SUMMARY OF LEARNERS INTRO &
VOCAB
“Evolution is always experimental. All progress is gained through mistakes and
their rectification. No good comes
fully-fashioned ... but has to be carved out through repeated experiments and
growth. The same law controls social and
political evolution also. The right to
err, which means the freedom to try experiments, is the universal condition of
all progress.” A Gandhi quote from
Raghavan Iyer’s, The Moral and Political
Though of Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford University Press, New York, 1973, p. 354.
One of weapon
mentality’s most corrosive myths is that we are innately
evil. According to this myth, we are
stricken by some ill-defined but primeval sin, surrounded by evil because full
of it; no good can come from our rotten efforts at improving the world. We might as well capitulate to civic evil, seek marginal and fleeting self-improvement
instead. Marginal, in reality, because
we backslide with horrific ease, and fleeting because we die soon anyway and
our private upgrades disappear with us.
This “No good…”
idea is ridiculous if you think about it.
My foot doesn’t need to be the World’s Most Beautiful one, nor do I need
to waste my entire life manicuring it, to kick trash off the sidewalk.
Just like this
sentence, so difficult for me to write and for you to decipher, doesn’t need to
be perfect. Honest error, if admitted
and allowed, can play a valid part in the overall scheme of things. Perfection is not necessary; excellence is
required.
The main
difference between reactionaries and progressives? The former believe that everyone is innately
evil, while the latter hold people to be essentially good. Go ahead; ask anyone that question, then
about his or her voting record. See for
yourself.
My experience
leads me to the opposite conclusion.
Almost everyone does the best he or she can, under most
circumstances—often heroically and at great sacrifice. Sure, some people are rotten to the core, but
rare on the ground (at most, four percent).
Sure, I bear my share of shameful memories. Also sure, everyone fails, from time to time,
and does something shameful. But – on
the whole and more often than not – we are all pedaling as fast as we can.
Look; if evil
were so prevalent, we’d get run over almost every time we crossed the
street! That is not the norm except in
war.
The essence of
sinful error – or any other human weaknesses, for that matter – is that we can
straighten it out through gradual stages of learning and self-correction. We are experts at this task. In other words, progress entails deliberate
evolution: personal, institutional, cultural, psychic and genetic: each
evolutionary facet interdependent, synergistic and holistically vital.
Which leaves you
with the responsibility to see the relationship between things, what increases
or decreases what, and the importance and unimportance of things―not
television, not politicians; you.
The notion of
original sin blunts our obligation to improve the world. It’s not a matter of abandoning it in favor
of improving the world, but of clarifying both concepts.
Like dinosaurs,
we have reached a crossroads without realizing it. An ‘ideal’ environment sustained them for
ages, then minor changes flickered and the die-offs began. They ran out of time, weren’t flexible
enough, found no way to trade tons of bone, sinew and armor plate – painfully
accumulated for eons – before extinction overcame them.
We retain some
advantages over dead owners of those monster bones. Our greatness resides in part on our ability
to love one another: a trait we share with other pack-scavengers. Another critical human talent may be the way
we provide for the young, the sick and the helpless. Elevated levels of empathy and solicitude may
be the true measure of our greatness.
To review:
empathy equals greatness; sociopathy equals deformity but military
advantage.
In some troubled
souls, mistrust and ‘realism’ have replaced compassion. This degeneracy pegs us lower than some
dinosaurs that watched over each other and their young.
Each of us, no
matter how abused and abusive today, received some loving care earlier on, to
survive to this day. Could most felons
have become so because they weren’t handled lovingly enough, early enough? Some say that the most accurate predictor of
criminal behavior is prior abuse of the prospective criminal as a child.
Mischief is easy;
any fool can do serious harm without breaking a sweat. Conversely, human nurturing takes a whole lot
of hard work. Reducing care to economize
would be about as stupid as starving to death to save on grocery bills.
If we could
tabulate the amount of violence on Earth into one sum of X energy, then our
wealth would equal the care we expend in thousands of X, minus the one wasted
in untruth and violence. The sum of human
care must dwarf that of harm, lest we perish.
Today, kinetic
care is dangerously level with the potential energy of our weapons. Think about it. How many mothers’ hugs would it take to equal
the energy of one hand grenade, one nuclear detonation or all of those we’ve
buried so expensively in silos and submarines, exploding together?
Basically, our
greatness resides in how well we share Learning. Keep in mind, each generation must relearn
the sum total of human knowledge; only then may we add our little
contribution. Anything not relearned by
someone must be forgotten and disappear, or sink into the collective
superconscience.
Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar postulates that a whole sub-universe
of information is hardwired into us and comes online as we mature. This programming won’t initialize, however,
until benign external stimuli activate internal software. To become fully aware and sane, we must be
nurtured with tender loving care.
Unlike those
doomed dinosaurs trapped in extravagant suits of armor plate, our elastic,
reprogrammable brains give us the means, motive and opportunity to shed our
liabilities and redefine ourselves virtually overnight. It might be messy and might not work all at once,
but the possibility remains: learning to do it better.
Learning dwarfs
lesser preoccupations like sex, predation and genetic survival. These inflated human motivations have become
the champions of scientific prejudice.
They serve Conspiracies of Greed the same way Social Darwinism and
Predestination once served them, as weapon myth propaganda to justify
institutional evil. Unlike these lesser
drives magnified beyond proportion, Learning is the real foundation of
self-awareness and PeaceWorld.
Until recently,
historians busied themselves collecting the biographical tidbits of
micro-history. They simplified vast
upheavals of climate, resources and civilization by dissecting the lives of a
few key potentates; by reducing humanity’s opulent transactions to the whims of
a few courted egomaniacs and the muffled sobs countless victims. Historians, beginning with Herodotus and ending with today’s pundits, wrote:
“King (President, Caliph, Dictator, etc.)
X decreed A, B and not C. His
Dukes (Ministers, Secretaries, Viziers, Satraps,
whatever), 1 though 6 with the exception of 4, revolted against his policies,
thus provoking...” an unending crisis of biographical reductionism and gross
simplification.
Our acceptance of
this simplification is about as sensible as compacting 16 million person-years
of human genius, hope and labor we accumulate every day, into a few wisps of newsprint and vapid newscast.
I hate
biography. Art transcends life; it
records dreams into culture. Shoddy
dreams, not for very long; magnificent and terrible dreams, lovingly and
virtually forever compared to our brief lifetimes. Art takes life’s little irrelevancies and
transforms them into a holism greater than the sum of its parts.
Biography
reverses this process. It turns cultural
dreams into a long, obsessive chronicle of nit-picking primate politics; of
pecking order torture; of the growth, displacement and destruction of meat
puppets and the mindless tide of their body fluids. Disgusting.
Setting aside
this gloss for a moment, the info proletariat raises the leadership it requires
through a process of organic hyper-democracy somewhat akin to a bee
colony’s. Our intimate involvement in
this process makes it seem more complex and subjective.
During the last
few decades, dissatisfied historians have consolidated massive compendiums of
correspondence and anecdotes into macro-histories. In so doing, they’ve attempted to chronicle
the life and times of entire peoples over
la longue durée (lah low+ng duray, the long
haul). Preliminary attempts have been
made to analyze history from multi-disciplinary perspectives: epidemiology,
meteorology, geoseismicity, biogeography, ecology, memetics, psychohistory,
herstory and sociobiology, among others.
The more interdisciplinary these studies, the more novel and
enlightening their conclusions. They’ve
let us dispel a whole pack of absurdities put forward earlier and quickset in
our spirit, since.
This breakup of
old beliefs induces scary insecurity. We
hesitate to believe in much of anything any longer. Nothing is easy to decide—not enough data
points and not enough time to collect them.
We could rewire the world so there would be plenty of time, time enough
for those who shared peace to collect their thoughts in a more leisurely
fashion and come up with better decisions on every scale.
As our point of
view broadens, personal idiosyncrasies dwindle to irrelevance; mere individuals
merge into the crowd and social behavior becomes easier to track. Near-identical patterns, stresses and energy
flows stack up on different scales of space-time—as forecast by chaos theory.
The dynamics of a
shoreline would be more difficult to track if we attempted to follow the path
of each grain of sand (especially ‘exceptional’ ones). On the contrary, we should study the lowest
common denominators of surf, wind and tide.
A deeper understanding of world history would require that we remove
ourselves from our comforting, reductive contexts: the self-referential,
biographical, nationalistic, piously sanctimonious, and human—even the
life-as-we-know-it and linear-entropic.
Recent photos of delicate Earth have been
taken from outer space. They suggest a
new perspective shift that would reveal life-as-we-know-it as mere luminescent pond scum writhing across a smallish marble of
blue porcelain thinly glazed with gas and water, orbiting serenely around a
perfectly ordinary star. This
perspective shift might allow us to isolate significant aspects of history,
provided we paid due reverence to a universe aglow with sacred intent.
Remarkable things
come to light at this scale of vision.
Decisive incidents resonate with equivalents from the past, influence
current events and distort future probabilities. Accidents of individuality, chronology and
locality (that teachers love to make their students cram) lose their illusory
significance except as place markers and shortcut jargon.
Carroll Quigley
focused his historical vision on continental scales. Such diverse writers as Ryszard Kapuscinski,
Rian Malan, Antje Krog and John Del Vecchio sought this level of reverence in their
reportage.
On the other
hand, many butcher geniuses have abused this scale of vision. For example, either reject Hitler’s Mein Kampf or don full biohazard
shielding before you crack it open. That
creep was certifiable. He wanted to
replace the Jews: the Chosen People of biblical God, with Good Germans. In so doing, he would have had to kill 1)
every Jew on Earth, and 2) anyone who recalled the Jews from their readings of
Biblical/Koranic/western history.
This collective
insanity is nothing new. A hundred and
fifty generations of weapon mentors have invoked man-aping gods, hyperactive
heroes, raw might, econologic, dialectics, national
honor, bloodline purity, scientific positivism (“I’m positive you’re wrong”),
post-modern nihilism and any other heady superstition they could dream up to
arouse it. Nazism was merely one of
their most spectacular failures at corporate social engineering. They have had many more, before and since,
that failed so consistently because they ignored the key, sacred context. Proper worship of it would have cancelled
their sickly ambitions and favored genocides.
Bringing on a
dizzying sense of moral detachment and loss of empathy, they’ve argued more and
more persuasively for fatalistic determinism (as revealed in Elias Canetti’s cheerless Crowds and Power) and Nazi mercilessness. Their fear-driven visions were pathetic
attempts to simplify the terrifying complexity of reality by squeezing all
life, beauty and reverence from it.
These deluded
folks may have failed us in the past; but that is no reason to become
credophobes and stop believing in anything: the quickest way back to
fascism. Whatever the risk, we must
cultivate our gift of vision.
I doubt if anyone
who has read a little history can use words like ‘humanitarian, humane and
human’ as analogues for ‘kindly, compassionate and just-plain-not-stupid.’ Typical mass human behavior is weapon-based. So far, massed humans have failed to earn the
title “civilized.” Clustered humans
never adhered to the good until they had exhausted every evil.
That’s not
surprising. Veterans, athletes and
professionals don’t become real experts until they have screwed up every other
alternative repeatedly. Then they must
accept at gut level a better way to do things, and practice it despite
recurrent errors and inconsistencies, until it becomes automatic. Just the way humanity will find its ultimate
success at peace, despite and because of its billion-times-repeated weapons
errors.
Celebrate Olympic
athletics! Celebrate the deep thought of
the PeaceWorld Agora.
Human cruelty is
less justifiable than a hungry predator’s.
Auschwitz is a monument to typical human behavior: its murderous rituals
re-enacted by every nation in recorded history—on a slightly cut-down scale and
perhaps a more pastoral setting, at least most of the time.
No nation or
creed can claim clean outcomes. Every
surviving culture has been the masterpiece of maniacs, tyrants, genocides and their weapon
mentor apologists. The bovine
mass of humanity has tolerated them and their bloody fantasies like horseflies
that only required an occasional swipe of the tail. History has exalted civilizations with the bloodiest
hands; it has erased from collective memory every society of exceptional
peacefulness.
Our weapons
institutions peddle their categorical world-view across a vast range of
multi-media. In pathetic pursuit of
flawless certitude, weapon mentors attempt to suck all truth, beauty and
mystery from life.
Despite the whine
of chainsaw logic, its patent certainties are obvious lies any child could see
through. Indeed, young ones see quite
clearly through this adult hypocrisy.
That’s why we spend so much time and effort breaking their spirits and
denying their ideals while they’re still tender and fragile.
We witness many
of these contradictions every day. Many
official truths are obviously inferior to their rejected counterparts. Our social creeds are so toxic,
none of their adherents need seduce all parties. We find it easier to insult, terrorize and
murder the Other—or tolerate those who do so on our behalf.
We could clean
house the moment we chose to reject this millennial brainwash. Once we adopted Truth and Non-violence as our
primary inspirations, the term ‘Learner’ might reflect our enormous hunger for
good (kalotropism) and we might re-earn the title ‘civilized’.
We should defy
two more myths
typical of weapon mentality.
According to the
first of these subtle delusions, each of us must fulfill impossible ideals of
personal sainthood. We cannot hope for
widespread improvement until we’ve become proper saints, first. Any hint of personal weakness confirms our Kosmic Korruption.
One may not
criticize the current state of affairs without first convincing his audience
that he’s a bona fide saint. If the
authorities can stick some accusation against him, he’s unfit to comment on
social issues. Since everyone has
something to hide, no one may comment except as a friend of the authorities who
will shield him from public attack.
Anyone who defies those authorities is at their mercy. How convenient for weapons mentality!
Thus global
improvement is impossible until we’ve all become angels. In the meantime, let’s just sit on our hands
and wait for Jesus to serve us the Kingdom of Heaven on a silver platter. For two thousand years now, we’ve sat on our
hands. I’m tired of waiting.
In John 14, 2-3,
Christ said, “In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I
have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I
will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am, you may be also.” Amen, brother.
In the meantime,
it’s obviously up to us. I must return
to His Parable of the Talents. The
Master left us a sum of money. When He
returns, He will be happier with those who have increased it than with those
who buried it so as not to lose any. It
is not a question of saving one’s soul by doing nothing else, but of taking
enormous risks to earn more for God.
Meanwhile no
healthy outlet remains for our frustration.
It festers within us until WeaponWorld can Heimlich it out of us in warfare. Behavioral repression multiplies with
regulatory density, as more and more meddlesome officials adjust the details of
our lives and less and less room remains for risky self-expression.
Walled in by our
own incapacity, we prickle with self-loathing; cursing the faults of others, we
plot futile revenge. We bitterly resent
growing intrusions on our precious time and assets in the material world. As inspiration and satisfaction grow more and
more remote and abstract, real obligations and penalties skyrocket around
us. Perpetually unfree, we double and
redouble the coils of our enslavement.
Mischief becomes extremely tempting; it seems to offer some relief from
our endless round of obligation and compromise.
The routine expectation of mischief provides officialdom more reasons to
grind us down. Sooner or later, we begin
yearning that a vast maelstrom come sweep everything away and resimplify our
lives.
Life never makes
things simpler, death does. Get used to
it.
Countless young
bulimics, addicts and attempted suicides – their nerve ends raw and aglow –
convey the same unheard lament. “I’m not
good enough for this!” Good
enough to do what? Cope with the endless
demands of empty moralism, or handle weapon mentality's hyper-refined
evil?
As we
pre-stupefied adults decline into ‘maturity,’ we suffer analysis paralysis from
orthodoxy’s ad hominem (“to the man,”
appealing to prejudice) brainwash. We,
in turn, chastise our idealistic juniors for having the gall to skip the only
approved track: absolute weapon mentality.
We’ve convinced ourselves that peace mentality can never be ‘realistic’
enough. We’re supposed to grow up and
abandon it.
Grow up and
embrace peace. I dare you.
To tell you the
truth, we are the best people we can be: the ultimate sentient masterpieces of
God, DNA and the Universe. Get used to
it – there is nobody better than you – nobody can take your place and do a
better job. There should be no need for
radical self-improvement until our radically improved institutions support our
efforts without contradiction or denial.
Would success be possible otherwise, even after a thousand billion
reincarnations?
The second
unfortunate weapon myth absolves our institutions. Unlike the individual, our institutions are
sacred, error-free, opaque to analysis and exempt from improvement—except every
few centuries during brief stretches of bloody revolution.
Even in the most
advanced countries, the approved method of expressing public disapproval for
gross institutional blunders is a protest march: perfectly dumb, bovine and
trivial if not detrimental to the cause.
If the topic in question is of any importance, this rally will culminate
in a police riot: more propaganda headlines in favor of our blundering
institutions.
For example, the
1999 Seattle demonstration against the World Trade Organization was said to
have caused “millions of dollars of damage.”
All of it was attributed to riotous misconduct by what turned out to be
a very well behaved, middle class crowd of perfectly legitimate protestors, at
least before the police stampeded them.
True, some pimply
hooligans broke a few plate glass windows, set fire to a garbage dumpster or
two and wrecked a few cars—allowing them to play the video game, Black Flag Anarchy, in real-time. That damage couldn’t have totaled more than a
couple hundred thousand 1999 dollars, tops.
I was there, before and after, and saw it all. Afterwards, I called the city paper newsroom
and challenged them to itemize the famous “millions of dollars of damage.” No one bothered to return my phone call and
no one itemized that damage in print, that I could find.
Nonetheless, this police riot has gone down in official history as a
vicious mass attack by the masses against property and propriety. Exactly the same thing happened during a big
pacifist demonstration against the Vietnam War in Seattle in 1968; its
reportage, equally misleading.
Is this how our
vaunted media commit current events to historic memory? I can only conclude: “Shoot, what
sophisticated system of political feedback!”
See Learning to Dance for the Learner alternative.
“Render unto
Caesar that which is Caesar’s.” Of
course, this biblical quote might also mean that Caesar owns nothing and is
owed nothing. After all, what authority
can Caesar claim when compared to God’s?
The opposite meaning jams our senses.
Weapon mentors worship Jesus’ torture rack and drown His sacred ideals
in blood: symbolic or all-too-real blood, take your pick.
What more can we
expect from weapon Christianity—that venerable relief program for smug
desperadoes? The other world religions
are not far behind in stealth hypocrisy.
Religions of abnegation do weapon mentality a great favor; they alienate
the best people from practical politics into listless isolation and
pseudo-mystic contemplation. The only
creeds more despicable than those that encourage people to give up on the real
world are those that encourage them to simplify the real world with more violence.
“Just
how confused we are over what we mean by individualism can most easily be seen
by looking at the West from the outside.
Buddhist societies are horrified by a great deal in the West, but the
element which horrifies them the most is our obsession with ourselves as a
subject of unending interest. By their
standards, nothing could be unhealthier than a guilt-ridden, self-obsessed,
proselytizing white male or female selling God or democracy or liberalism or capitalism
with insistent superior modesty. It is
clear to the Buddhist that this individual understands neither herself nor his
place. He is ill at ease in his role; mal
dans sa peau;
a hypocrite taking out his frustrations on the world.” John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards:
The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Vintage Press, A Division of Random
House, 1991, p. 469.
Yet the essential
good will of these believers let their religion survive, despite its errors and
hypocrisy compounded by their support of WeaponWorld and worsened by it. PeaceWorld would allow good politics and good
religion in symbiosis: each reinforcing the good in the other and curbing its
ill effects.
Officials love to
administer weighty oaths. The nastier
the institution, the more rumbling its oath of allegiance and the more often it
must be invoked. Hitler was an
enthusiastic organizer of mighty oath-taking ceremonies that bound his people
more closely to him—to their ultimate destruction. It is easier to get people to murder each
other if you first make them swear an oath to that effect.
Every weapon
society glorifies suicidal self-sacrifice.
Prism propaganda contradicts “live and let live” principles
everyone knows are preferable. Paul
Lackman points to the Japanese kamikazes and mass suicides of World War II; but
all the sacrificial tendencies of weapon mentality should be included, since
they are essentially interchangeable.
What state of
mind would you have to assume to drop a heavy bomb on a bustling city? Picture yourself flying over a major
metropolis. See it clearly? Ok, now drop your bomb. You would have to be nuts: either a desperate
terrorist embittered by a lifetime of suffering and humiliation, or a talented,
dedicated and brave military pilot fulfilling your military obligation in
exchange for an opportunity to gratify your love of flying.
The outcome would
be the same: a flaming ruin of debris and body parts where crowds of people
once thrived, for us to clean up afterwards at tremendous expense and with
broken hearts. A total waste in any
case. As if there was no poverty in the
world, as if wealth and good fellowship were in such surplus that we could
waste it this way.
Modern culture reveres
noble warriors who endure torture with stoicism, seek out privation and make
defiant last stands against overwhelming odds.
Cold bloodedly, they must violate the basic laws of humanity. They are hallowed because they’ve stepped
beyond the morality of common sense.
One way or
another, our institutions induce mass suffering without opposition. Sufferers are dehumanized and distanced from
the mainstream. By definition,
individuals are expendable, and institutions, irreplaceable.
The dictates of peace
management would be exactly contrary.
Every individual is a precious dynamo of good and evil. We should develop and modify new social
instruments to magnify their good traits and channel the evil ones into
semi-harmless games and theatrics.
Despite the holy
intercessions of Moses, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed, the ratio of good to
bad human acts has never seemed to change throughout history. Good Pagans were just as upright and numerous
in proportion back then, as good church people are, today. Vicious Pagans were just as obnoxious and
numerous as today’s religious/ideological extremists. The human sacrifice they demand today,
through jihad and holy war (religious or ideological), are continuations of
bloody-handed sacrifices they performed face-to-face in the past. Even while many non-believers, devout
atheists and situational ethicists straddled their fences, uncertain which way
the wind blew.
So we’ve never
changed the ratio of good and bad human actions. None of our saints have, none of our Prophets
have, none of our Saviors; and I doubt that anyone else will manage it in the
foreseeable future. Big deal.
We can, however,
shift the quality of our behavior toward the good (or bad) end of the
ethical spectrum. For example, we could
strengthen the Bill of Rights and shift our society towards better ethics, or
revert to genocide and slavery and shift more people and their decisions toward
evil.
Thomas Jefferson
enslaved himself to the abuse and hypocrisy of slavery. Suffering from that burden, he was a lesser
man than the most bigoted cracker would be, once slavery was abolished. In the same way, we can remain exactly the
same people we are today, yet become better practitioners of Good. We have merely to replace our weapons
institutions with more sensible ones of peace.
Valid social
instruments invite criticism and transformation. There is nothing irreducibly good about our
institutions. We have merely adopted
them for the time being. They deserve no
more devotion than fairy mushroom rings in a druidic oak grove. Institutions that go overlong unchallenged
tend to become riddled with self-serving parasites and authoritarian nitwits;
they fail more and more spectacularly over time.
You, me, everyone
is directly responsible for progress. A
healthy conscience makes no exceptions—unlike our sickly institutions that
mass-produce exceptions. Whenever an
institution becomes so inflexible that it supports more evil than good, it
should be exposed to instant, serial correction. Evildoers should be banished from
institutional power, the moment they begin improvising on the theme: “We
weren’t responsible. We were just
following orders, policies, profit guidelines, the competition, etc.”
“Few things are more revealing about man as warrior than his tendency
to slough off responsibility for the suffering and tragedy he inflicts. … Why can men do together without conscience things that
would torment them unendurably if done singly? …
“Seated in our
living rooms, remote from action and passion, most of us like to believe that
we shall never yield again to abstract hatreds…
Historically, our record for stemming the tide has not been good …
“Perhaps even worse,
few of us ever know how far fear and violence can transform us into creatures
at bay, ready with tooth and claw. If
the war taught me anything at all, it convinced me that people are not what
they seem or even think themselves to be.
Nothing is more tempting than to yield oneself, when fear comes, to the
dominance of necessity and to act irresponsibly at the behest of another. Freedom and responsibility we speak of
easily, nearly always without recognition of the iron courage required to make
them effective in our lives.” J. Glenn
Davis, The Warriors: Reflections on Men
in Battle, Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York, 1959, pp. 168-169.
The day after
Nazi conquerors ordered Danish Jews to sew a yellow star on their clothing, the
King of Denmark took his morning ride wearing a yellow star. Many of his subjects followed his noble lead
and thus restored the honor of their defeated nation.
This turns out to
be a magnificent legend. Quite often
during the Nazi occupation, King Christian X took his morning horseback ride
downtown without escort to stay in touch with his people. The Germans never imposed the yellow star on
Danish Jews, but on Jews elsewhere.
Very few non-Jews
wore that fatal badge, anywhere.
The fact remains
that almost every Danish Jew was hustled off to Sweden and relative safety,
under the Nazis’ flaring muzzles. It was
generally concluded by the Danes, that if Nazis had imposed the yellow star,
their King would have been the first to wear one. If Learners could make sure every King were
so honorable, this book would advocate monarchy. Indeed, PeaceWorld would encourage an
international nobility (by merit rather than inheritance), as long as it
remained trustworthy and effectively self-policed.
When you confront
the common dilemma of following regulations or giving someone a helping hand without
harming others, do the latter with conviction.
If you oversee such people, protect their obligation to do good. If these decisions were commonplace, many
protective regulations would become redundant.
If the criminal employees of some institution won’t clean up their act,
they cannot claim our support. Without
our support, their pet institutions would collapse—regardless of the level of
terror they might inspire.
We occupy an
incredibly shoddy world stage. Look at
it! It is begging for improvement.
Sir Lawrence
Olivier’s revenant ghost could recruit his favorite actors into a troupe of
brilliant workaholics obsessed with thespian perfection. These worthies could take years to rehearse
their scenes and months longer to perfect their costumes. But if they staged their Lear in a closed
garbage dumpster, that performance would be flawed, no matter how intrepid
their delivery.
I was once told
by some jokers at my expense, that such a scene would be worth watching. As a sad lesson in morality, perhaps? I would rather watch this Lear played close
to perfection on an excellent stage.
Misguided by
weapon mentality, we’ve wasted lifetimes fine-tuning our personal perfection
amidst a global concentration camp. Once
our pursuit of learning, abundance, justice and wilderness turns this garbage
dumpster WeaponWorld into a PeaceWorld worthy of our brilliance – and only then
– our quest for self-perfection may bear fruit.
Until then, we waste precious lifetimes on feel-good palliatives and
throwaway sainthood, simply to feel better about ourselves despite our utter
failure.
The proof resides
in the last few thousand years of history.
Misreading the instruction of our prophets, we’ve zealously pursued
nothing more than personal sainthood.
Despite this ceaseless quest, we’ve bungled our social schemes, suffered
moral bankruptcy and invited military disaster into our homes to spoil the
weekend feast.
That's nothing to
joke about.
When our
institutions encourage evil (the way the institution of slavery did), they lead
us to worsen the common lot despite our best intentions. Once our institutions will direct us to do
good more often, without compromise and free of paradox, we will behave better
without any need for extraordinary self-improvement. We will discover the beings we really are,
perfectly adapted to live together in peace and harmony despite our transient
weaknesses. We will find that our
personal sainthood is surprisingly advanced, once our institutions are perfected.
These regrettable
reversals of personal and institutional priorities arise from common
distortions of our historical perspective.
From this twisted but familiar perspective, our institutions seem like
monolithic granite outcrops carved and polished by centuries of painstaking
trial and error. On the other hand, each
mortal life seems as ephemeral as the first raindrop on a hot tin roof. It may seem reasonable to endow our
institutions with categorical attributes of permanence and perfection, and burden
our perishable selves with nagging demands for never-ending
self-improvement.
Learners will
reverse these attributes. Our
institutions are frail stopgaps we’ve jury-rigged just to get by, these last
few centuries. Human traits have taken
millions of years to adapt us perfectly to this world and to each other. We may transform our institutions in a matter
of weeks, months or years; but the chore of changing (improving) human nature
would be like grinding down Mt. Everest with a toothbrush.
The problem
remains: how to improve our institutions peacefully and thus with
near-universal consent? We must recruit
all those who have given up in despair, and seek the consent of those who
fantasize they would have something to lose in the transformation.
How to avoid
adjusting everything—with, by and for the sword?
There remains
only one alternative to the pitfalls of the weapon/peace antinomy:
PeaceWorld. We should infuse our
constellation of political metaphors with a superior vocabulary and dialectic. We must walk our talk for the first time in
history, relegate weapon technology and weapon mentality to vestigial status.
“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in
the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the
mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for
their society … The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large
extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.” Edward Sapir, “The Status of Linguistics as a
Science,” Language (Charlottesville,
Va.: Linguistic Society of America), vol. 5 (1929), p. 209.
LEARNERS: On the Move from
WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
