SUMMARY OF LEARNERS INTRO &
VOCAB
“…Citizens seeking to introduce changes in
the form of their government, whether in favor of liberty or despotism, ought
to consider what materials they have to deal with and then judge of the
difficulty of their task. For it is no less arduous and dangerous to
attempt to free a people disposed to live in servitude, than to enslave a
people who [opt] to live free.” Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourse on the First Decade of Titus Livius, Ninian Hill Thomson,
Trans., Kegan, Trench & Co., London, 1883, p. 376.
I’ve spent some
thirty years, now, waiting for a worthy patron to discover Learners,
publish it in many languages and make our fortune; otherwise, that I might
vanish quietly from this world without bothering with the upshot of my
intervention.
How amazingly
lily-livered and chicken-brained well-connected people turned out to be, how
many secondary perils and empty distractions they’ve given priority to, and how
well insulated from important but unforeseen matters by an army of myopic
gatekeepers! My work ignored by all of
them. Either they don’t give a damn or
they worsen an already bad situation, as long as their bank balance fattens in
the process…
Here I am, still
working alone, after all these years; my oft rewritten and rejected samizdat self-published on the World
Wide Web and treacherously ejected from it, only to arise from the ashes of
denial. After decades of intellectual
house arrest, forced to witness so-called activists and progressives
congratulate themselves that the reactionary backlash hadn’t got too much of a
hardon during their watch (even though it has), and for having dodged the grim
chore of studying Learners. Forced
to witness churlish warmongers earn big bucks and bask in public acclaim for
publishing reams of best-selling martial pomp, and every government trip over
itself to fulfill their slightest stipulation, while no one dares call them on
their kamikaze swan song! I’ve grown
weary and gray from this universal dismissal.
How much better the world could be, without so much avoidable misery!
As I review this
text, its cosmic presumption stuns me.
No special privilege entitles me to claim your time and attention; no
lofty reputation, mighty patronage, personal charisma, business savvy, saintly
complacency or literary merit. When I find decent work, I’m just another
clerk and a distracted one at that.
Nonetheless, I must claim your careful consideration here. This may be the most important text you
read; that’s up to you and your fondness for the status quo.
I’ve long dreamt of
abandoning this madhouse and repatriating into Grace – somewhere out there
beyond the white light – yet there’s so much love and beauty here. I’ve stayed up late nights, reviewing
infinite repetitions of the same botched political experiment and muttering,
“At least one of these ought to have worked out to spec!”
I still dare
hope. Learners are a Nation among nations, a state of being within the
State. In our own quiet way, once properly inspired, we will command
enough talent and initiative to tackle any challenge. Once we Learners
find each other in the dark; realize how numerous we are and the commanding
position we hold over the world; once we rally to these ideas, we will be
unstoppable and destined for glory—no matter how wretched and powerless human isolates may be, with their petty
pecking orders.
Aghast, I
understood King Ashoka’s
torment. Standing back-to-back in this
carnage of our making, we watched helplessly as a millipede of tearful refugees
crawled away from the smoking wreckage of the horizon. Neither of us
could escape our complicity in this disgrace, nor could we stand by, idle and
indifferent. We had to do something: lunge for the fat brass ring
dangling just beyond our wildest dreams; blow the doors off our fragile
confidence, competence and self-worth; risk everything to relieve the atrocity
of the human condition.
This text isn’t
incised in stone. Dedicated specialists, amateur and pro alike, should
chew over its assumptions; their debate may conjure a brilliant Learner
Commonwealth. Our new mantra should be,
“What if the sky were the limit?”
Every cubic yard
of earth, air, water and vacuum contains all the energy in the Universe (minus
1?). We must become clever enough to
reach into this cosmic fire and warm our hands, yet not burn our fingertips or
the world. Otherwise, we’re just
stumblebums, parched and starving in a desert, while untold abundance lies
locked below our feet.
We are sitting
down together – all of us – to share a giant, super-deluxe pizza. It stretches out to the horizon and beyond
that, to infinity. It is covered with
mounds of perfect vegetables, creamy cheese, aromatic spices and deli delicacies:
all the toppings of the world’s finest pizza.
It’s got college degrees, fair housing and low infant mortality; enough
abundance, justice and serenity for everyone; anything anyone could demand and
more of it than anyone could imagine, much less find use for.
Too bad we only
look down a one-degree slice of this pie, the sorriest of slices, saturated
with want, fear and pain. Stripped
bare, burned to the third degree and unbelievably unappetizing; it’s been
combed over at sword-point for ages.
Across it, starving children cower in stoic tears, in bunkers, hovels
and refugee dumps: poster children of our failure and guilt. We can’t distinguish anything, any longer,
but this WeaponWorld of ours, the napalm-blackened crust of a burnt-out
world. Starving for something better, we
scramble after its crumbs with microscopic compulsion.
The infinite
leftover heaping with untouched goodies?
It is beyond sight, as far as we’re concerned. We’ve been walled off from the other 359 degrees of this cosmic
pizza, blinkered by long-revered cultural conventions. Our culture blinkers us at birth, and more
and more severely as we age. It has
screened us from PeaceWorld and focused our attention on WeaponWorld. As a result, we have dismissed this
abundance as mere idealism, myth, dream, fantasy, utopia and science
fiction.
Learners will
polarize those blinkers and reveal the whole pie to everyone. This festive bounty is certainly there for
us to harvest on PeaceWorld. We have
but to clear our vision, roll up our sleeves, get to work and make it
happen. Then it will be the harvest
season, and most everyone will be too busy gathering and sharing this
incredible abundance to cause further harm.
Three quarters of a lifetime ago, as I began testing the shaky legs of new-foaled
opinions, my father challenged me thus: “It’s easy to condemn institutions,”
this suave Bayard told me. I’ll always
remember him as a chevalier sans peur et sans reproche: a fearless
and blameless knight.
That’s a tricky
combination, come to think of it. Harm
would be easy to inflict by those gifted with some illusion of
fearlessness. “I don’t give a damn; let
loose the dogs of war!” Only slightly
more difficult would be to do good from fear of harmful consequences. The truest goal would be to do nothing but
good, fearlessly. My valiant father
strove after that, his whole life, which made him a nobleman in the finest
sense of the term. No lesser deed would
be worthy.
So you think
yourself fearless? Fine. Do good, without counting the cost, and
prove it to us. A little trick you must
play in your head. Can you do it?
The above
paragraph may be the most important one for sociopaths who recognize their
predicament, as well as for their friends who see it in them. I suggest they reread it carefully. It might relieve their ailment and clear the
straightest path to PeaceWorld.
“Condemn
institutions? Don’t bother,” this mild
cavalryman told me, “unless you can come up with better ones.”
I've knocked
myself out, since, trying to conjure up those alternatives. As a child of the greasy 1950’s, I found
capital-R Revolution revolting: its runny blemishes more telling than its
watered-down promises. Among its worst
failures, after untold suffering, it offered nothing more than the inadmissible
present with frequent backslides.
Revolutionary dialectics (and every thesis that sprang from them) struck
me as so much cheap talk—culture’s inflamed reaction to orthodoxy’s stunted
mediocrity.
No Great Book On Peace exists, even though students
cram Clausewitz’s On War in every college. Believe me; I searched the stacks
in vain, for On Peace.
Midway through my
mandatory obedience training – once I’d gotten good and fed up with it – I
began combing available libraries for a primer on the administration of world
peace. You know, a real civics lesson
for a serious cosmopolitan? So what if
it were nothing but science fiction and wild-eyed speculation? I’d have settled for that!
All I found was On War and chosen textbooks on weapon
management. There were countless
histories, devout religious tomes, pompous political screeds, literary soap
operas and nut-cracking philosophical quibbles—each sustaining weapon mentality
and diverting attention from what should have been our primary study all along:
the mentality of peace. Otherwise, they
talked about feelings or sentiment or technicalities or meaningless
abstractions or some such nonsense. As
my readings grew more voracious and less picky, they led me to more and more
ponderous, elaborate and boring affirmations of weapon mentality. An alpine range of useless trivia aside, I
found very little else, to tell you the truth.
Avid for the
peace primer I never found, I set about drafting its Volume One. I would never dare call it On Peace. Only a global consensus of Learners,
assembled in the World Virtual Agora, could begin to compose such a work in a
thousand million volumes. Nowadays,
there are none.
Even if Learners fits all alone on a virtual
library bookshelf under a non-existent call number (no Dewey Decimal for peace,
the Library of Congress prefix JX no longer used), its scribe – no matter how
pride-scoured – cannot claim copyright of the ideals of peace. The gold
dust of peace mentality may lie buried under mounds of weapon mentality dross,
but hints of its color glimmer from all of our masterworks. Where did Learners’ opulent forbears go? They disappeared, replaced by the weapon
Classics we’ve been forced to worship all our lives.
This text
reconsiders a vital choice between the mentalities of weapons and peace.
Every moment we endure here on Earth, we connive with this evil or defy it,
whether we admit this to ourselves or not. These days, weapon mentality
dominates our thinking without serious debate. No wonder runaway weapon
technologies harvest evermore victims, since everyone submits to weapon
mentality without a second thought. Also, no wonder that every
progressive aspiration must shudder to a halt in this Sargasso Sea of weapon
mentality. What surprise is there in
that? This social defect is so common
and predictable, we shouldn’t even feel disappointed by it.
Once we shift the
focus of our faith from weapons to peace, we may yet thrive, along with the
rest of our progressive aspirations.
Until then, forget them, and us.
Since you begin
to grasp the central premise of Learners,
you may spit it out: a common enough gag reflex.
“World
peace? PeaceWorld? Shut up! I’m through!”
If you value
controversy in your mental landscape, ask yourself: “Why have I dismissed this
topic without fair hearing? During my
lengthy examination of other topics at school, why didn’t someone sit me down
and make me think this through?”
I’ll tell you
why. Emerging from infancy into
frustrated adolescence, we mature sexually long before we do so emotionally and
socially. Society exploits this offset
development. It offers us a predictable
life cycle: from adolescent rebellion to adult uncertainty, followed by the
mid-life backlash of reactionary senescence.
Like Herman Hess’s Siddhartha,
we may only plumb the depths of harsh asceticism, sensual pleasure, material
wealth, self-revulsion and eventually, saintly complacency in our own
mediocrity (by default). Forced to
surrender our healthy conscience and replace it with passive-aggressive
compromise and adherence at gunpoint to conspiracies of greed, we soothe our
heartache in ignorance, apathy, drugs, alcohol, fanaticism, amateur obsession,
professional compulsion, insanity, felony and self-destruction. From these escapisms, take your pick.
The
reform-idealism of youth is everywhere subverted. Suppressing youthful idealism is a pseudo-skill each of us is
called upon to master. Shouldn’t the
nurturing of their creative drive be our first priority?
Do you recall
when you were a bright young thing as pure as a glass of water? Remember the salvo of insults that met your
first, childlike questions about world peace?
No matter to whom you turned – to strangers or beloved, enlightened
teachers or dumb brutes – you ran the same gauntlet of veiled insult,
condescension and violence if you persisted.
Think back. “World Peace? End poverty? Feed and
care for everyone in honest equity? Get
real, stop dreaming, grow up! What do I
have to do, grab you by the shoulders and shake?”
Ok. I’m summarizing years of systematic and very
subtle indoctrination in as many lines of text. But you get my point.
On this
WeaponWorld of ours, a so-called “happy childhood” is the rare one during which
inescapable traumas and injustice are inflicted a little later, at random, by
surprise and by strangers.
Did this
ceaseless brainwash while you were young and impressionable—did it bring you up
short? Was your conscience battered
silent? Did you suspend disbelief to
avoid rejection? Did you enslave
yourself to it, regardless of its merit?
Would it have mattered what race, nation or creed you sprang from? Were you ever given a choice?
“Crimestop means the
faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any
dangerous thought. It includes the
power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of
misunderstanding the simplest arguments that are inimical to [orthodoxy], and
of being bored and repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading
in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in
short, means protective stupidity.”
George Orwell, 1984, the New
American Library, Inc., New York, 1961, p. 174.
See The 1984
Syndrome.
We stopped short
because Everyman silenced us the moment we started asking awkward
questions. Our culture subverts
pacifism and military decadence as obsessively as it controls human waste and
waterborne illness. Both are lethal to
a primitive society and both are suppressed.
We are potty trained, as children, against peace and valid
spirituality.
One arises from
the other, don’t you think? In the
absence of peace, wouldn't valid spirituality suffer? In the midst of war, doesn't our spirit turn into a monstrous
caricature of itself, sneering at our hypocrisy? During what we dare call peacetime, is it not just as bad?
Are we ready to
yell enough at this grotesque weapon cult? Have we ever been, will we ever be more ready?
As with our
weapon religions and their relevance to God, it doesn’t matter how much
mouth-jabber we devote to peace. We are
just as averse to it as to excrement.
As a result, we face unlimited social contradictions and zero closure,
resolution or clarity.
Sure, I can understand
your fear and loathing, but won’t let that stop me. You and other Learners, join me instead! We’re grownups now, apparently immune to
childhood blame. Unplug your ears –
there, that’s better – and pay attention.
Learners retrieves painful questions
we let drop when we were kids, with or without our honest consent.
The choice you
were never given as a child, is yours now to make as a Learner.
As this Aquarian
Age dawns, it’s a sorry state we submit to.
Arrogant mismanagement emerges from chainsaw logic lubricated by
snake oil democracy. Fate’s idiot smile seems to favor
Conspiracies of Greed. Smirking
predators gang rape Blind Justice before our disbelieving eyes. They laugh all the way to the bank,
congress, pulpit and academy; then come back for sloppy seconds. Over and over, our institutions legitimize
the spastic slapstick of killer primates.
Absurd clichés
jam our constellation of political metaphors, despite their spectacular
failure—or hadn’t you noticed? Like
nitwit kibitzers around a stalled car, we keep intoning “We’re just gonna need
more Love, personal perfection, Christ in this world, Humanism, Science,
Submission, Family Values, Free Markets – straighter politicians, fairer
bullies and kinder Fat Cats.” In short,
some purer dictatorship of fathead fatuity.
Even more widespread and worthless: “Don’t believe in nothin’, little
pal, but earning and spending your next buck.
Be cool, be a steady fool, like us.”
Stupefied by all
this barbarism, prophets, newscasters, technocrats and commoners bray disaster
in four-part harmony. Others pray that
swift Apocalypse come deliver them, pretty please. Stupefied by their panic, they worsen the necrosis of this world,
merely to hasten the Ending they crave.
Thus do we deny
the obvious, the Miracle upon which our existence depends a thousand times a
day. According to this Miracle, a far
greater wisdom awaits us, capable of replacing typhoons of venom with windfalls
of abundance. Fantastic plenty could
bloom where wastelands now fester; full justice, salve ancient traumas and
about-face mutinous legions back to civility.
Imagine
that! Cast away your silly panic and
start visualizing the best that could happen.
Instead, weapon
dissidents and weapon reactionaries croak contrapuntal duets of hoary
dogma. They obsess over the hated Other
and plot His impossible destruction.
Others sit on their hands until everyone has become an angel or until
Christ returns to deliver us (whichever comes first).
Everything is
improvised. No one has any idea what
he’s talking about and no one has a workable plan except for more killing—sit
still for it or stir it up worse. No
one listens to anyone any more. The
major perk of promotion to power, these days, is no longer having to listen;
just issue a series of insane orders unmindful of reality—the recipe for
guaranteed disaster. Nothing else is
tolerated.
We are only
permitted two kinds of politicians, nowadays: those who have quashed every good
idea for generations (Democrats) and those who never met a nasty idea they
didn’t love (Republicans). Like a
village blacksmith lusting after a first-glimpsed motorcycle, they long to
tease the world apart and reassemble it to suit their fancy. Yet their obsolete political vocabulary
won’t let them comprehend the world’s most basic contradictions and
opportunities. They seek to fix a
Harley-Davidson with Age of Pericles terminology and horse-and-buggy
tools.
Only the absolute
justice of our cause keeps it alive—not our necrotic habits of thought and speech. Toxified by gangrenous ideologies and
rejecting them, we’ve grown so credophobic that we refuse to believe in
anything any longer. Force-fed
meaningless commercial blather, our moral gyros tumbled, we’ve let go our last
spirit toeholds and fallen into riptides of change.
But don’t
despair. Heed Jesse Jackson and “Keep
hope alive!” As with two post-war
Germanys, reactionaries will hand over a basket case for us to reanimate once
it appears too late to salvage anything from the wreckage. Learners
anticipates that handover—this time, of the whole world. Up to us to rebuild everything!
You might recall
some movie where ruthless Evil secures every source of power, control and
security. By midway through the story,
the Good are dumbfounded. No one knows
what to do next.
Then someone –
perhaps Ruth – says, “Hold on, I have a plan.”
Rather than turn away in despair, passive bystanders start paying
miraculous attention. Inspired, they
turn into heroes. By that time, for the
sake of dramatic continuity, the camera has cut to the triumph of the
Good.
This book
itemizes the vital steps between ‘no plan’ and ‘plan in action.’ During this critical but no-fun stage, we
should discuss our plan in detail, expose its inherent weaknesses, suggest
better alternatives and coordinate our timing and chronology. Let daring volunteers take on tasks that fit
their special interests and talents.
All you reductive meliorists out there, who’ve been pounding your
steering wheel in stalled cars for the last thousand years, start your
engines! Shake awake all those who’ve
abstained from sheer nihilism and cowardice.
I have a scheme,
and here it is, as follows. We are at
this essential if boring stage of the procedure. Proceed accordingly and with dispatch, I implore you.
Some warnings,
before we begin. This book’s eccentric
prose, exotic idiom and outlandish speculation will make very hard
reading. We’re gonna make warfare
illegal across the planet, here—not bake a simple cake. You’ll find no easy sound bites in these
pages, none of the quick fixes and simplistic TV pabulum you’ve grown
accustomed to. You may click back,
now, if that was all you were looking for.
Treat Learners as a rough guide, clearer than
run-on Classics and straighter than Ivy-League obfuscations. After reading it, young prodigals may scout
out this locked-down prison world while guards and convicts slumber. Evenhandedly, it beckons ecstatic Nobel
laureates, berserkers with nothing left to lose, aimless idealists, madrassa
dreamers, bonzes, Talmud scholars and Bible seminarians, none of them
satisfied, prep-schooled sellouts and ghetto luminaries defying the evils that
wriggle just beyond their own brown study.
It speaks just as much to every Learner lost in a funhouse mirror-maze
of weapons and peace, as to my childhood ghost haunting bygone stacks. I address these words in equal parts to this
year’s applicants to the War Academies and to next year’s crop of middle school
prodigies. The best among you sought
the literature of peace in the library stacks of weapons administration, to no
avail.
This book
outlines what we were driven to discover and failed to find. California dreamin’, it surfs the riptides
of chaos and the undertows of paradox.
Irritably, it tosses aside treasured concepts and reconsiders
much-maligned ideas.
My message is
very biased. Attacking sly platitudes,
my arguments climb way out on shaky limbs—farther out than you may wish to
follow. You’ll find no ‘detachment’,
‘disinterest’ or ‘balance’ here, as those terms are misused today. Given this topic’s complexity, my writing
numbskills and lesser erudition, your work is cut out for you.
What’s more, I’ll
turn every rhetorical cannon against the weapon mentors who drilled me on
them. Horrified and enraged, I’ll invoke
any fallacy more useful than its ‘logically correct’ counterpart. I have no use for proponents of ‘logical
analysis’ who dare permit children to starve to death and turn their back when
such an awkward topic encroaches on their blank spirit. In the same spirit, Learners will energize PeaceWorld by shamelessly appropriating
every Madison Avenue fraud and taps bugle call that has lulled us to sleep up
‘til now.
If you seek a 250-word-or-less recipe for World Peace, consult the Georgia Guidestones, carved in English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian (but not French, you hicks):
1.
Maintain
humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2.
Guide reproduction
wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
3.
Unite
humanity with a living new language.
4.
Rule passion
— faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
5.
Protect
people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6.
Let all
nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7.
Avoid petty
laws and useless officials.
8.
Balance
personal rights with social duties.
9.
Prize truth
— beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
10. Be not a cancer on the earth — Leave room
for nature — Leave room for nature.
If the dry logic
of world peace is all you seek, read Mortimer Adler’s
How to Think about War & Peace,
Simon and Schuster, New York, 1944.
Back then, President Roosevelt and his brilliant staffers anticipated a
popular, one-world government that would have criminalized warfare across the
planet and guaranteed human rights for all – seventy years ago, with 150
million fewer war dead and a couple billion fewer dead of famine and
preventable disease than we “enlightened” contemporaries are responsible
for―and how many thousands of trillions of cash in vital assets and
sabotaged ingenuity thrown away with our consent?
How dare you
suggest it’s none of your doing! Quit
lying to yourself, here, at least. We
are all 100% accountable.
Alas, American
Weapon Party commissars made sure a failed haberdasher, Harry Truman,
would grab the reins of power from Roosevelt’s dying hands. Hiroshima, my love? Truman and his small-town, small-mind
cronies threw away all the goodwill America had earned by liberating the world
from fascism. Just like Bush and his
rat pack did, after 9/11. They’ve
groomed a succession of politically
correct mediocrities, since. Their
parochial prejudices allowed no alternative but another hundred and fifty
million war dead, and another half-century of bankrupt weapon management.
Still today, we
waste precious time and talent pointlessly protesting their mighty warmonger
initiatives. Let them protest, in absolute futility, our mighty peace initiatives—never again the other way around!
This text is a
speculative entertainment and an impassioned rally cry, not some textbook
drear. Neither fiction nor non-, it
fits in somewhere between confession, screed and sketchbook of homilies,
anecdotes and conjectures. As Margaret
Atwood puts it, forecast journalism.
There is no other text like Learners, and I can find no political
group that would adopt it as its own.
Were that I
could! I would not have felt so
abandoned on this planet of unrepentant killer primates.
I have no faith
in my own generation (good for nothing but Bush the Lesser and his National
Capitalist cronies) nor the one that follows; perhaps the following one… Learners
will certainly arise as a political party in the future—perhaps after I’m gone,
as with Marx, Rousseau and Erasmus.
“So it happens that beyond the imaginary demarcation line between past
and present, the writer still finds himself eye to eye with the human
condition, which he is bound to observe and understand as best he can, with
which he must identify, giving it the strength of his breath and the warmth of
his blood, which he must attempt to turn into the living texture of the story
that he intends to translate for his readers, in such a way that the result be
as beautiful, as simple, and as persuasive as possible.” Ivo Andrić, Acceptance Speech for the
1961 Nobel Prize for Literature.
"If humanity bears an eternal truth, it is certainly that tragic
hesitation of the man who will someday be called, centuries hence, an artist –
facing the artwork that he experiences more deeply than anyone, that he admires
the way none other can, yet that he, alone on Earth, wants to destroy sub rasa at the same time."
"So let’s understand this fully: if genius is a discovery, it is
upon this discovery that the resurrection of the past is based. At the beginning of this speech, I spoke
about what a renaissance could be, what the heritage of a culture could
be. A culture is reborn when men of
genius, seeking their own truth, draw from the depths of centuries everything
that formerly resembled this truth, even if they don’t recognize it." André Malraux, Les Conquérants, (The Conquerors), Le livre de poche, ©
Bernard Grasset, 1928, pages 311-13.
“The leader carries all of our confusion with
him as he attempts to climb above society in search of a clear view that would
indicate the right way. There, on his
imaginary mountain, he stands alone, suffering the personal anxiety of freedom. He watches us dancing aimlessly below, half
struggling with mortality in our consoling maze. He can see we have a certain reassurance, lost in our earthly
eternity. But how is he to get his own
reassurance if he cannot make all of us and the structure itself respond to his
efforts?” John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s
Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Vintage Press, A Division
of Random House, 1991, p. 349.
Accept those
parts of Learners you hearken to,
then make something better happen.
Dismiss anything you find in here that disconcerts your fancy—as conjecture,
hearsay, heresy, what you will.
If this work
inspires you to frame some new idea, let me know. I’d love to filigree new ideas into the next
rewrite of this text (with proper attribution, of course). With a little luck, I may get to chronicle
the real-world progress of this righteous endeavor … perhaps in future chapters
of this samizdat.
Why do the terms
‘utopian’ and ‘idealist’ consign our highest values to the trash heap? When did reactionary
chic make it unfashionable to do the utmost good?
We may be clumsy
practitioners of peace, at first, but the love of good throbs in our
veins. No word for this talent exists (kalotropism?), but it will not be denied
much longer. Who knows; doing good may
become fashionable once again, despite the mightiest efforts of the worst
among us, to forbid and ridicule it.
Loudmouthed
morality truants feign sophistication by aggravating our weapon neuroses. By rote repetition, they malign ‘do-gooders’
and ‘bleeding hearts’. Hiding their
shameful shortcomings, they confabulate the pig-headed terminology and criminal
line-up of reactionary correctness.
They’ve built up an assembly line of conmen and professional hypocrites
who are (literally) politically correct enough to serve as stand-ins for
legitimate leaders. Each candidate
worse than his predecessors, while people of talent and genius are chased from
politics and social commentary; either gunned down in the street or crucified
by the media.
Who are these
malingerers? Do-badders? Flinty hearts? Do a few stony hearts require a little lubricant bleeding to
re-oxygenate their owners’ flat-lined conscience?
After so many
tries, why don’t we have the best possible government? And don’t you dare suggest we have the best
government already. Be honest with
yourself, here, if nowhere else. With
all our schools, books and teachers, why aren’t there millions of peace mentors
out there, enriching the abundance that is our due, filling the world with
miraculous technologies, sacred wildlife, courtly love and random acts of
kindness? Where did the superb
replacements of young Andy Carnegie, the Roosevelts and Little Flower LaGuardia
go, that the administration of excellence demands? Where have you gone!
If we considered
this world one Great Academy – as Learners
hope it shall become – most of its students major in some aspect of weapon
technology while all too few take too few electives in peace. As the machinery of war grinds on without
letup, only its most devoted slaves may evaluate its usefulness in public
discourse.
Hardly anyone can
list the great peace mentors; I know I couldn’t. Peace’s foremost practitioners have been unassuming
gentlefolk. Female peace practitioners
are as under-reported here, as they have been in general history. Compare this blitzed state of ignorance with
our household familiarity with Genghis Khan, Hitler and like masters of
mayhem. If peace were our first
priority – not mass murder – this Learner deficit would cause us grave
concern. Nothing of the kind concerns
us, since we are first and foremost weapon slaves.
Your first
appraisal of Learners may make you
dizzy, its range of topics is so kaleidoscopic. We never studied them in the depth they deserved. Of necessity, our first review will be
insolently superficial and subject to myth-based denial at every
page-turn. Once this crisis has passed,
we may render full justice to these exotic notions.
Read the first
few chapters of Learners to take in
its vocabulary: (“Intro & Vocab” to “Stop”). Thereafter, resume your random perusal in any of its three
Sections:
SECTION I)
Why we’re in this mess;
SECTION II)
How we approach PeaceWorld; and
SECTION
III) What results we should expect.
The first and
harshest Section, “Why,” stretches midway through Learners. Why is so incendiary,
its first-time readers risk burnout.
Unlike more soothing texts, this one won’t overlook great evils we’ve
been taught to regret briefly and then take for granted. This merciless inventory of error will seem
wearisome to you at first, mind-numbing later and soon unbearable. Your subconscious will revisit every
aversion therapy you suffered as a child, to get you to quit. You’ll grow frustrated with this reading, then
nauseated by it and soon enraged.
You’ll have to brace yourself sternly to chugalug this bitter brew to
its dregs. Take tiny sips of this sour
mash and find more syrupy refreshment elsewhere, perhaps at the titty of TV.
Just don’t give
up. I might as well have entitled Why,
How and What—Lamentation, Transition and Hope.
Bittersweet “How”
lists unfortunate tendencies and proposes some countermeasures. Sweeter “What” sketches peaceful
alternatives to the weapon technologies we submit to today—assuming global
majorities have grasped Why and How beforehand.
This text is
intended for every Learner to come. Its
discontent should have been our patrimony and was—since forgotten. I leave the Sections Who, When and Where to
you, my beloved Learners. If you catch me fumbling my extraordinary
mandate, that’s your cue to take up the burden of proof.
I may have found
a hassle-free way to gatecrash heaven, merely by reincarnating into Jesus Christ’s
lifeline the next time I die. I believe
this painful redemption is open to all of us, no matter how heavy our Karmic
burden. In this as in other cases, I
repeat myself to emphasize a crucial concept.
This exotic
doctrine might shut down fundamentalists’ idiotic diktat, once and for all.
Its universal acceptance would eject all those fundamentalist middlemen unworthy
of spiritual discourse. By what right,
wisdom or benediction do they claim to butt in there, anyway? It would put the Kingdom of Heaven within
everyone’s reach in the afterlife, regardless of truth or error in this
lifetime; entrust earthly cares to our own accountability, and our salvation to
the Lord’s direct tutelage.
Once you grasp
this idea and its outcomes, no pompous bigot can lecture, weasel or torture
them out of you. You will be completely
free to save your soul, miraculously free.
Or you may return to these endless lives as often as you wish, as a
Bodhisattva—provided this lesson awaits you here the next time you come around,
and hasn’t been silenced by Godless fundamentalists and indifferent fools, as
so often in the past and present.
We may serve God
or Mammon, but not both at once. Learners suggests how to serve this
world gracefully and Grace in the next.
If you dismiss the above-stated as some worthless, Bible-thumping
crankdom (more fundamentalist babble), you missed my point entirely. And, my friend, that is your loss. Check out the “reincarnating” link above,
and see for yourself.
If you take your
weapons indoctrination too seriously, you may expect to sort religion from
government as independent variables.
Forget it. We are progressives
insofar our faith (in whatever) induces fearless love in us, and reactionaries
when we react (faithlessly) against the shadow of our fears and hatred. Our creeds and governments are one and the same. It doesn’t matter what phony drapes we use
to cover the religious underpinnings of government, the way prudish Victorians
used to drape piano legs to repress their sexual obsession.
These assertions
may sound like pure arrogance to you. I
assure you, they’ve been as carefully thought out as any you’ll find in Learners. It’s up to you to debate their worth, once and for all.
One of Christ’s
parables (that of the Talents: Matthew 25-14) entrusts risk-taking coinage to
each of his servants. The Lord intends
us to manage our lives for the profit of souls, not mere risk-reduction. As stunt persons in this universal action
feature, we’re here to take enormous risks.
Safe mediocrity must be illusory, since everything kills us in the
end. In our mortality reside our glory
and our salvation.
I’m surprised how
little this epiphany alters what I must say in Learners. Even more
surprising will be our grand
exploits once we’ve claimed grace in this world and Grace in the next.
At most, these
meditations have turned my fortune or failure on this material plane into the
blinding glare one gets off wavelets during late, sun-dappled afternoons. Transient and annoying at worst, they are
beautiful despite their ache and soon to fade.
I have given up
on free advice to “Live each day as if it were your first and last.” How hormonally unworkable! I look forward to each day’s end, now. My sorriest sleeping dream has turned out to
be more entertaining than the most spectacular and moving epic I’ve found in a
book or on the screen. I suspect that
the after-death experience, properly negotiated, is at least that much better
than life, or better yet. Good music,
good lovin’ and a few good friends, along with some other things during this
lifetime (like laughter, great meals and just helping somebody), they’re
something else; they make the pain of living bearable. I counsel no-one to abandon them
prematurely, no matter what fate our souls may have in store. It seems obvious that we have something
important to learn in the here-and-now.
I had no choice
but to write and rewrite – en deux
langues (in two languages) – this book, this whole book and nothing but
this book. In the end, I can only
justify my presumption by pointing out the depths of our moral bankruptcy … and
of our craving for Peace.
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LEARNERS: On the Move from
WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld