SUMMARY OF
LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
This text rejects straitjacket terms like
Leftist and Rightist. I have met some
decent, thoughtful conservatives.
Believe me, I’ve appealed to far too many ‘progressives’ and ‘activists’
whose only commitment was to their dead-end prejudices and herd-like
organization. I found many more people
whose politics slid right off this scale.
The incompatible demands of weapon mentality
empower multinational and interdenominational right-wingers, no matter how much
the rest of us despise them. Don’t tell
me that extremists
like Slobodan Milosevic, the KGB and their historical replacements are
‘Leftists.’ They imitated all the
tactics of typical Right Wing reactionaries.
Essentially, they are interchangeable weapon managers. Most of us bear the talon-marks of these
buzzards, as do our friends and family members overseas.
These days, ‘moderate’ reactionaries,
‘compassionate’ conservatives, shadistic liberals and mercenary radicals elbow
each other across our TV screens. Each
group lauds the peace content of its own position and condemns the weapons
outcome of its adversaries. No one uses
terms like ‘peace content’ and ‘weapons outcome,’ however. That forbidden vocabulary would make
everyone’s inexcusable lapses and shared strengths all too obvious.
Learners will conserve worthwhile values, extend a liberal hand toward those less fortunate, and go to the (radical) root of social problems. I might even conclude that they would display
reactionary revulsion—at renewed
attempts to validate weapon mythology, for
example. A more accurate political
shorthand might replace weapon managers’ ‘fearful hatred’ with Learners’ ‘love
without fear or reproach.’
Free enterprise is a precious activity in
many settings; central planning is, in others.
The so-called free market fosters central planning by corporations and
centralized corporate welfare within weapon states. It is hard to witness those activities in
their purest form, since the more they’re the only game in town, the more toxic
they become.
Any habit and institution that promotes
honest peace should be acceptable; everything that blocks it should be
marginalized. Peace benefits should be
identified and magnified; weapons aspects, isolated
and rendered vestigial. The same social
winnowing applies to every political dualism that so-called leftists and
rightists have failed to resolve as long as they controlled the terms of
debate.
Successful social transformation demands that
rulers and ruled share a consensus—not dominance and submission. This can only result from near-universal
consent among the well informed. Our
orthodox constellations of political metaphors cannot describe this unheard-of
consensus. This book calls it a Cooperative of Plenty
on the material plane, Laocracy on the political, and the World or Virtual Agora
on the intellectual.
Today, we submit to reductionist, hyperactive
and hyper- (actually, semi-) rational humanism.
In deference to this tyranny, a coalition of nation-states and
multinational corporations oversees the most culturally isolated and
politically neutered information proletariat it can engineer.
Every political party conspires to further
this runaway despotism: from Socialists and Communists, to Democrats and
Republicans, to Nationalists and Fascists, and then back around again. Reflexively, info elites shield their rice
bowl in the weapon status quo, even though they take great pains to hide their
primary motive.
Those who confront this Gorgon emerge as
militant extremists, either of the Left or the Right. Every ‘revolutionary’ member of a proto-elite
is imbued with the same weapon mentality as his tyrannical archenemy. He promises to confront orthodox violence
with redundant threats of popular violence.
He anticipates social collapse and plots to manipulate it—with no more
success than his dead-end predecessors.
Revolutionaries, crusaders and jihadi are good at only one thing:
perfecting the next round of weapon technologies.
We live in an algedonic age. The real rules are the ones we least
understand. Crucial social rules are
neither discussed nor acknowledged, by popular consent. They control a vast meta-system of warfare
that doesn’t intrude into our lives until the lead slug, toxiplasm or gamma ray
with our name on it crashes into us.
Until then, we remain placid, more or less reluctant conspirators with
weapon management.
On the other hand, Learners will sustain syncretism (“as the Cretans did”). They will identify failing institutions and
then remove, reform or circumvent them. Everyone’s life-quality, sacred awareness,
natural habitat and long-term profit will benefit.
We cannot sort these priorities effectively
outside a Learner Commonwealth. Ranking
them fairly requires everyone’s well-informed consent, which could only be
obtained therein.
Greed, power-hunger, and
deprivation/abuse/neglect fears will diminish under Learner
administrations. Criminals, the
obsessively rich and other social parasites will grasp the true meaning of
wealth and power, once they have let their primary fears subside. New benefits will outweigh old fears, thus
diminish violence and untruth.
Those heedless
few who persist in nurturing ancient evils will be caught up in social
safety nets much more flexible, benign and secure than the makeshifts we rely
on today: malign neglect before the fact, and compounds wrapped in razor wire,
after.
Only by adopting Learner priorities – and
subordinating lesser ones – may we expect real progress.
In the meantime, the best among us attempt to
relieve specific social ills in a vacuum.
No one person or group could hope to resolve any of these problems with
a mere lifetime’s work; they seem so overwhelming.
Frustrated reformers obey the useless logic
of scientific reductionism. They
sub-divide one big problem into tidbits insignificant enough to seem workable
and then pick the smallest of them to resolve.
These weapon reformers seek compromise solutions by scavenging them from
the discards of weapon technology. They
are very careful to leave monolithic weapon technologies intact, lest fear-haunted
elites forbid any additional improvement.
Independent groups of ‘morally superior’
beings perform this hopeless microsurgery in direct competition with other
reformers for starvation resources.
Their pecking orders resemble infighting among starving chickens.
We’ve tried every variant of this tactic for thousands of years, despite
constant failure. This behavior defines
insanity: doing the wrong thing over and over again and expecting better
results.
We must first topple weapon mentality from its
pedestal; only then may PeaceWorld stand a chance of succeeding.
Anti-cannibalism, universal salvation,
emancipation from slavery, constitutional rights, class equity, worker
solidarity, sexual liberation and apartheid terminated: it’s amazing how many initiatives
progressives have set in motion despite our human frailties! However, every time a mighty new ideal let
some isolated group momentarily pry loose from weapon mentality’s grasp,
regrouped weapon managers seized the next opportunity to ambush and scatter
that peaceful consensus. In a weapon
dominion, paradox, paralysis and political reaction attend every isolated lunge
at progress, no matter how well-intended.
We are on the verge of an Ethical Revolution
as staggering as the Industrial Revolution itself. We have endured weapon management for so
long, we no longer grasp the sovereignty of peace—it has ceased to
signify. We don’t respect or recognize
anything any longer except aggression.
Our societies are less and less able to handle any project except killing as many victims in
the shortest possible time.
Weapon mentality has stacked itself steeper
than its angle of repose; thus its eminent collapse is inevitable. This semi-pure Tao of Yang is long overdue
for a major infusion of Yin.
In order to invoke peace mentality, we must
manage the world under one roof, and that one peaceable. Each nation may attempt to protect its
national sovereignty by sacrificing the wealth and children of its citizens;
but this reflexive nationalism will enslave us all to weapon mentality forever.
This said, Normal
Angell made a valid point about nationalism:
“However mischievous some of the manifestations of Nationalism may
prove, the worst possible method of dealing with it is by the forcible
repression of any of its claims which can be granted with regard to the general
interest. To give Nationalism full play,
as far as possible, is the best means of attenuating its worst features and
preventing its worst developments. This,
after all, is the line of conduct which we adopt [with respect] to certain
religious beliefs which we may regard as dangerous superstitions. Although the belief may have dangers, the
social dangers involved in forcible repression would be greater still.” Norman Angell (pseudonym for Ralph Lane) The
Fruits of Victory, The Century Company, New York, 1921, p. 246.
As long as weapons elites coordinate proxy
wars between nation states and other Prism sub-aggregates – as they manage to
do today – weapon mentality and its contradictions will condemn us to misery in
the short term and military annihilation in the long run. National sovereignty and weapon management
have never delivered peace for very long, no matter how painfully they were
applied. Only world sovereignty could
hope to sustain it into the foreseeable future.
“Two things should be obvious at once:
“…The peace of a political community is impaired by civil strife of all
sorts. Whether or not we choose to call
such civil violence ‘war,’ the fact remains that civil peace cannot be regarded
as perfect until governmental machinery is able to cope with every form of
dissension or dispute.
“The perfection of peace does not depend on the removal of all causes
for dispute or strife; nor even on the avoidance of force in the settlement of
differences. It depends on ways of
keeping quarrels on the conversational level, and on a monopoly of the
legitimate force needed to execute decisions.”
Mortimer J. Adler, How to Think about War and Peace, Simon and
Schuster, New York, 1944, p 121.
Our weapons indoctrination teaches us to
dread the prospect of one world government, (see the 1984 Syndrome). This idea makes us nervous because we have
been convinced that the only workable alternative is dangerously
impossible. At the bottom of our hearts,
however, we loathe the current reality that allows Wimps/Prisms to lock us into
global mismanagement—not the ideal of one elegant, global polity.
We have as much to fear from one world
government as we would from a Mayor’s Office: benign or corrupt, as the case
may be. In other words, we have nothing
to fear that Learner vigilance could not handle in the long run. Just as conscience drafted and upheld the
best legislation written so far, so could it guarantee justice, freedom and
plenty for everyone under a global regime that excluded from power those
deprived of it.
But I cannot leave it at that. We are here to clarify our ideas and render
them more complex, not to simplify them.
The Bible and history reveal a fundamental
contradiction. Let’s call it the paradox
of the Tower of Babel. God interfered
directly in the government of mankind on three occasions, (his anointment of
Saul and David, and this one in Genesis
11: 1-9).
1.
And the
whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2.
And it
came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the
land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3.
And they
said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had
they for mortar.
4.
And they
said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto
heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of
the whole earth.
5.
And the
Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6.
And the
Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this
they begin to do: and now nothing will be retrained from them, which they have
imagined to do.
7.
Go to,
let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand
one another’s speech.
8.
So the
Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they
left off to build the city.
9.
Therefore
is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the
language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad
upon the face of all the earth.
It’s strange how God intended to bind us to
do what we feared and loathed the most: scatter across the planet…
Likewise, history teaches that every time a
civilization reached heroic heights of inclusiveness, abundance and
benevolence, some monstrous cataclysm destroyed it. Whether by plague, drought, volcanic eruption
or a meteor-driven, all-season winter; some calamity befell every society that
rationalized itself.
It doesn’t seem to matter that the same fate
befell every other human aggregate, civilized or otherwise, as well as entire
pre-human ecologies. It doesn’t matter
that primitive tribes were much less vulnerable to natural disaster, until very
recently, than more complex, stationary and vulnerable urban societies. We are interested in the fate of well-run
civilizations and not of those whose disappearance was never recorded. Right?
So what choice do we have? We are confronted by a planetary civilization
at odds with itself: vicious and arrogant because it is fragmented where it
should be whole (in its peace technology) and holistic where it should be
fragmented (in its mastery of weapons).
On the one hand, God forbids us to kill and
Jesus forbids us to harm the little ones.
We are supposed to love our neighbor and turn the other cheek to
violence. The best way to do that would
be for everyone to live under one roof and that roof a peaceable one, well
regulated—in other words, on PeaceWorld.
On the other, the God of Genesis appears to
have trained us like attack dogs to suppress our solidarity and replace it with
enough viciousness to execute random mayhem with enthusiasm. The Book of Revelation appears to threaten
with the Wrath of God anyone but Jesus who’d dare urge Peace on Earth.
Likewise, the natural world with its serial
disasters that seem to focus in time and space on the greatest centers of
civilization. Note the volcanic eruption
of Thera that blew Cretan civilization away; the meteor showers that destroyed
almost the entire urban fabric of the Middle Bronze Age, first, and of the
Early Iron Age, a thousand years later – see Burning Libraries (BC) – and so
on, recorded in history or not.
It would be difficult to record the
destruction of your civilization if your last ten generations were utterly
preoccupied with not starving to death.
So it must be up to each of us to decide what
we want to do. Do nothing, sit on our
hands and watch killer primates fatten themselves on helpless babes and the
World Forest? Or stand on our hind legs
and act like civilized beings? The
former certainly looks like a safer one for the soul, and I am sure many moral
cowards will cling to it. The latter is
more tempting for those who find this barbarism intolerable… even at the risk
of damnation by some red-toothed god—one in whose face I’ll spit as its jaws
closed on me.
Let me put it this way. Should planetary disaster befall us, its
illiterate survivors will likely blame it all on our having come together and
tried to turn this carnage around. No
doubt the first literates among them will forgo scratching their fleas long
enough to inscribe this solemn truth in the next set of sacred texts.
“Here is the holy post-script of nuclear
winter. The peacemakers were horribly
wrong. Everything was their fault and
not that of us chroniclers, our predecessors or our militant disciples. Viking mayhem, fervently performed, is the
only way to secure the blessing of God.
Hallelujah!”
Isn’t that strange? A few passages in the first and last books of
the Bible forbid world peace, whereas the remaining books command it. The Bible attributes every crime imaginable
to man; but the only social decision that might reduce their impact—God
forbids? Seems like an obvious textual
revision by weapon managers.
All I can respond is this. Screw that.
If God commands me to do A and then condemns my eternal soul for
optimizing A, that’s His business. I
refuse to be cowered into world war merely because some long-revered weapon
text tells me to do so. Let the chips
fall where they may; I will go on pushing for world peace. In my universe ruled by our God of Love, it
will be those who refuse to cooperate with peace who will face God’s
disappointment (God help them) prior to being saved in any case.
I have no use for a deity who can’t make up
his mind what his slaves should do, and who condemns them to eternal hellfire
for failing to satisfy his schizoid demands.
I will do my best not to kill and not to harm the little ones. Let God make up His own mind whom to punish
for His lack of clarity.
And you make up your own mind, now that you have these contradictions at your fingertips. All this impacted constipate has given me a raging headache…
LEARNERS:
On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld