SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO &
VOCAB
“Let
me mention a few of the characteristics which I believe that this
psychohistorical development will come to embody… It will retain a ‘model of time,’ but will
expand this model into new concepts that combine and give more subtle
expression to man’s individual and collective feelings toward his past and his
future. It will evolve a genuinely
dialectical position concerning the interplay of man’s psychobiological nature
on the one hand, and his historical experience on the other – avoiding the
historicism of Marx (the claim that man is nothing
but his history) and the psychologism of early psychoanalysis (the claim
that history is nothing but the
re-enactment of man’s psychological evolution).
It will retain Freud’s principle of the past as motor for historical
change, while at the same time taking account of that which is new in the patterns which emerge from the three-way
interplay of man’s psychobiological nature, his cultural past, and the existing
historical currents acting upon him. It
will similarly stress the dialectic between the reality of external events and
man’s unique need to perceive these events only through some form of symbolic
re-creation. In this way it will
maintain the psychoanalytic emphasis upon symbolic behavior, but broaden its
areas of symbolism beyond those of classical psychoanalytic theory… It will stress man’s innate need for
exploration and change as a fundamental element in the creation of his history,
as well as the countervailing tendency toward stability and stillness expressed
in Freud’s ‘Nirvana principle’.
“In all these ways,
the new historical psychology and psychological history – they may finally come
to be brothers – can gradually free themselves from two intellectual polarities
which have all too frequently dominated both historical and psychological work:
first, the lingering Newtonian legacy of the closed, mechanistic world of
absolute cause-and-effect relationships; and second, the intellectually
nihilistic rejection of all general principles or causative elements. It will instead evolve a stress upon patterns
and constellations whose cause-and-effect relationships are the intricate
transactions of elements always in process.”
Robert Jay Lifton, History and Human
Survival: Essays on the Young and Old, Survivors and the Dead, Peace and War,
and on Contemporary Psychohistory,
Random House, Inc., New York, Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto, 1961,
1962, 1963, 1965, 1969, 1970, pp. 296-298.
[His italics].
The painful
truth? For thousands of years, human
culture has undergone Darwinian selection for weapon mentality. Wherever ancient societies matured into
prototype peace technologies – or merely restrained their weapons
obsession for the time being – nearby weapon hordes overran them.
Human history
could be resumed as such:
1. the gradual perfection of social and material
tool kits that optimize contemporary weapon mentality and technology;
2. the discharge of this optimized technology in
a climax holocaust limited only by the means available (like a gunshot while a
pistol is being cleaned);
3. a Dark Age for humanity to recover from this
paroxysm; and then
4. return to Step 1.
The combination
of weapon Christianity and Roman weapon technologies triggered a
European Dark Age for the next thousand years; the same thing happened in China
and Islam. This trajectory can be traced
in the history of other civilizations,
especially after periods later recorded as revolutionary or of foreign invasion.
This historic
erosion of peace has bred an unconscious contempt for it in each of us and
especially in our info elites. With our
silent consent, they have restricted peace technology to the limit of the info
proletariat’s endurance. This eroded
peace triggered the next paroxysm. That one, nurtured by all of us through this
historical process, promises a planetary Dark Age even more durable and perhaps
permanent.
Books were very
rare and fragile things before tough, cheap paper and printing presses
made mass literacy commonplace.
Millennial cults (consecrating a chosen text like the Bible for a
thousand years or longer) required basic schools and libraries, and an educated
priesthood to run them. These priests required safekeeping from armed
hordes more concerned with loot than learning. Sooner or later, those hordes cut down the
guards and breached the gates; after which, the priests had to persuade them
not to suppress this unique text—that preserving it might lessen their terror
and satisfy their lusts.
“In
principle, the opposition of church and state can arise even within a single
polity…
“A number of systems
can be envisaged within which the sword-wielders and script-users are distinct,
and within which the latter, notwithstanding their lack of countervailing
physical force, can share effective power.
In any one single encounter, there is of course no question of any
equality of strength: he who has, and knows how to use, the sword, need brook
no nonsense from the pen pusher, and is indeed most unlikely to tolerate any
opposition from him. To understand the
manner in which pen pushers nonetheless can and do effectively oppose and
overcome swordsmen, we need not invoke or overestimate some mysterious power of
superstition in the hearts of the swordsmen which would compel them to bend
their knees to the upholders of legitimation and truth. We need only look at what happens when both
thugs and scribes are enmeshed in a complex, overall social order …
“The main point
about the loose and fluid congeries of lords of diverse rank is that they are
indeed loose and unstable. There are
diverse reasons for this. For one thing,
they are prone to conflict and warfare simply in virtue of their pervasive
ethos: violence is their honour, their specific
skill, and they are in effect required to demonstrate, almost perpetually,
their competence at inflicting and resisting it.
“There are also
other reasons. The balance of power
which keeps the peace between thugs and coalitions of thugs is unstable and
unpredictable. The power of a lord high
up on the scale, of a king in effect, depends on how many lower-level thugs he
can mobilize. The availability, the
“loyalty,” of a lower-level thug will in practice depend on his private
assessment of the strength of the king, and so, indirectly, on the lower-level
thug’s assessment of the loyalty of other low-level thugs. They are all tacitly watching each other …
“The alignments in
these conflicts, given the ambiguities of loyalties and the unpredictability of
outcomes, tend to depend in large measure on the legitimacy of contestants – which helps floating voters, or rather floating
fighters, to decide whom to support. … This in turn
gives considerable indirect power to those who, through a mixture of literacy
and ritual competence, possess the near-monopoly of legitimacy-ascription. They may be bureaucratic office holders of
the unique organization linked to revelation [Author’s Note: half these
examples are Gellner’s and the other half are mine,
none of them are categorical -- the Catholic model and that of primitive
churches], or members of an open class of scholars who alone can decide upon
rectitude of social and political comportment by comparing it with codified
divine rules [recent Jewish, Muslim, Protestant and Confucian models], or they
may be hereditary members of a caste without whose ritual services all social conduct and status loses its legitimacy [the
model in India, also of ancient Judaism, and also the western classical period
(Greek/Roman)]. The pen is not mightier
that the sword; but the pen sustained by ritual does impose great constraints
on the sword. It alone can help the
swordsmen decide how to gang up to the greatest advantage.
“It is in this way,
generically speaking, that social elements other than military ones interact
with brute force on something like equal terms…” Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword and
Book: The Structure of Human History,
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1989, Collins Harvill,
London, 1988, pp. 94-99.
Our
millennial texts have been the chosen reading of a long line of pirates and
murderers. A hundred generations of more
and more prominent weapon mentors have rewritten sacred texts and revised holy
doctrine to suit the conflicting demands
of weapon mentality.
If a peace
society produced nothing but pacifists, that would make it rich and creative,
grateful to God, exuberant, argumentative, law-reliant—and extremely vulnerable
to military aggression. Weapon societies
are good at nothing but hostilities; they fear their warrior God and
claim their religion or ideology is the only acceptable one.
Sorry, folks. God exists everywhere and in everything, including God’s multiplicity and non-existence. Every God of every religion provides an equally valid and equally inadequate description. There’s no stepping outside to take a smoke break from God; neither is there a specific God 'superior' to the rest. What a ridiculous and typically human prejudice!
Especially based on successful murder! You have got to be kidding me, just before
you murder me, like all my predecessors who branded you and your fanaticism
insane.
Such warrior
societies lose the capacity to feed and care for themselves without plundering
less warlike neighbors for slaves, rations, laws and other peace
assets. But they can’t last very long as
such. Longer-lived societies must carefully balance peace and weapon content,
yet favor weapon management to defend themselves against all comers.
Thus, the most
useful peace texts and discoveries disappeared a long time ago, feeding
some frenzied auto da fe (autodafay, “act of faith,” inquisitorial
pyre). Selflessly, endlessly, isolated
peace mentors have preached their own (and their society's) destruction at the
hands of itchy-fingered battle elites—both at home and abroad.
Historians have a
scant, carefully censored inventory of ancient records to go by. The best documented of ancient literatures
have a destruction rate greater than 99%: the Roman, Greek and Chinese, for
example.
Less than one
work in ten survives, from less than one in ten authors. The only remnants are scrawls of uncertain
provenance: ancient written lamentations mourning forgotten authors and
vanished masterpieces, marginal mention of great libraries disappeared
from China, Santorini, Phoenicia, Ionia, Carthage, Egypt and Kushan (see Burning
Libraries (BC)) and of apocryphal collections from cities great and
small, reduced to dust, ash and submarine silt.
It is interesting
to note that the oral histories of primal societies might have stood a
better chance of surviving the efforts
of militarily superior literate societies to suppress them. It is easier to destroy rare text collections
and murder a literate minority of info elites, than to silence the recitation of epic myths by tribal grandparents,
aunts and uncles, to rapt children gathered around humble hearths.
On a blank,
hypothetical world map, the space-time geometry of ancient warfare
registered as a shifting rash of red spots (pointillism) representing isolated crimes, raids and tribal skirmishes wherever
population densities forced such confrontations.
A little later,
the geometry of global massacre grew somewhat more elaborate. From the invention of metallurgy until
the Industrial Revolution, these blemishes merged into red ribbons of death:
the march routes, siege works and battle lines of armies (in a linear
geometry). Flowing death zones throbbed by land and sea from the 1700’s
Enlightenment through the World Wars (intermittent planes); modern Air-Land
battle eats its way across entire subcontinents (a spherical plane). Meanwhile, the initial irritation thickens
and swells as universal crime; chicken pox turned smallpox.
Historically instantaneous, near-certain death – planetary omnicide – would spread out during a nuclear/scalar/biochemical disaster (a hollow sphere).
If we let our weapon technologies fester much longer, a
carefully brewed nanoplague could boil the biosphere down into its component
organic molecules, or a sun rendered nova might constitute the next stage of
man-made catastrophe (in a solid sphere of annihilation).
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman has studied the adrenal-fueled, fight-flight-posture-or-submit reflexes that allow us to cope with mortal anxiety and exertion during brief intervals. In return, they demand a few days’ rest to vent nightmares, verbalize stress and restore one’s mental equilibrium.
Unlike cliché war movies during which one weakling cracks
and the other martial actors carry on with grim determination; 98% of veterans
bear a blank, ‘thousand-meter’ stare after a month or more of combat. The 2% of battle elite exceptions turn out to
be immune to combat stress; they’re aggressive sociopaths to begin with.
Modern combat’s
psychic and trauma casualties would reduce a conventional military unit into a
rabble cowering around its shot-up and supersaturated medical unit, actively
raided by lunatic commandos—within a month or two of the onset of total combat.
Recall the grinning conscript POWs of Saddam Hussein’s defeat.
Sounding the
alarm, Professor Gabriel concluded that new drugs
are being (have been?) developed, that would separate a soldier’s cognitive
awareness from its emotional seat while sparing his sensory
coordination, alertness and sleep cycles.
Combatants on this type of drug would become well-coordinated and alert
versions of a car driver taking Valium: racing down the highway at 120 miles an
hour, intellectually aware of the danger but cut off from it emotionally.
These drugs would
skyrocket combat lethality, war crimes and veteran reintegration problems. After their predictable spillover into
underground drug markets, our world would assume a nightmarish, TV-like
tint of cold-blooded criminality. Unlike real life, where crime and brutality
lurk in the shadows while peaceful normalcy prevails, they would come to
dominate our lives; just like they manage to, nowadays, in the media and during
warfare. Unless we criminalize warfare
soon, weapon technology threatens to chase us with bloody knives (or radioactive
dust) into our living rooms.
There is a direct correlation between military terror and child abuse. The more warlike the people, the worse treated their children. Shi Huang Ti, Alexander, Romulus and Remus, Genghis Khan, Shaka Zulu, Frederick the Great, Stalin, Hitler ... all these ‘great’ warlords were abused children.
Imagine the hells common children must have endured if
their Princes were so afflicted. Picture
the horrors today’s infants must endure, tender offspring of history’s
deadliest weapon states.
A population that undergoes worsening military stress throws off more and more abused children whose tragic gestations and pathetic childhoods set them up for the next paroxysm of perpetual world war.
Famine- and
terror-induced orphans from prior wars staffed many secret police agencies;
they grew up to become fanatical and merciless guardians of the State. A point George Orwell made in Animal
Farm. Cambodia, Aids-riddled Africa and entire
nations elsewhere fester in like manner, as we sit
here discussing it so comfortably.
Like suicidal
fools, we are breeding the next generation of desperate terrorists bent on
destroying the world. They’re
more than willing and fully equipped to do so, thanks to our oh-so-clever
weapon technologies and fashionable apathy: the ultimate outcome of our weapon
indoctrination.
A brief decade
from now, the means to plague entire cities and nations will replace the puny
AK-47s and suicide bombs they use today.
If we had taken care and fed
them properly, with due empathy, we
could have secured a more auspicious harvest than their grapes of wrath.
Military
academies and English Public Schools (private boarding schools in no way
limited to England) mass-produce weapon technicians. Harry
Potter fantasies aside,
Public Schools on the British pattern offer a slavish, authoritarian
environment. Emerging from them, cunning
battle elites may obtain crude but certified training that open many doors to power.
First year
(Plebe) cadets at West Point were interviewed about their politics. Four years later, the small minority of
cadets that had called themselves liberal (in old, progressive sense) had
disappeared: extra-familial hyper-discipline at work.
Political
extremism and perhaps even conservatism may reflect human stresses endured
during childhood, adolescence, and even past lives; (see the reactionary as ex-carnivore). Over generations, criminality and
militarism have reinforced each other through the systematic abuse of
children. Psychic repression during pubescence may be most telling, like the
social advantages of taller stature.
The Japanese are
famous for the tender solicitude with which they nurture their infants, the calculated
ferocity of adolescent competition and the command-controlled brutality of
their armies in the field. Yet that
abuse was always directed from above.
During some wars, like the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and the Boxer
Rebellion, Japanese soldiers were renowned for their self-control and
discipline; likewise, no doubt, in modern Iraq and Afghanistan. During other wars, they went berserk without
provocation and committed acts of barbarity under orders, which their opponents
found disgraceful.
Charismatic
imperialists were usually humans of excellent character, burdened, however,
with very hard childhoods.
The better most
children are treated, the more peaceful, anti-violent and cooperative their
grownup societies become (to the point of anti-competitive communalism),
and the faster their psyches crumble when confronting ‘civilized’ warfare. The main weakness of primal (so-called
‘primitive’) societies is the routine affection with which they raise their
young. Such tender youths don’t stand a
chance against bands of ruthless aliens systematically abused as children, who
ritually select the most abusive among them to lead.
Only after
several tribal generations have been abused and massacred in this manner,
only then will ex-primal tribes begin to mistreat their own children, from a
desperate, subconscious need for collective security. Unheard-of wife and child abuse, organized
crime and intoxication emerge, as does a steady stream of cold-blooded super-warriors. But the heart of the tribe has been ripped
out.
Our PeaceWorld
heart has been ripped out. Grow it back!
Lax childcare
satisfies a wholesale requirement for military killers. During the pressure-cooker
socialization of school and military basic training, children fortunate enough to be well raised get ‘reeducated’ by young
bullies and petty adult tyrants.
Taught to imitate the worst role models, kids spin off into arrogance,
ignorance and aggression. Some of the
brightest youths nurture this abuse into adulthood, when they may achieve
incredible wealth and power. The
leftover settles for petty delinquency, jail and/or the military.
“Military leaders,
too, put their shoulder the Big Wheel of reproduction, for obvious
reasons. First, because they can never
give up the customary idea of ‘big battalions’.
To that end, they crave hordes of young children and are ever greedy for
more. They consume them avidly, Providence
willing, and thus require an ample stock.
What’s more, they know that population pressure and above all
overpressure induce aggression, imperialism and violence. Driving people into war becomes child’s
play. This is why governments apt for
belligerence begin by legislating for more procreation. Louis XIV’s minister, Colbert, favored bigger
families by decree, once his boss aspired to warfare. Germany and Italy favored more babies in
1933. The Japanese government published
a law in 1941 that forced men to marry by 25 years of age, women by 21, and
couples to have at least five children.
“As soon as the
pressure cooker of state builds up a demographic head of steam, leaders declare
that the nation has too many mouths to feed and that it must have more living
space or it will explode. They rarely
favor the latter alternative; they prefer the former. Hence the Gauls embarked upon their
expedition into Germania under Sigovese, and under
Bellovese into Northern Italy; hence barbarians invaded more fertile and less
populous lands during the decline of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the
Dark Age; hence the teeming Japanese sought diversion in a conflict with
Russia; hence fascist Italy was driven to conquer Ethiopia. We could find many more examples.
There is a
remarkably clear-cut relationship between warfare and demography. At first, the military machine insists on
population growth; soon there is a surfeit of young people and the nation
begins to exhibit more and more forceful belligerence. Warfare breaks out and leaves a more or less
large dent in the population. However,
since the most warlike people are also the most vital and fertile, losses are
soon made up and the population swells once more...
“Birth rates, as
shown above, have grown beyond measure.
On a global scale, we need more and more murderous wars.”
Translated from Jean
Bacon, Les saigneurs
de la guerre (The Warlord Bleeders) by Presses D’aujourd’hui, Paris, in
1981. This work was published in Tokyo
in 1983, in England in 1986 and republished by l’Harmattan
Editions in Paris in 1995. Phébus published a third French edition in 2003. It was also published as The
Greater Glory, Prism Press, San
Leandro, California, 1986, pp. 116-117.
This book should be required reading in every Intro History class.
Occasionally, pre-historic population densities grew beyond sustainable limits (especially on the plains of Central Asia, seat of the most warlike tribes in history). Population controls (notably infanticide and protracted nursing), as well as limitless new lands (a ready escape hatch for wise underdogs) kept most primal populations below population densities so irritating that they triggered genocide. If not, family-based, semi-static tribes confronted equivalent adversaries. Under those aberrant circumstances, elaborate battlefield rituals evolved to limit martial violence. Primal battlefields offered bored bucks (whether Celtic, African or American Indian, the same logic applied) a symbolic stage upon which to dramatize their heroism and martial skill.
For example, counting coup – being the first to touch an enemy – brought greater honor than killing anyone. Harming non-combatants brought disgrace. The ritual suicide of non-combatants became the subject of epic mythology (whether among Amerindian tribes or Roman victors—Massada). The first death or mutilation drew ritual combat to a close.
Since television
did not exist to let them wallow in shadistic brutality, they sometimes tortured prisoners as an indoor
sport. More often, they passed prisoners
of war through brutal hazing initiations, and the bravest survivors were
adopted into the tribe to make up for its losses. Genocide was rarely practiced except in
extreme cases of overpopulation and resource depletion. A conspiracy of women, shamans and druids was
responsible for terminating this kind of conflict; nowadays, no one is
authorized to do so. How sophisticated
we’ve become!
We ‘modern
people’ consider genocide a sad necessity.
In order to fill the most battalions, modern societies boost their birth
levels well beyond overpopulation redlines, and industrial planning ignores ecological
sanity. Higher body counts among
foreigners turn out to be a mythical boon, (dead men, women and children,
interchangeably). The infrastructure
collapse of some foreign country just seems to reduce global rates of
pollution, at least for awhile.
Counting
coup has become irrelevant, and martial individualism is forbidden in military
training … yet still highlighted in our entertainment.
Today’s omerta (code of silence) holds equal sway in public and private speech. Careless parents and school guardians teach children: your tormentor is not necessarily your worst problem, but the next level of higher authority that places its convenience above justice. This sorry habit, too, emerges from the disinformation politics of weapon mentality.
We pay for it with a flood of 'unconfirmed' massacres,
unacknowledged disasters and unintended consequences. No one is held accountable, rewards for
wrongdoers exceed their punishment, and everyone worsens the damage.
Once the Routine
of Evil dishonors the law, (confirms the corruption and/or incompetence of
orthodox sources of control), personal ‘respect and honor’ take over, shifting
us another step further from harmony and justice. Civilized people find no social grace in the
champions of such ‘respect and honor.’
On the contrary, we reject them.
After all, their ‘high status’ feeds on raw terror induced by bloody
acts of revenge.
Some abused children-turned-adults mistreat their own kids in turn. They justify this reign of terror as obedience training. There is just such a scene in the movie, Red Dawn. A broken and gulaged father sends his son off to fight the oppressor: “This is why I was so hard on you! It is too late for me now. You, go out there and avenge me!” Very dramatic and very common among mankind. The heroes of this movie could just as well have been black African, Oriental or South Asian and Middle-Eastern Muslims; and the bad guys, Western corporate aggressors.
The weapon dynamic remains the same. Now-dominant armies evolved because their soldiers were defeated and then adapted to their defeat; defeated nations will develop ‘victorious’ armies in the future. Strategic victory and defeat are no more permanent or morally significant than the reverse sides of the fat coin I just spun across my desk.
Initially
unheard-of, then scandalous, then discouraged, then merely unfashionable;
public bullying, lynch mobs, gang warfare and clan feuds become ‘honored’
institutions. Multiplied and thereby
trivialized, casualties assume the function of a scorecard; scars born
and the number of people hurt add up to personal worth. For
millennia, we’ve lived for little else.
This pattern holds true in ancient China, Medieval Europe, ante-bellum
South Carolina and contemporary ghettos.
Race, income and other prejudices (that we obsess over) are
secondary if not irrelevant. The only
necessities are over-dense populations, sub-employment, abused children and a
vacuum of legitimate authority.
Any deviation from
this norm reduces the number of willing killers a society may call upon
in times of war. What results is
military devastation. Traumatized
survivors then resume the abusive pattern.
This pattern of abuse – abuse relaxed – assault – abuse resumed, renders irrelevant considerations of
moralistic right and wrong, especially when they are posed out of
context. It is only on PeaceWorld that we could hope to foster valid ethics
without paradox.
Unfortunately,
morally bankrupt authorities (and the savage proto-elites that challenge them)
reject peace management. Legitimate
or revolutionary, weapon mentors invoke routine weapon
myths to justify their customary abuses.
Human freedom is
inalienable. Everyone is born,
lives and dies in freedom’s cool shade.
Not because it was written into some constitution, not because some
government enjoyed a rare good mood this decade, or even because some Prism proclaimed, “Look, Ma! I’m a freedom fighter!”
Humans are
whatever they wish to be. They never
‘earn’ their freedom; they are born with it—even though a few misguided
power-addicts may traffic the illusion of freedom to satisfy some
secondary craving for security, authority, money, drugs, ‘belonging’, etc.
Immortal freedom
won’t emerge from its hiding place until the fighting stops. Anyone who claims to dole out of freedom,
monopolize it or defend it militarily – like some horde of gold –
enslaves himself and anyone who listens to him.
Battle elites hide their
predatory habits behind paradoxical weapon myths.
Every time these
insights have emerged, weapon managers did their worst to obliterate them,
like baiting and squashing a pesky bug. They used some combination of bread and
clubs, bribery and terror. With
morbid consistency, weapon managers worsened social stress. Once their stress has been ratcheted up to
unendurable levels, long-suffering proletarians turned to proto-elites to
germinate a new political membrane that might shield them from alienating
authority.
Weapon leaders
tend to push back hard. Proletarian
revolt is usually hesitant; crushing it appears to sharpen state power. History demonstrates, however, that ‘internal
security troops’ rot out; they become scavenging bullies worthless in
actual combat. Thank God, or we’d all be
corpses stacked in concentration camps by now.
Just as solid ice, if were not miraculously less dense than liquid water
(unlike most other molecules), would permanently fill in all the hollows.
Allowed free
reign, today’s Wimps orchestrate civil wars, political repression and international
bullying at gunpoint; these combine to rot out entire nations. As it stands, international gangsters prowl
the planet unchecked. Armed to the
teeth, thanks to our taxes, and exempt from effective prosecution, they’ve
mastered all the dance steps of prodigal brutality.
Only the
three-way alliance of a one-world government, its allied court and universal militia could defend us against
them. At last! Those criminals would be officially declared
pariahs. Every hand would be turned
against them and their sponsors, whether corporate, religious, ethnic, private
or governmental. We could create new
jobs for them on PeaceWorld, just as dramatic and dangerous, but a lot less
destructive.
In a weapon technology, info-proletarians are turned into individual isolates engulfed in economic phantasms beyond their understanding and control. The slightest mischance slings us through threadbare social safety nets, into joblessness, homelessness, squalor and criminality. WeaponWorld shreds ageless extended family structures and thousand-year habits of homegrown subsistence. It rips apart meaningful relationships among individuals and their friends, families and peers—even ‘belonging’ to the land itself. It forbids the very idea of belief in anything significant and turns us into cowering credophobes too scared to believe in anything.
Families are fractured into bare ‘nuclear’ minimums—then
beyond that into single parenthood, bastardy, institutional fosterage, runaway
homelessness and roguish isolation.
Almost all the nations and tribes to which we should owe natural
allegiance are forbidden. Alone,
helpless and cast adrift in a hostile world, info proletarians abandon their
tradition, culture, autonomy, faith and hope.
These sacrifices satisfy corporate magnates, agro-monopolists, vicious absentee landlords and showboat, megabuck project managers who gobble private freeholds to satisfy their insatiable portfolio demands. The only tribe on Earth that remains legal is the global one of the rich.
Any interest rate beyond 5% is usury that must induce unnecessary suffering in someone—however well veiled. International and local bureaucrats compound this tragedy in return for a steady paycheck. Meanwhile, slums and prisons mushroom across the planet.
All that would be formally prohibited on PeaceWorld; its manager, disgraced and ejected from power.
If individual
isolates become ensnared in unjust laws, so much the better! Each new injustice grants weapon managers
another hold over their lives. Once our
personal despair and self-loathing are complete, we become useful cogs
in the war machine. We mistrust everyone
and everything except our own weapon managers and their life-and-death
manipulations. We realize that they are hopeless creeps; and, in rare cases, that
we’ve become too scared to believe in anything. But we go along with their
scam anyway.
Learner peace
technicians will challenge these assumptions and reverse them. With full public approval, they will sponsor
economic interdependence, mutual interests, common politics, reverence
for extended family intimacies and the gentle despotism of communal
livelihood. They will cocoon everyone in
a complex web of personal obligation and reward; encourage personal
self-expression, public health and withdrawal from misery. In direct defiance of five thousand years of
cultural history, they will take deliberate and self-conscious steps to promote
peace and forbid war. Admission into
these kinship groups will be cheap or free, and departure easy.
In a Learner
future, most sociopaths won’t suffer enough
neglect and ostracism to act out their aggression. Imbued with the fundamentals of peace, our
societies will leave far fewer sociopaths untreated, and grant much less power
to the cleverest among them.
Type 1 sociopaths
cannot control their pathology; they are unmistakable. Type 2 sociopaths learn to postpone
their most blatant misdeeds; they only proceed when they know that no effective
resistance will be raised against them. Today, it is they who run this entire planet,
in the dumb name of weapon mentality.
Sexual predators will be identified and treated, long before they corrupt the next batch of helpless youngsters. Power-mad sociopaths will be cozened with therapeutic theatrics, taught the value of selflessness and drugged, if necessary, into serene complacency. All diseased individuals of this kind will be identified early (preferably, at birth) and carefully nurtured for the rest of their life. Thus will they cease to threaten us so frequently and so awfully.
Such therapies will become topics of passion for gifted
Learners of psychiatry. Once we stop idealizing stoicism and social
invisibility – if only because our clumsy communities cannot handle anything
more complicated – psychoshamanic researchers will develop drugs,
therapies and novel religious rituals to reconnect emotionally sick people with
their feelings. At that point, violence
will become a public health problem: a
regrettable epidemic to be addressed one-on-one and
institution-into-instrument.
We could defuse
the worst effects of human violence in one generation. The sins of our fathers may have revisited us
unto the seventy-seventh generation, but the promise of redemption through love
is ours to fulfill today. It is a
sacred obligation we neglect at our peril.
Learners shall buy off, monitor
and predict most acts of violence, both personal and collective. They will mitigate the worst consequences of
crime, whenever, wherever and however it evades their control.
The following
quotation includes another weapon myth and its clarification:
“Our Western vision of society—as a Hobbesian
[author’s note: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan] contract, consciously entered into
primarily to ensure harmony, offers no way of explaining the existence of
family bonds, of lifelong friendships, of the sense of cultural membership
afforded by shared language, and a thousand other precious things. Indeed, it totally misses and even denies the
deepest requirement that characterizes our species – the need for social
identity. Hobbes’ notion that without
society, humans would be at each other’s throats in a grand free-for-all is
totally right, but for completely the wrong reasons. He assumed that isolated human beings “in a
state of nature” would naturally destroy one another because their supposedly
innate competitive drives would lead them to do so. What Hobbes failed to realize – and many
still do today – is that humans evolved
with a desire to belong, not to compete. Biologically, we are obligatory social
animals, wholly dependent on a supportive social structure; and it is in the
absence of such a support system that destructive, ‘inhuman’ behaviors occur.” Mary E. Clark, “Meaningful Social Bonding as
a Human Need,” in Conflict: Human Needs Theory, John Burton, ed., Macmillan, Ltd., London,
1990, p. 40. (Italics mine).
If monsters surge
from the gloom when our social conventions begin to fray, then more angels
might materialize once we redouble our social bonds.
The Hobbesian
cartoon of humans as calculating beasts at war with one another,
only happens once we abandon the nurturing habits and cultural accommodations
our sanity requires. Hobbes’ obscene
pantomime occurred to him during the Enclosure Movement, when British info
elites stripped the countryside bare of peasants and cast them into urban
hells, eventually to provide Queen Victoria with more cheap riflemen, sailors,
whores and industrial labor.
We subscribe to
the same fallacies, wreak the same havoc worldwide, suffer from the same failure
… and wonder (very briefly) what could have gone wrong?
Instead, we should build up a Learner Commonwealth and put all this misery behind us. With a little luck and a lot of determination, we could turn this whole thing around in a single generation.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld