SUMMARY OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
“Liberty, in the
Jeffersonian sense, cannot survive a continual packing-in of people. If our numbers continue to rise on a resource
base that expands but little, the future inevitably holds ever-greater
restrictions on individual freedom. Our
descendants will not be able to live as we live and our free American and
European ways of doing things will seem like poems of the past. Liberty will fall progressively as the
numbers rise, and obedient compliance with the majority must take the place of individual
initiative. Perhaps some politician
cleverer than the rest will arrange this necessary peaceful compliance and call
it “free.” Paul Colinvaux, The Fates of Nations: A Biological Theory of
History, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1980, p. 349.
We should take to heart this forgotten truth: children are the most promising recipients of mass worship. This may surprise you, but raising a healthy child (or not hindering that child’s development) may be the ultimate worldly sacrament. Every baby should be a gift from heaven, not:
· wish fulfillment;
· compensation for loneliness and neglect;
· a desperate shot at immortality;
· submission to family and state pressures;
· an outlet for childhood torments;
· mass produced cannon fodder;
· the inarticulate expression of maternity or virility;
· mucilage for a shaky marriage;
· a blend of medical virtuosity and misplaced longing. (Grandmothers carrying their grandchildren to term—does this planet not produce enough orphans?);
· a biological old-age pension, (“God’s own Social Security” as one fundamentalist put it—he was dead serious);
· the only permissible outcome of sex; or
· the legislated outcome of unwanted pregnancy.
Throughout history, irresponsible people were favored to breed. In Medieval Europe and elsewhere, such arrangements were clear-cut. Those with more brains (both men and women) were set aside for religious celibacy, while titled bullies and peasant brutes (mostly illiterate) were tapped for militant fertility.
Nowadays in Germany and elsewhere, many studious and hard-working women lack the time and assistance to have children while they fulfill their professional ambitions. Motherhood seems to be more likely for those who have their first children before they’ve finished High School. Learners will provide day-care and financial assistance for professionals who take time off to have and raise children, and concentrated education for teenage moms.
Earlier on, creative minds were sucked into the first cities. In towns, filthy turmoil and overcrowding ensured higher mortality and lower birth rates, on average, than in the countryside. Country peasants and their fertile progeny took their chances with periodic famine, higher child mortality, military banditry and terminal boredom.
Generally speaking, the smarter the creature, the less likely it will breed under adverse conditions. Captive animals refuse to breed under constraints of excessive noise, malnutrition and overcrowding that do not allow them to raise healthy cubs. High stress induces physiochemical imbalances in the reproductive cycle of neurologically gifted species; it causes sterility, stillbirth, infant mortality and perhaps the likelihood of mutants, sociopaths and sexually deviant offspring; it lowers their immunity and increases their vulnerability. The pathetic history of humanity reflects this sterilizing level of stress―at least for those smart enough to notice it.
The human genotype seems tough enough to churn out relatively smart beings on average. There’s no telling how much smarter our ancestors were, compared to us. Are we breeding ourselves for stupidity as well as aggression? The two traits tend to merge, don’t you think?
Will humanity cancel eons of true-bred survivability during a few thousand years of liquor-sodden weapon management? Fragments of ancient literature offer few clues as to which Age – Past or Present – could be considered mentally superior. The suppression of sacred wonder is a dependable sign of modern senescence, as are the growing ills of our weapon technologies.
If we avoid restricting human genotypes to a few idealized clones – the way we have managed, so insanely, with our crops and livestock – genetic diversity should sire a relatively dependable bell-curve of intellect, worthy of greater expectations.
Differences between human ‘races’ are rather like those between two automobiles of the same make and model, but sporting different paint jobs and option packages. Some weapon mentors claim they’ve uncovered racial differences more significant than those caused by obvious environmental variables: pollution, starvation, cultural isolation, etc. Repeated attempts to document these claims have failed, despite elaborate methodologies and lavish financial support from bigot weapons elites.
Any group of humans that deviated noticeably from humanity’s norm would be ejected or reabsorbed by it. It would either displace lesser humans through superior adaptability, or disappear through incompetence, monstrosity and genocide.
Human sexuality has blended the genetic milkshake far more briskly than we care to admit. Whether by commerce and marriage or warfare and rape, human lineages have been vehemently and enthusiastically merged. Today, racial purebloods are statistical freaks and geographic anomalies; ‘racial purity’ is more a function of self-delusion than of DNA.
Any self-respecting farmer will tell you that crossbreeds are stronger. The more grand and longstanding the pure 'nobility of blood,' the smaller the genetic pool it can draw from, the weaker and dumber its offspring: vulnerable to all but optimal circumstances. Weeds thrive because of their genetic freedom, despite adverse conditions.
Learners will find little interest in ‘improving’ human eugenics. Natural diversity and freedom of choice should be promoted within a flowering of good conscience and vedic architecture. Anything less would be slow-mo suicide.
Quite often in the past, fanatical bigots have jumped into an abyss of psychosexual pathology and killed off entire peoples merely because of “wrong blood” and different habits. Fortunately, those who have tried this stunt in the past have allied the whole world, horrified, against them. Their executions earned them execution and nothing more. “Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place; for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” Matthew 26:52, the Bible. Many have tried this stunt in the past, and many more would like to try it again. It’s a free world, after all.
Hitler and his wacko buddies have demonstrated this Prism pathology quite aptly.
“Aryan tribes, often almost ridiculously small in number, subjugated
foreign peoples and, stimulated by the conditions of life which their new
country offered them (fertility, the nature of the climate, etc.), and
profiting also from the abundance of manual labor furnished them by the
inferior race, developed intellectual and organizing faculties which had
hitherto been dormant in these conquering tribes. Within the course of a few thousand years, or
even centuries, they gave life to cultures whose primitive traits completely
corresponded to the character of the founders, though modified by adaptation to
the peculiarities of the soil and the characteristics of the subjugated people. But finally the conquering race offended
against the principles which they first had observed, namely, the maintenance
of their racial stock unmixed, and they began to intermingle with the
subjugated people. Thus, they put an end
to their own separate existence; for the original sin committed in Paradise has
always been followed by the expulsion of the guilty parties.
“After a thousand
years or more the last visible traces of those former masters may then be found
in a lighter tint of the skin which the Aryan blood had bequeathed to the
subjugated race, and in a fossilized culture of which those Aryans had been the
original creators. For just as the blood
of the conqueror, who was a conqueror not only in body but also in spirit, got
submerged in the blood of the subject race, so the substance disappeared out of
which the torch of human culture and progress was kindled. In so far as the blood of the former ruling
race has left a light nuance of color in the blood of its descendants, as a
token and a memory, the night of cultural life is rendered less dim and dark by
a mild light radiated from the products of those who were the bearers of the
original fire. Their radiance shines
across the barbarism to which the subjected race has reverted and might often
lead the superficial observer to believe that he sees before him an image of
the present race when he is really looking into a mirror wherein only the past
is reflected.
“It may happen that
in the course of its history such a people will come into contact a second
time, and even oftener, with the original founders of their culture and may not
even remember that distant association.
Instinctively the remnants of blood left from that old ruling race will
be drawn towards this new phenomenon and what had formerly been possible only
under compulsion can now be successfully achieved in a voluntary way. A new cultural wave flows in and lasts until
the blood of its standard-bearers becomes once again adulterated by
intermixture with the originally conquered race.
“It will be the task
of those who set themselves to the study of a universal history of civilization
to investigate history from this point of view instead of allowing themselves
to be smothered under the mass of external data, as is only too often the case
with our present historical science.”
Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf,
Vol. II, Chapter 6.
Take your local bigots (please!). Replace the designation “Aryan” with that of their favorite race (their own). Replace the flowery palaver above with talk rendered incoherent by rage and ignorance. You've heard something like this from people like them in your own hometown. It doesn’t matter where those bigots come from, what language they speak or what they look like. Their famous blood nobility is just a manifestation of the reptilian limbic system we have inherited.
No one dogma or genotype is entirely satisfactory under all circumstances and from every point of view. The pursuit of happiness is everyone’s personal responsibility; it cannot be controlled from the outside in a realistic or effective manner. The best that government can offer, is to accelerate our withdrawal from misery. Eugenic ‘improvement’ will hold no interest for Learners. The industrial stench of the world’s human overburden proves how well adapted we are to it.
Average birthrates have fallen somewhat in developed nations. Unfortunately, each First World child consumes more resources and produces more garbage than dozens of poorer children from less industrialized nations. Thus, when a rich couple conceives another child, it actually spawns many consumer-equivalents. "Lower, more praiseworthy" First World birth rates represent a surge in overconsumption and waste. Compared to it, the higher birth rates of the Third World are equal or lesser burdens.
There is no good reason to worsen this traffic jam—whether in the First or the Third World. Chinese couples submit to a birth limitation of one child. This text suggests going well beyond this limit.
It may come to pass, in the future, that more and more liberties will become available to us and routine, to an extent we today would consider anarchic and unmanageable. Only one sphere of human activity will have to be regulated very strictly, the one we’ve left uncontrolled all this time: having and raising babies. Of course, this suggestion will lead to outcries of heresy, blasphemy and outrage.
The moment these rules are adopted, a thriving criminal syndic will see to it that the worst crimes imaginable fester in underground markets of illegal human childbirth, cloning and enslavement—driven by the strongest and darkest of human compulsions. Compared to it, the American Prohibition would seem like an irritating quarrel at a county fair.
Show me a real alternative and I would gladly drop this topic like a red-hot brick. Government regulation would be mandatory – whatever nightmare world that implied – because those smart enough to comply would be worthy to have children, and many of the rebellious, less so.
It would be best if we had turned this argument into a matter of morality and guilt feelings, gradually and after complex philosophical discussions stretching out for years and decades. Too bad we are out of time. Impassioned discussion, however brief, of these issues might be a good start for everyone. Their peaceful articulation might promote enough consensus to institute them voluntarily and better manage their negative fallouts.
What follows is written categorically. It remains to be seen if we could adopt it in this uncompromising manner, given enough time. In the meantime, these principles should be applied with much less dogmatism, only as much as possible, in absolute peace, in incremental steps and after bitter debate. The centuries we should have taken to reasoned them through to everyone’s satisfaction, have condensed into itty-bitty months.
How mightily our collective madness has been confirmed! How decisively Learner genius will have to prevail, to assure subsequent survival.
Everyone should be sterilized reversibly at puberty, as a rite of passage into adulthood and its privileges and obligations. This might involve supervised drug dosages or reversible minor surgery.
We issue uncounted licenses to drive, to practice law, to go fishing and for a thousand other deeds. Unfortunately, there is no supply or demand for advanced training to raise a healthy child. No-one bothers to note the fact that raising a child is a far graver responsibility and more vital obligation.
Those who insist on having children should undergo thorough training in childcare, internships serving the elderly and disabled, and in-depth psychological testing; they should take religious vows to care for children as a lifetime priority. Each graduate’s fertility would then be restored for one full-term pregnancy. Every newborn child would join an extended family of natural and surrogate parents both fertile and sterile.
No adult should have to endure single-handed the strenuous job of childcare, and no ‘difficult’ child should be left in the hands of impatient, hostile and indifferent biological parents: the recipe for many more adult criminals and warriors. Children should be taught socialization skills by the best role models we can recruit and by age-peers just as well treated. Learners will not tolerate child abuse in any form: accidental, institutional or criminal. There will be far fewer ‘regrettable’ exceptions that current societies mass-produce.
This childbearing priesthood would invite talented amateurs to join them, temporarily or permanently, on a full- or part-time basis. Such communities will require the same financial support we lavish on the military today. They would benefit from generous allotments of life support necessities, special services and full-time salaries. Couples bearing more than the one child would hand over additional offspring to these extended family groups, if necessary; safe havens for orphans, runaways and other young victims of abuse.
This text advocates these extreme measures for four reasons:
1. We need to reverse humanity’s historic selection for fertility and aggression.
2. Every child should grow up in a loving and permissive environment, the best one we can arrange, where minimal punishments are based on guilt and not brutality.
3. Note: guilt, not shame. Guilt is inner directed, it promotes empathy for victims, and leads to repentance and an urge to make reparation. Shame is impersonal and objectifying; it blames someone else and turns the self into a victim; it promotes more rage and violence. With a few exceptions, history’s shadists, tormentors and criminals – both petty and imperial – grew up as children abused by violence and humiliation. Interestingly, so did many great Learners, guilty-driven despite this abuse.
4. We need to shrink the human population to a fraction of its useless bulk, quickly, voluntarily and non-violently. The fastest way to do this would be to halve birth rates immediately worldwide and then halve them again several times within the next few decades, inducing a net decline of every human population.
5. Are you still awake?
It might seem that such stern measures are only necessary to reduce the enormous human overburden we face today. There are seven billion of us, soon to mass up to ten billion: a quite deep footprint for planet Earth. The superheavy footprint of a certain species invites world disaster; a lighter one, more flexibility. But this is not the only reason. It is not so much the mass of people that brings harm to the Earth today, as the shoddy quality of our thought and culture, and the waste of energy per capita that entails.
Nature may take on the chore of cutting our numbers down to acceptable numbers, at the cost of enormous pain from the unforeseen consequences of corporate greed and consequent mass-casualty catastrophes. The above-listed measures would still be worth adopting, even if humanity were hammered flat to a few fertile couples, (the way world-dominant species have been in the past—after their footprint grew too weighty for the world ecology to bear, but rarely before). We should broadcast them, if only to ensure that our rare replacements never repeat the same mistakes as ours, during future, prolific generations.
According to Richard Chatwin, in The Anatomy of Restlessness, our constitutional freedoms were built into the lifestyle of ancient hunter-gatherers, mainly because primal mothers and their relatives carried infants everywhere they went for the first five years of each baby’s life.
On the island of Bali, for example, it is bad luck for an infant’s feet to touch the ground while relatives remain awake. All other things being equal, prolonged touching and mobile perspectives from adult height would improve the neurological development of infants. Healthy communities of healthy adults raising healthy children would promote the freedoms we cherish most.
It was only with the Plant Trap – and the hyper-fertility, wife abuse and child neglect that could no longer be avoided – that our social problems began to fester in earnest.
If children were as rare as diamonds, we would treat them royally, as is their due. Because they are as common as dirt, we abuse and neglect far too many of them. It is not surprising that so many survivors of this abuse and neglect grow up to be treacherous and/or sickly adults.
“Irrational nature selects wastefully and with the maximum of pain and
misery, requiring innumerable individuals to be born in order that they may
struggle and perish. Rational humanity
would economize and humanize this struggle by substituting a rational, social
test of parenthood for the destruction of children by starvation, disease or
weakness.
“To prevent
reproduction from bad stock, however difficult and dangerous it may be, is
obviously the first duty of an organized society, acting alike in its own
self-defense and for the interests of its individual members. It is not necessary for the safety and
progress of society that ‘unfit’ children should die, it is necessary that they
should not be born, and ultimately the society which prospers most in the
character of its members will be the one which best fulfills this preventive
duty.” From J.A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study, George Allen &
Unwin Ltd., London, 1948, pp. 163-164.
Humanity has soaked in criminal neglect for far too long—so long that we face the decisions of a desperate surgeon. Fully fifty years ago, humanity needed to get its teeth cleaned. Forty-some years ago, after hearing that painful, restorative procedures would be necessary, we opted to do nothing but bemoan expenses and pain. Thirty years ago, several teeth badly needed to be filled. Once again, we let nothing happen. Twenty years ago, again nothing, despite our obvious suffering. Ten years ago, some rotten teeth needed to be pulled. Still nothing.
Nowadays, open skull surgery is the only alternative that may halt the spread of brain poisoning. There is no time left to whine and dine in pathetic indecision: what humanity appears to do best.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld