SUMMARY OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
“A doctrine that does not attack and affect the life of the period in its inmost depths is no doctrine and had better not be taught.” Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West.
Peace management demands a
completely new life ethic. Habits
tolerated in the past, as well as those found intolerable, should be reassessed
for their weapon content. Fundamental
contradictions confront us, between our ideals and the
weapon ‘realism’ we have endured, based on imaginary limitations. We must resolve these contradictions and
evolve a new awareness in absolute peace.
Assisted death should be
discretionary for adults. Powerful
philosophical arguments support this contention, involving personal
freedom. Weapon societies forbid
self-termination outright—another effort to cancel personal autonomy. This restriction, all by itself, validates
assisted death in case of need.
Killers should never be
allowed to abuse assisted death—that should be obvious. Waiting periods, offers of therapy, counsel
and social assistance, and published declarations of intent could secure the
safety of potential victims.
Self-directed death should be a solemn ritual as carefully thought-out
as a marriage or an abortion.
“To
merit painless death, we officials must certify that you are in unmanageable
agony or incurable catatonia. At that
stage, of course, you are unfit to request it.”
Such Catch-22 legalisms are mere refinements of weapon servitude.
During my father’s long
agony, I witnessed the lingering indignities of terminal illness. I would prefer a quick, clean death, at a
time and place of my choosing, over any amount of hyperactive, Hippocratic
meddling.
Authoritarians would
rather not permit prisoners to “cheat the hangman.” Everyone understands that life imprisonment
and capital punishment are far nastier than a quick, clean suicide. Punishment bureaucracies consider prisoner
suicide a grave disappointment, even though they invoke it the automatically to
disguise custodial neglect or malfeasance.
They’d rather someone placed at their mercy were stripped of human
rights and forced to suffer indefinitely—stripped even of the right to choose
their own setting and means of death.
As for contraception and
family planning, weapon managers aim to increase the number of abused offspring
who make the best cannon fodder. They
condemn promiscuity a priori because
the resulting sexual frustration conveniently multiplies criminal
aggression. Sexual rebels are punished
with unwanted pregnancy, moralistic condemnation, social ostracism and genital
diseases otherwise controllable by basic public health measures.
One might conclude that
warfare is a fundamental human imperative, a crude but customary method of
coerced population control. That is another
cherished weapon myth. So is the idea
that war promotes “survival of the fittest.”
Unfortunately, two realities intrude.
First off, warfare
promotes poverty, ignorance and high mortality.
These, in turn, induce polygamy: the obvious outcome of very poor and
therefore hyper-violent societies. Over
long periods of time, they spin off fewer male survivors and more females. This unbalanced sex ratio induces polygamy,
more children and social approval for inescapably larger families.
Poor people might as well
congratulate themselves for doing what they couldn’t avoid in any case. More often than not, rich folk have fewer
children and smaller families, the better to raise them. Larger families require overworked and (more
likely) abused women. These, in turn,
produce more neglected children. The
outcome is a mass of despised womenfolk, potential killers among their children
because poorly raised, denser populations and more warfare.
Secondly, warfare kills
off the strong, the brave, the bright, the creative, the healthy, the dutiful
and the enlightened, faster than it kills off the rest of us. The silage of warfare is a superfluity of
irresponsible mediocrities who waste lifetimes obsessing over their favorite
topics of tertiary importance and imposing those obsessions on the rest of
us. War’s outcome is their ultimate
revenge.
If warfare were forbidden,
future generations would grow up stronger, wiser and more honest. It would take whole generations of this kind,
to heal the harmful effects of a single massacred generation. It might take a century’s worth, after
consecutive generations of massacre.
Meanwhile, evil and indifference to evil prevail over the good and its
preventive concern, in direct proportion to these casualties.
Thus Rome’s
transition from Republic to Empire can be attributed to its management’s
deterioration from massive casualties during the Punic Wars and civil wars
thereafter. The stagnation of the Soviet
Union and Warsaw Pact nations and their eventual leadership collapse after
World War II, to casualties from that war and prior ones.
It is grimly comical to
note that subsequent historians have blamed this Roman transition on the
effects of Roman peace (almost as many effects proposed and ferociously debated
as there were historians in the debate), but never on those of war. In turn, the Soviets’ collapse was attributed
to the clownlike and ruinous policies of a reactionary con man (President
Ronald Reagan), but never to the festering sore of its previous casualties,
obvious for anyone to see. During World
War II, America suffered about two-percent of the casualties Russia suffered
(600,000 dead versus 30,000,000), and zero percent of its massive
infrastructure demolition; guess who won the Cold War? All that, thanks to Ronald Reagan – riiight.
There are better ways to
control population growth: high quality nutrition, universal health care,
education, dependable social security for the elderly and disabled and, most
important of all, strictly enforced equal rights for everyone, women and
children included, without compromise or exception.
With fanatical obstinacy,
weapon management has restricted each of them in turn. After all, its technicians specialize at
inflicting mass suffering and destruction.
Any life-enhancing activity merely adds to their primary goal or
subtracts from it. Improving the quality
of life is, at best, a sideline for weapon managers obsessed with other
priorities.
Forbidding birth control harnesses
explosive human energies: intense sexual frustration and the rage of bastardy,
multiplied by the human overcrowding reflexes of aggression and shadism. Weapon management strengthens itself by
sublimating into criminality and abuse such intangibles as the sex drive,
deprivation fears and natural differences between men and women, between people
of different ethnicities, divergent ideologies and exclusive faiths.
Any organization declares
itself a weapons institution when it discourages family planning and
disempowers women in the process: another reason to tag mass religions as
weapons institutions.
Sexual promiscuity is
unavoidable among people denied adequate education and healthcare; it is
equally prevalent among the affluent and well educated. Ordering people to refrain from something as
pleasant as sex is a royal waste of time for everyone concerned, except weapons
elites hiding their special agendas.
The duller and less skilled
the female, and the more fragile her support network, the more often weapon
managers will urge her to mother many children.
Such females are raped into motherhood whenever they lack high-privilege
male protectors, routinely and without redress.
Such sorry ravages occur as frequently today as they did during
antiquity (thus no social improvement can be observed in this respect.)
The best infantry recruits
are those with the least secure childhoods: in short, they are bastards,
orphans or both. Ghettos and slums make
the best nurseries for a large number of good soldiers. That is the only reason they exist. Otherwise they are without a doubt the least
profitable neighborhoods to run.
Reactionaries have
declared that the average liberal has legislated social decline, even though
that decline has been the reactionaries’ ultimate unconscious goal. This declaration is just their latest attempt
to bury their shame. In the name of consensus building and compromise,
Dollar democrats (“One million dollars equal one vote!”) have monkey-wrenched
progressive legislation for decades. Now
that the evils they bargained for have borne their bitter fruit, they declare
these outcomes to be the progressives’ fault.
Only weapon managers running weapon states could spew so many
provocative lies and get away with them, thanks to our collective apathy.
Everyone realizes that a
truncated human lifespan – terminated at the embryonic stage, if necessary – is
preferable to any lifelong crucifixion endured in some ghetto nightmare, famine
desert or prison hell. Many people would
never condemn their own children to such a demonic existence. Somehow, they convince themselves that the
innocent children of strangers, their poor parents and grown-up convicts
deserve it.
This contrarian
self-righteousness betrays the shadism of religious fundamentalists. They will struggle, go to jail and sometimes
kill to see that unwanted kids are born―but they wouldn’t cross the
street to assure those kids’ upbringing.
Furthermore, they’ll actively support warfare abroad, prison empires and
death penalties at home—targeting for misery and destruction the surplus
children they've insisted on bringing to term.
What would Jesus have
said?
On the other hand, those
who counter abortion by offering legitimate alternatives of adoption and
quality child-care, command unlimited respect.
I suspect ‘those’ would mostly be female. In so doing, they deny weapon technicians
their primary source of recruitment.
No one likes the
lesser evil of abortion. Safe and speedy
adoption should be the norm for every unwanted child and every couple qualified
to raise one. I have never understood
why there are so many waiting lists of unwanted children and desperate, would-be
parents.
At present, “morning
after” drugs – birth control alternatives far less invasive than surgical
abortion – have proven effective for days after conception. Attempts to suppress them have been just as
bitter.
Ignoring the social
challenges their precious contradictions induce, weapon managers make up bogus
challenges to their tyranny. By
denormalizing healthy sexuality and criminalizing drug use among consenting
adults, reactionaries have produced complete new sets of ‘deviants’ they may
persecute at will.
Unfortunately, we have
granted too much responsibility to certifiable
neurotics, allowed them to impose their obsession on the rest of us
from positions of authority. Then we’ve
let them recruit and train the next, even sicklier generation of neurotics to
take their place. This is a typical
tailspin of institutional degeneracy over time, until ruthless inquisitors
flourish everywhere, with total impunity.
Bring out the brooms!
The covert profits reactionaries
have gleaned from decades of illegal drug trade have financed a worldwide,
media-driven sprint to fascism. Where do
you think all those billions of dollars of criminal funds wound up, except in
their bank accounts? The media don’t
mind spurring this race along, since that disgrace is all to their profit.
Learners will redraft
legal codes with one overriding concern: enforcement through voluntary
cooperation.
If a significant minority
evades the law, it is unenforceable within that population. If a majority would not do it, yet would not
turn in someone they found doing it, it is unenforceable. When more than a trivial few are subject to
arrest and prison, the law becomes unenforceable. If the law permits penniless wastrels,
redundant lawyers and ideological fanatics to entangle honest folk in frivolous
legalisms, it becomes unenforceable.
When significant minorities define the police as hostile intruders, the
law as a whole becomes unenforceable.
Many social commentators consider the Law an inexorable
Juggernaut. According to them, it must
remain menacing and absolute, and may grow without restraint. Its failure to grow, or the correction of its
worst errors, might invite anarchic chaos.
This attitude leads to Auschwitz.
The law should remain a gossamer web best defined by its absence, in
which most humans would agree to entangle themselves when they stray.
Learners will enforce a
minimum of laws. Destructive activities
that cannot be forbidden outright should be regulated to serve public health.
“A State governed in this way requires very few laws, and insofar it becomes necessary to promulgate new ones, this need becomes apparent to everyone. The first to propose them just confirms what everyone has already felt, and it would not be a question of intrigue or eloquence to pass into law that which each had already resolved, as soon as he or she was sure that the others would do likewise.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social, (The Social Contract) Bordas, Paris, Bruxelles, Montréal, 1972. Book IV, Chapter 1.
Prostitutes should be
inspected and certified often and thoroughly by doctors. Drug distributors should be licensed like
alcohol and tobacco dealers. Gambling
receipts should be taxed to defray gambling abuses. Any abuse of minors should become unthinkable
and once again difficult to hide, by custom and universal conviction.
The populace will learn to
do the right thing reflexively, until most people regulate their own behavior
(and especially that of violence-prone local deviants) without excessive
supervision from the outside.
Once our laws have been
purged of their weapon-dross, specific offenses will emerge, uncovered by
precedent. In those cases, a duly appointed
jury should determine appropriate outcomes—not after-the-fact legislators with
one hand in the till and the other stroking rich criminals.
Even convicted felons
should view government and administration as benevolent entities, by and
large. Mean-spirited punishment incites
defiance; it doesn’t matter how hopeless that defiance may be. Excessive punishment glorifies the criminal
in the eyes of his community. It defeats
worthwhile outcomes.
Remember, every criminal
prosecution is another confession of collective failure. We must never view them as welcome rituals of
public vengeance and the sacrifice of criminals.
Of course, some crime
victims believe their tormentors merit severe punishment; that their
assailant’s suffering will somehow offset their own. I might come to the same conclusion under
similar circumstances. God help us
through this darkness.
The death penalty befouls
man and God, Heaven and Earth. We
conspire to execute the least fortunate, the most disturbed among us – or look
the other way in guilty silence – because we are moral cowards. If we loved one another fearlessly, we would
find better ways to live and let live, in obedience to the basic commandment of
every culture.
Murders of passion,
ignorance and insanity are a pity.
Wisdom would dictate that we preempt them through stratagems more subtle
than neglect-before-the-fact and hysterical brutality afterwards. Still, lethal self-defense might be
half-justified in worst-case scenarios. Juries might take to heart the cries
for revenge of a victim’s family.
In a society liberated
from weapon mentality, murderous violence would have the same appeal as eating
a plate of shit. No one but the
obviously insane would think of doing it, and they’d be easy targets for preemptive
identification.
However, when punishment
officials and their supporters collude to execute another prisoner, they
spatter themselves with that convict’s guilt and carve the Mark of Cain on
their own forehead. Many of them become
addicted to consecutive, legalistic murder, each new one less justified.
Tyranny’s worst and final
argument is the death penalty—in that direction lie civil war to settle mere
property disputes and the wanton slaughter of innocents to uphold paltry
principles.
In any legal confrontation,
the criminal, his victim(s) and official representatives of society (judges and
lawyers now; juries and trained mediators, soon), should merge their valid
needs into a holism. From this
agreement, pragmatic solutions may emerge.
The largest voluntary gathering of judge, jury, victims, the accused and
their intermediaries should seek to resolve these problems.
The media should portray
acts of violence as despicable, cowardly and tragic—never heroic. Rather than eliminate fictional violence, or
‘pretty it up’ and tone down its ill effects (the way it’s done today), movies
and television should worsen fictional violence until it kills off, maims and
disgraces everyone involved. Villains,
supporting actors, heroes and heroines alike: the more lovable the character,
the more senseless, purposeless and stupid his or her mutilation and
destruction should be, in portrayals of violent confrontation.
Hollywood already upholds
an implicit formula: in the end, no criminal should walk away unpunished. We should change that to read, in violence
programming, everyone dies in agony, is horribly mangled or left in total
ruin. By the movie’s end, only peaceful
onlookers should emerge from the smoking ruins with any claim to
happiness. No longer would ‘heroes’
triumph through skillful applications of violence ‘fully justified’ by lame
plot devices. No longer would lethal
violence be invoked at the drop of a hat, the moment problems became serious,
complicated and worrisome. No longer
would it ‘solve’ those problems, only aggravate them. Every antagonist in a violent confrontation
would be mangled, ruined, driven crazy or destroyed by violence shared. No more heroes except those of peace.
Under intensifying weapon
management, our country has turned into a vast prison yard. In unconscionable numbers, the law-abiding
lock themselves inside their fortified homes; outside, more and more harmless
prisoners and homeless indigents are victimized. Regardless of our guilt, innocence,
deficiencies or assets, it’ll be our turn soon enough.
A social commentator split
civil society into two worlds: open neighborhoods, and a banana republic where
the rich surround themselves with bodyguards and perimeter walls beyond which
mass poverty festers unattended.
The richest, most powerful
and freest nations are brazenly turning themselves into banana republics. We are disgraced and enslaved by failing to
defend at all costs our foremost values.
Paradoxically, the incredible wealth of our society matches its
inelegance. Nowadays, perimeter walls
and home alarms have become mandatory everywhere. My house has both: another disgrace of
mine. Too many Americans are in jail or
on probation. A black male citizen has
better odds of being crushed in judiciary clockworks than of winning at
roulette.
As peace mentality
emerges, so will our self-discipline and virtue, and refusal to accept the
unacceptable.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld