SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld
to PeaceWorld
“Your isolation is not so much the direct result of enemy action as of the fact that when you travel this road your experiences are shared by fewer and fewer people, until at last there’s no one to whom you can make yourself understood.” Sarah Patton Boyle, “Spit in the Devil’s Eye: A Southern Heretic Speaks,” from the October 20, 1956 issue of The Nation magazine © 1956. The Nation Company, LP. Reprinted with permission. Also found in The Nation 1865-1990, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Ed., p. 214.
Secretly,
throughout history, weapons and peace mentors have diced for our wealth,
talent, faith, bodies, posterity, sanity and Holy Spirit—the whole
caboodle. The former sought to protect
us militarily from the Other and protect themselves from us; the latter, to
accept the Other and ourselves in peace.
You will find the
same conflict between the mentors of weapons and peace—whether among whites or
blacks; Chinese, Argentineans, New Zealanders or Greenlanders; capitalists,
communists, socialists or fascists (progressive or reactionary); among
atheists, agnostics, deists, Christians, Muslims, Pagans, or Buddhists (whether
fundamentalist or ecumenical); as much among stone-tooled jungle dwellers as
among sky scraper tenants managing info technology.
No difference
whatsoever when it comes to this universal confrontation. Nobody is better off, no-one is immune. Certainly not you or me, not the Pope or the
Dalai Lama—despite all our prejudices of denial.
Is that fully
understood?
This contest has
cut right across every social divide we hold dear. Age, sex, race, class, religion, ideology, geography and
politics—mere window-dressing. They’ve
distracted us from our primary task: peace on Earth, once and for all.
The Weapon/Peace Dialectic regulates our political dialog across
a rigid Cartesian coordinate. Each of
us and each of our nation-states must communicate with a forked tongue. Its two tines (one controlled by weapon
mentors, the other by peace mentors) share three traits. They are:
·
Dialectical: parallel along the axis of understanding;
·
Antithetical: at right angles to each other's beliefs;
and
·
Antinomian: directly contradicting each other’s methods
and outcomes.
This thrice-knotted,
forked-tongue garble induces the Weapon/Peace Antinomy: absolute disparity
between methods used, goals sought and results achieved.
Let me offer you
this example. There are thousands more,
and you may come up with your own, once you grasp the concept. My example will be the term “utopia.”
Along the first, dialectical axis, Utopia
is a classic text whose author, Sir Thomas More, described a “perfect” social
order. Everyone agrees that his utopia is
not an accurate historical representation, is irrelevant to present
circumstances, and impossible in the future.
What a perfect model! But this
is the nearest that most scholars of the Western Enlightenment dare approach
the idea of PeaceWorld. There are a
handful of later texts, just as obscure and poorly thought out.
Reactionaries and
progressives agree that this is all the documentation necessary to judge the
relative merits of weapon mentality and peace mentality. Might as well cross the Rocky Mountains,
guided by a map of Pangaea.
If you’re interested, Lewis Mumford summarizes about two dozen
principal texts in English (several thousand pages worth) in the first 150
pages of his book The Story of Utopias. Don’t ask me what he intended to convey in
the last half.
So far, so
good. At least along the dialectical
axis, everyone may share the same meaning in their words.
Along the second,
antithetical axis, the word utopia signifies for weapon mentors, “that (place)
which may never be.” Utopia is their preferred reference
text, taught in every high school and college.
It confirms their deeply held conviction that peaceful and benevolent
societies are impossible. For peace
mentors, utopia means “that (place) which is not, but might be.” Utopia
is a narrow speculation of theirs, upon which to build a brighter peace.
Don’t ask me why
progressives haven’t published a half a hundred better works, since. Craven subservience to weapon mentors,
flawed imagination, subconscious approval of the status quo or mere mental
inertia: the ultimate reason for their failure is beyond my feeble reckoning of
submission to evil.
Note how the two
basic belief structures are set at right angles to each other, yet use the same
(parallel) terminology.
Along the third,
antinomian axis, weapon mentors use the word utopian like an adverbial clause:
“When pigs fly and hell freezes over.”
Any idea branded utopian can be dismissed by reflex, without further
consideration. Peace mentors use it to
describe a social scheme that intends to improve current reality, whether it
might be valid and practical or not. In
other words, the peaceful version of the word utopia signifies "something
good we should strive for," whereas the weapon version means "a
horror to be avoided like the plague…Not only useless, but somehow
poisonous."
Thus, along the
antinomian axis, the ultimate intention on each side is headed in exactly the
opposite direction. What was once a
conversation is now a tug of war.
Nowadays, weapon
mentality dominates our words, arguments and intentions; just as weapon
technology dominates our material lives.
We seek to survive in peace despite this universal dominance.
We owe it to
ourselves to clarify this antinomy. Our
synchronization of meaning, definition and intent – and the clarity it may
bring to public discourse – promise us security, abundance and fellow feeling
beyond our understanding.
Our institutions
and cultures retain a few peace remnants we should cultivate, and dominant
weapon memes we should render vestigial.
Until we clarify these ideas, they are equally suspect (including our
favorites) and valid (including those we most despise). This book revalidates ideas I believe are
most auspicious and marginalizes the remainder.
In this book, we
will use the words ‘weapon’ and ‘weapons’ interchangeably. Rather than use them simply as nouns, we
will wield them as modifiers: weapon technology and peace technology. From now on, ‘weapon’ will precede words
that begin with a consonant, and ‘weapons’ anticipate those that begin with a
vowel. Let the grammarians scream.
The text below
separates the weapon/peace antinomy into four word-pairs:
·
Weapon
mentality
·
Weapon
technology
·
Peace mentality
·
Peace
technology
Weapon
Mentality relies on fear,
and fear rules our world.
“… [The English historian, Thomas] Carlyle said that the great element missing from our attempted entry into the past is Fear; he set himself to re-enact it, and succeeded extraordinarily well. His syntax is designed to embody a distracted groping for certainties in a fog of rumour [sic] and of events at best only half-understood, in moods of acute anxiety, rage and sometimes dangerous exaltation.” John Burrow, A History of Histories: Epic, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2008, page 362.
In order to
secure its adherents from overwhelming dread, weapon managers develop threat
deterrents they believe so ghastly that none dare challenge them. Alas, WeaponWorld ordains this challenge:
“The best defense is a good offense.” And
no-one’s agonizing death has ever deterred anyone from anything; only offered
momentary entertainment for local psychopaths.
In this text,
we’ll avoid terms like ‘war mentality’ and ‘warfare mentality’. War mentality is to weapon mentality what
road rage is to defensive driving.
Neither weapon managers nor defensive drivers prefer a violent
collision. If a crash does occur, it’s
because things got out of hand. More or
less realistically, they believe their efforts will avert it.
Only rarely will
we use terms like militarism or fascism as substitutes for weapon
mentality. Much more widespread and
subtle, this mentality infects ‘free’ democracies as savagely as
dictatorships. Indeed, free citizens of
free republics are better weapon technicians than the slaves of a
dictator. A people that calls itself
peace-loving can manage its killing much more skillfully than another that
shrieks for foreign blood.
If you consider
yourself a lover of peace, pure beyond reproach – even though you’ve never
bothered to sort your peace and weapon priorities – you’re actually a weapon
fellow traveler and a pillar of the weapon status quo.
Like alcoholics
in denial, we worsen our addiction to weapon mentality insofar we deny it.
Weapon mentality
inflicts social distortions on purpose.
Poverty, rigid hierarchy, injustice, inequality, underemployment,
nurtured criminality, substandard education, malnutrition and professional
arrogance—the list goes on and on. We
mistake them as regrettable outcomes of stupidity, bigotry, insanity, greed,
crime, honest error and disaster; we refuse to believe they are allowed to
fester on purpose, to further the goals of weapon mentality.
Social reformers
imagine they can improve things reductively, gradually and
incrementally—problem-by-problem, identity position by identity position and
topic by topic. Using the same
scattered methods and reductive reasoning, they’ve failed for the last five
thousand years.
The only solution
to this problem is holistic, simultaneous and global peace mentality – agreed
upon by almost everyone – followed by a cascading swarm of atomistic and
reductive fixes. Long-term success is
impossible in the opposite order, since each small fix will be paralyzed by the
holistic, simultaneous and global countervailing force of weapon mentality as
worshipped these days.
A society, any
society, measures itself against a Constellation of Political Metaphors its
members agree to share. The one we
share is crammed with Weapon Myths. Many common policies and beliefs of religion, law and morality
constitute Weapon
Mythology: popular rationalizations for our most irrational
practices and institutions. Since the
basic values of weapon mentality are insane to anyone with the slightest love
for and understanding of peace, weapon mentors must impose their own mythic
vocabulary and syntax, immune to peace mentors' reasonable criticism.
For weapons
managers to succeed, all they need to be is reliably incompetent at peace. Military technology is the only field at
which they must excel (mercilessly graded by Darwinian selection on the
battlefield); every other field of endeavor can be ventured with relative
incompetence, and still fulfill their requirements. Within those limits, the worse they manage peace, the better they
will succeed at war. Weapons
technicians rule because it is much less bitter to fail at peace and triumph at
war, than to succeed at peace and lose a war.
A common weapon
refrain is, “You’re not paid to think about such things; we are.”
Information
proletarians are enslaved by
their deprivation of valid information.
Junk data, served piping hot and fresh to them every day, maintains
their servile status. Most often, you
and I fit in somewhere here. At other
times our loyalties sparkle between these meta-groups like energy quanta
between the atomic shells of a world-sized molecule.
As information proletarians learn, work
and play, they produce wealth while sustaining themselves and their
beloved. Much smaller groups (called
Information Elites) seize most of this wealth, in the name of Military
Security, and use it to defray the anti-profit costs of their Weapon
Technologies.
These costs go
well beyond mere peacetime expenditures for weapons and soldiers, far beyond
that. When comparing the economics of a
peaceful society to the econolologic of a weapons society, an accurate contrast
would be between the wealth of Geneva and Mogadishu, or between the athletic
performance of an Olympic runner winning his favorite race, versus that of a
wounded soldier dragging his best buddy’s body to the rear.
I’ve seriously
considered opting for the terms Opinion Elite and Opinion
Proletariat. Those terms emphasize
the fleeting nature of these prejudices and the information elite's paradoxical
lack of merit. Opinion elites believe
that their prejudices are a cut above everyone else’s; opinion proletarians
convince themselves that their preferences are second-rate compared to those of
opinion elites. Well-entrenched in the
media and schools, opinion elites fervently endorse this inferiority complex.
This may be the
root cause why an overwhelming majority of progressives (relying on reason)
never overcomes a tiny minority of weapon managers (and their shameless
reliance on sociopath
lies). Ah yes, I nearly forgot! That, and the knee-jerk reflex of
reactionaries, to kill and torture a large number people at random, whenever
they feel seriously challenged—either in the cellars of the secret police
during mass unemployment, or in the trenches of a war arranged for that purpose
alone, or both as often in succession as deemed necessary to renew the
proletariat’s reluctant submission.
Info
elites and weapon
managers are interchangeable among different nation-states, religious
affiliations and political organizations.
They include our rulers, their staff, media workers, judges, teachers,
priests, politicians and other key misinformation and disinformation
professionals―whether or not they know what they’re doing and why they
are doing it. They consider themselves
superior to their proletarian hosts – from whom they spring and upon whom they
depend – the same way a precocious junior might scorn his humble guardians.
In the
beginning, info proletarians chose their first elites from among
themselves. Thereafter, info elites
promoted their replacements from the info proletariat. It mattered not whether they did so through
princely privilege, democratic election, religious hierarchy, Soviet
nomination, robber barony or whatever.
Nor has it mattered if the political setting was a kraal of mud huts, a
stinking feudal barony or a continent spanning, multi-ethnic,
military-industrial Empire.
It never mattered
whether weapon managers were enslaved or free, secular or religious,
centralized or profit-oriented, plebian or noble, criminal or authorized,
professional or amateur. Identical
weapons elites emerged in any case, with remarkably similar mind-set, attitude
and reflexive behavior. Their talk
might have changed over time and under different circumstances – cynically,
opportunistically and with prejudice – but their walk never did. Except, perhaps, for honor …
Learners must
appeal foremost to warrior honor: the honor of my father, of every noble
warrior, which cleanses him of his filth.
Real warriors will instantly recognize honor and defend it against any
crazy deviant lacking it, lethal as he may be.
That honor will inspire PeaceWorld and defend it fiercely from then
on. Honor and Learning should become
one. After all, one learns honor.
Info elites
convince the info proletariat that their weapon management best suits
everyone’s needs (an obvious lie). They employ:
·
Weapon
Mentors to broadcast this
fabrication during pseudo-peace, and
·
Weapon
Sectarians to do so more
forcefully in times of war.
The
information elite is no smarter than the info proletariat from
which it springs. Its members merely
promote weapon mentality and themselves in the short term. They do so by censoring important
information and drowning this censorship in a tsunami of babble and lies. Those smart and conscientious enough to
criticize this poor bargain are marginalized.
This triage “in
the name of obedience and loyalty” dumbs down those chosen (and self-chosen) to
remain in power, collectively and automatically. After they have held sway for a while, weapons elites drift onto
the razor reefs of their own social contradictions. Quite predictably, they sink into ritual cruelty, institutional
terror and routine corruption (see “Ritual Stupidity”).
Info elites can
practice one of three broad categories of info politics. The first two categories simplify
information content; the third complexifies it. Transitions between these categories are
gradual and flexible; they can go backwards or forwards—they need not be
categorical, abrupt or progressive.
1. Politicians (or Elites) of Misinformation
broadcast as many lies as possible.
This is standard behavior for tyrants modern and ancient. Sooner or later, anything not a forbidden
truth becomes a mandatory lie. Misinfo
politics creates top-down battle management systems that seem optimized for
war. Think of Stalin and Saddam
Hussein.
Broadcasting
misinformation and discerning the truth become relatively simple tasks. In most cases of this kind of politics, the
exact opposite of anything relayed through official monologue media is closer
to the truth.
Misinfo politics
breed paranoia, suspicion and terror.
Nothing is as it seems and no one can be trusted. Under this claustrophobic compulsion, the
info elite shrinks to a bare minimum and then purges itself beyond that. Brain-dead dogma becomes manifest reality,
mindlessly repeated across every medium.
Rather than merely manipulate mass opinion, misinfo elites fantasize
that they can transform reality itself—as on paper, so in reality. They kill and terrorize their proletarian
hosts until this fantasy replaces common sense.
Gangsters rule
while self-blinded misinfo politicians wage holy war against Learner
creativity. Society runs on its own
inertia and feeds off its last reserves until it grinds to a halt and
starvation looms. The end result is
brutal foreign warfare and internal genocide to confirm official propaganda:
the ultimate simplification of public reality.
We can rate
misinfo elites by their ‘hardness.’ How
hard does the elite make it for the info proletariat to survive? The harsher the tyranny, the worse the
politics of misinformation.
‘Softer’
tyrannies are richer; they replace misinformation politics with disinformation politics. Disinformation is much more subtle and
difficult to manage than misinformation.
As a weapon state
matures, the defects of its misinformation politics become more and more
blatant. Lying yields nothing but
stolen wealth and its entropy into chaos—sustainable wealth grows from the
truth and trust in its legitimacy.
Thoughtful reformers attempt to weave a few strands of peace mentality
(including a bit of info politics) into the rotten basketwork of weapon
management. This conglomeration of
opposites cannot hold together for very long.
Instead, it polarizes corrupt weapon managers against frustrated weapon
dissidents in a centrifuge of disinfo politics. Here we are, ruled by...
2. Disinfo elites include a mix of
so-called populists and liberals, with a hard core of reactionaries who rule in
the end on every important issue.
Together, they broadcast their endless semi-monologue through extensive
hierarchies of corporations, governments and/or religions. Unlike politicians of misinformation, they permit carefully screened feedback in minute
doses.
The keyword in
disinfo politics is "but." As
in: "We hear your calls for
reform, and understand that true morality, morale and efficiency dictate that
we do things better; but …” there
follows a long list of excuses why inefficient and immoral practices must
remain routine.
“Please be more
reasonable, ladies and gentlemen. What
you propose would be impractical, too costly, subject to abuse by thugs,
inconsistent with our most cherished and ancient protocols, etc., etc.
...” Ephemeral religious dogma,
ideological gobbledygook, distortions of history, exquisitely written literary
blather, commercial advertising, sports babble, arena violence, empty show
trials, soap opera trivia, “scientific” data and “mathematical” conclusions
that wind up being utterly false: the whole will be broadcast through monologue
media—endlessly, from as many sources as possible, in lavish detail, with
painful exactitude and at enormous volume.
Significant
matters are lied about obsessively, usually by omission. This trancelike state becomes hypnotic and
self-reinforcing. Producers and
spectators alike refuse to distinguish obvious lies from the truth. Disinfo elites are just as vulnerable to
their own disinformation as their host proletariat. Destructive activities increase while real wealth
evaporates.
The populace
ignores its greatest strengths and perils, in favor of greater and greater
elaborations of trivia. It is easily
convinced of its imaginary wealth when it is on the verge of bankruptcy and
vice versa. Public policies become
arbitrary and vacillating, without moral or ideological basis. The regime improvises as it goes along, and
its outcomes suffer accordingly.
Useless and
trivial information becomes easier (cheap or free) to find and more profitable
to produce, while the useful kind becomes harder to broadcast and acquire (more
expensive, “unprofitable” and laborious).
Belief in anything but rabid commercialism, faith in anything but naked
greed and senile dogma, all but those forbidden by universal consent and
popular decree.
Disinfo elites
turn into bloated Mandarinates. Through
the active promotion of certified mediocrities and authoritative conmen, gifted
Learners are relegated to info proletarian status and sub-creative
frustration. These habits of deliberate
misunderstanding, consensus oversimplification and social mediocrity are only
reversed in times of war, when many frustrated talents are recruited into
revitalized weapon cadres.
I recall seeing a
photograph of workers leaving an American naval shipyard at the end of the
workday, back during World War II. An
enormous sign was posted over the entrance: “Tell us your good ideas!” No such sign would have graced a similar
factory gate at the same time in history, had it been between two wars.
Just as a slap in
the face will stop a fit of hysterics – and a deep kiss, likewise – mass trauma
is the usual method to put an end to this delusional state. Without warning, disaster and warfare strike
because no one bothered to address important issues preemptively. Everyone is so surprised when their sand castles come tumbling down all at
once. Afterwards, disinfo elites
declare war—a much simpler task than promoting additional abundance and fellow
feeling. Mass murder becomes the norm
once again. At that point, it’s too
late to adopt peaceful politics of information, since the requisite wealth and
unstressed, unpanicked populations have gone to waste.
Learners – by the way – is the kiss.
Rarely, peace
dissidents manage to overcome this social inertia and spread the good news that
everyone should share Learning even-handedly.
If info elites begin to pay miraculous attention to this idea and start
broadcasting it, they work themselves out of the job of restricting information
flow. At that point, info elites and
proletariats merge into an Information (or Learner) Commonwealth.
3. Politicians
of Information would generate truth and lies on every topic without
prejudice or favor, for Learners to sort out among themselves. A Learner Commonwealth would emerge through unrestricted
public discourse and extensive dialogues between self-selected
info-jurors. They would pursue their topics of
passion without regard to wealth or status—since those would be
theirs by right in an Information Commonwealth.
Many statements
that appear to be lies are just more complex elaborations of the truth. Whether through literary fiction, new
ideologies, academic postulates, inventions, discoveries or reinterpretations
of ancient dogma: the truth prevails because it is more profitable in peaceful
settings. People revalue information
because it seems more important to them than expensive artifacts and mythmaking
about military security.
Taking the
opposite tack, misinfo societies opt for nothing but lies and terror. The truth becomes least profitable because
it will get you killed on the spot. No
such choice remains in disinfo societies, where white noise drowns out
everything else—until the World Trade Towers come tumbling down in controlled
demolition. Everyone scrambles
thereafter to resume the reassuring chatter of fallacious normalcy, thus
exposing their neck to the next chop and doing nothing to ward it off.
In politics of
information, expanding communication systems become more interactive, complex
and adaptive. People engage in many
more dialogues across new media, rather than submit to top-down, monologue
propaganda from ‘superior’ elites. They
are more interested in their topics of passion than in the mass media’s trivial
disinformation.
TV is a monologue
medium, as are radio, print media and non-interactive web pages. You know, all those worthless corporate and
bigot propaganda web pages that have no Contact
link?
I cannot benefit
(or suffer, more likely) from the interactivity of Learners until you choose to contact me. You may do so from the Contact Page link at
the bottom of any chapter of Learners. Let me handle, in the meantime, the feeding
frenzy of viruses and spam that swarms to my door, in the hope of welcoming the
rare Learner’s constructive response.
Yours, perhaps? A response that
might make worthwhile all my messages in a bottle, otherwise fruitless?
I could use all
the help you can send me, battered as I am by witless criticism, criminal
neglect and stupid attacks. I've
already received a few (desperate or cheerily supportive), for which I am most
grateful.
The Greek Agora,
Town Hall meetings (unscripted… Gotta
add that, now that Bush the Lesser’s disinfo technicians have scripted, rehearsed
and packed audiences as a matter of routine), telephones and postal or
electronic mails are examples of dialogue media.
It is a question
of how well the Armchair Formula can be satisfied. Dialogue media can carry at least ten times more useful
interactions across the same bandwidth, than monologue media. The sum of useful communication equals real
wealth (divided by the sum of useless and/or noxious communications?). I’m talking ten, a hundred, a thousand times
more hard cash available to everyone without inflation.
“Your intent is noble, but your appeal misguided. If you talk to these emperors about profits, and in their love of profit they stop their armies – their armies will rejoice in peace and delight in profit. Soon ministers will embrace profit in serving their sovereign, sons will embrace profit in serving their fathers, younger brothers will embrace profit in serving their elder brothers – and all of them will have abandoned Humanity and Duty. When these relationships become a matter of profit, the nation is doomed to ruin.
“But if you talk to these emperors about Humanity and Duty, and in their love of Humanity and Duty they stop their armies – their armies will rejoice in peace and delight in Humanity and Duty. Soon ministers will embrace Humanity and Duty in serving their sovereign, sons will embrace Humanity and Duty in serving their fathers, younger brothers will embrace Humanity and Duty in serving their elder brothers – and all of them will have abandoned profit.
"When these relationships become a matter of Humanity and Duty, then the sovereign is sure to be a true emperor. So why mention profit? Mencius, translated by David Hinton, Counterpoint, Washington, D.C., 1998, p. 219. (Next quote).
It is up to each
of us to create a Virtual Agora of massive political dialog that spans
the globe. The World Wide Web is the
startup prototype of this Learner Virtual Agora.
Insofar as it spreads, we’re in luck.
With
insignificant outside threats and lots of surplus wealth (very rare), some
mature societies would allow Learners to complexify
information politics.
As complexity
induces more turbulence, it risks bursting the levies of social convention
intended to contain and regulate it.
Thus, info politicians must renew more and more sophisticated
vocabularies and communication habits.
Otherwise, the roar of chaotic argument might degenerate once again into
misinfo politics.
The latest
temptation of info elites, to censor the Internet from the top down; and of
proletarians, to cripple it from the bottom up (with viruses, hacking, flames,
spam and other info litter) is nothing more than a pathetic denial of an
ever-expanding information universe.
Think of a colicky baby who turns his face away from strained peas. Bewildered individuals and groups attempt to
re-simplify their life by lashing out against the newest complication they
consider vulnerable to their abuse.
Poor jerks.
In pursuit of
abundance, advanced practitioners of disinfo politics tend to disarm
unilaterally and thus invite more military aggression.
Other societies
evolved up to info politics, but were destroyed militarily and disappeared from
the historic record. Many budding peace
societies were annihilated and rendered ‘prehistoric’ because their top-down
managers promoted internal wealth and peace, while hungry outsiders hovered
nearby: restless, militant and jealous.
Note this
tendency in the United States where military casualties used to be political
poison. This public aversion to
military casualties in particular and to militarism in general, tempts
aggressive outsiders and internal militarists to inflict more damage. As their assaults grow bolder, better
coordinated and more destructive, survivors revert to politics of
misinformation and overt weapon tyranny: tempting options in an overmilitarized
world where knee-jerk panic trumps rational thought.
Weapon Technology
includes the mechanical
hardware and flesh-and-blood wetware of warfare: military forces (Weapon
technicians), intelligence gatherers, national security agents, secret
police, weapons industrialists, weapon workers, their capital plant plus the
enormous inventory of weapons themselves.
Today, there is one personal fireharm for every ten inhabitants on
Earth, and two or more bullets cast every year for each of them. In case the first one misses…
Weapon
Managers discriminate
against anyone and anything they can blame for their frequent policy errors
(since they are, by definition, the worst peace managers): the poor, women,
non-heterosexuals, children, liberals, ethnic/religious minorities, migrants
and immigrants, primal myths, human nature and nature itself. Sophisticated weapon managers recruit
reactionary candidates from among abused minorities; that way, they can pay lip
service to pluralism while stimulating social abuse.
“The more justly constituted the society, the more admirable its political form, the more war [weapon mentality] threatens to weaken its institutions and to pervert them. And it is also true that the best form of government is that least adapted to the exigencies of war.” How to Think about War and Peace, Mortimer J. Adler, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1944, p 42.
Weapon
managers get Battle Elites (about a 10% minority among weapon
technicians) to do the jackals’ share of their dirty work. Educated officers or enlisted slaves: it
doesn’t matter. Half genetically damaged
and half the products of childhood neglect/abuse fears, battle elites
thrive on both sides of the battlefield, the riot zone, jailhouse bars and
Belsen wire.
The remaining 90%
of weapon technicians serve as logistics and morale supporters for battle elites
on their side, and as easy prey on the other.
Finally, as firepower multipliers (artillerists and such) on both
sides. Whether in peace or in war,
battle elites do the killing and the rest do the dying.
Battle Elites cannot bring their aggression under
control. This makes them valuable
assets on the battlefield and costly nuisances elsewhere. Everyone shares some battle elite traits,
even though most of us keep ours under strict control. Call it good manners, good taste,
conscience, civility, delicacy, decadence or mere cowardice. Most of us are not hard-wired to thrive on
the battlefield and in bar fights, the way battle elites are.
I seem to have
made a special Karmic vow to someone very influential to me. I’ve promised not to kill or torture anyone,
this time around, if I can help it.
Instead, I’ve pledged this lifetime to the preaching of PeaceWorld. Was I an elite genocide during past
incarnations? Probably. I’m not proud of it, quite the
contrary. What a wasted opportunity for
fast-buck wickedness, and what a rocky row to hoe instead! Indiscriminate killing would be so easy,
this time around. There’d be no end to
the killing (with seven billion live targets), until everyone had been
pitchforked into the meat grinder.
Genocide is fantastically well subsidized on this planet—instant
gratification for wholehearted marauders.
As for preaching
peace, I wish myself luck before this esteemed assembly. And beg your pardon for this abuse, dear
reader, if you already consider yourself an honest Learner.
We may split
battle elites into two groups:
·
The Dirty
Dozen: born warriors, gunmen, bullies and outcasts who often outgrow their
aggression with the proper dispensation of maturity and loving-kindness.
·
The Himmler
Subgroup: primarily civilians, ostensibly good parents, spouses, neighbors
and administrators—and quite often, brilliant cowards. Charming and seductive as long as it suits
them, they look forward to wreaking havoc on a world of Others they have grown
to despise. They seek the highest rungs
of power from which they may get away with as much mayhem as possible, shielded
by their rank.
Just as a shark
retains rows of spare teeth in reserve, info proletariats nurture Info Proto-Elites eager to overthrow the
current info elite. Proto-elites
are a motley crew of ambitious clerks, students and subalterns – employed by
authorities or not – but covertly dissenting from them. These frustrated rebels only cohere
clumsily, once their elite’s failure rate maxes out.
Eric Hoffer’s book, The True
Believer, analyses Proto-Elite leaders. Unfortunately, he
indulges in the sorry habit of biographical reductionism: reducing the
complexities of global social movements into a simple inventory of their
leaders’ idiosyncrasies.
Herodotus treated
history and current events as cults of personality, as have many historians and
journalists since. Everything happened
because some poor slob and his flunkies – officially designated Leaders – made
it so exactly in the manner they foresaw.
“By the mid-4th century, there existed a large and well-known body of Greek literature that had as yet no convenient name―it was not yet called Historia – but was generally described as the “writings of the deeds of war” or “inquiries about the deeds of war’ : it included Herodotus, Thucydides, the several continuations of Thucydides, which went under the title Hellenica (Affairs of Greece) (only Xenophon’s survives), and the accounts of the western Greeks by the lost Syracusan writers Antiochus and Philistus, which went under the title Sicelica (Affairs of Sicily). It was taken for granted that this literature was the source of knowledge for anything about war, diplomacy or interstate relations. P. 85.
“But what of the historians? The 5th century had bequeathed two major narrative styles, the linear epic style of Herodotus and the antithetical realistic style of Thucydides, which were associated with two different views of the world—the encomiastic Herodotus world of moral achievement and cosmic law versus Thucydidean pessimism and irony….” Doyne Dawson, The Origins of Western Warfare: Militarism and Morality in the Ancient World, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1996, p. 95.
Those narratives
are about as accurate as the one that follows.
I’m driving my car and in absolute control. So I’m going to flip every car in a hundred-car pileup on a
freeway in the fog, into carefully preplanned slots, thus making sure that my
car and those that follow come out the other end without a scratch. Sure, buddy; it could happen!
Yet that would be
a rather simple problem, compared to running an entire country. See the leadership
section in my chapter “Identity Politics.”
After millennia
of crushed dissidence, progressive organizations have been hopelessly
Balkanized, which means chopped piecemeal and thus made ineffectual. Many social activists have worsened their
political impotence through mutual ostracism, special interest bickering, petty
private grievances and nit-picking ideological puritanism. In this way, much more pragmatic,
disciplined and cohesive weapons elites have defeated them in detail.
Rejecting
holistic transformation, weapon dissidents opt for endless hairsplitting, moral
compromise and hopelessness.
Indifferent to genuine peace and progress that they believe are quite
beyond their grasp, they turn into conformist adherents of a ‘loyal
opposition.’ They are emotionally
invested in token resistance against thriving a weapon state that strengthens
itself from their feeble resistance.
See The Nation. Too bad
for those who challenge their turbulent conformism!
Recall that body
builders push and pull their muscles like taffy against resistance. In roughly the same way, weapon states exploit
their weapon dissidents. Thus, the
clichéd yammer of the average weapon dissident makes his weapon state stronger,
subtler and more difficult to bring down.
On occasion, a
breakthrough peace movement manages to dissolve its weapon state. This lopsided relaxation of weapon
technology is usually fatal for the society involved, given the presence of
well-armed outsiders. So success at
peace has never been encouraged in the past.
Today’s fashionable ‘community activism’ is a continuation of thousands
of years of ineffectual (indeed, inversely effective) weapon dissidence.
My mailbox is
filled to bursting with rival solicitations for a charitable contribution, each
appeal more heart-rending than the last.
None asks for more than a check that magically disappears with the
promise that it will support some worthy cause, probably with more solicitation
mail.
On the other
hand, our institutions vacuum fortunes from our wallets to deploy the means,
justify the motives and develop opportunities for mass murder. The beneficiaries of thousands of years of
successful propaganda, weapon managers think holistically and plan
monolithically. Their international
transactions and expenditures are pseudo-voluntary, free spending and largely
independent of outside influence.
Just like during
the Franco-Prussian War, the leadership on one side has more in common with
that on the other, during their minuet of death, than with their info
proletariat carefully lined up for the massacre. Those who disagree with their goals will be marginalized into a
political minority both voiceless and trivial (by definition, not by
numbers). No matter how many of us
there are or how sensible our proposals, thanks to our historical incoherence
and hysterical paralysis.
Because of thousands
of years of defeat, rejection and Balkanization (and the rare, absolutely
lethal success), standard-issue weapon dissidents have become divisive,
elitist, holier-than-thou, miserly, exclusive, reductive and atomistic. They are satisfied with empty dramatics,
ritual bonding in adversity, moralistic self-indulgence and existential
despair. Thus do we honor our long
tradition of defeat. Most of us would
rather keep things that way indefinitely.
We would rather not alarm ourselves by grabbing real, transformational
power. The prospect scares me,
too. So what? As if we had any other choice but successful transformation at
this point in history.
Thus – every hour
on the hour – the media announce fresh weapon triumphs and peace
tragedies. Progressives cannot hope to
take over the political mainstream until they’ve rallied around a hyper-complex
platform of inclusive, cooperative and mutualistic reforms. In other words, until they’ve maximized
Learning planet-wide.
Some text –
perhaps this one, perhaps another better? – may catapult to world power its
international, interdenominational and interethnic adherents of every age, sex
and class. This could happen much more
readily than you might think. Like
other hidden truths, it is just a question of time and numbers: the time it
would take to spread understanding and the number of those who’ve
understood.
Like a vampire
caught out in daylight, weapon mentality cannot survive full exposure to the
truth.
This transition
could be as unforeseen, swift and exhaustive as the U.S.S.R.’s perestroika. Modern-day leaders – suddenly rendered powerless, clueless and
dumb by the exhaustion of “inexhaustible” energy sources and/or orthodox power
structures – could abandon their posts spontaneously and simultaneously. In the absence of an organizational
framework like Learners, this
transition could become horribly destructive—simply put, the mafia will take
over the world, and the worst political horrors will roll out like
clockwork. Remind you of current events?
Independent
ideologues and anonymous polemicists are hard at work at this task, each
bringing different insights and talents to bear. But it is almost impossible for us to broadcast our
findings—especially among weapon dissidents.
Paradoxically, they are more closed to new ideas than weapon managers
who will adopt novel improvements (reluctantly, but assuredly) into their
robust and self-confident management schemes.
The shaky ground progressives must negotiate does not permit them such
open-mindedness, at least until they change their mind. May dissidents experience a change of mind
and allow our best ideas to be heard, seriously meditated and rebroadcast! Unlike current events.
As our
civilization polarizes between luxuriant minorities and restless majorities, as
reason and rights fade from public discourse, raw greed becomes the final
arbiter of more and more new policy.
But even shifty greed must find its rightful place. Well-regulated Cooperatives of
Plenty shall welcome private enterprise – that wellspring of innovation and
abundance – provided every citizen gains the same basic benefits.
Despite their
inflated privileges, info elites are just as vulnerable to mistaken information
– both self-inflicted and out-sourced – as are info proletarians. In order to guarantee dependable benefits
for themselves and their dearest (as opposed to rickety perks they must defend
at gunpoint), info elites must find new ways to generate sustainable abundance,
and adopt harmless rituals that redirect fearful aggression, destructive
diligence and the most harmful ideas.
Among the tools
info elites use to organize their partisans, greed is second only to fear. Learners won’t tempt them to abandon their Conspiracies
of Greed until our shared vocabulary and purpose outsmart their hysterical
avarice. Learner doctrine must be
clear, concise and immune to prejudice, cupidity and panic. There must be a plan or a series of plans
for which most people would volunteer because they see a better chance to
benefit cooperatively (or merely survive) within the plan, regardless of their
origin and status.
The belief is
obsolete that people can be punished into better behavior. The more penalties, beyond the necessary
minimum, the more resistance—automatically.
Weapon managers are the only ones to profit from this tailspin of
coercion and defiance.
“… The primitive wisely knows that the wealthy man is not the one who accumulates surplus but the one who gives it away, that to be rich is to divest oneself of riches. This wisdom becomes difficult to sustain in the context of Neolithic stock keeping and agricultural surpluses; with the devising of metal coinage in the cities, however, we are in danger of losing it altogether. Can hard currency, being noncorruptible, perhaps be safely hoarded without corrupting its possessor, unlike the shit from which it has symbolically evolved? Can a hardened culture thus outwit its lowly origins and the limitations they propose?
“Probably not. The original heap of stones piously proclaims the hope that by gathering together we may build something durably human. When it is superseded by a heap of golden coins secreted in the rich man’s treasury, culture is almost certainly in trouble. The heap of golden coins is a frozen swarm, unmoving; the rich man, though apparently post-magical, will be tempted to fetichize this swarm, secretly to believe that his possession of it has alchemically transformed him from human baseness into imperishable purity that will live forever – in which case he will have by-passed the bowel … Thus the worship of filthy lucre is not, as many suppose, the worship of shit but its denial; and a denial of such fundamental realities will ultimately poison everything in its attempt to find utterance. Not only is it clear that hoarded coin sooner or later does rot the soul (just as retained feces and fetuses rot the body) but a money-worshipping culture forsakes the chief virtue that flows from gift-exchange: its magical capacity to restrain greed and forestall war.” Taken from The Origins of the Sacred: the Ecstasies of Love and War, by Dudley Young, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1991, p. 207.
Peace
Mentality sustains our
souls. Like a spiritual physicist,
Mahatma Gandhi revealed that its nucleus was the fusion of Truth and
Non-violence. Our souls sparkle around
this nucleus like electrons around a vast atom. Every moment of every day, a still, small voice whispers to us,
“Love fearlessly.” Tirelessly, from
across the cosmic void, it repeats itself at celestial amplitude. We have but to listen and obey.
Even though peace
mentality burns bright in idealistic young minds, it gutters out in middle age
and is often extinguished in unlucky souls.
Almost everyone would pick peace mentality over the weapon variety on an
even playing field. However, our
opportunities for peace are as fleeting as our weapon practices are diverse,
forceful and tempting. Given so much
negative conditioning, only an enlightened few achieve mastery of peace.
Peace technology
pays its own freight and that of weapon technology. Despite countless setbacks imposed by weapon priorities, peace
mentality inches forward. It transcends
life and death—much less the shameless narcissism of disinfo politics.
Peace
Technology includes:
·
our flight from
misery (above and beyond any “Constitutional” pursuit of happiness);
·
our run at
abundance, health, human rights and sustainable agriculture;
·
our worship of
nature and supernature;
·
our quest for
learning: play, entertainment and enlightenment;
·
our pursuit of:
o
Peace enforcement,
o
Sound philosophy,
o
Valid enterprise and
o
Useful professionalism, as well as other life-giving activities.
Without such
exemplary modifiers (in italics), we
needn’t consider these things essentially valuable. After all, they easily revert to organized bullying, wordy
nonsense, greed satiation and naked elitism: giveaway symptoms of weapon
mentality.
Peace mentality
has one Categorical Imperative: raise the children well. Everything else takes back seat to this
effort or impedes it. They say, “It
takes a whole village to raise a child.”
Raising healthy children requires every adult’s cooperation. The goal is not to raise many children
indifferently; that is a weapon requirement.
Peace management would demand that every child be cocooned in optimal
surroundings. Their health and Learning
should take absolute priority, as would the civil rights of their mothers.
“Young children all know love for their parents. And when they grow up, they all know respect for their elders. Loving parents is Humanity, and respecting elders is Duty. That’s the secret. Just extend it throughout all beneath Heaven.” Mencius, translated by David Hinton, Counterpoint, Washington, D.C., 1998, p. 240. Bibliography
It seems obvious
that all social good flows from cherished children maturing into good
citizens. Logically, we could conclude that
the opposite is also true: that bad citizens proliferate when more children are
abused. At gut level, we delight in
children’s happiness, suffer heartache when they come to harm, and sigh intense
relief when they are delivered therefrom.
One needn’t be a parent to feel these things, nor particularly
sensitive.
If you believed
in reincarnation, you would have to be crazy to support any social habit that
did not pamper every child without exception—you’d be signing your own torture
warrant during future incarnations.
Totally bonkers… Another reason
to emphasize the belief in reincarnation.
Those who resist
this empathy are deeply disturbed; so is our whole society, since it flouts
this basic truth. We let children
perish by the millions, let billions more become stupid adults through
malnutrition and neglect.
We should make
good these lethal scandals. This
travesty would be unthinkable on PeaceWorld―unheard of. It would cause government meltdown, trigger
a complete overhaul of leadership.
Ex-leaders would withdraw in disgrace from public service, paralyzed
with shame. Current weapon-leaders are not likely to
live up to such peaceful ideals. The
best of them might, under ideal circumstances.
Once we’ve convinced ourselves, they must be likewise convinced or
replaced.
A
political homily drones like Muzak in my mind.
Humans cleave to three broad categories of political behavior. Regardless of other allegiances, we fit in
among Ex-Herbivores, Ex-Carnivores and Omnivores
(oft-reincarnated herbivores and carnivores who have learnt the futility of
their old ways).
Ex-Herbivore:
“Hey, there’s plenty of good grazing out here. Grass ain’t brain food, so let’s just make lots of babies and
munch away―what we do best.
"We live in
the present. If we got an itch, we
scratch it. Our universe is in that
scratching. Anything more―that’s
just too complicated for us.
“Gee, our
carnivores are pretty nasty. They hunt
us, kill us and eat us. But they do
chase off other carnivores who might be worse.
Who knows; things could be worse.
Anything that really scares us, well, our blind stampede will make it
disappear, won't it? Why bother to
vote? We just want to be
happeeeee.”
Ex-Carnivore: “Behold this beautiful body of mine:
powerful, lean and hungry. My mind
ticks over, deadly and remorseless. I
live in the future, when my darkest needs will at last be satisfied.
“I am an expert at magical thinking. As long as I carry out a precise series of steps
in exactly the correct order and with perfect timing, I may feast to perfection
and indefinitely (which must be paradise and proof of my selection as God’s
favorite). No one may stop me, and I
will kill anyone who tries. If I fail,
it is from lack of self-perfection. It
doesn’t matter how many times this recurs; I must succeed in the end or die
trying.
“This
obsession-compulsion can be born by a lion during his hunt, a hierarch during
his cult devotion (bloody or otherwise), a tycoon during his stock market
transactions, a science doctrinaire during his laboratory tricks or an author
ruminating his prose. My results have
been more or less rewarding during reincarnations in these spheres and more. My universe is centered on the repeated
sacrifice of prey and my self-perfection in so doing. Nothing else matters, and neither God nor I need have any mercy
on anyone less obsessed.
“My sires taught
me to use this money, these fancy institutions and novel gadgets to satisfy my
hunger. Anyone slower, weaker and more
ethical than me is fair game. Anything
I can claw down is my sacred property, to dispose of as I please. If I don’t claim it, some hungrier carnivore
will.
"End of
discussion, time to pursue happiness.
“I know! Let's run for Congress!”
Omnivore: “Salads are fine in their
place. My peers and I can neutralize
any piddling carnivore at will. It’s
fun―plus what’s left is good eats!
“We coordinate
the past, the present and the future to improve our chances of personal
happiness. We’re not so much interested
in everyone's pursuit of happiness—that’s their business. We are
interested in accelerating their flight from misery: a political duty that
carnivores keep forgetting in their wild pursuit of personal happiness.
“Through natural
selection, we have evolved to learn.
The more complex our information universe, the more we owe it our
wealth. This wealth could serve to
distract ex-herbivores and divert ex-carnivores until they’ve grasped the
fundamentals of Learner civilization.
“After five
thousand years of bloody compromise, we’re just hitting our stride and that’s
exciting! Our information potlatch
promises to supplant the rigors of the stalk and the rights of spring. Everyone merits abundance and security… The best, most obvious way to secure our
own.
“You, fated
ex-herbivore bereft of imagination!
Look up beyond your cud. Hey,
you: shifty ex-carnivore! Your
aggression betrays your weakness. Go
ahead, take your next lunge. Sooner or
later, it will fail, as it has always done.
Both of you! Join us in peace!”
But this is mere
EZ listening. Learners shall take a
much closer look at the physiology of social behavior and public
responsibility, discover better models and clearer explanations of human
motivation.
“Paul MacLean tells us, ‘We are the possessors of a triune brain – not one brain but three, each with its own way of perceiving and responding to the world.’ Richard M. Restak, The Brain: The Last Frontier (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979). In ascending order on the phylogenic scale, they are: (1) reptilian (central core), (2) paleomammalian (limbic system), and (3) neomammalian (cerebral cortex). The first of these, the reptilian, is the most primitive; MacLean has also labeled this the “R-complex.” It is comparable to much of the brain found in [fish and] reptiles. And it includes the hypothalamus. Surrounding the reptilian R-complex is the next level, the limbic system which is associated with the brain found in early mammals...
“In effect, we appear to have been ‘pre-wired,’ at least partially, by the reptilian brain to be ritualistic, to be in awe of authority, to develop social pecking orders, and perhaps even to develop obsessive-compulsive neuroses ...
“We appear to have been pre-wired in the case of the limbic system as well, to respond emotionally to threats to self- or species-preservation …”
Dennis J. D. Sandole, “The Biological Basis of Needs,” Conflict: Human Needs Theory, John Burton, ed., 1990, Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1990, p. 71.
Of course, the
scientific community has done its best to naysay this theory, asserting that
non-mammals have other brain structures that serve similar functions. They cite cephalopods and birds (but not
reptiles) that display surprisingly advanced mental capacities. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=one-world-many-minds. But this theory remains quite useful to
illustrate the mental priorities in different kinds of humans.
Once our models
of human awareness improve, better estimates of human motivation and better
treatments for violence-, greed- and fear-driven deviants may help us love one
another fearlessly—at last!
Debra Niehoff
reviews criminal correction in her mindful book, The Biology of Violence, The Free Press, New York, 1999, “Picking
Up the Pieces”. Herself the victim of a
violent crime (as I have been, at gunpoint; and as you are quite likely to have
been in this sorry day and age, just like every past one), she downplays
violence as a criminal deterrent and suggests more thoughtful methods of
behavior modification. Her research
reveals that police terror and penal brutality do not so much suppress
criminality, as increase it. This is a
constant striving of weapon mentality: to increase criminality and aggression.
We live on a
man-ruled WeaponWorld bereft of God’s Peace, mutual welcome and care. Could we restore this planet to God’s own
PeaceWorld, filled with them? The God I
believe in loves Peace and abhors War among the children. God will reward faithful Learners eager for
Peace, as genuine offspring and true saints.
That reward will translate into miracles.
Let’s say you
were neither an atheist nor devout – unlike most of them, neither doctrinaire
nor closed-minded – and sought to prove the existence of God solely for your
satisfaction. There would be no better
way to do it, than to rebuild WeaponWorld into PeaceWorld and witness God’s
self-confirmation by showering us with miracles of approbation. After all, we would be doing what God had
always taught us to do, instead of what God forbade – despite the aberrant
commands of thousands of years of weapon fundamentalists and ideological liars:
“Kill, lie, rob your neighbor and despise him, pray in public. We order you to obey the commandments of
mere men and practice that which God forbids.”
Those miracles
would be God’s substitute for our perfectly scientific, perfectly orthodox,
perfectly serial disasters. We could
pour into PeaceWorld all the sanctity we had pent up in our hearts, and benefit
from miracles of wisdom and loving kindness.
Every Learner could become a brother and sister on PeaceWorld―so
much so that we could hardly imagine it.
It would be like
acting our part in a play, except that all the props, costumes and lighting
would conform more closely to Peace and improve over time. Furthermore, the play’s sponsors, cast, crew
and audience had changed their mind – that WeaponWorld was not so hot – and that we’d be better off on PeaceWorld.
Every Learner
could assume – with greater zest, charity and fellow feeling; more easily,
happily, cheaply and safely; less troubled by fear; using exponentially greater
artistry, passion and devotion – the bearing of God’s massed saints: athirst,
drunk and fulfilled with the Peace of God.
Until God had secured His Peace.
We are all
Learners, from birth to death. As
political, moral, spiritual, pragmatic human beings, bonded in love and in
family with everyone else – for better or for worse – we are the Chosen Ones in
this space-time continuum. Of God, of
Allah, of Fate or of Nothing? Whatever
you choose to call it. I call it God,
and us, God’s; which includes everything above, below, in between and
nowhere. Does that bother you? Why?
Instead, we have
chosen to dawdle as WeaponWorld slaves.
Caught up in a tap dance of perpetual war and ephemeral peace, we’ve
improvised as we went along, paying homage to two opposite sets of values:
weapon mentality and peace mentality.
Suffering from this mass schizophrenia and hostage to it, we have become
nothing more than asocial sheep and incompetent wolves … God’s spoiled children
instead of God’s saints.
What a sorry
waste!
LEARNERS:
On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld