SUMMARY OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
“A myth is a unit of imagination that makes it possible for a
human being to accommodate two worlds.
It reconciles the contradictions of these two worlds in a workable
fashion and holds open the way between them…
“Myth makes it
possible to live with what you cannot endure.
“And if the
myth has been learned well, it becomes a word—a single word that switches
on the whole system of comforting delusions…
“The function
of a myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a
contradiction. The myth proves that
things have always been like this, that things will never change.” Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull:
Guilt, Sorrow and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa, Times
Books, Random House, New York, 1998, p. 250.
You may find the following conclusion alarming. Our most cherished social truths are weapon myths totally opposed to peace. The weapon/peace dialectic corrodes human conscience, the way sugary saliva melts tooth enamel and acid rain dissolves marble.
As I toss these myths up and bat them out to you, track their trajectories fearlessly and step under them, don’t duck your head. Only your reasoned intuition can replace the measured platitudes of weapon mentality.
We have a book called On War, but no On Peace. That one-sidedness betrays our collective ignorance, apathy and stupidity.
According to Karl von Clausewitz, author of the sacrosanct text On War, (that ultimate exercise in weapon pedantry): “War is a continuation of diplomacy (foreign policy) by other means.” We might as well conclude that agriculture is a continuation of candy bars by other means. Check out the fortunes spent on combat preparations, even in peacetime, versus the pittance paid to professional diplomats. Warfare is a continuation of weapon technology in its purest form. It is our conversion of society’s potential energy into kinetic mayhem.
“In peace time the relations between two diplomats are like relations between two merchants. While the merchants trade in copper or transistors, the diplomats’ transactions involve boundaries, spheres of influence, commercial concessions and a variety of other issues which they have in common. A foreign minister or diplomat is a merchant who bargains on behalf of his country. He is both buyer and seller; though he buys and sells privileges and obligations rather than commodities. The treaties he signs are simply more courteous [Author’s Note: and much less well regulated] versions of commercial contracts.
“The difficulty in diplomacy, as in commerce, is to find an acceptable price for the transaction. Just as the price of merchandise such as copper roughly represents the point where the supply of copper balances the demand for it, the price of a transaction in diplomacy roughly marks the point at which one nation’s willingness to pay matches the price demanded by the other. The diplomatic market however is not as sophisticated [well regulated] as the mercantile market. Political currency is not so easily measured as economic currency. Buying and selling in the diplomatic market is much closer to barter, and so resembles an ancient bazaar in which the traders have no accepted medium of exchange. In diplomacy each nation has the rough equivalent of a selling price – a price which it accepts when it sells a concession – and the equivalent of a buying price. Sometimes these prices are so far apart that a transaction vital to both nations cannot be completed peacefully; they cannot agree on the price of the transaction. The history of diplomacy is full of such crises. …
“… In a diplomatic crisis the currency of one nation or alliance is out of alignment with that of the others. These currencies are simply the estimates which each nation nourishes about its relative bargaining power. These estimates are not easy for an outsider to assess or to measure; and yet these estimates exist clearly in the minds of the ministers and diplomats who bargain.
“…
“A nation facing a payments crisis can measure the extent to which it is living beyond its means. As the months pass by, moreover, it can measure whether its remedies have been effective, for the statistics of its balance of payments are an accurate guide to the approach of a crisis and the passing of crisis. On the other hand a deficit in international power is not so easy to detect. A nation with an increasing deficit in international power may not even recognize its weaknesses. A nation may so mistake it bargaining power that it may make the ultimate appeal to war, and then learn through defeat in warfare to accept a humbler assessment of its bargaining position.
“…
“In diplomacy some nations for a long period can live
far beyond their means: to live beyond their means is to concede much less than
they would have to concede if the issue was resolved by force. A government may be unyielding in negotiations
because it predicts that its adversary does not want war. It may be unyielding because it has an
inflated idea of its own military power.
Or it may be unyielding because to yield to an enemy may weaken its
standing and grip within it own land.
Whereas an endangered nation facing a currency crisis cannot escape some
punishment, in a diplomatic crisis it can completely escape punishment, so long
as the rival nation or alliance does not insist on war. Thus diplomacy may become more unrealistic,
crises may become more frequent, and ultimately the tension and confusion may
end in war.” Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War, The Free Press, Macmillan
Publishing Co., New York, first published by Macmillan in London, 1973, pp.
115-117.
“The real cause of war, on the
contrary, is seen most clearly when it is studied in correlation with the
decrease in profits, which, of course, may itself be due to the increase in
population and to the diminishing productivity of the soil, but which may also
manifest itself independently of these two phenomena as a direct effect of the
diminishing productivity of labor [or current technology] … In other words, as Proudhon remarks, war is
always the result of an economic strain which cannot be remedied by less costly
and less complicated means, such as commerce or a commercial monopoly. Benjamin Constant also truthfully
observes: “Men have recourse to
war only when they feel that commerce is unable to secure for them what they
seek to obtain by force.” Achile
Loria, The Economic Causes of War, John Leslie Garner, Trans., Charles
H. Kerr & Company, Chicago, 1918, p. 55.
So imagine yourself walking into a convenience store, holding your money in one hand and a pistol in the other. Everyone acts this way. Every time anyone buys so much as a pack of gum, both they and the cashier/store owner would have to decide whether money was going to change hands and, if so, how much, based on a mutual assessment of who would win the firefight otherwise.
Would that be a sane way to run a business – or a planet – if any other alternative was available?
Now, to fully replicate our reality of diminishing petroleum reserves and growing weapon technologies, imagine that both parties had children freezing and starving to death back home, and, instead holding of a gun, everyone grasped the detonator to bandoliers of dynamite wrapped around each body: wired to detonate their own, plus everyone else’s.
Would any sane witness stick around – this city or this planet – to see what happened? Could there be a less mythical alternative?
Regardless of your preference, you will be made to swallow war, and war will be made to swallow you. Yet we buy into this other nonsense. “If you want peace, prepare for war.” This quote is just another Latin contaminant in our constellation of political metaphors. Vegetius, a Fifth Century CE Roman, coined that phrase. A total of 150 copies of his De Re Militari, (“On Military Matters”) managed to survive the Dark Ages. This, despite a hecatomb of peace literature during the same period, (per Arther Ferrill’s article “Vegetius”, p. 487, in Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker, Eds., The Reader’s Companion to Military History, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, New York, 1996).
Like other disasters, war serves no purpose other than its own. It just exudes more unforeseen and dire consequences. The only consistent output of warfare is deadlier and deadlier weapon technologies. Wars are never short. Warfare is perpetual. Some wars are shortened by stagey statecraft: Desert Storm, Panama and Grenada, for example. This homicide interruptus just lessened their decisiveness. Long wars are trivially decisive; short wars, absolutely inconclusive.
Weapon mythology ennobles wars no nobler than latrine buckets on death row.
Somehow, we credit war with breakthroughs in literacy, freedom, social harmony, equality and other social benefits that elites HAVE TO cough up sooner or later—if only with the utmost reluctance. Even though they benefit the most from that exchange in the long run. Somehow, wars constitute the only acceptable form of male bonding. They turn boys into men and render invisible its cripples, mental vegetables and cadavers.
Haven’t we heard these weapon myths a thousand times over? Haven’t we memorized them hypnotically and recited them to each other for a hundred generations?
Instead, we should devote the Virtual Agora to peace mentality and saturate the collective superconscience with peace myths. Instead, we should make these phenomena perceptible to anyone interested in them, through the Virtual Agora of PeaceWorld. We’d no longer offer up in error all those sinister thoughts, writings, dramas and results on the altar of weapon mentality. Then we’d see how much better we could render the common lot.
Let’s imitate the wisest of primal shamans. In their ancient wisdom, they consigned combat survivors to elaborate rituals of social withdrawal and purification. No one could rejoin the peaceful community until he/she had completed these ceremonies. In the modern world, we ignore this subliminal venom. Unacknowledged, it curdles veterans’ psyches, turns them into walking dead: final casualties of wars long forgotten.
“Latest figures show that 264 [British] veterans of the 1982 Falklands
war have committed suicide since the conflict, compared with the 255 who died
in active service.” http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030521165439.qscyf5x8.html
Meanwhile, Simon Gardner of Reuters (8-19-2004) writes that over 300 Argentinean veterans have
killed themselves since the war—perhaps denoting the therapeutic benefits
of Latin passion over Anglo-Saxon emotional reserve, when it comes to
post-traumatic stress; since there were a lot more Argentinean veterans and
since they suffered military defeat and its psychological aftermath.
Victorious or defeated, combat veterans are heart-broken because they survived beloved peers. If they find no permissible outlet for their grief, their obsessive, adrenal-grenadier internal monologue runs something like this. “Since I had nothing better to do, I let the armed (Harm) Forces squander my golden youth in contempt, regimentation, brutality and terror. Myself, beloved companions and countless innocents were forced to run this gauntlet of defilement, disfigurement and death. Just by participating, we endorsed all this suffering. We survivors bear a fearsome blood guilt. Those who refused to participate are even guiltier in our eyes.”
Peace activists are the guiltiest of all, as far as they are concerned. We reject the utility of war without experiencing it. As if we had to catch the plague in order to seek its cure? In so doing, we have rendered that much less tolerable each warrior’s burden of pain and shame. After all, shouldn’t we be grateful they shouldered this staggering burden? Is that not the least we could do: honor them and their pain?
No way. Warriors have been honored to death for far too long. There’s been no improvement in sight, for us or for them. It is high time humanity resumed ancient rituals of warrior decontamination and psychic decompression, instead of glorifying those who’ve dealt intimately with unclean abominations and failed to purify themselves. It’s time we joined together, reluctant warriors and confused peaceniks alike, to resume the ancient ways of peace.
What little good comes from war, any well-run peace could produce much sooner and more profitably. Those who suggest otherwise are running a con, consciously or otherwise. Anyone who asserts that war promotes creativity while peaceful societies stagnate, that person is living in a dream.
“We may be
sure that wars will continue on the earth.
War may be a biological necessity in the development of the human race
– God’s housecleaning, as Ella Wheeler Wilcox calls it. War may be a great soul stimulant meant to
purge mankind of evils greater that itself, evils of baseness and world
degeneration. We know there are blighted
forests that must be swept clean by fire.
Let us not scoff at such a theory until we understand the immeasurable
mysteries of life and death. We know
that, through the ages, two terrific and devastating racial impulses have made
themselves felt among men and have never been restrained, sex attraction and
war. Perhaps they were not meant to be
restrained.
“Listen to John Ruskin, apostle of art and
spirituality:
“‘All
the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war. No great art ever rose on earth but among a
nation of soldiers. There is no great
art possible to a nation but that which is based on battle. When I tell you that war is the foundation of
all the arts, I mean also that it is the foundation of all the high virtues and
faculties of men. It was very strange
for me to discover this, and very dreadful, but I saw it to be quite an
undeniable fact. The common notion that
peace and the virtues of civil life flourished together I found to be utterly
untenable. We talk of peace and
learning, of peace and plenty, of peace and civilization; together; that on her
lips the words were peace and sensuality, peace and selfishness, peace and
death. I found in brief that all great nations
learned their truth of word and strength of thought in war; that they were
nourished in war and wasted in peace; taught by war and deceived by peace;
trained by war and betrayed by peace; in a word, that they were born in war and
expired in peace.’ ” Cleveland
Moffet, The Conquest of America at
http://www.knowledgerush.com/paginated_txt/etext05/7conq10/7conq10_s1_p10_pages.html
.
[Author’s
note: All this is perfectly true on
WeaponWorld, where war and preparation for war eradicate every trace of
peace. On PeaceWorld, where peace
flourished and war were equivalent to feasting on a plate of shit, luxuriant
peace would outperform war by thousands of times. As did prior peaceful tribes, we would find
dynamic means to endure and neutralize the harmful effects of egotism, idleness
and opulence. These are mythical reasons
to perpetuate mass killing, which is forbidden to us by God while the other
three are not—in case you’d forgotten.]
I recall one bellicose author who asserted how much more advanced, enlightened and brilliant international conflict made the world. This is another pet weapon myth. Fearlessly, (I must admit with some admiration) he visited Kosovo, Kigali and like military pestholes to fuel his otherwise insightful journalism. He collected important friends and powerful contacts at each stop. He could have chosen any one of these sites in which to settle. Instead, he’s raising his kids in some quiet backwater of Western Massachusetts. Presumably, what he really meant to say was that war is creative and enlightening FOR OTHER PEOPLES’ KIDS.
Weapon managers view real creativity and Learning with tremendous suspicion. At best, such attributes are effeminate and debilitating liabilities. At worst, they are treasonous assaults on long-cherished traditions and idiot protocols.
As for the stagnancy of peace, well: “95% of everything is crap,” as a wise guy once put it. And 95% of the people are mindless drones doomed by current ‘education’ to intellectual inertia and rote repetition of banal futility. Meanwhile, 5% or less of the population does and says anything of good or ill consequence. Learners alone, in a truly peaceful setting, could reverse these ridiculous percentiles through seriously applied Learning.
The list of weapon myths is endless. We recite them to each other endlessly. No real peace will emerge until we halt this ceaseless invocation—until we challenge, recognize and defy every weapon myth on the spot.
Two more weapon myths allow people to behave like ostriches, their heads stuck in the sand to hide from lethal hazards.
The first is the epithet ‘paranoid’. These days, paranoid is an adjective commentators use to describe anyone who discusses controversial and potentially dangerous topics without paying due reverence to the rotten status quo. ‘Paranoid’ is their shorthand code for: “I was too distracted and indifferent to study what he had to say in a serious manner. His content isn’t worth looking into; trust my spineless prejudice.”
The second is ‘conspiracy theory.’ In America, there is only one kind of conspiracy, the failed kind. Bumbling amateurs commit some massive crime in broad daylight. They leave a giant paper trail no rookie journalist could miss. They are too soft-hearted to kill and terrorize many witnesses who will give up the whole story without worrying about their family’s safety. That is the only accepted definition of a conspiracy in American popular culture.
Unfortunately, there is another kind of conspiracy: one in which cunning, powerful and merciless malefactors are very skilled at perpetrating their own crimes and exposing those of their enemies. They and their mentors have practiced for centuries; they are experts. They can call on enormous institutional memory of criminal and police practices, hire the best professionals to do their dirty work. They are so rich and influential, they control the official mass media. They have no conscience: killing witnesses is a minor inconvenience. They have enough patience to clean up after themselves, and many eager subordinates to take the fall if necessary.
Classical Greeks, at the height of their power, used to brand this practice as oriental, effeminate and degenerate despotism. They spat on it and crushed it almost effortlessly. A few thousand free citizens could route the largest horde these gangsters could bully into the front line—no matter if it were ten times more numerous. They didn’t surrender to the Roman Empire until they were dominated by like-minded gangsters from the neighborhood. These gangsters rot their own armies, by definition. This transparent gangsterism (Submit to our obvious wrongdoing or else!) is all our vibrant freedoms have degenerated into. We should be ashamed of our limp-wristed tolerance of this corruption.
Once the crime has been committed, there is no paper trail. There are no surviving witnesses except those terrified into silence. There is an overwhelming accumulation of circumstantial evidence, obvious lies and loose ends no one can explain, and piles of dead bodies instead of key witnesses; but no evidence that would stand up in court. Anyone who uncovers that evidence, after a lifetime’s investigation, gets quietly eliminated. Blackmail and extortion endure for decades, even the threat of civil war if word gets out. Official archives are sealed and incriminating evidence is confiscated and ‘lost’ by the bushel load. Most official investigators are supervised by these conspirators and their allies. They find nothing wrong, seemingly through unbelievable incompetence, which earns them their next promotion.
In America, this is never a conspiracy. A successful conspiracy is not a conspiracy; it is standard official policy, perfectly legitimate. Anyone who says otherwise can be branded a conspiracy theorist and dismissed as such without a hearing. What a reassuring and effortless way to mollycoddle powerful, well-connected and influential criminals. How convenient for them. What moral cowards everyone else turned out to be, in their pay and at their mercy!
As for the conspirators, success rewards success; they are tempted to outdo themselves the next time, and do so gleefully. Criminal conspiracy is their ace in the hole, their ultimate backup argument. It is perfectly legitimate, protected by popular convention, official sanction and media repression. Nothing stops them. We live in an age when no one well-connected is personally responsible for anything and when every wrong is someone else’s fault. Weak individuals are crushed, whether they’re guilty or not; and powerful people are free to misbehave in perfect anonymity with perfect impunity.
What a perpetual train wreck on instant replay; what pure Zola! Except Zola himself would be branded a conspiracy theorist and strictly forbidden from accusing anyone of anything. [Note: Emile Zola wrote a book called I Accuse that blew wide open an infamous French scandal, the Dreyfus Affair]. I’d rather be branded a paranoid conspiracy theorist and left without a dime, than pocket the paychecks of twenty slime ball collaborators well-paid and well promoted to protect gangland conspirators.
A strong case can be made, that the ultimate achievements of hierarchical politicians may be to induce pain and suffering among the enemy and to force one’s own people to endure additional misery. After all, the dead don’t vote or submit to public policy. Only poor, grieving survivors need choose between surrender and continued resistance under unbelievable stress. Armies don’t collapse until their suffering reaches an intolerable level of grief and agony. Casualty counts are the only valid quantifiers of the misery that armies must generate and their victims endure.
It is fortunate for us that our DNA took millions of years, prior to recorded history, to perfect itself in the form of intimately peaceful pack scavengers. Any deviation from the purest of ethics, any cumulative mayhem, unfruitful deviancy or misallocation of scarce resources destroyed violence-contaminated packs. Operating on a razor-thin margin of survival, they lacked any leeway to drift from moral excellence.
It may seem we are sealed in an armored carapace of thousand-year military history. But this is just a skim, rancid icing on a much deeper and sweeter cake of behavioral excellence. The freedom we seek is not based on some fantasy utopia (as weapon mentors keep insisting). It is based on the perfect freedoms our ancestors carried around in their hearts, guts and brains for hundreds of thousands of years. Paleolithic, hunter-gatherer freedom is the political context we crave, regardless of the fear weapon mentors have acid-etched with adrenalin onto our minds.
The spread of peace would not affect Learners alone in a vacuum. When we confront an aggressor today – be he lone gunman or military-industrial complex – we expect the Other to share our fears and weapon myths. They dictate that we hesitate to extend any overture of peace to him and that he reject our attempts to do so, unless one of us is down for the count. Weapon mythology whispers the same prejudices into everyone’s ears. According to its prejudices, every attempt at peacemaking is a token of weakness and betrayal that should inflame universal suspicion, hostility and aggression.
If peace mentality prevailed in our constellation of political metaphors, we could dissipate aggression (bilateral or unilateral) with common, mutually acceptable formulas and gestures of reconciliation. These would never be considered tokens of weakness, but reliable displays of wisdom, trustworthiness and safe power. Any child could defuse a murderous gun battle in an instant―the same way a beta pack scavenger shuts down an alpha-dominant’s lethal punishment by exposing its defenseless underbelly.
This capacity for automatic peacemaking is hard-wired into every healthy human being. We have merely forgotten it temporarily, deprogrammed it from our minds and driven ourselves out of our mind in the process. Once Learners respond to the worldwide rally cry, we will form an inarguable majority: an overwhelming one that will neutralize, therapeutically, those tiny minorities too badly traumatized to control their aggression.
I was inspired to cry wolf like this when I read Jean Bacon’s breakthrough book, The Greater Glory, Prism Press, California, 1986. The English translation of its third edition is due out soon.
Thereafter, we will study and institutionalize many hidden talents and capabilities. We may unleash enormous psychic energies that we’d held in check up ‘til now. We repressed these talents out of a rightful sense of self-preservation. After all, if we had loosed those energies prematurely on WeaponWorld, they would have annihilated us. We are limited, today, to hurling dead matter and powdered manure at each other. Like our ape ancestors, we throw shit at each other. Despite this fecal constraint, we’ve achieved global levels of devastation.
It’s only on PeaceWorld that we could obtain orders of magnitude more energy in secure abundance, without feeling obsessively compelled to blow everything away with it.
LEARNERS: On the Move from
WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
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