SUMMARY OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
Please read “The Future”
first.
I
have less and less faith in creeds – militaristic or mystical – that appeal to
anything but our best-informed self-interest.
Social systems are ridiculous that attempt to transform the masses into
saints. Those that rely on force, terror
and the law (merely the best-organized form of terror) are perverse and
therefore self-defeating.
No
matter how ‘sophisticated’ we become, the turbulence of mind/universe
interactions will outpace our ego-driven misrepresentation of them.
Mightn’t
this turbulence drift us towards a more fruitful trawl? For example, couldn’t we influence our world
through art, dreams, wishes, blessings and curses—just as much as through
material world routines?
Primal
humans ‘made up’ their personal identity and image of the universe by naming
the ancestors they could recall or imagine, then the events and landmarks of
their own lives. They recited this long
life story (as a chronology and scrolling map) around the campfire, as a
private epic.
“In the beginning, there was the word.” John 1:1, the Bible.
In
The Anatomy of
Restlessness, Richard Chatwin revealed an interesting talent. Some Bushmen could translate snippets of each
other’s ‘naming songs,’ even though their dialects were mutually
unintelligible. The narrator and
listener lived on opposite ends of the Australian continent; they spoke
dialects separated by thousands of miles.
Yet one listener could recognize a familiar landscape in the other’s
tale, solely by the cadence and rhythm of his narration.
The
same thing happened to me just as providentially. An African TV preacher was reciting the
Lord’s Prayer in his language that I couldn’t identify much less understand;
but his cadence was unmistakable.
For
better or for worse, we ‘program’ our reality by repeating to ourselves: “I
hope this happens; I deserve that joy” or “I’ll never succeed at this; it’s
bound to fail” and suchlike incantations, whether in the affirmative or the
negative. Subconsciously, we project our
reality through our speech and thought.
We imitate our parents and mentors who taught us what concepts to accept
and how to recite them to ourselves.
Thus the sins of the fathers are transmitted unto the seventh
generation.
More
traditional and therefore rigid faiths invoke this ‘New Age’ programming with
equal fervor. They use it as prayer—even
though they reject New Age doctrine.
Their prayer in church is specifically forbidden by Jesus (see Matthew
6-5 in the Bible).
Jesus
seems to have been more New Age than all of them put together; and most ‘New
Age’ practices seem more venerable to me, more cross-cultural and universal,
than the sacraments of younger, more restrictive and jealous mass
monotheisms. There is a way to view
Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other thousand-year-old cults as mere youths:
green with envy and cursing their better elders instead of venerating the best
of what they share.
‘New
Age’ is another weapon-distorted term of derision instead of reverence. We should replace it with something like
'primal' or another expression more neutral and benign.
I
would rather recite the Lord’s Prayer by myself in accordance
with Jesus’ specific instruction in Matthew 6.
This form of prayer has led me to believe that I may achieve personal
salvation by reincarnating into Christ's lifetime after my next death. I console myself with the promise of ultimate
flight from this vale of tears turned bloody charnel house, starvation camp and
Bedlam of future plagues. For me,
writing, translating and rewriting Learners
have become other means of meditative focus.
Jesus’
sovereign commandment: “Love your enemy,” may have been His best shot at
cleansing this universe. If, instead, we
revile one another and stick our elbows in each other’s ears until aggression
becomes the norm, then criminality (and worse yet, legal sociopathy) pollution
and warfare must rebound.
Besides,
I believe that if someone guns me down, I must come back as the shooter. He'll come back too, to be shot down by
me. Or who knows? One of us might find a way to interrupt this
pattern of destruction. And if I shoot
or torture someone, I must come back as my victim. There is no escape from this fate, except,
perhaps, Jesus as described above.
Speaking as the hopeless narcissist that I am, how can I not love
myself, merely cloaked in another incarnation?
Could
we wish and work for a world of human harmony?
In this alien world so unfamiliar to us, everyone’s needs and comforts
would be met as a religious sacrament, and leftover wealth would pile up unused
in the form of climax biohabitat and fossil water reserves.
In
your estimation, which alternative would seem more sustainable and
‘realistic?’ Since we should not pray
for things and circumstance (but only for those in the Lord’s Prayer), what
should we wish for?
Paranormal
talents, now forgotten, may have been commonplace in the past. Learner Networks and other breakthrough info
technologies may reveal those hidden talents and put them to good use. We are just beginning to apply the scientific
method to paranormal studies. Rupert Sheldrake is the patron saint of this
new science called Noetics. Assuming we
discarded our clever omnicide toys, this novel source of inquiry might boost
our energy manipulations to their next order of magnitude and enrich our
commonwealth tremendously.
God
help us if we only succeed at reinforcing weapon technology with new,
paranormal skills. Absent resurgent
peace mentality, powerful new talents might tempt us into extinction. We’d hold each other hostage for a while, and
then wreck everything during the next pointless military showdown.
Like
ambitious workers of a rigid bureaucracy, complex societies tend to promote
themselves one rung above their level of competence. For quite awhile, they
may operate optimally, at or below their level of competence; then some new
benefit permits them to grow beyond prudent dimensions and sustainable levels
of consumption.
Joseph A. Tainter, (The Collapse of Complex Societies), proposes that societies grow
more complex once they make a key discovery that responds to old problems with
innovative solutions and newer, more promising resources. Once some paradigm-shift offers unforeseen
new benefits (as did Islam, reciprocating engines and constitutional democracy,
for example), satiated majorities would rather maintain recent gains than take
risks to achieve additional ones. These
beneficiaries-turned-conservatives fossilize cultural orthodoxy and suppress
innovation. In pursuit of reassuring
simplicity, they deny the need for followup improvement.
There
is no more reactionary populace than a once-downtrodden one that has recently
obtained dependable new benefits. Its
totalitarian leaders, brought to power at all costs to maintain current levels
of satisfaction, weave an unbelievable fabric of lies. Eventually, subtler dollar democrats replace
them. They amplify trivial matters to
planetary significance (the World Series, for example) and trivialize
significant matters into invisibility.
The status quo is thus preserved beyond its useful lifetime. The longer this period stretches, the worse
the series of disasters that will end it and the more fascistic the leadership
takeover from then on.
Today’s
weapon societies produce progressives and idealists in numbers far exceeding
their public voice. In like manner, the
number of ancient progressives far surpassed their unheard voice in historic
memory. Only the pig squeals of a minority
of inflexible reactionaries remain to be heard.
Weapon communities only tolerate progressive comment insofar it suggests
chrome, cosmetic fixes to cover up the most ragged cracks of social
injustice. These regressive societies
have only found three uses weapon dissidents in three ways.
·
They
attract potential revolutionaries into their bogus organizations and betray
them to police surveillance.
·
They
uncover radical new ideologies and quash them with mental inertia, active
indifference, insipid argument and orthodox distortions of historical analysis:
negative peer pressure in this ascending order of complexity, depending on the
stubbornness of the rebellious outsider.
·
Through
endless, hot-air debates – like a roomful of monkeys typing a Shakespeare
Sonnet – they reveal new, low-risk ways weapon managers may tighten their
stranglehold on the information proletariat.
In
the absence of communal creativity, social rewards diminish over time. Public expenses skyrocket as newfound
benefits wear thin. Thereafter,
conservatives demand more and more effort for lesser return. Eventually, citizens starve, sicken to death,
revolt, get massacred or simply walk away.
Cultures decline because their leaders adhere more and more strictly to
some preferred norm, despite the real-world’s demand for sustainable
productivity through transformation.
Such societies collapse when unforeseen environmental disturbances and
military disasters force shell-shocked survivors to adapt (painfully) to
transformational traumatisms.
Otherwise,
the inevitable warrior class claims greater and greater riches for itself, even
though its interventions are less and less necessay,
preservative and cost-effective, since its foreign adversaries become just as
well armed and organized. It stages more
and more destructive temper tantrums and those are increasingly directed
inwards as military revolts and civil war, since in the long run its own
civilians become more accessible and profitable targets. It ceases earning its pay to defend anything,
but takes it as ‘protection money,’ to prevent it from destroying the whole in
armed pursuit of greater wealth.
The
conservatism and sense of honor typical of career military are all that block
this historical tendency. But the
cultural speedway into military chaos is paved with military loathing for
civilian life and its messy, peaceful pursuits.
It is interesting to note that the American military are the fiercest
defenders of the capitalist, laissez-faire philosophy; even though their own
lives and that of their dependents are strictly centralized, pre-planned and communistic
in totality. Their honor is the only
thing that will prevent them from wrecking the sum total, which fact peace
mentality must underscore above and beyond every other consideration.
Learners offers its readers – assuming they become numerous enough – the
opportunity to adapt willingly and peacefully this transition. We can do it the Learners way now; or
wait for weapon routines to overtake us, rip this last opportunity from our
grasp and annihilate us.
Cultural
creativity and chaosist aggression can resemble the discharge of an electric
battery. Its polarized ions interact
with their opposites (friend and foe, rich and poor, progressive and
conservative, chaosist and pacifist, legitimate and criminal, ignorant and
aware) to release energy. This energy is
either a useful current (peace, justice and progress) or a lethal discharge
(war, riot and revolt); as a function of the efficiency and usefulness of the
government circuit board into which it is plugged. This cultural battery runs down once its
depolarizing human ions become too similar; it fails when its ions share equal
parts of abundance and misery, unless some new energy source of higher
potential re-infuses it.
Learning
would distinguish a few communities of interest that share the same topic of passion, from many more that wouldn’t share it at
all or hardly at all. It would recharge
this cultural battery without resorting to our most customary and shameful
segregations: of age, class, race, nation, religion and of relative wealth or
political power. PeaceWorld would be
energized by the polarization of ignorance and expertise along so many
intersecting dimensions that everyone would consider themselves expert at some
topic and ignorant of many others, while other polarizations and their
destructive influence drained away.
Poverty
is a great incubator of genius, yet it is also a lure for others born into it,
towards crime, repression and militant bigotry.
On the other hand, those born clutching a silver spoon tend to incite
mediocre chauvinism. Look at the United
States whose rather well-to-do population suffers from oft-repeated crises of
smug severity and senescent reaction.
Most rich elites are satisfied with anticreative conservatism. However, they revert to vigorous devastation
the moment they feel threatened by change.
They work hard to short-circuit their own imagination and that of their
cultural inferiors, especially when the need for change becomes obvious. Socio-educational advantages and
disadvantages tend to muddy these waters, but they are significant in any case.
As
co-conspirators with the ultimate weapon societies, we are coerced from our
first, slapped breath until our nosed-into death rattle and terminal tax. Without letup, irrelevant and stultifying
information engulfs us. At every moment,
we are vulnerable to arbitrary confrontation at the hands of the police or
criminals interchangeably.
Our
governors are more intent on their immutable institutions and exquisite regulations,
than on the toxic influence they may impose on us. They teach us to tolerate ignorance, expect
injustice and respect oppression; that personal sainthood is required of us
even though current events and religious belief place it beyond our
reach―such that violence and lies must be our fate and reasonable
expectation. Even though these myths are
fundamentalist favorites, Learners will reject every scrap of them.
I
forecast that our civilization may perhaps rule itself more elegantly, this
time around. To achieve that, we will
have to abandon our cherished misgivings about radical transformation, our
elitist conceits and our weapon dissident’s self- restricting function as
orthodoxy’s early warning system. We may
serve instead (as our conscience dictates) as creative, sacrificial and thus
eventually affluent Learner minorities described above.
In
the meantime, the meek shall inherit the Earth by accident through their
suffering, and the mighty shall die by the sword because of their insufferable
conceit.
Let
us come to an agreement to share abundance and goodwill instead!
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld
to PeaceWorld