SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
What possible escape from WeaponWorld? It might seem simple in theory, but well-nigh impossible in practice. Past peace endeavors have been more or less lame. Given the depth of our weapons indoctrination, a present-day struggle for World Peace may seem naïve, impractical and illusory—in other words, ‘utopian.’
Let’s compare the faculties of a cat. Its sensory input and muscular output operate in decent harmony; its senses feed its brain so precisely that its intellect and musculature maintain a flawless balance. As a result, the cat’s dance is a delight to behold for anyone but its next prey.
Shift back to pre-industrial times. Only super-wealthy philosophers could dispose of enough spare time and instruction to condense the sparse information content of their day. If they wanted a ditch dug, they could order costly slaves to sweat it out over primitive tools. If they craved exotic knowledge, they could wander the world at enormous expense and peril. Over the course of a short lifetime, they could stumble upon rare wise men and records repositories within a few hundred miles of home.
The skills of those ancient philosophers had advanced somewhat beyond the cat’s—let’s say by thousands of times. Others obeyed their commands, even beyond the range of their perception and control. Cats ignore such imperatives. Spoken and written commands, slaves and primitive tools multiplied the philosopher’ muscle power much more than their mental power. They could maintain a balance of sorts, between muscle-power and brainpower, but this exercise would become more and more uncertain.
Today’s philosopher can read and converse all his life, generally longer. Better transportation, communication, and memory enhancement devices supplement his skills. Thanks to these gadgets, we can sort with relative ease through vast sheaves of information. All this input takes time, however, quite a lot of it compared to our slightly lengthened lifespans. And all too few of us are doing it. Though the human population has exploded, the competence of our philosophers has not kept up. They keep mangling the platitudes of antiquity; the way a cat might toy with its prey, waiting for its shock-coma so as to tear it to pieces.
Just as weapon religions once paralyzed private thought, modern weapons ideologies freeze our minds today. When it comes to doing good and uprooting evil, we resemble track stars, frozen in our cleats but anticipating a sudden burst of speed.
When it comes to sheer muscle power, we’ve made real progress. As to raw mechanical power, we can out-muscle those ancients by a thousand times. A brief day’s journey to the other side of the planet costs us less than a month’s average wage. From their perspective, only gods could contemplate deeds of strength we consider routine. And our foremost developments are still those of war. Sitting behind a machine-gun today, any dumb weakling could churn their triremes and armored phalanxes – the most brilliant expressions of their social and mechanical skills – into so much driftwood, scrap bronze and chopped meat.
Can you spot the imbalance here? The cat has a cat’s brain (x cerebral power) in a cat’s body (y muscular power). For all intents and purposes, x = y.
Our ancient philosopher could call on thousands of units of brainpower and a million of muscle power. Currently, each of us disposes of a million units of brainpower (much more concentrated in memory aids and communications devices, plus a better (?) education; about the same basic smarts) and a billion units of muscle power. A million x and a billion y.
Assuming the cat’s faculties were in balance, our civilization acts like an elephant’s body under the control of a cockroach brain—or a fritzing network of six billion poorly connected sub-brains in “control” of an elephant boneyard planet.
A beast afflicted with a brain-to-muscle imbalance of this kind would sicken without knowing it, break its bones while out on a stroll and starve to death in the middle of a farmer’s market. It couldn’t shield itself from the slightest threat. Its organs and appendages would glut themselves or starve out.
Recognize that the whole world is built to those specs and reacts that way.
Worse yet, its cockroach brain would be too preoccupied juggling momentous crises to address its underlying problem: the widening gap between its insectile brainpower and Bigfoot brawn.
Having managed to solve one or two problems by means of violence, it would tend to solve every future one with the same if not more vigorous applications of brutality. For a man equipped with a hammer and nothing else, every problem he sees becomes a nail.
We refuse to adjust our Learning (nervous) networks to our mechanical (muscular) capabilities. Thus, the balanced dialogue between a cat’s musculature and its nervous system degenerates into a Riot Act read aloud from Olympian institutions to the proletarian mob.
One resolution seems obvious. Implant an elephant’s brain in the elephant—and watch it dance! Rewire the world for intelligence (another term corrupted by weapon mentality into its opposite: “secrets”). We’ll be amazed how much smarter we may become, how many big problems will turn into smaller ones and how many small ones will disappear once we rewire the planet and train for greater smartness.
To our utmost ability, we must harmonize the ongoing global dialogue between nervous input and muscular output. Tremendous new efficiencies could arise once these perceptual networks oversee large-scale (superhuman) activities. Such networks will improve beyond imagining our laughable standards of living.
What does this mean in plain English? Multiply a thousand-fold every peaceable dialog and reduce warlike talk proportionately. By puberty, grant almost every child on Earth a Master’s Degree in self-directed studies. Adapt to this task all the modern communications systems we've perfected for mutual slaughter. Multiply this new peace technology by thousands of times.
“The preferred militaristic way of utilizing the mass feeling of
insecurity, is by raising a scare, preferably that of a threatened invasion and
maintaining that a danger exists which none but expert generals can gauge. Since history is not written along such
lines, it cannot be said how often the raising of such a scare has reason
behind it. But it can be said that it is
a permanent trick of any permanent military bureaucracy, early or late.” Alfred Vagts, A History of Militarism, Greenwich Editions, p. 341.
Weapon mentality claims dominance by crying wolf about massive threats that it discovers beyond the home membrane. The solution? Get rid of most of those membranes and substitute it with one within which everyone resides. Fewer threats will endure if no battle elites remain outside to break in. Any threat that remains is a police problem, calling for a more thoughtful, less militaristic response. Compensatory overheads instead of destructive ones—simply smarter and less stupid. Do you follow?
How? Again, the key lies in communications. Where one telephone line exists, install one thousand. Where the mail person comes once a week, once a day. Where public libraries already exist, double their funding and merge them into a global information network. Where they don’t exist, build superior ones.
Every government should sponsor a free web page that could translate any text to and from its native language. This would require selective translation and re-translation several times, until the translation re-translated corresponded to the original text. Otherwise, retranslate it in a different manner. This kind of service might exist already, sponsored, developed and monopolized by military intelligence. Every country should make the best national translation webpage available for free to everyone on the Net.
Let us converse among ourselves in peace like civilized beings, instead of dumb beasts killing each other for no reason. The worse the local fighting, the greater the need to multiply local communications.
Note the opposite tendency – replacing worthwhile media with monologue propaganda systems worth crap – in every population, rich and poor alike. American cities (if they’re big, rich and lucky enough) have only one daily newspaper when they used to have several more. Community radio broadcasters are hunted down like criminals or entangled in red tape, while corporate mega-casters consolidate their media monopoly thanks to federal giveaways. Access to overpriced computers shrinks for the poor, even as the rich build up the Internet and prop up obsolete video networks with expensive, state-of-the-art broadband technologies. Well, “state-of-the-art” is a relative term. Given current rates of technological development, once you build it, it’s already obsolete.
If we clog these high-tech media with nothing more than the promotional garbage we’ve grown accustomed to, every communication breakthrough will have gone to waste. Better communications systems welcome the best content available, not just newer broadcast hardware.
The Federal Communication Commission’s love affair with HDTV is a good example. Conversion of digital television’s hardware and software will force up prices on both the broadcasting and receiving ends of the information pipeline. Independent and community TV broadcasters will go under. Worthwhile content will shrink in favor of more and more insistent commercials. Only giant network corporations will profit from this cultural catastrophe. Media monopoly by a few corporations and their opinion spinners – their profits redoubled from surcharges to private subscribers of cable and satellite services, and corporate advertisers alike – these problems will only worsen, thanks to the FCC’s top-down imposition of a new-fangled technology that’s redundant until overall content has been improved.
Divergent opinions should be welcomed, and serious reflection should outweigh conventional propaganda. Eccentric ideas merit fair hearing. They might be worth the trouble and would certainly improve on the current lot.
Every tribe and nation should gain political expression and self-determination. These rights should be inalienable, based on constitutional guarantees backed by overwhelming force, and maintained by a consensus both global and irrefutable. If we do not achieve this from a sheer sense of fairness, we should do it to reduce negative fallouts from 'revolutionary liberation movements' that no army can eradicate.
No weapon state merits sovereignty based solely on its mythical monopoly of local firepower. In this case, as in most others, we should deliver justice—simply because it would be easier to administer in the long run, safer and more profitable than its denial for whatever reason.
True prosperity is a pipe dream until everyone expects personal abundance and dependable security as a matter of course. The poor among us deserve a comfortable existence and the yearly income it would take to pay for it. Every honest person should feel safer and more secure every day. Thereafter, the most ambitious may supplement that modicum by five to fifteen times (or perhaps more) without additional harm. Communal wealth could multiply indefinitely, provided we shared it more equitably.
Once our innovative activities overtake global weapons investment, the price of essentials will drop simultaneously. Large profit surpluses will be left over, with which to turn Space into an industrial and science park, and the world into Eden, the ideal setting for learning to dance.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to
PeaceWorld