VERSION FRANCOPHONE INTRO & VOCAB
I sent away on the
Internet for a free Bible in French (www.bibles.ch). The Bible is 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 the Hindu.
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 can be found at the end of LEARNERS’ chapter on Satyagraha—a fitting and timely blend of the best
of these religious creeds, I believe.
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’s not easy to
weave the 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 catch up my French friends who don't read
English. May they overlook 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 Brother need apply. It will be our group 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 Mogadishu on a bad day:
· 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
(America, Europe, Japan...) is like Embassy Row in Mogadishu: occupying the
least damaged, richest, most heavily armed neighborhood of a city in
ruins. I don’t know Mogadishu, so I might be wrong about its “best”
neighborhood. The illustration
stands.
Me, I’m greedy,
selfish and a coward to boot. I’d rather
live quietly in Seattle, Paris or Geneva (name your favorite city) – even as a
poor man – than attempt some desperate survival in the millionaire's district
of Mogadishu or Grozny. Whether it’s my
planet or hometown, the children and I would be better off growing up in Geneva
than dodging bullets down Mogadishu lanes.
I could care less
about all those sharp, sleek, fat cats strutting down Embassy Row. Those gangsters in expensive suits shoot down
and starve children by the million and then turn their back on them. They make me sick. They’re just like the old leadership of East
Germany, categorically worthless. Worthier
leaders are out there; we have merely to find and empower them honestly.
Simply put, I am
talking about transforming 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 safe; all the parks well tended; all the
artwork, ah, the artwork! And the
scientific discoveries!
Mogadishu could
become what it always aspired to be: a local capital of commerce, piety and
Learning; a tropical garden famous for its imperial parks; a thriving,
cosmopolitan port; an appealing tourist attraction and a center of abundance
and wisdom—where the call to prayer would never again be disgraced by
gunfire.
And the West,
Embassy Row of Planet Mogadishu on a Bad Day?
It would transform itself into the same super-luxury district on Planet
Geneva. All the boats would lift
together, yachts as well as dinghies.
Yet my favorite
Chinese philosopher, Mencius,
taught it is wiser to seek Humanity and Duty than a simple profit that can turn
destructive. Humanity, Duty and
Learning: these things could secure more dependable abundance.
After all, what are
our incentives nowadays? That we may
profit from WeaponWorld by perfecting it?
Criminal expediency. That
PeaceWorld might jeopardize our income 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 to it
as our version is not? Circular
reasoning to shirk personal responsibility.
Review our common motives here without mercy, the way a panhandler might
count his pitiful few pennies by drizzly twilight.
Of course, we’re
going to need these other things:
· A set of peace religions that value and embrace each other passionately. Are you a religious bigot preaching exclusion and brutality in the name of God? YOU’RE FIRED!
· A World Militia on the Swiss plan. It 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 World Court. It would investigate every hate crime and act of tyranny, and arrest every criminal at the source and early. Especially if local militias started acting like loose cannon.
· A World Agora of information politics and Learning, operating 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 raising would become a sacred religious obligation. So would the ritual purification of water by filtering it through biomass or some other “miraculous” technology. There’d be others …
· A guaranteed public health service with enough food, clothing, shelter and medical care for everyone. Simply because. As I say further on, a practical charity. We’d be sharing the wealth of Geneva here and not the penury of Mogadishu, both multiplied to planetary scale. More than enough to satisfy everyone's primary needs with a thousandfold left over.
· Free, store-front mediation and arbitration, both religious and non-denominational/public, available automatically to anyone with a grudge or dispute. No civil dispute would go before a jury until it were documented in this way.
· Climax biome restoration in every available habitat; and
· Space exploration in earnest.
You know, all those
things we make mighty noises 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 strength and that of God, it
could turn out to be nicer 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 collectively.
We are stripping the planet bare when we could be gardening Eden.
It’s time we grew
back a new conscience and a healthier one.
Our 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 project of world peace we fear most.
We submit more or
less consciously to this mass-induced if disgraceful stupidity because our
societies evolved through Darwinian selection to fear peace as much as cholera. Both are lethal to primitive cultures and
both are banned by them.
Our cultures train
us from infancy under fulltime hypnosis to shun peace and holy spirit as much
as 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 or 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: the 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. That is 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 that 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’re perched on a blue planet that’s good
for us in every way (even though it might not be our planet of origin, given
the human biological cycle is not 24 hours long), under a big black sky studded with diamond
solitaires and hiding much greater 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 in history, 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’ absolute failure to understand.
Our Christian religions rely on the words of the Apostle Paul, John of
Revelation and St. Augustine. Somehow,
the direct word of Jesus hangs in the background, decorative but
overruled. We heed the words of men, not
the Word of God. That which everyone
should adore in pure faith, almost no one can accept, so thoroughly has it been
corrupted. There’s an obvious void of
faith to be filled.
Jesus’ teachings
were deliberately rotted out 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
require 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
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 when we commit our souls, after dying, into the life of Jesus Christ with
our 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 kill you and your benighted progeny unless you consent to kill
them over there and theirs.”
Every weapon
sermonizer who refines suicidal weapon mentality by preaching cowardly lies,
violence, exclusion, compulsion, betrayal and damnation by an infinitely Loving
God—that creature is 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 may be saved: 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 rot to be officially endorsed
without opposition. It will bruise the
stout egos of those who declare themselves eager for peace—just as soon as
everyone reaches their dizzying height of puritanical pacifism. It will confound many pet pupils who’ve 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 him (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 understand perfectly 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 Stalingrad. No one and
nothing will remain untouched.
What will this
PeaceWorld look like once the smoke clears?
It will delight our Loving God who'll bless it with miracles; unlike
WeaponWorld despised by God, who lets it survive through infinite forbearance
for our unforgivable errors. True
servants of God: athirst for, drunk of and slaked by the peace of God; caring
wisely for every child; regrowing Eden and leaping for the stars. Justice.
Compassion. Peace. You could leave your front door unlocked in
perfect safety.
Think about that.
What if we stopped
fearing peace? What if we understood it
instead? Taught it to the children in
pure truth, to revere peace and uphold it forever on our honor with all our
might?
Once Learners
rally, the heavens themselves will come to our aid.
This is a summary
of LEARNERS.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
CONTACT PAGE (under development)