SUMMARY OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
“Liberty, in the
Jeffersonian sense, cannot survive a continual packing-in of people. If our numbers continue to rise on a resource
base that expands but little, the future inevitably holds ever greater
restrictions on individual freedom. Our
descendants will not be able to live as we live and our free American and
European ways of doing things will seem like poems of the past. Liberty will fall progressively as the
numbers rise, and obedient compliance with the majority must take the place of
individual initiative. Perhaps some
politician cleverer than the rest will arrange this necessary peaceful
compliance and call it “free.” Paul Colinvaux, The Fates of Nations: A
Biological Theory of History, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1980, p. 349.
We should take to heart this truth we’ve forgotten. Children are the most promising recipients of worship. This may come as some surprise to you, but raising a healthy child (or at least not hindering that child’s development) may be the ultimate worldly sacrament. Every baby should be a gift from heaven and not:
· a wish fulfillment;
· compensation for loneliness and neglect;
· a desperate shot at immortality;
· submission to family and state pressures;
· an outlet for one’s childhood torments;
· mass produced cannon fodder;
· the inarticulate expression of maternity or virility;
· mucilage for a shaky marriage;
· a blend of medical virtuosity and misplaced longing. (Grandmothers carrying their grandchildren to term—does this planet not produce enough orphans?);
· a biological old-age pension, (“God’s own Social Security” as one fundamentalist put it—he was dead serious);
· the only permissible outcome of sex; or
· the legislated outcome of unwanted pregnancy.
Throughout history, irresponsible people were favored to breed. In Medieval Europe and many other places, such arrangements were clear-cut. Those with more brains (both men and women) were culled for religious celibacy. Meanwhile, titled bullies and peasant brutes (mostly illiterate) were tapped for militant fertility.
Earlier on, creative minds were sucked into the first cities. In those towns, filthy turmoil and overcrowding ensured higher mortality and lower birth rates, on average, than in the countryside. Country peasants and their fertile progeny took their chances with periodic famine, high child mortality, military banditry and terminal boredom.
Generally speaking, the smarter the entity, the less likely it will breed under adverse conditions. Captive animals refuse to breed under constraints of excessive noise, malnutrition and overcrowding that do not allow them to raise healthy cubs. High stress induces physiochemical imbalances in the reproductive cycle of neurologically gifted species; it causes sterility, stillbirth, infant mortality and perhaps the likelihood of mutants, sociopaths and sexually deviant offspring. It lowers their immunity and increases their vulnerability. The pathetic history of humanity reflects this sterilizing level of stress, at least for those smart enough to notice it.
The human genotype seems tough enough to churn out relatively smart beings on average. There’s no telling how much smarter our ancestors were, compared to us. Are we breeding ourselves for stupidity as well as aggression? The two traits tend to merge, don’t you think?
Will humanity cancel eons of true-bred survivability during a few thousand years of liquor-sodden weapon management? Fragments of ancient literature offer few clues as to which Age – Past or Present – could be considered mentally superior. Our suppression of sacred wonder is a dependable sign of modern senescence; so are the growing ills of our weapon technologies.
Nevertheless, if we don’t restrict human genotypes to a few idealized clones – the way we have, insanely, with our crops and livestock – genetic diversity should sire a relatively dependable bell-curve of intellect, worthy of greater things.
Differences between human ‘races’ are rather like those between two automobiles of the same make and model, but sporting different paint jobs and option packages. Some weapon mentors claim they’ve uncovered racial differences more significant than those caused by obvious environmental variables: pollution, starvation, cultural isolation, etc. Repeated attempts to document these claims have failed, despite elaborate methodologies and lavish financial support from weapons elites.
Any group of humans that deviated noticeably from the norm would be ejected or reabsorbed by it. It’d either displace lesser humans through superior adaptability or disappear through incompetence, monstrosity and genocide. For example, any significant intelligence gradient between black and white Americans is traceable to Southern bigots’ systematic execution of every black man who showed superior intelligence and initiative: three centuries’ worth of selective castrations (more often social than surgical and more often fatal), lynchings and executions that wound down only a few decades ago.
The Rage of the South, and that of its tropical confederates equally thirsty for violence, are burdens our Constitutional oxen must shoulder, even thought we Northmen are just as violent in our own Frankish way.
Human sexuality has blended the genetic milk shake far more briskly than we care to admit. Whether by commerce and marriage or by warfare and rape, human lineages have merged forcefully and enthusiastically. Today, racial purebloods are statistical freaks and geographic anomalies; ‘racial purity’ is more a function of self-delusion than of DNA.
Any good farmer will tell you that crossbreeds are stronger. The more grand and longstanding the pure blood of 'nobility,' the smaller the genetic pool it could draw upon, the weaker and dumber its offspring, vulnerable to all but the best circumstances. Weeds thrive due to their genetic liberation, despite adverse conditions.
Learners will find little interest in ‘improving’ human eugenics. Natural diversity and freedom of choice should be promoted within a flowering of good conscience and vedic architecture. Anything less is just slo-mo suicide.
Quite often, fanatical bigots have jumped into the deep end of their psychosexual pathology and killed off entire peoples merely because they carried the “wrong blood” and/or practiced different habits. Fortunately those in the past who’ve tried this stunt have allied the whole world, horrified, against them. Their executions earned them execution and nothing more. “Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place; for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” Matthew 26:52, the Bible. Many have tried this stunt in the past, and many more would love to try it again today. It’s a free world, after all.
Hitler and his wacko friends demonstrate this Prism pathology quite aptly.
“Aryan tribes, often almost ridiculously small in number, subjugated
foreign peoples and, stimulated by the conditions of life which their new
country offered them (fertility, the nature of the climate, etc.), and
profiting also from the abundance of manual labor furnished them by the
inferior race, developed intellectual and organizing faculties which had
hitherto been dormant in these conquering tribes. Within the course of a few thousand years, or
even centuries, they gave life to cultures whose primitive traits completely
corresponded to the character of the founders, though modified by adaptation to
the peculiarities of the soil and the characteristics of the subjugated people. But finally the conquering race offended
against the principles which they first had observed, namely, the maintenance
of their racial stock unmixed, and they began to intermingle with the
subjugated people. Thus, they put an end
to their own separate existence; for the original sin committed in Paradise has
always been followed by the expulsion of the guilty parties.
“After a thousand
years or more the last visible traces of those former masters may then be found
in a lighter tint of the skin which the Aryan blood had bequeathed to the
subjugated race, and in a fossilized culture of which those Aryans had been the
original creators. For just as the blood
of the conqueror, who was a conqueror not only in body but also in spirit, got
submerged in the blood of the subject race, so the substance disappeared out of
which the torch of human culture and progress was kindled. In so far as the blood of the former ruling
race has left a light nuance of color in the blood of its descendants, as a
token and a memory, the night of cultural life is rendered less dim and dark by
a mild light radiated from the products of those who were the bearers of the
original fire. Their radiance shines
across the barbarism to which the subjected race has reverted and might often
lead the superficial observer to believe that he sees before him an image of
the present race when he is really looking into a mirror wherein only the past
is reflected.
“It may happen that
in the course of its history such a people will come into contact a second
time, and even oftener, with the original founders of their culture and may not
even remember that distant association.
Instinctively the remnants of blood left from that old ruling race will
be drawn towards this new phenomenon and what had formerly been possible only
under compulsion can now be successfully achieved in a voluntary way. A new cultural wave flows in and lasts until
the blood of its standard-bearers becomes once again adulterated by
intermixture with the originally conquered race.
“It will be the task
of those who set themselves to the study of a universal history of civilization
to investigate history from this point of view instead of allowing themselves
to be smothered under the mass of external data, as is only too often the case
with our present historical science.” Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. II, Chapter
6.
Take your own local bigots (please!). Replace the designation “Aryan” with that of their favorite (their own) race. Replace this flowery palaver with a discourse rendered incoherent by rage and ignorance. You've heard something like this from them in your own hometown. It doesn’t matter where those bigots came from, what language they spoke or what they looked like. Their famous bloodline nobility is just a manifestation of the reptilian limbic system which we are all heirs to.
No one dogma or genotype is entirely satisfactory under every circumstance and from every point of view. The pursuit of happiness is everyone’s personal responsibility; it cannot be centralized in any realistic or effective manner. The best that government can offer, is to accelerate our withdrawal from misery. Eugenic ‘improvement’ is uninteresting to Learners. The industrial stench of the world’s human overburden proves how well adapted we are to it.
Average birthrates have fallen somewhat in developed nations. Unfortunately, each First World child consumes more resources and produces more garbage than dozens of poorer children from less industrialized nations. Thus, when a rich couple opts to conceive another child, that couple actually spawns many consumer-equivalents. "Lower, more praiseworthy" First World birth rates quantify a surge of overconsumption and waste. Compared to it, the greater birth rates of Third World children are equal or lesser burdens.
There is no valid excuse for aggravating this traffic jam—whether in the First or the Third World. Chinese couples submit to a birth limitation of one child. This text suggests we should go well beyond this limit.
It may well come to pass, in the future, that more and more liberties will become available and routine, to an extent we contemporaries would consider anarchic and unmanageable. Only one sphere of human activity will have to be regulated very stringently, the one we’ve left unfettered all this time: having and raising babies. Of course, this will lead to outcries of heresy, blasphemy and outrage.
The moment these rules were adopted, a thriving criminal syndic would see to it that the worst crimes imaginable festered in underground markets of illegal human childbirth, cloning and enslavement—driven by the strongest and darkest of human compulsions. Compared to it, the American Prohibition would seem like an annoying argument at a county fair.
Show me any real alternative and I’d gladly drop this topic like a red hot rock. Government regulation would be mandatory – whatever nightmare world that implied – because those smart enough to comply voluntarily would be worthy to have children, and many of the rebellious would be unworthy.
It would be best if we turned this into a matter of morality and guilty feelings, gradually and after lengthy philosophical discussions lasting years and decades. Too bad we are completely out of time to do so. Impassioned and lengthy discussion of these issues might be a good beginning on everyone’s part. The peaceful articulation of these principles might attract enough agreement to foster them voluntarily and to manage their negative consequences more competently.
What follows is written categorically. It remains to be seen if we may adopt it in this uncompromising manner, given enough time. In the meantime, these principles should be applied much less dogmatically, only as much as possible in absolute peace, in incremental steps and after bitter discussion. The centuries during which we could have reasoned them to satisfactory conclusion, have condensed to itty-bitty months and years.
How mightily we’ve confirmed our collective insanity! How mightily Learner genius must prevail, to guarantee our subsequent survival.
Everyone should be sterilized reversibly at puberty, as a right of passage into the privileges and obligations of adulthood. Mechanically speaking, this might involve supervised drug dosages or reversible surgery.
We issue licenses to drive, to practice law, to go fishing, and for a thousand other tasks. Unfortunately, there is no demand for advanced training to raise a healthy child. No one bothers with the fact that raising children is a much graver, more essential responsibility and obligation.
Those who insist on having children should undergo thorough training in childcare, internships serving the elderly and disabled, and in-depth psychological testing; they should take religious vows to care for children as a lifetime priority. Each graduate’s fertility would be restored for one full-term pregnancy. Every newborn child would join an extended family of natural and surrogate parents, both fertile and sterile.
No adult should have to endure the strenuous imposition of single-handed childcare. No ‘difficult’ child should be mismatched with impatient, hostile and indifferent biological parents. That is a recipe for more adult criminals and warriors. Children should be taught socialization skills by the best role models we can recruit and by age-peers equally well treated. Learners will not tolerate child abuse in any form: accidental, institutional or criminal. There will be much fewer ‘regrettable’ exceptions that current societies mass produce.
This childbearing priesthood would invite talented amateurs to join them on a full- or part-time basis, temporarily or permanently. Such communities would require the same financial support we lavish on the military today. They’d benefit from the generous provision of life support necessities, special services and full-time salaries. Couples bearing more than the one child would hand over additional offspring to these extended family groups, if necessary. They’d become safe havens for orphans, runaways and other young victims of abuse.
This book advocates these extreme measures for four reasons.
1. We need to reverse our historic selection for fertility and aggression.
2. Every child should grow up in a loving and permissive environment, the best one we can arrange, where minimal punishments were based on guilt and not violence. Note: guilt, not shame. Guilt is inner directed, promotes empathy for victim(s) and leads to repentance and desire for reparation; shame is impersonal and objectifying, blames the victim or someone, anyone else, and promotes more rage and violence. With a few exceptions, history’s shadists, tormentors and criminals – both petty and imperial – grew up as children abused by violence and humiliation. Interestingly, so did many great Learners, guilty-driven despite this abuse.
3. We need to shrink the human population to a fraction of its useless bulk. We need to do so quickly, voluntarily and non-violently. The fastest way to do this would be to halve birth rates immediately worldwide and then halve them again several times within the next few decades, thus producing net declines across all human populations.
4. Are you still awake?
It might seem to you that these stern measures would only be needed to reduce the enormous human overburden we face today. There are nearly seven billion of us and we’ll soon mass up to a dozen billion. That is a heavy footprint for planet Earth. The heavy footprint of a certain species invites world disaster; its lighter footprint, more flexibility. However, this is not the only reason. It is not so much the mass of people that harms the Earth today, as the shoddy quality of our thought and culture.
Nature might take up the chore of cutting our numbers down to acceptable levels, with enormous suffering through mass-casualty catastrophes brought about by the unforeseen consequences of corporate greed. Even if humanity were hammered down to a few fertile couples, (the way every world-dominant species has been in the past—after its footprint grew too massive for the world, but rarely before), the above-listed measures would still be worth adopting. We should broadcast them to ensure that our rare replacements never repeat the same mistake during future, prolific generations.
According to Richard Chatwin, in The Anatomy of Restlessness, Constitutional freedoms were built into the lifestyles of ancient hunter-gatherers, mainly because primal mothers and their relatives carried infants everywhere they went for the first five years of each baby’s life.
In Bali, for example, it is bad luck for an infant’s feet to touch the ground while relatives remain awake. All other things being equal, prolonged touching and mobile perspectives from an adult height improve the neurological development of infants. Healthy communities of healthy adults raising healthy children would promote the freedoms we cherish.
It is only with the Plant Trap – and the hyper-fertility, wife abuse and child neglect that ensued inevitably – that our social problems began to fester in earnest.
If children were as rare as diamonds, we would treat them royally, as is their due. Because children are as common as dirt, we abuse and neglect too many of them. It’s not surprising that so many survivors of this abuse and neglect grow up to be treacherous or sickly adults.
“Irrational nature selects wastefully and with the maximum of pain and
misery, requiring innumerable individuals to be born in order that they may struggle
and perish. Rational humanity would
economize and humanize this struggle by substituting a rational, social test of
parenthood for the destruction of children by starvation, disease or weakness.
“To prevent
reproduction from bad stock, however difficult and dangerous it may be, is
obviously the first duty of an organized society, acting alike in its own
self-defense and for the interests of its individual members. It is not necessary for the safety and progress
of society that ‘unfit’ children should die, it is necessary that they should
not be born, and ultimately the society which prospers most in the character of
its members will be the one which best fulfills this preventive duty.” From J.A.
Hobson, Imperialism: A Study, George
Allen & Unwin Ltd., London, 1948, pp. 163-164.
Humanity has marinated in criminal neglect for far too long—so long that we face the decisions of a desperate surgeon. Fully fifty years ago, humanity needed to get its teeth cleaned. Forty-some years ago, after hearing that painful, restorative procedures would be necessary, we opted to do nothing but bemoan expenses and pain. Thirty years ago, several teeth badly needed filling. Again, we let nothing happen. Twenty years ago, again nothing, despite our obvious suffering. Ten years ago, some rotten teeth needed to be pulled. Still nothing.
Nowadays, open skull surgery is the only thing that may halt brain poisoning. There’s no time left to whine and dine in pathetic indecision: what we appear to do best.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
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