- WEAPON PATHOHISTORY 3

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1106222/13366779

LEARNER full text (2024)

PeaceWorld or death

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1106222/13381922 

APPRENTI texte integral (2024)

Le monde paisible ou la mort

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin 

- WEAPON PATHOHISTORY 3 

Human freedom is inalienable. Everyone is born, lives and dies in freedom’s cool shade. Not because it was written into some constitution, not because some government enjoyed a rare good mood this decade, or even because some Prism proclaimed, “Look, ma! I’m a freedom fighter!” Humans are whatever they wish to be. They never “earn” freedom; they are born with it — even though a few misguided power-addicts may traffic the illusion of freedom to satisfy some secondary craving for security, authority, money, drugs, “belonging”, loyalty, etc. 

Immortal freedom will not emerge from its hiding place until the fighting stops. It neither grows nor shrinks while murder goes on. Those who claim to dole out freedom, monopolize it or defend it militarily – like some horde of gold – enslave themselves and anyone who listens to them. Battle elites hide their predatory tendencies behind such paradoxical weapon myths. 

Every time this insight has emerged, weapon managers obliterated it, the way they would bait a pesky bug and squash it. Deploying with morbid consistency some combination of bread and clubs, bribery and terror, they worsen social stress. Once it has been ratcheted up to unendurable levels, long-suffering proletarians will turn to proto-elites to germinate a new political membrane that could shield them from alienating authority. 

Weapon leaders push back hard. Proletarian revolt is usually hesitant; crushing it appears to sharpen state power. History demonstrates, however, that “internal security troops” rot out. They become scavenging bullies worthless in actual combat. Thank God, or we’d all be skeletons stacked in concentration camps by now. 

Authoritarian cruelty dissolves in the light of Truth. In this it resembles water ice in the natural world.  If water ice were denser than liquid water (most other compounds are denser when solid), it would fill in the dark, cold depths permanently. Instead, miraculously, lighter ice forms on the water’s surface and melts away under the sun’s warming rays.

Allowed free reign, Wimps orchestrate political repression, civil wars and international aggression at gunpoint: a strategic mishmash that rots out entire nations. As it stands, international gangsters prowl the planet unchecked (Wagner, the corporation Xe that became the private Commando Brigade of Monsanto, and who knows how many more boutiques of death?). Armed to the teeth thanks to our taxes and exempt from effective prosecution, they have mastered all the dance steps of prodigal brutality. 

Only the trio of a one-world government, a world court and a universal militia could defend us against them. At last! Those criminals would be officially declared pariahs. Every hand would turn against them and their sponsors, whether they hid behind corporate, religious, ethnic, private or governmental titles. Learners will assign them other jobs on PeaceWorld, just as dramatic, interesting and dangerous but a lot less toxic.

In a weapon technology, info proletarians turn into individual isolates afloat in economic phantasms that transcend their understanding. The slightest misfortune slings us through a threadbare social safety net into unemployment, homelessness, squalor and crime. WeaponWorld shreds ageless extended family structures and thousand-year habits of homegrown subsistence. It sunders meaningful relationships between individuals and friends, family and peers — even “belonging” to the land itself. It makes us abandon firmly held beliefs and turns us into credophobes too anxious to trust anything beyond the corporate norm. 

Families are fractured into bare “nuclear” minimums — then even more isolated ones: single parenthood, bastardy, institutional fosterage, runaway homelessness and roguish isolation. Almost all the nations and tribes to which we owe natural allegiance are forbidden to us. Alone, helpless and cast adrift in a strictly mercantile world otherwise hostile, info proletarians abandon their traditions, culture, autonomy, faith and hope. 

These sacrifices satisfy corporate magnates, agro-monopolists, vicious absentee landlords and showboat, megabuck project managers who gobble up private freeholds and businesses to satisfy their insatiable portfolio demands. The only tribe on Earth that remains legitimate is the global one of the rich. 

Any interest rate above 5% is usury that induces someone’s unnecessary suffering — however well hidden. International and local bureaucrats compound this tragedy in return for a steady paycheck. Meanwhile, slums and prisons, mass graves and waste lands spread across the planet.

All of this would be formally prohibited on PeaceWorld. Managers of that kind will be replaced by worthy public servants.

If individual isolates become ensnared in unjust laws, so much the better for the powers that be! Each new injustice gives weapon managers another hold on their lives. Once our personal despair and self-loathing are complete, we become useful cogs in the war machine. We mistrust all and sundry except our own weapon managers and their life-and-death manipulations. Even if we realize that they are hopeless creeps and, in rare cases, that we’ve become too scared to believe in anything else, we go along with their scams anyway.

Learner peace technicians will challenge all this and reverse it. With full public approval, they will sponsor economic interdependence, mutual interests, common politics, reverence for the intimacies of extended family life and the gentle despotism of communal living. They will cocoon everyone in a complex web of personal obligations and rewards; encourage personal self-expression, public health and everyone’s personal withdrawal from misery. 

Compare the number of Olympic competitors each year with that of spectators and employees impassioned by this spectacle. Most soldiers do not return to the firing line because they want to murder the enemy but because they love their brothers in arms and will face death and worse shoulder to shoulder with them. Almost everywhere with almost everyone, cooperation beats competition.

The problem has always been how to coordinate government’s clumsy methods of control with the lowest-common-denominator understanding of the masses. The old solution was to swat gnats with sledgehammers never heavy enough (nowadays, the NSA). “Obey or we’ll hurt you.” The new one will rely on a delicate balance between thoughtful government and personal comprehension as expansive as possible. This relationship will evolve from the whip-crack of unworkable, forced obedience, into enlightened cooperation much less problematic and more productive. 

In defiance of five thousand years of cultural history, these social kinship groups will take self-conscious steps to promote peace and forbid war. Admission into them will be cheap or free and peaceful departure from them easy. 

In a Learner future, most sociopaths won’t suffer enough neglect and ostracism to act out their aggression. Imbued with the fundamentals of peace, our societies will leave far fewer sociopaths untreated and remove from positions of authority the cleverest among them. 

Sexual predators will be identified and treated long before they corrupt the next batch of helpless youngsters. Power-mad sociopaths will be coaxed with therapeutic theatrics, taught the value of selflessness and drugged if necessary into serene complacency. Most diseased individuals of this kind will be identified early (preferably before birth) and carefully nurtured for the rest of their life. Thus they will cease to threaten us so frequently and with such mechanically monstrous affect. 

Those therapies will become the topic of passion of gifted Learners of psychiatry. Once stoicism, televised passivity and social invisibility stop being normalized – if only because our clumsy communities cannot handle anything more complex – psychoshamanic seekers will develop drugs, therapies and novel religious rituals to reconnect emotionally sick people with their feelings. At that point, what remains of violence will become a public health problem: a regrettable epidemic to be addressed one-on-one and institution-into-instrument. 

We could drastically reduce the worst fallout of human violence in one generation. The sins of our fathers may have revisited us unto the seventy-seventh generation, but the promise of redemption through love is ours to fulfill today. It is a sacred obligation we neglect at our peril. Learners will buy off, monitor and predict most acts of violence both personal and collective. They will mitigate the worst consequences of crime whenever, wherever and in whatever way it evades their control.

The following quotation includes another weapon myth and its clarification. 

“Our Western vision of society — as a Hobbesian contract, [author’s note: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan], consciously entered into primarily to ensure harmony, offers no way of explaining the existence of family bonds, of lifelong friendships, of the sense of cultural membership afforded by shared language, and a thousand other precious things. Indeed, it totally misses and even denies the deepest requirement that characterizes our species – the need for social identity. Hobbes’ notion that without society, humans would be at each other’s throats in a grand free-for-all is totally right, but for completely the wrong reasons. He assumed that isolated human beings “in a state of nature” would naturally destroy one another because their supposedly innate competitive drives would lead them to do so. What Hobbes failed to realize – and many still do today – is that humans evolved with a desire to belong, not to compete. Biologically, we are obligatory social animals, wholly dependent on a supportive social structure; and it is in the absence of such a support system that destructive, ‘inhuman’ behaviors occur.” Mary E. Clark, “Meaningful Social Bonding as a Human Need,” in Conflict: Human Needs Theory, John Burton, ed., Macmillan, Ltd., London, 1990, p. 40. (Italics mine).

I will take the argument one step further. Our destructive behaviors do not so much stem from lack of humane support systems, as from dominant weapon mentality sermonizing the creed of sociopathy by, for, and against everyone. 

If monsters emerge when our social conventions begin to fray, guardian angels may take their place once we renew our social bonds. 

The Hobbesian caricature of humans as calculating beasts at war with one another only emerges once we abandon the habits of nurturance and cultural accommodation our sanity requires. Hobbes’ obscene pantomime occurred to him during the Enclosure Movement when British info elites ejected peasants from the countryside and cast them into urban hells to provide Queen Victoria with cheap riflemen, seamen, whores and industrial laborers. 

We subscribe to the same errors, wreak havoc worldwide, suffer countless failures … and then wonder (very briefly) what went wrong? 

Instead, we should assemble in a Learner Commonwealth and put all this misery behind us.

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COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net