SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO &
VOCAB
The regulation of
communications is the info elite’s most crucial and demanding task.
Weapon news media must
take advantage of their apparent truthfulness to beguile the info proletariat,
yet remain flexible enough to distort those truths in any way their masters’
desire. Even though global events must
be reported quickly, internal checks and balances must assure that undesirable
information never sees the light of day.
By default, the historical record is entrusted to the media's care, yet
they must drown out troublesome details in a flood of trivial noise. Their broadcasts must reach most people
daily, yet tiny info elites should retain the ability to control their
content. Freedom of speech is acclaimed, yet select news must be
trivialized or magnified on command.
Our news media foster
criminal censorship. Their propaganda
confirms the laziness and rowdiness of peoples beyond the local membrane. They denounce the inferiority of foreign
governments, regardless of objective merit.
They report municipal sports in more detail than international warfare;
advertising consumes more airtime and print space than domestic policy. Violent crime gets more coverage than
white-collar crime, even though the latter induces a thousand times more grief
and expense. Corporate malfeasance is a
taboo topic, as are the identity and political affiliations of the most
powerful evildoers.
Every day, humanity adds
another 460 million person-years of sweat equity to its history. Every day, this monumental effort gets
compacted into two or three pages of formulaic journalese and three-minute
segments of video infotainment. Critical
events are reported in a cursory, anecdotal present tense that ignores cause
and effect, motive and opportunity. The
tragic farces of famous buffoons are followed more attentively than matters of
historic importance. Puppy-in-a-basket
stories and soap opera dramas garner more loving detail than chronicles of
endemic social failure. If the long-term
consequences of ritual stupidity are reported at all, the names and political
affiliations of those responsible are carefully concealed. Meanwhile, perpetrators of trivial sex
scandals and dramatic but inconsequential street crimes are examined with
psychiatric ferocity.
This fascist rot of
American reporting has become as obvious as it is unforgivable. Learner media on PeaceWorld would resolve
many of these contradictions.
A society’s constellation
of political metaphors controls this process.
Our primary constellation regulates secondary ones and then all other
activity. We share clichés like: “Laissez faire (lehsseh fair, ‘let do’,
anti-regulationism), dictatorship of the proletariat, the marketplace of ideas,
manifest destiny, survival of the fittest, the unseen hand, spare the rod and
spoil the child, hewers of wood and gatherers of water.” These shared clichés become cornerstone
concepts that regulate other activities.
Dr. Kielbowitcz, of the University of
Washington, brought his brilliant theory to my attention during a public
lecture.
Diverting attention from
the tyranny of weapon management, weapon mentors infuse public discourse with a
steady drip of new buzzwords and catch phrases: “trickle-down, free market,
deregulation, supply-side, Contract with America,” etc.
Cherished old texts
dominate the meme-constellations of various cultures: the Bible; the works of
Shakespeare, (that political hack); the Koran; the Talmud; Das Kapital; Mein Kampf;
Mao’s Quotations, the Chinese Classics; violence-promoting weapon distortions
of complex works by Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Hegel, Nietzsche, etc. Each culture’s textual sources and popular
clichés may differ slightly from those of other cultures; but the consistency
of their dedication to weapon mentality is striking, regardless of their
written origin. Weapon mentors have freshened
up this intellectual fruit salad all the time.
They always seem to confirm the utility, splendor and inevitability of
naked exploitation.
Having supped at the
trough of the rich, many opposition leaders from one generation – uplifted
during their youth by progressive politics – slam the door of reaction in the
face of those who follow. Raised to
dizzying heights of prestige and privilege, they redeem their illusory debt to
the rich by subverting the ideals that liberated them. No-one’s experience of victimization
immunizes that person from future corruption and hypocrisy. On the contrary, prior misery may heighten
their vulnerability to latter-day seductions.
Reactionaries dish out new
buzzwords and clichés as hot, fresh and mouthwatering as lunchtime pizza. Meanwhile, progressives shackle their
discourse with rusty word chains forged centuries ago.
Oligarchs coined the term
‘democracy’ to disguise their tyranny in ancient Greece. The designations Right and Left distinguished
reactionary royalists from their bourgeois
counterparts in the first French National Assembly during the late 1700’s. Political moderates sat in the middle of a
straight tier of benches. Their
detractors sorted themselves politically by sitting with their friends to the
left and right of the moderates. The
further away they sat from the center, the more extreme their views. Meanwhile, members of the radical Montagne (Mountain) sat up top in the
back, like roughneck schoolboys.
So, if Learners retain
political designations like Left and Right, we could just as well use Up Back
for dirty-trick extremists, and Down Front for by-the-book,
goody-two-shoes. With a little
imagination, we could use terms like high (-minded, dollar-a-day, selfless
patriots), and low (-life, what’s-in-it-for-me grifters). That would permit a more accurate political
designation in three dimensions. George
Washington: high, front and center. Huey
Long: low, back, left. Joseph McCarthy:
low, back, right; etc. That sure would
beat one-dimensional, Left/Right designations.
Every politician would want to be called a High Front Centrist; but
their character, behavior and results would sort them out mercilessly across
this spectrum.
The word ‘utopia’ can mean
“that place which is not, but should be” or “that place which should never
be.” Most people use the term ‘utopian’
like a railroad abutment, to stop further conversation in its tracks. By a mere twist of linguistics, the adjective
‘utopian’ has come to mean “hopelessly impractical: consign this topic to
instant oblivion.” Once we brand an idea
utopian, we require no further thought to reject it. Weapon mentality makes us shut down our
critical faculties right away. Ditto,
"idealist, idealistic" about certain philosophers and their personal
attitudes. It means “ignore them:
they’re not worth the bother.” Such
language tricks typify weapon mentality.
Meanwhile, the status quo
glorifies homicidal ego-trippers with the title ‘realist.’ As if such ambitious mass murders could
expect any outcome more useful than promotion into the info elite and then a
series of unforeseen bad consequences.
Info elites resist
open-ended communication technologies; they restrict new systems to a size
somewhat more restricted than optimal for their own purpose—the better to
“control” them. When a newer, more
expansive communication design emerges, they revamp a compromise system on a
crash basis. Funding it amply to
undercut the alarming alternative, they load it down with trivia and then
install a new regulatory bureaucracy to ensure the abortion of the original
intent.
Meanwhile, vicious idiots
pollute the most open-ended information networks with the waste products of
their prismatic thinking. A lot of lousy television programming comes
to mind. Think about it: we could just
as easily watch complete course work from our best universities without any
commercials, as well as brilliant drama, performances and recitations in
realtime without limit. The same goes
for the Internet with more than its share of commercial exploitation,
fundamentalist babble, reactionary exoneration, virus littering and flaming
idiocy.
In addition, look at the
content of so-called 'progressive' periodicals written in English. They have repeated the same vapid nonsense
since the collapse of the New Deal and signed over the family farm to
reactionary card sharks in the process: acre by acre of good land and piece by
piece of sound equipment. They’ve
witnessed the defenestration of our political inheritance without saying or
doing anything significant to prevent it.
They don’t dare think about actively resisting this ongoing political
catastrophe; that would seem treasonous to them. They have rejected Learners, without
exception and without appeal, gang of two-faced cowards way too
comfortable with the status-quo.
By definition, the mass
media of a weapon state must suffer from content suppression.
Only civilian systems
undergo these info-constraints. Weapon
communications have always spearheaded technological development. Weapon mentality smothers rational discourse
as a matter of routine―so weapon technicians are free to go nuts with new
hardware.
Just look at the first
military highways of China, Rome and Persia, or the latest military highways built in Germany
and the rest of the world. Look at the
first telegraphs and railroads, at the Internet itself, (a Dr. Strangelove
experiment in post-nuclear, world battlefield management) and the hundreds of
tons of military jewelry easily worth its weight in gold, floating out there in
Earth orbit.
Some government agencies
spend half their funds designing sophisticated new communications systems, and
the other half making sure that any message transmitted across them is encrypted
gibberish. Think of the miracles
humanity could accomplish if all these systems became fully accessible!
We can’t decipher 3,500
pre-Vedic inscriptions from ancient India or those of ancient Crete and
elsewhere. Yet criminal hackers and
intelligence agents routinely decipher the most elaborate modern security
codes. This, despite the fact that those
codes have been devised by our best mathematicians and run through the fastest
computers that ample funding can buy.
There are no free online
web pages that fluently translate the primary language billions of people
speak, read and write, from and into English and other leading languages. AltaVista Bablefish, at http://babelfish.altavista.com/,
is an honorable exception that I have used to
translate preliminary drafts of this text.
Nowadays, that is the industry standard of free machine translation: very
rough, nearly incoherent drafts.
Higher-quality services may have been available for years; ask any government’s
intelligence agency. They’re just not
available for free to those who need them most.
We eagerly spend the
trillions of dollars needed to discharge our capacity to fight one another to
the death (the only commonly acceptable definition of every nation’s status);
but not the odd millions it would take to get everyone to converse freely and
talk our way out of most fights.
Meanwhile, ego-freak code writers outdo each other to write new virus
software and infect all our computers with it.
Go ahead, shit down the village well, you idiot savants!
We promote vicious morons
to dictate what is allowed and what is not.
Nine out of ten of our precious rules and regulations share one trait in
common—they answer this question alone: “What else do we need to ensure our
lives, safety and sanity, once the most unwise and
malevolent among us (inevitably) cast their shit into the collective
fan?” The Learner equivalent would ask:
“How much should we pay them to learn to stop, do something more creative and
leave us in peace—one hundredth or one thousandth part of current expenditures
on costly regulations?”
This communication
nightmare has a flip side. Learners can
take all the communication hardware we need, right off the shelf. Key components need merely to be coaxed from
the hands of mystified weapon technicians and plugged into Learner networks.
Despite the empty
denunciations of science, we are living during a magical era. Presto!
Peace management could fulfill our fondest dreams, or weapon managers
can make our worst nightmares come true.
Which magic act would you rather attend?
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld