SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO &
VOCAB
“And perhaps a great day will come when a people distinguished by war and victory, by the highest development of its military organization and intelligence, and accustomed to making the gravest sacrifices to these things, will voluntarily exclaim, “We will break the sword into pieces!”—and will demolish its entire military machine down to its deepest foundations. To disarm while being the best armed, as an expression of elevated feelings—that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a disposition toward peace: whereas so-called “armed peace” such as that which parades in every country nowadays, is a disposition toward hostility that trusts neither itself nor its neighbor and, partly out of hatred, partly out of fear, refuses to put down its weapons.” Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, (my edits) http://bartleby.com/66/83/42183.html
The
This may have a lot to do
with the contrast Professor Allen C. Guelzo notes during his lecture series on
‘The American Mind,’ available on recordings through the Teaching Company at http://www.teach12.com. According to him, Americans are sundered
between reason and will, between intellect and action.
Which habit is more
frightening to you: failing to act in time or failing to think through the
consequences of your action? Are you
more afraid of your analysis paralysis than of the unintended results of your
behavior?
Your response pigeonholes
you into one of two categories of Americans.
On the one hand, people like George W. Bush and his cronies who rush in
where angels fear to tread, based on faith, gut instinct, dogma or some other
BS; and their direct antagonists, so-called “peace and progress activists” who
haven’t a clue what they’re doing and could care less about their permanent
state of failure. On the other hand,
people like John Kerry, Bill Clinton and their supporters who never met an idea
they couldn’t dissect from now ‘til Sunday without doing anything much in the
meantime; and people like me and my companion ideologists stuck in our brown
studies.
Each group resents the
intrusion and failure of the other; each attempts to monopolize every source of
political and economic power. Political
equilibrium between these two tendencies must be meticulous; pre-emption by one
or the other could be fatal.
Strolling through any
urban landscape in
American law simulates
justice in sporadic fits, depending on the wealth and notoriety of the
accused. Equity under strong courts is
the letter of the law; self-promotion through vicious competition is its
spirit. When a poor person is swept into
the Prison Empire run for profit by reactionaries, he freefalls into Hell on
Earth, regardless of his real-time guilt or innocence. Judgeships provide lofty sinecures for many
stealth reactionaries and monstrous control freaks, and humble watch posts for
a few brilliant minds—at least at junior levels, where the ever-reactionary
Congress cannot meddle.
When the
Many young shoots of
idealism spring up, here and there, across an intellectual wasteland of
hypocrisy, greed and closed mindedness.
Americans have defended freedom, slavery, liberty and tyranny with equal
sincerity and ferocity. American
progressives and liberals maintain their illusion of harmony with conservatives
and reactionaries by agreeing to disagree about democracy’s fundamental
definition.
Orthodox politicians and
media pundits maintain that 'representative democracy' and the vote are
sacred. Yet ballots are miscounted by
the millions, especially in the Dixiecrat South. Recent voting scandals in
No one seems to care that
American voters constitute an Athenian minority surrounded by a majority of
idiot slaves, or that no Greek tyranny was run by such an oppressive, minuscule
minority as our corporate slave masters and their thought-police.
So long as Learner topics
of passion are not given priority in public discussion, the pool of leadership
talent must shrink, decision-makers get dumber, and unintended consequences
become more and more disastrous. Simple
arithmetic.
After they defeated a few
British assaults,
Except, of course, for
dispossessed American Indians, and Blacks abducted from their African
homelands. Both victims were denied the
right every American citizen values most: free welcome into fellow
citizenship. A welcome everyone on Earth
deserves. The same welcome that held the
Can’t you see the same
thing happening right here, right now?
Are we going to sit still for this Vandal scandal, like lead-dummied
Romans; or are we going the resist it with all our might? True, our poisons are much more toxic and
voluminous. Will we prove strong and
smart enough to overcome them?
Thus, American business,
art and science – even organized religion – all benefited from massive peace
inputs. Nevertheless, without really
knowing why, Americans nursed racial bigotry, mass poverty, ethnic genocide,
slavery and civil war. The main reason
they subsidized weapon mentality, in blatant defiance of the letter and spirit
of their Constitution, was to retain a razor-sharp weapon technology against
outsiders. This in keeping with the
Today’s proliferation of
biological, scalar and nuclear weapons confounds
Remember, growing apprehension
of outside threat multiplies homegrown reaction and
poverty. Each weapons elite pledges to
protect its info proletariat from identical elites abroad.
Radicals and reactionaries
misbehave with boring predictability.
Regardless of their origin, ideology, race and other cosmetic
distinctions, they believe their society won't cohere unless it confronts a
horde of potential enemies. Internal or
external, make-believe or real, it matters little who those Others really
are.
To leftists, the ultimate
enemies are the rich. Centrists’
favorite bogeymen are surly foreign powers and crafty criminals. Reactionaries define the enemy as anyone weak
enough (who controls few votes and little wealth). All three esteem brutality as a
cure-all.
These enemies often turn
out to be illusory. When real threats
emerge, they usually do so from unforeseen directions. Many aggressors, (Manuel Noriega, Saddam
Hussein, Adolph Hitler, Oussama bin Laden, for example), were promoted and
subsidized by the same authorities hired to keep an eye on them. Whenever projected threats turn out to be
significant and trigger strong defensive measures already been set up to
checkmate them, jingo politicians plug their ears to warnings of impending
disaster and let it happen, seemingly through sheer incompetence. Actually, they go to great lengths to provoke
the violent reaction their plans require.
In one sense, America’s
era of strategic immunity based on oceanic moats is over. According to our praetorians, we must adopt
permanent weapon mentality – even in times of peace – and accept all its
overheads. Otherwise, we might risk
being relegated to second-class status.
My question is: second-class to whom? When the United States sneezes, the other
powers get pneumonia. During the 1970’s,
the OPEC nations reversed their oil embargo.
This did not happen because their chokehold had crippled the Great
Satan, but because it was throttling the golden goose. They realized, a little late, that the real
victims of their petroleum price hikes turned out to be the poorest of their
allies and trading partners.
Rising crime and
unemployment statistics enumerate the raw deal of American weapon tyranny. These nightmare statistics are nothing
compared to the hell we may expect if we let smooth-talking Wimps and Prisms
con us into Armageddon.
Just as peace management
makes life as productive and rewarding as possible, weapon management craves
inequalities of wealth, creativity and security. Life must become so uncertain that military
enlistment becomes a viable option for many poor children. Weapon mentality creates a vast labor pool of
human drones and turns them into willing codependents of repression, warfare
and criminality.
Remember, every suppressed
demonstration, every illegal arrest, every unresolved act of police brutality,
every Banana Republican croaking “More repression!” reveals a panicked elite
lashing out against political fantasies more frightful to it than any real mob
or insurrection.
Conservatives share one
common weakness. They may sustain old
values, but they cannot nurture new ones.
Faithful to weapon mentality, they lack peace mentality’s creative
spark.
It took 300 years, from
the 1200's on, to persuade European conservatives to adopt the zero in
arithmetic.
Progressives cannot
propose some new approach to abundance without conservatives resisting “to
(someone else’s) death!”
beforehand. Conservatives cannot
believe that everyone would be better off once wealth were shared more
even-handedly. They refuse to picture
the wealth they could achieve by unrestrained sharing. So they feel obligated to misappropriate
wealth and creativity on a zero-sum basis.
“What I gain, you must lose.”
This despite history’s
most persistent conclusion: societies remain poor when some minority
misappropriates wealth. The smaller, in
proportion, this wealthy minority remains, the more restricted and thus stupid
its decision-making, the simpler its social structure and the poorer the host nation.
The genetics of a
restrictive elite must also suffer. Its
children, genetically weaker than more sturdy crossbreeds, will suffer higher
infant mortality in direct proportion to this restriction. An elite may eliminate itself entirely in
this manner during the next period of heightened infant mortality.
Ancient wealth trickled
like a mountain rivulet, from one god-king to his tiny court hermetically
sealed from the unwashed masses. It
bubbled along creek-beds of medieval nobility and priesthood carefully diked
off from their inferiors. Then it
streamed between the Victorian upper-bourgeoisie, clerics and general
staff. These worthies held the masses
out beyond the magic circle of wealth at bayonet-point. Today, this wealth meanders lazily among
tributaries of professionals and officers/bureaucrats. They try to buy off the underclass at minimal
expense, with factory-farmed burger-bread and circus television. Soon, all the wealth on Earth will flow into
the most deserving of seas, that of every Learner worldwide. At each level of redistribution, as if by
magic, everyone’s wealth increases exponentially.
Reactionaries can whine
all they want. They can kill, torture,
lie and steal as much as their cowardly panic allows them to. They will be the poorer for it and will never
escape this inevitability of history. If
they acted just a little bit more wisely, they’d profit from it exponentially,
once and for all.
Natural disasters and
warfare weaken peace management. Social
harmony is a delicate fabric woven from many strands of mutual trust,
cooperation and good will. This fabric
is very fragile; it frays under stress and soon parts. In disaster situations, the distribution of
necessities breaks down. That incites
people to looting, personal vengeance and other forms of lawlessness. “Civilization is just a question of fodder,”
Berthold Brecht. Facing unaccustomed
overloads, routine protocols become sporadic, unfair and inadequate. Rigidity, uncertainty and centralization set
in. Opportunistic Conspirators of Greed
proliferate, as does the synergy of their ill effects. Tyranny re-imposes itself as peace
technologies whither. As this process
worsens, traumatized societies shift from marginal peace to climax weapon
production—voila (VWAHLAH! “Here is”) true war fever.
An intermittent pandemic
appears to afflict entire societies.
While majorities sink into economic and spiritual decline, a shrinking
minority amasses undeserved riches.
Traditional values and sources of security are uprooted until combat
itself begins to look promising.
This pandemic of social
degeneracy was most apparent during the Great Depression. The carnage of World War I had converted most
info proletarians into ardent pacifists.
It nevertheless converted key elites into fanatical weapon sectarians
who made sure that the Great Depression so pummeled info proletarian
sensibilities that World War II would appear like a relief.
The best military recruit
is a slum child. This Golden Rule of
weapon mentality applies equally to bitter ghetto sociopaths and the sweet
majority of street urchins. The lucky
ones survive inevitable abuses. Their
parents and guardians do their best to help them within limited means. Nevertheless, awash in low self-esteem, slum
children are driven to join something greater than themselves. Hardened survivors, they can handle grinding
adversity, harsh discipline and the terrors of combat. Their gang leaders were street-tested in
armed combat. Those children who failed
to adapt, died young.
Weapon management harvests
an enormous crop of fine infantrymen at an instant’s notice by following this
simple formula. The more brutal their
childhood, the greater the number of valuable recruits and invaluable small
unit leaders. The end products are
countless regiments of fine infantry; a sprinkling of elite commandos manned by
certifiable sociopaths; a handful of sterling Learners like Booker T.
Washington, M.L. King, Jesse Jackson, Cornell West, General/Secretary of State
Collin Powell and their high-merit peers; and throngs of poverty-, ignorance-
and crime-crippled victims. These
victims are massive human tailings of a rarefied ore from which – at great
wastage – precious battle elites and numerous weapon technicians may be
refined.
“The first quality of a soldier is constancy in enduring fatigue and hardship. Courage is only secondary. Poverty, privation and want are the schools of good soldiers.” Napoleon, taken from Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman’s On Killing: The Psychological Costs of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Back Bay Books, Little Brown & Co., Boston, New York, Toronto, London, 1995. Printed by permission.
Weapon management brings
long-term destitution to any society that hosts it. This fact is papered-over with standard
weapon myths we’ve been taught to admire for ages. Anything and everything – bad weather,
hostile gods, heretics, witches, druggies, drug lords and criminals, an aging
workforce, welfare moms, inferior minorities, guerrillas and now terrorists –
can take the blame for shriveling economies that should thrive but never manage
to.
In mature societies, mass
poverty is not the cheapest way to go; on the contrary, it is THE MOST
EXPENSIVE SOCIAL POLICY. Let me repeat
that for emphasis, since we’ve heard it so rarely (never). Poverty is by far the most expensive social
policy. No society EVER grew rich by
fostering poverty. Info elites waste
enormous wealth while they cultivate poverty and other weapons overheads.
By rights, that wealth
should be ours to invest in peace.
You’ll be amazed how much peace Learners can buy with it, and how much
violence Learners could buy off with a small fraction of it.
However, higher living
standards breed spoiled, quarrelsome and self-indulgent people: totally
unsatisfactory cannon fodder. Social decadence
is not bad per se. But it would be unwise to maximize prosperity
and pacifism in one’s own people while the rest of the world attempts to meet
its needs at gunpoint.
Mass poverty IS NEVER some
stupid policy failure. It is not the
outcome of selfish greed, insanity and corruption. These are secondary symptoms of weapon
mentality, which is the underlying illness.
In fact, all money – the entire growth-dependent, zero-sum shell game
based on compound interest so dear to politicians, business people, academics
and conservative parasites who make up info elites – is merely a system of
accounting for the huge sums of wasted labor and resources that go to feed
global weapon technologies without any profit whatsoever. ‘Lack of money’ is our favorite excuse to
rebuild anti-profit slums in the wake of our destructive wars.
There is a chicken and egg
problem here: what came first? When
orthodox economies go into decline, for whatever reason, reflexive militarism
becomes an irresistible means to recoup wealth at the top. When massed humans become poor, all of a
sudden, their first instinct will be to dust off ancient military protocols.
When I speak below of
Americans, I also refer to everyone else on Earth who has lost their soul in
the arms of naked weapon mentality. Just
make sure you’re not afflicted with the same illness while you gleefully slam
Americans benighted by it.
Americans have suckled on
a toxic pap of obsessive materialism and vapid self-gratification, gushing
inexhaustible from luscious tits of television and commercial advertising. Thus, they’ve been taught to obey their
conscience only when it’s convenient, common sense only when convenient, good
taste only when convenient. Political and social transformation cannot
prevail until it is convenient―will never
happen, better yet.
They act as if their
misbehavior, apathy and lousy decision-making had no consequences
whatsoever. “If you don’t like what’s
going on, just change the channel.
Better yet, just sit still and wait for the next meaningless
commercial. Nothing of significance will
change, regardless of what you do—and insignificance will multiply, regardless
of what you do.” It has become a frenzy among them, pursuing mere indulgence
to its extreme and glorifying in their blind impunity. Thus American crooks and bigots thrive,
protected by a slapdash definition of personal freedom.
The balanced reporting of
American journalism? That just means that evil always gets a head
start. Whoever pays the most is entitled to lie, steal, cheat and get
away with it indefinitely, more so than anyone else. The end product of “balanced American
reporting” is dollar democracy: one million dollars equal one vote; one voter
equals nothing.
SOMEONE ELSE is always to
blame for downstream disasters, not us Americans. We keep telling
ourselves those disasters were aberrations and not the toxic backwash of our
rotten habits and institutions. Plus
there’s no reason to change them!
Bismarck noted that God
seems to favor Americans, drunkards and crazy people. So Americans seem
to get away with their shitstorm, more often than not. As a result,
America has become nation of spoiled brats.
But the moment God looks
the other way, duck and cover! 9/11 and New Orleans disasters of epic
proportions emerge. Then Americans feel SO SORRY for themselves.
And, of course, it must be someone else’s fault. How could it not be?
This nation’s business
would not be so awful, if its citizens grew up a little.
But they are, after all, only babies compared to Europeans’ deadly
idiocy dozens of centuries senior, and that of the Middle East and China, elder
idiots by millennia. Yet we only have a
few short years before annihilation overtakes us, in the absence of major transformation. All we have to work with are those toddler
Americans, plus everyone else endowed with their full-grown rot, supposed to
transform this world instantly. Good
luck with that crew!
Until then, Americans are
just a bunch of corn fed Republicans, which means fascist wannabes who haven’t
quite gotten it perfect yet. Just give the USA enough rope to hang
itself. Ronnie Raygun wasn’t quite perfect, but
nearly so. What with the Bushes and Nixon and their Supreme Court and
Congressional toadies; let’s just elect another Weimar
Democrat plaster figurehead. Decorative but ineffectual, he’s all we can
handle. One step back and three steps forward,
blindly, into a Thousand Year Reich wrapped in the red, white and blue.
In Iraq, an American Army
of mercenaries (anathema to the spirit of the Constitution) is practicing
‘pacification’ tactics for Buffalo, St. Louis and Seattle. But don’t worry, be happy! Just be good little boys and girls, sit on
your hands and watch it happen.
Nowadays, Americans may
only harken to arrogant nihilism and dogmatic Puritanism: moral vacuity or
empty moralism for their own sake. Mere profit, dogma, fad and
convenience, those are the only ethical score boards we are permitted.
Might as well try to breathe in a vacuum.
There is a golden mean, a
moral middle ground this country and this WeaponWorld despise. Is the
road to Hell paved with good intentions? In your dreams, perhaps.
It is paved with Halliburton stock certificates (a Best Buy!).
Conscience, idealism and
just plain doing good: those things merit reverence, if only because they cause
fewer unexpected disasters. Obey your conscience – even when it seems
uncool, inconvenient and unprofitable – and achieve unforeseen miracles.
Violate good conscience, good sense and good taste, and suffer more often from
surprise disaster. Morality as simple probability and enlightened
self-interest. Ignore it at our peril.
After this jeremiad of
American failure, I must emphasize this central point.
Given our Gemini
commonality, we Americans share more power, glory and genius than any other
nation. For two centuries, America has
been populated by the cream of the rest of the world―the
best as well as the worst. If we made
wise, heroic and generous use of our advantages (in typically American fashion)
we could neutralize every weakness and failure listed above.
Americans! Relax and let it all hang out. If we allowed our strongest nerves, sinew and
marrow to find their best workout for peace, we would find this effort
surprisingly simple—and its rewards, mind-boggling.
All the other alternatives
will be no fun whatsoever.
LEARNERS: On the Move
from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
CONTACT PAGE (under development)