SUMMARY OF LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
“Your isolation is not so much the direct result of enemy action as of the fact that when you travel this road your experiences are shared by fewer and fewer people, until at last there’s no one to whom you can make yourself understood.” Sarah Patton Boyle, “Spit in the Devil’s Eye: A Southern Heretic Speaks,” from the October 20, 1956 issue of The Nation magazine © 1956. The Nation Company, LP. Reprinted with permission. Also found in The Nation 1865-1990, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Ed., p. 214.
Secretly throughout history, weapons and peace mentors have diced for our wealth, talent, faith, bodies, posterity, sanity and Holy Spirit—the whole caboodle. The first 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 occupants 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 division we hold dear. Age, sex, race, class, religion, ideology, geography and politics—they’re 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:
· Dialectic: parallel along the axis of understanding;
· Antithetical: at right angles to each other's beliefs; and
· Antinomial: directly contradicting each other’s projected outcomes.
This thrice-knotted, forked-tongue garble induces the WEAPON/PEACE ANTINOMY: absolute disparity 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. Its author, Sir Thomas More, describes a “perfect” social order. Everyone agrees that his utopia is not an accurate historical representation, or relevant to present circumstances, or 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 subsequent texts, equally obscure and poorly thought out. Reactionaries and progressives agree that this is all the documentation they need to judge the relative merits of weapon mentality versus peace mentality. Might as well attempt to navigate the Rocky Mountains, using a map of Pangaea.
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 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 to do so – 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 peace 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 equally 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 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. Weapon mentality is 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 manages 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 meliorist 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 understanding of peace and love for 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. They 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 we compare the economic performance of a peaceful society to that of a weapons society, an accurate measure 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 massive 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 staffs, 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 best 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 recognize honor automatically. 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). INFORMATION ELITES 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 will drift onto the razor reefs of their own social contradictions. Quite predictably they will 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 and forwards—they are not categorical, abrupt or necessarily 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 weapon states mature, the defects of misinformation politics become more and more glaring. Lies yield stolen wealth and its entropy into chaos—sustainable wealth grows from nothing but 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 which 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 …” There follows a long list of excuses why inefficient and immoral practices must remain routine.
“Please be more reasonable, ladies and gentlemen. What you propose would be impractical, too costly, subject to abuse by thugs; it wouldn’t jive 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 all 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. As 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 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 World Trade Towers come crashing down. Then everyone scrambles to resume the reassuring chatter of fallacious normalcy. Thus do they expose their necks to the next chop and do nothing to ward it off.
In politics of information, expanding communication systems become more interactive, complex and adaptive. People engage in many more dialogues across new media, rather than submit to top-down monologue propaganda from ‘superior’ elites. They are more interested in their topics of passion than in trivial 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 and in my guest book (which I may have to close down soon, thanks to the prevalence of spammers over thoughtful commentators). I’ll handle the feeding frenzy of worthless 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 give 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. Either in my guestbook or by email—your pick.
The Greek Agora, Town Hall meetings (unscripted… Gotta add that, now that Bush’s disinfo technicians script and rehearse them 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 an order of magnitude 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, Washington, D.C., 1998, p. 219. (Next quote).
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 designed to 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) are pathetic denials 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 United States where military casualties are becoming political poison. This public aversion to military casualties in particular and to militarism in general tempts aggressive outsiders and internal militarists to inflict worse damage. As their assaults grow bolder, better coordinated and more destructive, survivors revert to politics of misinformation and overt weapon tyranny. Those are tempting options in an overly militarized world where knee jerk panic almost always trumps rational thinking.
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 the 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 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; thus they 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 Schuster, New York, 1944, p 42.
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 Belsen wire. The remaining 90% of weapon technicians only serve as logistics and morale supporters for battle elites on their side, and as easy prey on the other. Finally, as firepower multipliers (artillerists and such) on both sides. Whether in war or peace, battle elites do the killing and the rest do the dying.
BATTLE ELITES can’t bring their aggression under control. This makes them valuable assets on the battlefield and costly nuisances elsewhere. Everyone shares some battle elite traits. However, most of us keep ours under strict control. Call it good manners, good taste, conscience, civility, decadence or mere cowardice. Most of us are not hard-wired to thrive on the battlefield and in bar fights, the way battle elites are.
I seem to have made a special Karmic vow to someone who must be very influential to me. I’ve promised not to kill or torture anyone 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? Quite 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 already 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 forward to wreaking havoc on a world of Others they’ve been raised to despise. They seek the highest possible 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.
Type 2s nevertheless 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 World Forest, sowing landmines, starving babies by the millions and vetoing critical environmental, labor, human rights and peace conventions. On WeaponWorld, those promotions are guaranteed for this type of person and no other.
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 to them and more enduring than the phantom pain of 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.
Insofar 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 yourself into a Learner worthy of that name.
Just as a shark retains rows of spare teeth in reserve, info proletariats nurture INFORMATION 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 a cult of personality; so have many other historians and journalists. Everything happens because some poor slob and his flunkies, officially designated the 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, Boulder, Colorado, 1996, p. 95.
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 the 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 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.’ Beware 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. No one demands more than a check that magically disappears with the promise it will support some worthy cause, probably by buying 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 information 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 doesn’t matter how many of us there are or how sensible our proposals, thanks to our historical incoherence and hysterical paralysis.
As a result of thousands of years of defeat, rejection and Balkanization (and the rare, absolutely 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 really 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 LEARNERS 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 exhaustion 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 worst 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, weapon dissidents 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 have its place. Well-regulated COOPERATIVES OF PLENTY shall hail 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 absolute 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, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1991, p. 207.
PEACE MENTALITY sustains our souls. Like a spiritual physicist, Mahatma Gandhi revealed that its nucleus was the fusion of Truth and Non-violence. Our souls sparkle around this nucleus like electrons around a vast atom. Every moment of every day, a still, small voice whispers to us “Love fearlessly.” Tirelessly it repeats itself at celestial amplitude from across the cosmic void. We have merely to listen and obey.
Though peace mentality flares brightly in idealistic young minds, it gutters in middle age and is extinguished in 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 countless setbacks imposed by weapon priorities, peace mentality inches forward. It transcends life and death—much less the shameless narcissism of disinformation politics.
PEACE TECHNOLOGY includes:
· Our flight from misery (above and beyond any “Constitutional” pursuit of happiness);
· Our run at abundance, health, human rights and sustainable agriculture;
· Our worship of nature and supernature;
· Our 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 CAPS) 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 demands that every child be cocooned in optimal surroundings. Their health and Learning 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, get 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 leadership overhaul. 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 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 whole universe is in that scratching. Anything more―that’s just too complicated for us.
“Gee, our carnivores are pretty bad. They hunt us down, kill us and EAT us. But they DO chase off other carnivores who just might be worse. Things could be worse. Anything that really scares us, well, our blind stampede will make it go away, 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 from lack of self-perfection. It doesn’t matter how many times that happens, 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 by 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!”
OMNIVORE: “Salads are fine in their place. My peers and I can neutralize any piddling carnivore at will. It’s fun, plus it's good eats.
“We coordinate the past, the present and the future to improve our odds of personal happiness. We’re not so much interested in everyone else's pursuit of happiness—that’s their business. We ARE interested in accelerating their flight from misery, a political duty 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 wealthier we all become for it. We can use this extra wealth to distract ex-herbivores and divert ex-carnivores until they grasp the fundamentals of Learner civilization.
“After ten 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… That’s 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, make your next lunging charge. It’ll fail, sooner or later, as it always has. Both of you! Join us in peace instead!”
But this is mere EZ listening. Learners shall examine 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 may help us love one another fearlessly—at last!
Debra Niehoff reviews criminal correction in her mindful book, The Biology of Violence, The Free Press, New York, 1999, “Picking Up the Pieces”. A victim of violent crime herself, (as I am, as you are likely to be in this sorry day and age, like almost every past one), she downplays violence as a criminal deterrent and suggests more thoughtful methods of behavior modification. Her research reveals that police terror and penal brutality do not so much suppress criminality, they increase it. This is a constant striving of weapon mentality, to increase criminality and aggression.
We live on a man-made WeaponWorld bereft of God’s Peace, mutual welcome and care. 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.
Say you were neither an atheist nor devoutly religious – equally closed-minded – and sought to prove the existence of God merely for your own satisfaction. There would be no better way to do it than to restructure 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 us – 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, perfectly 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 all the props, costumes and lighting would conform more closely to Peace and improve all the time. Plus the play’s director, writers, cast, producers, sponsors and audience had changed their minds – 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, Allah, Fate or Nothing? Whatever you choose to call it. I call it God and us, God’s, which includes everything above. Does that bother you?
Instead, we have chosen to dawdle as WeaponWorld slaves. Caught up in a tap dance of perpetual war and ephemeral peace, we improvise as we go along, paying homage to two opposing sets of values: weapon mentality and peace mentality. Suffering from this mass schizophrenia and hostage to it, we've become nothing but asocial sheep and incompetent wolves. God’s spoiled children instead of God’s saints.
What an inexcusable waste!
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
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