SUMMARY OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
Taichi Sakaiya’s luminous
work, The Knowledge-Value Revolution,
advances two premises:
· people readily consume plentiful resources, and
· they treasure resources they consider rare.
Societies experience
alternate states of awareness as they resonate between these two impulses.
When some new abundance
appears, society organizes itself to consume it. Intellectual sophistication, objectivity and
logical reductionism regulate accelerating consumption. The more copious the resource, the more
commonplace become literacy, industrial efficiency and promotion by merit. These industrious habits reinforce the rule
of law, and its mass approval justifies a more even distribution of labor,
responsibilities and obligations.
Complex accounting techniques sustain frenzied transactions based on
elaborate indices of exchange. Art
becomes more widespread, skill-based and expressive. We consume more and more resources, heedless
of their depletion. Over-consumption
becomes its own reward, its future penalties and unforeseen consequences,
ignored.
During intervals of
poverty, our perception of abundance wavers.
Hoarding, corruption, political reaction, disaster and warfare replace
the prerequisites of enhanced distribution.
As this transition worsens from hectic productivity to induced poverty,
cultures drop their objective production criteria. They stop appraising things and deeds for
their objective value; instead, they accept more and more subjective
knowledge-value. Eventually, this new
value system supplants objective appraisal entirely.
I speak of our perception
of abundance rather than abundance itself.
You might find yourself
stranded in a desert and distressed by its sterility. It may appear to be on the verge of killing
you with thirst and hunger. It may
bloom, however, with proper care; or it might contain enormous riches
(petroleum reserves, for example) just beyond your awareness and thus out of
reach.
Every cubic yard of dirt,
of ocean and outer space hides an abundance of energy vast beyond
comprehending. We have merely to reveal it
without disturbing its natural hiding place: a task at which we’ve become
expert through painful trial-and-error.
You may assess the value
of a wristwatch by its accuracy, its durability, the raw materials and skills
needed to make and distribute it: these would be objective value
judgments. The price for a similar watch
might rise and fall somewhat; but under normal circumstances, it would
stabilize along some suitable, regular and predictable pricing curve: a dynamic
equilibrium.
Otherwise, you could give
the same watch a special coat of value-paint, a supplementary
knowledge-value. You could call it a
Cartier watch, the ten millionth watch ever made, a ‘lucky’ watch, your
grandfather’s, Franklin Roosevelt’s, or one that stopped on some momentous occasion. Subjectively, you could assign more or less
value than what strict consumption criteria would dictate.
This subjective ‘paint’
could have any shade of meaning people agreed to share. These subjective ‘colors’ could shift in
dramatic and unanticipated ways, baffling the supply and demand reckonings of
communist central planners just as much as those of dollar democrats who claim
membership in a ‘free’ market.
Knowledge-Value eras
evolve during periods of consumption decline and retrenchment later known as
Dark Ages. These are inception stages of
new empires, mass religions and revolutions: periods of insecurity,
arch-conservatism and perceived scarcity.
On a planetary scale,
cyclical meteor or comet bombardments, or volcanic eruptions, might have
initiated these Dark Ages. They might
have propagated disasters of geoseismic, climato-agricultural and epidemic
proportions. Relatively minor disasters
could have triggered this transition locally, provided the locality in question
remained isolated from outside help.
Otherwise, we can simply
run out of cheaply extracted petroleum.
Given our laughable state of preparation for this certain outcome, it
would be just as great a disaster for us.
Knowledge-value societies
embrace new beliefs with the fanaticism of an inquisitor. Once old elites have disappeared through
violence and dismissal, weapon societies breed new nobilities based on
illusions of bloodline purity and memorable ancestry.
Such nobles derive most
often their ‘honor and respect’ from terrorist brutality. A peaceful society would handle such ‘nobles’
with criminal ostracism, passive resistance and well-deserved contempt—the same
way the Balinese treated their Indonesian military elite and European colonial
‘masters’, both before and after post-colonial liberation; the same way we
shall marginalize militants and militaristic extremists instead of empowering
them and marginalizing the pacifists.
Knowledge value
practitioners expect prices to vary wildly for the same object in different
settings. Such societies crave splendid
nobility, romantic deeds and magic mementos.
Their chroniclers despise accurate accounting and ignore bean-count
tabulations in favor of epic exaggeration.
As a rule, the best leaders withdraw from the hectic minutiae of
day-to-day politics, into monastic contemplation and deep philosophical
discourse. In their absence, petty
tyrants take over. The less enlightened
they are and the greater their hunger for power, the more vicious, troublesome
and dangerous their competition becomes.
Kiss ancient freedoms and liberties goodbye under their tender care.
Knowledge-value seeks
balance, survival and security in periods of economic stasis and decline;
objective criteria encourage discovery, risk-taking and growth in times of
plenty. Such risks might not have been
survivable during more austere periods of knowledge-value.
A benign Learner
Commonwealth would deal even-handedly in knowledge-value and consumption
efficiencies, denying neither one its proper place in the scheme of
things. Peace technology would balance
cooperation and competition, shared stability and risk. It would induce a placid economy with few
surpluses and penuries (as in hunter-gatherer communism).
Objective criteria ratchet
forward with incremental inertia, two clicks forward and one click back;
whereas knowledge-value ebbs and flows as effortlessly as the rollers of a
flood tide.
The ideas written up in Learners
lend themselves to knowledge-value dissemination. Our present mind-set makes us fixate on
weapon values, but peace-values might over-paint this flawed understanding in
an eye-blink. Almost overnight, amazing
social transformations could sweep away current barriers to progress. Knowledge-value fervor could advance the goals
of peace. It could manage to do so much
more readily than some ponderous Gant chart could track the clumsy
demilitarization of every institution and the grudging conversion into honest
Learners of way too many weapon technicians and weapon stalwarts.
The Western World boasts
of more or less well-organized pacifists dating back at least three hundred
years. Humanity has nurtured the idea of
universal peace since the first bright child was struck by someone duller (whether
an impatient elder or a clique of brethren bullies). It has always been a question of how slowly
and carefully we should approach this universal peace, so unrealistic and
impractical by today’s standards.
In the development of
things, however, time does not seem to remain constant. After something has been sought consistently
for a long time, time appears to accelerate its approach with exponential
wings. Something long sought after
through many gradual steps—that something might emerge in a flash of time, from
our stunted perspective.
Rather than prescribe some
sweeping dogma, Learners suggests a more gradual, non-linear
approach. Our assessments of gradualism
and spontaneity have become null and void.
The time for peace had not yet come, and we were not ready for it; at
present, it has and we are. From a weak
start followed by incremental infusions of peace mentality, information
politics might yet overwhelm the disinformation politics
we've grown accustomed to.
A Learner course
correction would require no führerprinzip
(the principle of weapon leadership: “unrestricted authority downwards and
unrestricted responsibility upwards” – A. Hitler). No charismatic war leaders need apply—even
though they might have presided over every prior transformation. The leaders we require, tribal-wise rather
than war-wary, will awaken of themselves.
The more people who read Learners and peace texts like it, and
the more often they debate these topics until they become commonplace, the
faster this knowledge-value will take hold.
As Learners’ tenets become
ordinary, a Commonwealth of Learner peers will emerge as if from nowhere. It will surface like a new continent,
tectonic and unstoppable, from the Dead Sea that surrounds it, saturated with
apathy, stasis and inertia.
In the past, when the
thesis of weapon orthodoxy collided with its anti-thesis of weapon revolution,
their synthesis sparked a deadlier cluster of weapon technologies.
This time, we should brace
our feet, focus our spirit, and replace dominant weapon mentality with a brand
new one—of peace.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld