SUMMARY
OF Learners INTRO & VOCAB
“…To make the worker’s share in production the sole basis for his claim to a livelihood – as was done even by Marx in the labor theory of value he took over from Adam Smith – is, as power-production approaches perfection, to cut the ground from under his feet. In actuality, the claim to a livelihood rests upon the fact that, like the child in a family, one is a member of a community: the energy, the technical knowledge, the social heritage of a community belong equally to every member of it, since in the large the individual contributions and differences are completely insignificant.
“[The classic name for such a universal system of distributing the essential means of life – as described by Plato and More, long before Owen and Marx – is communism, and I have retained it here. But let me emphasize that this communism is necessarily post-Marxian, for the facts and values upon which it is based are no longer the paleotechnic ones upon which Marx founded his policies and programs. Hence communism, as used here, does not imply the particular nineteenth century ideology, the messianic absolutism, and the narrowly militarist tactics to which the official communist parties usually cling, nor does it imply a slavish imitation of the political methods and social institutions of Soviet Russia, however admirable soviet courage and discipline may be]. [The italics and brackets above are his.]
“Differentiation and preference and special incentive should be taken into account in production and consumption only after the security and continuity of life itself is assured. Here and there we have established the beginnings of a basic communism in the provision of water and education and books. There is no rational reason for stopping short at any point this side of a normal standard of consumption. Such a basis has no relation to individual capacities and virtues: a family of six requires roughly three times as much goods as a family of two, although there may be but one wage earner in the first group and two in the second. We give at least a minimum of food and shelter and medical attention to criminals who have presumably behaved against the interests of society: why then should we deny it to the lazy and the stubborn? To assume that the great mass of mankind would belong to the latter category is to forget the positive pleasures of a fuller and richer life.” Mumford, Lewis, Technics and Civilization, Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., 1934, pp. 403-404.
I don’t know if Karl Marx had a sense of humor. What little I have read of his writings show none. Only a nation with a hearty sense of humor could stomach classical Marxism.
During the mid-1800’s, Marx’s family subsisted in London poverty while he exhausted his paltry income on foreign newspaper subscriptions. Poor guy, poor family.
He thought the proletariat’s inferior status was based on financial hardship in particular, rather than lack of valid information in general. He concluded this despite the fact that high and low finances are mere subsets of total information content and flow.
The Victorian media’s gee-whiz reports of high-tech telegraph and railroad marvels convinced him that human communications had reached a new pinnacle of perfection. If world communications had reached such heights, Marx could have gotten his high-quality news for pennies or less a month.
Still today, we are not so fine-tuned. So-called ‘free’ information is the most heavily distorted. It costs a lot of time and money to acquire objective news without a toxin load of negative bias and special-interest agenda. Indeed, information is bias and agenda, it must be. But couldn’t we fine-tune that information flow such that bias and agenda became those of peace: positive bias and general-interest agenda?
In an optimal communications milieu, Marx could have bartered his analytical brilliance for a more than comfortable salary. That was not the case then and is not so now.
He hoped his money-proletarians would refuse to fight brother workers from foreign countries. After all, they had more in common with each other than with their money-elites. How wrong he was! Across Europe, Worker Party bosses caved in to national chauvinists and got their followers to massacre each other during two World Wars and many more rubber stamped since.
Modern Labor Union leaders are at the forefront of ecological devastation, organized crime and status-quo militarism. They defend these shameful activities in the name of ‘saving jobs.’ They have great difficulty agreeing with their progressive ‘allies’ (even though both are just as incompetent at peace) and confronting their common ‘enemies’ among corporate weapon management. It is easier for them to oppose progressive ideals and submit to corporate tyranny; it is easiest for them to fatten themselves and their bureaucracies on dwindling union dues and swelling corporate payoffs—and do as little as possible otherwise. I have outreached to them and been stung by their indifference, without exception.
Growing numbers of rank-and-file workers have voted – with their feet and their wallets – against them and their insane policies. Those who didn’t, saw their jobs fly overseas, in the name of “global economic efficiency.”
Famous holdouts against this militarist insanity were Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and their Spartacist disciples. Fellow labor leaders betrayed these peace martyrs to German proto-Nazis between the world wars. They were brutally murdered. Given this salutary example, no Labor organizations and activists remain to fight for Peace. Instead, they struggle mightily for second- and third-rate considerations—as does every institution “acceptable” to weapon managers.
Marx never explained how his proletarians could agree with each other, with him and with his extraordinary conclusions. How could they, without absorbing all the information he had acquired so painfully and without communicating freely among themselves? In most cases, that kind of communication was forbidden. The police of the day made sure that would not happen, and Communist Party bosses made just as sure that their subordinates would never discuss such things freely.
The key to proletarian subjugation was information starvation and it remains information starvation. Lack of money is just a symptom and consequence of information starvation. No one ever got this message out before Learners; no one has paid enough attention to it since.
We have been deprived of the following information: we are powerless because we are missing vital information. What’s more, it never occurred to us to demand better information. We were satisfied with the information (mostly junk info, like junk food) we were allowed to collect despite every institutional obstacle placed before us while we struggled to acquire it. It seemed neither possible nor practical to collect more and better information. The transformation of society to make that happen seemed unthinkable to us.
This oversight was Karl Marx’s gravest error. Given this bitter error, his subsequent conclusions are no more valid than those of his coeval philosophers before and since. We can no more dismiss the weapon/peace dialectic from a valid analysis of the politics of information, than discount gravity from the accurate calculation of orbital mechanics.
Otherwise, we must content ourselves with orthodox political analysis – the equivalent of Earth-centered epicycles and stars embedded in crystal spheres – published persistently since. Two thousand years of retardation in our political analysis! We need the equivalent of a Copernican political system to replace the central Earth of weapon mentality with the majestic Sun of peace mentality. Emery Reves scooped me on this analogy in his Anatomy of Peace, Harpers & Brothers Publishers, 1945 & 1946, reprinted in 1995.
Another weapon myth attributes significant ‘freedoms’ to economies bound by weapon requirements. We will discuss a few economic implications of the weapon/peace dialectic in another chapter of Learners.
Weapons economies may be hunter/gatherer, they may be herder, agricultural (“First Wave” according to the Tofflers of Future Shock fame), industrial (Second Wave) or informational (Third Wave). They may be decentralized or collective, openly or secretly militaristic; they may be particularistic (favoring a few individuals) or totalitarian (favoring no one for very long). Weapon management may be based on precedent, authority or self-interest. Each alternative fosters mass coercion, injustice, war and wastage of talent and resources—regardless of (and directly contradicting) the cant weapon managers use to promote themselves.
Pandemic unemployment, homelessness, statelessness, refugee status, famine, epidemics and genocide through tribal warfare (at once barbaric-primitive and techno-sophisticated) are routine methods of mass human disposal these days. We dub these government-accelerated catastrophes ‘complex disasters.’ As if they could be anything but complex? As we harden our heart to this infamy, our leaders ratify our heartlessness by pocketing more wealth. The end result is a ‘lifeboat philosophy’ that consigns the weak to the sharks.
What absurd reasoning shackled us to this slave galley? If we are stuck in an overcrowded lifeboat, let’s waste no more time choosing whom to drown at gunpoint. Instead, set every hand to bail or row, every stick and stitch to the wind, the prow for the nearest sea lane/landfall, and then, praying to any God we choose, row like hell!
What is the root cause of human exploitation? Marx lists several periods of exploitation, including such ones as the slave/master, serf/lord and proletarian/bourgeois. With today’s corporate dictatorship, he might let us add the individual isolate versus the government-corporate bureaucrat. Learners lumps these rivalries under the headings Info(rmation) Proletariat and Info(rmation) Elite. This word-pair forms another dichotomy and dialectic that Learners must understand with absolute clarity.
Marx filled many a page to narrate the economic shell game that wily bourgeois (boorjwah, burghers, middle-class people) play when they inflate the value of labor’s handiwork beyond its production costs. They enrich themselves from the difference, at the expense of the proletariat. Well, duh.
But if upper classmates merely fattened themselves in idle opulence, everyone could benefit from trickle-down wealth. After all, comfort-loving bourgeois would pay a pretty penny for superior goods and services, fully employing the rest. They’d hardly begrudge an extra few more to secure their precious law and order. Welfare states are cheaper to mismanage than ruinous, ham-fisted police states. That first kind of weapon state is more profitable, too, except compared to peace states. Nations at total peace would be much more profitable, but incredibly vulnerable to military aggression.
Instead, somewhere along the line, most of this wealth gets thrown away – deliberately and pointlessly – and never recirculates. Marx never noted this wastage. Despite his exhaustive analysis, he offered no safeguard against the next rabble of wasteful opportunists: Mafiosi, arbitrageurs, Communist apparatchiki, ‘deregulated’ corporate managers, corporate/governmental/labor leaders, politically correct politicians (gratifying the needs of the rich: see our last dozen Presidents), and the like. He refused to distinguish good administrators from bad ones.
According to the German social scientist, Robert Michels, there is an Iron Law of oligarchy. As soon as human beings put together an organization, power gravitates to its permanent officers. Regardless of the organization’s original purpose, its primary goal will become the preservation and growth of that organization and of its oligarchy, no matter how corrupting that tendency becomes.
No one prior to Learners has figured out how to use that tendency for the greater good, instead of submitting to its corruption. Like an old judoka master confronting a younger and more powerful antagonist, we could use the opponent’s tendencies and promote the greater good instead.
Similarly, Marx wrote a lot about the “alienation of labor.” He did not give a valid reason why members of the proletariat must hate themselves and their miserable work. He merely described this sentence of self-loathing as another example of the bourgeoisie’s broad-brush, vicious and unreasonable abuse.
Learners shows a clear reason why members of the intellectual proletariat must despise themselves and their place in the scheme of things. Alienation produces political powerlessness quite reliably. An information proletariat alienated to the point of powerlessness, consents to maximum weapon technology.
Emotionally secure people, in love with their world and with each other, would find a thousand reasons to challenge weapon mentality; they would sabotage weapon technology and block weapon managers at every opportunity. The way we would never dare to, since we have been so thoroughly alienated. If a nation must defend itself militarily, it must forbid this sabotage, make it impossible. Mass alienation is an effective way to prevent mutinous pacifism from uprooting protective fascism.
Let’s discuss this alienation some more.
“The new economic order (of the 19th Century) was
indifferent to every form of community or association, destroying the customary
associations of village, guild and peasant community.” Roland
N. Stromberg, Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914, The Regents Press of Kansas, Lawrence,
Kansas, 1982, p. 90.
Alienation is cultivated during decades of cultural mediocrity, insignificant social pecking orders and philistine materialism. Once warfare erupts, this alienation congeals into its antithesis: a passionate and overwhelming tribal in-gathering and sacrifice of the fearsome Other.
Rich and poor, plebian and elite, reactionary and progressive, illiterate and intellectual: every citizen feels the tug of this holy ingathering that trivializes past differences and re-imposes a sense of community banned during peacetime. When two countries go to war, both populations will harmonize their internal differences and contradictions before coming to blows with one another.
The reasons and justifications for this war may be fallacious, trivial, absurd or a fabric of lies; its consequences, seem disastrous to anyone who cares to note them. Thoughtful voices may speak out against it. Reasonable people, who might see through this mess under other circumstances, will fall into step in any case. The same cultural, educational and newsgathering institutions that promoted stupid and spiteful alienation during peacetime, will jump at the chance to rekindle the torch of atavistic tribalism. Everyone experiences an exalted sense of belonging that he or she could never feel (was never encouraged to feel) under normal circumstances.
This emotional earthquake rocked Europe at the beginning of World War I, and America right after 9/11. It’s most remarkable feature? Perfectly rational people, the entire intellectual elite tasked with safeguarding society’s collective conscience, jump from routine cosmopolitanism and tepid pacifism, (“Shouldn’t we go to war less often and only for the best reasons?”) straight into nationalistic bigotry and warfare hysteria.
Once this war has claimed its tyrant’s share of victims, these same intellectuals will revert to their default, brainless middle-of-the-roadism. They could not, to save their lives, describe what possessed them to turn into such blaring warmongers. Their recall of this transformation will leave them speechless. Quietly, they will forget their exalted fugue—as if it never happened.
In a society that prides itself in compulsively reporting the latest pop star’s latest belch, no research is allowed on this taboo topic. Then again, the entire weapon/peace antinomy is off-limits. Good God, could one ask why?
The only practical outcome of each communist revolution was the traumatic transformation of feudal societies, based on subsistence agriculture, into military-industrial states that could hold their own against any aggressor. Otherwise, feudal states could never defend themselves against industrialized nations that had nurtured their weapon technologies at long and bloody leisure.
Western colonial expansion was based on the military imbalance between industrial states, on one hand, and feudal societies and pre-feudal peoples, on the other. Pampered feudal dynasties and their military elites were too busy suppressing local revolts and peripheral native uprisings. They never bothered to develop proficient defenses against better-armed Western armies. Subsistence feudalism never produced the enormous economic surpluses, the despised and under-employed workforce and the belching smokestack industries those armies required.
Yet – at tremendous sacrifice and virtually overnight – Communist states managed to produce those things quite reliably. Then they proceeded to checkmate Western aggressors from any provenance.
Communism is a toxic vaccine that feudal societies must self-administer to immunize themselves against the hyper-organized assault of weapon National Capitalism.
“Virtually every aspect of the development of capitalism, from the rapid advance of technology, transport and communications to the evolution of new class forces and the political and ideological responses to them, had a major military significance. To adopt the traditional sociological terminology, social changes had both the socio-economic functions which were ‘manifest’ to contemporaries and social theorists, and military functions which were much more ‘latent’.
“Mass militarism can be seen, as it was for example by Karl Liebknecht in 1907, as the form of warfare appropriate to capitalism. But there is also a sense in which industrial capitalism and parliamentary democracy were the social and political forms required by a new form of state militarism. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was clear that both political nationalism and direct military needs would have social implications. Imperialism begat social reforms; the inadequacy of the labour (sic) supplied to the armed forces (for example, in Britain during the South African war) stimulated concern at the health and diet of the working class. Warfare had always had implications for welfare, but at the beginning of the 20th century it was a recognizable motor for change. The First World War greatly accelerated this change, particularly by expanding expectations among working people themselves – expectations which were to be disappointed in the aftermath of the war.” Martin Shaw, Dialectics of War: An Essay on the Social Theory of Total War and Peace, Pluto Publishing Ltd, London, 1988, pp. 74-75.
With respect to the impact of war on the development of the State, please consult Bruce D. Porter’s very convincing War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics, The Free Press, Macmillan, Inc., New York, 1994. Nailing his analysis down with literally hundreds of examples from history, Porter lists the political effects of war as follows:
Formative and Organizing Effects
Territorial Coalescence
Unifying Effect
Centralizing Effect
Bureaucratizing Effect
Government Growth
Fiscal Effect
Ratchet Effect (prior effects don’t disappear after each war)
Opportunity for Leadership
Disintegrative Effects
Total State Destruction
Catalyst of Revolution
Diminished Capacity
Fiscal Collapse
Reformative Effects
Integrative Effect
Socializing Effect
Social-leveling Effect
Spur to Social Reform
I hesitate to quote more from Porter; I would wind up filling a new volume of Learners with citations from his work.
He throws the following sop to academic orthodoxy before he packs the next three hundred pages with demonstrations of the exact opposite.
“What this book will not do is postulate a military dialectic of history. War is a profound agent of historical change, but it is not the fundamental driving force of history. Whatever causes war – economic factors, class conflict, human nature, modes of production, technological change, divine will – is by definition [how convenient!] a more basic causal agent than war itself. No matter how ubiquitous or profound the effects of war may be, war itself is a derivative and secondary phenomenon, never [sic] a prime moving force. By the same token, war should never be seen as an exogenous force that acts on states and societies from without; it derives rather from within them. When we say that war causes a given political effect, we should keep in mind that this is only a convenient shorthand; what really happens is that state leaders, governments, military officers, armies, and populations, in waging war and in coping with its myriad challenges, cause those effects to occur.” p. 4.
[NOTE: In the same way, I suppose, that apples, planets and stars, in coping with gravity, cause its motions to occur without being directly affected by it as an independent force; or animals, in coping with evolution, cause corporeal development to occur in the same way. What adulterated academic crap!]
These last few lines from Porter sound much like the retraction submitted by Galileo to the Catholic Church, written for the same reason of bureaucratic survival. Some friendly reviewer must have warned Porter, when he appraised his manuscript: “You had better insert a denial of ‘military dialectics,’ no matter how summary and telegraphic; otherwise, you run the risk of being blacklisted by academia.”
The academic community has served as weapons mentality’s lap dog for far too long, to honestly address the weapons/peace antinomy (or dialectic).
Recall the weapon maxim, whether from capitalist or communist lips: “Arm yourself to the teeth beforehand or submit to enslavement.” Never mind that the enslavement of weapon mentality and of military defeat are identical. In the final analysis, we cannot distinguish between national sovereignty and personal enslavement. One creates the other. But we may choose between the enslavement of WeaponWorld and the emancipation of PeaceWorld.
Do the unknowns of PeaceWorld seem more terrifying to you than the comforting bloody-mindedness of good old WeaponWorld? So what? Get over your hypnotized panic!
Communist militants never intended to create a socialist paradise. That was just another weapon myth carrot dangled in front of feudal information proletariats. The revolutionary vanguard’s real goal was to crash-optimize homegrown military technologies, despite the backwardness of feudal populations and especially of their backward elites.
Despite Marx’s warnings, every so-called Marxist society became equally tainted with weapon dogma. Peace idealists were gulaged and/or executed—just as often, in practical terms, as they were disempowered and marginalized in Capitalist societies. Like other weapon societies, Marxist ones supported wasteful, forbidden forms of weapon parasitism: minority dictatorship, class privilege, internal and external genocide, slave labor, secret police, premeditated mismanagement and worker alienation; actually, universal alienation that cut off communications, most especially between the info elite and the info proletariat, amputating valid communications between them. Such contradictions rotted out the fabric of every Communist society.
Thus, every Communist experiment turned into an exercise in barracks Communism, despite all the ideological cant written against barracks Communism. Every contradiction Marx deplored will exist in every weapon state, whether it adheres to National Marxism, National Capitalism or any other form of militarist self-deception.
The same thing happened during the French Revolution. Marx noted it and then forgot about it.
Power-drunk American information elites never tire of toasting their ‘triumph’ over Communism. Yet, despite their ragged masses, Russia and China have amassed enough nukes to protect themselves against any but the most suicidal opponent. Communism has served its main function. Consequently, it is sloughing off like an old snakeskin.
Even though Capitalism is just as necrotic, we refuse to let drop this rotten appendage and graft something healthier to the stump. We persist instead in absorbing its gangrene toxins, and intend to transfuse that stinking pus into ex-communist societies, to their obvious detriment.
By any rational accounting, weapon societies are tainted goods destined for the scrap heap of history. Capitalism’s fantasy ‘victory’ over Das Kapital has not reduced class struggle by one iota. It has merely made the conflict murkier and more intractable.
What is the basis of government power? Government strength is not in capital, as Scandinavian socialists have proven and the Great Depression confirmed. Capital ebbs and flows at the whim of the very rich.
By “very rich,” I mean those whose wealth is so old and huge, they have become transparent to journalistic and legalistic review. They are so rich that their insider trading on the world’s stock markets is not only legal but expected, so rich that the world’s best-paid corporate CEOs and grandest government dignitaries are their errand boys.
I doubt if enough people understand the incredible cumulative power of interest compounded over hundreds of years, and the unimaginable wealth that would place in certain people’s hands. It is illegal to do that kind of thing, nowadays – harvest the fruit of generations of circular interest – but it wasn’t in the past. Its interest rate could have been very low and thus certain; its current beneficiaries, totally unfit to control it. None of that would matter. They would be enormously wealthy and powerful in any case. Learners addresses them in particular—even if they benefit more than anyone else from this transformation, we will benefit as well.
The relationship that the very rich hold with info elites they tower over, and with the info proletariat that sprawls beneath their telescopic spire, is this:
· Information proletarians are like animals in a zoo. They are under total control and have no idea what’s going on, beyond a few reassuring routines they value most. They have been trained since infancy to value nothing else.
· Weapon managers are like zoo attendants. They have near-total control over the animals under their care and some awareness of what’s going on, but very little over their own decision-making and job security.
· The very rich resemble the board of directors of the zoo. They manage the two lower levels, while remaining remote from them and invisible.
What is actually in charge of the zoo? You could call it a mental value hidden in some recess of the human spirit, which esteems above all the satisfaction of its curiosity and dominion over the natural world. All three layers of actors, their future and class settings depend on the commands of this spiritual value.
Each tidal surge of finance – inflationary or deflationary – enriches those peak Conspirators of Greed at everyone else’s expense. Each surge of militaristic panic strengthens weapon managers at the peril of everyone else. Each information manipulation, deprivation and degradation seems to simplify the task of controlling the inferior class. Weapon mentality is the spiritual value that drives this process.
Government power is not a matter of military might, either. Muscle-bound military states so threatened their neighbors that they were overwhelmed by numbers, or so overtaxed their economies that they drove themselves to ruin; as Russia did a few years ago and as the USA is doing today.
When I mention ‘weapon technology,’ please avoid the caricature of stomping jackboots, bad brass bands and hysterical demagogues. Please don’t confound weapon mentality with its subset of fascist militarism. Humans have attempted this sick parody altogether too often. Its unforeseen consequences have always been disastrous, quite predictably.
If armies of barracks bullies and pampered thugs replace competent police and effective administrators, they lose their military edge against a foreign army, even an equally rotted one. The deadliest modern weapon state must hoard a substantial measure of peace technology.
As paradoxically demonstrated by Western democracies, the more lethal a weapon state, the greater its perceived distribution of peace benefits. Mozart and Peter Gabriel, kindness and light, gardening, ersatz (fake) forms of political empowerment: a hocus pocus of civility must be artfully compartmentalized and subordinated to the primary, killing goals of a weapon society.
The actual key to political power lies in communications—just as the key to individual empowerment is information acquisition. When conspirators plot insurrection, radio and TV stations are among their first targets for takeover. Thanks for this illustration, Paul Lackman.
Weapon states assert their sovereignty by restricting and simplifying social transactions, internal as well as external. Civilizations grow as mighty, rich and free as they allow their communications to grow complex. This happens in obedience to an Armchair Formula we shall review in its own chapter.
Weapon states deliberately sabotage their civil communications, the better to ‘control’ them. This fantasy control of information flow requires that current communications be subverted and their future growth be deliberately delayed. This deterioration must induce additional poverty; its fearless reversal, abundance in direct proportion to military vulnerability.
A sophisticated people may operate by virtue of liberal laws (in the positive sense of the term, since inverted by weapon mentality into its antonym, in English as well as French), and call itself free because of them. However, its dialogue can be homogenized by idolized sports and televised soap opera trivia; by patent discord between the polarized adherents of black-and-white ideologies; by paralyzing legalisms; by some mechanical doctrine, church liturgy or ideological dogma; by a tyrant’s mad ravings; by the obsessive narration of trivial but dramatic crimes; or by a tsunami of commercial blather. Anything will do, to distract public attention from the weapon/peace dialectic and drown out public commentary about it.
See the top five hundred key words searched on the Internet: (http://www.searchengineguide.com/wt/2011/0118_wt1.html ). You will be surprised how useless and trivial the majority of them are.
These intellectual contaminants are broadcast most readily through monologue (one-way) mass media. All by themselves, monologue media reduce communications by at least an order of magnitude. Exactly the same transmission channels, adjusted such that half the information flowed in each direction, could carry at least ten times or more (perhaps a thousand of times more) useful information.
These communications equal information flow; they are proportional to societal wealth: how many hundreds and thousands of times more real dollars each of us could dispose of without inflation—regardless of the ideological cant that affirms otherwise. A multitude of personal interactions and complex dialogues generate peace technology’s abundance.
Divided, please note, by the sum of harmful communications.
As these dialogues grow and spread beyond centralized control, they threaten to destabilize a weapon hierarchy by making it more vulnerable to internal and external extremists.
To forestall this destabilization, weapon propagandists boost the volume, saturation and repetition of official monologue; they simplify public reality until it turns into a caricature of nature. This is how the info proletariat is overawed into dead-end weapon dissidence, hysterical paralysis and social autism.
Apparent differences between National Capitalist and National Communist weapon states are strictly situational, which is to say they are based on their perception of geo-strategic threats.
Put the American population between Europe, Iran, South Asia, China and Mongolia; and that of the former Soviet Union, between Mexico, Canada, the Atlantic and the Pacific. Americans would have become militaristic bullies sooner, while the Russians would have baked a slightly more liberal flavor into their tyranny, if only temporarily. Leaving them in their own homelands, the Russians would have liberalized sooner if they could have blocked every invader far beyond their borders; and the Americans would have become overt totalitarians sooner if they had fought their climax defensive battles against external aggressors on the banks of the Mississippi—the way the Russians had to, on the banks of the Volga.
It is merely a question of the nature, size and proximity of the armed hordes we think we have got to hold off.
Apply current threat levels posed by transcontinental nuke, chemical, scalar and biological assault. It doesn’t matter whether those warheads are rammed through by ballistic missile, broadcast and triangulated (like laser holograms) by highly energized scalar antenna arrays, or borne in cheap suitcases by sweat-soaked fanatics. Watch both societies, plus all the others on Earth, doom themselves to cumulative military despotism and eventual omnicide (“Kill everything that lives!”): the ultimate simplification of information flow…
…Unless, by some 3rd Millennium miracle, a critical mass of wise people across the planet sparks a Learner transformation.
Thanks to the World Wide Web – this semi-dialogue system that allowed you to call up this text, and me, to send it to you freely – we may hope that such a transformation takes place despite our worst fears and prejudices.
Will you and your friends participate in this transition into a peaceful 3rd Millennium? Or will you remain placid spectators to it—or, worse yet, dogmatic antagonists who favor weapon mentality?
Read on, Learner activists …
SUMMARY OF Learners INTRO & VOCAB
As for the rest of you who came here querying a search engine for the name “Carl Marx,” I believe you have a term paper to get out of the way, or some such distraction.
It will soon be time for us to part. Think of placing Learners’ chapter summary page among your Favorites. You’re welcome to come back to it, and to its hundred-odd web mates, once you’re ready for a good political read and once I’ve edited them into a readable format.
Those pages outline the Why, the How and the What of the World Peace that awaits us. This book is not about sermons, but about results. Are you interested? If not, ask yourself, “Why not?”
LEARNERS: On the Move from
WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld