SUMMARY OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
“Could I tranquilly see my fellow-men walking [about] like idiots in every imaginable direction, except that alone in which the happiness they were in search of could be found?” Robert Owen, New Lanark, Cole, 108, taken from The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen, by A.L. Morton, Monthly Review Press, 1962, p. 61.
Graham Gwynn and Tony Wright, Left in the Dark, Kaleidos Press, 2008. www.leftinthedark.org.uk. The following is a summary of this text.
From its inception some seventy million years ago, humanity had enjoyed a diet of jungle fruit easily digestible and rich in flavenoids. This optimal diet inhibited the harmful effects of steroids and MAOs in the human body, stimulated pineal gland activity, and induced a physiological feedback loop that further inhibited steroid activity, lengthened the prepubescent growth period (the more advanced the species, the longer its prepubescent growth) and tripled the volume of the human brain, in an extremely short time span from an evolutionary point of view. During this period, humanity’s thought processes were perfected on the basis of two co-equal brain hemispheres functioning in parallel and balanced sanity.
Unfortunately, from 200,000 to 12,000 years ago, humanity was forced to adapt to a much less hospitable environment. Something induced the catastrophic constriction of the human gene pool to a handful of surviving female bloodlines. Thanks to humanity’s overgrown brain capacity, it survived this transition from a diet of lush arboreal fruit, to the savanna equivalent of tubers and seeds, then ice-age animal flesh. These forced diets induced a cumulative deterioration of intellectual capacity without any corresponding physiological evolution. We remained exactly the same species, just ate different foods and thought less ably.
This nutritional deviation increased the influence of testosterone on the human body (both male and female), which induced a cascade of mental retardation that accentuated the human sleep cycle, shut down the brain’s right hemisphere in favor of the left (linear thinking and short-term memory over holistic thought and long-term processing), and based human behavior on restrictive fear instead of holistic understanding.
According to the conclusions of this book, we are the brain-crippled survivors of the transition from a physiologically optimal diet of arboreal fruit, to less and less advantageous ones (ending in the absolutely worthless junk food of today), which brought about a spiraling decay in our values and behavior.
The ancient legend of humanity’s Fall from grace is actually a nutritional one, from optimal brain food to more and more detrimental ones and ensuing behavioral aberration… About which we’ve not had a clue up ‘til now. The still, small voice we hear from so rarely (and too often mistake for the voice of God) is that of our entombed right brain.
In her great book, The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman examines cognitive dissonance. By her definition, cognitive dissonance is a bureaucracy’s (and its society’s) tendency to abandon common sense, good conscience and long-term self-interest in favor of policies that violate these precepts. Cognitive dissonance takes the lead even though many warnings counsel against it.
Her prerequisites for cognitive dissonance include:
· lust for power,
· excessive power,
· mental standstill and stagnation,
· persistence in error, and
· protective stupidity (refusal to heed warnings).
The consequences of cognitive dissonance are:
· social suicide replaces reason, (as when the Trojans welcomed the Trojan Horse into their city and did not post guards around it while they celebrated their imaginary victory; Congress tallies its fossil fuel campaign contributions instead of addressing global warning);
· social instruments abandon their appointed tasks and become institutions, (the Renaissance Papacy pursued wealth and power instead of religious reform, Congress pursues campaign finance instead of the public benefit); and
· leaders enslave themselves to preconceived ideas: (America’s defeat in Vietnam, the self-defeating War on Drugs, the current prison empires, the collapse of Soviet leadership, the military quagmire everyone in a position of authority said would never happen in Iraq or Afghanistan, etc.).
The March of Folly has no chapter describing a self-critical government, even an exceptional one. Weapons administrations stroke, congratulate and perpetuate themselves, even during intervals of obvious collapse.
Ms. Tuchman mentioned the 1981 martyrdom of Mohammed Anwar el-Sadat. As President of Egypt, he made the unpopular decision to negotiate peace with Israel and was assassinated for his pains. A few decades later, for exactly the same reasons, exactly the same type of creep on the opposite side murdered his Israeli counterpart, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Standard weapon policies are only held in check by inefficient exploitation, muddled methods, mental inertia, obstacles of protocol and squabbling over spoils. Since misguided leaders insist on doing things the wrong way from the get go, institutional inefficiency lessens their ill effects. This, despite Mom’s dictum: “Two wrongs do not make a right.”
This is where the 1984 Syndrome comes from. Since everyone has been talked into believing that government is always malicious; we should keep it as weak and stupid as possible, to lessen its malice. Unfortunately, stupid governments are also the most malicious and have the greatest appetite for growth. Also, the most devoted adherents to this idea (Republicans and Independents) are by definition the worst managers, since they forgive themselves in advance for every criminal misdeed and incompetence.
What The March of Folly calls cognitive dissonance: a rare aberration, Learners calls ritual stupidity: a constant in weapon management.
The real activities of most public institutions are usually irrational. Even if their basic charter is rational, their bureaucrats make a point of contradicting it. Ms. Tuchman admits as much. She concludes that we can only muddle “through patches of brilliance and decline.” According to her, the only body that could hope to overcome cognitive dissonance would be an electorate so well informed, it would value moral courage above material gain—a vanishing rarity these days. Growing such a cosmopolitan world citizenry would be a basic Learner objective.
“Epic poems, inscriptions on monuments, treaties of peace—nearly all historical documents bear the same character; they deal with breaches of peace, not with peace itself. P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid.
Of those solemn documents, many have justified crimes against humanity. Under the lofty tenets of Stalin’s Constitution, his officials killed more Russians than the Nazis did. Militant Chinese exponents of Mao’s Quotations condemned more Chinese than did Japanese imperialists. The originators and supporters of France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man betrayed it, from the Terror to massacres in Indochina, Algeria and post-colonial Africa, (Rwanda in particular). Now, this semi-fascistic stupidity has sunk to the level of prohibiting good little girls from wearing religious symbols in public school. What next?
As for the Preamble of the American Constitution and its Bill of Rights; well! Witness the prison empire abuilding around us, and the standing army royally bankrolled to protect it. What more Constitutional distortions will the American Empire stipulate; what more abominations will we need to witness before the truth dawns?
May God forgive those who misread Learners to justify more crimes against humanity. That’s quite likely, though hopefully rare. They should figure out that weapon mentality has once again suckered them, when an outraged World Court lands atop them with both feet. If the World Court becomes just as corrupt; well, that's why there should be a sovereign World Agora and a World Militia, to detect this insanity right away and stop it at gunpoint on our doorsteps.
In fact, cognitive dissonance typifies human behavior. We practice all too rarely what we preach. In this ‘real world,’ we compartmentalize our feelings. Certain plots, characters and settings trigger trust, compassion, cooperation and amity, (towards family, clan, co-citizens, co-religionists and language peers). Meanwhile, others (dealing with the homeless or immigrants, for example) shrivel into fear, untruth and violence by proxy.
We may correct this double vision by polishing the clouded lenses of our weapon/peace dialectic.
Let’s picture two men: Mr. Stoic and Mr. Nerves. When Mr. Stoic hurts himself, he secretes endorphin pain suppressers that let him function at minimal efficiency. In addition, he practices the stoicism our weapon philosophers love to revere.
This social stoicism promotes insane public policies; it generates the bureaucracy Barbara Tuchman describes in detail. Decisions descend from the top, in isolation from reality; they dictate capricious desires that may or may not be practicable on the ground; that may contradict survival instincts, local capabilities and moral precept. Who cares? No one directly involved will be consulted. Middle managers will execute those decisions anyway, under the threat of summary removal. Reasonable objectors will be pruned from the decision tree. This pruning is every bureaucracy’s favorite pastime; ritually and automatically, it makes it all the more stupid.
Mr. Nerves swoons at the first sight of blood not to mention major injury. Deep-sunk in blackout, his shock endures until his subconscious stipulates that new conditions may be survivable. While Mr. Nerves remains passed out, his psyche mulls its options at leisure.
Debate, argumentation and consensus building govern nervous policy-making. The longer it takes to reach consensus, the longer the delay between its actions. Nervous and pluralistic administrations compromise, vacillate and delay. No one commits firmly to any position until everyone has staked a claim. As more and more voices join the debate, delays stretch out forever. The more data collected, the longer each decision takes. Taking two steps forward and three steps back, executive organizations gather information, then process it for revealed truth, announce their decisions, survey outcomes, rethink, determine the next course of action, etc.
Either that or the most opinionated minority makes arbitrary decisions and then ignores harmful consequences: a simpler, more common practice. When decision-making deadlocks, short-term greed becomes the tiebreaker, the final arbiter of overcrowded debate.
Let’s discuss three weapon management cure-alls: discipline, morale, and glory. Military disciplinarians apply just enough brutality to short-circuit the common sense and rational self-interest of their recruits. ‘High’ unit morale allows its subordinates to sacrifice themselves when push comes to shove. ‘Glory’ occurs when discipline is so well adjusted that all but a few military leaders (well insulated by distance and stupidity) submit to being massacred—often for no valid reason.
Good combat units must endure heavy casualties yet remain aggressive. They must attack without hesitation, even if they are checked, forced back and chased. In certain cases, they should submit to annihilation against impossible odds.
After all, personal disaster is the only outcome for anyone killed or maimed in battle. It does not matter how ‘glorious’ his sacrifice was. In short, all military personnel – from pot scrubbers to supreme commanders – must commit cognitive dissonance on demand.
That’s a difficult state of mind for a State to achieve. Military hierarchies operate in a fog of cognitive dissonance as a matter of routine. Yet even they have a hard time maintaining it. Therefore, weapon states must pamper masters of cognitive dissonance and marginalize the insightful, the critical, and the outspoken. From the info-proletariat’s ignorant grumblings to the pinnacles of epic myth, cardboard facades of enlightened civilization must be founded on dense footings of ritual stupidity. This foundation is so commonplace, it has become invisible to us.
Weapon states have learned to mask their overt aggression in times of peace. Instead, racial and domestic violence become routine; sports and popular culture glorify brutal competition. The proletariat finds less and less legitimate work, which boosts crime. In pursuit of short-term profits to pay off titanic war taxes, humans pit themselves against each other and conspire against their environment. In a flash of resource depletion, eons of ingrained reverence for nature are abandoned. Mass consumerism, personal littering and institutional pollution prevail. Excessive sexual restraints, religious intolerance, and alcohol/drug criminalization multiply aggression conveniently.
Pain – humanity’s most faithful companion – has long reinforced historical stoicism. Despite our braggart medical community, rich and poor alike suffer from poorly mended fractures, toothaches, chronic irritations and allergies, digestive disorders, psychiatric emergencies and wounds induced by accident, crime, battle, self-infliction, medical incompetence or idiopathy.
Our bodies are cumulatively poisoned through toxic, misunderstood and poorly taught nutrition. Disinformation is the bread and butter of food processing mega-corporations. In truth, their only real intention is to mass-produce battlefield rations: the most toxic and profitable foodstuffs ever produced.
In the past, elder warriors suffered more pain than most people; their perks let them outlive lesser folk despite battlefield trauma and the aches and pains of old age.
Indeed, the archaic 'superiority' of nobles over peasants may be traced to their long-standing monopoly of hunting privileges. They ate more animal protein. Peasant children grew up on vegetables and grain gruel. Their maturing brains never got enough protein to grow and compete successfully. Same goes for slaves and masters; the same goes for us. The cultural stagnation of certain modern nations and minorities can be traced back to inadequate nutrition (especially lack of iodine in their salt.) We could reverse it virtually overnight. Another confirmation of our weapon degeneracy: that we failed to fix this problem planet-wide, even though we have held the means to do so for generations.
People who cannot take care of themselves are more expensive to keep alive. People who can do so, produce dependable profits on their own. Poverty is the most expensive social policy on Earth.
Aside from cannabis, willow bark, mandrake, hypnosis, acupuncture and poppy sap in advanced localities, effective painkillers were very rare in the past. Leaders, especially hereditary leaders, made important decisions while beset by atrocious pain.
If you have been lucky enough to have avoided this kind of pain, trust my experience. Otherwise good people become perfect brutes under lengthy dazzles of pain; their reason abdicates to anger and cruelty.
Alcohol was the painkiller of choice long before more powerful analgesics were discovered. The combination of pain and alcohol abuse annuls social grace.
Alcohol may also help with digestion. Like carbon dioxide bubbles in soft drinks, it kills many food microbes harmful to digestion and the blood. In this way, it allows populations with no better means – there are much better ones, up to Learners to find – to purify their gut from time to time. Also, to clean wounds and soothe troubled minds.
A social philosopher whose name escapes me hypothesized that societies use alcohol to sort out their people. After all, alcohol is merely a concentrate of grain or fruit: complementary to basic sustenance if produced from its surplus or detrimental if produced despite its dearth. It would provide a significant surplus to survival requirements for families operating on the margin and deciding whether or not to consume it: a real extra, above and beyond basic necessities for poor families both ancient and modern.
Those who abstained from alcohol could use the extra income as collateral for productive enterprise during good times and as a survival margin in times of famine; whereas those who wasted it on excessive drinking would pin themselves to the lower class in good times and croak faster in those of famine, they and their family. Ancient societies that forbade alcohol became more rigid and fixed by forsaking that surplus and their families’ option to use it, whereas societies that permitted its consumption promoted the upward mobility of families by merit, if only indirectly.
Also, in millions of man-to-man confrontations, the soberer sword combatant would have cleaved the slower drunkard who had drunk his fill before battle to compensate for his fear of what would come next. Was that the Q’ran-dictated margin of victory of Muslim Arabs over Byzantine, Persian and Hindu armies that each outnumbered them by ten or more to one?
Another social philosopher, whose name I can’t recall either, had this other thing to say. He concluded that dynamic societies force women (and men, though he didn’t mention them) who don’t want to have children, to make babies. Permissive societies produced less gifted children, became less productive and degenerated accordingly, since they allowed neurologically gifted people to drift into celibacy (and homosexual intimacy, again unmentioned) and since ‘sensual’ women would be the only ones to have children in those societies.
According to this model, chemical birth control would produce the worst form of social decay. Another favorite reactionary prejudice. Even though he, a Victorian Britisher, only spoke of religious sexual segregation, as I recall.
In this model, the same brutal constraints employed to produce more children, would also be used against them during their upbringing, (also against women, social inferiors and whomever else it could lay its hands on) to make them fiercer. Meanwhile, social indulgence would have mollycoddled more babies, turned them into decadent peaceniks who couldn’t defend themselves militarily against the former group with its merciless constraints.
In many warlike societies (such as the Roman) it was illegal and even sacrilegious for highborn citizens to avoid having children—adoption was compulsory in the most extreme cases. For what it’s worth.
In addition, I would never have written up any of this, or outreached to others to get them to read it, without the divine lubricant of alcohol. I would have been too bound-up by my weapon indoctrination to defy it without the psychic emancipation of drink. My spirit, dead sober and unmodulated by the resonance of psychoactive drugs, might have found tolerable the murderous platitudes of weapon mentality. I suspect that a lot of cultural creativity springs from the same source. Look at Hemingway’s work and that of other artists.
The history of Russian elites and that of alcohol abusers share many symptoms. These include intense suspicion, periodic withdrawal, violent outbursts, destructive self-criticism, poor self-imaging, temporary repentance, improved behavior, worsening lapses, alternately doting and abusive treatment of co-dependents, frenzied outbursts interspersed with bottomless apathy, meticulous planning followed by indifference to outcomes, brilliant beginnings and clumsy follow-up. We might include both patients’ willingness to betray true friends and bearers of good advice.
Unfailing friendliness (metta in Buddha’s Pali language) is considered the supreme Buddhist virtue. It is also the first personal habit weapon managers suppress in the name of loyalty to their institutions.
“This is not a popularity contest. You have a serious job to do. Now go out there and hurt somebody bad, then report back to me. Dismissed!” WeaponWorld talk.
These traits characterize every weapon state, even though centuries of Anglo-Saxon propaganda have fixed them as Russian stereotypes. Such typical human behaviors occur chaotically, in parallel on different scales, from abusive siblings, mismatched mates, spiteful clerks and tyrannical desk sergeants, up to the highest rungs of power.
On PeaceWorld, this WeaponWorld speech, “This is not…” would likely go something like this: “Have you made a new friend or helped a stranger today? How many? Here is the sustenance you need to assist them in peace. If not, go back out there, find them and absolve us of the disgrace of not having helped them.” A roman emperor is quoted as having said, regretfully: “Today, I helped no one.” I would call him great, except that he flattened Jerusalem and who knows how many more communities?
A case can be made, that Industrial Era leaders not only drank to excess but did so from lovely, lead glass decanters—thus poisoning themselves synergistically with alcohol and lead, and their world with pointless violence. High-flying propaganda and institutional inertia justified this stupidity to every poisoned drunkard’s satisfaction—and to ours, today.
Ancient Greek, Roman, and modern information elites suffered similar poisoning. Acidic water and wine were served to them from leaden and lead-soldered vessels. Classy private homes collected rainwater from lead-covered roofs; others, lesser, were covered with copper or ceramic. Thus, the richer they grew and the more they ate and drank, the dumber they got.
Poor people ate and drank from wooden and clay vessels. They did not suffer from this problem except indirectly through the poor decisions of their social superiors. Even though, now that I think of it, all their famous viaducts were lead-sealed.
This chronic poisoning would have been enough to collapse a civilization. Each new problem would have received dumber solutions, spiced with reflexive terrorism. Sound familiar?
What’s our excuse? Three times as much background radiation? Maybe. A million times more dioxin, antibiotics and metabolic hormones double-parked in our food, air, drink and body fat? Perhaps. Or could it be our rote repetition of hypnotic weapon myths? Could we find their antidote here, among Learners?
The recreational consumption of psychoactive drugs (minus alcohol) actuates a different set of social symptoms involving decadence. When otherwise energetic people take recreational drugs, they tend to withdraw from productive materialism into mysticism, art, passive denial and asocial indifference. The extent of their withdrawal depends on the dosage and types of the drugs they take.
Adults often use these drugs as low-stress boredom relievers—trying to compensate for their failure to entertain their subjects of passion and cooperate with social groups equally obsessed. Roller coasters and dating, for example, are high-stress boredom relievers. Combat is the ultimate boredom reliever for society as a whole, as are other risk-taking activities.
Legalized, the social effects of recreational drug use are value-neutral and perhaps beneficial. Drug use, however, dangerously weakens a weapon state. This is especially true if the craved drug is grown, processed, and/or distributed by foreigners and thus eventual enemies.
Ideally, these drugs should be cheap, legal, locally grown and administered hygienically. If so, their side effects would be less harmful than those induced by the compensatory abuse of tobacco laced with toxic additives, alcohol, caffeine, bleached flour, processed sugar and sugar substitutes; not to mention police Prohibition, crime both organized commensal (that feeds at the same table), and every violation of human rights these august bodies bring to the table.
Mohammed’s injunctions against gambling and drinking helped shift his Islamic brethren toward social justice.
· Social justice might equal public health plus extras. Could it be proportionate to public health?
· Would the consumption of alcohol be the public health equivalent of washing one’s hands five times a day?
· What would equal washing the feet of one’s enemy?
· In courts of justice, perhaps…
· Washing a tired stranger’s feet as a social routine: what would that equal to?
Early Islam wrested giant info proletariats from the control of weapon elites undefeatable otherwise. The Koran offered greater wisdom than the dogmatic injustice of prior weapon religions and their potentates.
Long before Learners, God through Mohammed’s voice divided the world into a House of Peace (lodging those who agree with its tenets) and a House of War (their opponents). One need not be a practicing Muslim to belong to the House of Peace, just let Muslims practice their faith in peace. It is certain that Allah prefers the House of Peace and abominates the other. No wise Muslim, nor Mohammed himself, would contradict this conclusion. I may be nothing more than a wine-bibbing kafir, but this truth is apparent even to me.
Practicing Muslims will grasp the significance of Learners’ weapon/peace antinomy much faster than “Judeo-Christian” philosophers for whom the term “peace” is just another meaningless fill-word in their Testaments.
Later, more worldly Muslims cancelled their philosophical advantage by drinking themselves silly and ruling accordingly. Even later, Sunni and Shia weapon sectarians defiled the Koran by spilling each other’s blood. Reflexively, they fulfilled their weapon goals in disobedience of the peaceful intent of the Qran. Their blasphemous violence was based on tribal pecking orders, geographical pissing matches and ethnic bigotry, rather than any counsel contained in the Koran. Justifying and regulating this forbidden mayhem may have been the primary purpose of tafseer commentaries.
I am not qualified to comment further. Muslim Learners should do so in my place, loudly!
The combination of alcohol and powerful mind-altering substances produces more and more psychotic and violent behavior, as pre-Columbian and Scythian blood cults demonstrate. The ultimate consequence of this twin fixation appears to be mass cannibalism and ritual human sacrifice. No thanks, pass.
To those who indulge in psychoactive drugs, including blessed Cannabis, I recommend that you not have partaken of alcohol recently. The optimal combination would be the least alcohol with the strongest psychoactivity. Those who want to entertain the most constructive form of psychoactivity should join a brotherhood that strictly bans the consumption of alcohol.
But from this, to forbid laypeople the pleasure of a few pipe-loads and of a glass or two of good wine that stains red, shared from time to time among friends – as long as those things have obviously grown from good soil (thus, no generic white powders, clear liquids that taste of no fruit on earth, or other deadly laboratory stimulants) – that’s too great a sacrifice to demand of people! Celebrated most things in moderation as long as no harm arises.
City-based agriculture and urban tyranny are thought to have evolved hand-in-hand. Sedentary farmers produced crop surpluses impossible to trade beyond the local weather frontier. Cities were established along waterways bisecting these frontiers. In other words, everyone shared local weather – thus surpluses or dearth – simultaneously. Only overdeveloped transportation networks could shift farm surpluses any distance from their district of origin.
In the absence of cheap bulk transport, something had to be done to preserve unmarketable surpluses. It was neither wise nor safe to gorge in years of plenty and starve during the bad ones. Some way had to be found to level this nutritional roller coaster. Surplus perishables could be preserved until years of famine by extending their shelf life.
Fermentation helped ‘solve’ this problem.
Up to that point, human hunting packs would have operated much like wolves. They’d have shared merit-based leadership, self-enforced honesty, equitable food and labor distribution, automatic reproductive restraints, permanent controls against internal violence, and maximal care for a few youngsters very carefully raised by the whole community. Over a stretch of eons, marginal conditions destroyed any pack that deviated from this norm of excellence.
We have been bred for behavioral excellence a thousand times longer than for weapon mentality.
Let’s ignore for a moment the philosophical quibbles, knee-jerk nihilism and existential doubts that entangle us these days. Real morality increases the likelihood of long-term species survival by reducing the harm of unintended consequences on a probabilistic basis. Bad behavior produces worse results more often than good behavior does—when run through the probabilistic black box of unforeseen consequences.
In short, obey your conscience, do good and expect unforeseen miracles; disobey it, do evil and expect more unforeseen catastrophes. Obedience to conscience and its gift of miracle as a scientifically demonstrable phenomenon. Period, paragraph.
Routine alcohol abuse, however, shattered long-standing social controls through bouts of unthinkable violence and incivility, sickly hangovers, degenerative disease and adverse effects on the newborn. Generations of people recovering from benders or just sickened by daily tippling, would have evolved insane traditions and institutions to rationalize their drunken misbehavior. Is that us?
The first cities served (have always served) as logistics centers, disaster refuges and fortresses. Primitive citadels housed only priestly elites and their bodyguards: a perfect pick of weapon mentors and battle elites. Later on, inhabitants of walled cities faced three choices: send a field army out against an oncoming horde, suffer annihilation at its hands, or submit to it―often all three in succession. Field armies are just voracious, migratory cities.
Sedentary agriculture, urbanism and centralized-capital militarism evolved along parallel but independent tracks. Urban wealth not only paid for armies, it made them inevitable. Surplus riches demanded military defenses, property laws and police protection. Dense urban populations and their fixed assets made fortifications mandatory and affordable. It didn't matter whether armed slaves, mercenaries, regulars or ‘free’ militia manned them. The process of hyper-militarization became self- sustaining and automatic.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSC) also affects ritual stupidity. PTSD survivors are afflicted by permanent hyper-vigilance, attacks of unfocussed panic, paranoia, temper tantrums, a yearning for mayhem and general inability to readapt to civilian life. Hundreds of thousands of American veterans of Vietnam died homeless for decades thereafter (and now, those from Iraq and Afghanistan): more throwaway dead than the 59,000 and some engraved on the Black Wall in Washington—the same losses we suffer every year on our highways, with traumatized survivors in proportion.
Ancient leaders upheld their claim to nobility by seeking the thickest combat. Nonetheless, they were supposed to display inhuman wisdom in the course of peacetime decision-making. This, despite the fact that they may have been temporarily crazed by PTSD or permanently crazed members of the battle elite.
Another factor favors ritual stupidity. It takes time, lots of it, to collect intelligence and transmit orders via slow communications channels. Running a country in the days of horse and sail was like piloting a defective, radio-controlled airplane with a daylong command/control delay. In other words, the command you input at moment X would not take effect until X hour plus 24. This built-in time delay would induce a long series of crashes-on-takeoff, no matter how expert the royal hand – or the republican hands – on the joystick.
Nowadays, much is written about ‘risk management.’ Management theorists bemoan the fact that professional risk managers fly by the seat of their pants, especially in foreign policy circles. They base their decisions on ‘subjective criteria’ (read bullshit).
Students of risk management should study ‘uncertainty management’ instead. They should review the mental tricks that risk managers use to shield their conscience. After all, they make vital decisions based on inadequate data, apply them despite built-in time delays and then consider ensuing disasters routine and unavoidable.
Weapon technicians are at the forefront of broadband communications, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and knowledge systems. Meanwhile, ‘free market’ parsimony foists obsolete information systems on civilians―assuming anyone bothers with civilian applications a lot less well paid though much more profitable in the long run.
Few civilian organizations gather every bit of information in real-time and study its content in detail. Such systems are just beginning to surface as military communications, command, control, computers and intelligence (C5i) systems. Modern C5i hardware and expertise accelerate the process of analysis, execution, surveillance, repeat ... tremendously. Unfortunately, most civilian institutions still honor the languid thought processes of ponies and sail ships.
Weapon mentors practice routine protocols of stateliness, deliberation, and (whenever possible) retrenchment, censorship and reaction in matters of peace and social welfare. In matters of war, they practice free-spending creativity, vigor, speed, unpredictability and open-minded problem solving.
It takes decades to reverse big fat policy blunders (like the Vietnam War and that in Iraq). After all, bad programs must be carried out to their bitter conclusion, once top officials have ‘staked their reputation’ on them. They would rather appear infallible – until catastrophe pulls down their pants – than admit mistakes, make radical mid-course corrections and achieve a workable outcome. They will make appeal to every projection of failure that could result from this change and to every argument that would tempt them to stagnate in crisis mode.
The vulnerability of entrenched elites peaks when their cleverest managers realize their evil habits have brought them more trouble than gain. Then, half-heartedly, they tailor new policies to a broader cloth. Reactionaries block this transformation at every step. Having ripped off the most privilege and profit in times of worsening repression, they are outraged by any change. Their weapon hypnosis dictates that these things are paramount to them: more so than a clear conscience.
As social justice wastes away, (im)pertinent proto-elites froth up from the host info proletariat, eager to challenge ambivalent elites. Reactionaries and radicals often reinforce each other’s brutality. Battle elites serve one political extreme or the other or both; weapon managers both foreign and domestic support their brutality. Often, partisans of political extremes act in concert and in succession to disrupt the peace. Autonomous and antagonistic yet paradoxically complicit, they raise as much hell as they can get away with.
It takes much more self-control to grit one’s teeth and quietly bury one’s latest dead, than to dispatch the next helicopter raid or suicide bomber; firmer authority to forbid the next act of retaliation rather than look the other way while hotheads take matters into their own hands. Until such time, popular moderates will be targeted: the bravest ones will be assassinated; the most prudent, terrorized; and the most covetous, corrupted.
It will be the job of the World Court and World Militia to rescue brave moderates, protect the prudent and subsidize the covetous everywhere to promote Peace.
The info proletariat is always moderate in its politics, at least until threats, propaganda, selective assassination and aggression distort its outlook. Political violence favors extremists and frustrates everyone else.
The central question is not how often extremists have indulged in knee-jerk terrorism; but how rarely majorities have held to their peaceful ideals and made extremists suffer the consequence of their aggression instead of rewarding them with worsened violence, for having worsened violence.
The only time I’ve seen a terrorist group suffer from its actions and stop, at least for a while – as opposed to turning themselves into martyrs and inspiring the next bunch of murderous whackos – was during the Munich Olympics. Palestinian gunmen took Israeli athletes hostage, got them killed in the crossfire and congealed world opinion against their cause. What was the difference between that massacre and every one since, on either side? This I cannot fathom. Perhaps the Palestinians as a community momentarily horrified themselves?
Majorities must police their own extremists and ally themselves with non-abusive servants of public order—no matter how bad things turned out between them in the past. Those servants must be disciplined in the most draconian manner they will accept, or be replaced otherwise. The rejects should be offered the most deadly jobs available. Demining? This would be necessary to interrupt the killing.
An excellent analysis of weapon revolutionaries is The Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton. Ignoring the peace/weapons antinomy, he reviews other factors very carefully.
To summarize Anatomy in Learner terms, the info elite loses its privileged status when its disgruntled cadres defect to proto-elites in growing numbers. Reinforced by these defectors, the proto-elite most likely to restore a more lethal army, soaks up many battle elites. It kills its most effective opponents, terrorizes the remainder and takes over. Suffering from siege mentality and paranoia, its bosses brush aside any thought of peace. Thus will it manage to sharpen its nation’s threat deterrent.
That is the only outcome of weapon revolutions, wars and political/technological ‘progress’: more lethal weapon states.
“The [French] Revolution cleared the way for a much larger, more centralized, state apparatus, able to exploit its revolutionary-patriotic ideology and new means of coercion to mobilize large armies and the economic resources for major wars. The Revolution inevitably upset the balance of the European states system, in which France was centrally situated; and it created plenty of reasons on both sides for the series of wars which quickly unfolded. War, in turn, drastically affected the course of the Revolution, delivering the ‘coup de grace’ to the liberal phase of 1789-91, and creating both the bureaucracy of La France Fonctionnaire and the elements of a professional officer corps and a modern national army. Not for the last time, therefore, a social revolution was instrumental in bringing about a major development of the state machine. (Marx, incidentally, recognized this in the French case, where he erred was in believing that proletarian revolution would have a different result). Martin Shaw, Dialectics of War: An Essay on the Social Theory of Total War and Peace, Pluto Publishing Ltd, London, 1988, pp. 47-49.
Orthodox info elites attack each new revolution with just enough force to set the revolutionaries back on the track of weapon development. Peaceful revolutionaries are unseated through open warfare, subsidized terrorism and economic blockade. Where outright invasion is inappropriate because a popular Militia blocks it, internal chaosists (Contras) are unleashed instead.
Freer societies, more evolved in peace, can be goaded back onto the path of weapon tyranny by means of pinprick acts of terrorism, whether from external sources or internal ones.
Every world power accelerates this regression to the militarist mean, and lesser states follow close behind. Weapon managers pick off peaceable idealists and replace them with pet weapon mentors; they neutralize political moderates and replace them with battle elite creeps.
We are programmed to admire this Darwinian selection for heightened brutality and sociopathy. No exception is permitted.
Thus, the deadly status quo of contending warfare states grows more tyrannical every year, despite weapon revolutionaries’ mistaken attempt to resist and transform it by renewed violence. This tyranny grows stronger despite and because of them. Every form of violent resistance perpetuates, grooms and strengthens global weapon tyranny.
Non-violent resistance by all the conscience-driven united on a planetary scale – fully confident, transparent, homogeneous in its diversity and steadfast – would dissolve this sociopathocracy once and for all.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld