SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
Weapon mentors have obscured peace mentality and publicized weapon mentality throughout history. Recorded history is nothing more than the glorification of weapon states. If pure peace civilizations ever existed, they disappeared, erased from history and therefore ‘pre-historic.’
Weapon managers maintain that too much peace technology reduces (much less attractive) weapons efforts. They believe that popular hopes for evenhanded prosperity will outstrip their ham-fisted methods of social control, if peace managers allocate too many resources to non-military goods and services. They fear that peace softens the people, makes it less pugnacious in war—more ‘sophisticated, cosmopolitan and decadent.’ Minimal peace technology is their only acceptable alternative to open revolt and warfare.
Emphasize the word ‘minimal.’ Peace accustoms people to resolving their differences quietly; too much aggression disturbs them. Weapon mentors protest: “If we let this decadence go unchecked, weapon barbarians will overrun us.”
Martial poverty and hierarchical brutality are the flip sides of peaceful abundance and pacifist vulnerability.
Francis Fukuyama’s infamous prediction in his End of History may come to pass in a manner he least expects and desires. The Thousand Year Reich of National-Capitalist weapon mentality that he venerates will collapse under its own contradictions—either in omnicidal holocaust or Learners’ peaceful transformation.
Let’s assume we were exploring a distant planet. It would be much like Earth, except its climate would be so tropical that hurricanes would gust past 300 MPH from time to time. Our expeditionary vehicles would have to anchor themselves to bedrock so raging winds wouldn’t blow them away. Scrooge-like interstellar logistics, however, would dictate that our vehicles be lightweight, nimble and fuel-efficient.
Fixed or featherweight? This paradoxical requirement forms an antinomy, a contradiction along every dimension of the problem. Solving both problems in the same design will produce a gas-guzzling monster that would tumble away at the third serious gust.
The weapon/peace antinomy is entirely comparable.
Picture us in a lush, green jungle otherwise empty. Let’s release two lizard varieties: mottled green ones (weapon technologies) and Day-Glo ones (peace technologies). Day-Glo lizards are fat, vegetarian and friendly; cammo ones are fast, venomous and mean. While they interbreed with equal fervor, Cammo lizards develop a cannibal taste for Day-Glo flesh and eggs.
After a few thousand years, how many Day-Glo lizards will survive? How much Day-Glo DNA will persist among Cammo lizards? Cammo characteristics will wind up marking every survivor.
The dominance of weapon mentality is not chiefly a dark conspiracy among a few psychopathic evildoers – though this too can happen – any more than sharper fangs would be among surviving lizards. Like them, we all conspire with the prevailing paradigm: in our case, weapon mentality. Unlike them, we could stop conspiring with WeaponWorld or transform the context of our conspiracy into PeaceWorld.
It’s that simple. We would simply need to make up our minds during the same generation, all of us with but few holdouts. For the first time in history, we have all the communication channels, peace infrastructure and mutual recognition we could need to do just that.
The problem is—do we have the guts?
Let’s look for a more sizzling illustration. Suppose the atmosphere had a slightly higher concentration of oxygen. Fires would ignite spontaneously and burn super hot.
Fire fighting would be The Elite Preoccupation: the dignitary’s duty and poor man’s obligation. Everyone – from toddlers to the elderly – could act out basic fire drills in their sleep. Babies, brought to life by the touch of a red-hot iron, would begin learning fire management during their first few breaths of life. In medicine, the most talented healers would be pyrologists who treated burns.
Schools, the media and popular culture would hyper-refine this blazing reality in hypnotic cycles of rote repetition. Hundreds more terms would describe ‘fire.’ Literature and mythos would bristle with uplifting tales of fire fighting heroes.
Traditional fire fighting technologies would engulf national budgets; they’d distort land development, planning and architecture. Compulsive taboos would smother every high-energy technology from kitchen matches to nuclear power. Masonry, cold metalwork and cave sculpting would replace all carpentry. Asbestos, its health hazards ignored, would be worth its weight in gold. Root crops might replace stemmed plants that grew too vulnerably above ground.
Their governments (each with its favorite method of fire management) might claim they devoted only a small fraction of the Gross National Product to Fire Management. They would fail to mention the fortunes that went up in flames during intermittent firestorms; and these titanic sums wouldn’t begin to cover the hidden costs and personal sacrifices their citizens had to accrue.
Periodically, the very real threat of conflagration might tempt these people to backfire most of their infrastructure preemptively. They might even sacrifice each other, in trembling forfeiture to their pyromaniac God(s) and ideologies. The hellfires of religion would burn bright and cold in fanatical imagination―even more so than they do in ours…
As alien observers, we’d trip over social contradictions and overhead costs that locals would find perfectly normal.
From now on, consider me a distant observer alienated from this world, as many Learners must see themselves. The military anarchy that prevails on this planet has nothing to do with us Learners, except to cast us as observers and desperate fixers castaway on a world of killer primates. Learners: I invite you to save your soul, no matter what may transpire from this mess—a humble gift to my brother and sister Learners with our back up against the wall.
From our perspective, this world would seem warped and its natives, swayed by compulsions we would find horrific. They, however, would find everything perfectly normal.
Slightly more enlightened natives might decry the most extreme demands of firefighting orthodoxy. For instance, they might politely suggest that human sacrifice should happen less often. But no argument would budge smug majorities from the familiar comfort of their prejudice; and the most sophisticated resistance would come from native ‘progressives’ immunized from positive transformation by their intensive study of cliché arguments of the past.
Assuming you could prove that the atmosphere’s oxygen concentration and inflammability had subsided and that all their prejudices and practices had become obsolete, they’d still resist transformation anyway, out of lazy habit, imaginary fear and mental inertia. The fear of fire would distort their social arrangements – and nobody would care – the way the fear of military aggression perverts ours. Just as they’d cling to their firefighting reflexes, we cling to our war fighting reflexes.
Yet another example. Suppose you were the chieftain of a barbarian horde that had overrun an ancient civilization. To begin with, you would ignore your victims’ cultural achievement. Even if you were cunning enough to order the scribes interrogated and their books translated to you in private, you’d still discard most of this useless claptrap. Your frustrated curiosity might make you look foolish in front of your lieutenants; knowledge of soft city ways might harm your warriors’ fighting spirit; traditional native culture might draw popular opposition into guerrilla liberation bands.
You would thus ensure that this written culture disappeared along with its literate cadre—by neglect and by design. You’d terrorize, enslave and overtax the locals until they lost the will to educate their children for anything but your plowfields and barracks square. Learning its literature, religion, history and mythos would become capital offenses. This is how nomad conquerors distanced themselves from their victims through ignorance and apartheid. They made this the spirit and letter of their law. Of our law.
Warrior clans dominated urban civilizations as long as they retained simpler nomad ways. Irrigated croplands were inhospitable to herds, and soft city habits induced military decadence. Therefore, farmlands were laid waste, irrigation systems breached and great cities razed on a regular basis. Only a small, portable fraction of urban wealth was looted; only those books that served weapon mentality were preserved. The remainder was burnt to ash and washed away in blood, including priceless peace archives, technologies and technicians: all of them obliterated.
Our societies enshrine weapon mentality at great peril to themselves. Inferior standards of living, astronomical taxes and cults of repression, all of them engender militant bigotry, institutional arrogance, escalating insanity. This results in exploding penal populations, tidal waves of corruption and super-stratified class hierarchies.
Society reacts to these irritants much the way a disturbed bee colony would. Goaded by these contradictions, proletariats gestate new proto-elites eager to revolt. Our attack reflexes shift to overdrive.
Battle elites usually hire out to protect the info elite, but only so long as this guardianship brings them great profits. Once matters begin to fall apart for the info elite, more and more battle elites will side with the most vicious proto-elite (revolutionary cell) they can find.
Warfare provides a vast outlet for popular discontent. With surprising ease, info elites can shift responsibility for social evils from themselves to declared enemies internal and external. An info proletariat at war submits to its elite until it is convinced it has won or has bled dry. Passive witnesses to continuous government assaults against harmless minorities and outsiders, the info proletariat becomes disgusted, terrorized, relieved, fascinated, unified, regimented and finally inspired to commit worse crimes against humanity.
Foreign attacks against a ‘civilian’ population strengthen its will to resist. It doesn’t matter whether these attacks are mounted by stinking cavalry hordes, gleaming bomber streams or wild-eyed terrorists. Such assaults raise the proletariat’s tolerance for the failings of its elite.
This siege mentality reduces opportunities for effective dissidence. Info elites often galvanize this passive popular support by organizing domestic terror and international adventures. They hold unarmed combatants (civilians) hostage by controlling their relatives in the military and vice versa.
This is standard practice in America. Since almost no one has a taste for war, useless wars are initiated (as profitable for weapon ghouls as they are harmful to the troops and costly to their relatives), then skeptical civilians are condemned for refusing to provide moral support. We are told we must “support our sacrificial troops, if not the war itself.” If you are against the war, you are against the troops; if you are against the troops, you are not patriotic and may not criticize the war. Deadly circular logic.
What if they gave a war and nobody came?
Carroll Quigley’s unfinished thesis, The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis, (New York, the Macmillan Company, 1961), makes excellent reading on the topic of history. From pages 50 to 62, he contrasts:
·
“Instruments”: social organizations that fulfill their
mandate effectively, with
·
“Institutions” whose members
adopt illegitimate goals.
Some institutional leaders abandon their instrument’s mandate through personal weakness. Others focus overmuch on their own contribution. “The purpose of military discipline is to spit shine shoes and salute superiors; that of military training, to eliminate accidents.” Often they yield to laziness, mediocrity, neglect, greed, simony and inferior precedent. At other times, they refuse to accept new training, equipment and circumstances. Others, often the most powerful, are merely corrupt.
Besides, the largest chunk of most problems is solved with the first few increments of energy used to resolve it. The remainder of the problem demands more and more effort. Solving the last few details requires infinite energy, like pushing an object to the speed of light with a Newtonian mass driver.
In order to achieve the most progress, we needn’t solve most problems down to their last detail. Instead, we should redefine each problem so as to reapply the first, most efficient increment of energy to resolve it. Then redefine the problem, resolve that efficiently, and so on.
As social instruments decay into institutions by failing at this redefinition, their leaders mismanage more and more effort with less and less valid results. Instead, they ignore new breakthroughs and compound past errors. They give more importance to packaging and intent than to content and results.
Three outcomes arise from this “tension of development.”
·
Failing
institutions resort to reaction.
This reactionary outcome spirals antagonists into vicious cycles of
injustice, dissent and suppression.
·
They reform
themselves into viable instruments.
Emergency leaders take over from ineffectual timeservers and their new
instrument becomes more honest and competent.
·
New
instruments assume real power by circumvention. They leave former institutions as hollow
husks that fulfill ceremonial, cosmetic functions only. For example, parliament overrules a
degenerate monarchy and limits it to leading annual parades and pageants; or a
Roman emperor bullies Senators while honoring the Senate with many traditional
distinctions (as did the almost-emperor Marius).
Weapon managers affirm that international corporations are the most disinterested form of social organization. They’ve concluded that stable government requires public disinterest more than any other attribute. I wonder who funded their research?
For this situation to endure, corporations must assume all the rights of an individual: freedom of speech and assembly, plus immunity from liability unless proven in a court of law, plus a million times more wealth and power than any individual—without corresponding vulnerabilities or responsibilities. Finally, a continuous and unlimited lifespan instead of our common mortality. In other words, they must become organizational monarchies. Long live King Cola!
By their estimate, the most vital social assets are an apathetic, poorly educated and motivated electorate—and the shadow-puppet political infrastructure needed to groom it. Just another attempt by reactionaries to resimplify our political landscape back to medieval norms.
Learners insist it is not disinterest we really require – or so much fine reasoning – as passion.
“The heart accepts a conclusion for which the intellect subsequently
finds the reasoning. Argument follows
conviction. Man often finds reasons in
support of whatever he does or wants to do.”
Gandhi quote, taken from Young
India (weekly newspaper), Navajivan, 1919-32. Taken from Raghavan Iyer’s The Moral and Political Thought of Gandhi,
Oxford University Press, London, 1973, p. 18.
Human disinterest does not exist. Our perceived self-interests tug us where they will, even mass extinction. When we abandon our real needs and succumb to mortal panic, we submit to short-term greed, arrogance, cowardice, denial and sadism—actually schadenfreude.
Suffering from serial hierarchies of vicious Corporals, the German people coined this term to describe the shady delight some people take in the misfortune of others. Such people are happiest when they hurt people bad or gloat over their suffering at third hand.
Russians have an equivalent term: zloradtsvo. The 19th century Russian philosopher, Pyotr Chaadeyev, wrote:
“We are exceptional
people; we are among those nations that, as it were, are not members of mankind
but exist only to give the world some terrible lesson.”
This lament could apply just as well to every weapon nation.
Tsar Nicholas I had him formally declared insane and placed under house arrest (no exit, no visitors; think about that) until he recanted. Pyotr was the first of many Russian political prisoners on psychiatric grounds.
I suspect that any linguistic group would coin such a term after a recent bout of tyranny. Now that the tyranny of corporations has become commonplace throughout the world, a more accurate Anglo-Saxonism might be shadism.
Sadism is sexual arousal from another’s pain: a perversion that preoccupies only a jaded few. Unlike it, shadism is taught to each of us surprisingly early and often. By means of infinite rehearsals and painful repetition, we’ve become expert shadists, equally at home as its co-dependent victims and expert tormentors. We administer Hell on Earth because we’ve been brought up to admire fearful hatred and begrudge fearless love—in slavish submission to what has been taught us most often.
It is time we invoked our better nature and nurtured it in a global peace of our making.
LEARNERS: On the Move from
WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld