SUMMARY OF LEARNERS INTRO &
VOCAB
We
should confront the question of costs – if only briefly and with a great deal
of caution – given the misery we’ve endured while we paid undue attention to
imaginary dearth. For millennia, we’ve
not found enough wealth to invest in secure abundance. Instead, we’ve bemoaned peace expenses and
short-changed ourselves by reneging on them.
At the same time, we’ve under-estimated enormous weapon costs while
ruining ourselves to honor them.
Everyone
will pay dearly for this transformation.
Of necessity, the richest countries will be called upon to ante up first
and foremost. Conspiracies of Greed will
oppose Learner transformation with myths of fictive scarcity, as usual, even
though they’re awash in liquid capital seeking a valid catchment without ever
finding it, as usual, short of total war.
What
other choice do we have? Everything
is at stake. We can endure a few more
decades of eco-disaster, shrinking petroleum reserves and the resultant world
fascism of nation-states competing for the dregs. Otherwise, we can surrender to annihilation
this afternoon, victimized by some military paroxysm unforeseen by us, though
carefully engineered by others.
Any
concerted shift we choose to make, from weapons to peace, promises an
unforeseen future of staggering abundance and elegance.
For decades, econologicians have defended
supply-side (pro-investor) versus demand-side (pro-consumer) economic
models. Meanwhile, they’ve ignored the
obvious conflict between weapon production and peace demand.
Weapons
economies promote splurge consumption; they cannot balance military-industrial
potential with consumer demand in peacetime.
This economic imbalance creates a chaotic, boom-crash-boom cycle of
instability.
Only
weapons economies can produce the enormous ‘surpluses’ (of disposable people, iron
rations and military hardware as costly as it is non-productive); only they can
keep up with mushrooming battlefield demand.
They must produce massive quantities of zero-profit weapons and
no-choice inductees on very short notice.
For this reason, they must subsidize overpopulation and
military-industrial complexes of guaranteed obsolescence, social harmfulness
and environmental toxicity.
An
economy devoted to peace would emphasize the quality of life; it could
sustain reasonable enterprise at length by balancing peace supply and
demand. It would offer long-lasting if
modest prosperity with shallow and rare economic peaks and valleys. It could not provide the enormous industrial
output that armed hordes demand when warfare threatens. It would be much more stable, however, during
times of peace, by avoiding market saturation under conditions of
slow/no/reversed growth. Without
warfare’s binge and bust requirements, boom-crash-boom would settle down to a
soothing hum.
Let’s
make an automotive analogy. Weapon
economies in peacetime are like Formula One race cars throttled down to five
MPH for days on end. They foul up, stall
and require much upkeep―might as well walk. Fuel-saving peace sub-compacts would hum
along during peacetime at optimal cruising speed with minimal wear and tear and
fuel consumption. Just don’t expect a
sudden burst of speed during wartime emergencies.
Weapon
managers could care less what happens to civilian economies during peacetime,
so long as they can tear them down like stage sets and install weapon assembly
lines in their place. For all they care,
the world’s peacetime economy can collapse (like it did during the Great
Depression, and like it is threatening to do, today). This sudden collapse would just increase the
number of abandoned factories ready for instant conversion to war production,
and worsen the despair of jobless military recruits and their grim
parents. Those people become willing
collaborators, eager to go to war in exchange for a sturdy pairs of shoes, a dry
place to sleep and three hot meals a day.
Substantial
sacrifices may be demanded of us to create PeaceWorld. But what we value most can never be taken
from us. Our freedom to choose, our
craving to Learn, our good will and sense of humor: those things would remain
intact, regardless. PeaceWorld could
only enhance them.
In
Facing the Extreme:
Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, (Henry Holt and Company, New York,
1996), Tzvetan Todorov lists some rare human virtues like heroism and
saintliness, and compares them to mundane survival habits like preserving
personal dignity, caring for those near and dear (versus unfocussed charity)
and cultivating a life of the mind despite atrocious living conditions.
The
most saintly concentration camp inmates may have died first―and perhaps
most mercifully. No matter how quickly
the best of them had to die, Nazi concentration camps could not suppress basic
survival instincts among the survivors.
No future adversity can, without annihilating us.
If
our first attraction were to evil, if weapon mentality could sate itself
unchecked, our forebears would have left no progeny behind and we wouldn’t be
here to discuss this. That we survive
today confirms the fact that we are kalotropes:
attracted to the good in the same way plants are phototropes drawn to sunlight.
During
the idealism of youth, many fine young souls dedicate their future to the
common good. Weapon mentality does its
worst to root out this idealism. Our
institutions need only realign themselves with peace, for those ideals to
become everyday norms. Sooner or later,
our worst social contradictions will evaporate in the sunshine and fresh air of
peace.
Every
info elite runs its own mix of peace and weapon policies, with its
proletariat’s consent. We walk a fine
line between weapon constraint and peaceful decadence. We do so reflexively, basing our decisions on
a threat-distorted constellation of political metaphors. Those decisions may favor an ethical peace or
any trash information elites may choose to publicize while they run their toxic
and intoxicating weapon technologies.
The
info elite that opts for “Peace at Last” will work itself out of the chore of
rationing information. In so doing, it
will reach the peak of managerial excellence.
There is no higher moral ground for worldly leadership. It can never be achieved by a weapon
leadership which rations information and broadcasts mis/disinformation instead.
The
orthodox transition from marginal peace to total war induces a change in
attitude, away from thrift and towards extravagance. Now that mass killing takes priority, all
thought of profit and fiscal restraint goes out the window. New goals are established, priorities
redefined and plans fulfilled. Hang the
expense! New regulations are rigidly
enforced; it matters less who’s VIP toes get stepped on. Overnight, decrepit institutions snap to
weapon goals—or are cast aside without regret.
During World War I, British Edwardian society junked itself completely,
as did others elsewhere. Millions of
inductees dedicated their lives to weapon requirements, and then sacrificed
them entirely for little or no apparent reason.
In
order to achieve lasting peace, we must mobilize the entire war-making
potential of this planet. Peace problems
merit the same doggedness of spirit and scorn for obstacles that weapon
management claims automatically. In the
past, only weapon priorities took advantage of such problem solving. When info elites believed impending military
ruin threatened their children, they cast lesser priorities aside and met
weapon demands at all costs. Today, all
the children are at risk. World peace
(which alone can save them) should benefit from the same level of popular
enthusiasm and mass conscription.
Learner
transformation will start out with subtly revised understanding and behavior;
it will wind up with overwhelming social reforms driven by a mighty consensus.
Throughout
history, humanity has treated its wealth ‘surpluses’ like coke to be shoveled
into the perpetual blast furnace of warfare.
Learners will harvest that cash crop just ahead of the next
paroxysm. Like frantic farmers, we’ll
bring in the sheaves at the first rumble of the looming thunderstorm. Then we will celebrate a lengthy harvest
festival (like the Jewish holiday Succoth,
celebrating their deliverance from Pharaoh), snug beneath the tight, dry roof
of PeaceWorld.
Everyone
will obey their rational self-interest: the exact opposite of wartime
self-sacrifice and propaganda-driven passion.
Once we accept enlightened self-interest as our right and destiny, every
argument against PeaceWorld for cost reasons will become absurd. Celebration instead of sacrifice; peaceful
prosperity instead of warlike destitution.
While
peace technologies produce real wealth, weapon technologies produce nothing but
downstream overheads and mayhem. Learner
Networks promise real wealth surpassing every prior investment and solutions to
problems that contemporary thought cannot solve.
At
first, Learner Networks will be very vulnerable. Populations seething with weapon mentality
will have to defy the ultimate summons by their old elites to stampede into
Armageddon. Quite a few people, driven
mad by their weapon indoctrination, may not resist this last incitement to
mayhem.
Learner
Networks will require elaborate diagnostic and defensive measures, triply
redundant and compartmentalized; built-in protections against computer viruses,
nuclear pulse, vandalism, mob violence, criminal tampering and sabotage.
Learners
must exercise a firm but tolerant restraint between liberality and
security. Premature over-liberality will
engender chaos in societies soaked with weapon mentality; rigid police measures
will be equally unsuitable. Policies
Wimps use to dominate proletarians, and Prisms, to subvert proto-elites: all of
them need to be revised or thrown out altogether. See Intro
& Vocab (if you haven’t already) to grasp the meaning of
these expressions.
Learner
management must be error-free from the start.
Any extended series of failures will get no second chance.
Throughout
history, obsessed individuals have invented new peace technologies with little
or no official support. Info elites
usually ignored these inventors and their pet projects. If they suspected that these inventions might
destabilize the weapon status quo, they ruined them and their inventors without
a second thought.
You
won’t find gifted Learners by applying standardized tests. You won’t find them by running children
ragged through classroom obstacle courses or by promoting rare survivors of
examination hells (the Japanese model).
The more constraints imposed on these people, the faster they will drop
off our radar screen. They find their
own interests far sexier than the empty rewards of bureaucratic orthodoxy and
corporate greed, and the herd instincts of futile dissidents. Hypersensitive to form-over-content
pretension, they impose stratospheric demands on themselves and their
creation.
These
days, the best Learners are talented and driven amateurs scattered among masses
of info proletarians. Once they dispose
of enough leisure time and discretionary income, they set to work on their topic of
passion. Often, it’s at the
expense of a life others would consider normal.
By
topic of passion, I mean one they would gladly spend 10,000 hours
perfecting. Then, they need an info
elite crazy enough to accept, coordinate and broadcast their discoveries.
Most
often, the songs they compose are silenced, the games they invent forbidden and
the exquisite toys they make are crushed in favor of rubber-stamped platitudes,
homogenized mediocrity and redundant junk.
Status quo societies promote Mandarin ticket punchers who delight in
silencing Learners. They discard many
breakthroughs, only to witness their re-emergence when circumstances become
ideal once again. This grim attrition of
peace technology must stop. Humanity’s
dialogue must be fine-tuned with its energy management systems and with the
natural environment. The enormous
destructive energies accumulated in the past should be rerouted into
constructive Learning.
The
billions of children who starve today constitute the world’s ultimate pool of
untapped genius. I don’t advocate their
nurturing through disinterested altruism, though that purpose is also
served. I insist on it because their
genes have survived centuries of lethal scarcity. As survivors of this hecatomb, they include
the largest number of Learner prodigies, once cared for properly. In typically human fashion, they are the
people we need the most and care for the least.
Meanwhile,
sleek mediocrities play revolving doors through various bureaucracies either
useless or openly destructive. Lacking
enough instruction in the arts of love, empathy and generosity, these morality
amputees are as relevant today as those who occupied the Great
Universities during the European Middle Ages.
Actually,
there are remarkable similarities between the darkest years of the Middle Ages,
this last century and the one just beginning.
During
both ages, military aristocracies and corporate clergies shuffled personnel,
cash and paperwork. Both periods relied
on monolithic elites: their clergies and fragmented nobles—our corporate
bureaucrats, scientists and politicians.
Both pauperized the info proletariat.
Both erected inadequate, phallic skyscrapers from filthy slum seedbeds,
to immortalize the emptiness of their dreams.
Both ages were responsible for gross ecological and public health
blunders, clearly inferior to what they could have accomplished had they paid
the slightest attention to important matters.
Both adopted exotic languages to alienate their info proletariats: their
Latin and our mathematics. Both
validated their weapon mentality with pathetic weapon myths.
Both
ages based fundamental realities on social fantasy: theirs, on bureaucratic
religion; ours, on bureaucratic technology.
Both ages trusted dogmas as incoherent and clueless as they were
indisputable. They turned away from real
social and spiritual issues, in favor of corporate pseudo-faith―we have
corporate pseudo-entertainment: diversions equally seductive and divorced from
reality. They exploited witchcraft. Thousands of eccentric old ladies were
torched as scapegoats for evils elites had obviously committed. We have our War on the Drugged, War on the
Terrorized and the most sophisticated torments our police states and penal
empires can contrive.
Both
groups ground down their people through complex, expensive and filthy wars;
neither managed to avoid global war.
Maximum combat was routine during both ages; it didn’t matter whether it
was intercontinental or village-local.
Armed conflict dominated both worldviews: theirs, between Muslim and
Christian; ours between Communist and Capitalist. During both ages, fanatical Christians and
Muslims called for Crusades and Jihads in pursuit of their combat pay.
Eventually,
this fight will sort itself between the wealthy and all their victims. Otherwise, between progressive city dwellers
and reactionary small town and rural district inhabitants (as American politics
sort themselves today). More recently,
this global conflict has shifted between the rich North of the planet and the
South impoverished but capable of enormous future productivity.
Actually,
this North resembles Embassy Row in Mogadishu on a bad day. The industrial West,
including Japan and the Little Tigers of Asia: the most privileged, powerful
and well-armed neighborhoods of a planet in ruins.
“After all, our street gangs (politicians, career
paramilitary and paracivilian bureaucrats and their supporters) appear to be
the least miserable. We fantasize that they might have something
important to lose.” It’s very tempting
to mouth the stale platitudes of this sorry district. We refuse to realize that we could occupy Embassy Row
on Planet Geneva – just as easily, if not more so – and be that much more
magnificent because of it. We take no heed to the fortunes everyone could
gain by means of this radical transformation.
See Mencius.
Street gangs are street gangs and nothing more; they
will always embrace hypocrisy, criminality and tyranny. We can
complain all we want to about current problems, try to fine-tune our street
gangs and make them ‘nicer’ until the cows come home—our results will always be
the same, worse than we can imagine.
The secret formula would be to turn Planet Mogadishu
into Planet Geneva; not our street gang into a nicer one while the rest remain
the same. There remains one transformation for us to
carry out. Replace weapon mentality’s
sacrifice of victims, with peace mentality’s celebration of Learners.
Under
weapon management, population density and economic complexity multiply
inflation and human misery. Under peace
management, the same numbers would multiply abundance and civilization. Look at Holland and Japan, where population
densities are at a boil but peace inspires and adorns them.
Take
the city of Pittsburgh. Not long ago, it
was famous for its bustling factories, seemingly affluent inhabitants and
overwhelming social and ecological problems associated with over-dense
populations and industrial growth.
Calling Pittsburgh a scenic town would have been a sick joke. Abruptly, its industrial base imploded and
many of its laid-off workers were forced to abandon their homes. Soon thereafter, it became the most
‘attractive’ city in the United States.
Also
illustrated: how shoddy and run-down all our cities have become. We are miserable because we don’t allow
ourselves to be magnificent.
It
may be that modern humanity awaits its dismissal, just like Dark Age peasants
did. Many of them couldn’t improve their
lot until one-half of them died from the Black Plague. The survivors profited from this massive
cull, by offering their rarified labor for slightly better wages and sharing
the landscape of Europe more equitably.
Noble birth became less important when so many leadership slots went
vacant.
The
most effective escape from the Plague (besides a course of cipro)
is to bury oneself far from the madding crowd, snug in one’s country fortified
castle, and not leave for at least six months.
Consult Boccaccio, the surviving author of the Decameron. Even though there
would be additional casualties while later waves of infection snuffed out
additional victims. If that’s your fate,
bubba, there’s nowhere to hide.
The
Black Death’s personnel turnover – and its shocking psychic trauma –
jump-started the Renaissance.
As
did intellectual imports from China?
According the Gavin Menzies, Chinese sailors, scholars and diplomats
from the fleet of Eunuch-Admiral Zheng He sailed as
far as Cairo, the Adriatic and Venice (in addition to much of the rest of the
world), visited the Pope in 1434, and left behind a mass of technological,
agricultural, mathematical, cartographic, and astronomical information. The geniuses of the Italian Renaissance
copied this cultural treasure trove without attribution and improved upon it,
thus soaking up a thousand years of intellectual heritage Europe had failed to
develop on its own during the Dark Ages.
This trans-oceanic fleet was shattered by a comet strike off New Zealand
in 1340, that set off 550+ foot tsunamis across the Indian Ocean; then by
Chinese Mandarin officialdom’s decision to turn its back on foreign trade and
exploration and mothball the remainder of the fleet. Gavin Menzies, 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited
the Renaissance, HarperCollins, New York, 2008.
Are
we waiting for the same kind of pestilence to befall us? Will our descendants benefit from our
traumatic disappearance? God knows, if
AIDS mutates into an aerosol infection – the way the Plague evolved from Bubonic
to Pneumonic – even a raving optimist would write off human civilization inside
a decade. Here comes SARS (Severe Acute
Respiratory Syndrome), bird/swine flu or its evolutionary replacement, right on
schedule.
Nature
is rehearsing for our grand finale. It
is making up its mind whether or not, when and how to play the same card it has
played a hundred times before, against the momentarily dominant species of the
planet. It is toying with humanity until
we’re crushed under that discard. We
should guarantee that the best of our civilization survives this manifold
annihilation.
In
the near future, recombinant genetic engineering is going to put the means to
broadcast deadly epidemics within the easy reach of almost anyone. Some psychopath with a bit of science
training and access to a Community College lab will be able to cook up
continent-clearing pandemics—all too soon.
Set your watch for the next few years!
Once this cataclysm befalls us, neither an Ivy League tenure nor a blue
chip stock portfolio will offer any more protection than a lifetime spent
sifting garbage.
In
that event, Learners is a blueprint
for global reconstruction, assuming our dazed survivors ever renormalize their
lives.
Media
pundits keep echoing each other’s misgivings about impending disaster. Meteor strikes, environmental catastrophes
and high-tech warfare threaten us with multi-modal and synergistic
disaster. Could these alarms be
by-products of our collective malevolence, astral punishment for our sins, or
just the unhappy outcome of random coincidence?
UFO
stories abound; they seem to describe some aliens' (or distant future
earthlings’?) clumsy attempt to harvest genetic material from this planetary
biosphere before it shrivels up and blows away.
Are those aliens playing out an entertainment program? They’d be like the anglers on one of those
boring TV shows. “Reel ‘em in and toss
‘em back; reel ‘em in and toss ‘em back …” for no apparent reason except
perhaps the satisfaction of their boredom and curiosity. In any case, almost all the fish tossed back
die within a day or two.
Could
all this hysteria have some factual basis?
If our destiny is merely to be obliterated on schedule, then I ask that
you treat Learners as the private
entertainment I intended it to be. If
not, and our destiny proves slightly less ludicrous, consider this text’s Section III a laundry list of global chores we’ve neglected too long, which
demands the immediate attention of every Learner on Earth.
LEARNERS: On the Move from
WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld