SUMMARY OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
“Could I tranquilly see my fellow-men walking [about] like idiots in every imaginable direction, except that alone in which the happiness they were in search of could be found?” Robert Owen, New Lanark, Cole, 108, taken from The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen, by A.L. Morton, Monthly Review Press, 1962, p. 61.
In her great book, The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman examines cognitive dissonance. By her definition, cognitive dissonance is a bureaucracy’s (and its society’s) tendency to abandon common sense, good conscience and long-term self-interest in favor of policies that violate these precepts. Cognitive dissonance takes the lead, even though many warnings counsel against it.
Her prerequisites for cognitive dissonance include:
· lust for power,
· excessive power,
· mental standstill and stagnation,
· persistence in error, and
· protective stupidity (refusal to heed warnings).
The consequences of cognitive dissonance are:
· social self-destruction replaces reason, (as when the Trojans welcomed the Trojan Horse into their city and did not post guards around it, while they celebrated their imaginary victory);
· social instruments abandon their appointed tasks and become institutions, (the Renaissance Papacy pursued wealth and power instead of religious reform, Congress pursues campaign finance instead of the public benefit); and
· leaders enslave themselves to preconceived ideas: (America’s defeat in Vietnam, the self-defeating War on Drugs, the current prison empires, the collapse of Soviet leadership, the military quagmire everyone in a position of authority said would never happen in Iraq or Afghanistan, etc.).
The March of Folly has no chapter describing a self-critical government, even an exceptional one. Weapons administrations stroke, congratulate and perpetuate themselves, even during intervals of obvious collapse.
Ms. Tuchman mentioned the 1981 martyrdom of Mohammed
Anwar el-Sadat.
As President of Egypt, he made the unpopular decision to negotiate peace
with
Standard weapon policies are only held in check by inefficient exploitation, muddled methods, mental inertia, obstacles of protocol and squabbling over spoils. Since misguided leaders insist on doing things the wrong way from the get go, institutional inefficiency lessens their ill effects. This, despite Mom’s dictum: “Two wrongs do not make a right.”
This is where the 1984 Syndrome comes from. Since everyone has been persuaded that government is always malicious, we should keep it as weak and stupid as possible in order to lessen its malice. Unfortunately, stupid governments are also the most malicious and have the greatest appetite for growth.
What The March of Folly calls cognitive dissonance: a rare aberration, LEARNERS calls RITUAL STUPIDITY: a constant in weapon management.
Most public institutions usually act irrationally. Even if their basic charter is rational, their bureaucrats make a point of contradicting it. Ms. Tuchman admits as much. She concludes that we can only muddle along, “through patches of brilliance and decline.” According to her, the only body that could hope to overcome cognitive dissonance would be an electorate so well-informed that it would value moral courage above material gain—a vanishing rarity, these days. Growing such a cosmopolitan world citizenry would be a basic Learner objective.
“Epic poems, inscriptions on monuments, treaties of peace—nearly all historical documents bear the same character; they deal with breaches of peace, not with peace itself. P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid.
Of those solemn documents, many have justified crimes
against humanity. Under the lofty tenets
of Stalin’s Constitution, Stalin’s officials killed more Russians than the
Nazis did. Militant Chinese interpreters
of Mao’s Quotations condemned more Chinese than did Japanese
imperialists. The authors and supporters
of
As for the Preamble of the American Constitution and its Bill of Rights; well! Witness the prison empire being erected around us and the standing army royally bankrolled to protect it. What more Constitutional distortions will the American Empire demand; what more abominations will we need to witness before the truth dawns?
May God forgive those who misread LEARNERS to
justify more crimes against humanity. That’s quite likely, though hopefully
rare. They should figure out that weapon
mentality has suckered them one more time, when an angry
In fact, cognitive dissonance typifies human behavior. We practice all too rarely what we preach. In this ‘real world,’ we compartmentalize our feelings. Certain plots, characters and settings trigger trust, compassion, cooperation and amity, (towards family, clan, co-citizens, co-religionists and language peers). Meanwhile, others (dealing with the homeless or immigrants, for example) shrivel into fear, untruth and violence by proxy.
We may correct this double vision by polishing the lenses of our weapon/peace dialectic.
Let’s picture two men: Mr. Stoic and Mr. Nerves. When Mr. Stoic hurts himself, he secretes endorphin pain suppressers that let him function at minimal efficiency. In addition, he practices the stoicism our weapon philosophers revere.
Social stoicism promotes insane public policies; it generates the bureaucracy Barbara Tuchman describes in detail. Decisions descend from the top, in isolation from reality. These decisions dictate capricious desires that may or may not be practicable on the ground. They may contradict survival instincts, local capabilities and moral precept. So what? No one directly involved will be consulted. Middle managers will execute these decisions anyway, under the threat of summary removal. Reasonable objectors will be pruned from the decision tree. This pruning is every bureaucracy’s favorite pastime; it makes it more stupid, ritually and automatically.
Mr. Nerves swoons at the first sight of blood, not to mention severe injury. Deep in blackout, his shock endures until his subconscious stipulates that new conditions may be survivable. While Mr. Nerves has passed out, his psyche mulls its options at leisure.
Debate, argumentation and consensus-building govern nervous policy-making. The longer it takes to reach consensus, the longer the delay between its actions. Nervous and pluralistic administrations compromise, vacillate and delay. No one commits firmly to any position until everyone has staked their claim. As more and more voices join the debate, delays stretch out forever. The more data collected, the longer each decision takes. Taking two steps forward and three steps back, executive organizations gather information, then process it for revealed truth, announce their decisions, survey outcomes, rethink, determine the next course of action, etc.
Either that, or the most opinionated minoritarians make arbitrary decisions and then ignore their harmful consequences: a simpler, more common practice. When decision-making deadlocks, short-term greed becomes the tiebreaker, the final arbiter of overcrowded debate.
Let’s discuss three weapon management cure-alls: discipline, morale, and glory. Military disciplinarians apply just enough brutality to short-circuit the common sense and rational self-interest of their recruits. ‘High’ unit morale encourages its subordinates to sacrifice themselves when push comes to shove. ‘Glory’ occurs when discipline is so well adjusted that all but a few military leaders (well insulated by distance and stupidity) submit to being massacred—often for no valid reason.
Good combat units must endure heavy casualties, yet remain aggressive. They must attack without hesitation, even if they are checked, forced back and chased. In certain cases, they should submit to annihilation against impossible odds.
After all, personal disaster is the only outcome for anyone killed or maimed in battle. It does not matter how ‘glorious’ his sacrifice was. In short, all military personnel – from pot scrubbers to supreme commanders – must commit cognitive dissonance on demand.
That’s a difficult state of mind for a State to achieve. Military hierarchies operate in a fog of cognitive dissonance as a matter of routine. Yet, even they have a hard time maintaining it. Therefore, weapon states must pamper masters of cognitive dissonance and marginalize the insightful, the critical, and the outspoken. From the info-proletariat’s ignorant grumblings to pinnacles of epic myth, every cardboard facade of enlightened civilization must be based on dense footings of ritual stupidity. This foundation is so common, it has become invisible to us.
Weapon states have learned to mask overt aggression in times of peace. Instead, racial and domestic violence become commonplace; sports and popular culture glorify brutal competition. The proletariat finds less and less legitimate work, which boosts crime. In pursuit of short-term profits to pay off titanic war taxes, humans pit themselves against each other and conspire against their environment. In a flash of resource depletion, eons of ingrained reverence for nature are abandoned. Mass consumerism, personal littering and institutional pollution prevail. Unnecessary sexual restraints, religious intolerance, and alcohol/drug criminalization multiply aggression conveniently.
Pain – humanity’s most faithful companion – has long reinforced historical stoicism. Despite our braggart medicos, rich and poor alike suffer from poorly mended fractures, toothaches, chronic irritations and allergies, digestive disorders, psychiatric emergencies and wounds from accident, crime, battle, self-infliction or medical incompetence.
Our bodies are cumulatively poisoned through toxic, misunderstood and poorly taught nutrition. Disinformation is the bread and butter of food-processing mega-corporations. In truth, their only real intention is to mass-produce battlefield rations: the most toxic and profitable foodstuffs they’ve ever produced.
In the past, elder warriors suffered more pain than most people. Their perks let them outlive lesser folk, despite battlefield trauma and the aches and pains of old age.
Indeed, the archaic 'superiority' of nobles over peasants may be traced to their long-standing monopoly of hunting privileges. They ate more animal protein. Peasant children grew up on vegetables and grain gruel. Their maturing brains never got enough protein to grow and compete successfully. Same goes for slaves and masters; the same goes for us. The cultural stagnation of certain modern nations and minorities can be traced to this inadequate nutrition (especially the lack of iodine in their salt.) We could reverse it virtually overnight. This is another confirmation of our weapon degeneracy: that we failed to fix this problem planet-wide, even though we have held the means to do so for generations.
People who cannot take care of themselves are more expensive to maintain. People who can, produce dependable profits on their own. Poverty is the most expensive social policy on Earth.
Aside from cannabis, willow bark, mandrake, hypnosis, acupuncture and poppy sap, effective pain killers were very rare in the past. Leaders, especially hereditary leaders, made important decisions while beset by atrocious pain.
If you have been lucky enough to have avoided this kind of pain, trust my experience. Otherwise good people become perfect brutes under lengthy dazzles of pain. Their reason often abdicates to anger and cruelty.
Alcohol was the painkiller of choice long before more powerful analgesics were discovered. The combination of pain and alcohol abuse annuls social grace.
Alcohol also helps digestion. Like carbon dioxide bubbles in soft drinks, it kills many food microbes harmful to digestion and the blood. In this way, it allows populations with no better means – there are much better ones, up to Learners to find – to purify their gut from time to time. Also, to clean wounds and soothe troubled minds.
A social philosopher whose name escapes me now, hypothesized that societies use alcohol to sort out their people. After all, alcohol is merely a concentrate of grain or fruit: complementary to basic sustenance if produced from its surplus, or else detrimental if produced despite its dearth. It would be a significant surplus to basic survival requirements for families operating on the margin and deciding whether or not to consume it: a real extra, above and beyond basic survival necessities for poor families, both ancient and modern.
Those who abstained from alcohol could use the extra income as collateral for productive enterprise during good times and as a survival margin in times of famine; whereas those who wasted it on excessive drinking would pin themselves into the lower classes and croak faster during famines, they and their families. Ancient societies that forbade alcohol became more rigid and fixed by forsaking that surplus and their families’ choice of how to use it, whereas societies that permitted alcohol consumption promoted upward mobility of families by merit, if only indirectly.
Another social philosopher whose name I cannot recall, either, had this other thing to say. He concluded that dynamic societies force women (and men, though he didn’t mention them) who don’t want to have children, to make babies. Permissive societies produced less gifted children, became less productive and degenerated accordingly, since they allowed neurologically gifted people to drift into celibacy (and homosexual intimacy, again unmentioned) and since ‘sensual’ women would be the only ones to have children in those societies. According to this model, chemical birth control would produce the worst form of social decay. Another favorite reactionary prejudice. Even though he, a Victorian Britisher, only spoke of religious sexual segregation, if I recall correctly.
In this model, the same brutal constraint that was applied to produce more children, would also be used against them during their upbringing, (and women, and social inferiors, and whomever else it could lay its hands on) to make them fiercer. Meanwhile, social indulgence would mollycoddle more babies, turn them into decadent peaceniks incapable of defending themselves militarily against the former group with this additional constraint.
In many warlike societies (such as the Roman) it was illegal and even sacrilegious for high-born citizens to avoid having children—adoption was compulsory in the most extreme cases. For what it’s worth.
Finally, I would never have written up any of this or outreached to others to get them to read it, without the divine lubricant of alcohol. I would have been too bound by my weapon indoctrination, to defy it without the psychic emancipation of drink. My spirit, dead sober and unmodulated by the resonance of psycho-active drugs, might have found tolerable the murderous platitudes of weapon mentality. I suspect that a lot of cultural creativity springs from the same source. Look at Hemingway’s work and that of many other artists.
The history of Russian elites and that of alcohol abusers share many symptoms. These include intense suspicion, periodic withdrawal, violent outbursts, destructive self-criticism, poor self-imaging, temporary repentance, improved behavior, worsening lapses, alternately doting and abusive treatment of co-dependents, frenzied outbursts interspersed with bottomless apathy, meticulous planning followed by indifference to outcomes, brilliant beginnings and clumsy follow-up. We might include both patients’ willingness to betray true friends and bearers of good advice.
Unfailing friendliness (metta in Buddha’s Pali language) is considered the supreme Buddhist virtue. It is also the first personal habit weapon managers suppress in the name of loyalty to their institutions.
“This is not a popularity contest. You have a serious job to do. Now go out there and hurt somebody bad, then report back to me. Dismissed!” WeaponWorld talk.
These traits characterize every weapon state, even though centuries of Anglo-Saxon propaganda have fixed them as Russian stereotypes. Such typical human behaviors occur chaotically, in parallel on different scales, from abusive siblings, mismatched mates, malignant clerks and tyrannical desk sergeants, up to the highest rungs of power.
On PeaceWorld, this WeaponWorld speech, “This is not…”
would go something like this: “Have you
made any new friend or helped a stranger today?
How many? Here is the sustenance
you need to assist them in peace. If
not, go right back out there, find them and absolve us of the disgrace of not
having helped them.” A roman emperor is
quoted as having said, regretfully: “Today, I helped no one.” I would call him great, except that he
flattened
A case can be made, that Industrial Era leaders not only drank to excess but did so from lovely, lead glass decanters—thus poisoning themselves synergistically with alcohol and lead, and their world with pointless violence. High-flying propaganda and institutional inertia justified this stupidity to every poisoned drunkard’s satisfaction—and to ours, today.
Ancient Greek, Roman, and other information elites of the same period, suffered from similar poisoning. Acidic water and wine were served to them from leaden and lead-soldered vessels. Classy private homes collected rainwater from lead-covered roofs; others, lesser, were covered with copper or ceramic. Thus, the richer they grew and the more they ate and drank, the dumber they got.
Poor people ate and drank from wooden and clay vessels. They did not suffer from this problem except indirectly, through their social superiors. Even though, now that I think of it, all their famous waterworks were lead-sealed.
This chronic poisoning is all it would have taken to collapse a civilization. Each new problem received ever more stupid solutions spiced with reflexive terrorism. Sound familiar?
What is our excuse? Three times as much background radiation? Maybe. A million times more dioxin, antibiotics and metabolic hormones double-parked in our food, air, drink and body fat? Perhaps. Or could it be our rote repetition of hypnotic weapon myths? Could we find its antidote, here, among Learners?
The recreational consumption of psychoactive drugs (minus alcohol) actuates a different set of social symptoms involving decadence. When otherwise energetic people take recreational drugs, they tend to withdraw from productive materialism into mysticism, art, passive denial and asocial indifference. How thoroughly they withdraw depends on the dosage and types of the drugs they take.
Adults often use such drugs as low-stress boredom relievers—attempting to compensate for their failure to entertain their subjects of passion and interact with social groups just as obsessed. Roller coasters and dating, for example, are high-stress boredom relievers. Combat is the ultimate boredom reliever for society as a whole, as are other risk-taking activities for individuals.
Legalized, the social effects of recreational drug use are value-neutral and perhaps even beneficial. Drug use, however, dangerously weakens a weapon state. This is especially true if the craved drug is grown, processed, and/or distributed by foreigners and thus, eventually, enemies.
These drugs should be cheap, legal, locally grown and administered hygienically. If so, their side effects would be less harmful than those induced by compensatory overuse of tobacco laced with toxic additives, alcohol, caffeine, bleached flour, processed sugar and sugar substitutes; not to mention police Prohibition, commensal (that feeds at the same table) organized crime and every violation of human rights these august bodies bring to the table.
Mohammed’s injunctions against gambling and drinking alcohol helped shift his Islamic brethren toward social justice.
· Social justice might equal public health plus extras. Could it be proportionate to public health?
· Would alcohol consumption be the public health equivalent of washing one’s hands five times a day?
· What would equal washing the feet of one’s enemy?
· In courts of justice, perhaps…
· Washing a tired stranger’s feet as a standard social habit: what would that equal to?
Early Islam drew giant info proletariats from the control of local weapon elites who were undefeatable otherwise. The Koran substituted a far greater wisdom than the dogmatic injustice of prior weapon religions and their potentates.
Long before LEARNERS, Mohammed divided the world into a House of Peace (containing those who’d agree with its tenets) and a House of War (containing those who would fight against them). One need not be a practicing Muslim to belong to the House of Peace. One has merely to let Muslims practice their faith in peace. It is certain that Allah prefers the House of Peace and abominates the other. No wise Muslim, nor Mohammed himself, would contradict this conclusion. I may be nothing more than a wine-bibbing kafir, but this truth is apparent even to me.
True Muslims will grasp the significance of LEARNERS’ weapon/peace antinomy immediately; they'll do so much faster than “Judeo-Christian” philosophers for whom the term “peace” is just another meaningless, fill-word in their Testaments.
Later, more worldly Muslims cancelled their philosophical advantage by drinking themselves silly and ruling accordingly. Later, Sunni and Shia weapon sectarians defiled the Koran by spilling each other’s blood. Reflexively, they fulfilled their weapon goals in direct disobedience of the peaceful intent of the Qran. Their blasphemous violence was based on tribal pecking orders, geographical pissing matches and ethnic bigotry, rather than any counsel contained in the Koran. Justifying and regulating this forbidden mayhem may have been the primary purpose of tafseer commentaries.
I am not qualified enough to comment further. Muslim Learners should do so in my place, LOUDLY!
The combination of alcohol and powerful mind-altering substances produces more and more psychotic and violent behavior, as pre-Columbian and Scythian blood cults demonstrate. The ultimate consequence of this twin fixation appears to be mass cannibalism and ritual human sacrifice. No thanks, let’s pass.
To those who indulge in psycho-active drugs including blessed Cannabis, I recommend that you not have partaken of alcohol recently. The optimal combination would be the least alcohol with the strongest psychoactivity. Those who want to entertain the most constructive form of psychoactivity should join a brotherhood that strictly bans the consumption of alcohol.
But from this premise, to forbid laypeople the distinct pleasure of a few pipe-loads among friends, and of a glass or two of good wine shared from time to time – as long as those things have obviously grown from good soil (thus, no generic white powders, clear liquids that taste of no fruit on earth, or other deadly laboratory stimulants) – that’s too great a sacrifice to ask of people! Most things should be celebrated in moderation as long as no harm arises.
City-based agriculture and urban tyranny are thought to have evolved hand-in-hand. Sedentary farmers produced crop surpluses impossible to trade beyond the local weather frontier. Cities settled along principal waterways bisecting these frontiers. In other words, everyone shared local weather – thus crop surpluses or dearth – simultaneously. Only extremely complex transportation systems could shift farm surpluses any distance beyond their district of origin.
In the absence of cheap bulk transportation, something else had to be done to preserve unmarketable surpluses. It was neither wise nor safe to gorge in years of plenty and starve during the bad ones. Some way had to be found to level this nutritional roller coaster. Surplus perishables could be preserved across years of famine by extending their shelf life.
Fermentation helped ‘solve’ this problem.
Up to that point, human hunting packs would have operated much like wolf packs. They’d have shared merit-based leadership, self-enforcing honesty, equitable food and labor distribution, automatic reproductive restraints, permanent controls against internal violence, and maximal care for a few youngsters very carefully raised by the whole community. Over eons of time, marginal conditions destroyed any pack that deviated from this norm of excellence.
We’ve been bred for behavioral excellence a thousand times longer than for weapon mentality.
Let’s ignore, for a moment, the philosophical quibbles, knee-jerk nihilism and existential doubts that entangle us today. Real morality increases the likelihood of long-term species survival, by rendering unintended consequences less harmful on a probabilistic basis. Bad behavior produces worst results more often than good behavior does—when you run them through the probabilistic black box of unforeseen consequences.
In short, obey your conscience, do good, and expect unforeseen miracles. Disobey your conscience, do evil, and expect more unforeseen catastrophes. Obedience of conscience and its gift of miracle as scientifically demonstrable phenomena. Period, paragraph return.
Routine alcohol abuse, however, shattered long-standing social controls through bouts of unthinkable violence and incivility, sickly hangovers, degenerative disease and adverse effects on the newborn. Generations of people recovering from benders or just sickened by daily tippling, would have evolved insane traditions and institutions to rationalize their drunken misbehavior. Is that us?
The first cities served (always have) as logistics centers, disaster shelters and fortresses. Primitive citadels housed only priestly elites and their bodyguards, a perfect pick of weapon mentors and battle elites. Later on, inhabitants of walled cities had three choices: send field armies out against oncoming hordes, suffer annihilation at their hands or submit to them. Often all three happened in succession. Field armies are just voracious migratory cities.
Sedentary agriculture, urbanism and centralized-capital militarism evolved along parallel but independent tracks. Urban wealth not only paid for armies, it made them inevitable. Surplus riches demanded military defenses, property laws and police protection. Dense urban populations and their fixed assets made fortifications mandatory and affordable. It didn't matter whether armed slaves, mercenaries, regulars or ‘free’ militia manned them. The process of hyper-militarization became self- sustaining and automatic.
Post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSS) also affects ritual stupidity. PTSS survivors endure attacks of hyper-vigilance, unfocussed panic, paranoia, adult temper tantrums, an urge for mayhem and a general inability to readapt to civilian life. Hundreds of thousands of American Vietnam veterans died homeless for decades thereafter (and now, those from Iraq): many more throwaway dead than the names of those 59,000 and some engraved on the Black Wall in Washington—the same losses we suffer every year on our highways, with a proportional number of traumatized survivors.
Ancient leaders upheld their claim to nobility by seeking the thickest combat. Nonetheless, they were supposed to display inhuman wisdom during peacetime decision-making. This, despite the fact that they may have been temporarily crazed by PTSS or permanently crazed members of the battle elite.
Yet another factor favors ritual stupidity. It takes time, lots of it, to collect intelligence and transmit orders via slow communications channels. Running a country in the days of horse and sail was like piloting a defective, radio-controlled airplane with a daylong command/control delay. In other words, the command you input at moment X would not take effect until X plus 24 hours. This built-in time delay would induce a long series of crashes-on-takeoff. It wouldn’t matter how expert was the royal hand – or were the republican hands – on the joystick.
Nowadays, much is written about ‘risk management.’ Management theorists bemoan the fact that professional risk managers fly by the seat of their pants, especially in foreign policy circles. They base their decisions on ‘subjective criteria’ (read bullshit).
Students of risk management should study ‘uncertainty management’ instead. They should review the mental tricks risk managers use to protect their conscience. After all, they make vital decisions based on inadequate data, apply them despite built-in time delays and then consider ensuing disasters routine and unavoidable.
Weapon technicians are at the forefront of broadband communications, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and knowledge systems. Meanwhile, ‘free market’ parsimony foists obsolete information systems on civilians―assuming anyone bothers with civilian applications a lot less well paid though much more profitable in the long run.
Few civilian organizations gather every bit of information in real-time and then study its content in detail. Such tools and methods are just beginning to surface as military communications, command, control, computers and intelligence (C4i) systems. Modern C4i hardware and expertise accelerate the process of analysis, execution, surveillance, repeat ... tremendously. Unfortunately, most civilian institutions still honor the languorous thought processes of ponies and sail boats.
Weapon mentors practice routine protocols of stateliness, deliberation, and (whenever possible) retrenchment, censorship and reaction in matters of peace and social welfare. In matters of war, they practice free-spending creativity, vigor, speed, unpredictability and open-minded problem solving.
It takes decades to reverse major policy blunders (like
the Vietnam War and that in
The vulnerability of entrenched elites peaks when their cleverest managers realize their evil habits have brought them more trouble than gain. Then, half-heartedly, they tailor new policies to a broader, more elegant cloth. Reactionaries block this transformation at every step. Having ripped off the greatest amount of privilege and profit for themselves in times of worsening repression, they are outraged by any change. Their weapon hypnosis dictates that these things are paramount to them: more important than a clear conscience.
As social justice wastes away, (im)pertinent proto-elites froth up from the host info
proletariat, eager to challenge ambivalent elites. Reactionaries and radicals often reinforce
each other’s brutality.
It takes a lot more self-control to grit one’s teeth and quietly bury one’s latest dead, than to send off the next helicopter raid or suicide bomber. It takes a lot firmer social control to forbid the next act of retaliation, rather than look the other way while hotheads take matters into their own hands. Until such time, popular moderates will be targeted: the bravest will be assassinated, the most prudent will be terrorized and the most covetous will be corrupted.
It will be the job of the
The info proletariat is always moderate in its politics, at least until threats, propaganda, selective assassination and military aggression distort its outlook. Political violence favors extremists and frustrates everyone else.
The central question is not how often extremists have indulged in knee-jerk terrorism; but how rarely majorities have held to their peaceful ideals and made extremists suffer the dire consequences of their aggression instead of rewarding them with heightened violence.
The only time I’ve seen a terrorist group suffer from its actions and stop, at least for awhile – as opposed to turning themselves into martyrs and inspiring the next bunch of murderous whackos – was during the Munich Olympics. Palestinian gunmen took Israeli athletes hostage, got them killed in a crossfire and congealed world opinion against their cause. What was the difference between that massacre and every one since on either side? This I cannot fathom. Could the Palestinians, as a community, have momentarily horrified themselves?
Majorities must police their own extremists and ally themselves with non-abusive servants of public order—no matter how bad things turned out between them in the past. Those servants must be disciplined in the most draconian manner they will accept, or be replaced otherwise. Those rejected by this process should be offered the most deadly jobs available. Demining? There is no other way to interrupt the killing.
An excellent analysis of weapon revolutionaries is The Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton. Ignoring the peace/weapons antinomy, he reviews other factors very carefully.
To summarize Anatomy in Learner terms, the info elite loses its privileged status when its disgruntled cadres defect to proto-elites in growing numbers. Reinforced by these defectors, the proto-elite most likely to rebuild a more lethal army, soaks up many battle elites. It kills its most effective opponents, terrorizes the remainder and takes over. Suffering from siege mentality and paranoia, its bosses push aside any thought of peace. Thus will it manage to sharpen its nation’s threat deterrent. That is the only outcome of weapon revolutions, wars, and political/technological ‘progress’: the further enhancement of lethal weapon states.
“The [French] Revolution cleared the way
for a much larger, more centralized, state apparatus, able to exploit its
revolutionary-patriotic ideology and new means of coercion to mobilize large
armies and the economic resources for major wars. The Revolution inevitably upset the balance
of the European states system, in which
Orthodox info elites attack each new revolution, with just enough force to place the revolutionaries back on the path of weapon development. Peaceful revolutionaries are unseated through open warfare, subsidized terrorism and economic blockade. Where outright invasion is inappropriate because a popular Militia blocks it, internal chaosists (Contras) are unleashed instead.
Freer, more peacefully evolving societies can be goaded back onto the path of weapon tyranny through pinprick acts of terrorism (from external sources or internal ones).
Every world power accelerates this regression to the militarist mean and every lesser state follows close behind. Weapon managers pick off peace idealists and replace them with pet weapon mentors; they neutralize political moderates and replace them with battle elite creeps.
We are programmed to admire this Darwinian selection for greater brutality. No exception is allowed.
Thus, the deadly status quo of contending warfare states grows more tyrannical every year, despite every weapon revolutionary’s mistaken attempt to resist and transform it by renewed violence. This tyranny grows stronger despite and because of them. Every form of violent resistance perpetuates, grooms and strengthens this global weapon tyranny.
Non-violent resistance on a planetary scale –confident, transparent, heterogeneous and steadfast – would dissolve it once and for all.
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