened without our loyal collaboration. It will erupt – deteriorating gradually and then exploding spontaneously and unstoppable – if we don’t take vigorous steps to thwart it.
Both Wimps and Prisms rely on weapon mentality. Their ethics are equally corrupt and their odds of long-term success, nil. Sooner or later, their power trips will degenerate into blood baths. It’s merely a matter of time and weapon sophistication.
Fortunately, most people’s beliefs (or lack thereof) can be harnessed to peace struggle and Satyagraha: of which more in its own chapter.
This text advocates an alternate ideology, upheld by an army of one (me). It claims no sponsorship from the Skull & Bones, the Mujihadeen, the International Monetary Fund or any such. I hope this disclaimer tempts you to rally to its cause.
Learners will require the complete technological infrastructure humanity has assembled today. It must remain intact, growing and properly refined. What’s more, we will require that fewer and fewer people be deprived of home, homeland, security and livelihood.
Learners shall address the needs of the rich as effectively as those of the info-proletariat. In other words, a thousand times better than weapon managers ever got away with. Unlike weapon dissidents, Learners will require the enthusiastic cooperation, expertise and capital management of current info elites. Without them, none of this transformation will be possible.
We have barely accumulated enough capital and mutual good will to undertake this Learner transformation. Any massive societal breakdown (of the kind weapon dissidents keep longing for) would drive us to lower Levels of weapon barbarism and eventual annihilation. We cannot afford any more mass destruction, pilferage and terror of the type we’ve agreed – sigh! – was regrettably unavoidable.
As for those who seek to annihilate civilization while they hone their personal and/or Good Book survival skills, I stand in awe of their panic. Whether they adhere to the Unabomber’s screed, to some fundamentalist’s rant or to the murderous voices ringing in their head, their traumatic simplification of reality bodes ill for all or us—themselves included. May Learners revive their petrified imagination and cure them of their craving for lethal simplification!
I recall reading about a young mountain tribesman who got arrested for enforcing a blood feud. When the police asked him why he had murdered an innocent stranger, he told them he did it because his mother had urged him on. Women are just as lethal, in this context, as are men—perhaps more so, potentially. They can serve the uses of peace even more vigorously.
So-called ‘primitive’ shamans once informed a foreign observer that the main difference between men and women is this. Men hunt, fight and chop down trees; women tend children, men and gardens. Thus, men and women are entitled to their natural differences in talent, strength and aptitude. But, most importantly, women must tell men when to stop. We have forgotten that trustworthy right to veto.
Nothing is as permanent as it seems, not even annihilation. During the next Paroxysm of soiled underpants panic and mass stupidity, we may destroy the biosphere, the human race or just human civilization. It would only be a matter of the megatonnage we choose to offload, laced with additional deadly disease, twisted weather and weapon grade nano-tech.
Those dismal outcomes are largely moot to someone who believes in reincarnation. We’ll just have to re-enact the entire vicious farce of history, in order to reach current levels of peace potential. After the radioactive rubble stops bouncing, we can take a few thousand years the re-enact the entire history of human weapon civilization, or millions of years since the Dawn of Man, or billions more since life took hold on Earth.
Take your pick, you pompous bombardiers! You’ll have to wait awhile longer before you have bombs big enough to drive us further back in time. That’s all your malicious panic can do, just delay things a little while longer during life’s near-infinite time span.
How much more time do we wish to squander on historical re-enactments? How many more devourings, rapes, suicides, crucifixions, pogroms and massacres must we witness for our dining and dancing pleasure—before we do the right thing?
You can read all about war in your newspapers and history books. What you’ll never read is this. After every war, things pretty much return to the way they were before the war began. Survivors interact, love and hate one another, care for lucky youngsters and go about their business. The war, no matter how “glorious and significant,” changes nothing. Exactly the same result (a much better one, more likely) could have been achieved during an equivalent peace. The only real difference resides in the decades of additional work it will take to rebuild the wealth and trust that war squandered and to replace its irreplaceable casualties. Everyone loses every war; there are no winners except weapon elites.
During the early evolution of terrestrial life, multi-cellular organisms underwent one dramatic transformation. Primitive colonies let central cells starve out and suffocate. Surrounded, as they were, by layers of 'selfish' cells along the outer rim, they couldn’t get enough food and oxygen to survive. More complex, three-dimensional life forms couldn’t evolve until ‘privileged’ outer cells collected surplus nutrients and oxygen, and passed them into the ‘poorer’ center. Then, they had to transmit this talent unto latter generations.
Anyone who spouts "survival of the fittest" dogma had better contemplate "survival of the most generous.” Natural ecologies support the most complex community of sharers that can tailor their lives to mutual support in this environment. See Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution.
“Over
millions of years, nature’s ecosystems engineers have been especially effective
in the promotion of overyielding [my italics]. They have coevolved with other species that
exploit the niches they build. The
result is a harmony within ecosystems.
The constituent species, by spreading out into multiple niches, seize
and cycle more materials and energy than is possible in similar
ecosystems. Homo sapiens is an ecosystems engineer
too, but a bad one. Not having coevolved
[author’s note: in intimate proximity—a peace technology we could carefully
cultivate] with the majority of life forms we now encounter around the world,
we eliminate far more niches than we create.
We drive species and ecosystems into extinction at a far higher rate
than existed before, and everywhere diminish productivity and stability.” Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life, Alfred A. Knopf,
Once a Learner creed takes hold, info elites blessed with surplus wealth will discover the titanic profits they may achieve (pragmatic yet fully moral) once they sustain the rest in superior equity. Compared to this abundance, their latest, most grandiose accomplishments will look like mere slumlord flops.
While everyone merits modest comforts, those who excel may outstrip that minimum by no more than five to one between the highest and lowest fifths of the population, and fifteen to one between the highest and lowest income percentiles of the population. Thus, the higher the comfort ladder the poorest may climb, the more luxuries the rich may permit themselves in good conscience.
Here I go again, making specific pronouncements when Learners’ only real goal is to trigger global transformation in general, then step aside and let experts and specialists optimize their topics of passion. I should let some Learner more qualified do this work for me.
“Socioeconomic Democracy is a model socioeconomic subsystem in which there is some form of Universal Guaranteed Personal Income [UGI] as well as some form of Maximum Allowable Personal Wealth [MAW], with both the lower bound on personal material poverty and the upper bound on personal material wealth set and adjusted democratically by all society.” Robley E. George, Socioeconomic Democracy: An Advanced Socioeconomic System, Praeger Studies on the 21st Century, Praeger Publishers, Westport, Connecticut, London, 2002, p. 91.
Learners will seek neither absolute economic equality nor absolute economic opportunity. For that matter, it will be the nature of Learners to shun any absolute. Everything in moderation (except wisdom, beauty and elegance), everything well balanced, everything promoting peace.
Stalin and Pol Pot demonstrated that the former alternative leads to absolute poverty and millions of corpses of entrepreneurs of all kinds. Whether civilian or military, bureaucratic or professional, farm or factory managers; everyone who tried to get ahead was killed, and many more innocent of such ambition. The United States have demonstrated the unhealthy polarization of wealth and poverty when the latter is adopted without exception.
A golden mean must be found, so that everyone may live comfortably, entrepreneurship may not be deprived of its creativity and rightful gain, and a much healthier moral conscience may prevail within all of society and each individual. It is a question of becoming much wiser: the ultimate goal of Learners.
A good conscience is the ultimate luxury of rich and poor alike. Compared to it, their shining treasures and ringing honorifics are mere baby baubles and babble; compared to it, all their sacrifice and suffering are a waste of time and energy.
I’m not talking about the satisfaction one may experience by clawing one’s way to the top of the human meat pile; or of that experienced by the few rich who struggle for the rights of the poor. I am talking about real self-worth, real conscience and real well-being: things weapons societies have sacrificed on the weapons altar, worth a thousand times all their diktats and conspicuous consumption, all their submission to suffering or rebellion against it, once they realize what was missed.
As yet, we don’t have a term for such a variable political entity as a Learner. Currently, we are nameless and therefore powerless. We are powerless because we reject better doctrine. Somehow, we expect to muddle along despite our refusal to improve the content of political discourse.
Indeed, our constellation of political metaphors is a patchwork of obsolete buzzwords and rusty clichés that may have held some promise in the distant past, but none today. These mushy euphemisms (democracy, left versus right, capitalism, collectivist, phtui!) do nothing but worsen our errors and compound their ill effect. Politics-as-usual forbids us to tinker with the creaking boilerplate of civilization. Learners notes this curb to progress and side-steps it.
“These
principles, therefore … are to be submitted to the dispassionate and patient
investigation … of those individuals of every rank and class and denomination …
who have become in some degree conscious of the errors in which they exist; who
have felt the thick mental darkness by which they are surrounded; who are
ardently desirous of discovering and following truth wherever it may lead; and
who can perceive the inseparable [connection] which exists between individual
and general, between private and public good!” Robert Owen, Catechism, Cole,
205-7. Taken from The
Life and Ideas of Robert Owen, by A.L. Morton, Monthly
Review Press, 1963, p. 128.
One cannot cheat at Learning, lie about it or avoid it. Bullies learn evil; victims, endurance; and progressives, if they’re lucky, patience and compassion. Everyone learns to do it better next time. Learning is hard-wired into us; it is our favorite game. From conception to death (and perhaps beyond), our consciousness burns to learn.
The verb ‘to learn’ begs for its active voice, to supplement the passive one we’ve grown accustomed to. We need to upgrade its original intent, from ‘passively absorbing information’ to ‘exchanging information freely.’ “I learned to read … My school-marm learned me to read.” In addition, the term Learners, as understood here, includes the packet of information each of us needs to absorb to get on with civilized life. I claim my share of Learners and hope to trade my share for yours.
The words ‘teaching’ and ‘education’ carry an overburden of compulsion and regimentation that has nothing to do with the ‘Learning’ we’re talking about.
While the index to Theories of Learning – A Comparative Approach has many entries under punishment, conditioning and suchlike compulsions, there are no entries under play and games. Interestingly, the only reference to play occurs in the Preface of the book, where the editors explain how much play they indulged in while they “worked on the problem” of learning.
While this book may address an unsuspecting mass of Learners (“Who, me?”) it seeks those special people who recognize the Learner within themselves the instant they scan these lines.
Learners! Rally here!
We are all born Learners; none may abstain. The body of Learners embraces infant and elder; rich person and poor; victim and tormentor; know-nothing, academe and self-taught alike. Age, race, sex, abilities and other identity positions are one and the same on the playground of Learning.
Once all the Learners across the planet recognize each other and rally to their topics of passion according to their talents and interests, the stars will be ours for the asking.
This text rejects straitjacket terms like Leftist and Rightist. I’ve met some decent, thoughtful conservatives. Believe me, I’ve appealed to far too many ‘progressives’ and ‘activists’ whose only commitment was to their do-nothing organization and dead-end prejudices. I found many more people whose politics slid right off this scale.
Weapon mentality’s incompatible demands empower multinational and multi-denominational right-wingers, even though the rest of us despise them. Don’t tell me that extremists like Slobodan Milosevic, the KGB and their historical replacements are ‘Leftists.’ They imitated all the tactics of typical Right Wing reactionaries. Essentially, they are interchangeable weapon managers. Most of us bear the talon-marks of these buzzards, as do our friends and families overseas.
Today, ‘moderate’ reactionaries, ‘compassionate’ conservatives, shadistic liberals and mercenary radicals elbow each other across our TV screens. Each group lauds the peace content of its own position and condemns the weapons outcome of its adversaries. No one uses terms like ‘peace content’ and ‘weapons outcome,’ however. That forbidden vocabulary would make everyone’s inexcusable lapses and shared strengths all too obvious.
Learners will conserve every worthwhile value, extend a liberal hand toward those less fortunate, and go to the (radical) root of social problems. I might even conclude they’ll display reactionary revulsion—at renewed attempts to validate weapon mythology, for example. More accurate political shorthand might replace weapon managers’ ‘fearful hatred’ with Learners’ ‘love without fear or reproach.’
Free enterprise is a precious commodity in many settings; central planning is, in others. The so-called free market fosters central planning by corporations and centralized corporate welfare within weapon states. It’s hard to witness those activities in their purest form, since they become toxic when they’re only game in town.
Any habit and institution that promotes honest peace should be accepted. Everything that blocks it should be marginalized. Peace benefits should be identified and magnified; weapons aspects should be isolated and rendered vestigial. The same social winnowing should apply to every political dualism that so-called leftists and rightists have failed to resolve as long as they controlled the terms of debate.
Successful social transformation demands that rulers and ruled achieve mutual consensus—not a shared dominance and submission. This can only happen through near-universal consent among the well-informed. Our orthodox constellations of political metaphors cannot describe this unheard-of consensus. This book calls it a Cooperative of Plenty on the material plane, Laocracy on the political, and the World or Virtual Agora on the intellectual.
Today, we submit to reductionist, hyperactive and hyper- (actually, semi-) rational humanism. In deference to this tyranny, a coalition of nation-states and multinational corporations oversees the most culturally isolated and politically neutered information proletariat that it can engineer.
Every political party conspires to further this runaway despotism: from Socialists and Communists, to Democrats and Republicans, to Nationalists and Fascists, and then back around again. Reflexively, info elites shield their rice bowl in the weapon status quo. Meanwhile, they take great pains to hide their fundamental motives.
Those who confront this multi-headed Gorgon emerge as militant extremists, either Left or Right. Every ‘revolutionary’ member of a proto-elite is imbued with the same weapon mentality as his tyrannical archenemy. He promises to confront orthodox violence with redundant threats of popular violence. He anticipates social collapse and plots to manipulate it—with no more success than his dead-end predecessors. Revolutions, crusades and jihads improve only one thing: the next round of weapon technologies.
We live in an algedonic age. The real rules are the ones we understand least. Crucial social rules are neither discussed nor acknowledged by popular consent. They control a vast meta-system of warfare that doesn’t intrude into our lives until the lead slug, toxiplasm or gamma ray with our name on it crashes into us. Until then, we remain placid, more or less reluctant co-conspirators with weapon management.
On the other hand, Learners will sustain syncretism (“as the Cretans did”). They will identify failing institutions and then remove, reform or circumvent them. Everyone’s life-quality, sacred awareness, natural habitat and long-term profit will benefit.
We cannot sort these priorities effectively outside
a
Greed, power-hunger, and deprivation/abuse/neglect fears will diminish under Learner administrations. Criminals, the obsessively rich and other social parasites will grasp the true meaning of wealth and power, once they’ve allowed their primary fears to subside. New benefits will outweigh old fears. Thus will violence and untruth dwindle.
Those insane few who persist in nurturing ancient evils will be caught up in social safety nets much more flexible, benign and secure than the makeshifts we rely on today: malign neglect before the fact, and razor wire compounds after.
Only by adopting Learner priorities – and subordinating lesser ones – may we expect real progress.
In the meantime, the best among us attempt to relieve specific social ills in a vacuum. No one person or group could hope to resolve any of these problems in a mere lifetime’s work, each of them seems so overwhelming.
Frustrated reformers obey the useless logic of scientific reductionism. They sub-divide one large problem into tiny tidbits insignificant enough to seem workable, and then pick the smallest of them for resolution. These weapon reformers seek compromise solutions by scavenging them from the discards of weapon technology. They are very careful to leave monolithic weapon technologies intact, lest fear-haunted elites forbid them any further improvement.
Independent groups of ‘morally superior’ beings perform this hopeless microsurgery, in direct competition with other reformers for starvation resources. Their trivial pecking orders resemble infighting among starving chickens. We’ve tried every variant of this tactic for thousands of years, despite unremitting failure. This behavior defines insanity: doing the wrong thing over and over again, and expecting better results.
We must first topple weapon mentality from its pedestal. Only then may PeaceWorld stand a chance of succeeding.
Anti-cannibalism, universal salvation, personal emancipation, constitutional rights, class equity, worker solidarity, sexual liberation and apartheid terminated: it’s amazing how many initiatives progressives have set in motion despite our human frailties! However, every time a mighty new ideal permitted some isolated group to pry itself loose for a moment from weapon mentality’s grasp, regrouped weapon managers awaited the next opportunity to ambush and scatter that peaceful consensus. In a weapon dominion, paradox and paralysis attend every isolated lunge at progress, no matter how well-meant.
We are on the verge of an Ethical Revolution as staggering as the Industrial Revolution itself. We have endured weapon management for so long, we no longer grasp the sovereignty of peace—it has ceased to signify. We don’t respect or recognize anything, any longer, except aggression. Our societies are less and less able to handle any project, except killing as many victims as possible in the shortest possible time.
Weapon mentality has stacked itself steeper than its angle of repose. Thus, its eminent collapse is inevitable. This semi-pure Tao of Yang is long overdue for a major infusion of Yin.
In order to invoke peace mentality, we must manage the world under one roof, and that a peaceable one. Each nation may attempt to guard its national sovereignty by sacrificing the property and children of its citizens; but this reflexive nationalism will enslave us to weapon mentality forever.
This said, Normal Angell made a very valid point about nationalism:
“However mischievous some of
the manifestations of Nationalism may prove, the worst possible method of
dealing with it is by the forcible repression of any of its claims which can be
granted with the regard to the general interest. To give Nationalism full play, as far as
possible, is the best means of attenuating its worst features and preventing
its worst developments. This, after all,
is the line of conduct which we adopt [with respect] to certain religious
beliefs which we may regard as dangerous superstitions. Although the belief may have dangers, the
social dangers involved in forcible repression would be greater still.” Norman Angell (pseudonym for
As long as weapons elites coordinate proxy wars between nation states and other Prism sub-aggregates – as they manage to do today – weapon proliferation and social contradictions will condemn us to misery in the short term and to military annihilation in the long run. National sovereignty and weapon management have never delivered peace for very long, no matter how painfully they were applied. Only world sovereignty could hope to sustain it into the foreseeable future.
“Two things should be obvious at once:
“… The peace of a political community is impaired by civil strife of all sorts. Whether or not we choose to call such civil violence ‘war,’ the fact remains that civil peace cannot be regarded as perfect until governmental machinery is able to cope with every form of dissension or dispute.
“The perfection of peace does
not depend on the removal of all causes for dispute or strife; nor even on the
avoidance of force in the settlement of differences. It depends on ways of keeping quarrels on the
conversational level, and on a monopoly of the legitimate force needed to
execute decisions.” Mortimer J. Adler, How
to Think about War and Peace, Simon and
Our weapons indoctrination teaches us to dread the prospect of one world government, (see the 1984 Syndrome). This idea makes us nervous because we have been convinced that the only workable alternative is dangerously impossible. At the bottom of our hearts, however, we loathe the current reality that allows Wimps/Prisms to lock us into global mismanagement—not the ideal of one elegant, global polity.
We have as much to fear from one world government as we would from a mayor’s office: benign or corrupt, as the case may be. In other words, we have nothing to fear that Learner vigilance could not handle in the long run. Just as Learner vigilance drafted and upheld the best legislation we’ve written so far, so could it guarantee justice, freedom and plenty for all, under a global regime.
But I cannot leave it at that. We are here to clarify our ideas and render them more complex, not to simplify them.
The Bible and history reveal a fundamental
contradiction. Let’s call it the paradox
of the
1.
And the whole earth was of one
language, and of one speech.
2.
And it came to pass, as they
journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the
3.
And they said one to another, Go
to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had
they for mortar.
4.
And they said, Go to, let us build
us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a
name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5.
And the Lord came down to see the
city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6.
And the Lord said, Behold, the
people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and
now nothing will be retrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7.
Go to, let us go down, and there
confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
8.
So the Lord scattered them abroad
from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the
city.
9.
Therefore is the name of it called
It’s strange, how God intended to bind us to what we feared and loathed the most, and scatter us across the planet…
Likewise, history teaches that every time a civilization achieved heroic heights of inclusiveness, abundance and benevolence, some monstrous cataclysm destroyed it. Whether by plague, drought, volcanic eruption, or a meteor-driven, all-season winter; some calamity befell every society that rationalized itself.
It doesn’t seem to matter that the same fate befell every other human aggregate, civilized or otherwise, and entire pre-human ecologies. It doesn’t matter that primitive tribes were much less vulnerable to natural disaster, in the long run, than urban societies that were more complex, stationary and vulnerable. We are interested in the fate of well-run civilizations, and not of those that never recorded their disappearance. Right?
So what choice do we have? We are confronted by a planetary civilization at odds with itself: vicious and arrogant because it is fragmented where it should be whole (its peace technology) and holistic where it should be fragmented (its mastery of weapons).
On the one hand, God forbids us to kill and Jesus forbids us to harm the little ones. We are supposed to love our neighbor and turn the other cheek to violence. The best way to do that would be for everyone to live under one roof and that roof a peaceable one, very well regulated—in other words, PeaceWorld.
On the other, the God of Genesis appears to have trained us like attack dogs, to suppress our innate teamwork and replace it with enough viciousness that we may execute random mayhem with enthusiasm. The Book of Revelation appears to threaten with the Wrath of God anyone but Jesus who’d dare urge Peace on Earth.
Likewise, the natural world, with its serial disasters that seem to focus in time and space on the greatest centers of civilization. Note the volcanic eruption of Thera that blew Cretan civilization away; the meteor showers that destroyed almost the entire urban fabric of the Middle Bronze Age, first, and of the Early Iron Age a thousand years later – see Burning Libraries (BC) – and so on, recorded in history or not.
It’s hard to record the destruction of your civilization when your last ten generations were utterly preoccupied with not starving to death.
So it must be up to each of us, to decide what we
want to do. Do nothing, sit on our hands
and watch killer primates fatten themselves on the
Let me put it this way. Should planetary disaster befall us, I am sure illiterate survivors will blame it all on our having come together and tried to turn this carnage around. No doubt, the first literate person among them will forgo scratching his fleas long enough to inscribe this solemn truth in the next set of sacred texts.
“Here is the holy post-script of nuclear winter. The peacemakers were horribly wrong. Everything was their fault, and not that of us authors, of our predecessors or militant disciples.
