World War COVID Guerre mondiale: From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld; Learner, begin... De la terre en armes au monde paisible ; Apprenti, débute
We live on WeaponWorld. Why not PeaceWorld? How would that work? What should we expect? Has that transition been discussed to your satisfaction, or was it suppressed?
I'm slopping a ladle full of forbidden PeaceWorld Mulligan Stew onto your WeaponWorld prison zinc tray. Next!
Nous habitons la terre en armes. Pourquoi pas au monde paisible ? Comment cela marcherait-il ? Cette transition t'a-t-elle été discutée de façon satisfaisante ou supprimée ?
Je te verse une louchée interdite de Ragout Mulligan du monde paisible sur ton zinc pénitentiaire de la terre en armes. Au suivant !
World War COVID Guerre mondiale: From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld; Learner, begin... De la terre en armes au monde paisible ; Apprenti, débute
WORLD WAR COVID full text 2024 (no audio)
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https://www.buzzsprout.com/1106222/
LEARNER full text (2024) and chapters
All or nothing, PeaceWorld or death
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1106222/
APPRENTI texte integral (2024) et chapitres
Tout ou rien, Le monde paisible ou la mort
WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin
2024, mark mulligan
Contents
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld. 1
- TABLE OF CONTENTS linked and summarized - pick your passion 54
- REPLACE THE SOCIOPATHS, asabiya's dark side -110
- MINE FART QUOTING HITLER OUT OF CONTEXT -129
- SURVIVAL OF THE DEADLIEST -147
- HEAVEN AND HELL, ON EARTH -247
- THE SOCIAL CONTRACT, BY JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -277
- BURNING LIBRARIES (BCE) -377
- KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS -722
- WHAT I THINK OF YOUR RAPTURE, PAL -727
- SUNKEN EDUCATION, FLOATING ARMCHAIR.. 852
- DEMOS: LAOCRACY OR PATHOCRACY –. 901
- ANCIENT ABUNDANCE & LITTLE GREEN MEN -997
- THE COLLECTIVE SUPERCONSCIENCE -1083
- CATHARI, the Corner Stone Rejected -1102
- HYPOTHETICAL CONSOLAMENTUM -1127
- ODE TO TRUTH AND NON-VIOLENCE -1162
SECTION 3 – WHAT TO EXPECT. 1174
- DOCTORS WITHIN BORDERS -1224
- DOCTORS WITHIN BORDERS –. 1240
- CONSTITUTIONAL ECOLOGY? –. 1267
- YOUR RIGHTS OR THEIR PRIVILEGE –. 1301
- STOP VOMITING IN THE SALAD BAR –. 1317
- PEACE ON EARTH, AND GOODWILL –. 1376
- IT IS NEVER TOO LATE FOR GLORY –. 1425
- DEDICATION
To Maman, who advised simplicity
And Dad, fearless knight beyond reproach …
To our libraries and their quest to appease the Hunger.
Those brave soup kitchens soon banquet halls of Learning,
Porticos to the Agora of PeaceWorld.
I submit this work to the verdict of Ganesh.
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS –
The quest for Learner has led me from one oasis of fellowship to the next, across a Tartar steppe of blazing solitude. At each way station, tenders of support from a handful of friends revived me somewhat before my scorching, dismal trek resumed.
In The Language Instinct, Peter Pinker says he never met anyone bored by his topic of passion. I cannot admit as much. Passive indifference begot lively antagonism when I interrupted routine patter with Learner’s discontent.
I am a genius at stirring ire. I recite the same truth to absolute power and to feeble apathy, defying each in turn. Sexual harassment would not have triggered such bitter confrontations. My wife Linda suggested it was not so much what I said that bought me trouble, but how I said it. That may well be. This work would never have come to light without her heartfelt support, if at times bemused. Ah, my beloved manuscript widow!
I’m proud of my family and friends: Learner role models all. Many more people furthered this work in their own way, even if without a clue.
I owe special thanks to foreign volunteers and kibbutznikim (Israeli collective farmers) from Kibbutzim Evron and Dorot, as well as to our Palestinian hosts whose birthright is Peace. To distant ancestors of those ancient domains: Hominids, Pagans, Jews, Christians, Muslims and those in between: the ultimate survivors of the Wrath of God.
PeaceWorld Learners, rally here!
I’ve been shown many gifts: Plutarch’s passion, Voltaire’s star-field clarity, Ursula Le Guinn’s The Dispossessed, John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, the Dupuy Brothers’ Encyclopedia of Military History, Carroll Quigley’s Weapon Systems & Political Stability, and Mortimer Adler’s How to Think about War and Peace.
My thanks to Lewis Dartnell for his book, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch, The Penguin Press, New York, NY, 2014. An elegant, compact work filled with hope and desperation, packed with solid instructions. A must-read for thoughtful Learners, notwithstanding, my categorical veto of his counsel at the end of the Learner chapter “Is Ecology Constitutional?”
I used to draw sanity supplements from The Nation magazine, but had to give it up eventually, due to its galling rejection of my project and other calls for transformation. Like other “liberals and progressives” its editors whine endlessly about things they refuse to change. They and their peers producing The Progressive, Dissent, Z, Harpers, Utne Reader, Mother Jones and other periodicals, who dare call themselves Leftist or Progressive despite their stuffy, middle-of-the-road fainéantise (faynayonteez, “best do nothing attitude”). As things get worse, they whine louder about more and more tragedies and scandals, while more and more horror-struck subscribers pay them more to whine. Yay! If there were any significant improvement, their “don’t-touch-it!” critique would go out of business. In the final analysis, the union of meddlesome meliorists and atomistic progressives only note in passing the worst mayhem.
There are only two political parties in the USA: one Conservative and the other Reactionary: Democrats who haven’t had a good idea in six decades or adopted anyone else’s in three, and Republicans who never met a bad idea they didn’t love. Bad ones the Democrats never resist effectively, as if by black magic or some veiled urge (well-funded) to see Republican projects succeed with their anonymous help. We’re caught between these two packs of political mercenaries: kleptocrats and hypocrites. Take your pick.
The major difference between them is this: Democrats can’t tell the difference between good policies and bad ones, while Republicans, between bad policies and illegal ones. Bipartisanship is achieved when they agree on policies akimbo between bad and illegal.
The editorial formula of The Nation (assuming there is one; it is carefully masked) entails fumbling the initiative to the reactionaries. Handing it over, rather. Our political quagmire confirms this conclusion. So-called Progressives are more to blame for the sewage backflow of American politics than the reactionaries themselves. We could easily dismiss those stupid, stupid reactionaries; but the subtle monopoly and sabotage of progressive ideals by “liberal leadership” is a paralytic of fearsome potency.
With such friends, who needs enemies?
Many people and publications have confirmed one or more of my conclusions, even if they never understood the subtext of their words, motives and deeds.
The natural world has shown me many heart-breaking wonders. Each new revelation confirmed our entitlement to abundance and justice in peace ― from the God of Love, the Comforter Jesus promised us pending His return. Could that have been Mohammed?
Until we come up with PeaceWorld, current events offer us nothing more appealing than the next psychopath in line who claims imminent leadership.
I am grateful to Govind Naidu, Professor of Political Science at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. The Post Office fluttered on his desk my unsolicited little manuscript. His thought-provoking reply galvanized this odd quest of mine. After one ephemeral phone call, I settled for his unique inspiration.
I owe undying thanks to Ted Fagin: affable neighbor, gentleman gambler, anarchist, bibliophile and Dog Soldier: the mentor I prayed for and now grieve. Cheerily, he set aside his terminal affliction and grave misgivings about the content of my book, to mentor me English. Thanks also to my sister Leslie who landscaped the prose after Ted had undertaken its civil engineering, to Karen for calling me outside my comfort zone, and to Jill’s passion for fairness.
My best adult friends, Doug Dean and Paul Lackman, plowed through rough drafts of this text and offered many more suggestions than my few attributions to them suggest ― Doug, from first drafts until his regretted demise such a long time ago, and Paul more recently.
Thanks anyway to swarms of thugs, hooligans, hypocrites and fascists (flaming, blaming or crypto-), for whom:
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
It doesn’t matter if they donned battledress or class-A drag, institutional silks or the rags of dissent, TV makeup or the ashes of mourning? We are all naked monkeys underneath. Their stupid meanness, raised to new heights of genius, shot my rancor to new depths of loathing. Without the awful fecundity of their malice (the best fed topic of passion on WeaponWorld), I’d never have found enough outrage to monkey wrench this project.
I owe a great debt of gratitude to the kind souls at the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights (OCR) Seattle, for whom I’d worked so long; and earlier, to the staff of the Damage Assessment Branch, US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), also in Seattle. A less distracted clerk would have served them better, but they found work arounds for my Learner daydreams.
The ideas presented here are my own and do not reflect the policies of the U.S. government, of NOAA or of the Department of Education. Were that they could…
The AltaVista Babelfish online translation service let me turn my impossible dream of translating Learner into French, into an entertaining if challenging impracticality. It translated my Keyword page into a dozen language pages. Likewise, Google Translation for Arabic, Farsi and Indonesian versions. In addition, I thank Microsoft, Inc., and its Bowne Global Service auxiliary for useful if cranky online translation services in the Word 2000 package. To http://www.wordreference.com/fr/index.htm, where I found French translations I could not think up, and http://www.touchon.net/annuaire-site-plans-dictionnaires.php for synonyms in French. Also Médiadico and, finally, http://www.linguee.fr/, the most useful automated phrase translation service I found.
Even in those that translate entire texts, their end-quality was at best dubious. We are nitwits at coming together in peace. Much work remains to be done.
I must also thank Mamiehiou. Her grammar page at http://mamiehiou.over-blog.com/article-verbes-qui-se-construisent-avec-a-infinitif-ou-de-infinitif-86346139.html taught me which French prepositions go where: a hard thing to keep track of in French, like their genders I will never learn in this lifetime..
Learner scorns entrepreneurial software companies. Such services should be consolidated into a public utilities renowned for their consistency, free use, effortlessness and reliable security, making use of WANG word processing as one of many free Learner Agora services.
Ancient Rome had good fountain water flowing for free in unlimited quantities in every neighborhood; PeaceWorld will require that good data flows freely in unlimited quantities throughout the human biofilm.
In the meantime, Mr. Bill Gates, thank you for easing my burden in many instances and complicating it tremendously in others (Styles, really?).
Thanks also to Jean Bacon and son, whose book Les Saigneurs de la Guerre and translation The Greater Glory lit my way through the catacombs of WeaponWorld. To the others listed in my Bibliography, whose stepping-stones across the crimson quagmire of WeaponWorld led me to the shaded groves of PeaceWorld.
To the lovely Esmeralda Arana, whom I never met, the author of The Path: A Practical Approach to Sorcery. She gave me a kick at just the right time, if only in a direction unforeseen.
Few ideas herein are solely mine. Most of Learner’s recommendations unfold as a natural part of the Tao, as reactionary arrogance collapses from its own contradictions.
Mine the errors contained herein. Please address your concern to me. I welcome your corrections and thank you for them. My feeble wit is not up to the task; that’s obvious. The shared understanding of the world’s Learners may suffice, once assembled in the PeaceWorld Agora. That is my hope.
Thanks finally to the poets.
- PREFACE -
If every Learner on WeaponWorld cast off misgivings
And worked to the same plan, we could build PeaceWorld in one generation.
FIRST THINGS FIRST, PEACEWORLD FIRST!
Many good ideas have been stolen from us and thrown away. This rather long book gathers them up. I would rather multi-media specialists had adorned it with images as handsome as stained glass, (like the beautiful ones in the Reader’s Digest Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary) and a soundtrack of minus zero Kelvin adagios to match, also an animated video, Learner, begin. Ah, well, projects beyond my talent for lack of adequate help. Where did all my spontaneous Learner assistants disappear?
From your favorite book, to the Bill of Rights, to a Space Shuttle Service Manual, a text won’t take wing until many people make it their own. Until then, it is just a string of empty symbols and they, a huddle of dreamers. Whether to launch liberty, liftoff – or PeaceWorld, for that matter – many people must study the same basic text, give voice to it and make it happen.
No text is perfect; so you’ll have to sift through mounds of raw ore to come across nuggets worth showing off to your friends, such that they join the cause.
Here, I may be encouraging your reading chore, or mine of endless rewrites.
A revolutionary text is like a new tool. At first, it will seem to fall short in your virgin mind, the way an unwieldy tool might fail in your novice hands. Only meticulous examination will make it work for you. Be patient. I assure you; your patience will be rewarded. You Learners I’ve waited for so impatiently, here is what you so patiently awaited.
Those who crave PeaceWorld more than fear it must rally ‘round a central text. This one, or another? I’ve found no other like it. Learner may just be the posthumous draft of some better scheme, or a mere sketch for ambivalent dissidents to ignore to death. I hope that's not the case.
To draw something big from Learner, we will have to familiarize ourselves with its tenets by debating them. For or against in majority, no matter; sharing the same ideals and vocabulary, that matters. Until such time, we’re just miming futile daydreams to each other.
Look around you. The world sickens worse every day. It lacks the healing balm of untold voices preaching PeaceWorld and their shared effort to make it happen.
Don’t hear Learner with your inner voice alone, but with the massed roar of allied Learners. Without their input, this text is moot, no matter what message it intends to convey. With their help, the ideals of PeaceWorld will evolve from wishful thinking into down-to-earth common sense. The creative anarchy of Learners will have to overcome the sterile cowardice of current institutions.
I sent this message to you on the Internet, the way Erasmus used the shiny new printing press to transmit his. Learner idealist, I’m letting you echo my dream, the way Erasmus used Middle Age humanists to proclaim his.
What I ask from my brilliant readers overseas, is that you find a favorite chapter of Learner, translate it into your mother tongue, broadcast it on the Internet for free, and tell me about it. You and I have prepared for this task all our lives.
I did not write this text, nor did you seek it, just to stoke the WeaponWorld Jive Drive, distract you from your Learner responsibilities, and reassure you that weapons elites should make every vital decision without your input. That has never been sane policy. Learners will include everyone’s valid input, naturally.
The secret formula for PeaceWorld? All those on Earth, elites and proletarians alike endowed with a healthy moral conscience, must cooperate as Learners to put an end to the chaos international cliques of psychopath warmongers have stirred up among us since history began, and reward them more for peace from now on, than for war.
In pursuit of why not, how, and what to expect from PeaceWorld, Learners, rally here!
- SUMMARY OF LEARNER -
Some political theories have attempted to “fix everything” but almost never managed to and only momentarily in those rare cases.
Why?
If a good mechanic was tasked to fix a machine that had broken down for thousands of years, “How do I fix this?” would not be the first question he would ask. After all, former mechanics had asked that question and answered it as best they could, all for naught. Otherwise, we would not be here trying to fix it again. It would work fine already.
No, the first questions to ask would be:
· Why did the machine break?
· How did it break?
· Who broke it?
If it broke because forces beyond its endurance were applied to it, then it would not matter the parts replaced, it would break again where it broke before or at another weak link. If it broke because those who should have tended it, abused it in favor of their special interests, then again, it would not matter what parts were replaced. If it was used for purposes other than those intended; again, no matter.
Answer those questions to your satisfaction and you might find a lasting fix; otherwise, no way. All three questions would have to be resolved before addressing the fourth: “How do I fix this?”
Despite thousands of years of babble by reductionist meliorists on “How to fix” government (Plato, Machiavelli and Marx come to mind; as does the next tank-top online troll of the Chinese Gov’t/neoKGB/Koch brothers’ Repugnant variety), Learner poses those three primary questions so that its readers may follow its lead and make a better job of it. Unlike those knee jerk parts replacers, we might construct good government once and for all.
I sent away for a free copy of the Bible in French (www.bibles.ch). The Bible must be a wellspring of literary style and inspiration for the cultures that adopt it; like the Koran (Qran) for Muslim cultures, the Vedas for Hindus and other texts for other denominations. Since I had not read the Bible in French up ‘til then, (nor the Qran in what I’ve been told is its purest Arabic; nor, alas, the life of Buddha nor the Gita in Pali or Sanskrit …), it seemed my rusty French might benefit. I must admit I never found a version of the Bible written in French as melodious as the King James Version in English.
As long as we recognize how little we know compared to what we don’t, and as long as we can catch a whiff of garlic simmering (per J.G. Ballard), everything will turn out fine.
My request earned me this answer.
“What did you intend to write?”
I replied something like this (revised many times since).
It’s hard for me to weave a welcome mat for Learner, begin. So many ideas in so few words!
I foresee a new world, soon to be provided with the following.
· One duly elected World Mayor’s Office, with its Administrative Council duly elected from grass roots widespread and deep. Note my italics: no Big Brother need apply. It will be our civic duty and private pleasure to replace them with worthy tribal leaders.
· One vigilant and humane Judiciary controlled by randomly selected juries.
· An expert Police Force: the best warriors on Earth, handpicked to uphold the peace.
They would govern this planet all by themselves, the way our best cities are run: exclusively with one police force, one judiciary and one mayor’s office.
This planet looks more like Mogadishu on a Bad Day:
· two hundred cruel, ego-freak gang lords trumping each other at the expense of the anthrosphere;
· two hundred councils of senile elders acting at cross purposes from restricted politics, at the expense of their little corner of the city/planet; and
· two hundred gangs of street corner idlers coached by grizzled old murderers to play bloody War with AK-74s, M-4s and worse.
Nowadays, the powers that be (America, Europe, developed Asia... Get it?) resemble Embassy Row in Mogadishu. They occupy the least damaged, richest and most heavily armed neighborhoods of a city in ruins. I don’t know Mogadishu’s layout, so I might be wrong about its “best” neighborhood. My illustration stands.
Simply put, I intend to transform this Planet Mogadishu into Planet Geneva. To get there, I will need your cooperation and that of millions more Learners. The more, the merrier!
Picture the wonders well raised children could accomplish! The streets would be spotless and secure; the parks, well-tended and inviting; the artwork, ah, the artwork! And the scientific discoveries!
Mogadishu could be what it always wanted to be: a regional capital of commerce, piety and Learning; a subtropical garden famous for its imperial parks; a thriving, cosmopolitan port; an inviting tourist attraction and a center of abundance and wisdom — where the call to prayer would never be interrupted by the disgrace of gunfire.
And the West? Embassy Row of Planet Mogadishu on a Bad Day? It would be the same district on Planet Geneva — just super-deluxe. The rising tide would lift every yacht and dinghy.
Yet Mencius, my favorite Chinese philosopher among those commemorated, held it wiser to seek Humanity and Duty rather than a simple profit that can turn destructive. Humanity, Duty and Learning: those priorities could secure a more dependable abundance.
After all, what motivates us today? Could we profit from WeaponWorld by perfecting it? Criminal expediency. Could PeaceWorld threaten our livelihood without additional return? Might it be too difficult and dangerous? Cruel and gutless denial. Could PeaceWorld not emerge until humanity 2.0 had emerged, as perfectly suited for it as our version 1.0 is not? Circular reasoning to dodge personal responsibility. Appraise our common motives here, without pity, the way a panhandler would finger his meager pocket change by drizzly twilight.
Of course, we will need these other things.
· A brace of peace religions that travel hand in hand. Are you a religious fanatic preaching exclusion and brutality in the name of God? Nobody is listening; you’re fired!
· A World Militia on the Swiss plan that would let us defend home, hometown and home world against any Aggressor. It would end organized crime and armed aggression in every community that signed up for it.
· Direct and free access to the World Court. Every hate crime and tyrannical conspiracy investigated at its source, every human rights offender, arrested early on, especially if some local militia turns into a loose cannon.
· The World Agora of info politics and Learning, operating from the grass roots, as high quality as municipal water, far more responsive than our common politico/info/entertainment lash-ups.
· An advanced degree for every child by puberty, the way we honor musical prodigies today. Most children will be prodigies in at least one topic of their choosing, if we encourage the full range of their interests and don't quash them.
· · Child rearing would be a sacred calling no longer left to those less qualified;
· The ritual purification of water by filtering it through biomass or some other “miraculous” technology (perhaps Multi-use Titanium Dioxide). Many more technologies will emerge, with so many Learners pursuing their topics of passion in the World Agora.
· Guaranteed public health, with enough food, clothing, housing and care for everyone. We would be sharing the wealth of Geneva here, not the poverty of Mogadishu — both magnified to planetary proportions. Enough basic necessities to satisfy everyone's needs, with more and more left over.
· Free storefront or sanctuary-based mediation and arbitration services (free water bars?), attended by religious and/or secular experts, to serve any pair of citizens holding a grudge and dispute. No civil case would go before a jury until it had been mediated in this manner.
· The cultivation of climax biomes in various habitats; and
· Space, undersea and microbial biome research in earnest.
You know, all those things we make wishful noises about, yet let drop in favor of our weapon technologies? Please note: “our weapon technologies, our responsibility” — no one else’s. If we agreed to play this hand honestly, with all our might and that of God, it could be a much better deal for us than the fatal one we play today, blaming others for our sins.
In so doing, we lead a life of misery stripped of civility, charity, true faith, serious education, useful infrastructure, high art, climax biome, good taste and dependable security. Indeed, we’ve stripped our conscience raw — both as individuals and as communities. Our social habits should let us honor PeaceWorld rather than rehearse what it will take to survive another bad day on WeaponWorld.
We submit to this mass-induced stupidity because our societies evolved through Darwinian selection to fear peace as much as cholera. Both were lethal to primitive cultures and both are banned.
Our cultures train us from infancy, under full time hypnosis, to shun peace and Holy Spirit as much as shit. Social collectives and lone philosophers that taught honest peace, true sainthood and real merit, got their throats cut by more militant communities both at home and abroad.
We are the worst weapon demons and our societies, the deadliest weapon technologies that five (?) thousand years of Darwinian selection could produce. Do you recall the Orcs in Tolkien’s fantasies? Well, the real-world Orcs, that’s us: so-called lovers of peace who never manage to set it up.
The only thing our culture is really good at is perfecting the Threat Formula:
body count x (distance/time2)
Nuclear, biological and perhaps meteorological omnicide, that’s our ultimate cultural achievement and manifest destiny unless we transform ourselves on every scale: social, personal and spiritual. Otherwise, that was all we were good at, and our ultimate fate.
Humanity 0, Omnicide -1.
What a sorry score for this carefully tended, wisely hardened, perfectly nursed species. We perch on a blue-green orb, under an immense, black velvet sky studded with solitaires, that hides much more abundance. This planet is good for us in every way ; even though it is probably not our planet of origin. Its 24-hour orbital time frame does not match the human sleep cycle. Nor is the sun safe to stare at, even though animals can do it unharmed. And our backbone and joints were never suited for a lifetime of comfortable activity under one gravity.
Come on, Learners! We can do better than that!
For the first time in history, we every tool PeaceWorld requires: global communications, mutual recognition and universal longing for peace. For the first time, all of humanity (even those not yet willing) could recognize one another as worthy equals. We could all start from the same page. Up ‘til now, we lacked those vital tools. At present, all we need is consensus, will, faith and guts. Have we got enough?
Have we had enough?
Note at the top of my list, the adoption of new religions of peace. In my opinion and contrary to trendy dogma, the church and state cannot be separated. If you attempt to “separate” church and state, some lesser proxy of a religion will fill the vacuum alongside the undead government, or some surging creed will replace government that turned unworkable. In the past, the relative liberalism of Western governments could be traced in part to their adherence to Christ’s morality, as opposed to the bureaucratic depravity of Christian religions. At present, the spiritual emptiness of national capitalist corporate consumerism (junk spirit, akin to junk food) has been imposed as the public creed, to our obvious detriment.
If you find these ideas bad along with others presented in Learners, skip them. It doesn’t matter much if I connect with those who reject new ideas. The marketplace of ideas is a lot like hitchhiking: mediocre people drive themselves out of the picture quite conveniently.
Christian cults rely on the words of the Apostle Paul, John of Revelation and St. Augustine. Somehow, those of Jesus are lost in the background, decorative but annulled. We heed the words of men, not the Word of God. What we should adore in pure faith, almost nobody can stomach, so thoroughly has it been degraded. Jesus’ instructions were corrupted since the Roman persecution, the Nicene Council and the extermination of the Cathars.
I believe Jesus taught us to live well and die one last time as clueless meat puppets; that we should be reborn in Him, literally. Reincarnate into His perfect life and live it out. Learn from it exactly what we need to be saved. Suffer the second death by taking up His cross and go directly to heaven with Him.
Go read His words and see for yourself.
Otherwise, we condemn ourselves to Samsara on the Wheel of Death and Desire: endless reincarnations, circular abstractions, insignificant rituals, empty sins and futile deaths — apart from this last one He taught us, pending our compliance with His instruction.
Review your current life and see for yourself.
All creeds are equally valid – Christian, Judaic, Buddhist, Muslim, Vedic, Atheist, Gnostic, Agnostic, Deist, Pagan or other – if they help us live a better life and don’t get too upset if we commit our soul, after dying, into the life of Jesus Christ, our conscience somewhat less flayed by remorse. After this penultimate death, we would be free to choose Him and His path to heaven, for the first time in our many clueless lives.
I defy you to find such a miraculous, perfect and divine freedom to choose under other circumstances. Certainly not among the officious and enslaving prescriptions of killer ape-men stuck on WeaponWorld: “Do me this, do me that, or be damned. Believe in nothing but what we preach (including the belief in nothing). By the way, allow us to snuff you and your benighted progeny unless you go over there to murder them and theirs.”
Every Repugnant preacher of cowardly lies, brutality, exclusion, compulsion, betrayal and damnation by our infinite, Loving God — they just refine suicidal weapon mentality devoid of faith, love and God. May God forgive them and may I find some way to ape God's mercy.
We could build temples of eternal peace. The Lord has enough mercy for every soul, with more to spare. I seek this apocatastasis, this universalism. The saints we need to establish it are unemployed all around us.
Every soul is saved, sooner or later: yours, mine, anyone’s. Thus toughened and afraid of nothing on Earth, we must do our duty; thus armored, create PeaceWorld.
With no such faith – no real hope – no valid government – no true peace.
This summary will upset many, especially those trained as children to fear PeaceWorld and block it as adults.
This text is radical revolutionary and at odds with orthodoxy, as am I. According to Learner, the most admirable nationalist patriot is just another jumped-up Crip or Blood claiming supremacy by flashing his idiot gang signs: from a cosmopolitan point of view, a blood thirsty tribalist. The pacifist devotee who claims moral superiority over the average guy, will achieve no better result (since he is lying to himself—at least the average warmonger is an honest monster). Learners should expect fierce opposition from every philosophical azimuth.
To achieve peace, we must understand how much we fear it, how completely our institutions thwart it and how thoroughly our current thoughts and actions oppose it. Whether we call ourselves warriors or lovers of peace; whether we’re young or old, rich or poor, learned or ignorant, pious or not; whether our institutions appear benign and sacred to us, or just mediocre, or infernal; regardless of our nation, religion, ethnicity, race, sex or other identity position. Every institution, every down-home cliché, every cultural checkpoint will have to be taken by frontal assault and cleared hand-to-hand in this intellectual Stalingrad; no-one and nothing will be spared.
What will PeaceWorld look like once the smoke clears? It will delight our Loving God who will bless it with miracles of approbation; unlike WeaponWorld abhorrent to God, Who lets it survive through infinite forbearance for our unpardonable sins.
Justice. Kindness. Peace. The dictatorship of empathy and the tyranny of compassion. Far fewer exceptions.
Think about that.
What if we stopped playing hooky from PeaceWorld? What if we embraced it instead? Taught it to the children with pure conviction, to revere and uphold it forever, on our honor, with all our might?
Once Learners rally, the heavens will come to our aid.
That’s my summary of Learner, begin.
- WARNINGS -
“…Citizens seeking to introduce changes in the form of their government, whether in favor of liberty or despotism, ought to consider what materials they have to deal with and then judge of the difficulty of their task. For it is no less arduous and dangerous to attempt to free a people disposed to live in servitude, than to enslave a people who [opt] to live free.” Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourse on the First Decade of Titus Livius, Ninian Hill Thomson, Translator, Kegan, Trench & Co., London, 1883, page 376.
Me, I’m just a cheap, craven stay-at-home with no claim to prophecy. My sole intention, while writing Learner, is to catalyze a more bearable world into which to reincarnate. There’s no way to predict how the world will turn out after one’s gone; but flying blind, I find PeaceWorld more welcoming than WeaponWorld.
As I review this text, its cosmic presumption stuns me. No special talent or privilege entitles me to claim your attention; no lofty reputation, mighty patronage, personal charisma, business savvy, saintly complacency, public or private ambition or literary merit. When I found decent work, I was just a clerk and a distracted one at that. Nevertheless, I must claim your attention here. No-one else bothered to take up this crucial task; so I felt compelled to do so. This book may be the most important text you read. That’s up to you and your fondness for the status quo.
I’ve stayed up late nights, reviewing endless do-overs of the same botched political experiment and muttering, “At least one of these should have worked out to spec!” I still dare hope. Learners constitute a Nation among nations, a state of being within the State. In our own quiet way, once properly inspired, we can call upon enough talent and initiative to tackle any challenge. Once we Learners assemble in the dark, realize how numerous we are and the sovereign sway we hold over the world; once we rally around those ideas, we will be unstoppable and destined for glory. It won’t matter how wretched human isolates become with their sterile pecking orders, or how much work it will take us to sort things out. WeaponWorld’s grim combats past and present have prepared us for those to come in support of PeaceWorld.
Your appraisal of Learner could make you dizzy, its range of topics is so kaleidoscopic. We never studied them in the depth they deserved. Our first review will be insolently superficial and subject to myth-based denial at every page-turn. Once this crisis has passed, we may render full justice to these exotic notions.
Read the first few chapters of Learner to take in its vocabulary: (“Intro & Vocab” to “Stop”). Then resume your perusal at random across the following three Sections:
SECTION 1) Why we’re in this mess;
SECTION II) How we approach PeaceWorld; and
SECTION III) What results we should expect.
The first and harshest Section, “Why,” stretches beyond the midpoint of Learner. “Why” is so incendiary, its first-time readers risk burnout. Unlike more soothing texts, this one won’t overlook great evils we’ve been taught to regret briefly and then take for granted. This merciless inventory of error will seem wearisome to you at first, mind-numbing later, and soon unbearable. Your subconscious will recall every aversion therapy you suffered as a child, to get you to quit. You will grow frustrated with this reading, then nauseated by it and soon enraged. You will have to brace yourself sternly to chugalug this bitter brew to its dregs. Take tiny sips of this sour mash and find some sweeter syrup elsewhere, perhaps at the titty of TV.
Just don’t give up. I could just as well have called these three Sections, Lamentation, Transition and Hope.
Bittersweet “How” lists regrettable tendencies and proposes some countermeasures. Sweeter “What” sketches peaceful alternatives to the weapon technologies we submit to today, assuming global majorities have already grasped Why and How.
This text is intended for Learners to come. Its discontent should have been our patrimony and it was, since forgotten. I leave the next Sections: Who, When and Where, to you beloved Learners. If you catch me fumbling my mandate, that’s your cue to take up the burden of proof.
Learner isn’t chiseled in stone. Dedicated specialists, amateur and professional alike, should chew through each of its assumptions. Their debate may call up a brilliant Learner Commonwealth whose new mantra will be, “What if the sky were the limit?”
You might have seen some movie in which ruthless Evil secures every source of power, control and security. By midway through the story, the Good are stunned; no one knows what to do next. Then someone – perhaps Ruth – says, “Hold on, I have a plan.” Rather than turn away in despair, listless bystanders start paying miraculous attention. Inspired, they turn into heroes. By then, for the sake of dramatic continuity, the camera cuts to the triumph of the Good.
This book lists vital steps between “no plan” and “plan in action.” During this critical but no-fun stage, we should discuss our plan, expose its weaknesses, suggest other alternatives and coordinate the timing and chronology. Let volunteers take on tasks that fit their special interests and talents. All you reductive meliorists who’ve pounded your steering wheel in a stalled car for the last few centuries, start your engines! Shake awake those who’ve dropped out from sheer nihilism and cowardice.
I have a scheme; you are reading it. We are at this vital yet tedious stage of the process. Hurry!
A few warnings before we begin. This book’s erratic prose, exotic idiom and outlandish speculations make hard reading. We’re going to make warfare illegal across the planet, here, not bake a cake. You’ll find neither quick fixes nor simple sound bites in these pages, none of the TV pablum you’ve grown used to. Click the Back key if that is all you came here to find.
What’s more, every chapter of Learner was crafted as a stand-alone pamphlet, any one of which a searcher could find independently on the Internet. Incidentally, most of my chapter headings weren’t listed on the first ten search pages of Google and other corporate search engines, which favored irrelevant trash on and off that topic. Anyway, you will run into lots of repetition when you read this book. Good! You have never heard enough of this stuff.
Treat Learner as a rough guide, clearer than foggy old Classics and straighter than Ivy-League obfuscations. After reading it, young prodigals may scout out this locked-down prison world while guards and convicts slumber.
Evenhandedly, this book appeals to ecstatic Nobel laureates, berserkers with nothing left to lose, idealists adrift, madrassa dreamers, oriental bonzes, Talmud scholars and Bible seminarians -- none of them satisfied -- prep-schooled sellouts and ghetto luminaries defying evils wriggling just beyond their own brown study. It speaks just as much to every Learner lost in a funhouse mirror-maze of weapons and peace, as to my childhood ghost haunting bygone stacks. I address these words just as much to this year’s class at the War Academies as to next year’s crop of middle school prodigies.
The best among you combed the library stacks of weapons administration looking for the literature of peace, to no avail. This book sketches what we were driven to discover and failed to find.
California dreamin’, I surf riptides of chaos and swim the undertows of paradox. Irritably, I toss aside treasured concepts and take up much-maligned ideas. My message is very biased. Hunting down sly platitudes, I climb way out on shaky limbs, farther than you may care to follow. You’ll find no “detachment,” “disinterest” or “balance” here, as those terms are misused today. Given the complexity of this topic, my literary numbskills and lesser erudition, your work is cut out for you.
I turn rhetorical cannons against the weapon mentors who drilled me on them. Horrified and enraged, I cite any fallacy more useful than its “logically correct” counterpart. I have no use for proponents of “logical analysis” who permit children to starve and turn their back when this awkward topic intrudes on their blank spirit. To uphold PeaceWorld, Learners will pirate every Madison Avenue fraud and taps bugle call that lulled us to sleep up ‘til now.
A longish lifetime ago, as I was testing the shaky legs of new-foaled opinions, my father challenged me thus. “It’s easy to condemn institutions,” this charming Bayard told me. I’ll always remember him as a chevalier sans peur et sans reproche: a knight both fearless and beyond reproach.
That’s a tricky combination, if you think about it. Doing harm would be relatively easy, wrapped in some illusion of fearlessness. “I don’t give a damn; let loose the dogs of war!” Less easy to do good from fear of evil consequences, but not much more rewarding. The true goal would be to do good fearlessly. My father strove to do just that during his life, which made him a nobleman in the finest sense of the term. No lesser accomplishment is worthy.
Do you consider yourself fearless? Fine. Do good without counting the cost, and prove it to us. A trick you will have to play in your head, for your entertainment and the world’s wellbeing. Can you manage that?
This last paragraph may be essential reading for sociopaths who recognize themselves and for their friends who see it in them. To them, I suggest they reread it carefully. That might ease their trouble and let them break new trails to PeaceWorld.
“Condemn institutions? Don’t bother,” that thoughtful cavalryman told me, “unless you can come up with better ones.”
I've knocked myself out, since, guessing those alternatives. As a child of the greasy 50s, I found capital-R Revolution revolting. Its runny blemishes revealed more about it than its watery promises. Among its worst failures, after untold suffering, it offered nothing more than the unbearable present with frequent backslides. Revolutionary dialectics and all their conventions struck me as so much cheap blah-blah, culture’s inflammatory reaction to orthodoxy’s nonstop insults.
No great book On Peace exists, even though students cram Clausewitz’s On War in every college. Believe me; I searched the stacks in vain for On Peace.
Midway through my mandatory obedience training – once I’d gotten good and sick of it and its countless lies and victims – I started combing through available libraries for a primer on the administration of PeaceWorld. You know, a real civics lesson for a serious cosmopolitan, up against the idiot babble of nationalists of every stripe? So what if it were nothing but a wild-eyed speculation? I’d have settled for that!
All I could find was On War and other textbooks on weapon management. There were countless histories, pious tomes, pompous political screeds, literary soap operas and nut-cracking philosophical quibbles, each sustained weapon mentality and diverted attention from what should have been our primary study all along: PeaceWorld. They dealt with feelings, sentiments, technicalities, meaningless abstractions or some other nonsense, anything but PeaceWorld. As my readings grew more voracious and less finicky, they led me to affirmations of weapon mentality more and more ponderous, elaborate and boring. This mountain range of minutia aside, I found little else, to tell the truth.
Avid for the PeaceWorld primer I never found, I set about drafting its Volume One. I would not dare call my work On Peace. Only a global consensus of Learners, assembled in the World Agora, could compose such a work under a thousand million titles. Nowadays, we benefit from none.
Even if Learner stands alone on a virtual library shelf under a non-existent call number (no Dewey Decimal for peace; the Library of Congress prefix JX no longer used), this scribe cannot claim copyright to the ideals of peace. The gold dust of peace mentality may be buried under the dross of weapon mentality, but it shimmers from our masterworks. Where did Learner’s opulent forbears go? They disappeared, replaced by weapon Classics imposed on us all our lives.
Learner calls into question the choice between weapon mentality and its peace equivalent. Every moment we endure here on Earth, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we connive with this evil or defy it. Nowadays, weapon mentality dominates our thinking without serious debate. No wonder runaway weapon technologies harvest evermore victims, since everyone submits to weapon mentality without a second thought. It is also no wonder that progressive initiatives shudder to a halt in this Sargasso Sea of weapon mentality. Is there any surprise in that? This social defect is so common and predictable, we shouldn’t even feel disappointed by it. Disgusted and enraged, certainly, but not disappointed.
Once our faith shifts from weapons to peace, we may thrive along with all our progressive hopes. Until then, forget them and forget us.
Since you begin to grasp the central premise of Learner, you might reject it.
“World Peace? PeaceWorld? Shut up! I’m through!”
If you like to form your own opinion by triangulating all the elements of a controversy, you might ask yourself: “Why dismiss this topic without a fair hearing? While I pursued extensive studies at school, why did no-one sit me down and inform me about this just as carefully?”
Sit still and listen and I will tell you why. Emerging from infancy into frustrated adolescence, we mature sexually (in our teens) long before we do so emotionally and socially (around age 30?). Society exploits this offset development. It offers us a predictable life cycle from adolescent rebellion to adult uncertainty, followed by the mid-life backlash of reactionary senescence. Young hostages are force-fed weapon mentality until their youthful idealism is wrecked.
It’s funny, if you think about it. From the standpoint of physical fitness, the human body was designed to be eaten around age thirty by a saber-tooth tiger and thus avoid the painful dissolutions of old age. Under those lethal conditions, survivors endured the transports of love, sex and reproduction as adolescents. Most humans don’t fully develop their empathy and problem-solving skills until they’ve reached thirty years of age or thereabouts (some sooner, others never). The pitiless Neolithic killing ground called for near-suicidal recklessness and procreation as early teens, thus the selfish naiveté of young beasts in heat. Thoughtful elders, though revered by the brightest surviving children, were never welcome in the natural world.
If humanity tries to separate itself from nature, crush it and bend it to its will, it is merely returning nature’s favor. Nature grows things by killing them, including humankind. This antagonism will likely end badly for us, even though it is entirely understandable. See The Cosmic Serpent chapter.
Every cubic yard of earth, air, water and vacuum may hold all the energy in the Universe (minus 1?). Can we become clever enough to reach into this vacuum fire and warm our hands in it, yet not burn our fingertips or the world? Or will we remain parched and starving bums stumbling across a desert while untold abundance lies locked below our feet?
We are sitting down together to share a giant, super-deluxe pizza that stretches out to the horizon and beyond to infinity. It is covered with mounds of creamy cheese, aromatics and deli delicacies: all the makings of a fine pizza. This pie has got college degrees, fair housing and low infant mortality; enough abundance, justice and serenity for everyone; anything anyone could ask for and more than enough to satisfy everyone’s needs.
Too bad we only look down a one-degree slice of this pie, the sorriest of slices, unbelievably bitter. It’s been combed over at sword-point for millennia, stripped bare, scorched to charcoal and saturated with poverty, fear and suffering. All around it, starving children cower in stoic tears, in bunkers, hovels and refugee dumps: poster children of our failure and guilt. That’s all we can see: this WeaponWorld of ours, the blackened crust of a burnt-out world. Yearning for something better, we scramble after its crumbs with microscopic compulsion.
The infinite leftover heaping with untouched goodies? It is out of sight as far as we’re concerned. The other 359 degrees of this cosmic pizza are walled-off from us by long-revered cultural blinkers that screened us from PeaceWorld in favor of WeaponWorld ever since we were born, more and more persistently as we grew up. So we’ve dismissed the potential abundance of PeaceWorld as mere utopian fantasy.
Learners will depolarize those blinkers and reveal the whole pie to everyone. A bumper crop is there for us to harvest on PeaceWorld. All we have to do is focus our vision, roll up our sleeves and make it happen. That will lead almost everyone to share this incredible abundance. They’ll be too busy doing that to rip each other off for lesser gains, a military extravagance we can no longer afford.
As in Herman Hess’s Siddhartha, we may only plumb the depths of harsh asceticism, sensual pleasure, material wealth, self-revulsion and eventually, saintly complacency in our mediocrity (by default). We are forced at an early age to surrender our healthy conscience and replace it with passive-aggressive compromise and adherence at gunpoint to conspiracies of greed. We soothe our heartache with big doses of ignorance, apathy, drugs, alcohol, fanaticism, amateur obsession, professional compulsion, insanity, felony and self-destruction. Among these forms of escape, take your pick.
Aghast, I understood King Ashoka’s torment. Standing back-to-back, we couldn’t deny our complicity in this carnage of our own making or stand idly by. We had to do something dazzling: reach out for the big brass ring dangling just beyond our wildest dreams; blow the doors off our fragile confidence, competence and self-worth; risk everything to reduce the robotic atrocity of the human condition.
The reform-idealism of youth is everywhere subverted. The suppression of youthful idealism is a pseudo-skill each of us is called upon to master. Shouldn’t our first priority be to nurture that creative drive?
Do you recall when you were a bright young thing as pure as a glass of water? Do you recall the barrage of insults that blasted your childlike inquiry about peace? No matter to whom you turned – strangers or beloved, enlightened teacher or dumb brute – you ran a gauntlet of veiled insult, condescension and violence if you persisted.
Think back. “World peace? End poverty? Feed and care for everyone with honest equity? Get real, stop dreaming, grow up! What am I supposed to do with you and your silly questions? Cut it out, now! They’ll teach you about this stuff the hard way when you get to school."
Ok. I’m summarizing years of systematic and very subtle indoctrination in a few lines of text. But you get my drift.
On this WeaponWorld of ours, a so-called “happy childhood” is the rare one during which inescapable traumas and wrongs are inflicted at a later date, at random, by strangers and by surprise.
Your timid childhood investigations were no doubt cut short by denunciation, rejection and dismissal from weapon conformists. According to them, “World peace equals crap. Act accordingly, if you know what’s good for you.”
Did this ceaseless brainwash bring you up short while you were young and impressionable? Was your conscience battered into silence? Did you suspend disbelief to avoid rejection? Did you enslave yourself to lies, regardless of their merit? Would it have mattered what race, nation or creed you sprang from? What choice did you have?
“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments that are inimical to [orthodoxy], and of being bored and repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.” George Orwell, 1984, the New American Library, Inc., New York, 1961, page 174.
See The 1984 Syndrome chapter.
We were blocked because Everyman silenced us the moment we started asking awkward questions. Our culture subverts pacifism and military decadence as obsessively as it controls human waste and waterborne disease. Both were lethal to a primitive society and both are suppressed. We have been potty trained, as children, to invalidate peace and valid spirituality.
One must arise from the other, don’t you think? In the absence of peace, doesn't valid spirituality suffer? In the midst of war, doesn't spirituality turn into a monstrous caricature of itself, sneering at its own hypocrisy? During what we dare call peacetime, is it not just as bad? Are we ready to yell Enough at this grotesque weapon cult? Have we ever been more ready? Will we ever be more ready?
As with our weapon religions and their relevance to God, it doesn’t matter how much mouth-jabber we dedicate to peace. We are as averse to it as to excrement. As a result, we face a host of social contradictions and zero closure, resolution or clarity.
Sure, I understand your fear and loathing. But I can’t let that stop me. You and other Learners, rally ‘round! We’re grownups now, seemingly immune from childhood blame games. Unplug your ears – there, that’s better – and pay attention. Learner retrieves painful questions we let drop when we were kids, with or without our consent. The choice taken from us as children, Learner restores it to you.
It’s a sorry state we submit to as this Aquarian Age dawns. A giant, hereditary and adoptive conspiracy of arrogant bunglers invokes chainsaw logic lubricated with snake oil democracy. Fate’s idiot smile seems to favor conspirators of greed. Smirking predators gang rape Blind Justice under our disbelieving gaze; they laugh all the way to the bank, congress, pulpit and academy; then come back for sloppy seconds. Over and over, our institutions legitimize the spastic slapstick of killer primates.
Absurd clichés jam our constellation of political metaphors, despite their spectacular failure, or hadn’t you noticed? Like nitwit kibitzers around a stalled car, we keep intoning “We’re just gonna need more Love, more personal perfection, national patriotism, Christ in this world, Humanism, Science, Submission, Family Values, Free Markets; straighter politicians, fairer bullies and kinder Fat Cats.” In short, some textbook dictatorship of fathead vacuity. Even more common and worthless: “Don’t believe in nothin’, little pal, but earning and spending your next buck. Be cool, be a steady fool, like us.”
Stupefied by all this barbarism, prophets, newscasters, technocrats and commoners bray disaster in four-part harmony. Others pray that swift Apocalypse come deliver them pretty please. Bewildered by their panic, they worsen the necrosis of this world, merely to bring on the Ending they crave.
We deny the obvious, the Miracle upon which our existence depends countless times all day long. According to this Miracle, a greater wisdom will replace typhoons of venom with windfalls of plenty. Abundance could blossom where wastelands fester now; full justice, soothe many old traumas and walk mutinous legions back to civility.
Imagine that! Picture the best that could happen.
Instead, weapon dissidents and reactionaries sing rounds of senile dogma. They obsess over the hated Other and plot His impossible disappearance. Others sit on their idle hands until everyone turns into an angel or until Christ comes back to deliver us (whichever comes first).
Everything is improvised. No-one knows what they are talking about or has a workable plan except for more killing: sit still for it, prepare for it, or stir it up. The foremost privilege of promotion these days is not having to listen; just pass along without question a string of orders unmindful of reality: the recipe for guaranteed disaster. In fact, modern leadership tends to manage by disaster. It inherits criminally neglected disasters or starts new ones, then demonstrates “leadership” by waving its arms and blaming subordinates for failing to meet impossible demands.
We are only permitted two kinds of politicians, these days: those who have quashed every good idea for generations (Democrats) and those who never met a bad idea they didn’t love (Republicans). Like a village blacksmith lusting after a first-glimpsed motorcycle, they long to tease the world apart and reassemble it to suit their fancy. But their obsolete political vocabulary won’t let them understand the world’s fundamental contradictions and opportunities. They seek to fix a 1050 Harley-Davidson with Age of Pericles terminology and horse-and-buggy tools.
Only its absolute justice keeps our cause alive, not our necrotic habits of thought and speech. Made feverish by gangrenous ideologies that benefit no-one but special interests, we have become too credophobic to believe in anything any longer. Force-fed commercial blather, our moral gyros tumbled, we have lost our last spirit handholds and tumbled into riptides of change.
But do not despair. Heed Jesse Jackson and “KEEP HOPE ALIVE!” As in Germany after two World Wars (sic), reactionaries will hand over a basket case for us to reanimate once it seems too late to salvage anything from the wreckage. Learner anticipates that handover, of the whole world this time.
If you seek a formula for PeaceWorld in a few hundred words, consult the Georgia Guidestones. They used to be carved on both faces of four vertical slabs in English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian, with four more translations carved on horizontal slabs on top: Babylonian cuneiform, Classical Greek, Sanskrit and Egyptian hieroglyphs. But not in French, shit.
1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely, improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion, faith, tradition, and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally, resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth, beauty, love, seeking harmony with the infinite.
10. Be not a cancer on the earth, leave room for nature, leave room for nature.
Since dynamited (2022) by the good people of Georgia and bulldozed away without investigation by their State Police. Merits a poem perhaps or a new chapter, Iconoclasm.
If the dry logic of world peace is all you seek here, read Mortimer Adler’s How to Think about War & Peace, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1944. Back then, President Roosevelt and his brilliant staffers anticipated a popular one-world government that would have criminalized warfare across the planet and guaranteed human rights for all. That would have been seventy years ago; with scores of millions fewer war dead and much fewer deaths by famine and preventable disease than those we “enlightened” contemporaries are responsible for. Plus how many thousands of trillions of dollars, vital resources and sabotaged ingenuity thrown out the window with our consent?
Don’t you dare protest it is not your fault! Quit lying to yourself, here at least. We are all 100% accountable.
Alas, commissars of the Binary American Weapon Party made sure that an artilleryman and failed haberdasher, Harry Truman, grabbed the reins of power from Roosevelt’s dying hands. Hiroshima, my love? Truman and his small-town, small-mind cronies threw away all the global goodwill America had earned liberating the world from fascism. Like Bush the Lesser and his rat pack did, after 9/11, when the whole world stood by our side once again.
Truth to tell, America and the world never recovered from the “purely coincidental” regicide of two Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers (as well as many other progressive leaders across the world, wasted anonymously by bilateral dark ops during the Cold War and since), and their replacement by slime molds of the reactionary warmonger variety. They’ve groomed a series of politically correct mediocrities, since. Their prejudices inflicted millions more war dead and another half-century of weapon ruination.
Still today, we waste precious time and talent in pointless protests against mighty warmonger initiatives. Let them protest, in total futility, our mighty peace initiatives. Never again the other way around!
This text is a speculative entertainment and rally cry, not some textbook drear. Neither fiction nor non, it fits in somewhere between confession, screed and sketchbook of homilies, anecdotes and conjectures. As Margaret Atwood put it, forecast journalism. Its paragraphs are core samples of renewed peace mythology that will replace, on PeaceWorld, the archaic weapon kind.
I found no other text like Learner. I never found a political group that would adopt it as its own.
Were that I could! I would not have felt so alone on this planet of unrepentant killer primates and their clueless hippy opponents; nor so terrified that things will go from bad to worse at their hands, whether or not Learner gets published.
I have lost faith in my own generation good for nothing but Bush the Lesser, his National Capitalist cronies, then Trump the Joker. But Learners will certainly emerge as a serious political party in the future, perhaps once I’m gone with all my runaway from peace contemporaries, as happened to Erasmus, Rousseau and Marx.
“So it happens that beyond the imaginary demarcation line between past and present, the writer still finds himself eye to eye with the human condition, which he is bound to observe and understand as best he can, with which he must identify, giving it the strength of his breath and the warmth of his blood, which he must attempt to turn into the living texture of the story that he intends to translate for his readers, in such a way that the result be as beautiful, as simple, and as persuasive as possible.” Ivo Andrić, Acceptance Speech for the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature.
"If humanity bears an eternal truth, it must be the tragic hesitation of the man who will be called an artist for centuries to come – standing before the work of art that he experiences more deeply than anyone, that he admires in ways no one else can, yet that he alone on Earth wants secretly to destroy at the same time."
"So understand this fully: if genius is discovery, the resurrection of the past is based upon it. At the beginning of this speech, I told you what a renaissance could be, what the heritage of a culture could be. A culture is reborn when men of genius, searching for their truth, draw from the depth of centuries everything that used to resemble the truth, even if they cannot recognize it."
André Malraux, Les Conquérants, (The Conquerors), Le livre de poche, Compagnie Bernard Grasset, 1928, pages 311-13.
“The leader bears all our confusion in his attempt to climb above society for a clear view that reveals the right way. There, on his imaginary mountain, he stands alone while suffering the private anxiety of freedom. He watches us dancing aimlessly below and half struggling with mortality in our reassuring maze. He can note a certain self-confidence on our part, lost in our earthly eternity. But how will he manage to collect his thoughts if he cannot force all of us and the structure itself to respond to his efforts?” John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Vintage Press, A Division of Random House, 1991, page 349.
Accept the scraps of Learner you agree with, then make something better happen. Dismiss anything that disconcerts you, as conjecture, hearsay, heresy, pseudo science, what you will. If this work inspires you with some new idea, let me know. I’d love to layer new ideas into a rewrite of this text (with proper attribution, of course). I may get to chronicle the real-world progress of this endeavor … perhaps in upcoming chapters of this samizdat.
Why do the terms “utopian” and “idealist” consign our highest values to the trash heap? Since when has reactionary chic declared empathy pathetic and compassion worthless? We may be poor practitioners of peace at first, but the love of good flows in our veins. No description exists of that talent (kalotropism?) but it will not be denied much longer. Who knows; doing good may become fashionable once again, despite ultimate efforts to forbid and ridicule it by the worst among us.
Loudmouthed morality truants fake cleverness by worsening our weapon neuroses. By rote repetition, they malign “do-gooders” and “bleeding hearts.” Hiding their disgraceful shortcomings, they confabulate the pig-headed terminology and criminal line-up of con men and professional hypocrites barely “politically correct” enough to serve as stand-ins for legitimate leaders. Each newcomer worse than his predecessor. People of talent and genius are chased from politics and social commentary -- gunned down in the street or crucified by the media -- while their tormentors promote each other.
Sneering reactionaries give themselves away by abusing such expressions as “politically correct, woke, cancel culture.”
Who are these thugs? Do-badders? The flint-hearted? Do a few stony hearts require a little lubricant bleeding to re-oxygenate their flat-lined conscience?
After so many attempts, why don’t we have the best possible government? With all our schools, books and teachers, why aren’t there millions of peace mentors out there, enriching the abundance that is our due, filling the world with miraculous technologies, sacred wildlife, courtly love and random acts of kindness? Where did the peace leaders go, needed to manage the dictatorship of empathy and the tyranny of conscience?
If we viewed this world as one Grand Academy – as Learners will transform it – most of its current student body majors in some aspect of weapon technology while all too few take an elective minor in peace. As the machinery of war grinds on without letup, only its most devoted slaves may evaluate its usefulness in public discourse.
Hardly anyone can list the great peace mentors. Peace’s foremost practitioners have been unassuming gentlefolk. Female peace practitioners are as under-reported here as they have been in general history. Compare this state of ignorance with our household familiarity with Genghis Khan, Hitler and like masters of mayhem. If peace were our first priority – not mass murder – this Learner deficit would cause us grave concern.
I had no choice but to write – en deux langues, in two languages – this book, this whole book and nothing but this book. In the end, I can only justify my presumption by pointing out our moral bankruptcy on WeaponWorld and our unspoken love for PeaceWorld: the ultimate taboo passion.
- TABLE OF CONTENTS linked and summarized - pick your passion
These chapters are available in English and in French.
Title Page
Warnings!
We are trained as children against peace. Once every Learner admits this fact and defies it, the gates of PeaceWorld will open wide for us.
Table of Contents (you are here.)
Intro & Vocab
We need a whole new political vocabulary. The range of topics we must cover will be encyclopedic; their first treatment here will be insolently superficial and subject to mythic dismissal at every page turn.
Sociopaths and their replacements
About 70 millions psychopaths and 210 million sociopaths subsist on Earth today. Whenever civilization falters, they take over and wreak havoc on innocent strangers who would instinctively look after each other in their absence. What is their responsibility for the persistent lies, cruelty and hypocrisy of day-to-day politics that we the conscience-driven despise in overwhelming numbers? How have one percent and three percent of humanity, bereft of the moral conscience the rest of us take for granted, weaponized the last five thousand years of world history by twisting our deepest values? How did they manage to make PeaceWorld impossible in practice and “utopian” in theory? Why do we submit to their dismal science and disastrous outcomes, since we outnumber them 24 to one?
Mein Fahrt, Quoting Hitler out of Context
Hitler understood that a new ideology needs a simple message everyone can understand and adopt. He called for step-by-step development without interruption. His intent was toxic; ours will be benign. The method lends itself just as easily to hope and good will as to fascistic terror and lies. Also, your appraisal of Learner will call for tremendous open-mindedness on your part
SECTION 1 – WHY? WHY NOT?
Why are we caught up in this mess?
Noble Virgins Raped
Superficial growth from deep roots, explosive growth from shallow ones. Deep roots and fruitful growth. The golden rule of human conscience or the toxic one of military survival.
The Collective Superconscience
Do we share a collective superconscience? Have we blighted it with violence? Could we apply Peace to it instead?
Survival of the Deadliest
The development of military states by Darwinian selection. Leadership in its weapon and peace contexts.
Could We Be Good?
Innate human evil or ultimate good? Nature, nurture and other fine considerations.
You Choose
Pick your constellation of political metaphors: historically conformist or dreaming up tomorrow.
The Future
Could the Earth be turned into a superior model of Victorian England? The Earth as a manor land. Factory towns fringe Earth orbit instead of the sea. Outer space, the colonies?
We Conceive the Future
Your version is as valid as mine. Let’s shape ours together.
Heaven and Hell, on Earth
A list of suggested does and don’ts, at least more or less.
The 1984 Syndrome
The Syndrome: government is bad; make it as slow and stupid as possible. The cure: government is as good or bad as the nearest Mayor’s office. Each must improve or be replaced.
The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
His social contract lacked the consideration (legal term) that would have triggered and guaranteed it: PeaceWorld. Rousseau’s genius ignored the limited communications of his day. Those faulty communications neutralized the social contract with respect to international relations. Using technologies his time lacked, we can reduce that cyclopean wall to a puff of air.
Karl Marx
Marx’s fatal mistake: he tried to define politics in the absence of the weapon/peace antinomy, which would be like calculating orbital mechanics without gravity. Marx’s obsession, economics, is just a tributary of the great flow of information, infinitely renewable and exponentially profitable in the absence of his “dismal science” and its ad hoc conclusions. Information flow can grow a thousand-fold, once set to chaotic and anarchic dialog mode instead of centralized and government-promoting monolog mode much less productive. Learners will liberate this source of abundance left untapped since Marx and his peers ignored it.
Threat Formula
Body Count times Distance over Time squared, instead of the armchair formula that accelerates thought (see below). The obsessive refinement of this first formula has taken enormous wealth away from far more profitable peace pursuits.
Infantry
Pull on the boots of an average grunt.
Criminal War
he links between crime, warfare and governance.
The Capital Option
A garden or a viral infection: the two paths of Capitalism and their outcomes.
Paradox America
Action or deliberation? America’s great weakness and rare gift.
Burning Libraries (BCE)
Among the best-preserved old writings of world literature, less than one out of ten of those authors survives and one out of ten of their works. Counting urban centers burned to the ground, 99.99...% destruction of texts.
Burning Libraries (AD)
More book burning up until now. It has been omnipresent in history and sickeningly widespread among psychopath adherents on both sides of every age, creed and nation.
Weapon Mentality
Fascism and modern politics are too much alike. Why?
Ritual Stupidity
Failure to heed warnings until it’s too late, in accordance with weapon mentality.
Some Big Fat Lies
A partial list of lies by type. How can elites lie so often, so consistently, so shamelessly and with so much professional arrogance? Those questions drove me to write Learner.
Pick Your Poison
Weapon mentality is lethal by design. It cannot help it; that is what is does best. If you seek a dog that bites, you’ve picked the perfect rottweiler. Choose a friendlier pet.
Weapon Pathohistory
War has never been begun and has never ended; it has been perpetual. Those who resisted it the most perished most quickly.
Paroxysms
War has never begun and never ended; it perpetuates. Those who resisted it the most died the fastest.
Weapon Technology
The science and craft of warfare in history and the present.
Know them by their Fruits
Sacrifice or celebration? Weapons religions sacrifice the Others; peace religions celebrate them. Celebrate Learning and sacrifice no-one but yourself.
What I Think of Your Rapture, Pal
Jesus never used the term Rapture anywhere in the Bible. Christ forbids Christians from praying in church and in public; see for yourself in Matthew 6-5. What are ‘Christian’ fundamentalists up to, flouting His direct instruction, perverting Christianity and turning potential believers away in disgust?
Cathari the corner stone rejected
What made longstanding peasants and nobles prefer those heretics over their Catholic clergy fully mature? Could we imitate the Cathari model and summon the best from every creed? Contrary to weapon mythology, government and religion cannot be separated except to promote a worse combination.
Hypothetical Consolamentum
My attempt to reclaim the Cathari catechism suppressed since the Inquisition began. Like the Tibetan and Egyptian Books of the Dead, it describes reincarnation on the Wheel of Desire and Death. This epic must have been recited and written in many urban languages. Counting those burned to the ground, hundreds of versions disappeared. According to my views set forth in this chapter, we may switch off the Karma autopilot while dying, choose to reincarnate in Christ’s lifeline, and go to Heaven with Him on the very evening of His promise.
Identity Politics
Identity, conflict and community. Adherents of different identity positions could turn into Learners. Their shared identity could shield them from human rights abuse. Identity politics is so divisive it impedes progress. Elites, united regardless of their identity politics, thrive at the expense of self-fragmented identity groups that weaken themselves thereby. Reunited Learners can set off PeaceWorld.
Weapon Mythology
Our constellation of political metaphors is chock-full of weapon myths. What if equivalents of peace replaced them?
SECTION 2 – HOW TO GO ABOUT IT
How to tumble WeaponWorld into PeaceWorld?
Ashoka
The institution of righteousness. We have our precedent.
Learning to Dance
The body of the World Elephant is directed by a cockroach brain: its enormous muscle-power out of balance with its lightweight nervous network. It wanders blind, breaks a leg out on a stroll, and starves in the middle of a farmers’ market. That is our world. We could implant an elephant’s brain in the elephant’s skull and watch it dance. That Fantasia is our lifeline to PeaceWorld.
Sunken Education, Floating Armchair
Modern education is about triage and restriction. Learner education will award each child by puberty with at least one graduate degree, the way musical prodigies earn theirs today. Accelerate the flow of information instead of rationing it. Flip the ziggurat of hierarchic education and turn it into a cornucopia of Learning, anarchic but self-filtering for excellence.
Words that Follow
Our constellation of political metaphors creates rules that regulate communications. Free speech and profit centers. Broaden the bandwidth of anarchistic dialog and narrow the frequency of official monolog.
Universal Library
Information handling in a peace technology setting. Like fountain water in the squares and byways of ancient Rome: unlimited supply, clean and free.
Knowledge-Value
Taichi Sakaiya wrote about perceived abundance and its objective value judgments, about dearth and its knowledge value judgments. Suggested peace technology applications of knowledge-value and how they could balance affluence and poverty, objective value and knowledge-value.
DEMOS: Laocracy or Pathocracy
Laocracy as a direct, proportional and continuous referendum, to replace representative democracy: indirect, problematic and sporadic. PeaceWorld suggestions for the architecture of the World Agora and its info politics. Otherwise, pathocracy: the WeaponWorld rule of sociopaths (see above).
Jury Duty
For maximum justice.
List those Impassioned
How to list topics of passion and their adherents.
White Noise
Some problems with large-scale governance.
Ancient Abundance & Little Green Men
Laughably unscientific speculations and outlandish hypotheses for your fireworks entertainment.
Learner Science
Peace technology applications of science and superstition. True scientific creativity has flat-lined since the 1950s. It’s been reduced to marginal improvements of gadgets and banging things with bigger hammers. Corporate weapon science has buried untold scientific discoveries, pending their release during a renaissance of peace science.
Beyond Darwin
A complementary aspect to his theory of evolution. Disease as a mechanism of evolution, infection as a therapeutic tool, and sex between the biological kingdoms.
Let's Travel
On the benefits of extended travel.
Language
Amer-Ind as a universal travelers’ language supplementing everyone’s mother tongue. On cultural ecology: its suffocation by corporate weapon culture and its growth on PeaceWorld.
Satyagraha and Allah
On the art of verifaction: the search for truth on both sides of a conflict. On Islam. What if the two matched?
Some Basic Rules
Gandhi’s ideas on Satyagraha, conflict resolution and non-violence ― lifted with gratitude from Mark Juergensmeyer’s book.
Ode to Truth and Non-Violence
A poem on Satyagraha and verifaction.
Costs
Please stop appraising peace technology by the econologic of weapon mentality. While the latter is anti-profit in the long run; the former would be much more sustainable if pursued with equal passion. A likely solution to the problems of swelling population and thinning resources.
SECTION III – WHAT TO EXPECT
What to expect from PeaceWorld?
The Cosmic Serpent
Is the living voice of DNA that of Satan, the serpent of Eden? Or is it the Holy Spirit Jesus left us as comforter, pending His return? DNA is very ancient and very wise. Our souls are already saved. Why not find answers to our worst problems in that titanic database? DNA has survived them and turned them to its advantage in other incarnations. Why not share this expertise here and now?
Aliens & Cavemen
Some outlandish, prehistoric speculations for your dining and dancing pleasure.
Doctors within Borders
This is where we talk about COVID and its followers. Many more medics must serve us. Weapons impediments to public health. Peace technology as it applies to health care.
Plus LTA, Minus Nukes
Alternative transportation hardware. The formal interdiction of nuclear war.
Is Ecology Constitutional?
Sustainable ecology as a constitutional right.
Planet Overwatch
Grass roots surveillance of large-scale activities. Urban renewal, urban forestry, tectonic remediation, covered cities, elevated walkways, solar power.
Your Rights or Their Privilege?
Human rights on PeaceWorld.
Please Don't Vomit in the Salad Bar
The best method to control population would be as many people well cared for as possible — far fewer exceptions.
World Militia
“The Constitution calls for a well-regulated militia, …” Harm Forces on PeaceWorld.
Peace on Earth and Goodwill
Convivencia, learning to live together. Urban design and environmental protection.
What Can I Do?
Be kind enough to translate your favorite chapters of Learner into your mother tongue and broadcast them for free on the Internet. A list more or less wise of personal suggestions.
It Is Never Too Late for Glory
It it too late? Probably. Maybe not. So what? We are honor-bound to do our best, no matter how likely our success or failure.
Conclusion
The sustainable development of peace technologies. Activism, social commentary, futurism, prophecy, politics, political theory, ecology and peace, idealism, urban renewal, global federation. The vision of the world we lack.
Trash Soccer
Street litter may be fit for the hell paths of WeaponWorld, but not the New Jerusalem of PeaceWorld. Litter control should be a sidewalk sport; it’s recycling, child’s play.
Bibliography
Please interrupt your reading in the vicinity of quotations: each an introduction to the ideas that follow or a confirmation of those preceding. After a thoughtful rest, resume your reading there or somewhere else in Learner.
- INTRO AND VOCAB –
“Your isolation is not so much the direct result of enemy action as of the fact that when you travel this road your experiences are shared by fewer and fewer people, until at last there’s no one to whom you can make yourself understood.” Sarah Patton Boyle, “Spit in the Devil’s Eye: A Southern Heretic Speaks,” from the October 20, 1956 issue of The Nation magazine © 1956. The Nation Company, LP. Reprinted with permission. Also found in The Nation 1865-1990, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Ed., p. 214.
Secretly throughout history, weapons and peace mentors have diced for our wealth, talent, faith, bodies, posterity, sanity and Holy Spirit ― the whole caboodle. The former wanted to protect us militarily from the Other and protect themselves from us; the latter, get us to accept ourselves and each other in peace.
You will find the same conflict between weapon mentors and those of peace ― among whites and blacks; Chinese, Argentineans, New Zealanders and Greenlanders; capitalists, communists, socialists and fascists (progressive or reactionary); among atheists, agnostics, deists, Christians, Muslims, Pagans, and Buddhists (fundamentalist or ecumenical); as much among jungle dwellers knapping rare flint as among city workers managing (or managed by) a frenzy of info technology.
Is that fully understood? If not, re-read.
This contest cuts right across every social divide we hold dear. Age, sex, ethnicity, class, religion, ideology, geography and politics ― mere distractions from our primary task: making PeaceWorld happen.
The Weapon/Peace Dialectic regulates our political dialog across a rigid, Cartesian coordinate system. Each of us speaks with a forked tongue, as do our nation-states. Its two tines (one controlled by weapon mentors, the other by peace mentors) share three communication traits. They are:
• dialectical: parallel along the axis of understanding;
• antithetical: at right angles to each other's beliefs; and
• antinomical: directly contradicting each other’s methods and outcomes.
This three-fork tongue-tie creates the Weapon/Peace Antinomy: absolute disparity between methods used, goals sought and results achieved.
My example will be the term “utopia.”
Along the first, dialectical axis, Utopia is a venerable text whose author, Sir Thomas More, describes a “perfect” social order. Everyone agrees that his utopia is not an accurate historical representation, is not relevant to present circumstances and not possible in the future. What a perfect model! But this is the nearest that most Western scholars dare approach the idea of PeaceWorld. There are a handful of later texts just as obscure and poorly thought out.
Reactionaries and progressives agree that this is all the documentation they require to determine the relative merits of weapons and peace. Might as well try to cross the Rocky Mountains using a map of Pangaea.
If you’re interested, Lewis Mumford summarizes about two-dozen primary texts in English (several thousand pages worth) in the first 150 pages of his book The Story of Utopias. Don’t ask me what he intended to say in the latter half of his book.
Along the second, antithetical axis, the word utopia signifies for weapon mentors, “that (place) which can never be.” Utopia is their favorite reference text on this subject. Taught in every high school and college, it confirms their prejudice that peaceful and benevolent societies are impossible. For peace mentors, utopia means “that (place) which is not, but might be.” Utopia is a speculation upon which to build a better peace.
Don’t ask me why progressives haven’t published a half a hundred better works, since. Craven subservience to weapon mentors, flawed imagination, subconscious approval of the status quo or mere mental inertia? The reason for their failure eludes me.
Along the third, antinomical axis, weapon mentors use the word utopian like an adverbial clause: “When pigs fly and hell freezes over.” Any idea branded utopian can be dismissed by reflex without further consideration. Peace mentors use it to describe a social scheme that intends to improve current reality, whether it is doable or not. In other words, the peaceful version of the word utopia means "something good we should strive for," whereas the weapon version is "a horror to be avoided like the plague.” Not only useless but somehow toxic.
Thus, along the antinomical axis, the intention on each side is in total opposition. What was once a conversation is now a tug of war.
Nowadays, weapon mentality dominates our words, arguments and intentions, just as much as weapon technology dominates our material lives. We try to survive in peace despite the dominance of weapon thought.
Our synchronization of meaning, definition and intent – and the clarity it may bring to public discourse – promise us security, abundance and fellow feeling surpassing our understanding.
Our institutions and cultures retain a few peace remnants we should cultivate and a majority of weapon memes we should render vestigial.
In this book, we will use the words “weapon” and “weapons” interchangeably. Rather than use them simply as nouns, we will wield them as modifiers: weapon technology and peace technology. From now on, “weapon” will go before words that begin with a consonant, and “weapons” anticipate those that begin with a vowel.
The text below separates the weapon/peace antinomy into three word-pairs:
• weapon mentality
• peace mentality
• weapon technology
• peace technology
• weapon mythology
• peace mythology
Weapon mentality relies on fear, and fear rules our world.
“… [The English historian, Thomas] Carlyle said that the great element missing from our attempted entry into the past is Fear; he set himself to re-enact it, and succeeded extraordinarily well. His syntax is designed to embody a distracted groping for certainties in a fog of rumour [sic] and of events at best only half-understood, in moods of acute anxiety, rage and sometimes dangerous exaltation.” John Burrow, A History of Histories: Epic, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2008, page 362.
Trying to shield its adherents from their overwhelming dread, weapon managers develop threat deterrent weapon systems they believe so ghastly that no-one will dare challenge them. Alas, WeaponWorld ordains this challenge: “The best defense is a good offense.” In the long run, no-one’s agonizing death has deterred anyone from anything; it has only given momentary satisfaction to psychopaths.
In this text, we’ll avoid terms like “war mentality” and “warfare mentality.” War mentality is to weapon mentality what road rage is to defensive driving. Neither weapon managers nor defensive drivers prefer a violent collision.
Only rarely will we use terms like militarism or fascism as substitutes for weapon mentality. The latter is much more widespread and subtle; it infects “free” democracies as much as dictatorships. Indeed, free citizens of free republics are better weapon technicians than slaves of a dictatorship. A people that calls itself peace loving can manage its killing more skillfully than another that thirsts for foreign blood.
If you consider yourself a lover of peace, pure beyond reproach – even though you’ve never bothered to sort out your peace and weapon priorities – you’re actually a weapon fellow traveler and a pillar of the weapon status quo.
Like alcoholics in denial, we worsen our addiction to weapon mentality insofar we deny it.
Weapon mentality inflicts social distortions on purpose. Poverty, rigid hierarchy, injustice, inequality, ecocide, underemployment, nurtured criminality, substandard education, malnutrition and class arrogance ― the list goes on and on. We mistake weapon mentality for a regrettable combination of stupidity, bigotry, insanity, greed, crime, honest error and disaster. We refuse to believe those things fester on purpose to further its goals.
Social reformers imagine they can improve things reductively, gradually and incrementally ― problem-by-problem, identity position by identity position and topic by topic. Using the same scattergun methods and birdshot reasoning, they’ve promoted nothing but war for the last five thousand years. “Sorry about that!”
The categorical solution to this problem would be holistic, simultaneous and global peace mentality – agreed upon by almost everyone – followed by a swarm of atomistic and reductive fixes. Long-term success is impossible in the opposite order (as currently practiced), since each minor fix is paralyzed by the holistic, simultaneous and global repression of weapon mentality.
Society measures itself against a constellation of political metaphors its members agree to share. Ours is crammed with weapon myths. Many common policies and beliefs of religion, law and morality constitute weapon mythology: the popular explanation for our irrational policies and institutions. Since the basic values of weapon mentality seem insane to any lover of peace, weapon mentors impose their own mythical vocabulary and syntax to shield themselves from peace mentors' reasonable criticism.
For weapon managers to succeed, they must be incompetent at peace. Military technology is the only field at which they must excel (mercilessly graded on the battlefield by Darwinian selection). Other endeavors can be ventured with deliberate ineptitude and still fulfill their requirements. The worse they manage peace, the better they will succeed at war. Weapon technicians have ruled for thousands of years, for it is much less bitter to fail at peace and triumph at war, than to succeed at peace and lose at war.
A common weapon refrain is, “You’re not paid to think about such things; we are.”
Information proletarians are enslaved by their lack of valid information. Junk data, served piping hot to them every day, maintains their servile status. Most often, you and I fit in somewhere here. At other times, our loyalties sparkle between these meta-groups like energy quanta between the atomic shells around a world-sized atom.
As information proletarians learn, work and play, they create wealth while sustaining themselves and their beloved. Much smaller groups (called information elites) seize most of this wealth in the name of military security, and use it to defray the anti-profit costs of their weapon technologies.
These costs go well beyond peacetime expenditures for weapons and soldiers, far beyond that. When comparing the economics of a peaceful society to the econologic of a weapon society, a more precise distinction would be between the wealth of Geneva and the poverty of Mogadishu — or the strength of an Olympic runner winning his favorite race, versus that of a soldier carrying his wounded buddy to the rear.
I’ve considered opting for the terms opinion elite and opinion proletariat to emphasize the fleeting nature of these prejudices and the information elite's paradoxical lack of merit. Opinion elites hold that their prejudices are a cut above everyone else’s; opinion proletarians are convinced that their preferences are second-rate compared to those of the opinion elite. Well-entrenched in the media and schools, opinion elites stress this inferiority complex.
This could be the root cause why an overwhelming majority of progressives (relying on reason) never prevails over a tiny minority of weapon managers (shamelessly reliant on sociopath lies). Ah yes, I nearly forgot! That, and the knee-jerk reflex of reactionaries, to kill and torture people at random if they feel seriously challenged ― either in the cellars of the secret police during mass unemployment, or in the trenches of a war arranged for that purpose alone, or both as often in succession as they deem necessary to renew the proletariat’s reluctant submission.
Info elites and weapon managers are interchangeable among different nation-states, religious affiliations and political organizations. They include our rulers, their staff, media workers, judges, teachers, priests, politicians and other key misinformation and disinformation professionals ― whether or not they understand what they’re doing and why they are doing it. They consider themselves superior to their proletarian hosts – from whom they spring and upon whom they depend – the same way a precocious youngster might scorn his humble guardians.
At first, in times of weapon chaos, info proletarians picked their elite from among themselves; thereafter, once things got more organized, their replacements were promoted from the info proletariat by the elites. It did not matter whether this happened through princely privilege, democratic election, religious hierarchy, Soviet nomination, robber barony or whatever. Nor did it matter if the political setting was a kraal of mud huts, a stinking feudal barony or a continent spanning, multi-ethnic, military-industrial empire. No matter whether weapon managers were enslaved or free, secular or religious, centralized or profit-oriented, plebian or noble, criminal or authorized, professional or amateur. Identical weapons elites emerged in any case, with remarkably similar mind-sets, attitudes and reflexive behaviors. Their talk might change over time and under different circumstances – cynically, opportunistically and with prejudice – but their walk does not. Except, perhaps, for honor and glory: the first at great sacrifice, the second by reckless success.
Learners must make foremost appeal to them, to those of my father, of every noble warrior, that cleanse him of his filth and confirms valor. A real warrior will recognize them at once and defend them against any crazy denier, lethal as he may be. Glory will stem from PeaceWorld’s success; honor will uphold it fiercely thereafter. Those and Learning should become one. After all, honor is learned until glory ensues.
Info elites assert that their weapon management best suits everyone’s needs (an obvious lie). They employ:
• weapon mentors to broadcast this lie during pseudo-peace, and
• weapon sectarians to do so more forcefully in times of war.
The information elite is no wiser than the info proletariat from which it springs. Its members merely promote weapon mentality and themselves in the short term. They censor important information and drown this censorship in babble and lies. Those scrupulous enough to criticize this poor bargain are marginalized.
This triage “in the name of obedience and loyalty” dumbs down those chosen (and self-chosen) to monopolize power, collectively and automatically. Holding to this course for a while, weapons elites run aground on reefs of their social contradictions. Quite predictably, they sink into ritual cruelty, institutional terror and routine corruption (see “Ritual Stupidity”).
Info elites can practice one of three broad categories of info politics. The first two categories simplify information content; the third complexifies it. Transitions between these categories are gradual, granular and flexible; they can go backward or forward ― they need not be categorical, abrupt, monolithic or progressive.
1. Politicians (or elites) of misinformation broadcast as many lies as possible. This is standard behavior for tyrants modern and ancient. Sooner or later, anything not a forbidden truth turns into a mandatory lie. Misinfo politics create top-down weapons elites optimized for war. Think of the regimes of Stalin and Saddam Hussein.
It would be a relatively simple task to sort what remains of the truth from the misinformation broadcast through official monologue media. In most cases, the exact opposite of what was announced is closer to the truth.
Misinfo politics breed paranoia, suspicion and terror. Nothing is as it seems and no one can be trusted. Under this claustrophobic compulsion, the info elite shrinks to a minimum and then purges itself beyond that. Brain-dead dogma becomes manifest reality, repeated mindlessly across every medium. Rather than merely manipulate mass opinion, misinfo elites fantasize they can transform reality itself ― as on paper, so in reality. They murder and terrorize every proletarian they can lay their hands on until their fantasy replaces common sense.
While gangsters rule, self-blinded misinfo politicians wage holy war against Learner creativity. The end result is brutal warfare abroad and intellectual decimation (every nine readers beat the tenth to death) at home to validate official propaganda: the ultimate simplification of public reality. Society runs on its own inertia and feeds off its last reserves until it grinds into chaos and ruin.
We can rate misinformation by its “hardness.” How difficult has the elite made it for the info proletariat to survive? The harsher the tyranny, the worse the politics of misinformation.
“Softer” tyrannies are richer, they replace misinformation politics with disinformation politics. Disinformation is much more subtle and difficult to manage than misinformation.
As weapon states mature, the defects of misinformation politics become obvious. Lies yield nothing but stolen wealth and its entropy into chaos ― sustainable wealth only grows from the truth and its public trust. Thoughtful reformers attempt to weave a few strands of peace mentality (including a few straws of info politics) into the rotten basketwork of weapon management. This mix of opposites cannot hold together for very long. Instead, it pits corrupt weapon managers against frustrated weapon dissidents in a centrifuge of disinfo politics. Here we are, ruled by...
2. Disinfo elites include a mix of so-called populists and moderates with a hard core of reactionaries who rule in the end on every important topic. They broadcast their semi-monologue through extensive hierarchies of corporations, governments and/or religions. Unlike misinformation politicians, they permit carefully screened feedback in minute doses, like a therapeutic poison.
Whereas information politicians would prize it as the staff of life.
The keyword in disinfo politics is "but" as in: "We hear your calls for reform. We understand that true morality, morale and efficiency dictate that we do things better; but …” there follows a long list of excuses why inefficient and immoral practices must remain routine.
“Please be reasonable, ladies and gentlemen. What you propose is impractical, too costly, subject to abuse by thugs, harmful to ancient protocols, political heresy (socialistic for capitalists and vice versa), would encourage our enemies, etc., etc....” Ephemeral religious dogma, ideological gobbledygook, distortion of history, exquisitely composed literary blather, commercial advertising, sports babble, arena violence, empty show trials, soap opera trivia, “scientific” data and “mathematical” conclusions that wind up being utterly false: the whole broadcast through robotic monologue media ― nonstop, from as many sources as possible, in lavish detail, with painful exactitude and at full volume.
Matters of significance are lied about obsessively, usually by omission. This trancelike state becomes hypnotic and self-reinforcing. Producers and spectators alike refuse to sort obvious lies from the truth. Disinfo elites are just as vulnerable to their own disinformation as the host proletariat. Destructive activities increase while real wealth evaporates. The populace ignores its greatest strengths and perils in favor of successive elaborations of trivia. It is easily convinced of its imaginary wealth when on the verge of bankruptcy and vice versa. Public policies become arbitrary and dithering, without ethical or ideological basis. The regime improvises as it goes along and outcomes suffer accordingly.
Superfluous information becomes easier (cheap or free) to find and more profitable to mass-produce, while the useful kind gets harder to broadcast and acquire: more and more expensive, laborious, censored and declared “non-commercial.” Belief in anything but rabid commercialism, faith in anything but naked greed and senile dogma, all but those are forbidden by universal consent and popular decree.
Disinfo elites turn into bloated Mandarinates. As soon as certified mediocrities and authoritative conmen are actively promoted, gifted Learners get relegated to info proletarian status and sub-creative frustration. These habits of deliberate misunderstanding, consensus oversimplification and social mediocrity are only reversed in times of war when many frustrated talents are recruited into revitalized weapon cadres.
I recall a photograph of American shipyard workers heading home at end of shift during World War II (sic). An enormous sign stood above the front gate: “Tell us your good ideas!” No such sign would have graced a similar factory gate at the same time in history, had it been between wars.
Just as a slap in the face may stop a fit of hysterics – and a deep kiss, likewise – mass trauma is the usual method to put an end to this delusional state. Without warning, disaster and warfare strike because no one bothered to answer vital questions. Everyone is so surprised when their sand castles come tumbling down. Thereafter, disinfo elites declare war ― a much simpler task than promoting abundance and fellow feeling. Mass murder simplification becomes the norm once again. At that point, it’s too late to adopt peaceful info politics, since went to waste the wealthy and serene populace needed.
Learner – by the way – is the kiss.
On rare occasions, peace dissidents overcome this social inertia and spread the good news that everyone should share Learning even-handedly. As info elites begin to pay miraculous attention to this idea and broadcast it, they work themselves out of the job of restricting information flow. At that point, info elites and proletariats merge into an information (or learner) commonwealth.
3. Politicians of information generate truth and lies without prejudice or favor on every topic, for Learners to sort out among themselves. A Learner commonwealth emerges through unrestricted public discourse and extensive dialogues between self-selected info-jurors. They pursue their topics of passion without regard to wealth or status ― since those would be theirs by right in an Information Commonwealth.
Many stories that appear to be lies are just more complex elaborations of the truth. Whether through literary fiction, new ideologies, academic postulates, inventions, discoveries or reinterpretations of ancient dogma: the truth prevails because it is more profitable in a peaceful setting. People revalue information content because it seems more important to them than expensive artifacts and mythmaking about military security.
Taking the opposite tack, misinfo societies opt for nothing but lies and terror. The truth becomes worthless because its pursuit will get you killed. No such choice remains in disinfo societies where white noise drowns out everything else, until the World Trade Towers come tumbling down in controlled demolition. Then everyone resumes the deceptive chatter of reassuring normalcy, thus exposing their neck to the axe without doing anything to ward it off.
In politics of information, expanding communication systems develop more interactive, complex and adaptive exchanges. People engage in many more dialogues across new media, instead of submitting to top-down, monologue propaganda from “superior” elites. They are more interested in their topics of passion than in the mass media’s messaging for the most part personally irrelevant thus useless.
TV is a monologue medium, as are radio, print media and non-interactive web pages. You know, those worthless corporate and bigot propaganda web pages without a CONTACT link? Find mine below.
The Greek Agora, Town Hall meetings (unscripted… Gotta add that, now that Bush the Lesser’s disinfo technicians have scripted, rehearsed and hand-picked Town Hall audiences as a matter of routine), telephones and postal or electronic mails: all of them serve as examples of dialogue media.
It is a question of satisfying the armchair formula. Dialogue media could carry more useful information and much more inspiration across the same bandwidth than monologue media. The sum of useful communications equals real wealth (divided by the sum of useless and/or noxious messages?). The same amount of hard cash available today, only much more valuable without inflation.
“Your intent is noble, but your appeal misguided. If you talk to these emperors about profits, and in their love of profit they stop their armies – their armies will rejoice in peace and delight in profit. Soon ministers will embrace profit in serving their sovereign, sons will embrace profit in serving their fathers, younger brothers will embrace profit in serving their elder brothers – and all of them will have abandoned Humanity and Duty. When these relationships become a matter of profit, the nation is doomed to ruin.
“But if you talk to these emperors about Humanity and Duty, and in their love of Humanity and Duty they stop their armies – their armies will rejoice in peace and delight in Humanity and Duty. Soon ministers will embrace Humanity and Duty in serving their sovereign, sons will embrace Humanity and Duty in serving their fathers, younger brothers will embrace Humanity and Duty in serving their elder brothers – and all of them will have abandoned profit.
"When these relationships become a matter of Humanity and Duty, then the sovereign is sure to be a true emperor. So why mention profit? Mencius, translated by David Hinton, Counterpoint, Washington, D.C., 1998, p. 219.
It is up to us to create a Virtual Agora, a vast cultural network that spans the globe. The World Wide Web is the startup prototype of this Learner virtual agora. Insofar it spreads, it bodes well for us.
With few outside threats and lots of surplus wealth, a mature society would allow Learners to complexify information politics.
Since social complexity increases the likelihood of turbulence, it risks bursting the levies of social convention intended to contain and regulate it. Therefore, info politicians must improve vocabularies and habits of communication. Otherwise, the roar of chaotic argument may decline back into misinfo politics.
The latest temptation of info elites, to censor the Internet from the top down, and of proletarians, to cripple it from the bottom up (trolling, viruses, hacking, flames, spam and other info-trash) are pathetic denials of an ever-expanding information universe. Think of a colicky baby who twists away from a spoonful of strained peas. Disoriented individuals and groups re-simplify their existence by weaponizing recent complications they consider vulnerable to their abuse.
In pursuit of abundance, the best practitioners of disinfo politics tend to disarm unilaterally and thus invite military aggression.
Some earlier societies grew into info politics, but were destroyed militarily and wiped out of the historical record (they became “prehistoric”) because their senior managers promoted internal wealth and peace, while hungry strangers lingered outside: poor, militant and jealous.
Note this tendency in the United States, where military casualties used to be political poison. This public aversion, to military casualties in particular and to militarism in general, tempts aggressive outsiders and internal militarists to inflict more damage. As their assaults grow bolder, better coordinated and more destructive, survivors revert to politics of misinformation and overt weapon tyranny: tempting options on a hypermilitarized planet where knee-jerk panic often trumps rational thought.
Weapon technology includes the mechanical hardware and flesh-and-blood wetware of warfare: military forces (weapon technicians); intelligence agencies both foreign and domestic; weapons industrialists and workers, their enormous capital plant and inventory of weapons. Nowadays, there is one personal fireharm for every ten inhabitants of Earth, and two or more bullets cast every year for each of them. Just in case the first one misses…
Weapon managers discriminate against everyone and everything they can blame for their many policy failures (since they are mediocre peace managers at best, by definition): the poor, women, non-heterosexuals, children, liberals, ethnic/religious minorities, migrants and immigrants, primal myths, human nature and nature itself. The smartest of those managers begin recruiting reactionary candidates from among despised and abused minorities. That way, they can pay lip service to pluralism while stimulating all kinds of social abuse.
There is no recruit more faithful than an outsider recently converted, and no downtrodden population more loyal than one convinced its members can win some implausible lottery to success, provided it be at the expense of “inferiors.”
“The more justly constituted the society, the more admirable its political form, the more war [weapon mentality] threatens to weaken its institutions and to pervert them. And it is also true that the best form of government is that least adapted to the exigencies of war.” How to Think about War and Peace, Mortimer J. Adler, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1944, p 42.
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Weapon managers get battle elites (about a 10% minority of weapon technicians) to do their jackals’ share of the dirty work. Educated officers or enlisted slaves: it doesn’t matter. Half genetically damaged and half the issue of childhood fears of abuse or neglect, battle elites thrive on both sides of the battlefield, riot zone, jailhouse bars and Belsen wire.
The remaining 90% of weapon technicians? They serve as logistics and morale supports for battle elites on their side, and as easy prey on the other; finally, as firepower multipliers (artillerists and such) on both sides. Whether in peace or in war, battle elites do the close-up killing and the rest do the dying.
Battle elites cannot readily bring their aggression under control. This makes them valuable assets on the battlefield and costly criminals elsewhere. We all share some battle elite traits, even though most of us keep ours under strict control. Call it good manners, good taste, conscience, civility, delicacy, decadence or mere cowardice: most of us are not hard-wired to thrive on the battlefield and in bar fights, the way battle elites are.
We can split battle elites into two groups.
· The Dirty Dozen of born warriors, gunmen, bullies and outcasts who often outgrow their aggression with proper maturity and loving-kindness.
· The Himmler Subgroup: primarily civilians, ostensibly good parents, spouses, neighbors and administrators ― and quite often, brilliant cowards. Charming and seductive as long as it suits them, they look forward to wreaking havoc on a world of Others they despise. They seek the highest rungs of power, from which they can get away with as much mayhem as possible, shielded by their rank.
Just as a shark grows rows of spare teeth in reserve, info proletariats nurture info proto-elites eager to overthrow the current info elite. Proto-elites are a motley crew of ambitious clerks, students and subalterns — employed by authorities or not, but covertly dissenting from them. These frustrated rebels only cohere clumsily once the failure rate of their elite maxes out.
It is important to note that this apparent sea level of frustration is preventable along with its shifting tides of dissent. By prioritizing weapon requirements and limitations, WeaponWorld creates a bottleneck of positions of responsibility too narrow to fit every mind avid for such responsibility. On PeaceWorld, those frozen out of weapon priorities will stake their claim to responsibility in other topic-of-passion networks they choose. More connection and responsibility, less frustration, less dissent.
Eric Hoffer analyses proto-elite leaders in his book, The True Believer. Unfortunately, he indulges in the sorry habit of biographical reductionism. He turns the intricacies of global social movements into an inventory of their leaders’ personal idiosyncrasies.
Herodotus treated history and current events as cults of personality, as have many historians and journalists since. Everything happens because some poor slob and his flunkies – officially designated Leaders – made it happen exactly the way they foresaw.
“By the mid-4th century, there existed a large and well-known body of Greek literature that had as yet no convenient name – it was not yet called Historia – but was generally described as the “writings of the deeds of war” or “inquiries about the deeds of war’: it included Herodotus, Thucydides, the several continuations of Thucydides, which went under the title Hellenica (Affairs of Greece) (only Xenophon’s survives), and the accounts of the western Greeks by the lost Syracusan writers Antiochus and Philistus, which went under the title Sicelica (Affairs of Sicily). It was taken for granted that this literature was the source of knowledge for anything about war, diplomacy or interstate relations. P. 85.
“But what of the historians? The 5th century had bequeathed two major narrative styles, the linear epic style of Herodotus and the antithetical realistic style of Thucydides, which were associated with two different views of the world ― the encomiastic Herodotus world of moral achievement and cosmic law versus Thucydidean pessimism and irony….” Doyne Dawson, The Origins of Western Warfare: Militarism and Morality in the Ancient World, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1996, p. 95.
This sort of narrative is about as convincing as that which follows. I’m driving a car and in absolute control. So I’m going to flip into carefully pre-planned slots every car in a hundred-car pileup on a freeway in the fog, and thus make sure that my car and those that follow mine roar out the other end without a scratch. Sure, buddy, it could happen! Yet that would be a rather simple problem, compared to running an entire country. See the leadership section in the chapter “Identity Politics.”
After thousands of years of crushed dissidence, progressive organizations are Balkanized, which means chopped to pieces and rendered vestigial. Many social activists worsen their political impotence through exclusive identity politics, mutual ostracism, special interest bickering, petty private grievances and nit-picking ideological puritanism. As a result, much more pragmatic, disciplined and cohesive weapons elites defeat them in detail.
Rejecting holistic transformation, weapon dissidents opt for endless hairsplitting, moral compromise and existential despair. Indifferent to genuine peace and progress they believe beyond their grasp, they turn into conformist adherents of a “loyal opposition.” They are emotionally invested in token resistance against a robust weapon state that thrives from their trifling resistance. Too bad for those who challenge their patchy conformism!
Recall that body builders push and pull their muscles like taffy against resistance. In roughly the same way, weapon states grow stronger by exploiting their weapon dissidents. Thus, the clichéd yammering of the average weapon dissident makes his weapon state stronger, subtler and more difficult to pull down.
Occasionally, a breakthrough peace movement manages to dissolve its weapon state. This lopsided relaxation of weapon technology is usually fatal for the society involved, given the prevalence of hungry outsiders armed to the teeth. So success at peace was never encouraged in the past. Today’s fashionable “community activism” is a carry-over of thousands of years of ineffectual (indeed, inversely effective) weapon dissidence.
My mailbox bursts from a flood of rival solicitations for my paltry charity, each appeal more heart-rending than the last. Nothing more is sought than a check that magically disappears with the promise to support some worthy cause, probably with more solicitation mail and its bureaucracy.
On the other hand, our institutions suck fortunes from our weekly pay packets to deploy the means, justify the motives and develop further opportunities for mass murder. The beneficiaries of thousands of years of successful propaganda, weapon managers plan massive projects and carry them out. Their international transactions and expenditures are holistic, pseudo-voluntary, free spending and for the most part independent of outside influence.
During the Franco-Prussian War, the leadership on both sides of the fight had more in common with each other, during their minuet of death, than with their own info proletariat lined up for massacre.
Those who disapprove of their goals will be marginalized into a political minority equally voiceless and trivial (by definition, not by numbers), no matter how numerous they are or how sensible their proposals, thanks to our historical incoherence and hysterical paralysis.
After thousands of years of defeat, rejection and Balkanization (and the rare, absolutely lethal success), standard-issue weapon dissidents are divisive, elitist, holier-than-thou, miserly, exclusive, reductive and atomistic. They satisfy themselves with empty dramatics, ritual bonding in adversity, moralistic self-indulgence and existential despair. Thus have we honored our long tradition of defeat. Most of us would rather keep it that way indefinitely. Why trouble ourselves with really transformational power? The prospect frightens me too. So what? As if we had any other choice but successful transformation at this point in history.
Thus – every hour on the hour – the media announce more weapon triumphs and peace tragedies. Progressives will never master the political mainstream until they rally around a hyper-complex platform of inclusive, cooperative and mutualistic reforms under the control of local progressives who are expert in these domains. In other words, until Learning is established planet-wide.
Some text – perhaps this one or something better? – may catapult to world power its international, interdenominational and interethnic adherents of every age, sex and class. Much more likely than you might think. Like other hidden truths, it is just a question of time and numbers: the time it would take to broadcast this understanding and the number of those who understand.
Pre-empted by psychopaths who always sucker punch first and cave in soon after, the innocents may be packed off to extermination camps. Like all those whose life was cut short in the past, our passionate lives and agonizing deaths may go up in smoke as cosmic archetypes. Nuclear war likewise, wholesale.
The organized resistance of massed Learners will block that outcome. As during WWII (sic), Nazi wannabes who seek extermination will be stopped by the overwhelming majority of those conscientious. In post-massacre Rwanda: coward bully genocides became militarily helpless. Like vampires caught out in daylight, weapon mentality cannot survive exposure to the truth.
Three world heroes: Stanislav Petrov, James Blunt and Vasili Archipov, set their careers and bodies between the world and its annihilation by thermonuclear war. How many more Smiths, Joneses and Duponts did so without being recognized?
This transition could prove as abrupt as the U.S.S.R.’s perestroika. Modern-day leaders – suddenly checkmated by the exhaustion of “inexhaustible” energy supplies and/or orthodox power structures – could abandon their posts all at once. In the absence of an organizational framework like the one in Learner, this transition could turn horribly destructive ― simply put, the mafia takes over the world and the worst political horrors roll out like clockwork. Does that bring current events into focus?
Independent ideologues and anonymous polemicists are hard at work at this task, each bringing different insights and talents to bear. But it is almost impossible for us to broadcast our findings ― especially among weapon dissidents. Paradoxically, they are more closed to new ideas than weapon managers who will adopt novel improvements (reluctantly but assuredly) into their robust and self-confident management schemes. The shaky ground progressives must tip-toe across does not allow them such open-mindedness, at least until they’ve grasped and steadied that ground for that purpose. Let’s hope the dissident community allows its best ideas to be disseminated, as opposed to the current practice of mutually assured ineptitude. Otherwise, worse ones will take their place.
As our civilization polarizes between luxuriant minorities and restless majorities, as reason and rights fade from public discourse, raw greed becomes the final arbiter. But even shifty greed must find a rightful place. Well-regulated cooperatives of plenty will welcome private enterprise – that wellspring of innovation and abundance – provided in the meantime every citizen obtains withdrawal from their primary misery, based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs ; not to mention outpourings of public and private moral conscience.
Despite their inflated privileges, info elites are just as vulnerable to false beliefs – both self-inflicted and out-sourced – as info proletarians. To secure dependable benefits for themselves and their dearest (as opposed to rickety perks they have to defend at gunpoint), info elites must find new ways to generate sustainable abundance and adopt harmless rituals that redirect fearful aggression, destructive diligence and bad ideas.
Among the tools info elites adopt to manage their partisans, greed is second only to fear. Learners won’t tempt them away from their conspiracies of greed until our shared vocabulary and purpose outsmart their hysterical avarice. Learner doctrine must be clear, concise and immune to prejudice, cupidity and panic. There must be a plan or a series of plans most people will adopt because they see in them a better chance to benefit cooperatively (or merely survive, for lack of anything better) regardless of their original beliefs and status.
The belief is obsolete that ordinary folk can be punished into better behavior. Rewards work much better. The more penalties imposed, beyond a necessary minimum, the more resistance ― automatically. Weapon managers alone benefit from this tailspin of coercion and defiance.
Peace mentality sustains our souls. Like a spiritual physicist, Gandhi found its nucleus was the fusion of Truth and Non-violence. Our souls sparkle around this nucleus like electrons around a vast atom. Every moment every day without cease, a still, small voice whispers “Love fearlessly” at celestial amplitude from across the cosmic void. We just need to listen and obey.
Even though peace mentality burns brightly in idealistic young minds, it sputters in middle age and often gutters out in unlucky souls. Almost everyone would pick peace mentality over the weapon variety on an even playing field. However, our opportunities to practice peace are as fleeting as our weapon practices are diverse, forceful and tempting. Given so much negative conditioning, only an enlightened few approach the mastery at peace.
Peace technology pays its own freight and that of its weapons evil twin. Despite countless obstacles imposed by weapon priorities, peace mentality trucks on. It transcends life and death, much less the shameless narcissism of disinfo politics.
Peace technology includes:
• our flight from misery (above and beyond any Constitutional “pursuit of happiness”);
• our run at abundance, health, human rights and sustainable agriculture;
• our worship of nature and supernature;
• our quest for learning: play, entertainment and enlightenment;
• our pursuit of:
o Peace enforcement,
o Sound philosophy,
o Valid enterprise and
o Useful professionalism, as well as other life-affirming activities.
Without such exemplary modifiers (in italics), we needn’t consider these things valuable in and of themselves. After all, they easily revert to organized bullying, wordy nonsense, greed satiation and naked elitism: giveaway signs of weapon mentality.
Peace mentality has one categorical imperative: raise the children well. Everything else takes back seat to this effort or impedes it. They say, “It takes a whole village to raise a child.” Raising a healthy child requires everyone’s cooperation. The goal is not to raise many children indifferently; that is a weapon requirement. Peace management would demand that every child be cocooned in optimal surroundings. Their health and Learning would take absolute priority, as would the civil rights of their mother.
“Young children all know love for their parents. And when they grow up, they all know respect for their elders. Loving parents is Humanity, and respecting elders is Duty. That’s the secret. Just extend it throughout all beneath Heaven.” Mencius, translated by David Hinton, Counterpoint, Washington, D.C., 1998, p. 240.
It seems obvious that every social good flows from cherished children growing up to become good citizens. Logically, we might conclude that the opposite is also true: that bad citizens proliferate when more children are abused. At gut level, we delight in the happiness of children, suffer heartache when they come to harm, and sigh intense relief when they are delivered therefrom. We needn’t be parents to feel such things, nor particularly sensitive.
If you believed in reincarnation, you would have to be crazy to support any social habit that did not pamper every child without exception. Otherwise, you’d be signing a warrant calling for your torture during future incarnations. Totally bonkers… Another reason to uphold this belief.
Those who resist this empathy are deeply disturbed, as is our whole society since it flouts this basic truth. We let children perish by the million, let billions more grow up to be stupid adults through malnutrition, neglect and chronic abuse.
We should make good these lethal scandals. Such travesties would be unthinkable on PeaceWorld ― unheard of since a barbarous past (our present). Any instance of them would trigger government meltdown and a complete overhaul of leadership. Ex-leaders would withdraw in disgrace from public service, paralyzed with shame.
Today’s weapon leaders are not likely to live up to such peaceful ideals. The best of them might, under ideal circumstances. Once we’ve convinced ourselves, they must be likewise convinced or replaced.
A political homily drones on in my mind. Humans cleave to three broad categories of political behavior. Regardless of other allegiances, we fit in among Ex-Herbivores, Ex-Carnivores and Omnivores (oft-reincarnated herbivores and carnivores who’ve learnt the futility of their old ways).
Ex-Herbivore: “Hey, there’s plenty of good grazing out here. Grass ain’t brain food, so let’s make babies and munch away ― what we do best.
"We live in the present. If we get an itch, we scratch it. Our universe is in that scratching. Anything more ― it’s just too complicated for us.
“Gee, our carnivores are pretty scary. They hunt us, kill us and eat us. But they do chase off other carnivores that might be worse. Who knows; things could be worse. Anything that really scares us, well, our blind stampede will make it disappear, won't it? Why bother to vote? Just let us be happeeeee.”
Ex-Carnivore: “Behold this beautiful body of mine, strong, lean and hungry. My mind ticks over, lethal and remorseless. I live in the future when my darkest needs will finally be satisfied.
“I am an expert at magical thinking. As long as I carry out a precise series of steps in exact order and with perfect timing, I may feast indefinitely, which must be paradise and proof of my status as the Chosen One of God. No-one can stop me, and I’ll kill anyone who tries. If I fail, it will be from lack of self-perfection. No matter how many times I fail, I must succeed in the end or die trying.”
This obsessive-compulsive condition is experienced by a lion at his hunt, a hierarch during his cult devotion (bloody or otherwise), a tycoon during his stock transactions, a science doctrinaire performing laboratory tricks or an author ruminating his prose.
“My reincarnations have been more or less rewarding in these settings and others. My universe is centered on the sacrifice of prey and my self-perfection in so doing. Nothing else matters, and neither God nor I need have mercy for anyone less obsessed. My sires taught me how to use this money, these fancy institutions and novel gadgets to satisfy my hunger. Anyone slower, weaker and more ethical than me is fair game. Anything I can claw down is mine to dispose of as I please. If I don’t claim it, some hungrier carnivore will.
"End of discussion; it’s time to pursue happiness.
“I know! Let's run for Congress!”
Omnivore: “Salads are fine in their place. My peers and I can neutralize any piddling carnivore at will. It’s fun ― plus what’s left is good eats.
“We coordinate the past, the present and the future to improve our personal success. We’re not so much interested in anyone's pursuit of happiness ― that’s their business. We are interested in accelerating their flight from misery: a political duty ex-carnivores keep neglecting in favor of their exclusive pursuit of happiness.
“Under the impulse of natural selection, we evolve to learn. The more complex our information universe, the more we owe it our success. The exponential growth of this wealth could distract ex-herbivores and divert ex-carnivores until they’ve grasped the fundamentals of Learner civilization.
“After five thousand years of bloody compromise, we’re just hitting our stride; that’s exciting! Our information potlatch promises to supplant the rigors of the stalk and the rights of spring. Everyone merits abundance and security: the best, most obvious way to secure our own.
“You, fated ex-herbivore deprived of imagination! Look past your cud.
“Hey you, shifty ex-carnivore! Your aggression betrays your weakness. Go ahead, make your next lunge. It will fail, sooner or later, as it has always done in the past.
Both of you! Rejoin us on PeaceWorld!”
But this is mere EZ listening. Learners will take a close look at the physiology of social behavior and public responsibility. They will find clearer details of human motivation.
“Paul MacLean tells us, ‘We are the possessors of a triune brain – not one brain but three, each with its own way of perceiving and responding to the world.’ Richard M. Restak, The Brain: The Last Frontier (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979). In ascending order on the phylogenic scale, they are: (1) reptilian (central core), (2) paleomammalian (limbic system), and (3) neomammalian (cerebral cortex). The first of these, the reptilian, is the most primitive; MacLean has also labeled this the “R-complex.” It is comparable to much of the brain found in [fish and] reptiles. And it includes the hypothalamus. Surrounding the reptilian R-complex is the next level, the limbic system which is associated with the brain found in early mammals...
“In effect, we appear to have been ‘pre-wired,’ at least partially, by the reptilian brain to be ritualistic, to be in awe of authority, to develop social pecking orders, and perhaps even to develop obsessive-compulsive neuroses ...
“We appear to have been pre-wired in the case of the limbic system as well, to respond emotionally to threats to self- or species-preservation …”
Dennis J. D. Sandole, “The Biological Basis of Needs,” Conflict: Human Needs Theory, John Burton, ed., Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1990, p. 71.
Of course, the scientific community has gone to great lengths to naysay this theory, asserting that non-mammals have other brain structures that serve the same purpose. They cite cephalopods and birds (though not reptiles) that display surprisingly advanced mental capacities. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=one-world-many-minds. But this theory is still useful to illustrate political priorities.
Once our models of human awareness improve somewhat, better evaluations of human motivation and better treatments for violence-, greed- and fear-driven deviants may help us love one another better ― at last!
Debra Niehoff reviews criminal correction in her mindful book, The Biology of Violence, The Free Press, New York, 1999, “Picking up the Pieces”. Herself the victim of a brutal crime (as I was, at gunpoint but less brutally; and you too, no doubt, just as often in this age as sorry as those in the past), she downplays violence as a criminal deterrent and suggests more thoughtful methods of behavior modification. Her research reveals that police terror and penal brutality do not so much suppress criminality as increase it. This is the constant aim of weapon mentality: boosting crime and aggression.
We live on WeaponWorld dominated by man and bereft of God’s Peace, mutual welcome and care. Why not re-establish the PeaceWorld of God? The One I believe in abhors war and loves peace. God will reward faithful Learners eager for peace as genuine offspring and saints. That reward will translate into miracles.
Let’s say you were neither a rock bed atheist nor overly devout – often just as closed-minded – and sought to verify the existence of God solely for your own satisfaction. What better way to do that than to transform WeaponWorld into PeaceWorld and witness God self-reveal in a shower of miracles of approbation? After all, we would do what God had always wanted us to do, instead of what God forbade – in defiance of aberrant commands by weapon fundamentalists and ideological liars for thousands of years: “Kill, lie, rob your neighbor, despise him, and pray in public. We order you to obey the commandments of mere men even though they’re forbidden by God.”
Those miracles would be God’s substitute for our perfectly scientific, perfectly orthodox, perfectly serial disasters. We could pour into PeaceWorld all the sanctity left pent up in our heart, and benefit from miracles of wisdom and loving kindness. Learners could become brothers and sisters on PeaceWorld ― beyond our capacity to imagine it.
We would be acting our part in a play, except all the props, costumes and lighting would conform more closely to peace and improve over time. What’s more, the play’s sponsors, cast, crew and audience would have changed their mind – that WeaponWorld was not so hot – and all of us would be better off on PeaceWorld.
Imagine that!
Every Learner could assume – with more liberty, zeal and fellow feeling; with greater ease and thrift; less troubled by hazards and fear; using greater artistry, passion and devotion – the bearing of God’s massed saints: athirst for, drunk with and filled by the Peace of God, until God secured God’s Peace.
From birth to death, we are all Learners. As political, moral, spiritual, and pragmatic entities linked in love and family devotion to everyone– for better or for worse – we are the Chosen ones in this continuum of space-time. Of God, of Allah, of Fate or Nothing? Whatever you choose to call it. I call it God, and us, God’s, including every other manifestation of the sacred. Does that metaphysical jumble bother you? Why? Your favorite God (or lack of such) would be included automatically.
Instead, we subsist as WeaponWorld slaves. Caught up in a tap dance of perpetual war and ephemeral peace, we improvise as we go along, paying homage to two contrary sets of values: weapon mentality and peace mentality. Suffering from mass schizophrenia and hostage to it, we have become nothing more than asocial sheep and incompetent wolves … God’s spoiled brats, instead of God’s saints.
What a sorry waste!
- REPLACE THE SOCIOPATHS, asabiya's dark side -
One of the charms of the fine arts is their immunity from sociopaths. Whether it be the plastic arts, music, dance, drama or creative writing; whether as an interpreter, appreciator or creator; sociopathy is irrelevant. Other skills and talents are called for and ethics don’t matter.
Of course, psychopaths and sociopaths have a long history of art abuse: the murder, censorship and enslavement of artists; the destruction, theft and vandalism of art works across the world. That kind of targeted turmoil is more fun for them than random mayhem. But art, like nature, has always outshone their churlish transgressions.
Sociopaths have infiltrated, corrupted, inverted by decree and eventually taken over almost (?) every human institution: politics, religion, education, justice, philosophy, science, industry and mores. Unlike them, the fine arts are immune to this contamination. The absolute nature of aesthetics trumps the give-or-take lies, routine hypocrisy and corruption taken for granted when it comes to human ethics.
That is why the least creative of sociopaths (like those in Congress) are so hostile to the fine arts, and why Learners must support the arts with all their might.
My thanks to the late Lloyd Rigler.
Out of all humanity, about three percent of men and one percent of women are sociopaths; one percent are psychopaths. They number around three hundred million and thus equal the sixth largest nation on Earth.
For purposes of comparison and none other, there are 40 million blind people on Earth. Say you crossed the path of someone blind on the fifteenth of the month and the one prior on the first. During that two-week interval, approximately two psychopaths and six sociopaths crossed your path.
Their passage is marked by the litter that carpets every public space and byway. It is not thoughtlessly cast aside, as one would assume, but carefully sited by young sociopaths of both sexes for maximum ugliness, even when a trashcan is nearby. When they’re not serially littering, they develop their special talents by tormenting helpless playmates and animals, abusing siblings, stealing whatever they can and lying more and more convincingly to parents and teachers.
Depending upon the taxonomy of therapists, those who suffer from psychopathy, sociopathy, antisocial personality disorder and malignant narcissism are more or less interchangeable.
Don’t bother butting me your buts, you witch doctors.
Psychopaths tend to be lone wolves often lethal and delusional. Sociopaths are outwardly sane people who join a subculture that promotes their vicious egotism; such as organized crime, criminal justice, politics, corporate and government bureaucracies, religion and the military. And more recently, finance, science and technology: wherever the most money can be got.
More or less one quarter of corporate bosses are psychopaths, and who knows what proportion of politicians and the military? How many preachers are more intent on textual fundamentalism than the spontaneous – and from their point of view, satanic – dictates of personal conscience? Religious dogma is essential to them because they have no internal moral compass to steer their lives by.
Almost a quarter of those in prison are psychopaths; they are at fault for most of the violent crimes penalized. Psycho/sociopathic cops, court officers, legislators and their cronies lock up most other convicts for victimless or one-time crimes; they occasionally conceal proof of their innocence. In extremis, they get them executed. Cops who shoot unarmed suspects and get away with it, and their judges? The rich and their political supporters who rob the poor? Likewise.
Is there a parallel between the finding that 96% of the universe is made up of “dark energy and matter” whereas only four percent is visible, and that 96% of humankind is conscience-driven, whereas four percent is not? Is there an ecological need for a four percent margin of predators and a 96% remainder of prey, to maintain the vigor of the human species, since we don’t have other serious predators than microbes?
Various Ages, or Youga, may have differed in their percentage of psycho- and sociopaths present. Our era, the Iron Age or Kali Youga (Age of Evil), supports as many of them as possible, short of the complete destruction of civilization ― merely now and then for a millennium or so until the next renaissance. The Bronze Age, two-thirds as many; the Silver, one-third; and the Golden, almost none.
Why these shifting proportions over time? Sociopaths tend to love ‘em and leave ‘em, fathering a long succession of bastards and orphans who often become sociopaths in turn, since they were left to their sad fate and genetically predisposed. Psychopaths love to tyrannize, torture and murder as many conscience-driven people as they can — preferably with patriotic, religious and civic-minded “help” from the conscience-driven themselves. Finally, psychopaths enjoy being led by other psychopaths, contrary to conscientious people who detest such bosses. So they proliferate in positions of responsibility and of preparation for those, like bacteria in a neglected egg dish.
Modern civilization’s predicament is like that of a classroom with too many troubled students; whereas those who lived during a Golden Age went about their business in peaceful harmony, without having to suffer from those fulfilling their evil Karma.
Some Asian societies only retain one percent of sociopaths, perhaps because of their collectivism and their tendency, as far as the Japanese are concerned, to “hammer the nail that sticks out.” I would rather attribute it to the prevalence of seafood in their diet with its high protein and micronutrient content, plus rice with its lower digestive acidification especially important for growing children. Negligence of proper child nutrition (especially by corporations run by psychopaths) helps to induce mass sociopathy.
They can tell right from wrong, but suffer no remorse when they commit the latter. They have no conscience, no shame and no love for anyone but themselves and perhaps blood relatives they’ve been taught to care for. They do not recognize those feelings and look down on those duty-bound by them. The truth is a matter of convenience for them, to be twisted to their advantage. Especially the truth about themselves. For example, they are never mistaken or imperfect (think of Trump). Ever.
They can act in good conscience, but must be coached to do so under relentless supervision. In one of his “Culture” science fiction novels, Ian M. Banks foretold that each of them would be escorted full time by an artificial intelligence “slap missile” set to thwart their misdeeds.
Type One sociopaths (with Antisocial Personality Disorder) have no impulse control, they are unmistakable. The Type Twos (standard psychopaths) postpone their most blatant misdeeds and only proceed when they know that no effective resistance will be offered. Today, they run this planet in the dumb name of weapon mentality — the reason why the Golden Rule is violated so commonly everywhere without correction.
Many of their victims find their devil-may-care attitude attractive at first. Charming and debonair when so inclined, they turn vicious and manipulative when they can get away with it. They can “read” like a book the body language and facial expressions of the conscience-driven, fake emotions, seek pity and affection they don’t feel for others, and seduce their victims just prior to exploiting, insulting and injuring them. They use people and discard them, the way you would a Kleenex.
They commit sins without guilt, sins the rest of us would find inconceivable to carry out and painful to recall. They get away with many evils because no-one around them can imagine such complex, aggressive and risky behavior for rewards as trivial as the relief of boredom, idle greed, one-upmanship and simple jealousy of those with superior talents.
Since the average psychopath is not bothered by moral conscience, love and their many subconscious calculations ‒ somewhat like those needed to remain upright on a bicycle, but a lot more voluminous and complex ‒ his idle brain burdens him with a permanent state of boredom that can only be relieved by risky behavior and elaborate abuse of conscientious inferiors, their torture, humiliation and betrayal.
He usually grows old, sick and broke, shunned by one and all including his family. Many are ruined or slain by the protector of one of their victims or by several of their avengers. Few die in bed surrounded by loved ones. They are pitiable if quite dangerous moral amputees.
The craft of government consists in keeping most psycho/sociopaths in check as long as possible (that is, moderately well off in exchange for wreaking as little havoc as possible). The tragedy of government is that sooner or later they will take over its highest ranks as well as several rungs below, and ruin the life of everyone they control, for no good reason.
Recall that their primary motive in life is to sow chaos and revel in it, thus relieve their crushing sense of boredom.
From a peace mentality point of view, good governance must remain calm, fair, generous and permissive. You may do pretty much as you please and not be disturbed by the government (but for taxes) except under special circumstances and with elaborate safeguards.
Under such minimal constraints, psychopaths thrive upward from below and gradually take over all the bases of wealth and political power. No-one makes a serious effort to identify and impede most of them. They recruit other sociopaths as protégés into dysfunctional or overtly criminal organizations. Once they have taken over most positions of responsibility, they eject the conscience-driven from the rest of them. Their self-serving abuse rots out the rest of society, unavoidably and unarguably, no matter how awful the outcome of their takeover.
Since most wealth is inherited instead of earned, its long-term inheritors display a random spectrum of behaviors. There will be good inheritors and nasty inheritors of fortune, more of less equally distributed. Then again, you would have to be a seething psychopath, a carnivorous specialist at ripping it off, to accumulate wealth to begin with. So more psychopath offspring inherit great wealth than those psychosane. Regardless of this automatic imbalance in favor of evil, these people, good and bad, will use their wealth in the future to further their principles and scotch those of their powerful rivals. Pretty much a static muddle in favor of minor evil, most of the time.
A decade or so before modern wars (local or world), there will have been a major financial scandal (à la Stavisky or Bernie Madoff). Some kind of ponzi scheme that sucks dry the wealthy pockets of many people of good will. They believe in good faith, since they are themselves motivated by good conscience, no matter how piratically their wealth was accrued in the past, or how stupid their greedy trust in ponzi sweet talk. Their faith in mankind makes them vulnerable.
Wealthy psychopaths and sociopaths almost never fall for this sucker bait. After the scandal, they get to regulate the future based on wealth disproportionately redistributed in their favor. Raw wealth, per se, is a slow and clumsy tool of social manipulation on continental scales. A preponderance of wealthy psychopaths will need time to buy up the centers of power and media, to recruit four sociopaths for every new psychopath they recruit, and to get the massed frogs habituated to their up and coming boiling bath.
So a massive financial scandal will happen ten or fifteen years before the next war.
But once the trap is sprung, the result is inevitable (since it happens unnoticed by anyone). Psychopathocracy takes over most sources of power. The psychosane, stripped of funds, die alone, penniless and without influence. Psychopaths find employment and power; the psychosane, less so, then not at all. War, the heaven of psychopaths, becomes “inevitable.”
“Sorry about that, folks! Patriotism forever!”
After a while, the growing resentment of a conscience-driven majority explodes into open revolt. Non-violent and frequent, cripplingly large and clumsy public demonstrations are followed by expert bloodbaths at the hands of elite psychopaths and their sociopathic mercenaries in charge of police suppression. At that point, their opponents and victims, the conscientious revolutionaries, discover the military advantage of a chain of command of psychopaths, recruit prior outcasts from among them as combat leaders and thus fatally compromise the lofty ideals that triggered the revolt.
After a psychopath-directed seesaw of revolution and counter-revolution (this chaos, their idea of paradise since it allows them the greatest scope of corruption and terror), the slate is wiped clean. The absolute minority of psychopathic leaders is exterminated and so many more casualties accrue among the conscience-driven that their survivors, exhausted and disgusted, will take up once again the temporary reins of government. They reward surviving psycho/sociopaths at minimal expense to do the least damage, then re-institute more peace, justice and benevolence. You can do pretty much as you please — and so on.
Expect not much more from any weapon revolution. Expect it to be a lot worse than the simple, tidy procedure described above, much more torturous, prolonged and malevolent.
I took the following quotation from MIT’s Internet Classics Archives version of Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War at http://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.3.third.html, Book Three, Sections 82 and 83. This passage describes the takeover of both sides by psychopaths during the course of that war. It applies to world politics these days, growing more and more extreme and intolerant, and to prior takeovers of both sides of every war by psychopaths throughout world history.
3.82 “So bloody was the march of the revolution, and the impression which it made was the greater as it was one of the first to occur. Later on, one may say, the whole Hellenic world was convulsed; struggles being everywhere made by the popular chiefs to bring in the Athenians, and by the oligarchs to introduce the Lacedaemonians. In peace there would have been neither the pretext nor the wish to make such an invitation; but in war, with an alliance always at the command of either faction for the hurt of their adversaries and their own corresponding advantage, opportunities for bringing in the foreigner were never wanting to the revolutionary parties. The sufferings which revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur, as long as the nature of mankind remains the same; though in a severer or milder form, and varying in their symptoms, according to the variety of the particular cases. In peace and prosperity, states and individuals have better sentiments, because they do not find themselves suddenly confronted with imperious necessities; but war takes away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a rough master, that brings most men's characters to a level with their fortunes. Revolution thus ran its course from city to city, and the places which it arrived at last, from having heard what had been done before, carried to a still greater excess the refinement of their inventions, as manifested in the cunning of their enterprises and the atrocity of their reprisals. Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot, still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries. In fine, to forestall an intending criminal, or to suggest the idea of a crime where it was wanting, was equally commended until even blood became a weaker tie than party, from the superior readiness of those united by the latter to dare everything without reserve; for such associations had not in view the blessings derivable from established institutions but were formed by ambition for their overthrow; and the confidence of their members in each other rested less on any religious sanction than upon complicity in crime. The fair proposals of an adversary were met with jealous precautions by the stronger of the two, and not with a generous confidence. Revenge also was held of more account than self-preservation. Oaths of reconciliation, being only proffered on either side to meet an immediate difficulty, only held good so long as no other weapon was at hand; but when opportunity offered, he who first ventured to seize it and to take his enemy off his guard, thought this perfidious vengeance sweeter than an open one, since, considerations of safety apart, success by treachery won him the palm of superior intelligence. Indeed it is generally the case that men are readier to call rogues clever than simpletons honest, and are as ashamed of being the second as they are proud of being the first. The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition; and from these passions proceeded the violence of parties once engaged in contention. The leaders in the cities, each provided with the fairest professions, on the one side with the cry of political equality of the people, on the other of a moderate aristocracy, sought prizes for themselves in those public interests which they pretended to cherish, and, recoiling from no means in their struggles for ascendancy engaged in the direst excesses; in their acts of vengeance they went to even greater lengths, not stopping at what justice or the good of the state demanded, but making the party caprice of the moment their only standard, and invoking with equal readiness the condemnation of an unjust verdict or the authority of the strong arm to glut the animosities of the hour. Thus religion was in honour with neither party; but the use of fair phrases to arrive at guilty ends was in high reputation. Meanwhile the moderate part of the citizens perished between the two, either for not joining in the quarrel, or because envy would not suffer them to escape.
3.83 “Thus every form of iniquity took root in the Hellenic countries by reason of the troubles. The ancient simplicity into which honour so largely entered was laughed down and disappeared; and society became divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow. To put an end to this, there was neither promise to be depended upon, nor oath that could command respect; but all parties dwelling rather in their calculation upon the hopelessness of a permanent state of things, were more intent upon self-defense than capable of confidence. In this contest the blunter wits were most successful. Apprehensive of their own deficiencies and of the cleverness of their antagonists, they feared to be worsted in debate and to be surprised by the combinations of their more versatile opponents, and so at once boldly had recourse to action: while their adversaries, arrogantly thinking that they should know in time, and that it was unnecessary to secure by action what policy afforded, often fell victims to their want of precaution.”
If your conscience prompts you to pursue good and reduce evil ‒ no matter what race, ethnicity, country, religion, ideology or organization you belong to or reject ‒ half of your rare enemies are on your side and half of your many friends, on the other. The only non-delusional segregation? That between those with a healthy conscience (your real friends) and those without (your enemies).
It doesn’t matter which “side” you “belong” to, except to justify the bloody-mindedness of that side’s psychopaths otherwise constrained. Thus, war, jihad and crusade fester at random intervals, each one a manhunt for the Other made a monster (even though we are all for the most part the same people), justified by clever psychopath propaganda.
Heed my warning. Pick your friends and sort out your enemies with equal care.
There are dependable psychological tests to identify psychopaths. During brain CAT scans, they react to emotional problems the way most people would to an algebra problem. The same brain volumes light up in both cases. When observing torture films of unspeakable horror, nothing much lights up in their brain, while cerebral fireworks go off in those of conscientious people.
They rarely yawn after other people do so; they have no fellow feeling.
Their record as a schoolyard bully and animal tormentor gives them away during naïve youth, as does the shameless way they seek pity once they’ve been caught at confirmed serial misdeeds as adults. Let me repeat: they are never wrong and cannot be wrong. It is always someone else’s fault, your fault or their victims’ who deserve their abuse. Their routine speech, absolving themselves and scapegoating others, echoes that of national weapon propaganda since history began.
There is no cure for their disease, nothing chemical or psychoanalytical (perhaps genetic surgery someday?). They do not want to be cured. They consider themselves superior, and the conscience-driven, their social inferiors and legitimate targets. After advanced group therapy sessions targeting their affliction, they emerge with better techniques to simulate emotions they never felt, thus duping their future victims more readily next time.
Track them down, identify them and eject them from positions of authority high and low. A public contact network should be dedicated to their victims, so they can turn in a sociopath tormentor. Investigators would bring the suspect in for testing, the results of which would confirm or deny the necessity of restraining them from positions of responsibility, authority and control over their victims.
Above all, never allow sociopaths to take over the hunt for sociopaths. If given the slightest opportunity, they will surpass every evil of the Inquisition (another historical Paradise for them), hunting down innocent victims and laughing in their face as they ruin and kill them.
They should be stroked and cozened, once they are identified, and generously subsidized for life. Experiments have shown that their criminal recidivism can be reduced much more effectively by methodical rewards than by punishments they seem to be immune to. In addition, that kind of treatment will neutralize a great chunk of the merely lazy and parasitical ones, otherwise inoffensive, at lesser cost than present day laissez-faire. Prison and penal punishments only serve to isolate them from the civilian population; they have little effect on their bad behavior except to worsen it.
Those left at liberty should be given constructive outlets for their immense boredom (demining, commando work, high risk surgery and space exploration, for example) and otherwise peacefully neutralized. They are better qualified for technical tasks that require emotional distancing from the people they interact with, like delicate neurosurgery and violent law enforcement. Under strict supervision and with generous rewards, they will be encouraged along those lines.
The last thing to wish for: that they unite against the rest of the world out of fear for their life and liberty. No other army would be more lethal, no insurrection more destructive, no terrorist group more alarming than that of psycho/sociopaths united because the rest of us attack them. Under most circumstances, they are anarchistic individualists and their organizations stumble because they are so internally competitive, as demonstrated by cutthroat civilian Nazi leadership.
They are most useful in war when they find it easy to commit frightful atrocities, then move on to the next. Unimpeded by moral conscience, they are more technically competent at organized killing and more imaginative in carrying it out. They suffer no remorse from the grim chore of killing the enemy, not even from the pileup of casualties on their own side in order to get the job done.
Psychopaths commit the first atrocities in war and then drift off to the next, anonymous, invisible and unpunished (if not promoted for their acts). Meanwhile, conscientious people in uniform (or peaceful villagers left behind) hold the ground and get punished in retaliation. If those sociopaths are bossy enough, normal people will obey their insane orders and commit crimes unthinkable under other circumstances. Sociologists have confirmed these outcomes during experiments simulating interactions between fake convicts/prison guards and torture victims/administrators. People tend to fall into the roles of tormentor and victim reflexively.
The evils military psychopaths commit are never attributed to them, but to the country, religion or ideology they defend, leaving them in the clear of their misdeeds and their victims never properly avenged.
This is how dirty war spreads on both sides.
World War II (sic) in North Africa was fought with relative chivalry because the Nazi SS were not dispatched and the Allies never concentrated their psychopaths in similar, “political” units. On the other hand, combat turned rabid in the USSR because both sides used them (SS versus NKVD).
Dread them like Satan. They and the idiots under their control are responsible for most of the large-scale evils on Earth. In their absence, utopia might draw just within reach without necessitating so many laws and so much paperwork and general constraint.
Of course, powerful psychopaths have bad-mouthed utopia in all the mass media they could control. They’ve slandered idealists and pacifists so systematically; they’ve turned them into pariahs and made those passions taboo. They’ve produced a whole literary culture that exempts them from responsibility for most crimes, and attributes it to conscientious people who stray (“Anyone is capable of any crime”) even though they commit almost every crime, especially the serious ones — all this with our amiable consent. For thousands of years, we have repeated their vicious lies like brainwashed idiots.
Beware!
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door: the Ruthless versus the Rest of Us, Broadway Books, USA, 2005.
Robert D. Hare, Without Conscience: the Disturbing World of the Psychopaths among Us, The Guildford Press, New York, 1999.
http://www.bullyonline.org/workbully/serial.htm
http://www.alienview.net/conspire.html
Another minority may exist, of super-conscientious, super-empathic people: the psychosane and the sociosane (note how we have no such PeaceWorld terms). For people like Buddha, Abraham, Gandhi and quite a few more (mostly women), the suffering of others is more painful to them than their own. They would rather suffer and die, if necessary, than see their fellows harmed. The leadership of PeaceWorld should be drawn from them alone, even though they’ve been sidelined by mainstream WeaponWorld culture, up ‘til now, as “weak-kneed do-gooders.”
Don’t use the term “empathetic” instead of empathic. Empathetic sounds too much like “pathetic” a turn of phrase useful for psychopaths.
It will be up to Learners to recruit the empathic leadership they require, by means of cooperative procedures distinct from competitive selection dictated by psychopaths.
The historic selection of male leaders of the Iroquois Nation by so-called “senior mothers,” their control of those leaders and potential but absolute veto of their worst decisions, those should be seriously studied, brought up to date and adopted. After all, the first American constitution was made of wampum.
- MINE FART QUOTING HITLER OUT OF CONTEXT -
Every soul runs its own trip, right? Subject to Karma? Yours, mine, to each their own: managed more or less deftly until its fatal end nobody wants? Hitler and his henchmen ran theirs, too. Some new tyrant, lurching downtown like Godzilla, could smash ours like a docked yacht in a hurricane. History has warned us.
Learners tap into everything known. That makes them smarter. Smarter people, fewer mistakes; fewer mistakes, less pain; less human pain, greater productivity. Rapid investment for limitless profit. Can we call on enough Humanity and Duty, per Mencius, to see this through? Do we have guts enough to attempt it?
Have we become too cagey for our own good? Have we found it safer to believe in no new ideology, whatever the cost? Fanaticophobia: what a sorry habit! “The opposite of illusions is not disillusion but the truth.” A Course in Miracles, Foundation for Inner Peace, p. 438.
So here’s my agenda. First things first! World peace first!
Abog in denial, I shout this from the rooftops, so far left unheard.
You may have noticed four phenomena merging for the first time in history.
1) The Corona virus has turned all of us into life-or-death allies against a common enemy. For the first time in history, we are waging total war on the same side and not against each other.
2) We have global communication networks. Our alien and alienating nation-states are merging into One People and One World. “Me Tarzan. Me tie message to Internet vine, throw to you. Catch!”
3) Regardless of ethnicity, nationality and creed, like-minded Learners who share a craving for peace crowd this planet. Overqualified and ready for anything, the count of conscientious Learners outnumbers by 24 times that of tyrants and sellouts (moral conscience amputees).
4) Finally, we teeter on the cliff-edge of omnicide ("Kill everything!") that grows closer every day in alarming ways.
Why not exploit this window of opportunity, recruits and crisis, barely cracked open? Since we lacked essential peace components in the past, it was sealed shut against us. Failed efforts in the past convinced us peace would always fail, with or without those essential components. This window of opportunity will slam shut again soon. We have only this fleeting opportunity before the evil-twin of peace finishes us off.
We need to rally around a shared ideal unfamiliar to us so far, but acceptable after careful consideration by everyone sane. It would embrace the best and worst of who we are; brace us to fear and exclude no-one and nothing; shield us from ice storms of recrimination, blame games, cruelty and untruth. Finally, it would let us forgive everyone and everything, ourselves included, and the worst we have done as individuals and communities in the past. Could we forgive ourselves, atone for our unholy wars and make honest amends? What would that take?
Learners will call that high ideal “PeaceWorld.” For the first time, we dispose of the means, motive and opportunity for peace. Once the baton drops for the first note, our peace chorale will drown out the bad brass band blare of WeaponWorld.
Quotes from:
http://sunsite.org.uk/packages/Online-Book-Initiative/Adolph.Hitler/unpacked/mkv1ch04.html.
[Author’s note: a neutral, academic web site, now offline. I will not refer you to a Nazi one. My family fought the Nazis, tooth and claw; I despise them. However, this is WeaponWorld and I must harvest my quotes where I can find them. Learner will pry open your mindedness beyond the comfort zone.
“In every case where there are exigencies or tasks that seem impossible to deal with successfully, public opinion must be concentrated on the one problem ... Only in this way can public interest be aroused to such a pitch as will urge people to combine in a great voluntary effort and achieve important results.
“This fundamental truth applies also to the individual ... He must always concentrate his efforts to one definitely limited stage of his progress, which has to be completed before the next step be attempted … This systematic way of approaching an objective is an art in itself and always calls for the expenditure of every ounce of energy...” Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. I, Chap. 10.
“… all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be repeated persistently until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.” Vol. I, Chap. 6.
“The more the militant energies of the people are directed towards one objective, the more will new recruits join the movement, attracted by the magnetism of its unified actions, ...” Vol. I, Chap. 3.
“Any Weltanschauung (world view) though a thousandfold right and supremely beneficial to humanity, will be of no practical service for the maintenance of a people, as long as its principles have not yet become the rallying point of a militant movement.” Vol. II, Chap. 1.
Hitler’s idea of militancy was the panic-struck brutality of gangster allies. The Learners' version will be the cooperation of self-confident mutualists … thus much stronger.
Will America uphold its title as political lighthouse of the world? Or must it degenerate into the world’s recent Centurion? Why not nurture our legendary idealism and transplant it into the Old World whose only crop up to now has been weapon mentality?
This country has been a test bed for lofty new ideals. Its citizens have taken up the most radical and risky ideologies and transformed them into working models of downstream abundance. Around the world, idealists, entrepreneurs and common folk alike have fallen in love with our results and beaten a path to our door. It is what we are most admired for, what we do best. And yet, when we ape some Old World tyrant, they begrudge us our second-hand despotism and strike back hard. That is entirely justified: those gladiator-movie clichés never worked out well for five thousand years, as everyone knows perfectly well.
The time has come to establish PeaceWorld: our obvious calling.
“To these three forms of law a fourth links up, foremost of all. It’s not chiseled in marble or bronze, but in the heart of citizens. It is the true constitution of the State, which gathers strength every day. It revives and replaces other laws when they reach their expiration date or exceed it. It holds a people to the spirit of their institutions and quietly replaces the power of authority with that of habit. I speak of mores, of customs and above all of opinion: the overlooked part of our politics yet upon which everything else depends, the part that secretly preoccupies the great statesperson who only seems intent on specific regulations. Those are but the girdle of the dome of which mores – brought forth more gradually – form the unshakable key.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social, (The Social Contract). Book II, Chapter 11.
I can invite you into PeaceWorld, but not shove you into it. All I can do is suggest the melody and hope you choose to harmonize. Everyone, sing along!
How will PeaceWorld repay us? Will we get to bask in its glory?
Our conscience at long last revived, glory to the God or not of our choosing, proper reverence for ancestors, the well-being of posterity and our military honor as guarantors of Peace, that should be enough.
SECTION I – WHY
“There are seven sins in the world: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice and politics without principle.” Gandhi
Noble Virgins Raped
Herds of sheep;
Woolens, tapestries and rugs;
Linen from fine-spun flax,
One of the first human harvests?
Spinning cotton tough to pick, as Gandhi recommends,
And weaving satin from it;
Or spinning silk of endless toil,
Were those the source of literacy?
Did poems alone speak of spirit and wisdom?
Written prose only for accounts and suchlike
Because the written word is easier to ignore
Than good poetry recited in those days;
Nothing more or less than that?
Shut out bad judgment by failing to memorize it
And forbidding its transcription?
Did some epics survive the end of the world
When book learning disappeared?
Was the epic, the Veda, the only thing left to be heard,
Under the rolling tick-tock of Yugas,
Once time wound down and vaporized every page and pixel,
(All that hard work gone!)
Along with the skill to transmit it
And the will to understand it?
Waterpower,
In mills, on boats and when fishing.
Was that the source of the numeric?
Or was it the knapping of flint?
Parallel and perpendicular: an initiation to geometry?
Noble virgins raped,
Pried from shielding arms
Right after the last gasp of desperate fathers,
Lovers, husbands and brothers,
All fallen in combat.
Those victims left alive cast out
To distant hills and shores
Far from the massacre.
Take refuge in the wilderness
Far from warrior haunted plains,
Unto distant hills and shores,
Between reticent shepherds and taciturn fishermen,
Where security is bought with silence.
To tarry there distant.
Sigh over beauties and laughter long gone,
Count the stitches, reweave the nets,
And recite the rhymes you’ve memorized
Despite the tears they wring from you.
While weapons comb the cities,
Burn them, flatten them and spill them out to sea,
Set adrift in famine and disease,
Turn them into blood-greased charcoal,
Their quiet hearths smothered for years or forever,
As God wills it.
Zombies keen nightmares on the silver screen,
Lunge to eat victims alive:
Merely starving survivors of that hecatomb?
Phantoms logged long ago in DNA
From a distant past best forgotten?
Merely us in less opportune guise?
Withdrawn there from zombies
Shut away from plagued and looting armies,
Teach the young survivors, if you can,
To recite the verses and count the stitches.
Thus, in hardy fisheries and alluring embroidery,
In the magic of books and rare wines
Traded from afar for quite some time,
In a civilized way, in our way,
During good years prior and since.
The tinkle of gold, soft abacus clicks
And charming music along shared shores.
Let's speak of civilized ways, ephemeral yet heroic,
What wise men discuss with full bellies
While the children are safe asleep.
Every Learner, often and together,
As long as there’s peacetime left.
In courts of law,
Why not wash each other’s feet?
The ritual purification of jurors,
Litigants wash the feet of their rivals
And of other celebrants?
Before and after the trial?
Let’s discuss the mercy God shows us
Mimed by our pardon of the Other,
Our outbursts becalmed miraculously by the peace of God.
Let’s discuss hearts delivered by our love for one and all,
That we forgot, repressed and stifled;
With tears of joy and sighs of relief
From human angels praising God
Not the jibber jabber prayer of stupid demands,
As if we knew what we needed better than God.
Should we accept God’s tender loving care,
The only thing that keeps us alive –
We, lost in our heart of darkness –
We could warm the chill beating in our chest,
And cradle all the children in loving arms.
Peals of infant laughter,
Flocks of birds from forests as far as the eye can see.
Front doors left unlocked in trouble-free security.
Protection vouched for by trustworthy warrior valor.
Famine unknown,
Plague inadmissible,
Injustice unjustifiable.
Learning everywhere instead.
A pleasant life a thousand years long
The painful one cut short:
A simple question of choice.
With the ethics of a newborn:
Fragile, deep and charming.
Sacrifice vestigial but deeply rooted:
Self-sacrifice, less often of the Other.
Celebration explosive but shallow,
Evident everywhere, unknown nowhere.
What can I tell you about this neglected peace?
Me, druid on the outside looking in,
Sipping the morning warmth of whiskey tea
Spokesman for long dead prophets
Relieving winter pains with hot sake
Mere apologist for the sadly mistaken
Savoring soft dark red wines.
Harken to the herald of Learner!
Herald, not hero (as Sarraute noted).
The true heroes and heroines are coming,
Their thoughts deeper than mine,
Better peace technicians than I,
Dependable lovers of dependable neighbors.
Accounts of their opulent exploits will amplify Learner
From the Sections Why, How and What
To Who, When and Where.
Proud to serve as that herald.
No matter how fleeting my message,
How poorly written or unread.
Proud to post it clearly on the Internet.
I spit at the eye of doom,
That you may read me and agree,
Or refute me, just as well,
Or better yet, do it better.
Hear Yee! Hear Yee!
We have just passed the Kali Yuga,
The Age three-quarters evil,
Into the Dvapara Yuga, that of halves;
Technological progress over time
From the bad (nukes) to those better (Eden).
History has never been our judge and jury
The executioner who blindfolds us on the scaffold,
But our past: a cracked old mirror,
An old snakeskin we must slough off.
Having struck bottom and rebounded,
We ascend to the surface,
Whether we understand that or not.
It is up to you, young Learners,
With little help from us weapon-stained elders
Trailing the blood-trails of victims of history,
Starving millions of babies, killing beasts by the billion,
Our heart chilled by those blots on our soul.
Instead of drowning the poor,
Every hand to the oars and the bailing!
Every brain inspired by the idea of peace,
Every gut soothed by its rewards
Every heart strengthened by its success.
Peace technologies will follow its awakening…
… Ours …
Time enough may remain before the pixels fade,
Before the world jumbles once again,
Before bright eyes become bitter dust,
And entropy bays its victory, shuts us up for good
And recasts the Yuga dice.
By all that’s holy, some heroism!
Good sense and good hearts.
The best possible world placed in all humility
On the altar of God,
Not the WeaponWorld concentration camp.
That satisfied mediocrity swapped out for PeaceWorld,
Before the merciless universe annihilates us in any case,
Exterminates us like the social insects we are.
Let our ideals gleam!
Our fondest dreams shine like a second Sun,
More so than the chorus of our radios.
Let our foremost hopes shine brighter than entropy
And set the abyss of Death alight with the flare of defiance!
Far too familiar with bitter truths,
We could navigate beyond them to God’s serene homeport.
What do we have left to lose,
We who must lose everything in any case?
What are we afraid of learning, who know next to nothing?
What are we afraid of, with nothing left to fear?
I defy you to make PeaceWorld happen;
I could care less where you come from,
Your prejudices, your fears and your misfortune.
I invite you to pledge to the common good
As a deputy of this honorable race,
A PeaceWorld Learner.
- SURVIVAL OF THE DEADLIEST -
Weapon mentors dismiss peace mentality and promote weapon mentality instead. Recorded history is merely the glorification of weapon states. If a pure peace civilization existed, it disappeared, “pre-historic” because erased from history.
Weapon managers maintain that too much peace technology reduces (less attractive) weapons efforts. They believe that public expectations of justice and prosperity will outstrip their ham-fisted methods of social control, once peace managers allocate too many resources to non-military goods and services. They worry that peace will soften the populace, make it less pugnacious in war ― more “sophisticated, cosmopolitan and decadent” instead. Minimal peace technology is the only alternative to open revolt and warfare they will tolerate. Underline the word minimal.
Peace accustoms people to resolve their disagreements quietly; too much aggression disturbs them. Weapon mentors protest: “If we let this decadence go unchecked overlong, weapon barbarians will overrun us.” Martial poverty and hierarchical terror are the flip sides of peaceful abundance and pacifist vulnerability.
Francis Fukuyama’s infamous prediction in his End of History will come about in a manner he least expects and desires. The Thousand Year Reich he venerates, of weapon mentality National-Capitalism, will collapse under its contradictions ― either in omnicidal holocaust or by way of Learners’ peaceful transformation.
Let’s assume we are surveying a faraway planet. It would be much like Earth, except its climate is so tropical that hurricanes gust past 300 MPH from time to time. Expeditionary vehicles will have to anchor themselves to bedrock so raging winds won’t blow them away. Our scrooge-like interstellar logistics, however, dictate that these vehicles be lightweight, nimble and super fuel-efficient.
Well anchored or featherweight? This paradoxical choice forms an antinomy: a contradiction along every dimension. Meeting both specifications in the same design will produce a gas-guzzling monster that will tumble away at the third serious gust.
The weapon/peace antinomy is just the same.
Picture a petrie dish full of nutrient, otherwise sterile. Release two varieties of bacteria into it: mottled green ones (weapon technologies) and Day-Glo peace technologies. Day-Glo bacteria are accommodating and non-competitive; the cammo ones are aggressive and toxic. While they multiply with equal fervor, Cammo bacteria develop a cannibal taste for Day-Glo ones.
After a few thousand generations, how many Day-Glo bacteria will survive? How much Day-Glo DNA will persist among Cammo bacteria? Cammo characteristics will mark all the survivors.
After a few thousand generations, how many Day-Glo bacteria will survive? How much Day-Glo DNA will persist among Cammo bacteria ? Cammo characteristics will mark all the survivors.
The dominance of weapon mentality is not chiefly due to a dark plot among psychopathic evildoers – though that happens too – any more than stronger toxins would be among surviving bacteria. Like them, we collaborate with the prevailing paradigm without really understanding it ― in our case, weapon mentality. Unlike them, we could admit we live on WeaponWorld, stop collaborating with it and shift our conspiracy in favor of PeaceWorld.
It would be as simple as that. We would need to make up our mind during the same generation, with but few holdouts. For the first time in history, we can take right off the shelf all the communication channels, peace infrastructure and mutual recognition we need to build World Peace. The problem is ― have we got the guts?
Take a more sizzling example. Suppose the atmosphere held a slightly denser concentration of oxygen. Fires would ignite spontaneously and burn super-hot.
Fire fighting would become The Elite Preoccupation: the dignitary’s duty and poor man’s chore. Everyone, from toddlers to the elderly could act out basic fire drills in their sleep. Babies, brought to life by the touch of a red-hot metal wire, would be taught fire management with their first few breaths. In medicine, the most talented healers would be pyrologists who treated burns.
Schools, the media and popular culture, each of them would hyper-refine this blazing reality in hypnotic cycles of rote repetition. Hundreds more terms would describe “fire.” Byblos and mythos would bristle with uplifting tales of fire fighting heroes.
Traditional fire fighting technologies would engulf national budgets; they’d distort land development, planning and architecture. Compulsive taboos would smother high-energy technologies from kitchen matches to nuclear power. Masonry, cold metalwork and cave sculpting would replace carpentry. Asbestos, its health hazards ignored, would be worth its weight in gold. Root crops would replace stemmed plants that grew too vulnerably above ground.
Their governments (each with its favorite technique of fire management adapted to local mores and circumstances) might claim they devoted only a small fraction of their Gross National Product to Fire Management. They would fail to mention the fortunes gone up in smoke during sporadic firestorms. And those titanic sums wouldn’t begin to cover the hidden costs and personal sacrifices their citizens had to bear.
From time to time, the very real threat of fire storm might lead those people to backfire most of their infrastructure preemptively. They might even sacrifice each other in trembling forfeiture to their pyromanic God(s) and ideologies. The hellfires of religion would burn bright and cold in fanatical imaginations ― even more so than ours today…
As alien observers, we’d trip over social contradictions and cost overheads that locals would find perfectly acceptable.
As of now, consider me a remote observer alienated from this world, as many Learners must consider themselves. The military anarchy that prevails on this planet has nothing to do with us Learners except to cast us as traumatized witnesses and desperate peacemakers castaway on this planet of killer primates. Thank God, there’s excellent music hereabouts, a ma’s love and the grandmas,’ gobs of heroic self-sacrifice and countless things good and beautiful! Noble deeds overall.
Learner friend, I invite you to save your soul, no matter the outcome of this mess ― a humble gift to my brother and sister Learners with their back up against the wall.
From our point of view, this world seems warped, and its natives, acting under horrific compulsions. But they would find everything perfectly fine.
Slightly more enlightened natives might decry the most extravagant demands of firefighting orthodoxy. For instance, they might politely suggest that sacrificial victims be roasted alive less often. But no argument would budge smug majorities from their prejudices. And the most sophisticated resistance would come from native “progressives” immunized against significant reform by robot repetition of obsolete clichés.
Assuming you could show them that the concentration of atmospheric oxygen had subsided along with its combustibility, eliminating the need for most of their prejudices and practices, they’d resist that suggestion anyway, out of sluggish habit, imaginary panic, false morality and mental inertia. The fear of fire would distort their social arrangements — just the way fear of military aggression distorts ours. So they’d cling to their pyrophobia as much as we cling to our weapon reflexes.
Another example. Suppose you were the chieftain of a barbarian horde that had overrun a long-standing civilization. To begin with, you would ignore your victims’ cultural achievement. Even if you were cunning enough to order scribes interrogated in public and their books translated for you in secret, you’d still disdain most of this useless trash. Your frustrated curiosity might make you look the fool in front of your lieutenants; the knowledge of soft, city ways, spoil your warriors’ fighting spirit; and traditional native culture, enlist popular opposition into guerrilla liberation bands.
So you would ensure that this written culture disappeared along with its literate cadre ― by neglect and by design. You’d terrorize, overtax and enslave the locals until they had lost the will to prepare their children for anything but your plow fields and parade grounds. Learning its literature, religion, history and mythos would become capital offenses. This is how nomad conquerors distanced themselves from their victims, through ignorance and apartheid, and made this the spirit and letter of their law. Of our law.
Warrior clans dominated their urban conquests as long as they retained simpler, nomad ways. Irrigated croplands were inhospitable to herds; soft city habits induced military decadence. Therefore, farmlands were laid waste; irrigation systems, breached; and great cities, depopulated and razed to the ground on a regular basis. Only a small, portable fraction of urban wealth would be looted, only those books that served weapon mentality were preserved. The remainder was reduced to ash and washed away in blood, including priceless peace archives, technologies and technicians, all of them obliterated.
Our societies preserve weapon mentality at great peril to themselves. Lower standards of living, extravagant taxes and cults of repression engender militant bigotry, institutional arrogance and escalating insanity. The end result is an exploding penal population, open class warfare and tidal waves of public corruption.
Society reacts to these irritants much the way a disturbed bee colony would. As the proletariat’s attack reflexes shift to overdrive, goaded by these contradictions, it gestates new proto-elites eager to revolt.
Battle elites usually hire out to protect the info elite, but only so long as this guardianship boosts their profits. Once matters begin to fall apart for the info elite, more and more battle elites adopt the most vicious proto-elite (revolutionary cell) they can find.
Warfare provides a handy outlet for popular discontent. With surprising ease, info elites can shift responsibility for social evils from themselves to declared enemies both internal and external. An info proletariat at war submits to its elite until it has bled dry. Passive witness to government assaults against harmless minorities and outsiders, the info proletariat becomes disgusted, terrorized, relieved, fascinated, unified, regimented and ultimately inspired to collaborate in crimes against humanity.
Foreign attacks against “civilian” populations strengthen their will to resist. It does not matter whether those assaults are carried out by stinking cavalry hordes, gleaming bomber streams or wild-eyed terrorists; they increase the proletariat’s tolerance for the failings of its elite.
This siege mentality reduces opportunities for effective dissidence. Info elites often galvanize popular support by organizing domestic terror and international adventures. They hold unarmed combatants (civilians) hostage by controlling their relatives in the military and vice versa.
This is standard practice in the USA. Since almost nobody has a taste for war, meaningless wars are initiated (as lucrative for weapon ghouls as they are painful for the troops and costly for their relatives), then skeptical civilians are condemned for refusing to provide moral support. We are told we must “support the sacrificial troops, if not the war itself.” If you are against the war, you are against the troops; if you are against the troops, you are not patriotic and may not criticize the war. Deadly circular logic.
What if they gave a war and nobody came?
Carroll Quigley’s unfinished thesis, The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis, (New York, the Macmillan Company, 1961), provides an excellent analysis of the evolution of historical bureaucracies. From pages 50 to 62, he contrasts:
· “Instruments”: social organizations that fulfill their mandate effectively, with
· “Institutions «whose members satisfy illicit ambitions.
Some institutional leaders betray their mandate from personal weakness: laziness, mediocrity, neglect, greed, simony or bad precedent. Many bosses, often the most powerful, are merely corrupt or power drunk. Others focus overmuch on their own contribution: “The purpose of military discipline is to spit shine shoes and salute superiors; that of military training, to eliminate accidents.” Even more don’t see any need for new training, equipment and circumstances.
Besides, the largest chunk of most problems is solved by the first serious increment of energy used to resolve it. What remains demands more and more effort. Solving the same problem down to the last detail requires infinite energy, like pushing an object to the speed of light with a Newtonian mass driver.
For better results, each problem needn’t be solved to its utmost depths. Instead, we should define it such as to apply the most efficient amount of energy to resolve it quickly and well; then redefine the problem, resolve it equally well according to that redefinition; redefine it again and so on.
As social instruments molder into institutions by failing to carry out these serial redefinitions, their leaders mismanage more and more effort for lesser results. They ignore new breakthroughs and worsen past errors. As their success fades away, they place more faith in packaging and intent, and less in content and results.
Three outcomes emerge from this “tension of development.”
· Failing institutions resort to reaction that entangles antagonists in vicious cycles of injustice, dissent and suppression.
· They reform themselves into viable instruments. Emergency leaders take over from ineffectual timeservers; their new instruments become more honest and competent.
· New instruments assume real power by circumvention. They leave former institutions as hollow husks that fulfill ceremonial, cosmetic functions only. For example, parliament overrules a degenerate monarchy and limits it to leading annual parades and pageants. Or else a Roman emperor bullied and massacred Senators while honoring the Senate with many traditional distinctions (as did the almost-emperor Marius).
Rebecca Costa made an extraordinary analysis of civilizations’ complexity and collapse and their patterns of thought and behavior. Richard Branson and E.O. Wilson backed her; for those among you who recognize such thoughtful people. Bravo, Rebecca. Your work is brilliant.
Rebecca Costa, The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction, Vanguard Press, Perseus Publishing Group, England, 2011.
According to her, every successful civilization reached a cognitive threshold beyond which prior solutions ceased to address the latest batch of social and environmental problems. From Babylon to the Maya to the Trump White House and electorate (including their opposition), standard human reactions to this dilemma have been similar. Once reason cannot respond adequately to current problems, belief replaces it thanks to greater ease of use, despite its much lesser success. This corrosive process takes the path of supermemes. It is much easier for humans to fall into the following intellectual (anti-intellectual) traps than adopt creative alternatives.
· Irrational opposition: simply oppose current wrongs without proposing new solutions too risky, controversial and difficult. Such solutions are often vetoed by interest groups seemingly powerful, who will crumble sooner or later along with everyone else in the wake of unaddressed catastrophe. Those interests favor blind opposition without any cost to themselves between now and then.
· The personalization of blame: track down and condemn a few scapegoats found guilty for systematic problems beyond their personal control. Believe their punishment solves the problem when it does not, (author’s note: unless their many peers and superiors in crime suffer a like fate or are at least decimated professionally).
· Counterfeit Correlation: attribute causation to two phenomena that are merely contiguous. I have a problem with her idea: the human species is poorly equipped to separate synchronicity from causation, Ms. Costa included. See her example on p. 113 where I disagree with her dismissal.
· Silo thinking: I would rather call this compartmentalization, as if different compartment watch teams on board a ship threw grenades down corridors and hatches at each other instead of cooperating for its survival: prioritize the exclusive requirements of one’s own identify or special interest group, as against the shared good.
· Extreme economics: give priority to mechanical profit/loss requirements over those arising from empathy, compassion and spirit, much more rewarding in the long run.
Ms. Costa’s solutions to these problems involve strengthening personal objectivity through public instruction, and better coordinating left/right brain thought with recently developed mental exercises.
Personal insight sees through the thousand and one distractions of true complexity to reveal one elegant solution based on a few key elements, which seems obvious to everyone after the fact. Rebecca proposes several steps society could take to cultivate genius in the masses instead of expecting it from a few gifted people while crushing it out of all the rest in school.
She is unfamiliar with the weapons/peace antimony much more significant to progress, for good or ill. Rebecca’s solutions complement those proposed in Learner. Her advocacy of a shower of separate mitigation efforts to solve each complex problem, mirrors Learner’s suggestion to flood the latest problems with mass expertise self-cohered.
Bravo, Rebecca. Your work is brilliant.
Rebecca Costa, The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction, Vanguard Press, Perseus Publishing Group, England, 2011.
Modern weapon managers insist that international corporations are the most disinterested form of social management. They’ve concluded that stable government requires an apathetic public more than anything else. I wonder who funded their research.
For this situation to endure, corporations must assume all the rights of the individual: freedom of speech and assembly, plus immunity from personal liability even if proven in a court of law, plus billions of times more wealth and power than that held by most individuals ― without corresponding liabilities. Finally, a continuous and unlimited lifespan instead of our common mortality. In other words, they must become organizational monarchies. Long live His majesty, King Cola!
By their rationale, the most vital social assets are an apathetic, poorly educated and undermotivated electorate and an unjustifiable infrastructure of shadow-puppet politicians. Just the latest attempt by reactionaries to simplify the political landscape back to the medieval norms they prefer, the way maggots favor rotting flesh.
Learner insists it is not so much disinterest or fine reasoning we require –– as passion.
“The heart accepts a conclusion for which the intellect subsequently finds the reasoning. Argument follows conviction. Man often finds reasons in support of whatever he does or wants to do.” Gandhi quote taken from Young India (weekly newspaper), Navajivan, 1919-32. Taken from Raghavan Iyer’s The Moral and Political Thought of Gandhi, Oxford University Press, London, 1973, p. 18.
Human disinterest hardly exists. Our perceived self-interests tug us where they will, even unto mass extinction. When we abandon our real needs and succumb to mortal panic, we drop into short-term greed, arrogance, cowardice, denial and sadism ― actually schadenfreude.
Suffering from serial hierarchies of vicious Corporals, the German Volk coined this term to describe the shady delight some people take in the misfortune of others. Such people get off by hurting people bad or savoring their suffering at third hand. Russians have an equivalent term: zloradtsvo. The 19th century Russian philosopher, Pyotr Chaadeyev, wrote:
“We are exceptional people; we are among those nations that, as it were, are not members of mankind but exist only to give the world some terrible lesson.”
This lament applies just as much to the inhabitants of every weapon state.
Tsar Nicholas I had him declared insane and placed under house arrest (no exit, no visitors; think about that) until he recanted. Pyotr was the forerunner of a long line of Russian political prisoners on psychiatric grounds.
Every language group coins such a phrase after a recent spell of tyranny. Now that corporate tyranny has become commonplace throughout the world, a more accurate Anglo-Saxonism might be shadism.
Sadism is sexual arousal achieved from another’s pain: a perversion that preoccupies only a jaded few. Unlike it, shadism is taught us surprisingly early and often. By means of infinite rehearsals and painful repetitions, we’ve become expert shadists, equally at home as its victims, witnesses and tormentors.
We administer Hell on Earth because we’ve been brought up to admire fearful hatred and begrudge fearless love ― in submission to what we were taught most often.
It is time to send the psychopaths packing and inspire our better selves to foster PeaceWorld.
- YOU CHOOSE -
“We are being taught by all the foregoing to assume as closely as possible the viewpoint, the patience and the competence of God.” Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, St. Martin’s Press, p. 251.
During the Second (sic) World War, every European had to face the same choice: accept the Nazi fait accompli or defy it. Today, it’s up to you. No time is left to duck key issues (a favorite human pastime), nowhere’s left to hide. From New Zealand to Novaya Zemlya, your choice will be between accepting the status quo or defying it by turning into a Learner worthy of the name: between moral bankruptcy and self-sacrifice. Weigh your options carefully here, before push comes to shove.
First off, you will have to jettison three layers of mental ballast. Without thinking much about it, you may have chosen to be:
· nescient: “I can only trust those ideas I have heard at least a hundred times before, those least likely to get me into trouble. Nothing else matters.”
· credophobic: “I don’t believe any of this BS they’ve pelted into my brain, but I can’t accept anything else.”
· fanaticophobic: “I only trust those who repeat well-worn ideas to me. Anyone who testifies otherwise must be a fanatic, a crankcase or a snake-oil peddler. No-one can con me; I’m way too cool for that.”
These days, almost everyone has become a fanaticophobe. Not you?
You can set those notions aside and put up with the social ostracism that will come with your denial. Strike out on your own, for a change; make up your own mind and take creative risks. Only you can unplug your ears to new ideas (“Only you can prevent forest fires…”). That will take guts, brains and heart the current mind-set would rather you passed up.
Have you got what it takes? You just might, since you’ve stuck to Learner thus far.
The prevailing orthodoxy bids us to submit a “New World Order” based on global national-corporatism. “Us, the rulers, versus Them, the People.” At best, fond adults caring for children; at worst, con men mugging suckers.
I call these people World Imperialists or Wimps. Current events confirm their dominance if not, regrettably, their competence. Our existential despair, the environmental holocaust we witness against our will and the rise of militant chaosism – from microcriminal to macromilitary – reveal the corporate econologic that drives them. Televised thought-control beams quantities of Hollywood trivia and Madison Avenue materialism into our brains, thus amplifying the Wimp lunacy we share and concealing its toxic outcome.
When you think of corporations and their outrageous control freaks, think of capricious, enduring, licentious and dangerously shortsighted monarchies. Their worst fear is that the slightest social progress will diminish them — which prediction they fulfill by opposing progress more and more brutally until a Newtonian blowback explodes in their face. Learners will deal with multinational corporations the same way European republicans of the Enlightenment dealt with their corporate monarchist opponents. Old school, violent overthrow just multiplied the misery of mirror-image counter-revolutions, but intelligent and gradual succession brought forth some new improvements.
Old school troglodytes assert that a “chosen few” must “return” to some dreamland of uncertain provenance, while the rest of us must surrender to Wimp servitude at their hands. Hypnotically, these Prisms imprison themselves and everyone else in their favorite “ism.” Be it individualism, libertarianism, “strict” constitutionalism; generic nationalism, Nazi/Fascist/Bushido national socialism, Soviet/Maoist national communism, corporate national capitalism, religious national fundamentalism either idolatrous (cult of personality), atheistic, mono- or polytheistic; radicalism, anarchism, racism or tribalism. Take your pick of those simple cure-alls; all of them the ingathering of like-minded peers make-believe superior and the sacrifice of imaginary inferiors who are in reality quite akin in their shared diversity. By their Prism shall you know them.
The title Prism applies equally to military autocrats, politburo absolutists, religious fanatics, government-paid and extra-governmental terrorists, ethnic genocides, crime barons and their secret brothers in the secret police, military-industrial extortionists, reactionary politicians and their know-nothing supporters — as well as you and I in a bad frame of mind. In search of sedative simplicity, such activists dehumanize their enemies by turning them into philosophical abstractions, the better to kill one or more of them, terrorize and subdue the rest.
In The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York, 1959, J. Glenn Davis lists several types of warriors and the way they abstract the Other into a perfect enemy.
Professional soldiers would rather fight competent and courageous enemies; they hold a lesser adversary in contempt. Paradoxically, their enemies should be despised and destroyed with professional efficiency as long as they resist, but treated honorably once they surrender — even though sociopaths hand-picked for the job may abuse those prisoners to death later on in distant prison camps. When unarmed civilians are tortured, robbed and killed, as they must be in war, (and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise), this must happen with ceremonious reluctance on the part of professional warriors.
With the exception of psychopathic warriors who get away with the opposite: they dodge powerful enemies and torture the helpless ones.
Racist warriors turn their enemies into sub-humans. There is no room for mercy, human decency or redeeming values in their attitude — which adds a robotic drudgery to war’s other insults. The enemies of a religious or ideological crusader are not only subhuman but Incarnations of Evil in insufferable revolt against God, the Leader or some other lofty principle. Killing them is not only a crusader’s duty; it is his divine calling. Expect even less compassion from such mass murderers.
In addition, compared to the glory of the abstraction they uphold, everyone’s well-being and survival are insignificant, whether among opponents, innocent bystanders, fellow combatants, even themselves — even if the adopted ideal forbids this type of aggression. For example, Shia and Sunni fight each other without mercy, even though both are practicing Muslims forbidden by the Koran to attack fellow Muslims. Mohammed would not have approved.
May Learner never be so debased! You lethal cowards who advocate mass murder will find no excuse this time around. Your criminal routines will be forbidden, no matter what the excuse.
On the other hand, conscience-driven people consider their opponents fellow human beings and victims of forces beyond their control — especially during wartime. Contradictions between that healthy attitude and the brutal requirements of combat make it (and sanity) hard to hold onto very long on a battlefield where hesitation often leads to casualties and defeat. Jesus Christ or survival?
Professional soldiers are very critical of this attitude. From their standpoint, scorning the enemy simplifies the perilous task of killing him and subduing his survivors. Thus, they prefer reflexive contempt (despite its mercilessness) to any undermining sense of fraternity. Since it’s hard to stay sharp while brooding over two opposite thoughts, they feel similar contempt for anyone outside their military clan.
In This Thing of Darkness: a Sociology of the Enemy, University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 1994, pp. 36 et seq., James A. Aho lists five steps required to reify ethnic hatred. Reification means turning an abstraction like bigotry into a conviction.
1. Naming: a false characterization of one individual as the role model for an abstract evil category.
2. Legitimization: validating this lie by reversing official findings.
3. Myth-making: creating a legendary history to confirm this lie.
4. Sedimentation: embedding these legends into the memory of the next generation as part of a group bonding dynamic.
5. Ritual: the traumatic, spectacular extinction of victims, often en masse, often accompanied by the entrapment and ritual torture of their family.
6. We might add a sixth element, Martyrdom: the sacrifice of some minor bigot to horrified authorities after the above-described Ritual and his canonization by senior bigots who got clean away. God, how sorry they feel for themselves! Especially after they’ve gotten away with some unbelievable atrocity. Strapping a remote control suicide bomb to a little girl and sending her out to die in the resulting massacre? Unnamable monsters!
These habits are no doubt twisted equivalents of peaceful, “mixing bowl” rituals (getting little girls to present roses). As with many weapon rituals, with a few rewrites of the theatrics involved, we could convert them into practices of peace.
Warring tribes replaced their heavy casualties by adopting prisoners of war after inflicting physical and psychological tortures on them so as to test their spirit and tame it. Thus, lethal bigots became experts at the art of turning bitter enemies into blood brothers. Life is paradox.
Fanatical elites are looking forward to a final orgy of prismatic aggression that will climax in the planetary, pan-toxin gangbang we have helped to prepare: the bio-chemo-nano-nuclear-scalar extermination of every hated Other as well as the fearsome Other within. We deny our part in this upcoming disaster that could never come about without our staunch support.
In the near future? Peace will worsen by small degrees until total war erupts irretrievably – unless we’ve already taken vigorous steps to head it off.
Both Wimps and Prisms rely on weapon mentality. Their ethics are equally corrupt; their odds of long-term success, nil. Sooner or later, their power trips degenerate into a blood bath. It is merely a question of time and weapon sophistication.
Fortunately, most people’s belief (or lack thereof) can be harnessed to peace struggle and Satyagraha, of which more in later chapters.
This text announces a different ideology upheld by an army of one (me). It claims no sponsorship from the Skull & Bones, the Mujihadeen, the International Monetary Fund or any other club of for-profit cutthroats, stealthy or otherwise. I hope this disclaimer attracts you to the cause.
Learners will require the complete infrastructure humanity has assembled today. It must remain intact, flourishing and constantly renewed. What’s more, fewer and fewer people may be deprived of home, homeland, security, livelihood and life.
In short, everyone on Earth will have the constitutional right to withdraw from their misery.
Learners will address the needs of the rich with as much care as those of the info proletariat. In other words, a thousand times more skillfully than what weapon managers got away with. Unlike weapon dissidents and their reflex hatred of the rich, Learners will require the cooperation, expertise and capital management of info elites (at least the conscience-driven cadre among them). Without their support, none of this transformation will be possible.
Humanity has barely got enough capital and good will to undertake this transformation. Any societal breakdown (of the kind weapon dissidents keep calling for) would drive us to lower Levels of weapon barbarism and eventual annihilation. We can’t afford any more mass destruction, pilferage and terror of the kind we’d agreed – while heaving great big sighs! – were regrettably unavoidable.
As for those who seek to destroy civilization while they hone their survival skills, I stand in awe of their hysteria. Whether they adhere to the Unabomber’s screed, to some fundamentalist’s rant or to murderous voices in their head, their brutal simplification of reality bodes ill for everyone, themselves included. May Learners bring to life their petrified imagination and neutralize their craving for deadly simplification!
I recall the story of a young mountain tribesman arrested for enforcing a blood feud. When the police asked him why he had murdered an innocent stranger, he said it was because his mother urged him on. Women are just as lethal as men in this context, perhaps more so. Most will serve PeaceWorld even more enthusiastically.
So-called “primitive” shamans told a foreign observer what the difference was between men and women. Men hunt, fight and cut down trees; women tend the children, the men and the garden. Thus, men and women are entitled to their natural differences in talent, vigor and aptitude. However, most importantly, women must advise men when to stop.
We have forgotten this reliable veto.
An incident in Mormon history comes to mind. At a certain point, their leader concluded that migrants passing through had to be massacred. If his wives (polygamists) had blocked his decision (and I suspect they tried to with all their might), this massacre would never have sullied the Mormons’ reputation. I also suspect that many deadly patriarchal combats throughout history could have come to a better conclusion by means of this veto, just as much then as now and in the future.
By social convention, an elite of women should be able to cut short serious killing (or even serious talk about it) by a majority of men. Period.
Nothing on Earth is as permanent as it seems, not even annihilation. During the next Paroxysm of mass stupidity and soiled underpants panic, we may destroy the entire biosphere, the human species or merely its civilization. It’s just a question of the megatons offloaded, laced with additional deadly disease, warped weather and weapon-grade nano-tech.
Those dismal outcomes would be meaningless to a believer in reincarnation. We’ll just have to re-enact the entire vicious farce of weapon history to reach current levels of peace potential. Once the radioactive rubble stops bouncing, our survivors can take the next few thousand years to re-enact the history of weapon civilization, or millions more to match that since the Dawn of Man, or billions since life took hold on the Earth.
Take your pick, you pompous bombardiers! You’ll have to wait a little while longer before you can score bombs fat enough to drive us further back in time. That’s all your malevolent panic can do: just delay things for a while longer, given life’s near infinite time span.
How much more precious time will we squander on historical re-enactments? How many devourings , burnings alive, rapes, suicides, crucifixions, pogroms and redundant massacres will we have to attend?
You can find out all you want about war in your news feeds and history pages; what you will never read is the following. After every war, things pretty much return to the way they were before the war began. Survivors resume their routines, love and hate one another, care for youngsters and go about their business. No war, no matter how “glorious and significant,” has changed much of anything. The same thing (more likely a better one) would have resulted from an equivalent stretch of peace. The only real change is in the decades of toil and skill it will take to replace the wealth and mutual trust war squandered, along with irreplaceable casualties.
Everyone loses at war; there are no winners except weapons elites.
Early on in life on Earth, multi-cellular organisms underwent a dramatic transformation among others. Primitive colonies let their central cells starve out and suffocate. Surrounded by layers of “selfish” cells on the outer layer, the ones inside couldn’t get enough nourishment, clean water and oxygen to survive. More complex, three-dimensional life forms couldn’t evolve until “privileged” outer cells collected surplus nutrients and oxygen and passed them into the “poorer” center. Then this capacity had to be transmitted unto latter generations.
Anyone who spouts "survival of the fittest" Social Darwinism dogma of the kind sociopath’s worship (à la Ayn Rand), had better contemplate "survival of the most generous.” Nature supports the most complex community of sharers that can coexist in that environment. See Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution.
“Over millions of years, nature’s ecosystems engineers have been especially effective in the promotion of overyielding [my italics]. They have coevolved with other species that exploit the niches they build. The result is a harmony within ecosystems. The constituent species, by spreading out into multiple niches, seize and cycle more materials and energy than is possible in similar ecosystems. Homo sapiens is an ecosystems engineer too, but a bad one. Not having coevolved [my note: in intimate familiarity — a peace technology we could cultivate] with the majority of life forms we encounter around the world; we eliminate far more niches than we create. We drive species and ecosystems into extinction at a far higher rate than existed before, and everywhere diminish productivity and stability.” Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2002, p. 112.
Once the Learner creed takes hold, info elites with surplus wealth will discover the titanic profits they can enjoy in a pragmatic yet fully moral way, once everyone is sustained with greater equity. Compared to this abundance, they will look back on their most grandiose projects to date as slumlord flops.
While everyone merits modest comforts, those who excel may outstrip that minimum by no more than five to one between the highest and lowest fifths of the population, and fifteen to one between the highest and lowest income percentiles. Thus, the higher the comfort ladder the poorest can climb, the more luxuries the rich may indulge in with a clear conscience.
Here I go again, making pronouncements when Learners’ aim is to trigger global transformation, then step aside and let experts and specialists optimize their topics of passion. I should let a more qualified Learner do this work for me.
“Socioeconomic Democracy is a model socioeconomic subsystem in which there is some form of Universal Guaranteed Personal Income [UGI] as well as some form of Maximum Allowable Personal Wealth [MAW], with both the lower bound on personal material poverty and the upper bound on personal material wealth set and adjusted democratically by all society.” Robley E. George, Socioeconomic Democracy: An Advanced Socioeconomic System, Praeger Studies on the 21st Century, Praeger Publishers, Westport, Connecticut, London, 2002, p. 91.
Learners will seek neither absolute economic equality nor unlimited economic opportunity. For that matter, their first reflex will be to shun almost every absolute. Everything in moderation (except wisdom, beauty and elegance), in well-balanced proportion and facilitating peace.
Stalin and Pol Pot revealed to us that enforced equality leads to absolute poverty and millions of murdered entrepreneurs of every kind. Whether civilian or military, bureaucratic or professional, farm or factory managers; almost everyone who tried to get ahead was killed, as well as many people innocent of any such ambition. The United States and Victorian England demonstrated how unhealthy polarization become between the rich and the rest when personal and corporate wealth is prioritized without exception. In the absence of economic moderation, the psychopaths take over both political wings, left and right, high and low, with no good outcome for innocents caught in their crossfire.
A golden mean must be pursued such that everyone lives in comfort while entrepreneurship is allowed its creativity and rightful gain, and a much healthier moral conscience prevails in most individuals and in society as a whole. This while providing the several Earths-worth of resources it will take to supply the same level of comfort to thronging billions. We need to acquire much more wisdom: the ultimate intention of Learner.
As much for the rich as for the poor, a healthy conscience is the ultimate luxury. Compared to that, all the treasures accumulated and honorifics awarded thus far have been mere baby baubles and babble; every sacrifice and affliction endured, a sorry waste of time and energy.
I’m not talking about the satisfaction obtained by clawing to the top of the human meat pile, or experienced by the handful of the privileged that struggles for the wellbeing of the poor. I’m talking about authentic self-worth, a clear conscience and real wellbeing well-earned because universal. Sacrificed up ‘til now on the weapons altar, those are a thousand times more valuable than the diktats and conspicuous consumption of the elite, and much more so than the proletariat’s submission to its suffering or rebellion against it.
Recent political labels assert dogma and linear thinking. They pin us like butterflies to a politico-linguistic corkboard, the better to “control” us.
No term has ever been coined for a political entity as well-represented as a Learner. We’ve gone nameless therefore powerless because we’ve turned our back on better doctrine. We’ve expected to muddle through despite our refusal to clarify our politics.
Our current constellation of political metaphors is a mashup of dusty buzzwords and obsolete clichés that may have held some promise in the distant past but none any longer. These vague euphemisms (left versus right, democracy, capitalism, collectivist, Republican, Democrat, phtui!) served no better purpose than to aggravate our errors and compound their ill effects. As Simone Weil attests in her pamphlet “On the Abolition of All Political Parties”, political parties serve no interest except their own institutional and personal ones; they defraud the public instead. Politics-as-usual prevents us from fine-tuning the boilerplate of civilization. This text notes that obstacle to progress and sidesteps it.
“These principles, therefore … are to be submitted to the dispassionate and patient investigation … of those individuals of every rank and class and denomination … who have become in some degree conscious of the errors in which they exist; who have felt the thick mental darkness by which they are surrounded; who are ardently desirous of discovering and following truth wherever it may lead; and who can perceive the inseparable [connection] which exists between individual and general, between private and public good!” Robert Owen, Catechism, Cole, 205-7. Taken from The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen, by A.L. Morton, Monthly Review Press, 1963, p. 128.
One cannot cheat at Learning, lie about it or dodge it — except to learn how to lie, cheat and duck. Bullies learn evil; victims, endurance; and progressives, if they’re lucky, patience and compassion. Everyone learns to do it better next time. Learning is hard-wired into each of us; it is our favorite game. From conception to death (and perhaps beyond), our consciousness burns to learn.
The verb “to learn” is missing its active voice to supplement the passive one we’ve grown used to. We need to renew its meaning, from “passively absorbing information” to “exchanging information freely.” “I learned to read … My school-marm learned me to read.” In addition, the term Learning, as understood here, includes the packet of information required to get on with civilized life. I claim my share of Learning and hope to barter part of mine for part of yours.
The terms “teaching” and “education” imply compulsion and regimentation that has little to do with the “Learning” we’re talking about here.
While the index to Theories of Learning – A Comparative Approach has many entries under punishment, conditioning and suchlike compulsions, there are no entries under “play” and “games.” Interestingly, the only reference to play occurs in the Preface where the editors explain how much they indulged in play while they “worked on the problem” of learning.
Even though my book may address a clueless crowd of Learners (“Who, me?”) it is especially addressed to those who identify as Learners the moment they scan these lines.
You Learners! Rally here!
We are all born Learners; none may abstain. The body of Learners embraces toddlers and the elderly; rich persons and poor; victims and tormentors; know-nothings, academes and the self-taught alike. Age, race, sex, ability and other identity issues are one and the same on the playground of Learning.
Once Learners recognize each other and rally to their topics of passion in keeping with their talents and interests, the stars will smile on us for the asking.
This text casts off straitjacket terms like Leftist and Rightist. Believe me, I’ve met some decent, thoughtful conservatives and I’ve appealed to far too many “progressive activists” whose only devotion was to their dead-end prejudices and sheep herd associations — not to mention international right-wingers who would rather re-enact their horror film Kristalnacht. I found a good many people whose politics slid right off the platters of this scale.
The clashing demands of weapon mentality empower multinational and interdenominational right-wingers, no matter how much we despise them. Don’t tell me that extremists like Slobodan Milosevic, the KGB and their historical replacements were “Leftists.” They’ve imitated all the tactics of typical Right Wing reactionaries. In essence they are interchangeable weapon managers. Most of us have born the talon-marks of these buzzards, if only indirectly on our acquaintances here and overseas.
These days, “moderate” reactionaries, “compassionate” conservatives, bellicose liberals and mercenary radicals elbow each other across our TV screens. Each group lauds the peace content of its own position and condemns the weapons outcome of its adversaries. However, nobody uses terms like “peace content” and “weapons outcome.” That taboo vocabulary would reveal the inexcusable lapses and predictable strengths all these people share.
Learners will conserve worthwhile values, extend a liberal hand toward those less fortunate, and go to the (radical) root of social problems. They might even display reactionary revulsion — at renewed attempts to validate weapon mythology, for example. A more accurate political description might replace weapon managers’ “fearful hatred” with Learners’ “fearless love beyond reproach.”
Free enterprise is a vital activity in many settings; central planning is, in others. The so-called free market fosters central planning by corporations and centralized corporate welfare on behalf of weapon states. It is painful for conscience-driven people to observe those activities in their pure form, since they become more and more toxic after they make themselves the only game in town.
Habits and institutions that promote honest peace should be adopted; anything that blocks it, marginalized. Peace benefits should be identified and magnified; weapon threats, isolated and rendered vestigial. The same social winnowing applies to every political dualism that so-called leftists and rightists have failed to resolve as long as they could dictate the terms of the debate.
Success at social transformation demands the shared agreement of rulers and ruled as equal partners — never again mere dominance and submission, whatever the reason. This concord could only result from the near-universal consensus of those well informed. Our orthodox constellation of political metaphors cannot convey this unheard-of accord. This book calls it a Cooperative of Plenty on the material plane, Laocracy on the political, and the World or Virtual Agora on the intellectual.
We are enslaved by reductionist, hyperactive and hyper-rational humanism (actually, semi-rational). In deference to this tyranny, a coalition of nation-states and multinational corporations oversees the most culturally isolated and politically neutered info proletariat it can engineer.
Every political party conspires to hurry up this runaway despotism: from Socialists and Communists, to Democrats and Republicans, to Nationalists and Fascists and then back around again. Reflexively, info elites shield their rice bowl in the weapon status quo, even as they deny that fact.
Those who confront this Gorgon emerge as militant extremists be it from the Left or the Right. Every “revolutionary” proto-elite is imbued with the same weapon mentality as their tyrannical archenemy. Each promises to confront orthodox violence with redundant threats of popular violence. Each anticipates social collapse and plots to manipulate it — with no more success than their dead-end predecessors. Revolutionaries, crusaders and jihadi are only good at one thing: perfecting the next round of weapon technology.
We live in an algedonic age. The real rules are those least understood. Crucial social rules are neither discussed nor acknowledged by popular consent. They control a vast meta-system of warfare that is not likely to crash into our lives until the lead bullet, toxiplasm or gamma ray with our name stenciled on it does so. Until then, we remain complacent, more or less reluctant conspirators with weapon management.
On the other hand, Learners will sustain syncretism (“as the Cretans did”). They will identify failing institutions and then remove, reform or circumvent them in favor of everyone’s life-quality, sacred awareness, natural habitat and the common long term.
We cannot sort these priorities effectively outside a Learner Commonwealth. Ranking them fairly will require everyone’s well-informed consent, which could only be obtained therein.
Greed, power-hunger, and deprivation/abuse/neglect fears will fall away under a succession of Learner administrations. Criminals, the obsessively rich and other social parasites will grasp the true meaning of wealth and power once they’ve let go of their primary fears. New benefits will outweigh old fears and thus reduce brutality and untruth.
Those heedless few who persist at ancient crimes will be caught up in social safety nets much more flexible, benign and secure than the makeshifts we rely on today: malign neglect before the fact and thereafter, armored doors sealing shut concrete prisons wrapped in razor wire.
Only by adopting Learner priorities – and subordinating lesser ones – may we expect to achieve real progress.
New Learner ceremonies could dissipate homicidal hostility — perhaps with live-fire militia exercises. Ernest Callenbach’s book, Ecotopia, portrays this form of ritual pseudo-battle.
Think of a bounded playing field. Wall it off from curious bystanders and forbid idle spectators. An underground “Dome of Pain” might serve best.
Set no rules, with the following exceptions:
· Neutral ground: This dome should be located far away from contending militants’ home ground. It should be under the control of a local militia with no stake in the argument being contested.
· Equal numbers: None but equal teams of contenders (by numbers and weight) may be present during a ritual confrontation, everyone else excluded. Afterwards, only local medical teams may rescue survivors and retrieve bodies (with an armed escort of locals if necessary).
· Comparable qualifications: Politicians, priests and bureaucrats should confront their peers from the opposite side. One side’s military leaders should be opposed by the other side’s, etc. One side cannot send a team of commandos, or one or two politicians with a platoon of bodyguards, to exterminate the other side’s team composed of nothing but politicians and their admin assistants.
No doubt, new rules will have to be thought up once clever psychopaths figure out new ways to massacre their opponents without harm to themselves. If respective parties cannot be made to agree about them, drop this controversial model.
Arm naked antagonists with spiked clubs and fill emergency rooms with the outcome of their rage. Begin with the ten top rank representatives of each aggressive assembly – political, military and religious – then ten more replacements, then more until none of that kind remain outside a hospital or cemetery. Let them express their hatred and rage fully. This alternative might be preferable to the current practice of quietly dispatching masses of innocent, patriotic children, equipped with modern military hardware and our social blessing, to confront equally innocent and deadly victims from the other side.
These days, arena-style televised violence panders to disgusting human traits without serious analysis or catharsis. Entire peoples and countries are sacrificed to re-enact our common dread of the Other, which teaches no-one anything useful.
Learner violence games will shut out voyeur (voy-uhr, Peeping Tom) thrill seekers. Such artificial confrontations may turn out to be superior to the crime scenes, prisons, and battlefields across which we let our accursed rage range freely.
In exchange for voluntary and anonymous participation, they would provide:
· mystery and initiation;
· a real risk of sacrifice, serious injury and death;
· a mystical quest for mutual understanding and forgiveness;
· elaborate ceremonies of shared pardon and ritual cleansing; and
· a mystical rebirth – symbolic, hypnotic, perhaps even hallucinatory by psychoactive drug – then return to the real world where such cruel atavisms were no longer tolerated.
For example, the Maya staged a ball game so painful, difficult and sacred that the rare winning team could claimed the onlookers’ belongings and the losing (winning?) team’s captain was sometimes sacrificed afterwards. Such brutal confrontations might stem from duel-challenge, provided the challenged party could call upon volunteer and mercenary champions.
Outer space offers a handy death arena for those who must have their mortality served to them piping hot.
“The particular combination of physical and mental empowerment, retreat from and return to the ordinary world, and spiritual renewal that adventure offers, bears a close formal resemblance to classic warrior myths. And with care and thought, it should be possible to design adventures that could serve as initiation ceremonies for boys making the transition to manhood. Undoubtedly, activities not based on adventure, and myths not based on war can also be developed that would similarly move men forward toward maturity and transcendent experience. To assert that myths meet human needs and that we need new myths, does not imply that the Age of Enlightenment is over, just that rationalism has limits: it can take the world apart, but not put it back together. Only stories and visions do that.” James William Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America, Hill and Wang, A Division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1994, p. 308.
These realtime wargames might parallel today’s battlefield reenactments and paintball wargames. In highly structured, ritualistic environments, people might band together to act out their atavistic urge to posture, fight, flee or submit. As in martial arts sparring, outright violence might cause a few serious injuries and the exceptional fatality. The violence provoked could vary in proportion to the severity of local disputes; its numeric proportion controlled by the number of real bullets issued compared to blanks. The first death and injury from this ceremony would end it — in obedience to sorceress and shaman referees, as during similar ceremonies in pre-Roman Gaul. Deliberate risk-taking and sacrifice would form an integral part of the psychic process. All such activities would be strictly forbidden outside the arena.
These cruel dramas could turn into basic lessons in civics. Emerging from such hermetic rituals, shaken participants would shun further violence. They would undergo lengthy stretches of medical care, ritual purification, psychological healing, and repatriation into PeaceWorld. They’d never revisit these “Arenas of Suffering” unless they felt the need to revisit their craving for violence.
Male or female, hopeless addicts to these violence games would become paid agents, cult priests and priestesses and permanent inhabitants of these taboo precincts. They could also serve as volunteer and mercenary stand-ins for weaklings called upon to duel. They could serve in long postings to the Foreign Legion, or far-flung and dangerous missions in outer space. Everyone could find their rightful place on PeaceWorld, even those most ferocious.
In the meantime, the best among us try to solve a single problem in a vacuum. Those problems seem so overwhelming that no one person or group can hope to resolve any one of them with a mere lifetime’s work.
Frustrated reformers obey the dogma of scientific reductionism. They chop up one big problem into tidbits that appear to be tiny enough to be workable, then sort out the least among them to fix. These weapon reformers seek compromise solutions by scavenging the discards of weapon technology. They are careful to leave monolithic weapon technologies intact, lest fear-haunted elites forbid further improvement.
Independent groups of “morally superior” beings carry out this hopeless microsurgery in direct competition with other reformers for scarce funding. Their pecking order resembles infighting among hungry chickens. We’ve tried every variant of these tactics for thousands of years, despite continuous failure.
We must first topple weapon mentality from its pedestal in front of City Hall; only then may PeaceWorld emerge.
Cannibalism terminated, universal salvation, emancipation from slavery, constitutional rights, class equity, worker solidarity, sexual liberation and apartheid concluded: it’s amazing how many initiatives the best among us have set in motion despite their human frailty! However, every time a mighty new ideal pried some isolated group loose from weapon mentality’s grasp, regrouped weapon managers ambushed, scattered and replaced the peaceful consensus. In a weapon dominion, hostile cash and reactionary politics drown in paradox and paralysis every isolated lunge at progress, no matter how well intended.
We are on the verge of an Ethical Revolution as significant as the Industrial Revolution. We have endured weapon management for so long (long before the industrial one and perhaps even that of bronze), we no longer grasp the sovereignty of peace — it doesn’t mean anything to us. We don’t count on anything except aggression any longer. Our societies cannot handle any project except killing as many long-distance victims as possible in the shortest possible time.
Weapon mentality has stacked itself steeper than its angle of repose. Its eminent collapse is inevitable. This nearly pure Dao of Yang is long overdue for a major infusion of Yin.
In order to invoke peace mentality, the world must be managed under one roof and that a peaceable one. Each nation may try to protect its national sovereignty by sacrificing the cash and kids of its citizens, but this reflexive nationalism will always enslave us to weapon mentality.
This said, Norman Angell made a critical point about nationalism:
“However mischievous may prove some of the manifestations of Nationalism, the worst possible method of dealing with it is by the forcible repression of any of its claims which can be granted with regard to the general interest. To give Nationalism full play, as far as possible, is the best means of attenuating its worst features and preventing its worst developments. This, after all, is the line of conduct which we adopt [with respect] to certain religious beliefs which we may regard as dangerous superstitions. Although the belief may have dangers, the social dangers involved in forcible repression would be greater still.” Norman Angell (pseudonym for Ralph Lane) The Fruits of Victory, The Century Company, New York, 1921, p. 246.
As long as weapons elites coordinate proxy wars between nation states and other Prism sub-aggregates – as they manage to do today – weapon mentality and its contradictions will condemn us to misery in the short term and military annihilation in the long. National sovereignty and weapon management have never delivered peace for very long, no matter how painfully they were enforced. Only a sovereign, one world government could hope to secure world peace into the foreseeable future.
“Two things should be obvious at once:
“…The peace of a political community is impaired by civil strife of all sorts. Whether or not we choose to call such civil violence “war,” the fact remains that civil peace cannot be regarded as perfect until governmental machinery is able to cope with every form of dissension or dispute.
“The perfection of peace does not depend on the removal of all causes for dispute or strife; nor even on the avoidance of force in the settlement of differences. It depends on ways of keeping quarrels on the conversational level, and on a monopoly of the legitimate force needed to execute decisions.” Mortimer J. Adler, How to Think about War and Peace, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1944, p 121.
Our weapons indoctrination coaches us to dread one world government, (see the 1984 Syndrome). This idea makes us nervous because we have been convinced (have convinced ourselves) that the only workable alternative is dangerously impossible. However, in our heart of hearts, we loathe the current reality that allows Wimps and Prisms to lock us into global mismanagement — not the ideal of one elegant, global PeaceWorld.
We have as much to fear from one world government as from a Mayor’s Office: benign or corrupt as the case may be. In other words, we have nothing to fear that Learner vigilance could not handle in the long run. Just as human conscience inspired the best legislation and social philosophy so far, it could promote justice, freedom and plenty for everyone under a global regime that excluded from power those who disregard it.
But I cannot leave it at that. We are here to deepen our thinking, not to simplify it.
The Bible and history reveal a basic contradiction. Let’s call it the paradox of the Tower of Babel. God intervened in the government of mankind in Genesis 11: 1-9.
1. And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.
4. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be retained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
8. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
It’s strange how God made us scatter across the planet…what we hated most to do.
Likewise, history demonstrates that every time a civilization reached heroic peaks of inclusiveness, abundance and benevolence; some monstrous cataclysm destroyed it. Whether by plague, drought, volcanic eruption; a meteor-driven, all-season winter; or by annihilation by a weapon horde; some calamity befell every well-run society.
It does not seem to matter that the same fate befell every other human aggregate, civilized or not, as well as entire pre-human ecologies of every kind; not matter that primitive tribes were much less vulnerable to natural disaster until recently, than much more complex, stationary and fragile urban societies. We are looking into the fate of well-run civilizations and not those whose disappearance was never recorded. Right?
So what choice does that leave us with? We are confronted by a planetary civilization at odds with itself: vicious and arrogant because it is fragmented where it should be whole (in its peace technology) and holistic where it should be fragmented (in its mastery of weapons).
On the one hand, God forbids us to kill and Jesus, to harm the little ones. We are supposed to love our neighbor and turn the other cheek to violence. The best way to do that would be if everyone lived under one roof and that a peaceable one, well regulated — in other words, on PeaceWorld.
On the other, the God of Genesis has trained us like attack dogs, to forget human solidarity and commit random mayhem instead. The Book of Revelation threatens the Wrath of God for anyone but Jesus who would dare promote Peace on Earth.
Likewise, the natural world with its serial disasters that seem to focus in space and time on the greatest hubs of civilization. Note the genocide of the pacifistic, trans-European civilizations of the Goddess, halfway through the fourth millennia BCE. Note the volcanic eruption of Thera that blew Cretan civilization away; the meteor showers that destroyed the entire urban fabric of the Middle Bronze Age, first; and then a thousand years later, those of the Early Iron Age – see Burning Libraries (BC) – and so on, whether such disasters were recorded in history or not.
It would be difficult to chronicle the destruction of your civilization if your last ten generations had to focus on not starving to death.
So it must be up to each of us. Do nothing, sit on our hands and watch killer primates fatten themselves on helpless babes and the World Forest? Or stand up on our hind legs and act civilized? The former course certainly seems safer and I am sure many moral cowards will cling to it. The latter is more tempting for those of us who find all this barbarism intolerable — even at the risk of damnation by some red-toothed god, into whose face I’ll gladly spit when its jaws close on me.
Let me put it this way. Should planetary disaster befall us, its ignorant survivors will blame it on our having come together and tried to turn this carnage around. No doubt, those who can read and write among them will forgo scratching their fleas long enough to inscribe this solemn truth in the next set of sacred texts.
“This is the holy post-script of nuclear winter. The peacemakers were horribly wrong. Everything was their fault and not that of our predecessors, our militant disciples or ourselves. Fervent mayhem is the only way to secure God’s blessing. It is better to be a Viking than a victim. Hallelujah!”
Isn’t that strange? A few passages in the first and last books of the Bible forbid world peace, whereas all those in between recommend it. The Holy book attributes every crime imaginable to man, but the only regulation that might reduce their impact — God forbids? Seems like an obvious revision of the text by weapon managers.
All I can say is this: screw that. If God commands me to do A, and then condemns my eternal soul for having optimized A, that’s His call. I refuse to consent to perpetual world war merely because the last, certifiably crazy chapter of a long-revered weapon text forbids world peace. Let the chips fall where they may; I will go on pushing for world peace. In the universe ruled by Loving God, it will be those who refuse to cooperate in peace who will face God’s disappointment prior to being saved in any case.
I have no use for a deity who can’t make up His mind what His slaves are supposed to do, and who condemns them to eternal hellfire for failing to satisfy His schizoid demands. Obeying Jesus, I will do my best not to kill and not to harm the little ones, regardless of their provenance. Let God decide whom to punish for His lack of clarity.
And you, make up your mind as well, now that these contradictions have been set before you.
Strutting Prisms display their weapon psychoses for all to see; they’re unmistakable. Subtle Wimps make stealthier antagonists. The epithet “Wimp” should be political poison for a tyrant and his lovers. Beware of Wimps who call themselves Learners! Fortunately for us, Wimp elites betray themselves as follows.
They consolidate political power to the highest, most centralized summit they fantasize they can dominate. Their impulses are irrational and reflexive. They can’t tolerate the probing questions of public discourse that Learners thrive on. Learning declines, even among children of the elite, despite endless micromanagement by remote education bureaucracies.
On WeaponWorld, skinheads in suits run crumbling weapon states. Political, economic and police terror extract submission from a disarmed citizenry. Militarized police conduct security crackdowns with no checks and balances against their abuse. “Non-lethal” weaponry makes this reflexive terrorism less controversial, even as it becomes more widespread and arbitrary. Democratic institutions become shameless facades for Conspiracies of Greed. Government officials seek omniscience by spying on everyone and everything. So-called transparency hides a methodical witch-hunt for whistle blowers, and mass deportations underline the promise of smarter migration policies. Republican policies become Democratic showpieces while the Republicans wallow in neo-Nazi psychobabble and nationwide sabotage until it gives them absolute power over the tatters that remain. Living standards rise to stratospheric heights for a privileged few as poverty crushes a swelling underclass and grinds down the dwindling remainder.
Ripped off the land and deprived of legitimate livelihood, entire peoples become stateless pariahs hunted down like animals. Their desperate leaders accept token development aid and millions more to acquire weapons. The UN Security Council, which rules on their legitimacy, is an elite club of the worst weapon merchants.
Meanwhile, weapon dissidents nurse their sense of inferiority: a liability more taxing than any police repression. Our passive acceptance of this disgrace strengthens weapon tyranny and demeans us all in proportion.
Not too long ago, corporate elites sliced the Earth into First, Second and Third Worlds — the better to devour it. Nowadays, those Wimps plot to slice the swollen info proletariat in two.
1) The slaves: a drab mass of human cogs that over-consume and over-produce to meet the profit quotas of info elites. Most of us shuffle along this pathetic treadmill. We wage-slaves no longer recognize the primary objective of our forced labor: that we’re on permanent standby to arm the world for the next paroxysm of total war … whether or not that priority is rational. Otherwise, we can be incinerated or plagued in a few desperate months along with our defenseless cities, vulnerable power grids and delicate food and water supplies.
2) The unpeople: unemployable, untouchable, invisible and stripped of rights … pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire put it ("to motivate the others," us slaves).
For Wimps, human rights are a marginal concern at best. When civil rights and other ethical considerations clash with weapon protocols, flagrant abuses are tolerated, promoted and officially sanctioned. The administration of President Bill Clinton specialized at this kind of sellout à la Democratic Leadership Council; his replacement Biden has gotten even better at it. Good for nothing, mind you, but slow motion military catastrophe for the nation and corresponding economic decline for the masses.
As a fashionable dissident, you could have protested against the World Trade Organization (WTO). Nonetheless, the World Village is going to need a well-ordered Bazaar to manage its global transactions.
What we should have protested was the weapon content of the WTO (which no “activist” bothered with): its refusal to regulate military affairs to ensure regional reconstruction, restore universal justice and enforce global peace. No anti-WTO activist demanded that during Seattle’s 1999 WTO police riot. It did not occur to them or to anyone else.
I was too busy with the nth rewrite of this book and don’t much care in any case for “social activism” as malpracticed worldwide. Besides, my few efforts in that direction fell on the deaf ears of local and global “activists” as bossy as they were clueless about constructive alternatives. Those factors they got around to protest were, as usual, second-tier considerations such as friendlier labor and environmental regulations. Weapons organizations like the WTO are sure to neglect them — at least until world peace, secured first, forces them to honor such obligations.
Meanwhile, as if by magic, titanic peace dividends disappear down bottomless pits of financial scandal, weapon deficit, wars of corporate convenience, preventable disasters and handouts to the rich. That shouldn’t bother Learners. It will just consolidate the funds needed for PeaceWorld. Fewer gatekeepers to sweet-talk.
Insurance companies garner more and more profits by ejecting indigents from their homes, the unhealed and the mentally ill from their hospital beds. A century of centralized, IMF/Supreme Soviet-style mismanagement has nursed neo-colonial contempt for the Other. The same thinking brought forth a plethora of disasters. The demolition of the World Trade Center was their handiwork, systematically provoked but officially “unforeseen.”
A series of ecological disasters has been brought together under the term “global warming” and thus handily dismissed. Some bold scientists, carefully ignored, predicted the influence of human industry on air pollution and global warming since the 1800s. All they had to do was choke on Victorian smog and calculate its simple growth curve. https://mymodernmet.com/history-climate-change/
Industrialists shouted them down. As signs of global warming grew more spectacular and inarguable, that roar grew louder and better paid. Their arguments resemble the deft maneuvers of a defeated army’s rear guard: falling back on a succession of barely tenable arguments that assert the influence of human industry on global warming:
· doesn’t exist;
· is a statistical blip on a flat line of environmental stability;
· is irrelevant to natural phenomena insufficiently studied and thus unaffected by man (no need for logic);
· cannot be prevented economically;
· is drowned in a flood of cosmic influences; and finally
· repeat the above idiocies until everyone has been convinced to do nothing.
Given our leaders’ long history of inducing mass misery among select prey by “thinking the unsinkable” on the cheap (think of the Titanic, built penny ante and sailed full speed into disaster), what political legitimacy can they claim? Only that of our listless submission.
Shifting tornadoes of military violence land here, land there… They pause long enough to devastate communities, level cities and decimate peoples. Then they spin away just as abruptly, with no one the wiser.
Learner civilization will foster peaceful talent instead of expertise at killing. Unlike prior revolutions, there will be no call any longer for more mass violence, oppression and destruction.
The media praise inept foreign relations and inflame our fear of new immigrants. They refuse to analyze world events for content and context. Gross miscalculations and institutional blunders are conveniently ignored. Without explanation, deadpan newscasters report more and more flagrant international atrocities as minor dips in the superhighway of global morality.
TV and movie worship thugs and bullies we wouldn’t hire to sweep the sidewalk. Reporters have exposed our leaders as hypocritical buffoons so often we’ve stopped expecting better leaders but worse miscreants instead. Newscasters have promoted their corrupt sponsors to the highest rungs of power, which must have been their principal task all along.
If the rich and powerful are exposed and punished, it’s only because they pissed off richer superiors. Those superiors hold that a scapegoat should be thrown to the mob every once in a while, to divert its attention from their much riper misdeeds.
Just follow along behind fictitious Indiana Jones or all-too-real Bush the Lesser (and now Trump), and catalog the infrastructure and lives they’ve wrecked. Each of them belongs in the docks of Justice.
On Learner PeaceWorld, administrative responsibilities will settle to the most local level to which it can be delegated, including police and self-defense functions. A well-regulated World Militia – of the kind ignored in the United States despite its Constitution and practiced only in part in Switzerland and Israel – will see to local defense.
The broader the mandate of a Learner agency, the more reluctant it will be to micro-manage local affairs. By constitutional decree and universal consent, World Government will limit itself in scope and, more importantly, tax receipts. It will defer decision-making to lower levels of administration that benefit from a greater share of tax receipts to deliver well-proportioned local services. Most social problems will be handled at municipal, county and bioregional levels. This last per Joel Garreau in The Nine Nations of North America. Only the broadest tasks will be delegated to continental levels of administration and only peacemaking, globe spanning and extra-planetary projects will receive attention from the World Government.
Learners will multiply ethnic and cultural inputs; they will reinvest in peace the massive dividends we’ve wasted on some illusion of national military security; they will turn political power, security and Learning into constitutional rights. Schools will be rebuilt to honor these principles; (see “Education as Pathology”, “Laocracy”, and “Is Ecology Constitutional?”).
Info proletariats will merge with their elites to form a Learner Commonwealth. Populations will stop splintering between well-schooled elites and dunce-head majorities. At worst, tiny info proletariats will emerge, composed of know-nothing extremists, disability-illiterates, and ideological and religious fundamentalists intent on boycotting World Peace. Nothing they do, short of violence, will reduce their share of rights on PeaceWorld. Only diagnosed psycho- and sociopaths will be filtered from power.
Learner civilization will come to resemble the culture of Bali in its prime. With more extensive leisure time and many more mentors wiser than those today, people will cultivate their topics of passion and contribute to a mighty Learner Commonwealth. Everyone will work various temporary jobs interrupted by equivalent sabbaticals. They will live parallel, creative lives much more crucial to their wellbeing and social status. Most will learn everything they can on their topic of passion. A majority of self-taught entrepreneurs (“takers-in-between”, go-betweens) will replace tiny Conspiracies of Greed with Cooperatives of Plenty.
While science renews its expertise, popularity and findings, the sacred will resume its rightful role in commonplace reality with the blessing of the scientific community. Spirit and science seem incompatible because faith is based on personal certitude while scientific inquiry, on collective skepticism. We should agree that those attributes are complementary, not mutually exclusive. The two will become everyday norms of worship and the arts will welcome every honest contribution.
Small but vital minorities have begun to develop most of the peace technologies we require. Few essentials need be invented from scratch, even though countless additional ones will need to be.
This Commonwealth will not coalesce until international majorities practice info politics on a daily basis and a global scale, and until they’ve shouldered enough political responsibility to claim membership in it.
For the first time in history, Learners can pull fully serviceable, planet-spanning communications right off the shelf. This is the first time that PeaceWorld has stood a chance of success. Humanity’s past failures are irrelevant, since it lacked the fundamentals of global communication, universal cosmopolitanism, economic commonwealth, and most importantly, a global mass of well-briefed Learners. Prior failures are not valid arguments for further delay; rather they confirm the promise of peace by chaos phase shift beyond our cunning. PeaceWorld may appear beyond our reach: its impracticality confirmed by every page of our long and bloody history. But it will soon become a practical reality. The only alternative is sooner or later is annihilation… and we know it.
Today’s dollar democrats resemble the owners of the Palace Hotel just before the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Back then, that town boasted one of the finest Fire Departments on Earth, with more trained personnel than it hires today. The hotel was built stoutly enough to shrug off the actual quake. Its design incorporated every new-fangled safety feature money could buy.
Unfortunately, other structures roundabout had not been as well thought out. The city’s brilliant Fire Chief was among the first to die in the wreckage of his headquarters. Most of his boys were crushed under collapsing firehouses ; so was most of their shiny new equipment. Water mains burst and gas mains exploded. A post-quake firestorm engulfed the city.
Seeking to block the fire, poorly trained soldiers blew up block after block of buildings (including a big alcohol depot) with state-of-the-art dynamite, only to feed the firestorm. In an attempt to hold out the blaze, the Palace staff and parched firemen pissed away its high-tech emergency rooftop water supply — to no avail. It was a total loss despite every precaution taken during its construction.
Twenty-eight thousand buildings were destroyed; a quarter million San Franciscans lost house and home, including all the Nob Hill mansions. For fear of crashing property values, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce lied about the extent of the carnage. It reported 478 deaths when the rubble gave up almost ten times that number of bodies.
Just as the Palace Hotel was no more fireproof than the shoddiest tinderbox next door, so the rich of today are no more secure than the poorest of the homeless around them. Everyone knows this. Irrationally, we’ve papered over our apprehensions with gloating stock market projections. Yet we suspect, in our heart of hearts, that a Learner Commonwealth may be the only sanctuary we could reach in time.
As if from nowhere, new investment opportunities break out in rare bursts between long stretches of stagnation, like the one we’re experiencing now. A few entrepreneurs make tremendous profits by turning someone’s harebrained scheme into lucrative reality. This upcoming Learner renaissance promises more abundance than any prior growth phase in history, despite and perhaps because of the catastrophic exhaustion of petroleum reserves and the perestroika-like crash of weapon institutions that depend on them.
Unheard-of prosperity awaits us just around the corner, provided we focus on the quality of life — and a lot less on the quantitative, military parameters of national chauvinism. “How much firepower? How many battalions? Built, trained and deployed how quickly?”
And don’t forget Mencius’ advice! Humanity and Duty must always overrule mere profit, in the same way a winning football score is trivial compared to the dedication and passion required to achieve it.
- THE FUTURE -
“In constraining carbon through rationing, we might soon find that we were building a different sort of society, one emphasizing quality of life before the raw statistics of economic growth and relentless consumption. I have no grand plan for how this society might look, nor do I pretend that it would be some kind of utopia. Life would go on, with all its trials and tribulations — and that, after all, is precisely the point. Unless we do constrain carbon, life will very largely not go on at all.” Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C., 2008, p. 302.
Picture God as a senile old coot once lauded as the Picasso of his day. Having lost the better part of his vision these last few years, he has simplified his worldly pallet to four shades: desert tan, basalt gray, the purest aqua blue and cotton cloud white. Gone ice’s silver white, wiped off of equatorial mountains (one degree Celsius), from the Arctic Ocean (two degrees), from the Alps, the Rockies and the Andes (three degrees), and finally from the mighty Himalayas, even from Greenland and the Antarctic Archipelago after a mere four degrees’ rise in the average heat on Earth. Gone forest green, tropical or temperate, since the ice fields’ life-giving rivers no longer flow so dependably in summertime. Gone the dark brown of good soil, either flushed away by floods or blown away to dustbowls by drought.
Given the heat engine of a hotter Earth, rains will conform to the biblical scheme: “For to those who have much, more will be given; but for those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” No more fallow fields, no forests, no living coral reefs and no fish left alive.
Gone all the port cities, flooded no matter how well fortified; gone the bioluminescence of human cities by night. A few smudges of luminosity might close up against polar shores, subsisting any way they can. Instead, countless bright flashes explode out to sea, where once deep-frozen and sublimated methane hydrate froths up from square miles of continental shelf and detonates in titanic explosions that punctuate Force 6+ hypercanes with tsunamis and top off the congealing yoke of atmospheric greenhouse gas.
The oceans are the purest aqua blue because there is no oxygen left in the water and therefore no life. On every seashore, the lethal, rotten-egg stagnancy of sulfur dioxide has replaced the bracing ozone tang of ocean breakers. What biomass subsists on land consists of inedible scrub or mangrove swamp and not much of that; all induced by a mere five-degree rise in average world temps. Six degrees and forget the human bioluminescence of industrial cities for at least a few centuries until the world climate restabilizes from the equivalent of a Permian-Triassic die-off, during which the Earth almost went to barren rock. A ragged remnant of humanity might survive, reproduce and rebuild, but not much and not at all quickly.
An equivalent drop of six degrees from the norm would glaze the whole planet with mile thick layers of ice, perhaps all the way to the equator.
To ward off this fate, we must start scheduling tranches (“wedges” or statistical pie slices) of conserved energy and reduced greenhouse gas. Each wedge would reduce CO2 emissions by 1,000 metric tons per year by 2050; this according to Robert Socolow and Stever Pacala of Princeton University. If we “inserted” enough of these wedges into our world, say 13 or more of them, we might avoid the deadliest manifestations of this heat death.
· Double the fuel efficiency of every car;
· Halve their yearly mileage;
· Halve their number on Earth;
· Make as many (?) houses as possible energy-neutral;
· Seven hundred one-Gigawatt nuclear power plants (watch out for those that pop!) PeaceWorld’s Thorium reactors might work more cheaply and safely than WeaponWorld’s Uranium ones;
· Fusion reactors? Cold fusion? Impossible? As nuke physicists put it: “We’ll get there in the next fifteen years!” So they’ve said for the last 75. It would neither be the first time nor last that the powers-that-be were 100% misleading and misled;
· Two million, one-Megawatt wind- or water-driven turbines;
· Dozens of artificially dug, optimized Bay of Fundy tidal power basins generating thousands of megawatts each;
· Five million acres of photovoltaic solar panels (27 square feet per person on Earth). Should I lead by example and go broke lining my roof with not very efficient solar panels? This number would shrink with significant efficiency improvements, comparable eventually to that optimal of plants;
· Massive reforestation (X million acres of replanted trees) and bury those trees once matured, then replant. The tailoring of fungus/microorganism communities to accelerate this process and re-establish soils worldwide. Look out for horrific ecological damage from mismanaged mushroom projects! See The Cosmic Serpent to forestall such likelihoods;
· End all industrial clear-cutting and forest burns as of yesterday;
· Devote 618 million acres to biofuels, as opposed to food. This would be massively inefficient: fertilizer, pesticides and farm equipment generate massive carbon releases. Plus arm yourselves against those you have deprived of cheap food! Typical Repugnant bullshit;
· Sequester 1,000 metric tons of liquid CO2 underground every year from now on;
· Artificial photosynthesis (biomechanical, in vertebrates, in humans?);
· Genetically engineered coccoliths (planktons) that produce millions of tons of calcium carbonate, thus suck huge quantities of carbon from the atmosphere and sink it to the sea floor. It seems that Gaia may have managed something similar in the distant past and may also have mixed up submarine sediments to stimulate the growth of this kind of oceanic life;
· Loft billions of large, plastic mirrors into orbit, or fog up the sky with shadow-inducing nitrates and sulfates? Turn Earth into a hellish version of Venus on reprieve. Do so forever, or else! This project would be relatively simple, local and cheap, even if it promises infernal consequences; thus as tempting to weapon corporations as the choking smog of coal and peat fires of the Victorian era, and its sewerfied rivers.
· Orbital solar power plants beaming power back to Earth (beware of unforeseen atmospheric consequences!);
· A massive “cull” of humanity? One Plague or several (natural or weapon-grade?) or some other Apocalypse that would subtract 25%, 50% or more of humanity, and probably you and me too, between now and as soon as possible. I’ve been told that even if a “small” atomic war broke out (like that between India and Pakistan, say), the resulting Nuclear Winter might kill a billion human beings but leave six billion more without basic resources and infrastructure;
· ?... Other ideas, good, bad or crazy? Allow a pool of spent fuel rods underwater to leak out, burn up à la China Syndrome, and contaminate the rest of the planet, the way Fukushima Daichi No. 4 threatens to do the next time a 7+ earthquake strikes nearby?
· massive industrial applications of terra preta, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100810122030.htm;
· Some unforeseen new technology; several of them complementary and synergistic? By all means, go for it! As long as your solution does not present more profits for the rich at the risk and expense of the poor into the indefinite future…
In any case, no matter what transformations may be undertaken at present or endure in the future, the Earth will stay hotter for at least another few thousand years until its climate restabilizes naturally, with or without the burden of us and our civilization.
Picture this planet’s civilization dedicated instead to World Peace. I know that’s hard for you to imagine, but try. Fair and serene on its surface, Earth will devour the resources within solar reaches.
· Limitless vacuum and weightlessness will allow die-casting, crystal cultivation and alloys and compounds of extreme purity. For example, perfect ball bearings and gears without lubricants. Glass poured in the arid vacuum of space is twice as strong as steel.
· Tremendous new energy reserves tapped directly from the Sun.
· Powerful engines run on temperature differentials between sunlit and shadowed surfaces in the vacuum of space. Venus and Mercury covered with a spider web of caloric conduits: future power plants of the solar system? The moon: their prototype?
· Freezing lakes of liquid oxygen, frozen water and dry ice (carbon dioxide).
· Giant chunks of raw ore in accessible orbits. At least ten times the ore contained in the Earth’s meager crust (a billion times more drifting in the Oort Cloud?). Imagine solid veins of pure gold or even more precious water ice floating out there in the silky, merciless black — fractured heavy, fused and set adrift in some cosmic collision. Those fragments orbit in three layers around the solar system, each one more massive and attractive to a ravenous space race: the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the Kuyper Belt beyond Pluto, and the Oort cloud half-way to the nearest stars… As if they had been installed there like training wheels for a bicycle beginner;
· Artifacts? Documents? Biology?
Once these resources are properly developed (a major dividend of WeaponWorld’s disarmament), high pollution, high-energy industries will migrate to Earth orbit and beyond.
This said, outer space must not become more polluted thereby. Learner debates on this topic will be crucial.
The skyward uplift of materials management industries, of energy generation and heavy manufacturing will release much of the world’s acreage to regrow climax ecology. This liberation of the natural world will help restore it to an approximation of its pre-urban purity.
Learners may fulfill Gaia’s apparent intent by seeding space with life forms of terrestrial origin.
Recent world leaders are militarizing orbital space. Against whom, the Martians? A frenzied schedule of military satellite launches prompted the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. The Columbia was doomed once NASA withdrew civilian funding in favor of military projects. These last fifty years, the militarization of orbital space has hamstrung civilian space research. It has left us enough nukes to sterilize fifty earthly civilizations, enough spyware to film it in High Def, and a junkyard clutter along low Earth orbits.
It’s striking to note that the interval between the Wright brothers’ flight and those to the Moon was sixty years long, and that the sixty years since then have been semi-paralytic in comparison, with the exception of the strokes of genius described directly above.
As we speak so placidly, genetic treasure troves are ransacked in the wild. Corporations lock away a few tissue remnants in giant seed-bank repositories and then seek patents for every biological remnant (even human cells and their genes) relying on the rulings of reactionary judges.
Some sociopaths among our Victorian predecessors dreamt of doing the same thing with chemical elements. “Pay us for the contractual privilege of breathing. We own patent rights for oxygen!”
Once those corporations have stripped most biological resources from their natural settings, they plan to reissue the surviving progeny – with or without genetic tampering, changes useful, benevolent or otherwise – then ransom those hostages with imperial royalties. What nerve!
This colossal corporate hijack reminds me of the Consultant’s words in Douglas Adams’ brilliant satire, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Longmeadow Press, Stamford, Connecticut, 1986, p. 299. He’s gone now — we’ll miss his comical wordplay.
[Note: A management consultant is addressing a crowd of emigrants banished from their home planet because their job skills were considered “redundant” … The population of the planet of origin died out soon thereafter because a seemingly redundant skill (that of telephone receiver wiper) turned out to be fatally crucial for public health.]
“‘…Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.’
“Ford [the protagonist] stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed.
“‘But we have also,’ continued the management consultant, ‘run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut.’
“Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The management consultant waved them down.
“‘So in order to obviate this problem,’ he continued, ‘and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and … er, burn down all the forests. I think you’ll all agree that’s a sensible move under the circumstances.’
“The crowd seemed a little uncertain about this for a second or two until someone pointed out how much this would increase the value of the leaves in their pockets, whereupon they let out whoops of delight and gave the management consultant a standing ovation. The accountants among them looked forward to a profitable autumn.”
Surfing along the crest of Global Warming, conspirators of greed may bake sterile the Earth’s equatorial zone, overheat or chill the seven seas, turn tropical rain forests, barrier reefs and micro-organic marine colonies into regretted dead zones. As we struggle to restore these air-purifying biomes gone to waste, we will dedicate a lot more arable land and sunlit shoals to natural growth.
Will Gaia accept our confession of guilt, contrition and offer of amends? Will she let us commute our self-imposed death sentence? Can we readjust our lives with that of Nature, temper chaos-driven catastrophes and evolve from simpleton exploiters into subtler caretakers of the Earth?
Someone once compared Earth to a living tree. Its vital epithelium is a thin outer layer covering a thick inner core of dead tissue. The anthrosphere appears to veneer the Earth like the mottle of luminous lichens on the bark of a tree.
The Environmental Protection Agency of the World Court will exert enormous influence over future events, as will its Administrative equivalents locally. They’ll shield the environment from further corporate insult; not corporate profits, meaningless in the long term, from marginalized environmentalists.
It is time we confronted multinational paper, timber and agro-monopolists and confronted their self-serving ads. “We plant x million trees!” They mistreat the World Forest the way some hard-bitten cracker might wear out his back-forty cornfield before moving on to the next one. Corporate elites strip-mine old growth forests and restock some of that devastated ground with methane farting cow herds and timber monocultures of fast buck, forced-growth inbreds.
In like manner, oceanic coral reefs, the rain forests of the sea, are being destroyed. This mayhem began with the construction of historic ports; it accelerated during the Greater Paroxysm’s frenzied construction of coastal airfields and fortifications; and is coming to an end with overheated and acidified ocean waters.
The sea-surface microlayer is a molecular membrane of water and air that teems with microbial life and covers the oceans’ coasts. We’ve flooded it with toxins while its densely stratified but super thin micro-communities suffer additional heat and ultraviolet stress. Even though coastal wetlands are crucial to our long-term survival, we’ve turned most of them into landfills and parking lots.
Learners will restore wetlands out to the edge of select urban and rural continental shallows by removing infrastructure and human populations displaced by future hurricanes and rising sea levels. Follow-up biological rest and restauration would take a certain amount of time to re-seed, restore water plants and bio-colonize, coral and faunal communities. Where applicable, restored biohabitats will be installed with floating chain mails of family scale human habitats properly anchored and submersible during emergencies. These habitats will be occupied by Cham, local, and other shoreline global warming refugee communities. There, they will harvest nutritious aquatic plants (horsetail, lotus, hydrangea, rice, etc.) and fish, amphibians, reptiles adapted to these wetlands.
Clumsy recombinant genetic projects may lead to unforeseen disasters, especially out to sea. The sea release of recombinant gene technology threatens to induce toxic disasters we may never manage to clean up afterwards.
Subtler minds will restore shattered ecosystems, focusing along altitude/latitude boundaries, as well as lake, river and ocean shores. This undertaking will be titanic: the global regrowth of wildlife habitats and reduction of industrial exploitation to the minimum necessary to sustain a comfortable peace economy.
First priority: replant diversified habitats along those demarcation lines. The rest may grow back naturally in their own good time, even though the need to reverse global warming quickly may not permit such finicky regrowth.
Oceanic plateaus, marine highlands and land-bound seas will be declared Marine Sanctuaries, Parks or Preserves. Those will double and redouble in size under the jurisdiction of genuine Environmental Protection Agencies — no longer an exploitation bureaucracy like Defense, Agriculture, Fisheries, Commerce, Interior or Tourism. In most cases, local Administrations will relieve national governments and international corporations of their environmental mandates. No longer will ecological concerns be overseen by corporate and government interests that devastate the most extensive landmass in the least amount of time, in pursuit of trivial, short-term profit. The environmental branch of the World Court will oversee them.
Some preliminary eco-projects will halt the spread of the Earth’s deserts and reverse their growth. While English speakers talk about desertification, their peace-shallow and war-deep vocabulary offers no worthwhile antonym. “Afforestation” reads too much like “aforestation,” strip-mining forests for profit. Besides, not all biohabitats will take kindly to brute reforestation. Perhaps the term “edenization” will do.
Learners will irrigate mountain and desert regions from nearby rivers and seas. By using solar power and perhaps thorium-fueled nukes, as well as new genetic biotechnologies and filter nanotechnologies, water treatment plants will convert brackish water into fresh. Using bio-osmotic power or Jerold Polack’s liquid crystals, fresh water will be pumped into deserts to irrigate heat-resistant green cover. Such installations, built big, will ensure public access to clean piped water; built small, they will serve as public fountains from local springs.
As soon as our prejudices get slightly subtler, we may edenize large stretches of the desert. Learners will make use of advanced irrigation techniques to avoid salt-poisoned soils. Ancient aquifers will be topped off. Many deserts can be watered in a logistical exercise on par with a global war. In the long run, no insurmountable problem should present itself. The great deserts may expand for a while longer, despite initial attempts to reverse their growth.
The disenfranchised of the Earth – be they refugees or populations declared “surplus” – could find a new home in arcologies of the kind proposed in the chapter “White Noise.” A watchful World Court will see to their communal charters, political rights and self-determination.
The logistics required to edenize each continent’s deserts will come from a pool of funds collected from that continent’s governments. Each would contribute in proportion to the number of volunteers it sent and reduce its desert area to the minimum required to sustain a healthy biosphere.
Wimps and Prisms may see this project as a convenient way to dispatch undesirables to perish out in the desert. That kind of genocide will be forbidden. Every colonist will require the life support inputs of an expeditionary soldier. The Israeli kibbutz movement has published handbooks that outline exactly what would be needed per capita and per community.
Mountain ranges can be adapted to terrace agriculture. One has but to look at the magnificent terraced fields of Oceania, Asia and South America to see that much more land could be cultivated in this manner. This project will demand much more intensive labor than spendthrift capital. In addition, mountainsides stripped bare should be carpeted with lush ground cover and tree stands, thus moderating floods, landslides, erosion and water-born pollution. These would make excellent work projects for urban youth setting off for summer camp or on quest treks of self-discovery.
Priority would go to replanting areas stripped of vegetation and protecting them. Learners will micro-manage corporate exploitation to re-establish climax native ecologies. Industrial forestry will be limited to fringe orchard areas while old-growth forests expand outward. If possible, native populations and their guests will administer these areas. Learners will clean up sterilized seas and waterways and restock their fauna and flora.
Official dosage rates of pollution will be curtailed. Tolerable maxima will be established for every pollutant, much lower than our “scientific,” hope-for-the-best guesstimates. Reversible processes will fine-tune toxin inputs to neutralize their harmful effect. If necessary, major polluters will be fined until they have to shut down. Funds so acquired will finance cleanup programs for less shitty industries and municipal waste treatment systems of sound design. Urban storm drains will become just that, not sewage outflows during heavy rains.
Learner genetic architects will redesign plankton and marine algae to flourish in changing conditions of oceanic salinity, acidity, eutrophication and warmth. Current conditions are stressing natural strains and becoming less and less survivable. Tailored bacteria and fungi will break down persistent toxins into less harmful substances. Those whose toxicity cannot be minimized to tolerable levels will become Controlled Substances and outlawed.
The World Court will offer generous bounties to whistle-blowers who turn in the hoarders of weapons of mass destruction and spreaders of omnicide toxins. Gene architects will restock wrecked ecologies and refill barren niches with newly tailored wildlife. Learner naturalists will restore biological diversity after decades of weapon-directed biosimplification.
Genetic engineering horrifies thoughtful people with its elaborate preparations for horrific new weapons and runaway disasters by deliberate, cumulative error. The prohibition of genetic engineering would drive its military research apparatus underground. As usual, military applications are at the forefront of secret research. What did you think would happen while you didn’t pay attention?
Gene architecture is a problematical peace technology; it will grow in reward as other peace technologies mature concurrently. However, it would be unrealistic to expect weapon managers to regulate genetic engineering since they are neither able nor willing to address its negative consequences. Without corrective action by thoughtful adults, their spoiled-child tantrums will prove suicidal in the long run.
The exponential increase of greenhouse gas emissions threatens to cook the planet to such a degree that plants won’t grow anywhere: eighteen degrees F or hotter by 2100 or sooner — almost ten times as much additional heat as that falsely predicted by the powers that be, in about half the time they predicted.
So be it. Forget the Kyoto protocols and their appeal for sanity. Instead, we could let emitters of sulfur- and nitrate-based pollutants multiply their atmospheric pollution to such extent that its solar dimming properties would counteract the greenhouse effect. Whoopee! Let everyone pollute, pollute, pollute! Our weapon managers contemplate balancing the solar regime of Earth by turning its atmosphere into something like the pea-soup smog that shrouds Venus. Maintain it without cease from then on, for fear of catastrophic fallouts from any interruption.
There is a simple test for new technologies. Will the Lloyds of London insurance company (representing the hallowed Free Market) insure it against accidents? If so proceed with caution; if not, drop it like a hot potato. Lloyds will not insure any nuclear power plant at any premium, nor will it insure recombinant genetic engineering carried out in the open; it won’t even insure communications industries against the health hazards of electrical transmission towers. Will anyone insure high-tension power lines against their biological effects?
Lessons for the wise.
Once PeaceWorld takes root, we won’t need so many polluting inputs.
Atomic and other high pollution industries will be exiled to Earth orbit and beyond or taxed out of existence. Smaller communities will pay more attention to local ecologies. Finally! The brightest minds among us may go back to elucidating the paradoxes of human nature, nature and the supernatural.
Data trespass and environmental pollution – both “legal” and not so according to current law – will fuel the mobster crime of the future. This will happen whether or not we regulate it today.
Of course, now that I think of it, the worst criminals will gravitate to the highest-paying crime: the traffic of human flesh, whether or not this involves spare organs, enslaved human/animal chimera, immune and other cloned cells, bioweapons, illegal human fertility or other biomedical technologies yet to be foreseen. Nightmare criminality will fester in this heart of darkness. An unspeakable syndic will take root, whether or not humanity organizes a rational program of global eugenics to shrink its swarms peacefully and thus ensure its survival. See the chapter "Please Don't Vomit in the All You Can Eat Buffet".
Drug, gambling and prostitution crimes of today are just warm-up exercises for the data-and-pollution-driven crimes of tomorrow. Its victims suffer multi-facetted punishments, while wealthy racketeers and their reactionary political patrons go home free and well rewarded. In the same way, the American Prohibition was a cozy nursery for organized thugs and their police “controllers.” Psychopaths always dominated both sides.
In pollution law of the future, the burden of proof and cleanup will fall on polluters both primary and secondary. Such environmental criminals will include organized thugs, government collaborators (like congresspeople), corporate managers and other powerful interest groups that profiteer from pollution. We will stop subsidizing those absentee polluters who have managed to evade the worst personal consequences of their greed up ‘til now. Nowadays, they live in fortified, high-luxury communities tucked away from the outfalls of their crimes and pollution. That form of high-profit escapism will be brought to a halt.
A few decades from now, the Earth may turn into a mosaic of parklands inlaid with lovingly tended squireships smaller, more scattered, and environmentally friendly than today’s cities and corporate agro-complexes. Agricultural freeholds and garden/university townships will flourish. Extended family and volunteer collectives will practice intensive horticulture and aquaculture on just enough cultivable land and shoreline to support local communities. Cottage industries will produce exquisite crafts for luxury export. Every bioregion will pursue climax reforestation in local parklands, as well as intensive restoration projects for soil, flora and wildlife.
We should pickaxe another fault line here. Squireship implies a hereditary succession of proud yeomen and land-loving squires equally intent on fruitful landscapes, sleek livestock and vigorous offspring. This alternative – like that of Hindu castes – might stabilize skills, talents, political order and consumer demand. However, it would consign many people to inherited duties and to lesser accomplishment.
A common social alternative is promotion by merit. If administered with grace and imagination, it offers more promise than its caste equivalent. But such systems often go wrong when hyperactive scoundrels promote themselves by abusing their Napoleonic share of skill and hypocrisy.
As usual, neither solution fits every circumstance; a flexible combination of them would be more promising and more challenging. Future agricultural communities may become collective and hereditary, while built-up municipalities would provide restive talent with free market certifications of merit. Freedom of choice would be secured by allowing voluntary transfers between these communities and many more whose local arrangements will best suit their circumstances.
We have not mobilized our full public health potential against AIDS and older, resurgent epidemics (transmitted sexually and otherwise). This shocking oversight is just another weapon effort at mass misery and slow-mo’ genocide. As we speak, plague, ebola, tuberculosis, malaria, hepatitis, meningitis, polio and cholera stiffen their grip on humanity. This list of inexcusable pandemics grows yearly, while effective drugs and acceptable preventives dwindle back down to a medieval blank page.
Once the cities that remain offer better accommodations to their inhabitants, here and there, great heaps of corporate competition, harsh living conditions and high pollution will fester. In these last citadels of Capital, Blade Runner visions of dystopia will hold sway. Everyone accepts this abortive vision as the most likely future for the world. We should aim for better outcomes in all but the worst cases.
We should expect the last of these dystopia enthusiasts to assemble in a few cramped conurbations. The last economic ghettos will relocate toward the Equator where extra-planetary payloads require less energy to lift into orbit. Hyper-urban space gantries of this kind will be set in the Andes, the mountains of equatorial of Africa, Sumatra, Borneo and other elevations dotting the Tropics.
Otherwise, people will live in orbital habitats, in self-sufficient squireships, in small, garden and university communities and in the giant arcologies described above — or as primal hunter-gatherers in the heart of the World Forest. As the aspirations of this world citizenry evolve, its members may migrate from one of these communities to the next or back again. None of these settings would rule out the rest. On the contrary, each would complement and reinforce the others by offering new markets and sources of luxuries and necessities. The only big problems would be those posed by sustainable surface transport, which local Learners will certainly figure out.
Domed cities and new recycling technologies (Paul Lackman mentioned the Biosphere experiment) may show more effective ways to deal with pollution, incoming ultraviolet and heat exchange problems in each of these settings. Future freight shipping technologies may include super canon, MAGLEV and space elevator payloads, once they stop threatening us as cheap strategic weapons. Our customary transport methods will shrink, replaced by others we cannot yet imagine. See the chapter, Plus LTA, Minus Nukes.
The problem is not the lack of scientific soundness of “soft” technologies like parapsychology and New Age research, no matter how much well-financed “debunking” of zero scientific validity has been brought to bear against them. But as long as weapon managers retain control of them, it would be hard to imagine a greater threat than their potential to summon new, effectively uncontrollable and enormously destructive energies.
Mega-project technocrats want to construct giant orbital solar power collectors/transmitters and moon-based solar power plants. They intend to refine lunar regolith into deuterium, cement and water; and use these materials to build power plants that would beam raw energy back to Earth. That would be fine, provided that orbital and lunar factories soak up all this extra energy. Forget about microwaving power back to the Earth’s surface through the atmosphere. Such techno-hubris (hoobreess, God-aping pride) could invite unimaginable weather disasters. The ozone layer might tear apart, Grand Chaos cyclones might blow up and we might have to endure another Deluge or Ice Age for good measure. It's likely that the Earth's Van Allen belt would weaken, aggravating cosmic radiation bombardments at least until unknown new energy technologies harvest these radiations. Bad news all around.
Energy collected from outer space should be expended on-site to manufacture beautifully finished products from raw materials mined in outer space. These artifacts could be delivered relatively cheaply by free-fall to Earth-surface communities that had become edenic by means of low populations and low energy signatures. Solar energy collected along Earth orbits will power the orbital Birminghams, Coventrys and Glasgows of this new Victorian model — not gigawatt weapon technologies squirming on the land.
The near and far reaches of the Solar System would represent the outer colonies of this Victorian model. Braving great peril, enterprising pioneers will cast off from the Earth. A few survivors will make it back bearing fantastic treasure. At first, expect these space colonies to be plagued by isolation, dearth, primitivism, terror and exceptional lethality. Very needy humans + very thin police = space piracy and savage black markets, unlimited opportunities for crime and corruption, petty and elite.
All puns aside, we cannot expect to explore space in a vacuum. Colonists will require massive shipments of survival necessities, energy sources and elite human reinforcements, which only a thriving Earth-base could provide. We will have to dream up new peace technologies in order to colonize outer space successfully.
Before the bidding begins, ambitious contractors must study plans, sample soils, pick up new techniques, price innovative materials, satisfy all kinds of bureaucratic requirements and line up skilled craftspeople as well as a good food truck. Like them, we will have to focus on the Earth itself – the wellbeing of its inhabitants and its ecologies – and fine-tune these titanic details before we can begin to explore the heavens in earnest.
The robust health and matriarchal solidarity of an elephant herd allow it to raise a delicate calf, despite what appear to be insurmountable difficulties and dangers. The African savannah: what a thorny environment in which to raise a tender cub! We Earthlings will need to cultivate hardy utopias and ecotopias. Only a well-run Learner civilization can nurture space exploration into the latter decades of this century.
We may explore other planets with specially trained and equipped colonies of insects and extremophiles (like water bears). Their life-support requirements would be minimal. Their curiosity and survival instincts would drive them to explore the terrain of Mars, for example, with inhuman thoroughness, at a fraction of the cost of manned exploration and more thoroughly than clumsy robots.
Specially tailored multi-species colonies of insects could be dispatched via one or more centralized “nests” with scout patrols equipped with miniature video and sampling equipment. Life support necessities would be issued from these nests; sampling results could be collected, fractionated and transmitted from there back to Earth. Freight payloads, slowly boosted and parked in orbit, could supply these insect colonies. Insect sterilization would delay the biocontamination of new habitats. Or they could operate under pressurized dome tents (perhaps self-propelled) and die out as their oxygen and supplies ran out.
The difference between extraterrestrial contamination and terraforming is largely moot. This problem is critical; future Learners will have to thrash it out in detail. Indeed, we shall have to pay particular attention to the pollution of outer space.
A ballistic junkyard clutters near-Earth orbits with thousands of thoughtless discards and weapon remnants that threaten astronauts with fatal collision. Every collision between large pieces of this whizzing cloud of junk worsens the problem exponentially by producing sprays of smaller debris. An entrepreneurial genius will no doubt earn a fortune by sweeping up this orbital trash and recycling it as precious raw materials for future use in outer space. Land-based entrepreneurs will sort through landfills with the same intent. As it stands, our best-laid plans involve slowing the trajectory of as much of this horrifically expensive junk as possible, so that it will fall into the atmosphere, burn up and disappear from our radar screens. What a waste!
An attractive but very dangerous alternative would be to park relatively large asteroids in low Earth orbit to act as bullet-proof butts for small debris and gravity sweeps (electro-magnetized?) for larger objects, allowing them to impact, be absorbed and perhaps harvested for re-use in orbit. Whether these objects would be manned, automated or just dumb rocks, very severe technical and safety problems will need to be resolved.
Outer space offers a relatively clean slate. Insofar possible, we should clean it up.
Earth’s consolidated space program will assemble permanent space stations and factory complexes at every Lagrange point: five orbital coordinates where the Earth's and Moon’s gravities cancel out and satellites require minimal fuel burns to remain stationary relative to the Earth-Moon system. Two of those points are fully stable; the other three require periodic fuel burns.
Remote-controlled, long-endurance orbiters, fuel tankers, surface landing and takeoff craft for transit at both ends of the trip, as well as Earth-return vessels; those vehicles will be parked at leisure, tethered in orbit or mothballed on distant planets for later use. Giant unmanned spaceships will store massive exploratory payloads and elaborate life support systems. They will orbit other celestial bodies or touch down softly to await future crews. Unmanned, modular payloads will swing toward other planets along broad, lazy trajectories. These vehicles will supplement chemical or ionized rocket propellants with gravitational fly-bys and solar wind sailing.
Other projects worth studying include the interplanetary repositioning into optimal orbits of comets and meteors captured and hollowed out to provide exploratory, mining, repair, rescue and trans-shipment bases in solar orbit. There they’d await much swifter, smaller, more specialized human-transit vehicles built like fast armored cars shielded against cosmic rays with brand new shielding technologies, by protective layers of melanin-saturated living cells or simple walls of ice, rock and metal.
This deliberate project will take decades and generations instead of months and years; it will eliminate the need for a complete life support/exploration/return vehicle package bearing a minimal crew in one costly, pared-to-the-bone and triply redundant spaceship almost as fragile and hazardous as a World (sic) War I biplane.
Already, NASA plans to make rocket fuel from the oxidized sands of Mars and to generate power, water and ceramics from sun-kilned Moon cheese and lunar ice. According to the Russian newspaper, Izvestia, the U.S. plans to harvest Helium-3 from the Moon where it is plentiful and bring it back to the Earth where it is rare. This turns out to be a less risky fuel for fusion reactors. Shipping it back from the Moon would be cheaper than refining rare traces of it from Earth dirt. http://www.hindu.com/2004/01/26/stories/2004012600601500.htm.
It might be a good idea to limit space exploration to automated recon probes and fully stocked orbital satellites parked for later use, at least until our methods and technologies improve.
- WE CONCEIVE THE FUTURE -
Please read “The Future” first.
I have less and less faith in creeds – militaristic or mystical – that appeal to anything other than best informed self interest. Social systems are ridiculous that attempt to turn the masses into saints. Those that rely on force, terror and the law (the most organized form of terror) are perverse and thus self-defeating.
No matter how “sophisticated” we become in the future, turbulent mind/universe interactions will outpace our ego-driven representations of them.
Could this turbulence drift us into more promising fisheries? For example, could art, dreams, wishes, blessings and curses influence the world as much as worldly routines?
Primal humans “made up” their story and image of the world by naming the ancestors they could recall or dream up, along with significant events from their lives. They recited these epic feats of memory to each other around the evening campfire as a timeline and a scrolling map. That was the infotainment of the day. See Genesis:
“In the beginning, there was the word.” John 1:1, the Bible.
In The Anatomy of Restlessness, Richard Chatwin discussed a fascinating endowment. Some Bushmen could translate snippets of each other’s “naming songs,” even though their dialects were mutual babble. The protagonists lived at opposite ends of the Australian continent; they spoke two dialects (out of 500) separated by a thousand miles. Yet one listener could picture a familiar landscape of the other’s tale just by the cadence and rhythm of his narration. The same providential occurrence befell me. An African TV evangelist recited the Lord’s Prayer in his language that I couldn’t identify much less understand, but the cadence of his speech was unmistakable. Spoken in any language: Allah Akbar!
For better or worse, we “program” our reality by repeating to ourselves: “I deserve that joy; I hope it happens” or “I’ll never succeed at this; it’s bound to fail” and suchlike incantations affirmative or negative. Subconsciously, we project our reality through speech and thought. We imitate our parents and mentors who taught us what notions were acceptable and how to recite them. Thus are transmitted the sins of the fathers unto the seventy-seventh generation.
Traditional and thus more rigid faiths invoke this “New Age” programming with equal fervor. Even though they reject New Age doctrine, they misuse it as prayer in church, which Jesus specifically forbade (see Matthew 6-5 in the Bible).
His teachings seem more “New Age” than all of them put together; more venerable, cross-cultural and universal than the exclusionary ceremonies of newer, more restrictive and jealous mass monotheisms. In a way, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other thousand-year cults appear to be mere sprouts oozing the green sap of envy, cursing earlier wisdom instead of worshiping the best of what they share.
“New Age” has become a weapon-distorted insult; like the idiot catch-phrase “politically correct,” one of the last arrogant self-dispensations that suppressed bigots can get away with these days. Learners will replace the former with a neutral and benign expression like “primal” or something else, and treat the latter as worthless: the latest sociopath summons to mayhem.
I would rather recite the Lord’s Prayer at home by myself, in accordance with Jesus’ specific instruction in Matthew 6. This type of prayer has led me to believe that I may achieve personal salvation by reincarnating into Christ's lifetime the next time I die. I console myself with Christ’s pledge of ultimate flight from this vale of tears soon to become once again charnel house, famine site and Bedlam of plague.
Writing Learner serves me as a focal point of meditation.
Jesus’ commandment to “Love your enemy” may have been His best effort to cleanse our universe. If, instead, we shout insults and swing elbows at each other until aggression becomes the norm, then criminality (worse yet, lawful sociopathy) must rebound along with injustice, pollution and warfare.
I believe that if someone guns me down, I must return as the shooter. He'll come back too, to be shot down by me. Or, who knows? One of us may find a way to interrupt the cycle of destruction. And if I shoot or torture someone else, I must come back as the victim. There is no escape from this fate except, perhaps, in Jesus’ love.
Speaking as the hopeless egotist I am, how can I not love myself, even if only cloaked in another’s incarnation?
Could we wish for a world of human harmony and prepare ourselves to establish it? In that new world so alien to our way of thinking, everyone’s primary needs and comforts would be met as a sacrament, with wealth left over to pile up “unused” in the form of climax biohabitat and aquifers topped off with clean fossil water.
In your estimation, what would seem more sustainable and “realistic?” Since we should not pray for things and circumstances, but only recite exactly the Lord’s Prayer, what should we wish for in between those prayers?
Paranormal talents, neglected these days, may have been commonplace in the past. Learner Networks and other breakthrough info technologies may allow us to re-examine those hidden talents and put them to better use. Some researchers have begun to apply scientific methods to paranormal studies. Rupert Sheldrake is the patron saint of this new science, called Noetics.
Others have explored mystical applications to post-industrial agriculture, reforestation, massive soil amendment and environmental purification. Some of them are described in Secrets of the Soil, Peter Tomkins and Christopher Bird, Harper and Row, New York, NY, 1989.
Assuming we cast aside our clever omnicide toys, this new path of inquiry may boost our energy manipulations to greater orders of magnitude and enrich us sustainably. As they say in aircraft engineering: “With enough extra energy, you can make a brick fly.” Or snap WeaponWorld into PeaceWorld.
Heaven help us if we persist at current practice: reinforcing weapon technology with or without added paranormal talents. Absent resurgent peace mentality, this surge of mightily awakened skills will invite extinction. We would hold each other hostage for a while, then wreck everything during the next pointless military showdown, or let artificial intelligence kill us off that much more efficiently. IBM punch cards charted the victims’ ebb and flow of Nazi concentration camps; now, we have the real-world military development of fictional Skynet. Now contemplate the opposite track: PeaceWorld.
Like ambitious employees in a rigid bureaucracy, complex societies promote themselves to one or more rungs above their utmost level of competence. They may operate optimally at or below that level for a while, but then some new benefit promotes their grow beyond the counsel of prudence.
Joseph A. Tainter, (The Collapse of Complex Societies), proposes that societies grow more complex once they make a key discovery that responds to an old problem with new solutions and more auspicious resources. Once this paradigm-shift offers unforeseen new benefits (as did Islam, reciprocating engines and constitutional democracy, for example), satiated majorities favor recent gains over additional risk-taking needed to surpass current limits. These beneficiaries-turned-conservatives fossilize cultural orthodoxy and suppress further improvement in favor of reassuring simplicity.
There is no populace more reactionary than one once downtrodden that has finally found a dependable source of new benefits that can be lost once again. See Weimar Germany, Brexit England, and Trumped America. Tyrants are brought to power to maintain current levels of satisfaction at all costs. They take credit for them (even though not of their doing), and weave an astonishing fabric of lies. Eventually, subtler dollar democrats replace them. They amplify trivial matters to world-shaking importance (the World Series or the Super Bowl, for example) and trivialize significant matters into invisibility. The status quo is thus preserved beyond its useful shelf life. The longer this period stretches out, the worse the series of disasters that will bring it to a close, and the more fascistic the leaders in the meantime.
Our weapon societies have produced progressives and idealists in numbers surpassing by far their muted voice in the historic record. Only the pig-squeal of a minority of inflexible reactionaries remains to be heard, amplified by present-day psychopaths in control of world media. Weapon communities only tolerate progressive commentary insofar it obscures the ragged edges of social injustice so as not to upset special interests that profit from them.
Regressive societies dispose of several means to neutralize the dissidents they tolerate:
· They attract potential revolutionaries into bogus opposition organizations that betray them to police surveillance.
· They uncover radical ideologies and quash them by means of mental inertia, verbose indifference, insipid argument and orthodox distortions of historical analysis. Negative peer pressure is exerted in this order of complexity, depending on the intransigence of the rebel.
· By means of endless hot-air debates – like a roomful of monkeys would eventually type out a Shakespeare Sonnet – they reveal new, low-risk ways for weapon managers to tighten their stranglehold on the info proletariat.
As communal creativity tails off over time, social rewards shrink. Public expenses skyrocket as recent benefits wear thin. Conservatives demand more and more effort for less return. Eventually, citizens starve, sicken to death, revolt, get massacred or simply walk away. Cultures go into 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 to change, even though they grew up forbidden to do so in any hurry.
Otherwise, the inescapable warrior elite (along with its paramilitary and paracivilian support networks) claims greater and greater riches, even though its interventions are less and less productive. After all, its foreign adversaries have become just as well organized and lethal. It stages of increasingly destructive temper tantrums, aimed more and more often inwards as military revolt and civil war. In the long run its own civilians appear to be easier, more profitable targets. It ceases to earn its keep protecting anything, but takes its pay as a protection racket, lest it destroy the whole in armed pursuit of a quick buck, which it winds up doing in any case, multiple times. Then invasions from abroad and eco-social devastation from within finish the job.
All that blocks this historical tendency is the rock bed conservatism and sense of honor typical of career military personnel. Yet the speedway to military chaos is paved with the military’s loathing of messy civilian culture. Their sense of honor alone prevents them from wrecking the whole. This consideration peace mentality must emphasize above all others when dealing with the military.
It is noteworthy that the American military have fiercely championed laissez-faire capitalist philosophy, even though their own lives and those of their dependents are strictly centralized, pre-planned and communistic; also that the first seeds of capitalism take root in the army headquarters of nations that have been historically deprived of it.
Learner offers its readers – assuming we become numerous enough – the opportunity to effect this peaceful transition willingly. We can do it this way now, or wait for robotic weapon routines to overtake us, rip this last opportunity from our grasp, and eat us alive.
Although cultural creativity and chaotic aggression seem antithetical, they share a resemblance with the discharge of a battery. Its polarized ions interact with their opposites (friend and foe, rich and poor, progressive and conservative, legitimate and criminal, ignorant and aware, chaosist and pacifist) to release energy either as useful current (peace, justice and progress) or as a lethal discharge (war, riot and revolt). These pairs interact in proportion to the efficiency and usefulness of the social circuit board into which they’ve been plugged. This cultural battery runs down once its depolarizing human ions become too similar; it fails when they share equal parts of abundance or misery, unless some new energetic potential re-infuses the whole system.
Learners will differentiate some communities of interest that share the same topic of passion, from many more that don’t or hardly ever. These segregations will recharge the cultural battery without having to resort to customary and shameful “us versus them” prejudices: age, class, race, nation, belief, relative wealth and political power. PeaceWorld will draw power from the polarization between ignorance and expertise across so many dimensions that everyone will consider themselves an expert at one or more topics and in most others hopelessly ignorant (compared to others more focused on that topic of passion). The power and pernicious influence of older polarizations will shrink.
Poverty is a great incubator of genius, even if others born to it come to crave crime, repression and militant bigotry. On the other hand, those born with a silver spoon in hand often grow up in favor of chauvinistic mediocrity. Look at the United States, where a more or less well-to-do population suffers from recurrent bouts of smug severity, ungrateful exclusion and senile reaction. Most rich elites are satisfied with passive-aggressive conservatism, but they can revert to vigorous aggression if they feel threatened by change. They feel compelled to short-circuit their own imagination and that of their cultural inferiors, especially when the need for change is obvious. Socio-educational advantages and disadvantages tend to muddy these waters, but such distinctions remain significant in any case.
As members of the ultimate weapon societies, we are coerced from our first, slapped breath until our pried-into death rattle. Irrelevant and stultifying information engulfs us without letup. We are vulnerable at any moment to arbitrary confrontation by the police community or the criminal one or both in succession. Our governors are more intent on their immutable institutions, regulations, profits and technologies than the noxious effect they may have on us. We are taught to tolerate ignorance, expect injustice and respect oppression. Personal sainthood is required of us by every creed, yet our circumstances place it beyond our reach. Hence the foreseeable fate of violence and lies winds up being our reasonable expectation.
Even though such myths are the favorite talk of fundamentalists, Learners will reject them in their entirety. This time around, civilization will choose to rule itself more wisely. We will have to abandon cherished misgivings about radical transformation and elite fantasies that we must serve as orthodoxy’s early warning system. We will act instead (as good conscience dictates) as the creative, sacrificial and in time affluent Learners described above.
In the meantime, the meek will inherit the Earth by accident through their suffering; and the mighty, die by the sword because of their insufferable conceit.
Rich and poor alike, why not opt for goodwill and abundance instead?
- HEAVEN AND HELL, ON EARTH -
Bear in mind that humanity must lean leftwards in times of plenty,
but shove to the right during intervals of massive dearth or threat.
PEACE MENTALITY:
Peace mythology
More peace tech (monolithic) than weapon technologies (fragmented).
WEAPON MENTALITY:
Weapon mythology
More weapon tech (m) than peace technologies (f).
ABUNDANCE and prosperity for all.
Decadence.
ABUNDANCE: Universal abundance or universal poverty.
Little wealth and much poverty at the same time.
ACTION: Given half a chance, people will act wisely.
Given half a chance, they will do ill.
ADMIRATION.
Respect.
ANARCHY equals freedom.
Anarchy equals chaos.
AVARICE.
Self-promotion.
BLESSING.
Curse.
BROTHERHOOD: We are all brothers and sisters In the eyes of God.
I am not my brother’s keeper.
BUILD bridges; knock down walls (Berlin).
Blow up bridges (Mitrovica); build walls (Baghdad)
BUSINESS through cooperatives and utilities.
Business by corporations.
CAUSE & EFFECT:
Fear grows violence and untruth.
Lust causes excess, which provokes Wrath.
CHILDREN are small adults in terms of rights
and special in terms of needs.
Spare the rod and spoil the child.
Children are basically cheap labor.
COMMON SENSE.
Dogma.
COMMONS
Tribal sharing and reverent conservation.
Exhaustive exploitation by the few
COMPASSION.
Entitlement to privilege
COMPASSION.
“My people are exceptional.”
COMPASSION.
Self-pity, selfishness, shadism.
CONSENSUS.
Hierarchy.
CONTINUITY
Through personal responsibility.
Continuity through institutions.
COOPERATION.
Competition.
CORRECTION.
Punishment.
CREATE.
Protect.
CREATIVITY.
Competition.
CRIME PREVENTION:
The provision of jobs and good social services prevents crime.
The best crime prevention is swift and sure punishment.
DEMOCRACY: Direct democracy is best.
Representative democracy works best.
DEMOCRACY: For every person, the same number of votes.
One million dollars equals one vote.
DEVOTION.
Fear.
DISTRIBUTION:
From each according to his talents, to each according to his needs.
Maximum profit for the few at the risk and expense of the many.
DO GOOD.
Do gooder.
ECOLOGY is paramount to survival.
Ecology is a fabrication.
ECONOMY: of abundant satisfaction.
Economy of monetary penury.
EMPATHY.
Self-pity.
ENLIGHTENMENT.
Realism.
ENLIGHTENMENT: self discovery.
Proper indoctrination.
EQUALITY for all.
LIBERTY to dupe equality
EVOLUTION by the influence of internal and external factors.
By mutual struggle and survival of the fittest.
FREE WILL.
Conditioning.
FREEDOM is innate. Everyone is always free.
Freedom is earned. Heroes are free and cowards become slaves.
FUN: pure enjoyment & pleasure. Timelessness and annihilation of ego. Learning
must be a fun game to be most effective.
FUN: empty diversion, ridicule (to make fun of someone) & competition. Fun,
games and serious learning are absolutely incompatible.
FUTURE:
the future holds promise.
The future is at best uncertain.
GAMES:
the ultimate learning tool.
“You’re not serious, are you?”
GOOD & EVIL.
Ours and theirs.
Required and forbidden.
Usual and unusual.
GOOD & EVIL:
Shared by all, understood by a three-year-old under parental guidance.
A blood-soaked bramble a hundred generations of scholars cannot untangle.
GOOD & EVIL:
Synonyms: Human conscience, the golden rule, Sermon of the Mount, Holy Spirit.
Imperative: Do what we tell you to do. That is good.
GOOD & EVIL:
Love conquers fear; fear leads to violence and untruth.
Wisdom conquers Ignorance in the Chosen alone. Ignorance induces Lust, which
leads to Excess and Wrath.
GOODNESS.
Morality.
GOVERNMENT: Competent government is best.
Slow, stupid government is best. Efficient government promotes tyranny.
GOVERNMENT at the planetary level
ADMINISTRATIONS at grass roots levels.
Governments at Nation and State levels in military competition.
GOVERNMENT redistributes wealth.
Government reconcentrates wealth at the top to buy more weapons..
GOVERNMENT: Good government is fair.
By definition, government is inefficient and amoral.
GRACE through charity.
Ritual.
GUILT: inner-directed, leads to humility, compassion for victims and identification
with them, regret, repentance and desire to make amends.
“What I did was wrong.”
SHAME: focuses on humiliation; leads to self-pity, denial and evasion; shifts the
blame to the victim or to someone else; multiplies rage and follow-up malfeasance.
“I am a disgusting person.”
HAPPINESS for everyone.
The Chosen Few have the absolute right to pursue happiness.
HELL does not exist except for this one here of our own making.
All but the Chosen Few are damned to hell.
HOPE.
Fear.
HOW can we improve the community?
What’s in it for me and mine?
IDEALISTS.
Bleeding hearts
IDEALS.
Formulas, clichés, limitations and apprehensions.
IGNORANCE corrupts.
Power corrupts.
I’m from the government and here to help.
I’m from the government to help myself and mine.
IMAGINATION, wonder and dreams.
Ambition and dirty tricks.
INCLUSION.
Exclusiveness.
INFORMATION: broadcast it.
Hoard information; broadcast disinformation and misinformation.
INSPIRATION.
Fraud, memorization
INTUITION.
Hallucination.
JURY DUTY is central to public spirit.
Jury duty is a trivial formality best left to people too stupid to avoid it.
JURY DUTY:
Randomly selected juries. Total jury empowerment. Jury nullification.
Juries are too irresponsible to come up with valid decisions unless they are carefully
sorted by law school graduates and then thoroughly regulated by judges.
Actually, they should be eliminated and replaced by trained and certified specialists
at law.
JUSTICE.
Revenge.
JUSTICE is complex and unique to each case.
An eye for an eye is pure justice.
JUSTICE versus tyranny.
Law and order versus chaos
LAOCRACY: the rule of an Information Commonwealth.
Fear the mob. Democracy insulates us from the mob and allays its threat.
National Socialism (Nazi)
National Communism (Stalin, Mao)
National Capitalism (corporate)
National Fundamentalism (religious)
In short, Sociopathocracy.
LEADERSHIP: by the very best tribal statesmen and stateswomen.
By psychopaths and their sociopathic slaves.
LEADERSHIP is earned.
Rank hath its privileges.
LEADERSHIP: Society creates the leadership it deserves by pressuring and
molding its leaders, in the same way beehives produce queen bees as necessary.
The King is dead, long live the King. Superior leaders ‘pull’ the rest of society
forward.
LEARNING is understanding how to think.
Teaching the Chosen to retain the best values from the past.
LIBERAL.
Conservative
LIBERTY is innate: everyone is always free.
Liberty is won; heroes are free, cowards become slaves.
LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY:
The least constraint, the same justice, care for the weak.
Negative liberty - reduced obstacles
(bussing, equal employment, choice).
Human brotherhood & sisterhood.
ORDER, LOYALTY, SANCTITY AND PURITY:
Respect authority; obey superiors; act saintly, shun filth.
LIBERTY (qualified), EQUALITY (say what?), FRATERNITY (blood relations,
the military):
Positive liberty - improved opportunities
(the four freedoms, right to life).
Procedural fairness, in theory an even playing field.
Proportionality - more effort (read riches), more reward
(In-) family values - the closer the relation, the more deserving of reward
The two blocks above inspired by
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind.
LOVE fearless and irreproachable.
Of self, or panicked control.
LOYALTY: One world. Global Confederacy.
My country, right or wrong. Patriotic nationalism.
MAGIC, miracle.
Witchcraft, Satanism.
MERIT, competence regime.
TYRANNY, incompetence regime
MILITANCY (fresh air).
Rebellion (corrosive)
MISERY makes sin.
Sin produces well-deserved misery.
MORALITY equals the Golden Rule.
Possession is 9/10ths of the law.
MORALITY: Everything in moderation, almost nothing in excess.
Good and evil acts are clearly defined and judged by us on behalf of God.
MORALITY:
Tit for tat plus:
First do good,
then do what was last done to you,
with many exceptions favoring good.
Genetic morality:
Do good to self and relatives.
Do ill to others.
Cheat whenever possible.
From Roy F. Baumeister’s Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty.
MORALITY:
“But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and
your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind
unto the unthankful and to evil.” – St. Luke 6-35, the Bible.
Tit for Tat at all costs, without regard for unforeseen consequences.
MORALITY:
In moderation, wine, women and song.
Degeneracy.
MOTIVATION: Righteousness.
Fear.
NATURE: preserve it to ensure survival.
Nature is a free resource from which to extract cash profit.
Use it or lose it to someone more businesslike.
NEO-CORTEX (problem solving).
Limbic system (threat assessment)
NEW JERUSALEM
(For us to achieve).
Utopia: a place that cannot (should not) be.
NURTURE.
Nature red in tooth and claw.
OPEN-MINDED to new people, ideas, places.
CLOSE-MINDED In favor of comforting conformity.
PAST: the past was barbarous.
The past held a Golden Age.
PATERNALISM: Loving protection.
PATRIARCHY: Fearful punishment
PEACE is necessary for human survival.
Peace is impossible.
PEACE is the ultimate destination of civilization.
War is the ultimate summons of civilization.
PEOPLE are innately good.
Due to Original Sin, man is innately evil.
PEOPLE have equal, inalienable rights.
Some people (especially my people) are naturally superior. Most people are inferior.
Some people, (my people) are meant to lead, while the rest are meant to serve.
PEOPLE: The people rule.
The people are children.
PERSUASION
Force.
POLITICIANS: We should have no politicians, but recruit trained mediators
and motivated public facilitators.
The best politicians are the most corrupt frauds, they are the most predictable and
malleable.
POLITICS and morality are inseparable.
Politics is amoral, morality is apolitical.
POLITICS: Information politics.
Politics of ignorance, misinformation and disinformation
POLITICS: Improvement through Satyagraha.
All politics are corrupt & fraudulent.
PRESENT: the present is scandalous.
The present keeps getting worse.
PROGRESS through massive, collective improvement.
If any, only by preserving the best elements of the past.
PROGRESSIVE.
Reactionary.
PROMOTION by merit.
Promotion by birth.
RACE is a cosmetic artifact.
Race is the ultimate mark of superiority or inferiority.
RACES are interchangeable.
Superior races stay pure. Inferior races become mongrelized.
REACTIONARIES.
Leadership.
REALITY: Meditation and dreams can be just as powerful as ‘reality.’
Hard work in real time is everything.
REGULATION to restrict the potentially disruptive.
Laissez-faire to benefit the powerful.
RELIGION: Celebration
Sacrifice the Other.
RELIGION: Political morality.
Self-perfection and personal salvation.
RELIGION: Sacred awe and grace.
Ceremony and hierarchy.
RELIGION: self-sacrifice.
Sacrifice the Other.
RELIGIOUS TEXTS offer parables and examples.
Contain every historic and societal truth we need.
RIGHTEOUSNESS and, through it, power.
Might makes right.
RIGHTS and responsibilities.
Privileges and penalties.
RULE by plurality.
Rule by a self-defined elite.
RULE from the bottom up.
Rule from the top down.
SADISM by a very small minority
Universal shadism
SALVATION through good works.
Salvation through personal purity and ritual cleansing.
SALVATION by reincarnating into Jesus’ Life after one’s death.
Salvation by obeying perfectly our incoherent religious instruction on this Earth
(and no one else’s).
SCIENCE: curiosity, wonder and awe.
Confirmation of prior wisdom,
Source of profit and power, proof of cultural superiority
SELFISHNESS Is likely to be harmful unless well-regulated and self-aware.
Regulated only by the “unseen hand”: the best regulator because unreal.
SEX: most consensual sex is good.
Sex is wrong except to multiply.
SOCIAL ORDER through self-discipline and personal responsibility. Through clearly defined hierarchies and the application of force.
STEWARDSHIP:
We are caretakers of a world we do not own.
What’s mine is mine. Property rights produce civilization.
SUPERNATURE.
Superstition.
STAGNATION.
Stability
TOTALITARIAN.
Realist.
TRIAL AND ERROR.
Precedent.
WAR is evil, peace is good.
Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.
WAR:
Life would be better without war.
Life would be stagnant/decadent/boring without war.
WAR:
“War is hell.” W.T. Sherman.
R.E. Lee: “It is well that war is so terrible—
we would grow too fond of it.”
WEALTH comes in two forms:
earned and unearned.
Wealth is good.
WEALTH:
Personal wealth is an accident.
Personal wealth is deserved.
WEALTH:
Everyone owns everything as a birthright.
(Almost) everyone but me should own less than I.
WHAT can I do to improve the World?
WHAT can I get away with?
WORK: Do what you’re best at. Contribute to abundance.
Do what I tell you to do. Make me a profit or starve.
THE WORST: Injustice.
Filth.
- THE 1984 SYNDROME –
George Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984, describes a hyper-Churchillian nation-state so powerful, it could adopt pure peace technology. Instead, it dedicates itself to never-ending global war. At random intervals, it joins with or attacks its continental equivalents overseas. In this way, it ruins the prosperity and the discipline of its disinformed proletariat.
Post-Orwell weapon mentors have convinced us that the best way to safeguard human rights is to keep the government clumsy and slow. According to them, the more efficient the government, the less justice, peace and liberty can be expected from it. Even though it’s left unsaid, the advantage for weapon managers of such a stupid institution is that it cannot block their criminal schemes.
This is the 1984 Syndrome, enshrined in weapon mythology. Actually, this myth promotes crypto-fascism (fascism that won’t acknowledge itself). Narrow-minded governments get themselves into jams, then stupidly try to extract themselves from those jams by heaping terror atop abuse.
We could steer clear of this jagged reef by establishing efficient local Administrations overseen by the best possible World Government.
According to weapon religion, God reigns from his storm cloud on high, without debate except among selected hierarchs and not even them most of the time (Job). Similarly, in pyramidal weapon hierarchies, commands descend without appeal from pre-eminent info elites to the bottomed-out proletariat.
In a weapon state, responsibility, debate and creativity are rare privileges reserved for a trusted few. Weapon hierarchs find aid, comfort and advancement in arbitrary promotion criteria and clannish departmental pecking orders. Popular review of controversial topics is forbidden. Weapon managers rely on by-the-book solutions — no matter how lame they may prove to be. Regardless of real-time rights and wrongs, problems are dealt with by fiat, based on irrelevant traditions and misconceptions of past precedent.
This is the only way the cockroach brain of weapon mentality has found to trip and stumble the elephant’s body of WeaponWorld entrusted to its care. PeaceWorld would dance with many times that energy and a ballerina’s grace.
Weapon government directives usually begin with “Always” and “Never” followed by more or less arbitrary commands and registers of ingenious punishments for disobedience. Those of peace would begin: “What would work best to promote PeaceWorld in this particular situation?” followed by a selection of best options and results expected.
When it comes to personnel selection, weapon hierarchies rely on built-in redundancy. They accept life-and-death decisions (even bad ones) without serious debate, despite the high-stress, high-mortality environment and information chaos of combat.
For example, in Queen Victoria’s day, families of the nobility could openly purchase officer commissions. The more money tendered, the more prestigious the unit their candidate could sign up for, regardless of merit. Thanks for this reminder, Paul Lackman.
Nowadays, not only are officer cadet slots up for grabs by the richest families, but so is the Presidency of the United States and most of the positions of responsibility directly below it. Good luck with that world-class weapon leadership absolutely incompetent at peace.
Weapon hierarchies promote authoriphiles who submit to superiors and bully inferiors; they marginalize authoriphobes who challenge bad management and empower their subordinates. Competence and job skills are at best secondary considerations. No criminal genius goes unrewarded in a weapon civilization. Peace civilization would shield the innocent from them and exclude them from the elite; it would replace them with other, more compassionate people.
Another sorry tendency trips up the least bad weapon managers. Inevitably, their weapon policies ensnare them in unintended consequences. Attempting to work their way around the worst of them, they treat each evil symptomatically, as if it was happening in a vacuum. “Today, let’s discuss child abuse; tomorrow, local hunger. Next week, we’ll tackle traffic congestion; and next fiscal year, perhaps, corruption.” Every baby step in the direction of progress trips over social contradictions that swarm around it.
Leadership grows from respect that can be based on admiration or on fear. Terror is the final arbiter in weapon hierarchies where bad leaders flourish through sham competition adjudicated from above with little concern for the led. Mid-level weapon managers boast of rewards they acquire at their expense. They seize riches to insulate themselves and their dependents from the bad consequences of their despotism. That padding never gets thick enough. Their misrule makes them fall back on tyranny, crass materialism, incoherence and hypocrisy as substitutes for valid ethics. When integrity becomes redundant, greed flourishes unchecked. Hierarchical leaders wind up breaking bonds – social, emotional, economic and informational – that bind them more closely to the led. Each severed link reduces their ability (and willingness) to stick to the straight and narrow.
“In proportion as the chiefs become detached from the mass, they show themselves more and more inclined, when gaps in their own ranks have to be filled, to effect this, not by way of popular election, but by cooptation, and also to increase their own effectives wherever possible, by creating new posts upon their own initiative. There arises in leaders a tendency to isolate themselves, to form a sort of cartel, and to surround themselves, as it were, with a wall, within which they will admit only those who are of their own way of thinking. Instead of allowing their successors to be appointed by the choice of the rank and file, the leaders do all in their power to choose these successors themselves, and to fill up gaps in their own ranks directly or indirectly by the exercise of their own volition.” Robert Michels, “Political Parties, 1911”, taken from Princeton Readings in Political Thought, p. 526.
Primal societies tended to separate their peace and war decision-makers. They chose two leaders and two or more separate councils – blessed with different sets of talents and sensibilities – to handle those clashing responsibilities. Usually, a complex, clannish and shifting network of wise women, revered elders and shamans controlled the peaceful, day to day aspects of society. Young hotheads and grizzled veterans only did so during rare tourneys of battle.
Peace leaders relied on open debate, consensus, voluntarism and cooperation. They and those they led freely shared rewards, values and available information. In short, they gossiped shamelessly. Gifted leaders recruited, challenged and replaced one another in a steady stream that filtered out the incompetent and the wicked. If they overvalued the perks gained at the expense of the led, they lost respect that justified their authority and sacrificed any claim to it. Their power-base deflated like the stone-busted red balloon.
No such selection process favors a weapon hierarchy where incompetents and sleazebags rule without hindrance — indeed, come to dominate society through the cumulative selection and replacement of like-minded malefactors whose competition they prize. Political communications tail off into meaningless slogans, empty promises and the seduction of reactionary special interests for their self-serving campaign contributions.
Peace hierarchies would promote playful creativity in peaceful settings under token time constraints. Ideally suited to churn out real, cooperative wealth under stable conditions, they can’t keep up with the time-slaved rigors of warfare — much less the cutthroat, zero-sum competition of weapon management between its inevitable wars.
Popular aspirations must take precedence over hierarchic perks. Leadership must find its reward in its noble conduct, self-sacrifice and merit. If those among the led do not expect this kind of leadership by long tradition, if instead they are pistol-whipped into blind submission to weapon terror and its arbitrary decision-makers, then peace mentality must cave in. Everyone must carefully relearn PeaceWorld requirements.
A society can suffer from poverty yet thrive under honest peace leadership; its neighbor may be aswim in riches yet pauperize and lobotomize itself at the command of its corrupt weapon managers. The best option would be a longstanding tradition of peace leadership that benefited from great wealth shared alike. The worst must be ours today, mirror-image minorities of weapon managers who hoard wealth and power at the expense of an overwhelming but overwhelmed majority, wield the most firepower, pledge nothing more than smoke and mirrors, and offer nothing better than forthcoming misery.
You chose.
- THE SOCIAL CONTRACT, BY JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
In 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau published Du contrat social ou principes du droit politique (On the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Rights). There followed the French Revolution that nearly disrupted the human condition of perpetual world war.
Christians took two thousand years to reach the achieve goal and failed miserably. Its smug hierarchs seized upon Christ’s perfect message (its perfection would imply 100% adoption by humanity) and twisted it to such an extent that only one sixth of humanity would have anything to do with it.
According to those hierarchs, their doctrine and transmission methods are perfect; the fault lies with the five sixths of humanity that turn away from Christianity. It seems evident to these hierarchs that the non-believer deserves to die and be damned. How much more un-Christlike can one get, than their fathead conceit?
Rather than two thousand years, Rousseau’s social contract took a few hundred to succeed, with matching failure. The advocates of the French Revolution and the Terror worshipped Rousseau and his social contract. If anyone could have made it work the way he intended, they could. Every conscience-driven liberal, humanist, socialist and democrat has paid due reverence to it since, all for nothing.
Rousseau seems to have left out some key element from his social contract, without which it was worthless except as a minor argument against the National Capitalism of Hobbes (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan) that prevails in its place. That missing element is what common law calls a consideration: "some right, interest, profit or benefit accruing to the one party; or some forbearance, detriment, loss or responsibility, given, suffered or undertaken by the other." It is hard to consider a contract valid in which one party gives something up out of pure affection or fear and the other does nothing in return. Rousseau himself dismissed that scenario.
“Whether from one man to another or from one man to a people, such talk will always be just as crazy: I will make a pact with you entirely in your care and entirely to my benefit; I will hold to it for as long as I please, and you will, for as long as I please.” Book I, Chapter 4.
[Note: Such a pact between nations would be just as crazy, even if enforced by victory in war. It would require an armed guard over every locality tempted to resist it. It would be unenforceable even then, as the U.S. found in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as prior colonial imperialists discovered to their sorrow.
I can only think of two such arrangements:
The first would be between good parents and their children. The effort/benefit ratio starts out at the total expense of the former and corresponding favor to the latter. It would become another question altogether once the children had grown up and the parents aged, the reason no doubt for the oriental requirement for filial piety, if not from natural affection then from a judicious sense of proportion.
The second is “unlimited authority downward, unlimited responsibility upward” as dictated by Hitler and the Nazis. You can see what that got them].
The primary purpose of the social contract is to replace pity: a common virtue among people in the state of nature, which cancels the ill effects of ordinary inequalities between them. People in society have substituted that pity with “laws, customs and virtue,” and obviously failed at that substitution.
The primary intent of the social contract appears to have shifted from “liberty” (its foremost goal in Book I, Chapter 6), to “the greatest good for all” (the end purpose of all legislation per the first line of Book II, Chapter 11). These intentions were poorly defined and circular. The social contract will be incontestable because it will be incontestably worthwhile because everyone will agree that is the case. How neat and tidy! There are no loose ends because the uroboros serpent has swallowed its tail.
Essentially, master Rousseau never found the hook upon which to hang his hat. That is why he never tried to describe the foreign relations component of his social contract. Not because he couldn’t find the time (his excuse), but because the slow crawl of 18th Century WeaponWorld communications prevented its evolution into PeaceWorld. Unlike our much faster and denser communications today, which make PeaceWorld not only doable but obligatory despite our bias to the contrary.
To be valid, a social contract must have a tangible consideration its co-signers find worthwhile to establish and useful to maintain through personal and collective sacrifice. It must be something they can see, feel and hear every day of their lives, worth living to uphold and dying to protect; something a vast majority would support through thick and thin. It would be so obvious that its unmistakable presence would guarantee that the social contract were honestly fulfilled, so obvious that its slightest absence would cancel the contract automatically.
PeaceWorld is that consideration everyone will recognize or miss right away. It would be unmistakable. Its failure to replace WeaponWorld, or its decay into WeaponWorld, or its disappearance in a distant land, any of them would be obvious and cancel the social contract. This would mobilize everyone to reestablish PeaceWorld, like the feverish retrieval of an ancient battle ensign or modern radio communications lost during a hot firefight. The social contract could not be completely re-established until it had re-emerged like a sunken ship refloated to the surface.
But let’s see what Rousseau had to say.
[Author’s note: On PeaceWorld, the text that follows would apply to nations as well as to individuals (men and women, of course). There would be far less personal degradation than that which WeaponWorld imposes on us in industrial quantities.]
“This shift from the natural state to the civil one induces a remarkable change in a person by replacing instinct with justice in their conduct. It endows their activities with the integrity they once lacked. It is only once the voice of duty overrides physical impulse and appetite, that a person who had only seen to their own needs up ‘til then, will have to act on new principles and consult reason before their own inclination. Even if, in this state, they pass up a few advantages inherited from nature, they recover others so great that their faculties are pumped up, their ideas mature, their sentiments are ennobled, their soul reaches such heights that if the misdeeds of this new condition had not often degraded them below that from which they had just escaped, they would not stop blessing the lucky moment that tore them from it forever and, from stupid, clueless animals, molded sentient, human beings.” Book I, Chapter 6.
“This is the first and foremost consequence of the principles set forth above: the general will is the only way to direct state power in accordance with its institutions’ end-goal, which is the common good. If the clash of special interests made the creation of society necessary, their concord made society possible. The social bond is formed by those things special interests hold in common. If there was no point agreed upon by all interests, no society could exist. Thus it is only by this common interest that society must be governed.” Book II, Chapter 1.
Nobody proposed the common interest that legitimate interests could share unanimously. National interests were always in contention, soon warped by supranational ones (religious or ideological) or subverted by lesser special interests. Universal agreement could never be reached, even by the light of Rousseau’s genius.
PeaceWorld is the only principle that could satisfy the strategic interests of every nation. It is the common interest we always lacked, that everyone could adopt for strategic security and mutual benefit. Valid interests would be satisfied and the common interest would be the best secured. At that point and only then, the social contract of PeaceWorld would snap into place automatically everywhere. Everyone of sound mind would honor it above and beyond its WeaponWorld equivalent.
Please consider the following quote as if our petroleum reserves were exhausted. Indeed, on a global scale, demand already outstrips supply. The world economy risks coming apart under this sorry burden, fully within a few years and perhaps catastrophically. Compared to the collapse of this economic bubble, preceding ones including the Great Depression were small change indeed. This is going to happen soon, not once you’re too old to care or once everyone is “perfectly ready.” That fact is inescapable: there’s no time left to waste fooling around fooling ourselves.
[Author’s note: In our case, replace the term “State” with “the entire world” ― and “the individual” with “nations and lesser aggregates including individuals.”
Chaosism does not care what level it surges from; PeaceWorld will only spring from the highest level in concert with all the lower ones.]
“But when the social bond begins to fray and the State begins to weaken, when private interests make themselves felt and minor associations influence the greater one, the common interest alters and finds foes, unanimity no longer rules the voice vote, the common cause ceases to be everyone’s cause, contradictions arise, debates, and the best counsel cannot pass without a quarrel.
“Lastly, when the State is on the verge of ruin and only survives in vain and illusory forms, such that the social bond is shattered in every court and vile interests claim the sacred title of public good; at that point, the general will falls silent. Everyone, prompted by secret motives, stops thinking like a citizen, as if the State had never existed, and iniquitous decrees are falsely passed in the guise of laws whose only objective is special interest.
“Does it follow from this, then, that the general cause is annihilated or corrupted? Not at all, it remains steadfast, pure and constant; but it is subordinated to others that overwhelm it.
“All and sundry, splitting their interest from the common one, know full well they cannot free themselves entirely. But their part in public harm seems paltry when set against the exclusive benefits they intend to claim. Setting aside their gain, they hanker after the common interest for their own sake just as much as anyone else. Even when they sell their vote for cash, they can’t snuff out the general cause that smolders within them; they just avoid it. They are mistaken in changing the premise of the question and answering something other than what was asked. Thus, instead of declaring with their vote: ‘This proposal is beneficial for the State,’ they need to utter: ‘It is beneficial for this or that person or this or that party that such-and-such proposal be ratified.’ Therefore the requirement of public order in assemblies is not so much that the general will be maintained, but that things be arranged such that, always consulted it always replies.” Book IV, Chapter 1
PeaceWorld can no longer be leisurely contemplated like a philosophical exercise – given a cozy status quo that will endure indefinitely – whether or not PeaceWorld takes hold. We must act now, while we retain the moral and material resources to make World Peace happen from now on.
Had we been true children of the Enlightenment, we would have moved from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld during the 1950’s when abundant, cheap energy would have cushioned the errors we committed. But we are mere killer primates and must humbly beg Loving God to forgive our unforgivable errors and correct them by miracle.
If we keep waiting for non-renewable resources to disappear before we act, we will face inconceivable sacrifices with no corresponding celebration. The consolidation of WeaponWorld will become a question of firepower, wreckage and casualties instead of PeaceWorld’s cooperation, creativity and peaceful intent. Nothing good will come of it, only trouble.
“Trouble” what an easy term to dismiss! Read casualties, destruction and anguish surpassing anything endured in the past. Terrors beyond count. We should see reason, beware and repent. There is so much remedial work to do, and so little time!
“The people’s opinions are born from its constitution. Even though the law does not regulate mores, legislation gives birth to them. When legislation weakens, values decay. At that point however, the rule of censors won’t achieve that which the full force of the law failed to achieve.
“It follows from this, then, that censure may serve to safeguard mores, but never restore them. We should establish censors while the law remains vigorous. Once that has been lost, all is despair; nothing legitimate will retain any power once the laws have none left.” Book IV, Chapter 7
"A censor may maintain, he can never restore, the morals of a state. It is impossible for such a magistrate to exert his authority with benefit, or even with effect, unless he is supported by a quick sense of honor and virtue in the minds of the people, by a decent reverence for the public opinion, and by a train of useful prejudices combating on the side of national manners. In a period when these principles are annihilated, the censorial jurisdiction must either sink into empty pageantry, or be converted into a partial instrument of vexatious oppression." Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Penguin Press, London, 1997, Chapter X, “Decius revives the office of censor in the person of Valerian… The design impracticable and without effect.” p. 263.
- CARL MARX -
“…To make the worker’s share in production the sole basis for his claim to a livelihood – as was done even by Marx in the labor theory of value he took over from Adam Smith – is, as power of production approaches perfection, to cut the ground from under his feet. In actuality, the claim to a livelihood rests upon the fact that, like the child in a family, one is a member of a community: the energy, the technical knowledge, the social heritage of a community belong equally to every member of it, since in the large the individual contributions and differences are completely insignificant.
“[The classic name for such a universal system of distributing the essential means of life – as described by Plato and More, long before Owen and Marx – is communism, and I have retained it here. But let me emphasize that this communism is necessarily post-Marxian, for the facts and values upon which it is based are no longer the paleotechnic ones upon which Marx founded his policies and programs. Hence communism, as used here, does not imply the particular nineteenth century ideology, the messianic absolutism, and the narrowly militarist tactics to which the official communist parties usually cling, nor does it imply a slavish imitation of the political methods and social institutions of Soviet Russia, however admirable soviet courage and discipline may be].
“Differentiation and preference and special incentive should be taken into account in production and consumption only after the security and continuity of life itself is assured. Here and there we have established the beginnings of a basic communism in the provision of water and education and books. There is no rational reason for stopping short at any point this side of a normal standard of consumption. Such a basis has no relation to individual capacities and virtues: a family of six requires roughly three times as much goods as a family of two, although there may be but one wage earner in the first group and two in the second. We give at least a minimum of food and shelter and medical attention to criminals who have presumably behaved against the interests of society: why then should we deny it to the lazy and the stubborn? To assume that the great mass of mankind would belong to the latter category is to forget the positive pleasures of a fuller and richer life.” Mumford, Lewis, Technics and Civilization, Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., 1934, pp. 403-404.
I don’t know if Karl Marx had a healthy sense of humor. What little I’ve read of his writings shows none; and of his biographies, only the dimwit guffaw of fart jokes. Only a nation with a hearty sense of humor could stomach classical Marxism.
During the mid-1800s, Marx’s family subsisted in a Londoner’s poverty while he exhausted his paltry income on foreign newspaper subscriptions. Poor guy, poor family.
He thought the proletariat’s inferior status was based on financial hardship in particular rather than lack of valid information in general. He concluded this despite the fact that high and low finances are mere subsets of predominant information flow.
The Victorian media’s gee-whiz reports of high-tech telegraph and railroad marvels convinced him that human communications had reached a new pinnacle of perfection. If world communications had in fact reached such heights, Marx could have gotten his high-volume, high-quality news for a few coppers per month.
Still today, we are not so fine-tuned. So-called “free” information is the most heavily distorted. It takes a lot of time and money to obtain objective news without a toxin load of negative bias and special-interest agenda. Indeed, information is bias and agenda; it must be. But couldn’t we fine-tune that info flow such that its bias and agenda were those of peace: priority to the common good and programming for the general-interest?
In an optimal communications milieu, Marx could have bartered his analytical brilliance for a more than comfortable salary. That was not the case then and is no more so today. Screwing unemployment down tightly in every journalistic medium, the powers-that-be have ruined the life of all but their subtlest propaganda parrots.
Marx hoped his penny-proletarians would refuse to fight brother workers from foreign countries. After all, they had more in common with each other than with their stockholding elites. How wrong he was! Across Europe, Worker Party bosses caved in to national and corporate militarists and got their followers to massacre one another during two “World Wars” (sic) and many more rubber-stamped since.
Labor union leaders rallied to the forefront of ecological devastation, organized crime and status-quo militarism. They defended these shameful activities in the name of “saving jobs.” They had a hard time agreeing with their progressive “allies” (both just as incompetent at peace) and confronting their common “enemy,” corporate weapon management. As with the Democratic Party, it was easier for them to block progressive ideals and submit to corporate tyranny, easiest to fatten on dwindling union dues and swelling corporate payoffs — and do as little as possible otherwise.
It was a Nazi trademark that industrial management and labor had to cooperate fully to make more guns. They executed or ruined every rebel. All the National-Somethings: -Socialism, -Capitalism, -Communism, -Fundamentalism, -Whateverism, were set up with the same goal in mind.
This problem will solve itself once and for all when robots piloted by artificial intelligence fabricate without human intervention many more killer robots than any human shop could produce. Rock’em-Sock’em, antlike robot war across the ruins of every human city turned mass graveyard. It will make the battles of Verdun and Stalingrad look like birthday parties (since hundreds of thousands of combatants survived them; not this time) ― then multiply by thousands. National-Mechanism triumphant!
Rank-and-file workers voted in growing numbers – with their feet and their wallets – against them and their insane policies. Those who didn’t, saw their jobs go away overseas in the name of “global economic efficiency.”
The powers that be in the USA neutralized the labor movement by permitting the Mafia to infest it without constraint while they suppressed organized crime mercilessly elsewhere. Any legitimate Left wing was amputated from American politics during a century and a half of Nazi-style police and media suppression. This infamy cleared the way for ineffectual centrists (vilified as “the Left”) and raving reactionaries to swing the country evermore toward corporate fascism, the way a bold child would try to sail over the crossbeam of a swing.
Famous holdouts against this militarist madness were Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and their Spartacist disciples, soon axe murdered. Given this salutary example, along with Jean Jaurès and A. Trotsky prior and of M.L. King and countless others since, no labor organizations and activists remain to fight for World Peace. Instead, their replacements wage mighty struggles over second- and third-rate considerations — those “acceptable” to weapon managers.
Marx never explained how his proletarians could agree with him and his extraordinary conclusions. How could they, without communing freely among themselves to share the information he had assembled so painstakingly? In most cases, that kind of exchange was forbidden. The police of the day made sure it would not happen. Communist bosses forbade it. Party discipline, you know.
The key to proletarian subjugation was info starvation and so it remains. Lack of money is just a symptom and consequence of information deprivation. Nobody prior to Learner got this message across and nobody paid enough attention to it since.
We have been denied the following information: we are powerless because we’ve been denied vital data. What’s more, it never occurred to us to demand better information. We were satisfied with that issued to us in clumsy chunks (junk info, like corporate junk food), in spite of institutional obstacles set in our way while we sorted it for usefulness. It seemed neither possible nor practical to find data tailored to our needs. Any transformation of society to make that happen was inconceivable except in this book.
This oversight was Marx’s gravest error. Given this error, his subsequent conclusions are no more valid than those of ideologists before and since. Likewise, the entire academic field of economic “science.” We can no more dismiss the weapon and peace dialectic from a valid analysis of the politics of information than discount gravity from an accurate reckoning of orbital mechanics.
Otherwise, we must satisfy ourselves with the last two thousand years of misinformation disseminated so assiduously, even though those models are no more useful than Earth-centered epicycles and candles embedded in nested spheres of crystal overarching a flat Earth and our empty heads.
We require a new set of politics: a prescription of Earthly leadership equivalent to the Copernican version of celestial mechanics. It will replace the guns-and-dirt centrality of weapon mentality with the solar majesty of peace mentality. Emery Reves scooped me on this analogy in his Anatomy of Peace, Harpers & Brothers Publishers, 1945 & 1946, reprinted in 1995.
Another weapon myth attributes basic “freedoms” to economies bound by weapon requirements. We will discuss the economic implications of the weapon and peace dialectic elsewhere in Learner.
A weapons economy can be populated by hunter and gatherers, it can be herder or agricultural (“First Wave” according to the Tofflers of Future Shock fame), industrial (Second Wave) or informational (Third Wave). It can be decentralized or collective, openly or secretly militaristic; particularistic (favoring a few individuals) or totalitarian (favoring no one very long). Weapon management can base itself on precedent, authority or self-interest. Each alternative fosters mass coercion, injustice, warfare and wastage of talent and resources — regardless of and contradicting the cant weapon managers use to promote themselves.
Epidemic unemployment, homelessness, abortion, statelessness, refugee status, famine, plagues and genocide through national-ethnic warfare (at once barbaric primitive and techno sophisticated) are routine methods of mass human disposal these days. We call these catastrophes accelerated by government “complex disasters.” As if they could be anything but complex? As we harden our hearts to this infamy, our leaders endorse our heartlessness by stuffing their pockets with unearned wealth. The result is a “lifeboat philosophy” that consigns to the sharks those we’ve marked weak.
What were we thinking, shackling ourselves to this galley? Even if chained to an overcrowded lifeboat, we shouldn’t waste time choosing whom to drown at gunpoint. Instead, set every hand to row or to bail, every stick and stitch to the wind. Then, aiming the prow at the nearest refuge and praying to any God we choose, row like hell!
`What is the basis of human exploitation? Marx lists several such pairs of victim and abuser: slave and master, serf and lord and proletarian and bourgeois.
Incidentally, to those who lament the recent enslavement of their ancestors: every human being has a history (even if “forgotten”) of genetic ancestors or prior incarnations enslaved: every white person, every black one and everyone else. Painstaking claims of superiority through noble lineage won by the sword were feeble attempts to hold one’s head above this floodtide of servitude, at least for a few generations. Nobody was free continuously or even frequently in the past. No-one avoided becoming a victim of cannibals, or even becoming a cannibal themselves, if called to account long enough in the past.
Had Marx forecast today’s global corporate dictatorships, he would have included individual isolates versus government-corporate bureaucrats and their annuitants.
The near future may pit masses of helpless, jobless and more or less terrorized human beings against an occult hedge of sovereign artificial intelligences sloppily programmed by a tiny info elite to manage the human herd, supposedly with the best intentions but in reality on the cheap and for the usurious profit, as usual. And you think customer service is disappointing nowadays!
Learner lumps these rivalries together under the headings Info(rmation) Proletariat and Info(rmation) Elite. This word-pair forms a dichotomy and a dialectic that Learners must grasp completely.
Marx filled many pages to narrate the economic shell game that wily bourgeois (boorjwah, burghers, middle-class people) play when they inflate the value of labor’s handiwork beyond its production costs. They enrich themselves from the difference, at the expense of the proletariat.
Well, duh.
But if those upper classmates had merely fattened themselves in idle opulence, everyone could benefit from trickle-down wealth. After all, comfort-loving bourgeois would pay a pretty penny for superior goods and services, fully employing the rest. They’d hardly begrudge a few more pennies to secure their precious law and order. Welfare states are cheaper to mismanage than ruinous, ham-fisted police states. More profitable too, except compared to peace states. Nations at total peace would be much more prosperous but defenseless against military aggression.
Instead, most of this wealth gets thrown away – deliberately and pointlessly – and never recirculates. Note the disappearance of great decadal chunks of the gross national product into corporate bailouts and tax exemptions, quickly vaporized as if by magic in the stock market, instead of being invested in much more durable and profitable infrastructure, health and education. Unbelievable incompetence or deliberate weapon mentality? You tell me.
Marx did not note this wastage. Despite his exhaustive analysis, he offered no safeguard against the next rabble of wastrel opportunists: mafiosi, arbitrageurs, Communist apparatchiki, “deregulated” corporate managers, corporate and government and labor leaders, politically correct politicians (therefore gratifying the needs of the rich: see our last dozen Administrations: executive, legislative and judicial), and like parasites. He refused to distinguish good administrators from bad ones.
According to the German social scientist, Robert Michels, there is an Iron Law of Oligarchy. As soon as human beings form a new organization, power gravitates to permanent officers. Regardless of the organization’s original purpose, its primary goals become the growth of that organization and the rewards of its oligarchs, no matter how much that tendency may sabotage its purpose.
Nobody, prior to Learner, bothered with how to take advantage of those hierarchical tendencies to benefit the greater good, instead of submitting to their corruption. Like an old judoka master who confronts a younger, stronger contender, we can use the opponent’s tendencies to promote the common good.
Marx wrote quite a bit about the “alienation of labor.” He never explained why members of the proletariat would hate themselves and their miserable jobs. He merely described this loathing as another example of mysterious abuse by the bourgeoisie.
Learner specifies why members of the info proletariat hate their place in the scheme of things. Alienation produces political powerlessness quite reliably. An info proletariat alienated to that extent of powerlessness consents to maximal weapon technology and token dissent.
Emotionally secure people, in love with their world and with each other, would find a thousand reasons to challenge weapon mentality. They would sabotage weapon technology and block its managers at every opportunity, in a way we would never dare since we’ve been so thoroughly alienated. If a nation must defend itself militarily, it must forbid this sabotage, make it impossible. Mass alienation is an excellent way to prevent mutinous pacifism from uprooting protective fascism.
Let’s discuss this alienation a bit further.
“The new economic order (of the 19th Century) was indifferent to every form of community or association, destroying the customary associations of village, guild and peasant community.” Roland N. Stromberg, Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914, The Regents Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, 1982, p. 90.
This alienation is cultivated during decades of cultural mediocrity, philistine materialism and pecking order hierarchy. Once war erupts, alienation congeals into its antithesis: a passionate and awesome tribal ingathering to massacre as many as possible of Them at lowest cost to Us.
Rich or poor, plebian or elite, reactionary or progressive, illiterate or intellectual: every citizen feels the tug of this holy ingathering that trivializes past differences and re-imposes a communal sense of unity banned during peacetime. When two countries go to war, the people on each side harmonizes its internal disputes and social contradictions before coming to blows with each other.
The reasons for going to war may be trivial, absurd or a tissue of lies; its consequences may seem disastrous to anyone who notes them. Thoughtful voices may speak out against them. Reasonable people, who might see through this mess under other circumstances, fall in march step anyway. The same cultural, educational and newsgathering institutions that promoted stupid and spiteful alienation during times of peace will jump at the chance to rekindle this atavistic tribalism. Everyone experiences an exalted sense of belonging they could never feel (were never encouraged to feel) under normal circumstances.
This emotional earthquake rocked Europe at the start of World War I (sic), and America right after 9 and 11. It’s most remarkable feature? Perfectly rational people, the entire intellectual elite tasked with safeguarding society’s collective conscience, jump from routine cosmopolitanism and tepid pacifism, (“Shouldn’t we go to war less often and only for the best reasons?”) straight into bigot nationalism and warfare hysteria.
Once war has claimed its blood price, these same intellectuals revert to their mindless, middle-of-the-road mediocrity by default. They cannot, to save their souls, describe what possessed them to turn into such blaring warmongers. Their recall of this transformation will leave them speechless. Quietly, they will let drop their exalted fugue — as if it had never happened.
The only practical outcome of each communist revolution has been the traumatic transformation of a feudal society based on subsistence agriculture into a well-armed military-industrial complex that could hold its own against any aggressor. Otherwise, post-feudal states could not defend themselves against industrial nations that had nurtured their weapon technology at long and bloody leisure.
The colonial expansion of the Western World resulted from a military imbalance between industrial states (machine guns and artillery), on one hand, and feudal societies and pre-feudal peoples (spears and courage) on the other. Pampered feudal dynasties and their military elites were too busy suppressing local revolts and peripheral native uprisings. They never developed effective defense against better-armed armies of the West. Subsistence feudalism never produced the vast economic surplus, the despised and under-employed workforce and the smokestacked industries those armies required. Yet – at tremendous sacrifice and virtually overnight – Communist states produced those things quite reliably, after which they checkmated foreign industrial aggression regardless of its provenance.
Communism is a toxic vaccine that feudal society shoots up to immunize itself from the hyper-organized assault of weapon National-Capitalists, National-Communist, National-etc., in other words National-corporatists.
“Virtually every aspect of the development of capitalism, from the rapid advance of technology, transport and communications to the evolution of new class forces and the political and ideological responses to them, had a major military significance. To adopt the traditional sociological terminology, social changes had both the socio-economic functions which were “manifest” to contemporaries and social theorists, and military functions which were much more “latent.”
“Mass militarism can be seen, as it was for example by Karl Liebknecht in 1907, as the form of warfare appropriate to capitalism. But there is also a sense in which industrial capitalism and parliamentary democracy were the social and political forms required by a new form of state militarism. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was clear that both political nationalism and direct military needs would have social implications. Imperialism begat social reforms; the inadequacy of the labour (sic) supplied to the armed forces (for example, in Britain during the South African war) stimulated concern at the health and diet of the working class. Warfare had always had implications for welfare, but at the beginning of the 20th century it was a recognizable motor for change. The First [sic] World War greatly accelerated this change, particularly by expanding expectations among working people themselves – expectations which were to be disappointed in the aftermath of the war.” Martin Shaw, Dialectics of War: An Essay on the Social Theory of Total War and Peace, Pluto Publishing Ltd, London, 1988, pp. 74-75.
With respect to the impact of war on the development of the State, please consult Bruce D. Porter’s very persuasive War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics, The Free Press, Macmillan, Inc., New York, 1994. Nailing his analysis down with hundreds of historical examples, Porter lists the political effects of war as follows:
Formative and Organizing Effects
Territorial Coalescence
Unifying Effect
Centralizing Effect
Bureaucratizing Effect
Government Growth
Fiscal Effect
Ratchet Effect (prior effects don’t disappear after each war)
Opportunity for Leadership
Disintegrative Effects
Total State Destruction
Catalyst of Revolution
Diminished Capacity
Fiscal Collapse
Reformative Effects
Integrative Effect
Socializing Effect
Social-leveling Effect
Spur to Social Reform
I hesitate to introduce more quotes from Porter, since I would wind up filling a second volume of Learner with citations from his work.
He throws the following sop to orthodox academics, before he systematically denies their claim in three hundred pages of his work.
“What this book will not do is postulate a military dialectic of history. War is a profound agent of historical change, but it is not the fundamental driving force of history. Whatever causes war – economic factors, class conflict, human nature, modes of production, technological change, divine will – is by definition a more basic causal agent than war itself. No matter how ubiquitous or profound the effects of war may be, war itself is a derivative and secondary phenomenon, never [sic] a prime moving force. By the same token, war should never be seen as an exogenous force that acts on states and societies from without; it derives rather from within them. When we say that war causes a given political effect, we should keep in mind that this is only a convenient shorthand; what really happens is that state leaders, governments, military officers, armies, and populations, in waging war and in coping with its myriad challenges, cause those effects to occur.” p. 4.
[Note: In the same way, I suppose, that apples, planets and stars, in coping with gravity, cause motion to occur without being directly affected by it as an independent force. Or animals, in coping with evolution, cause corporeal development to occur in the same way.
What dogmatic bullshit!]
These few lines from Porter sound a lot like the forced retraction submitted to the Catholic Church by Galileo, registered for the same reason of bureaucratic survival. Some friendly reviewer must have warned his friend, during his appraisal of Porter’s manuscript: “You had better insert a denial of ‘military dialectics,’ no matter how summary and telegraphic. Otherwise, you risk being blacklisted by academia.” This list of forbidden research topics more wide-ranging every decade.
Recall the weapon maxim, whether proclaimed by capitalists or communists: “Arm yourself to the teeth beforehand or submit to enslavement.” Never mind that the servitude of weapon mentality and that of military defeat are identical. In the final analysis, nationalist sovereignty cannot be separated from personal enslavement; one leads the other. But we could favor the emancipation of PeaceWorld over the robotic enslavement of WeaponWorld.
Do the unknowns of PeaceWorld seem more worrisome to you than the bloody-mindedness of WeaponWorld? So what! Get over your weapon hypnosis.
Communist militants never intended to create a socialist paradise. That was just another weapon myth carrot dangled in front of feudal info proletariats as if before a mule. The revolutionary vanguard’s real goal was to crash-optimize homegrown military technologies despite the backwardness of feudal populations and especially of their ancient elites.
Despite Marx’s warnings, every so-called Marxist society was equally tainted with weapon dogma. Peace idealists were gulaged or executed — just as often, in practical terms, as they were stripped of power and marginalized in Capitalist societies. Like other weapon societies, Marxist ones supported wasteful and forbidden forms of weapon parasitism: elite dictatorship, class privilege, internal and external genocide, slave labor, secret police, premeditated mismanagement and worker alienation; actually, general alienation short-circuiting valid communications, most especially between the info elite and its info proletariat. These contradictions rotted out every Communist society, to the benefit of the psychopaths in control.
Thus, every Communist experiment became an exercise in barracks Communism despite all the ideological cant Marx wrote against barracks Communism. Every social contradiction Marx deplored will exist in every weapon state, whether it adheres to National Marxism, National Capitalism, National Fundamentalism or any other National-corporate fantasy.
The same thing happened during the French Revolution. Marx noted it and forgot about it.
Power-drunk American elites tirelessly toast their “triumph” over Communism. Yet despite their ragged masses, Russia and China have amassed enough nukes to protect themselves from all but the most suicidal opponent. Communism has served its main purpose, so it is being painfully sloughed off like an old snakeskin.
Even though Capitalism is just as necrotic, we don’t let drop that rotten appendage and don’t graft something healthier to the stump. Instead, we persist in absorbing its blood poisons and intend to transfuse that puss into ex-communist societies to their evident detriment.
By any rational accounting, weapon societies are tainted goods destined for the scrap heap of history. The fantasy “victory” of Leviathan over Das Kapital has not diminished the class struggle by one iota. It has merely made the conflict murkier and more intractable.
What is the basis of government power? The vigor of government does not reside in the Gross National Product (a misleading yardstick that conforms with the insectile awareness of whalelike WeaponWorld) ― as Scandinavian socialists proved and the Great Depression confirmed. Capital ebbs and flows at the whim of the very rich.
By “very rich,” I mean those whose wealth is so old and huge, it has made them transparent to journalistic and legalistic review; so rich their insider trading on the world’s stock exchange is not only legal but expected, so much so that the best-paid corporate CEOs and the grandest dignitaries are their errand boys.
I doubt if enough people grasp the sprawling power of interest compounded over hundreds of years, and the unimaginable wealth that would put in certain people’s hands. That kind of thing is illegal nowadays – harvesting the fruit of multiple generations of circular interest without touching principal or interest in the mean time – but it wasn’t that way in the past. Its rare practitioners made sure to slam the door shut behind them. Their interest rates could have been very low and thus pretty certain; current beneficiaries, unfit to control the accumulation. None of that would matter. They would have become enormously wealthy and powerful in any case. Learner addresses them in particular — even if we benefit from this transformation, they will that much more.
This is the bond that the very rich hold with info elites they lord over and with the info proletariat that sprawls beneath their telescopic spire:
· Info proletarians are like zoo animals. They are under total control and have no idea what’s going on beyond the reassuring routines they value most. They have been taught since infancy to value nothing more.
· Weapon managers are like zoo attendants. They have near-total control over the beasts under their care and some awareness of what’s going on, but very little over their own decision-making and job security.
· The very rich resemble the zoo’s board of directors. They manage the lower orders while remaining distant, invisible and essentially hostile to them.
What is the central control of this zoo? You could call it a mental value hidden in the human spirit, that esteems above all the satisfaction of its curiosity and its dominion over the natural world. All three layers of actors, their class allocations and lot in life depend on the commands of this spiritual value.
Every tide of finance – whether its surge is inflationary or deflationary – enriches those peak Conspirators of Greed at everyone else’s expense. Each surge of militarist panic strengthens weapon managers at the peril of everyone else. Every manipulation, deprivation and degradation of good information seems to simplify the task of controlling the inferior class. Weapon mentality is the spiritual value that drives this process.
Government rule is not a matter of military might, either. A muscle-bound military state (Napoleonic France, Paraguay under Lopez, Germany under Prussian militarists) so threatened its neighbors that it was overwhelmed by numbers, or so overtaxed its economy that it drove itself to ruin. As the Soviets managed to do just prior, and as the USA is lining up to do today, in imitation of the British Empire a hundred years ago, with the Chinese replacing those young American upstarts.
It’s like watching microbial stains sprout from various spots on the Earth as if in a petri dish and compete there blindly.
When I talk about “weapon technology,” please avoid the caricature of stomping jackboots, bad brass bands and power drunk demagogues. Don’t confound weapon mentality with its subset of fascist militarism. Humans have played out this sick parody all too often. Its unforeseen consequences wound up being disastrous, as was foreseen by conscientious people whose sound warnings everyone ignored.
Do you dare suggest that nobody warned the German Volk that the Nazis were the worst news for them ever? Or that important people paid any attention to those warnings while they stacked their bank vaults with the gold teeth of massacred Jews?
These days, they add more zeros to their stock portfolio, scream against immigrants, cluster bomb civilians overseas and stoke the heat-death of the world. Knocked out for good reason half a century ago, idiot fascism has awakened once again.
If an army of barracks bullies and pampered thugs replaces competent police and effective administration, it loses its military edge against foreign armies, even equally rotten ones.
Even the deadliest of modern weapon states must hoard a certain measure of peace technology. As paradoxically demonstrated by Western republics, the more lethal the weapon state, the greater its distribution of peace benefits. The music of Mozart and Peter Gabriel, kindness and light, gardening, ersatz (fake) political progress: this hocus-pocus of civility takes second place only to the primary killing goals of a weapon society.
The key to political power lies in communications — just as the key to anyone’s power resides in their acquisition of information. When conspirators plot insurrection, radio stations, TV broadcast companies (and major Internet servers?) are favored targets for takeover. Thanks for the illustration, Paul Lackman.
According to Thom Hartman, the Press is the only industry upheld by the U.S. Constitution. Corporations are nowhere to be found, much less the ridiculous idea that “corporations are people.” People are mortal; corporations, not necessarily. Recent, unconstitutional Supreme Court rulings to corporate advantage are outright betrayals of that court’s mandate.
Weapon states flex their sovereignty by weakening social transactions internal as well as external. Civilizations only grow as mighty, rich and free as they allow their communications to grow more complex. This happens in obedience to an Armchair Formula we will review in its own chapter.
Weapon states sabotage their civilian communications systems, “the better to control them.” This fantasy control of info flow demands that current communications be subverted and their future growth, slowed. This deterioration worsens poverty; its reversal promotes abundance while worsening military vulnerability.
A sophisticated people can operate under “liberal” laws (in the older, positive sense of the term: “generous,” since inverted by weapon mentality into its “mercenary” contradiction in English as well as French). It may call itself free thereby. However, its dialogue can be homogenized by excessive devotion to sports and televised trivia; by patent discord between the polarized adherents of black-and-white pseudo-ideologies purpose-built never to agree; by paralyzing legalisms; by some mechanical doctrine, church liturgy or ideological dogma; by a tyrant’s mad ravings (Trump); by the obsessive narration of trivial but dramatic crimes; else by a tsunami of commercial blather. Anything to distract public attention from the weapon and peace antinomy and drown out talk about it. Peace, Appeasement? Another term inverted from simple “put at ease or at peace” for individuals, to exceptional “cowardly surrender, à la Pact of Munich” of whole peoples.
See the top five hundred key words searched for on the Internet (http: and www.searchengineguide.com. I don’t have the stomach to confirm the silliness of a more recent list. You may be surprised how trivial the majority of them are.
These intellectual contaminants are broadcast most readily through monologue (one-way) mass media. All by themselves, monologue media reduce communications by at least an order of magnitude. Exactly the same transmission channels, adjusted such that half their info flowed in each direction, could transmit at least ten times more useful information, probably enormously more.
The same goes for global digital spyware such as PRISM. Its suction dredge of data from the bottom upwards turns out to be comparatively trivial from a Learner perspective, since limited to one direction. It may be constitutionally treasonous and politically lethal, sooner or later, but qualitatively trivial in terms of Learning.
Just as commercial advertising is qualitatively insignificant since it is unidirectional and tunnel visioned for mere profit; regardless of its monstrous wastage of time and effort.
These communications equal info flow and societal wealth: how many thousands of times more purchase power each of us would have without inflation (those terms would be obsolete on PeaceWorld) — regardless of the ideological cant that affirms otherwise. This flood of personal interactions and complex dialogues generates peace technology’s abundance.
Divided, it would seem, by the sum of harmful communications. Such info vandals should be ostracized into their own sterile networks: another function of Learner precision as compared to our clumsy institutions.
As these dialogues spread out beyond central control, they threaten to destabilize a weapon hierarchy by increasing its vulnerability to internal and external extremists.
Trying to forestall this destabilization, weapon propagandists boost the volume, saturation and repetition of official monologue. They simplify public reality until it turns into a parody of the real world. Please consult an hour of corporate TV news. This massively unnatural simplification overawes the info proletariat into dead-end weapon dissidence, hysterical paralysis and social autism.
Distinctions between National Capitalist weapon states and National Communist ones are strictly situational, which is to say based on perceptions of geo-strategic threat.
Set the U.S. population between Europe, Turkey, Iran, South Asia, China and Mongolia; and that of the former Soviet Union between Mexico, Canada, the Atlantic and the Pacific. The Americans would have become militaristic bullies sooner, while the Russians baked a slightly more liberal flavor into their tyranny, if only temporarily. Left in their own homelands, the Russians would have liberalized sooner if they could have blocked invaders far beyond their borders, and the Americans would have turned into overt totalitarians sooner if they had had to fight their climax defensive battles against foreign conquerors who had reached the banks of the Mississippi — the way the Russians had to block the Nazi surge (among others from various directions) on the Volga.
It is merely a question of the nature, size and potential triumph of armed hordes we think we must hold off.
Apply current threat levels of transcontinental nuke, chemical, scalar and biological assault. It doesn’t matter whether those warheads are rammed through by ballistic missile, broadcast and triangulated by high-energy scalar antenna arrays (like laser holograms), or borne in cheap suitcases by sweat-soaked fanatics. Watch both societies, plus all the others on Earth, surrender to cumulative military despotism and eventual omnicide (“Kill everything that lives!”): the ultimate simplification of nature’s torrent of information …
…Unless a Third Millennium miracle allows a critical mass of wise ones across the planet to set off a Learner transformation. Thanks to the WWW, we may look forward to peaceful transformation despite our worst fears.
A dialogue system if there ever was one, it lets you whistle up this text and lets me send it to you at modest expense — at least for the time being. Then again, the recent sabotage of Net Neutrality by corporate cum regulatory conspiracy may put an end to the online component of the Learner project, à la Chinese Communist Party.
Will you and your friends lend a hand to this transition to a peaceful Third Millennium? Or will you remain placid spectators of it, or worse yet, hardened opponents?
Read on, Learner activists …
These pages outline the Why, How and What of the World Peace that awaits us. They are not about sermons or wishful thinking, but about results.
Are you interested?
- THE THREAT FORMULA -
Body count x (distance / (time squared))
Tirelessly, civilization refines this threat formula packed with other constants and variables. Recorded history offers us no more than a deceptive account compulsively refined. Humanity forgot as much peace technology as it retained weapon know-how. Infant mortality, calories consumed per capita, songs sung: variables like those went up, went down and were forgotten just as quickly. Meanwhile, humanity faithfully committed weapon requirements to collective memory. Weapon management is all that humans have been really good at.
Weapon management never ensured its adherents’ safety for very long. The more passionately we embrace weapon technology, the likelier its next paroxysm will throttle us along with everything we hold dear. Every nation identifies (or invents) strategic threats both at home and abroad, and coordinates a vast array of technologies and behaviors to sustain its threat counter-deterrent. From Trinidad to Tiananmen Square, each of them is a brittle masterpiece of weapon management optimized for war. Each can snap to instant war footing and conduct combat nonstop even though it is equally vulnerable to total devastation within hours.
We have forgotten most real peace technologies and mentalities (whether based on religion or ideology), even preliminary ones adopted long ago by weapon civilizations less defensible than ours. Everything peaceful we accept today, we have forgotten time and time again and had to relearn just as often. By definition, pure peace management is prehistoric: beyond the purview of historical records because recorded history destroyed it. It may have been extremely refined in the past, but is considered “primitive” or reduced to non-existence by contemporary weapon barbarism.
Weapon technology forces otherwise peaceful economies to shrink from sustainable levels of development and creativity. Even in times of peace, many workers are idled to satisfy military recruitment demands. Many peace technologies are rejected as cost-inefficient (such as solar and wind power). On the other hand, ruinous weapon technologies get double and triple subsidies. Every nuclear power plant, for example, demands at least five fortunes: one for construction, one for operation and three more for security, radioactive waste disposal and downstream decontamination. So far, no commercial nuclear reactor has been completely dismantled. We will soon have to pay that astronomical bill, much less that for 500 others soon-to-be obsolete. A typical weapon system: ruinous from a peace standpoint and just as lethal.
Sub-standard education and unemployment never reduced inflation, even though checking inflation has been a routine justification for abusive levels of unemployment. It never solves economic problems; it only worsens them.
During World War II (sic) – despite total mobilization and full employment – America neutralized inflation by taxing military-industrial profits and redistributing this wealth through GI Bill housing and educational loans, as well as foreign aid programs to Europe (the Marshall Plan), Japan and the “little tigers” of Asia. The Swedish people and government managed to do so – from the end of World War II (sic) until that country’s end-of-century backslide into just another McDonald’s parking lot – by taxing everyone and everything, then devoting this fortune to full employment through massive public works and generous social benefits.
On the other hand, crimes and riots multiply with mass unemployment, as do recruitment rates for the Harm (Armed) Forces and the quality of those recruits. Reactionary politicians thrive in it like maggots in carrion. Criminal, industrial, environmental and tax wastage hold this in common. Like a beached whale just butchered, they leave strips of financial blubber lying around during peacetime, to be recycled with greater efficiency during military emergencies to come. That is why weapon managers never manage to control routine injustice, runaway crime and economic wastage. They proliferate in times of peace despite well-meant attempts to stop them. Reinvested more efficiently in times of war, this gross peacetime wastage will pay for unforeseen but critical military projects.
Getting a weapon state to operate with justice and empathy would be like getting a garbage dump to smell like roses. You can do it, mind you, and with relative ease. Just cover the garbage with topsoil and plant roses. But it wouldn’t be a garbage dump any longer. A weapon technology cannot transform into a peaceful one without destroying it by exposing its transformers to better armed, more reactionary and fanatical weapon technicians both at home and abroad.
National reputation is another key factor in the weapons equation. How often has the army been victorious? How often defeated? Paradoxically, defeated armies often turn into more capable adversaries than those with a long string of victories. Surviving military defeat and restoring political cohesion are much more demanding governmental tasks than managing victory. It takes superior leadership to turn military defeat into long-term success. Any fool can manage a victorious nation. Aren’t conspiracies of dunces doing so lately? Later on, the superior leaders on the side that lost may well overcome ex-victorious mediocrities.
General George Patton asserted that nobody ever won a war by standing on the defensive. The American trauma in Vietnam, and that of Russians then Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq, would have baffled him as much as they did his John Wayne mimics, Capitalist and Communist alike. No doubt he would have decreed that we nuke the lot. That was the way French generals plotted to get the Americans to do so during the battle of Dien Bien Phu in Indochina — drop a nuke (atomics, actually) on the Vietminh Army that French generals had drawn into an enormous target by deploying their elite troops as bait in the bull’s-eye. Generals MacArthur and Lemay and their military-political peers wanted to deal with the entire Communist world in the same way. American losses, a hundred million or so, they deemed “acceptable” to eliminate that threat…
Nobody back then was allowed to talk about nuclear winter. They knew about it fully, even back then.
Actually, no one ever achieved decisive military victory. Such victories are subject to the material imperfections of the real world (which Clausewitz called “friction”). Alexander the Gross of Macedon came close to total victory, but his triumphs cost him his life and empire. The Mongols and others may have come close to it by liberal applications of genocide, but their ambition tore them apart almost as quickly. America may well boast that it won both World Wars (sic), hands down. However, its hundreds of thousands of war dead since World War II (sic), its bloated military-industrial-intelligence-prison complex, collapsing civilian infrastructure, ignorant electorate and leadership that has raised stupidity to new heights of genius, all of them give lie to this rosy scenario.
In total war, the bravest, most dutiful, idealistic and diligent people fall on the frontline of battle, (along with the least). Incompetents, cowards, mental fossils and timeservers are left, by and large, to pick up the pieces. Thus Europe took decades to recover from its Paroxysms, America never recovered from its Civil War, and the ex-Communist countries have just begun to emerge from their traumatized comas. A nation ravaged by total war resembles a stroke victim slowly recovering the use of palsied limbs, voice and memory.
Eventually, every empire falls prey to its internal contradictions. Only a superb organization can absorb such vicious losses and emerge with long-lasting success. Following defeat, surviving peace technicians (the best of them lost in combat as small unit leaders and gentlemen troopers, or massacred by both sides as defenseless community leaders – teachers, doctors, priests and such) mend a frayed social fabric, replenish an exhausted production base and reassure a shaken public. Once they’ve restored a modest infrastructure of peace as best they could, weapon managers re-emerge, re-assert their illicit control and resume their abuse.
What would civilization look like, had so many talented artists, good folk and brilliant thinkers not perished in war? Think of thousands of international Einsteins, Teslas, Kants, Monets, Clara Bartons, Verlaines and Yeats, ground down under artillery barrages and sickened to death in charnel trenches; and their children who disappeared from lack of good water and food, medicine and care. Multiply this sacrifice by thousands of historic instances and thousands of locations.
World War II (sic) followed World War I (sick) like clockwork, not because of some myth of inevitable geopolitics, but because the collective genius that could have maintained the peace was killed off in previous battles, battles that served no other purpose than to rewind the cuckoo clock of weapon mentality. If they had been spared, world culture would no doubt be much more brilliant, refined and meaningful — much less weighed down with bad taste, mass-produced junk, and the literary, philosophical and political blather favored by the vicious mediocrities that war spares and promotes in their place.
A defeated society’s survival technique is more interesting to study than “successful” military empires we are coached to revere. Those tend to collapse at the death of their charismatic originator or at the first serious defeat. Besides, the history of peace mentality is a staccato of well-intentioned fiascos that always seem to end in disaster. So post-defeat attitudes and strategies should arouse Learner curiosity.
We can draw certain conclusions about weapon dissidents. Their many defeats make them as avid for success as they are clueless how to achieve it. They insist on the soundness of their old tactics and refuse to admit their nonstop failure. Like mental patients mummified in a straightjacket and locked away in a padded cell, they repeat the same empty distractions over and over again, expecting better results.
The current leadership of the world has done a better, more consistent and irresistible job of sabotaging progress than its worst fascists could have managed. They have sabotaged the progressive agenda from above, within and below, as did the Nazis in Germany. Has progressive “leadership” managed nothing more than that? That’s quite likely, given their results.
During the Alaska Nuclear Freeze initiative in 1986, a delightful, middle-aged lady hosted Anchorage activists in her home. Eventually, we had to re-organize elsewhere because, despite her many expressions of enthusiastic support, she downplayed and nay-said every course of action we suggested in her presence. The same thing may have befallen the anarchic body of alter-globalists: their activities hosted, sponsored and sabotaged by our worst enemies masquerading as inspirational patrons? That would explain a lot …
Reactionaries hold several advantages over ineffectual progressives. Their leaders needn’t be admirable. On the contrary, best they be harsh, judgmental, arbitrary and punitive (Trump). They can lie about a wide range of topics with enthusiasm and artistry. A sense of humor is superfluous to them, the last refuge of the weak. Any plausible deviation from those extremes can be accepted as a hypocritical tactic, and the deviationist, esteemed for his ability to hoodwink the credulous. Conservatives will choose a cad (Nixon), a mediocrity (Bush the Lesser), a smooth-talking con man (Reagan) or an obvious nut case (Trump) — so long as he embraces Conspiracies of Greed with gusto. Reactionaries require no rational policies. On the contrary, the more emotional, simplistic, escapist, self-serving and prejudicial they are, the better. Their basic appeals (in code if necessary) are to greed, panic, bigotry, self-pity and unjustified entitlement.
Emotional appeals seem to work for them better than wisdom, so much so that they scour the latter from public discourse. That is an interesting idea in itself. Psychopaths with no empathy appeal to panicky emotions to block common sense. Those whose conduct is based on empathy appeal to rational thought first and foremost and find emotional appeals insignificant most of the time. After all, for the conscientious, few emotional appeals are needed; the reasoning is self-evident. When it comes to those deprived of conscience, their appeals to panic emotions seem to be essential. In fact, having no policy beyond a few insulting clichés just reduces reactionaries’ vulnerability to rational criticism. Many conservative politicians based a successful career on fraud, deceit, blackmail and worse — shared only by those in the know. The most powerful ones focus their malice against a select prey minority. Had their everyday crimes been publicized, they would have spun off into political oblivion, (Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Kurt Waldheim, Radovan Karadzic, Bush the Lesser, etc.). Alas, they are shielded by info elites just as corrupt if not more so. It has been a long-standing habit of reactionary Americans to hog-tie the United Nations, lobotomize the State Department and plant troglodyte bosses to rule the intelligence community. The less mastery these organizations display, the more warfare and crises they allow in the world, with corresponding wartime revenues for their slimy patrons. Since this kind of abuse has gone uncorrected for so long, all we can expect from those agencies are shoulder-shrugging ineptitude, bureaucratic stagnation, behind-the-scenes mayhem (currently drone-driven and remarkably similar to the Assassins of ancient Syria), bigot shadism and media-driven panic-mongering.
Who could have predicted that 8,000 guys riding Toyota machine-gun pickups could rout four divisions of American-equipped and -trained Iraqi infantry? Or that Gadhafi’s arsenals had to be carpet-bombed before they fell into the wrong hands and inflamed the Middle East? Who indeed? Ever since its inception in Afghanistan under Soviet occupation, one way or another, Daesh has been subsidized and its recruitment spurred by the United States.
Giant tax receipts disappear into the pockets of the worst crooks that reactionaries can unearth, both at home and abroad. Bagram airbase in Afghanistan received literal pallet-loads of American currency shrink-wrapped by the ton, immediately flown back out to overseas banks accounts by local crooks. Exactly the same thing in Iraq. The Pentagon cannot account for the billions of dollars its revolving-door careerists pay each other every year, as if it were Monopoly money. Think of Vice President Dick Cheney and thousands of his shady peers: foxes guarding the hen house.
Progressives, on the other hand, hesitate to back anyone. They await some Moses to lead them into the Promised Land. Anyone whose sainthood they cannot certify to their satisfaction isn't worthy of devotion. This moralistic insecurity is their greatest glory and most consistent weakness. The Perfect Leader they wait for so placidly can be assassinated with ease, clearing the political landscape for certified reactionaries and robber barons for another generation or two, century or two, until the next charismatic target has the guts to stand up, get promptly gunned down and so forth. For one reason or another, progressives refuse to take the initial step and rally regardless of personal and organizational limitations. They’d rather delegate the risk and responsibility for social transformation to some mirage Messiah shimmering in a distant, hazy future. No-one has grasped this basic truth: the Perfect Voice and Vision they wait for so placidly is that of Conscience that dwells in the collective superconscience, beyond the reach of political assassination and character defect.
Most colonial conquests started out as ambitious pillaging expeditions dreamt up by a few junior middlemen. Insignificant militarists, journalists, shopkeepers, politicos and religious fanatics slopped red gore and red ink by the bucket, despite the extreme reluctance of metropolitan citizens and bureaucrats.
As to the influence of the rich, well:
“Every great political act involving a new flow of capital, or a large fluctuation in the values of existing investments, must receive the sanction and the practical aid of this little group of financial kings…
“To create new public debts, to float new companies, and to cause constant, considerable fluctuations of values are three conditions of their profitable business. Each condition carries them into politics, and throws them on the side of Imperialism.
“The public financial arrangements for the Philippine war put several millions of dollars into the pockets of Mr. Pierpont Morgan and his friends; the China-Japan war, which saddled the Celestial Empire for the first time with a public debt, and the indemnity which she will pay to her European invaders in connection with the recent conflict, brings grist to the financial mills in Europe. Every railway or mining concession wrung from some reluctant foreign potentate means profitable business in raising capital and floating companies. A policy which rouses fears of aggression … and which fans the rivalry of commercial nations … evokes vast expenditure on armaments, and ever-accumulating public debts, while the doubts and risks accruing from this policy promote that constant oscillation of values of securities which is so profitable to the skilled financier. There is not a war, a revolution, an anarchist assassination, or any other public shock, which is not gainful to these men; they are harpies who suck their gains from every new forced expenditure and every sudden disturbance of public credit…
“The policy of these men, it is true, does not necessarily make for war; where war would bring about too great and too permanent a damage to substantial fabric of industry, which is the ultimate and essential basis of speculation, their influence is cast for peace. [Author’s note: this was written before the First (sic) World War, which permanently refuted this conclusion]… But every increase of public expenditure, every oscillation of public credit short of this collapse, every risky enterprise in which public resources can be made the pledge of private speculations, is profitable to the big money-lender and speculator.
…
“In view of the part which the non-economic factors of patriotism, adventure, military enterprise, political ambition, and philanthropy play in imperial expansion, it may appear that to impute to financiers so much power is to take a too narrowly economic view of history. And it is true that the motor-power of Imperialism is not chiefly financial: finance is rather the governor of the imperial engine, directing the energy and determining its work: it does not constitute the fuel of the engine, nor does it directly generate the power. Finance manipulates the patriotic forces which politicians, soldiers, philanthropists, and traders generate; the enthusiasm for expansion which issues from these sources, though strong and genuine, is irregular and blind; the financial interest has those qualities of concentration and clear-sighted calculation which are needed to set Imperialism to work. An ambitious statesman, a frontier soldier, an overzealous missionary, a pushing trader, may suggest or even initiate a step of imperial expansion, may assist in educating patriotic public opinion to the urgent need of some fresh advance, but the final determination rests with the financial power. The direct influence exercised by great financial houses in “high politics” is supported by the control which they exercise over the body of public opinion through the Press, which, in every “civilized” country, is becoming more and more their obedient instrument…” Imperialism: A Study, by J. A. Hobson, George Allen & Unvin Ltd., London, 1902, Fourth Impression, 1948, pp. 57-60.
A situation fraught with disturbance, panic and uncertainty generates the greatest profit for the elite. The favorite con of the very rich is to bring the hottest spark of confrontation to the thickest explosive vapor of international tension, without igniting the pool of gasoline everyone flounders in.
Thus the Cold War left us a hundred million more war dead, billions more casualties from preventable starvation and disease, and millions more refugees. In reality, 68.5 million in 2018, adding up to the 20th nation on Earth, dropping the population of France to 21st place. All this serves as a plush nursery for war profiteers. As long as they succeed at their bloody game, they earn unimaginable wealth. But should they miss the mark for an instant, and boom! There go their kids along with almost everybody else’s, down the drain of total war.
Learners will defy this longstanding routine. From their perspective, an excellent, fully informed foreign policy will induce the worst climate for high-risk investment: too boring, too much security for distant victims, too much personal recognition, too many intimate interactions (“How are the kids?”) and expressions of mutual esteem. None among the weak would be ignored and despised enough to serve as dehumanized victims ripe for profit-taking (as the poor in the South serve the rich in the West these days). None of those in power would expose fellow human beings near and far to such disasters, no matter how improbable. No more profits to be had from that, and a lot more trouble. Effective international policy will apply minimal force to reduce world tensions. In cosmopolitan interactions, the clearly superior community will sacrifice minor concessions to re-stabilize things after each crisis (as between New York and Connecticut). Local moderates will gain full support while Prisms and Chaosists get disarmed using minimal force. This policy will frustrate high-risk speculators on Earth. Learners will shift their attention to outer space where their craving for crisis management and big risk-taking will do best.
A near-future commercial project in orbital space may be a habitat wheel like that in the movie 2001. It would resemble a giant roulette wheel when viewed from a spacewalk, and from the Earth’s surface as a fat, ruby-red star. It will serve as a luxury casino for the rich and a hideaway retreat or display case for celebrities. Under Learner management, every instrument will find its place in harmony with its counterparts, doing what it does best and leaving the remainder to those better qualified. Never again weapon management, whether by means of the bean-counting nihilism of corporate slave markets or some new cult or ideology (no matter how seductive) running everything by brute force and failing to control anything effectively. It should be obvious that only God controls everything under the sun. That has never been the case for any institution man came up with and imposed at gunpoint.
When weapon policies curdle into massacre and disaster, they cannot be called “failures” or “errors” as we’ve been led to believe. Instead, weapon managers worsen outcomes on purpose. After every disaster and mass crime, we are left to wonder, “What went wrong?” The answer? “Nothing went wrong. Everything went strictly according to the plans of weapon management.” Every time we’ve mistaken deliberate weapon policy for accidents of petty greed, insanity or stupidity – each insignificant – we’ve helped weapon managers cover their tracks. We can’t even consider total nuclear war a weapon management failure. After all, warrior bees die when they dart their sting. That does not prevent them from stinging a threatening apparition. And they may flatter themselves, with their last flicker of consciousness, that they fulfilled their honorable duty. The same thing applies to nuclear holocausters to whom we’ve handed the means of terminating civilized life on this planet, to defend values that may or may not be authentic.
Arms embargoes don’t work either. Legitimate governments and their innocent citizens suffer the brunt of a bilateral (“even-handed”) arms embargo. Weapons embargoes have failed during the Spanish Civil War, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the Yugoslav Crisis, during the hiatus between the Iraq Wars and on other occasions. All justice forfeit, the Aggressors’ first reflex just before they attack will be to outgun their victims. For a price, well-organized (and/or criminal) brokers will provide the former with more munitions on demand. Often, these brokers are the same ones mandated to enforce the weapons embargo, while mass victims and their legitimate governments suffer its worst effects.
America’s ritual recall of the assault it suffered at Pearl Harbor kept the global community on the edge of its nuclear seat for the last half century. Our only redemption? That we pulled that easy trigger only twice during our watch, aroused by the utmost provocation. As for Russia and other nuclear powers, never.
Moreover, the likelihood of sudden nuclear war approached one hundred percent every day from 1950 to 1970. The absence of accidental and/or criminal launches does not correspond to the number of reactor accidents at the same time, even though nuclear attack opportunities were much more numerous than those for reactor control accidents. This statistical anomaly implies an alien control agency superior to the human one, that prevented the corresponding certainty of nuclear war. And perhaps the prevention of any nuclear war on Earth, provided it remains forbidden by this agency.
Recent decades of pointless war between the Muslim World and the West were triggered by 9/11. In the same way, Russia’s part in the Cold War and Putin’s attempt to resume it since were in part justified by the Nazis’ thousand-mile assault against Mother Russia. Most of Europe, likewise. The Chinese suffered the same fate at the hands of the Japanese. Just imagine, an overnight invasion from Maine to Florida by superbly organized and ruthless invaders! Is it any wonder that everyone operates on a hair trigger? All the governments of WeaponWorld suffer from PTSD.
There is irony in the deduction that President Franklin Roosevelt knew Admiral Yamamoto’s attack plan in detail before Pearl Harbor’s Battleship Row was struck. Three thousand American casualties, hundreds of aircraft wrecked and eight obsolete battle wagons sunk in the shallows of Oahu: those losses might have been less painful than those of the next most likely scenario. Had the U.S. Battle Fleet endured the Japanese attack with fewer losses (at full alert with guns manned and planes aloft instead of its flaccid Sunday routine), it would have sailed to the rescue of General Macarthur and his troops in the Philippines, in accordance with the wishes of “battleship” admirals and an American public screaming for revenge.
Four American aircraft carriers (conveniently absent from Pearl Harbor on December 7, along with vital, high-speed supply ships and naval oil tankers) plus almost every other surface combat ship the Navy could muster ‒ their aircraft obsolete and pilots novice; their radars primitive, cranky or non-existent; and their twitchy torpedoes fatally defective ‒ would have convoyed entire divisions of Regulars and Marines, as well as hundreds of crated aircraft, artillery pieces and tanks: at least half the trained cadre and ordnance inventory of the US.
Somewhere in the West Pacific, beyond friendly support and ensnared in a spider web of fortified Japanese air bases, they would have had to face off against ten enemy aircraft carriers loaded with superb planes and veteran pilots, a like number of modernized dreadnoughts, swarms of submarines and surface escorts bristling with deadly Long Lance torpedoes.
At that time, bigot American Admirals underrated their opponent’s prowess — a routine bad habit among the American military. It’s obvious, military outcomes will end up worse than expected if one underestimates one’s enemy. Out for blood, the Japanese would not have burdened themselves with vulnerable transports. Day-long aerial duels and submarine wolf pack attacks – more imbalanced in favor the Japanese than those at Midway and the Solomon Islands, during which the Americans barely won through heroic sacrifice and miraculous timing – would have alternated with slashing night surface firefights relying on Mark I eyeballs enhanced by exquisite binoculars and brutal training, versus infant U.S. radar technologies — firefights at which the Japanese Navy routinely whipped the Americans during the first half of the war.
It would have been the battle of Tsushima all over again. This time, it would have been the Americans, blinded by their bigotry and lack of radars, who would have succumbed to samurai sailors instead of Russians who lost in 1905 because they stacked ready ammunition loose in their secondary batteries (to forestall a surprise torpedo boat attack) that detonated sympathetically during the first long-range hits by Japanese primary batteries, gutting Russian ships.
Instead of the shallows of Oahu, America’s vital military assets would have sunk into the Pacific abyss. The survivors who fought their way through to the Philippines would merely have added to Japan’s haul of prisoners shamefully abused. Reeling from this debacle, lacking trained cadres for its world-spanning armed forces, the USA would have taken at least another half-decade to achieve 1944 levels of combat skill. Of necessity, Americans would have ignored Europe beyond the static defense of England. We would have had to counter-attack across the Pacific to secure long-range bomber bases for atomic weapons. Unlike us, these Americans would have needed atom bombs to defeat their enemy otherwise unstoppable.
As a matter of fact, the Japanese had at least five opportunities to drag the war out for another half-dozen years:
· Pearl Harbor: stage a third wave attack and bomb essential fuel depot and repair facilities into rubble;
· Savo Island, Guadalcanal: after having gutted its cruiser escort, close in on the defenseless American invasion fleet and destroy it;
· Midway: send in the Japanese battleships first, to act as airpower bait in small, carefully spaced carrier hunter-killer and shore bombardment groups, instead of in the rear as mediocre escorts for Japanese carriers;
· Komandorski Island: sink a self-crippled American cruiser and its escorts, then destroy every enemy afloat and facility ashore in nearby seas; and
· Leyte Gulf, Philippines: close in with overwhelming firepower and destroy the vulnerable American invasion transports left unguarded.
·
But Admiral Yamamoto, a brilliant samurai and gentleman scholar, was infected during his visit to America with the conviction of ultimate U.S. victory, to such an extent that he convinced his admiral disciples (even beyond the grave) that the triumphs listed above were not worth the risk involved.
In any case, an American submarine could have delivered a nuke to Tokyo Bay, Etajima or some other symbolic target (on a suicide run, if necessary) just as readily as a B 29 bomber that might never have taken off for Hiroshima or Nagasaki from the Marianna Islands because those atolls were out of reach of U.S. amphibious forces, defeated according to this hypothesis.
For the umpteenth time, policy makers on both sides agreed to fail at pre-war planning and negotiations. They chose passive-aggressive militarism instead of the active pursuit of peace — precisely as we are failing today. All sides committed these errors, rubber-stamped by the castrated League of Nations, long before the Manchurian Incident triggered the Second (sic) World War a decade before Pearl Harbor. Our United Nations and its Security Council (certified purveyors of peril) are not much better. Not one of today’s governments can claim world peace as its primary goal. None can claim legitimate sovereignty except at gunpoint with our reluctant consent, as during an airline hijack.
While the first-rate powers are spellbound by the dynamics of military aggression, the weak are equally tempted to resort to it as long as the great powers forbear. High-ranking fools (the 1990’s Yugoslav Aggressors, for example) argued that this kind of restraint was a sign of weakness to be exploited. This dilemma is crucial. When weapon sectarians block the path of peace, they should be disarmed using minimal force. This is more a question of rapid police intervention than of a military one carried out too late, as we have grown accustomed to witness. Questionable expedients may be judged legitimate, like arresting tin pot dictators in their bedclothes (Assad) and pumping sleeping gas into kangaroo legislatures (the Bosnian Serbs) before they vote for war. However, we should rely on World Court-juried trials for final say as to the legitimacy of these tactics. Local moderates should be encouraged in every other way.
After enduring enormous sacrifices, a defeated nation may achieve strategic superiority over its tormentor. It may come to resemble its enemy in more ways than it would care to admit — since military imitation is the sincerest form of defiance. Revived losers may challenge old enemies in a grudge rematch. In that case, they have merely traded places: operant parameters remain the same, mirrored but otherwise undisturbed.
Another factor influences the threat deterrence formula. It is the count of person-years wasted in combat, subtracted yearly from the productive pool of workers and permanently from the roster of the living. Had humanity not squandered the titanic effort and resources on warfare, we could have wasted the same amount of energy in idleness and license, yet everyone could earn a comfortable living from a twenty-hour workweek and a few years of such each. We could pursue our topics of passion for the rest of our lives (or do nothing but watch TV) and the whole world would find itself much better off anyway. Another crucial factor in the weapon formula is the political cohesion that binds a proletariat to its elite. It cannot be faked or coerced for long. Defeat looms if the info proletariat refuses to support its elite spontaneously. Popular discontent must remain muted.
In all but the worst-case scenarios, (see Boom! above), info elites sacrifice very little compared to the benefits they gain. They reserve this privilege for the info proletariat. In the long run, public opinion must remain apathetic, even for overly long and costly wars (and what war isn’t?). As was the case during the World Wars (sic), once elite youths get massacred as frequently as proletarian ones, their grieving parental decision-makers refuse to opt for peace. After all, they have already made the supreme sacrifice. They won’t give up until their nation has been stomped flat and they are shoved up against a wall.
We must forestall this ultimate sacrifice and turn it into a celebration shared by the same actors.
The number of well-trained warriors, times their rate of fire, divided by re-supply deadlines, times cruising and battle speeds; divided by the defender’s throw-weight, his ability to dig in, armor plate, maneuver, evade detection and replace casualties; times ... These and many other constants and variables make up an intricate threat formula that weapon managers refine compulsively. Col. T. N. Dupuy attempted to formulate this equation in Understanding War, Paragon House Publishers, New York, 1987. He didn’t quite make it. His results, bearing on the Iraq War and predicting enormous American casualties under heavy fire from Saddam Hussein’s army, were not predictive. The definitive version of this formula exists; it just hasn’t been openly published yet.
In a process strikingly similar to Darwinian selection, alternate bursts of technological innovation favor the means of attack and defense. These and many other variables make up a complicated threat formula. Morale, morality and cultural factors (for example, personal eagerness to kill despite God’s forbidding it, and the ritual default to ultimate self-sacrifice) may turn out to be just as important as details of military hardware and strategy, for better or for worse. The Japanese and the Celts believed as much, to their ultimate defeat by more pragmatic combat adversaries.
Thousands of years ago, the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, perhaps the ultimate military theoretician on Earth, listed five non-negotiable requirements for victory:
· Politics: that which makes people stand alongside their leaders, even at the risk of their lives;
· Weather;
· Terrain;
· Commander: his particular traits; and
· Military doctrine: organization, discipline, ordnance and logistics.
It seems that everything else, good or bad, can be endured, made up from scratch or ripped off from the enemy. Slightly modified, this list (and the rest of his philosophy of struggle) could just as well serve the goals of World Peace.
Modern nuclear, scalar and biological warfare nullify every known form of military defense. Weapon technicians have optimized the threat formula to such an extent as to render it suicidal. Modern armies (harmies?) – with their superb warriors, exquisite weaponry and extraordinary paramilitary and paracivilian supports – run the risk of total collapse under a rain of computer, nuclear, meteorological, biological and propaganda bombardment. As a result, they are less and less likely to achieve a satisfactory outcome, even while their maintenance costs spiral out of control.
It sickens me to witness infantry patrols posted to urban malls and transit stations after the latest terrorist atrocity, combat vehicles parked on street corners and fighter jets thundering over cities: the least effective of preventive measures. Yet they’re very effective to get one’s own people to tolerate intolerable circumstances.
The collapsing logic of this value system vindicates Learner. Virtually overnight, the time-honored paraphernalia of weapon states has become obsolete; its glories, justifications and tactics, futile. If you’ve followed this line of reasoning, you should be just as frightened as excited by now. Everything we have been led to believe has grown too bitter to hold down. It is up to us to come up with better alternatives. It’s about time!
It is time we optimized the Armchair Formula at the expense of the Threat Formula. This project might seem unrealistic and even alien to our way of thinking. But we can’t let that stop us. We have had so little practice at peace — unlike total war at which we are experts.
To succeed at peace, we must reclaim ancient expertise long forgotten and retrieve it from the collective superconscience that has never forgotten anything. Until the terms of this debate become common knowledge, weapon mentors will harness the delusion of hypnotized masses to cancel it. Learners won’t replace them until global majorities agree to resolve their problems in unison and in peace despite incessant calls for more war and less peace. In the meantime, most isolated attempts at individual, institutional and mystical improvement will fail, engulfed by the social contradictions that surround them.
Learners will be duty-bound to defy weapon mentality in all its manifestations, sink weapon mythology into the depths of the collective conscience, re-codify our laws and train up to dependable peace. Let many warlike sacrifices be converted into peaceful celebration.
Tell yourself, “I am ready.” Find peers just as ready to discuss and broadcast Learner. Once enough people have grasped these ideas and rallied around them, the next steps will reveal themselves clearly, each in its perfect time and place, carried out by the individual or group most qualified to do so with excellent success.
- INFANTRY -
This time around, I have neither served as a warrior nor experienced ground combat (touch wood!). But I believe I have had to do so in past lives and I believe so have you. We are all veterans and victims of combat, if only by way of subliminal recall.
If you reject my proposal because you refuse to believe in reincarnation or because you insist that civilians (or anyone who disagrees with you) should shut up about war, too bad, so sad. Read on or refuse to; figure it out or not. All I can do is propose it to you.
We must taste the blood-acid vomit of war without experiencing it first-hand, take deep breaths of its stench and soak our face in its gore. We must reacquaint ourselves with those horrors spared us by rare good fortune and wisdom this time around.
Let’s evoke combat from the stories of those who have experienced it for us, as well as from past experience dimly recalled or wiped from memory. That way, we can stop re-enacting it today and in days to come — much less often than we’ve had to in past reincarnations.
I can only repeat the story my grandfather told me. He said the sweetest fruit he ever ate – and we lived in Provence where the fruit is good and plenty – were raw onions dug up from a desolate garden plot. Those onions were clotted with soil, and “We ate them like apples.” The memory made him smile.
That when your squad gets caught in an artillery firestorm too far away from shelter, it is best to crawl flat on your belly until your head works under the crotch of the next man in line, then cover his ass with your helmet.
How funny they found it when one guy crapped his pants (as happens to one in four combatants or more under fire) this time over the head of the man underneath. They lived through that barrage, scary enough to crap one’s pants, and got to cackle about it afterwards.
Or my Dad’s story about catching lice with his tank destroyer recon company under a rotting pier. Or solemnly showing me a narrow, cobble beach at the bottom of a deeply shaded gorge, too steep to climb down into blindly, though there must have been a path somewhere. He never showed it to us and we never went back, even though our home was quite close nearby.
His best friend, along with his scout troop spilling out of a landing craft, were massacred in a hail of German machine guns probably nested along the cliff top where we stood, a hundred or so feet above (I was young and small back then) a pebble beach along the coastal highway. Out on the far-right flank of the American landing in Provence (Southern France), beyond which the French Naval Assault Group of Corsica got massacred. My dad was a lucky guy.
Another good friend of his died after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. He commanded the tank platoon sent to that place: ten tanks flown there in pieces, and him in the lead tank with both arms broken and set in plaster. He died during the death march out to a concentration camp, along with two thirds of the caged survivors.
Or another story my father once told me, when he was a young lieutenant commanding the point element of a horse cavalry regiment on its way home, heat-drugged after a thirteen-hundred-mile march from Fort Hood, Texas to Fort Riley, Kansas and back, the last long march like that in American history.
The horses at the point of the advance guard got wind of the nearing post and charged over the last crest and into the valley below, drawn to their cozy stalls and out from under the blazing sun and their dozing riders. No doubt a few of those tumbled off, though he didn’t tell me and I was too dumb to ask.
My father sent word back that everybody had to look sharp because the horses were going to get frisky. I’ll bet they made a fine parade entrance after a masterful march. He never said so, but I saw the pride in his eyes.
Both of them parsed their stories short and doled them out to me sparingly, even though they knew I would pay rapt attention as long as they chose to speak. Such was the pain of their recall.
Let’s pull on the muddy boots of an infantryman. On PeaceWorld, every child will have read that kind of thing as ordinary fare — but nothing about military glory. Eight-year-olds will have heard about “Infantry” in school or devoured it as a comic book.
But let’s go there anyway…
Instead of waking up in a soft bed in a warm room down the hall from loving parents, or alongside a sweet mate bent on loving, or just shiftless and on your own; you start up from rotting leaf litter at the bottom of a dank hole, roused by nonstop itching and the high-explosive roar that has stunned your senses for months, or an ominous quiet that portends nothing good.
The horizon rumbles with the distant grumble of heavy artillery – yours, if you’re lucky; the other side’s or both, if not – surprisingly similar to an empty stomach’s growl — except it’s shaking the landscape in addition to your shriveling guts. Ravenous for another bite, it releases a trickle of sand into your hole. Beware lest it corkscrew you out of your hole and shred you for breakfast. Nothing you can do about that in any case.
You’re on your own, surrounded by steaming huddles of fellow sufferers buried out of sight. For a fortnight or more, none of you has set aside his rotting shoes or shit-color rags, rested or bathed properly. If you slept at all, your mortal coma was bathed in sweat, teeming with nightmares and maddeningly interrupted at any moment. The haze of sleep deprivation is your daily lot, as well as that of your officers who decide if you live or die.
This damp, dark morning is much like the others: sweat-soaked hot or shivering cold per the seasonal excess. Rain and sweat soak your rotting clothing. Who would have dreamt – in the coziness of a tight house – that daily weather could be so savage?
Stink fills your nostrils. It is common to every battlefield: a compound of mud or dust; foul breath, body odor and human waste; moldy clothing, food and equipment; high-explosive gas and smoke; rotting, seared lumps of flesh of every description: the burst of fresh blood, the sickly cocoa funk of its rot or the roast pork aroma when it burns. For the past hundred years, the common stink has been the inescapable one of diesel smog. Prior to that, the dung of draft and cavalry beasts and the random human kind coated every marching boot. Nothing alive stinks worse than a close column of filthy infantry, except that of overworked horses with weeping sores.
The toxic effluvia and taboo fluids you would shun in peacetime will make up your body bath during war. Its stench and racket will fester in your psyche until you die. Any hint of them in your remote civilian future will trigger fugues of post-traumatic stress.
Your body aches all over and gut-wrenching diarrhea trots along behind you — half from dread and its immune-suppressing pall and half from the fecal breakfast you just wolfed down. Your muscles are laced with lactic acid, the milk of overwork. You cringe from a maddening skin crawl of bugs (the combatant’s faithful companions), and a sticky, stinking glaze that coats your skin. You and your buddies stink of ammonia sweat. Your hyper-abused bodies don’t carry fat any longer and burn muscle tissue instead. Nobody acknowledges your embarrassing sores and chronic complaints except with ridicule. You will have to cough, sneeze, piss or shit during moments of danger and imperil your friends in so doing. You have lost more weight than would be normal or healthy. Your exhaustion would flatten you under normal circumstances. Any doctor worth his salt would take one look at your sorry ass and prescribe a week of bed rest and rich food. Not here, not now. Front line rifle units are usually too poorly manned to permit such luxuries.
You’re always hungry and thirsty. Blood warm, chlorine-stinking water nauseates you rather than quenching your thirst. Your appetite disappears the moment you open the next can of dog food combat rations. For every torment the genius of your nation’s combat logistics spares you, a dozen more plague you worse and without repair.
Whether you suffer from a clinical addiction or not, the false promise of alcohol and drugs will make you suffer like the damned. You would do almost anything for a few swigs, pills or shots of escape. Nonetheless, neither food nor drink nor drugs – those musty horrors available in your pigsty – offer any real consolation.
Only the fitful mails can console you now: a precious word from home. The mail clerk can just as well toss you a Dear John letter letting you know your mate went crazy from loneliness and threw herself at the next jerk in line, or your family and friends were massacred during a recent, martial atrocity back home and have abandoned you forever.
Instead of endless commutes to an almost bearable job, you face the snarling machinery of industrial hate that stretches out beyond the horizon: the entire genius, fortune and flower of youth of some random country whose citizens you never met and against whom you never held a quarrel — entirely, devoted, to, your, personal, extermination. Gulp!
Your side’s firepower is just as menacing as that of the enemy. Front-line troops can be massacred by either side. Mechanized forces are hotbeds of disaster. Both sides’ artillery, tanks and aircraft are perfectly designed to shred your delicate transparency. Disease and accidents will kill you just as dead as combat, often sooner. Death is not picky on the battlefield.
Danger lurks everywhere, as well as quiet execution by firing squad or a squad leader’s pistol if you tarry too long in a place of safety. No relief or security awaits you except in the tidy rows of a military cemetery or convalescent ward. Otherwise, in a common grave carved out by bulldozer, or some dank, scream-filled and stinking aid station grotto — from first aid to the three volleys of a funeral salute, by the book with military precision.
Instead of schmoozing with familiar and reasonable people under the constraints of law and civility, you confront lost souls as filthy and miserable as your own. Instead of a coterie of friends and acquaintances nourished by mutual kindness, they are a bunch of smelly, brutish and crude compulsive-neurotics with whom you share nothing but common misery motivated by petty spite and perfectly reasonable terror.
If you’re lucky enough and possessed with the dignity of courage, they will treat you like a noble brother during a crisis, share their last crust of bread and sip of water with you, risk their life to save yours — and treat you like dirt at other times. Your tender feelings and bruised bodies are at each other’s mercy. No choice in the matter.
This black morning promises calamity for you and your guys. You have become sly creatures by now, as superstitious as cannibals and feral-wary of everyone else.
If you find yourself in a pocket of relative security, combat may seem to be a lesser worry. You will be bullied by rear area lifers handpicked for cruelty and determined to keep you cowed. Perfect brutes you would neither party with behind the lines nor trust in combat — for endless rounds of meaningless, filthy and exhausting chores. Their only response to your demand for dignity: reflexive insult, brutality and another perilous assignment. Their relative safety dictates your peril; their meager comfort, your misery. Imps lining the entranceway to Hell, goading the damned to their doom — their primary goal is to drive you back into the fight. Like other repressive institutions in peacetime, like the cilia lining peristaltic intestines, they flutter chow along their way while wringing the last scrap of vitality from it.
Your commanders are more intent on the enemy’s destruction than your wellbeing. If they are good, they will work themselves ragged to see that you are fed and housed to minimum standards. They may briefly regret your bug-like distress and extinction, then carry on with their plans. Otherwise, they won’t give a damn. Indeed, they’ll seek their promotion by promoting your distress without sharing it with you.
A good officer will lead you into hell and bring back as many of you intact as possible, by his coolness under fire, his compassion and know-how (especially miraculous good luck!); a bad one, on the contrary, will get you killed by his elite laziness, stupidity, snobbery and cowardice. There are no bad troops, only bad officers. The good ones form elite troops before sacrificing themselves; the bad ones survive their lethal ineptitude too often.
That is what makes a general’s career and earns him more stars. His honorable record generations ago as a small unit combat leader, and his political cunning since, have brought him promotion. Like good wine soured to vinegar, his noble task devolves into rote mechanics: oppress or replace subordinate commanders when their torn compassion paralyzes them. Needless to say, barring catastrophe, he’s headed nowhere near peril, he and his drafted three-star chef. His primary task is to dig you and your friends into some untenable spot, then send you on endless marches into greater peril until you become casualties: so much lost baggage. There will always be a stream of anonymous new replacements to fill in and get used up. General George Patton wasn’t happy unless a few of his many lieutenants got shot recently. That is a general’s duty, glory and reward.
As for civilian masters of war, things are even less decent. As frontline infantry, the less you know about that stuff, the better.
Did you know that the last four successful Republican Presidential candidates negotiated with the enemy behind the back of a Democratic Incumbent President? Look it up for yourself in the public record: Johnson v. Nixon with the North Vietnamese, Carter v. Reagan with the Iranians, Clinton v. Bush the Lesser with the Taliban, and Obama v. Trump with the Russians. Treason, high crimes and misdemeanors: the only way Republicans can win a straight-up contest – at least until the reactionary Supreme Court puts its thumb on the voting scale. The “neutral” media would crucify any Democratic candidate who dared do such a thing. Just like Obama could never get away with one-tenth the crap Trump gets away with routinely. If I sought a security clearance with one-tenth of Trump’s moral baggage, they’d laugh me out of the office. Who gave that jerk a security clearance, anyway, long before he was subject to “executive privilege?” Apparently, you don’t need a security clearance if you’re a Presidential candidate, even less so if elected.
Your best buddy will die before your eyes or lie horribly mangled in your arms, and their replacement and their replacements afterwards, and likely yourself in the long run. After witnessing their agony and washing your hands in their blood, you will bury them in a common grave (one of hundreds you had to dig) that took hours of grueling work to scrape away the clay, the rocks and stubborn roots at your feet. Digging a proper grave or a decent dugout by hand takes a staggering amount of work.
Lemon-sized sub-munitions bounce into the bottom of fortifications, down dugout steps and around sandbag walls before they go off in a blizzard of mini detonations, shredding those cowering in terror underneath and inside. Kamikazes or technicians based on the other side of the planet can pilot vehicular and drone-borne explosives, and soon artificial intelligence, without any likelihood of escape.
THE FOLLOWING, IRREPLACEABLE CITATIONS AMPUTATED THANKS TO THE ANTI-QUOTE GESTAPO
“The ‘million dollar’ wound (as suffered by Hollywood heroes) is caused by a high velocity military bullet, undistorted and still encased in its metal skin, which passes straight through relatively elastic muscle tissue and out the other side, making a pencil-thin tunnel and leaving a star-shaped exit wound only about three-quarters of an inch across.
…
“Even a ‘clean’ penetration of the heart, liver of major blood vessels is usually fatal, and brain damage normally has devastating results even when the victim survives: …”
[Author’s note: bulletproof armor and modern surgical techniques permit the survival of many wounded soldiers who used to die quick: those struck in exposed portions of the face and neck, leading to the brain and cervical vertebra. Another, larger group gets concussed by explosives and suffers an impairment. Thus more and more wounded veterans live out the rest of their lives more or less vegetative and/or paralyzed. Yet another bunch of high-tech survivors lose unarmored appendages: arms and legs, hands and feet].
“… apart from yawing and bone strikes; the amount of damage a bullet causes depends upon another effect known as cavitation.
…
“In the best case, new healthy tissue will grow inwards all around the debrided wound. In the worst case, sepsis will occur – gangrene – and the patient’s prospects become seriously worrying.”
Martin Windrow, The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam, Da Capo Press, Perseus Books Group, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004. Originally published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, England, 2004, pp. 533-534.
“No weapon frightens me as much as the shell. …
…
“ It’s only the detonation which always seems the same – a feeling as much as a sound, a hideous suck-roar-thump that in itself, should you be close enough, can collapse your palate and liquefy your brain.”
Anthony Boyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, Penguin Group, New York, London, 2001, first published by DoubleDay, New York, 1999, p. 244.
“The most clichéd but accurate metaphor for the sound of incoming shells in flight is that of an old-fashioned steam express train rushing past a few feet away…
…
“The results of massive destruction – the ruined hulk of a torso, the crimson rack of ribs, the glistening entrails, limbs ripped away and scattered, a severed head – have a charnel house squalor that denies all human dignity. On chilly evenings at Dien Bien Phu, the warm, gaping body cavities steamed visibly, and the opened-up bowels gave off a stink of faeces.”
Martin Windrow, The Last Valley, op. cit., pp. 371-374.
Or check out Southern Lebanon or Palestine or Syria within the last few years… Am I really in the 3rd millennium of the Christian Era on Planet Earth? And our Bronze Age barbarism still prevails?
“It comes down to physics. What movies cannot render is that, often, the most lethal aspect of an explosion is not the scattering of projectiles in its blast, but the tremendous shock wave that blast releases. …
…
“While more advanced armies have developed firebombs that literally suck the oxygen out of a targeted area, quickly exterminating all within, the more common form of death in such circumstances is the protracted ordeal of carbon-monoxide poisoning as the building around the victim slowly burns. And then, of course, there are those who linger for a time, who don’t succumb to their wounds until the next day or the one after that…”
Scott Anderson, Moonlight Hotel, Doubleday, Random House, 2006, pp. 168-170.
END OF AMPUTATED QUOTES
Otherwise, you will have to lug their broken, lead-heavy body to an uncertain fate in the rear, half-willing that they croak and relieve you of the struggle to save them. The loss of precious friends will twist like a dagger in your heart. Later on, you will shun such painful friendships.
The buddy you save is a ‘lucky’ one. More likely, your friends will move out, under orders to ignore the wounded. The next volleys of enemy fire will mow down your heroic medics. Your wounds will pin you to the ground until some wandering enemy ends your misery with sadistic enthusiasm or queasy hesitancy and strips your body before he moves on. In your own good time, you may die screaming in agony or quietly bleed to death all alone.
Why bother with anyone outside your vermin-infested tribe? Anyone beyond your narrow squad – friend or foe, combatant or non-combatant – will assume the phantom profile of inhuman wraiths whose suffering and extermination are matters of relief, indifference or derisive sport. Most of all, you will despise those pasty civilians you were sent here to defend. Wishing them a fate worse than your own, the black magic of your envy may worsen theirs.
Sooner or later, you and every survivor not a sociopath-born will become post-traumatized zombies — at which point, nothing much will matter until you’ve received months of professional help and perhaps never again. You will never recover fully.
Your only real assignment is to kill and, if possible, not be killed. You will be invited to commit every crime you despise. Nothing less than your complete acceptance of this criminal degradation will let you escape this hell with perhaps your body intact but your soul in tatters. Your hatred will blind you. The screams of agony of the enemy will become music to your ears, along perhaps with the wail of wretched women and children caught in the crossfire. Plunder will become an indoor sport, a pastime from the interminable boredom of military life, the endless boredom of military life, the unending boredom of military life: repeat ten thousand times a day. Any decency you once prized will be ripped from you, and every perversion of justice and compassion will become routine.
Not until then will you fully grasp the monstrosity of war. Unfortunately, too late to do anything about it except compound its misery. Your options will narrow to mere survival and perhaps not even that. Everything else will become empty words and meaningless sensations, compared to the combined rush of combat survival, fraternal loyalty and the random verdict of life or death.
Stripped of the pastels and smiling rainbows of civilian life, you may become addicted to your black and white dilemma and unfit to resume the trappings of peace. In that case, your beloved society, ancient practitioner of social triage, will quietly snuff you out once you resume its embrace — without pause, mercy, dignity or regret. Your disappearance will not even be counted among the casualties of war, much less honored. More veterans die that way than in combat, dying alone and forsaken by everyone at home. From 22 to 28 suicides per day in 2019 USA.
These days, more children die from war than soldiers. It has probably always been so, but never reported without censorship to the civilian world. Psychopaths would rather harm the innocent wholesale with the consent of an ignorant public.
Tomorrow’s wake-up will seem much like today’s and yesterday’s and the one the day before, unless some new disaster probes your courage, sanity and endurance, and likely leads you to collapse, convulse and perish.
Instead of operatic appeals to God, to duty, honor and country that you’d imagine you’d utter heroically; your last gasps are likely to be the whimpers of a toddler in pain: ma, mommy, mama – begging for a miraculous reprise of her loving embrace, to please, please come soothe your agony with her recalled love – your last plea for the comforts of the breast and the womb. It hurts so bad! Your precious adult vitality will pour out of you with your blood.
Nobody will pay much attention to you for very long. The Army is set up to dispose of your body with the least fuss. If you are a parent, your death will worsen the misery of your children and spouse and the agony of your parents. Those who grieve you will shut down sooner or later, whether they survive into victory or in defeat. Then they will pass on, and your life, cast into oblivion, will be forgotten.
Your misery will become an abstraction, less significant than a footnote in history books that have buried so many throwaway lives in military jargon, fantasy heroics and sociopolitical nonsense. Less meaningful than a crushed ant or a moth in the flame. Your passionate, pristine existence – born in pain and hope and tenderly nourished by parents and guardians – will be shoveled into the WeaponWorld Jive Drive. Endless yous, reincarnated in the children to come, will have to retrace your absurd path into oblivion.
So tell me, dear Learner, how can the reassuring routines of peace and progress prepare us for this long, serial agony — compared to which Christ’s afternoon Crucifixion might have made up for its Agony by its brevity? Only gradual and hypnotic conditioning from birth – backed by thousands of years of obsessive regimentation, courtesy of weapon civilization – prevent us from abandoning this charnel bedlam screaming our lungs out and defying the psychopaths who want to poke our tender extremities into their patriotic blaze, like weenies crackling in a campfire.
It would be better if there were no more war, only peace. Not no combat at all on this planet, at least for a while longer — but less now and a lot less in the future. Please God.
- LEARNER PEACEWORLD -
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
…
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863
- CRIMINAL WAR -
“Better yet, the most extreme measures, the most radical actions, the bloodiest combat methods are kindest in the long run, simply because they hasten the end of hostilities and thus reduce the count of casualties and destruction. This was the point the famed Marshal Hindenburg upheld when he said: ‘The more ruthless the war, the more humane in reality, since it will end sooner.’ It remains the thought of great strategists to this day. Jean Bacon, The Greater Glory, Prism Press, San Leandro, California, 1986, p. 36 [translated by me].
“A soldier’s conduct must be modeled on that of a rat: kind and considerate towards members of his own group, cruel and ferocious towards strangers. Lose this delicate balance, tip the scale the other way, and disaster looms. The war machine – well-oiled up ‘til then – threatens to grind to a halt. One word is repeated in hushed tones through headquarters and strikes the generals with terror: ‘fraternization’.” Ibid., p. 190.
Regardless of a modern state’s peculiarities – ideological, religious and technological – its adherents obtain the most privilege by contributing to the nation’s war effort. Family wealth, seniority, dominant race and political allegiance are primary recruitment criteria for positions of authority, privilege and prestige. Compassion is at best a secondary consideration.
Aversion to warfare is a grave liability for ambitious candidates; it guarantees their rejection from the corridors of power. Compassion and empathy are personal weaknesses weeded out and driven from power.
The governments of today are masterworks of weapon mentality. The ruthlessness and ideological peculiarities of national elites correspond to the vividness of the threats that appear to surround them. The more an info proletariat fears those threats, the more tyrannical its elite may become. The extent of its power base, malice and impunity depend on the projection of those fears on the proletariat.
Given current danger levels, the threat of instant biological, nuclear and meteorological annihilation gives rise to the worst kind of weapon tyranny. By gradual increments of terror, we have set ourselves up to be ruled by a succession of more and more hyperactive Hitlers.
Every state exists today because it has optimized its weapon technology. Otherwise, its neighbors would saturate it with guerrillas, invade it and replace its defeated government with a successor more partial to weapon mentality.
Most nation-states are powerful enough to block conventional aggression. Routine international relations can head off most of these manifestations. Terrorist attacks provoke the states they target just enough to worsen their weapon tyranny. Look at the harm done to the Bill of Rights by 9/11.
Weapon mentality justifies its existence by erecting barriers between nation-states ruled by rival but identical elites. In a cyclical process throughout history, these barriers (or membranes) have ballooned outward. Within them grew the prismatic family, the tribe, village, metropolis, culture, race, religion and/or nation-state to which allegiance was due; outside were bogeymen that could be attacked when convenient and abused the rest of the time.
The toughest membranes and the tightest prismatic groupings assembled in the vicinity of remote wastelands – mountains, jungles, swamps and deserts of sand, stone and ice – lonely spots where sheer survival poses a major problem. The swiftest hitchhiking and the most generous hospitality is found in poorer lands. They are harder to obtain if not forbidden outright where the cops are vigilant, the climate mild, the cars new, and their drivers sleek and self-absorbed.
The residents of such wastelands could see a stranger as a lethal menace, yet it is they who obey the laws of hospitality and protection most strictly. Once you are under their protection, those people would rather die than see you harmed. That is their law. It should be ours as well, regardless of our plush surroundings.
Extending from prehistoric family units, these membranes have ballooned outward. Gathering diverse peoples into unified wholes – brutally or otherwise – they have spread out, their growth nourished by the arterial supply of communications networks budding from within.
Now that sub-continental populations share a common membrane, now that two voices at opposite ends of the planet are separated by .6 seconds over the telephone, we are a single quantum jump from global unity. Actually, this political process resembles the emergence of a large bubble from a froth of smaller ones — and probably conforms to a similar set of surface tension laws.
Imperial authority demands that districts remain subordinate to a powerful central government. In confederations, central authority exists for more limited purposes. Confederate leaders seek the consent of diverse peoples by leaving them as little disturbed as possible.
At first, I thought Learner civilization would honor Panch Shila: five principles of confederacy articulated by Jawaharial Nehru and Chou En-lai, then ratified by their Third World supporters during the Bandung Conference of 1955.
· Non-intervention,
· Mutual respect of territorial integrity and sovereignty,
· Mutual non-aggression,
· Mutual aid, and
· Peaceful coexistence.
I used to think that the World Court alone could rescind these rights and obligations, and then only temporarily according to the verdict of randomly selected juries fully briefed by an international system of challenge and pleadings.
Since then, we have witnessed many atrocities foreign and domestic. Governments and their associates have indulged in them under armored umbrellas of non-intervention and national sovereignty.
Since then, I’ve read Mortimer Adler’s How to Think about War and Peace. His much clearer analysis of the politics of PeaceWorld (published in 1943 and ignored since) includes the following directives. I quote them to you in their entirety:
“With respect to any plan proposed for maintaining ‘peace in our time, the following conditions should be satisfied.
· That they commit no political or economic injustice by way of inequitable distributions or unfair discriminations.
· That they contemplate no alliance which will, directly or indirectly, preserves a status quo built upon already existing injustices.
· That they use power, whether or not through the methods of coalition, to support international good faith, not to supplant it; to safeguard freedom, not to suppress it.
· That they anticipate the direction of social, economic, and political changes, so that no measures positively taken will operate as impediments to progress anywhere in the world, and so that some positive measures be taken to facilitate it.
· That they permit, encourage, and even perhaps institute international agencies, such as the League of Nations and the World Court, not because such institutions can by themselves postpone the next war, much less perpetuate peace, but because such institutions provide men with the image of an international community, and with the political experience needed for the formations of the future.
· That they multiply such agencies and the International Labor Office, which deal with problems common to all nations from the point of view of a common good that transcends national interests; and, in this connection, that they create an International Office of Education for the purpose of equalizing educational opportunity throughout the world at the highest level [author’s note: which is Learner’s primary intent], and to guide education everywhere in the training of citizens.” pp. 290-291.
Along with the tools required to exterminate a certain population comes the capacity to administer it in peace. The Pax Romana (Peace of Rome) only extended as far as Roman Legions could troop their Eagles. Just as the population of Earth could be exterminated in a few weeks of total war, dependable abundance and justice can be offered to the same number of people.
Only battle elites thrive in a fractured society.
Imagine yourself visiting a booming Renaissance port town. Its inhabitants dispose of surplus capital, ships, goods and luxury orders that can only be filled abroad. However, a stable government must guarantee the investors’ stake in foreign trade. Their profit margins must remain reasonably secure despite long periods of idle apprehension awaiting their cargos’ return. If gangs of armed hooligans control the docks and commandeer the freight and passengers that pass across them, no merchant would gamble his savings on such a risk.
Everyone on Earth is in the same predicament. The United Nations recognize the sovereignty of about two hundred street gangs. Each holds its citizens hostage at knifepoint and attacks any other gang it can get away with. They don’t even need that excuse.
Meanwhile, at least five thousand nations – the finalists of tens of thousands more that lost their place in what is left of recorded history – compete for those two hundred remaining certificates of sovereignty. No wonder the world is crawling with guerillas and terrorists!
Like any other polis (poleece, “citadel,” city-state), the Earth needs the equivalent of one City Hall, one Justice of the Peace and one duly appointed Police Force. Not two hundred glorified street gangs disguised as Prism governments; not some combination of 189-odd recognized governments and the best-organized criminal/corporate gangs contending for military/economic dominance. And certainly not the worst Wimp gang whipping the others in long-drawn-out rumbles until it, too, collapses from its internal contradictions.
“In a dark period of five hundred years, Rome was perpetually afflicted by the sanguinary quarrels of the nobles and the people, the Guelphs and Ghibellines, [author’s note: pro-pope and imperialist, respectively], the Colonna and Ursini: and if much has escaped the knowledge, and much is unworthy of the notice of history, I have exposed in the two preceding chapters, the cause and effects of the public disorders. At such a time, when every quarrel was decided by the sword; and none could trust their lives or properties to the impotence of law; the powerful citizens were armed for safety or offense against domestic enemies whom they feared or hated. Except Venice alone, the same dangers and designs were common to all the free republics of Italy; and the nobles usurped the prerogative of fortifying their houses, and erecting strong towers that were capable of resisting a sudden attack. …
…
“… Whatever is fortified will be attacked, and whatever is attacked may be destroyed … ‘The houses,’ says a cardinal and poet of the times, ‘were crushed by the weight and velocity of enormous stones; the walls were perforated by the strokes of the battering-ram; the towers were involved in fire and smoke; and the assailants were stimulated by rapine and revenge.’ The work was consummated by the tyranny of the laws; and the factions of Italy alternately exercised a blind and thoughtless vengeance on their adversaries, whose houses and castles they razed to the ground. In comparing the days of foreign, with the ages of domestic hostility, we must pronounce that the latter have been far more ruinous to the city, and our opinion is confirmed by the evidence of Petrarch. ‘Behold,’ says the laureate, ‘the relics of Rome, the image of her pristine greatness! Neither time nor the Barbarian can boast the merit of this stupendous destruction: it was perpetrated by her own citizens, by the most illustrious of her sons; and your ancestors (he writes to a noble Anibaldi) have done with the battering-ram, what the Punic hero could not accomplish with the sword.’” Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Allen Lane Ltd., the Penguin Press, London, 1994, p. 1073-5.
How chaotic would the USA become if New England and Dixie still fought each other across the Mason-Dixon Line; if California and Texas sent their National Guard to face off in Santa Fe, Cleveland and Miami; if New York City bankers and those in Chicago sub-contracted rival gangs for regional dominance? America and regional powers play the same deadly game on the world stage, with predictable results: runaway military anarchy, mass calamity and world-scorching ecocide.
Re-reading Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War, I wondered how the members of the modern Greek Parliament would react if someone read into the record one of the speeches from that book favoring a battle executed back then, as if the same Greek communities had to repeat it today. That nut would be laughed out the hall. Once mortal enemies are now fellow citizens; war between them is out of the question. Everyone should cultivate the same relationship with respect to every other on Earth. If Greece and Turkey allied in good faith today, both would graduate: one from its economic inferiority and the other from its federative exclusion. A new, more workable Mediterranean power balance would result.
PeaceWorld will let every nation and ethnic group reclaim its sovereignty and political independence through legal means and without war. That way, those forbidden will stop turning into hot spots of military friction: Tamils, American Indians by tribe, Karins, Kashmiri, Kurds, Rohingyas, Palestinians, Fulani ... that list can stretch out real long, real fast. This option is closed to us today because criminal activities are certified legitimate provided they grow huge and profitable enough for the few.
Thus the modern state can wage unending police repression of minorities; kidnap, torture and loot some; starve, exterminate and banish others; extort local economies and pillage national resources. Its leadership can play bait-and-switch with the drug trade and draw its profit from repressive prohibition. It can foster more terrorists with each new generation, simply by terrorizing those near and dear to them, (drone wars forever!) — and no-one so much as grunts. Of this kind of tyranny, PeaceWorld will never be so permissive.
Hey you! Yes, you! Do you presume your rights secure if some tyrant can play games, somehow, somewhere, with other people’s indignation?
You’re next, pal.
The central question of politics: who do you trust?
The People? Can we arm them, grant them sovereign political rights, access to all the information they need and latitude to do their best in peace? The American Constitution is founded on that trust: the source of its greatness. Our crooked leaders shift more and more assets to the paranoid, weapons alternative described below.
We can distrust the People and shift our trust to some elite minority (an information elite). It perpetuates itself by investing more in its dominion than in justice. It hyper-educates itself, is supremely class-conscious and well adapted to run a military dictatorship whenever it feels the urge to do so and justifies it with enough war propaganda. And no-one on this hell-world finds anything wrong with that.
Then arm some minority police or paramilitary (a battle elite) to impose this illegitimate leadership. Thereafter, bring on ruin by paying the enforcers more than generously to cause the least possible damage (USA); or let them run riot on the cheap, tear society apart and destroy the environment for short-term profit (too many examples to list here).
In either case, the more vicious the battle elite, the safer the info elite will feel — even though reality dictates the exact opposite: less aggression, more security.
In the end, we are left to hope that Mafia thugs don’t take over and replace those same elites. That takeover is a Darwinian certainty that has already happened, in case you hadn’t noticed.
The People or the Mafia? You choose.
Military and criminal organizations share an intimate and subtle co-dependency.
An illustrative military/criminal order is the Hashashin of ancient Syria. Their rest, recreation and training areas were sited in remote mountain fortresses where the abuse of drugs and young women persuaded novice assassins that they could live in earthly paradise while they served the Hashashin and then go to heaven by dying in their service. Meanwhile, their leaders worked their way up through laborious ranks of mystery and initiation into the central, revealed Truth of the cult. “This whole deal is just a patchwork of lies and power hunger. Enjoy.”
These days, generic death squads fester across the planet. Usually, they serve as Gestapo-like security thugs and/or revolutionary enforcers. Similar organizations clutter the history books: the military religious orders, (Buddhist warrior monasteries compacted like bonsai plants into criminal clans by government suppression); knights Templar, Hospitalier and Teutonic; Westphalian Vehmgericht (Vehmic courts of medieval Germany); Japanese Ninja; Indian Thugees; KKK lynch mobs; Hermandad of Spain and Acordada of Mexico; and highland Scots, Colombian, Moroccan and Afghan tribal clans, among others.
Also, secret animal clans: Werewolf in Germania and Scandinavia, African Lion and Leopard societies, Panthers in pre-Columbian America, and Asian Tiger equivalents. Since the summary execution of social deviants becomes less and less acceptable to local communities, these clans evolved to permit it. The body of victims would be found torn to shreds, the track marks of big predators left all around their bodies – torn apart by iron claws, the paw prints made by carefully crafted sandal soles. No one could tell whether it was an animal predator that had claimed another victim, or the most dangerous predator of all: man.
Nowadays, “death squad member” is a routine job description in many countries, title to earn one’s keep where there aren’t enough honest jobs to go around — not a label of loathing and ostracism. If you know people who know the right people, you can get someone bumped off cheap. Such nations disgrace themselves.
Finally, the differences between the Assassin attacks of yore and killer drone campaigns of today are minor when compared to their similarities.
Criminals mirror militarists; both sides share the same battle elite fondness for inflicting woe. You will find similar traits in all three camps: risk-taking, clan loyalty, expert brutality, ritual dominance and submission, ferocious chains of command, insistence on perfect obedience, power grabs by force and cunning, contempt for outsiders, fondness for deceit, and the compulsion to foment pain, torment and terror — preferably on defenseless innocents much easier to abuse.
Once warfare breaks out, prisons, jails and criminal syndicates erupt into the Army. In peacetime, criminal courts often force wayward teenagers to choose between jail and the military. Several murderers-for-hire sought new customers in Soldier of Fortune magazine. Nowadays their private security descendants have corporate offices in every big city.
Another weapon brotherhood that’s gone unrecognized: that between criminals and police. Snitches and petty larcenists in Victorian Era capitals were the first recruits of modern police forces of Europe. The information elite’s reasoning went as follows:
· the best hunter of a criminal is another criminal; and
· why not hire the smart half of the worst aggressors, put them under uniform discipline, track them with vigorous oversight and call them “the police” — rather than try to suppress both sets of scoundrels with another, less qualified force?
Interpol, Europe’s central police agency, was founded on Gestapo files and informant networks; the CIA, on anti-Soviet agents recruited by its predecessors in the OSS. The first functional agency of the European Economic Community was the last one of Nazi-dominated Europe: its police force… In the same way, the last gasp of the Roman Empire was its body of laws.
Recently, Interpol officially purged itself of the worst of its Nazi contamination. Unlike the American government that never retracted its post-war fondness for fascist operatives and dirty tricks… up to and including the unpunished assassination of John F. Kennedy, incumbent President of the United States.
In a real democracy, this kind of crime would set off a civil war all by itself, until every elite conspirator had been dragged out into the light of day and publicly condemned. To avert this catastrophe, the American leadership lied, executed who knows how many honest witnesses and protected the bastards responsible,.
According to current weapon thought, new production efficiencies will deprive enormous civilian labor pools of employment and legitimate income as those necessities are misunderstood these days. Rather than install Learner Networks to generate new livelihoods for these people, reactionaries organized massive trivia-criminalization and contractual prison programs.
There are way too many prisoners in the USA alone (one percent of Americans and still more, a quarter of the world’s prisoners for 5% of the world’s population). Too many more people are placed on government payroll to hunt, process and guard them. Stalin would have been proud of his psychopathic successors. These idiot substitutes for gainful employment typify weapon management.
No army, criminal syndicate or police force – no matter how brutal and armed to the teeth – can enforce obedience that exceeds what a local majority is willing to impose on itself. Without a corresponding Learner transformation, any revaluation of the common currency of public responsibility is a waste of time — be it at gunpoint and death camp, or using non-lethal weapons and mass media propaganda.
Getting the police to suppress legitimate dissent through supplements of personnel and firepower ‒ by stepping up trivial arrests, reflexive brutality and illegal surveillance ‒ that just refines corruption, strengthens organized crime and exposes more victims among the innocent. As psychopaths would dream of doing.
The most effective police departments are peace instruments; unlike secret police, intelligence agencies and armies that are weapon technologies. Well-run police use minimal force to suppress violence. In order to operate effectively, they must be backed by well-financed social services. Ideally, they submit to an honest and wary judiciary controlled by juries through tiers of public review and private appeal. At best, this police force should be recruited from an ethnic mix similar to the population it patrols, and live in the same neighborhood.
Civic problems should be handled by social, legislative, voluntary and entrepreneurial interventions — not pummeled by brute force. If legitimate grievances generate mass demonstrations, they must be dealt with constructively. New channels of communication need to be opened up, based on the legitimacy of those demands.
On the other hand, armies are trained, organized, and equipped to inflict the most damage and mayhem in the shortest possible time — this regardless of rights and wrongs. They demand absolute sovereignty in their chosen field of destruction and recognize within it no law but their own.
Ordering the military to use discrete increments of force – to provide disaster relief and social assistance in civilian settings, for example, or impose non-violence on antagonists who reject a cease-fire – that betrays a complete misunderstanding of weapon management. Every time info elites confuse police and military functions and attempt to merge them into a single armed bureaucracy, they abuse their proletarian hosts through alternate doses of overzealous brutality and bungling neglect, both of which lead to unnecessary suffering
Go take a look in Iraq: our WeaponWorld model of things to come. Faluja = your hometown. Does that prospect appeal to you?
As the quality of life deteriorates, criminal punishment loses its effectiveness. When the quality of life improves, especially among the poor, criminal deterrence recovers. Clever criminals find that they have too much to lose – and too many good alternatives to pick from – to settle for mere criminality. Once they adopt the straight and narrow, they turn into allies of the forces of order, or at least neutrals.
Once punishments are reduced, the following results can be expected. Fewer, less competent criminals will confront law-abiding majorities alongside their natural allies: a more-or-less honest police force and a jury-controlled judiciary.
Otherwise, so-called criminals are just obscure guerrilla fish swimming in the sea of their cooperative victims. The populace and its criminal minority become reluctant allies standing should-to-shoulder against their ‘anti-crime, law-and-order’ oppressors — as did Bosnian people both law-abiding and criminal during the early stages of their confrontation with the Serbs, Bosnian and national. Later on, “moderates” and violent fundamentalists in Syria had to ally with each other against the trans-ethnic fascism of Assad.
If a revolution does break out, criminals become the strike force of less militant civilian revolutionaries, as well as the armed bullies of reaction. Both sides pay well. These associations create an optimal recruiting ground for battle elites, thus the preferred setting of weapon managers.
In a weapon state, an active moral conscience is reserved for idealists, slaves, veterans nursing old nightmares, and infants listening raptly to bloody fairy tales. Weapon mentality has the rest of us betray our conscience on command. It teaches us to tolerate the intolerable — much the way the Nazis taught Europe and the world to ignore the Holocaust, at Luger-point.
What we call “modern culture” is our attempt to justify this massive aberration of values. By what right and duty do we shore up this travesty?
Call for something better, the way you’d get your dog to bring you your evening slippers.
- BURNING LIBRARIES (BCE) -
Polastron, Lucien S., Books on Fire: the Destruction of Libraries throughout History, John E. Graham, Trans., Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont, 2007. Livres en feu, Editions Denoël, Paris, France, 2004. Better treatments of this topic.
“Thus I had the grief of discovering, in the Manichaean shrine K, a library which was utterly destroyed by water. When I had unearthed the door from the heaped-up loess dust and sand, we found on the threshold the dried-up corpse of a murdered Buddhist monk, his ritual robes all stained with blood. The whole room into which this door had led was covered to a depth of about two feet with a mass of what, on closer inspection, proved to be remains of Manichaean manuscripts. Loess water had penetrated the papers, stuck everything together, and in the terrible heat of the usual summer there, all these valuable books had turned into loess. I took specimens of them and dried them carefully in the hope of saving some of these manuscripts; but the separate pages crumbled off and dropped into small fragments on which the remains of beautifully written lines intermingled with traces of miniatures executed in gold, blue, red, green, and yellow, were still to be seen. An enormous treasure has been lost here...” Albert von Le Coq, Buried Treasures of Chinese Turkestan, Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, Toronto, 1985, p. 61. By permission of Oxford University Press.
The ruin in question was called Khocho, Ephesus, Dakianus, Idikuchahri, Kao-chang and Karakhoja. This chain of names reveals the rainbow of peoples it once housed.
Von Le Coq, a German of French Huguenot ancestry, had the good fortune to die before World War II (sic). Before and after WWI (sic), he painstakingly retrieved entire museums of priceless art, manuscripts and artifacts from treasure troves abandoned along the Silk Road ― or looted them, depending on your point of view. During World War II (sic), those museums were incinerated under a hail of Allied firebombs. Many schools, libraries, museums, houses of worship, record repositories and oral traditions were annihilated at the same time. This annihilation continues as we speak.
This chapter is a casual survey of ancient archives destroyed. For those interested in fresher atrocities, please consult “Burning Libraries (AD)”.
In many cases, mention of empires and capital cities is the only clue of their disappearance. Lost archives may have held vital pieces of our information puzzle. We’re so clever; no-one recalls what happened to most of them.
According to Howard Bloom’s The Lucifer Principle, human beings coagulate into social “super-organisms.” These may be based on shared genes and geography, but more often on shared memes: “theories, world views [and] cultures.” Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in The Selfish Gene, Oxford University, 1976. Merciless competition between meme super-organisms triggers most Prism misbehavior. The dissemination of Learner (and equivalents out there) is an uphill battle against the dominant cultural meme, weapon mentality.
Tracing the disappearance of great libraries is like answering the Zen riddle: What sound does a tree make in the forest if no one is there to hear its fall?
In his book, Famine: A Short History, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2009, p. 36) Cormac Ó Gráda notes that few famines are recorded in ancient history. He hypothesizes that all-out famines were relatively rare in the past, and those for the most part short-lived and not Malthusian “demographic correctives.” Otherwise, they would have punched such gaps in local populations based on subsistence agriculture and minimal replacement rates (hovering just above 2.1 children per female most of the time: forty-year-olds were rare and soaring infant mortality was very much not) that extinction could not have been averted, at least regionally.
Similarly, the Encyclopedia of Plagues and Pestilence, (George Kohn, Ed., Facts on File, Inc., NY, NY, 1995), lists two dozen epidemics before 1000 CE and four and a half hundred since, two thirds of which occurred during the 19th and the 20th centuries.
Even though lack of proof does not disprove a conclusion, that won’t stop me until a factual counter-proof is offered. In the meanwhile, a novel hypothesis occurs to me.
Not only were ancient famines, follow-up epidemics and ensuing social chaos persistent, they were also hyper-lethal (approaching 100% lethality in cases of multi-year repetition), devastating to urban populations that shared the same bioregional climate. Ancient records of plagues and famines are hard to find, not because they were mild and few and far between, but because so frequent and lethal that hardly any records survive. When an urban civilization collapses, its records rot away unattended unless they are carved on massive stone monuments. Most such carvings reflect fatter times when they were inscribed ― the case for those we’ve dug up.
Scholars keep talking about a maximum mortality rate of one third during the European Black
Death. They cite a few census registers that remain from (relatively) giant cities of that era. Nonetheless, survivors streaming into town from the desolate countryside may have replaced urban populations several times. Regional death rates, multiplied by the famine and military mayhem that followed, may have approached 100%. Original inhabitants and efficient scribes may have died in those cities where pestilence was constantly renewed by the influx of rural refugees. Reality could have doubled or tripled our optimistic, one in three death projection. Subsequent record keepers, once the death toll began to drop off, had other things to think about than tallying every carcass and listing the provenance of every poor survivor.
Ancient burial registers are even more misleading, since the overflow of cadavers would have been swiftly disposed of with impromptu funeral pyres, unregistered backyard burials and massive corpse dumping in nearby waterways, rather than orthodox burials well recorded.
Prof. Ó Gráda grades the severity of famine from successive harvests blighted by drought, flood or frost.
In other words, one year of bad crops was tough: food prices shot up and many more of the poor died than usual (they died like flies anyway). The best governments were stressed to provide relief; the worst, some sadistic pretense of order. There was more and more profiteering from above and petty theft from below.
Two years in a row were disastrous. Many died among the young and the old of every class, epidemics took hold as mass hunger undermined herd immunity, and most elites ran off to infect outlying forts.
With three years of poor harvests, society simply collapsed. Nobody was left to bury the dead, plant crops or harvest them, or just lead a civilized life. It was every man and woman for themselves. The anarchy of psychopaths reigned supreme, made hellish by routine bouts of cannibalism.
Four years or more in succession and nothing was left to consolidate except a few survivors with post-traumatic stress (PTSD) living (literally) hand to mouth in the ruins. Even bandits would shun this accursed zone.
Setting aside our moral, aesthetic and culinary revulsion, cannibalism wasn’t sustainable. It multiplied human cross-infection and killed off more precious labor than it fed, in a world that ran on human labor and not much else. It was unsustainable unless enough food crops were on hand to make it redundant. This is demonstrated by pre-Columbian civilizations whose many ancient cities stand empty now, even though they once housed tens of thousands of people or more. The ruins of such towns pockmark the globe like the old sores of a smallpox victim. Almost every town in the Old World is underlain by stacks of old ruins that once flourished and were left carpeted with corpses. Many more such sites are too barren for a modern town.
Swarms of road warriors, (either local cannibals or roadies from the less infected regions) plundered at will. Or a wannabe warlord with his horde of thugs would take over almost without resistance, ransack and burn everything, kill everyone except nubile women, and either install himself permanently, march on or waste away from local disease.
Nowadays, historically recorded epidemics are almost always described as the outbreak of a single sickness, (plague, typhus, typhoid, yellow fever, smallpox, influenza, malaria, encephalitis, etc.). Quite often, the signs and symptoms carefully narrated at the time do not coincide with any disease known today. It was more likely that a host of lethal agents that had long simmered endemically in the local population combined to kill off zombies immune-suppressed from the terrors of famine, ruin, massacre with a new mix of dread afflictions.
Only recently have the following phenomena emerged:
· cosmopolitan populations, survivors of a long series of epidemics from across the world, more or less immunized and organized against new pandemics;
· mutually supporting urban centers so widespread they can draw strength from those beyond the kill zone;
· food crops so diverse that hardy, secondary harvests can compensate for the failure of fragile, primary ones;
· regional populations so dense that massive immigration could replace local mass casualties; and
· human leadership so literate and numerous that its survivors can take civilized governance back in hand.
Followed by:
· public health measures (vaccines, antibiotics, soap and clean hot water, thus basic hygiene) that blocked off old epidemics, at least in populations rich enough to “bring under control” their lethal conflicts;
· large populations of epidemically naïve people very vulnerable to new pandemics (Ebola, MERS, influenza);
· globalized industrial monoculture of super-inbreds, thus extremely vulnerable to bad weather and new crop blights; and
· genetic engineering that can custom-tailor new plagues of absolute lethality, and end-times terrorists unafraid to use them against one and all including their own people.
By these recent means, the threat of pestilence and famine has receded somewhat but could re-emerge a thousand times more lethal. At least for the past few centuries in densely populated parts of the world, the climate grew so mild that such disasters were minor blips in an accelerating spiral of human growth. Global warming could reverse this climate trend and its human growth rate, to our catastrophic harm.
Weapon mentality varies as the square or cube of FEAR, as do ignorant and wasteful violence.
Peace mentality varies likewise with HOPE, alongside wisdom, virtue and creativity.
We have been taught to disregard the next series of decades-long, continent-spanning catastrophes and failed to shield ourselves from their effect. Nowadays, the governments of Earth should be stocking food reserves like frantic squirrels, like Joseph on behalf of Pharaoh.
If reading a long list of dates and place names does not appeal to you, scan the next few paragraphs and skip the rest of this chapter (Burning Libraries BCE) and the next (Burning Libraries AD). Hopefully, you’ve begun to think about vast sinkholes of lost memory we can’t overlook or recover. Huge info treasure-troves have sunk into uncharted oblivion. Peace information (perhaps crucial to the common good) has disappeared at alarming rates ― almost as fast as Learner inspiration.
Look around you, keeping in mind the fact that we are sitting down to share a super-deluxe pizza that stretches out past the horizon, covered with mouth-watering toppings. Yet we starve, since we focus on a slice of the pie one narrow degree in width, charred black and gnawed bare: WeaponWorld and its appurtenances and annexes. The infinite leftover (PeaceWorld) we hold out of sight and out of mind; they are nothing more to us than pseudo-science, magic, fantasy and utopia.
This chapter skims immense stretches of space-time. Oftentimes, tales of destruction grew so wanton and redundant, I had to abridge, condense and skip many. I resisted the myopic worldview of my Western upbringing, according to which, the universe is a stylized dartboard laid out as follows. White nobility and the upper bourgeoisie, their sycophants and satirists, occupy a giant bull’s eye of boundless glory. History’s worst pirates and murderers are honored with ceremonial salutes. Intensive study is made of Jewish, Greek and Roman war tribes, and of no-one else.
Even those well-known tribes lost 99% of their literature.
A fixed inventory of soap opera novels and philosophical quibbles (the Great Books, with a few exceptions) is selected for crashing boredom, labyrinthine verbiage (see the Greeks, Kant, Marx, et al.), biographical reductionism, trivial redundancy and masterful obscurantism. Its ultimate value can be summarized as follows: it provides a thorny obstacle course for grad students and an elaborate cultural code, the elements of which weapon elites can swap enthusiastically and forever without clarifying the worst social contradictions. A greasy smokescreen that reveals nothing important: what a compendium of genius! Meanwhile, our real Learning texts have disappeared.
A handful of thousand-year religious texts provided job security for ancient copywriters who cloaked their ignorance in ambiguity. Today’s fundamentalists grace us with “literal” misinterpretations of similar worth and clarity.
Technologies constrained by weapons are analyzed in microscopic detail, along with the skeletal science dogma that supports them. They are then declared the only certainties in the Universe. I haven’t heard such bunk sustained with so much obstinacy since, perhaps, Lagash. Meanwhile, few texts remain on the destruction of ancient thought, or of PeaceWorld in general, for that matter: perhaps the most important and poorly documented topics on Earth.
Historical dates flicker and fluctuate in proportion to the number of historians consulted and inversely to their certainty. For the sake of convenience, I used the last date referenced, provided it meshed with adjacent events. I invoked Procrustes when I had to trim dates to fit. Torn between the inter-relatedness of events and strict chronology, I fear I’ve done violence to both.
My thanks to Hammond Past Worlds: The Times Atlas of Archaeology; Encyclopedia of Library Science; The Timetables of History – The New Third Revised Edition by Bernard Grun; Timelines of War: A Chronology of Warfare from 10000 BC to the Present by David Brownstone and Irene Frank; The Encyclopedia of Military History by the Dupuy Brothers; Joseph A. Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies; Grousset’s The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia as translated by Naomi Walford; War and the World: Military Power and the Fate of Continents by Jeremy Black; and The New York Library Book of Chronologies by Bruce Wetterau. Those texts provided multiple chronologies and cross-references, as did others cited below. Also, Beck’s History of Ethics Chronological Index filled in many of my gaps; it’s available at http://www.san.beck.org/AB-Chronology750-1300.html.
Thanks also to Fernando Baez and his A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq, Alfred MacAdam, Trans., 2008, Atlas and Co., New York, NY. He filled in many voids and details the others had not covered. Just for fun, I footnoted every reference to his text in Learners with the page number of his book where I found it. I never liked footnotes.
Those texts and others cited below offered many citations and chronologies. Many more did not get the mention they deserve here. I read them long before I began documenting this research. I was born knowing none of this stuff; I should have annotated everything.
Ancient cities formed a sequential stack of ruins based on some combination of sweet water, dependable crops, economic opportunity, and terrain both defensible locally and accessible regionally. Usually, some navigable waterway provided the natural highway of ancient bulk transport, a dependable source of high-quality protein: fishing, and a means to flush away the worst urban waste, necessities for a real city. Each one was built on the ruins of its predecessors perhaps more elegant.
For every mangled remnant of a text collection we’ve retrieved from the past, many royal libraries and many more oral histories never made it. We have forgotten an uncounted number of preliterate healers, bards, scribes, sibyls, shamans and mages; in addition to conventional authors, editors, publishers and librarians. All of them sharing wisdom with their people; all of them forgotten.
For example, of the 142 books written by Livy, only 35 remain. He was one of the best documented historians in ancient Rome. Counting a few more fragments, the following ratios apply: Sophocles: seven books out of 120; Sapho: only two poems from nine volumes; Euripides: 18 out of 82 books; Aristophanes: 11 comedies out of 40; Agathon: zero; Alcman: zero; Diphilus: zero; Eupolis: zero; Alexis: zero; the Pyrrhonists: zero; the Skeptics: zero; the Cynics: zero; the Stoics: zero; Zeno: zero; Cricipus: zero. Fernando Baez says he’s compiled a 6,000-page list of equivalent disappearances.41 You’ll find some additional examples in this book, and will have to imagine many more for which no documentation remains. As you read this chapter, picture countless archives crumbling to dust and ashes, but recall as well exquisite poetry, religion, medicine, psychology, botany, etc. – entire prehistoric civilizations, oral and written – silenced forever.
Remember, for the greater part of historical time, soldiers were rarely paid except with weapons, booty and rations (and often not even those). Wherever ancient armies marched, misery trailed close behind, among the camp followers.
Recall also that Saddam Hussein’s tyranny was pretty middling compared to most of those of old. His many persecutions and crimes mirrored those of the weapon lords of antiquity. Resentment and payback fantasies must have festered among ancient city dwellers, as well as Ali Baba dreams of getting rich quick while nobody stood the guard. They do so now among our disentitled rural folk, thus Trump supporters, yellow jackets and Brexiteers. So, when ancient “regime change” caused a temporary vapor-lock in the transmission lines of power, local criminals rose up in riot, looting and arson, the same way the worst Baghdadis did when they got the chance. Any urban booty that armies did not destroy or carry away, local survivors plundered.
I tried to list the destruction of as many big towns as I could find. But you cannot assume that peace reigned elsewhere, just because I did not mention war in that space-time continuum. Essentially, no civilization avoided war much longer than a generation. Look at us; we haven’t. And we’re so progressive, talented and peace loving!
Quite often, natural catastrophes overtook entire civilizations. At least every five years for the past few thousand, somewhere around the world, some important document collection suffered major damage along with its host population. Quite often, independent civilizations collapsed all at once, no matter how far apart their cities were spaced across the planet.
While the boastful inscriptions and booty ledgers of greasy warlords sometimes recorded the devastation summarized below, often no literati (readers, Learners) survived to lament the end of remarkable civilizations. In effect, entire civilizations were erased from human memory ― likely a majority of them and certainly the most peaceful ones.
According to Rick Potts in Humanity’s Descent (William Morrow and Co., New York, 1996, pp. 201-203), the oldest symbolic artifact is a female figurine carved from an exotic pebble unearthed from an Israeli dig and dated 230,000 years of age. In 2003, a perfectly formed hand-axe was found in a burial pit 300,000 years old; and some less sophisticated ones, 500,000. In 2008, traces of a fire were found to have been set 790,000 years ago. Recognizable tools of chipped rock date back two and half million years in Africa; more sophisticated, bi-faced hand axes, as of 1.78 million years ago. All kinds of specialized tool kits of hand-rocks evolved about 150,000 years ago, involving regional trade in special kinds of stone; 130,000 years ago, carved, notched and engraved animal bones and teeth. Recognizable human art (and that recently found to be Neanderthal) art became widespread around 40,000 years ago. Its diversity exploded around 18,000 years ago, when climatic spikes of grim northern glaciers and frigid southern deserts drove human survivors into the Fertile Crescent.
Our ancestors, human and pre-human, were hammered without mercy. We are history’s anviled progeny, beaten flat in a thousand folds like Japanese sword steel or crumb pastry. Human DNA has been brutally forced through a series of genetic bottlenecks when all but a handful of breeding lines were wiped out. In the distant past, natural events caused these mass casualties. A more recent one, seven thousand years ago, resulted from patriarchal clan warfare. This kind of massacre has befallen us so often that we have become hard, sharp and brittle indeed – as well as very close siblings – all seven billion of us.
Personal codes, memory aids and perished written media may have driven Neolithic (10,000 to 50,000 years ago or more), Paleolithic (older) or pre-human civilization.
After all, the few blue whales that survive these days share daylong tunes planet-wide that vary in season. Do they demonstrate advanced culture stripped of “hard” technology?
Beyond a few knickknacks, cave wall paintings, knot strings and burial sites, we recognize neither records so old nor signs of such ancient sentience. The scope of our arrogance is astounding, only matched by the depth of our ignorance. It turns out those “primitive” cave wall paintings of stunning right-brain beauty are also left-brain star charts of astonishing mathematical precision. Who knew?
Denise Schmandt-Besserat published her brainstorm in Before Writing, Volume One: From Counting to Cuneiform, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1992. She figured out that clay tokens were used as counting devices and memory enhancers, long before humans developed the writing we recognize (8,000 to 4,000 BCE – before the Christian Era). The first of those were encoded inventories inscribed on the outside of clay “envelopes” that held these tokens. Such tokens have been dug up from many prehistoric digs; they are some of the oldest fired-clay artifacts. Up until her publication, we presumed that pre-historic writing never existed: a typical human conceit.
In The Chalice & the Blade, Riane Eisler presents a compelling case. She bases it on her interpretation of Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization, 1989, Thames and Hudson, London.
From eight thousand years BCE to about midway through the Third millennium, matrilineal societies worshipped the Goddess. They occupied many unfortified sites across Europe and the Mediterranean. Those were overrun by four waves of nomad cavalry that destroyed and replaced them little by little.
Recent genetic research at Stanford University indicates that humanity suffered a Y-chromosome bottleneck seven thousand years ago, during which the male human population shrank to one seventeenth of the female one. https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2018/05/30/war-clan-structubiological-event/. Geneticists attribute this decline to vicious infighting between patriarchal clans, during which about 94 percent of the male population perished. A little bit like Paraguay after the War of the Triple Alliance in 1870, when 28,000 men survived out of a remnant population of 221,000 after 302,000 people died in warfare.
This male/female imbalance might have allowed local matriarchies to establish a foothold of peace and sexual equality, which may have persisted for thousands of years until warlike patriarchies re-established themselves elsewhere (likely Kurgan tribes on Trans-Caspian steppes), invaded the rest of Europe and destroyed its matriarchal civilization.
Until then, their village sites were fondly selected for beautiful vistas, fertile fields and sweet water nearby. Houses of uniform quality and surprisingly current design boasted whitewashed, multi-room interiors, latching doors, overhead storage bins and windows fitted with clear membranes. Their ceramic industry was prolific, wide-ranging and sophisticated. Grain was stored in pits carefully lined with clay. This sealed moisture out and pest-destroying fermentation gasses in.
Is that why soda pop and beer go down so well with cheap fast food? Does their carbon dioxide content kill off nasty "bugs" that might cause indigestion?
From Europe and West Asia to many locations in North Africa and the Middle East, we have found red ocher-covered remains and flower-filled burial sites. Many stylized female figurines have surfaced, as have sculpted bull’s heads, moon crests, and double-headed axes (labrys) made from thin sheets of copper (i.e.: ornamental and non-weapon grade). Elitist claptrap like weapons, body armor and city fortifications were absent.
It is anyone’s guess how these people handled the inevitable sociopaths and psychopaths human genetics throw up if left unretouched. The worst ones may have been exiled out into the wilderness, after which surviving outcasts radiated out onto the Eurasian steppe to form the killer hordes described below. Otherwise, I’m afraid this Goddess worship cult selectively sacrificed the worst deviants.
This cult may have mirrored a superior culture that thrived beforehand, drowned since.
Robert O’Connell, in Ride of the Second Horseman: The Birth and Death of War, believes that humans started out as peaceable, independent, Bushman-style hunter-scavengers.
At first, they raised a few children devotedly into sane and healthy adults. Afterward, they fell victim to the Plant Trap. In exchange for a slightly more dependable food source, the Plant Trap required ceaseless stoop labor, submission to routine toil unbefitting proud huntsmen, and female hyper-fertility.
Plant-trapped women had to bear too many children. They became too abused, degraded and overworked to give their infants proper care. For example, prolonged breastfeeding was a natural method of pre-Plant Trap birth control, abandoned since. It also ensured that infants would benefit from lavish fondling for the first five years of their life. Babies held at adult height would naturally assume an adult perspective of the world, more readily than those crawling on the ground or wheeled across it. Fondled and held aloft during their waking infancy, their bodies would have developed stronger immunity, bones, and musculature along with denser neural networks.
The Plant Trap took away hunter-gatherer benefits through parental overwork, exhaustion and neglect. Small village hydro-agriculture and its heavy labor requirements aggravated these problems. They became unmanageable by free people when slave-driven hydraulic civilizations – the weapon organizations our historians love to rhapsodize – demanded corvée labor (korvay, “fatigue duty,” seasonally forced).
No matter how hard the toil of those caught up in the Plant Trap, famine followed a few transient years of plenty. While hyper-fertility multiplied farming manpower, it also worsened epidemics and infant mortality. The dense population demanded by agriculture made such plagues inevitable. Eventually, over-cultivated ecosystems collapsed and famine came in on its heels. Warfare became a favorite method of fine-tuning this reciprocating engine of population explosion and collapse.
There followed the split between Cain and Able, the herdsman and the farmer. Note that, as opposed to our outlook, the farmer was found guilty in this biblical story whose originators must have been herdsmen. The Bad Guy is always the Other in these stories. Even though, from a psycho-statistical standpoint, half of your real friends live among the Others and a similar fraction of your real enemies are psychopaths who claim to be your own people. Please note how that range of friends and enemies differs from your current worldview.
By the way, farm animals helped incubate most human diseases. Epidemics had to wait for the urban world. Few diseases could jump from wild animals to hunter-gatherers and then spread beyond the initial infection site. Hunter-gatherers were too scattered, compared to townsfolk.
I’ve changed my mind on this topic. The transmission of global pandemics via wild birds (as with Avian Flu, West Nile Virus, etc.) would have struck hunter-gatherers just as hard. In the absence of compulsive taboos forbidding them from eating infected species ‒ tired ones more easily brought down in flight and trapped once aground ‒ those birds would have been as much a death threat to hunter-gatherers as to townspeople. Given a sky full of infected birds and hunting grounds crawling with sick scavengers, it would have been immaterial whether hunter-gatherers were scattered compared to cheek-by-jowl city slickers. Either way, mosquitoes, those filthy flying hypodermic needles, could have done the job.
The herdsmen’s misery worsened in late winter when their livestock was scrawny and least trade-worthy. At such times, they were tempted to raid farm communities and rip off their known surpluses. Once raiding parties headed home laden down with loot, they were vulnerable to rapid pursuit, ambush and reprisal. According to O’Connell, they resorted to ultra-violence against the villagers so that their shock and grief would delay pursuit. The farmer’s horrified reaction was to fortify his village walls. Those enclosures became pressure-cookers of social stress, pestilence and tyranny. Besides, fortified farmers began attacking unfortified neighbors. Soon every community got caught up in the bloody game. So concludes Mr. O’Connell.
This would have resembled what befell the ancient Iroquois on a different continent thousands of years later (I know, this anecdote belongs in Burning Libraries AD, the next chapter). Intertribal warfare, fanned by overpopulation and resource depletion, grew so fierce that military anarchy reigned supreme. Nobody could venture beyond tribal fortifications to glean, hunt, fish, fetch water and tend crops in safety. Starvation ruled the long houses and cannibalism became commonplace. No warrior mythology could survive so much despair and abuse.
The Iroquois endured endless misery until they listened to the words of their Great Peacemaker, Deganawida. He was a Huron and should have been considered a dangerous outsider and potential threat; plus he had a serious speech impediment. But he was supported by Hiawatha, a great war chief with powerful Onondaga and Mohawk affiliations, and by Jigonhsasi, a famous hostess who fed any warrior who passed along her trail, a major warpath between the tribes, and thus learned their heart. When he preached of peace, abundance and confederation, they followed his advice with religious conviction. Thus arose the most powerful Indian confederation, the Six Nations, which governed itself in internal peace for centuries (five nations as of one of two eclipses in 1142 or 1451 CE, the sixth incorporated without political rights during the XVIIIth Century).
Unfortunately, the first tribes did not grant equal rights to new entrants, so the Peacemakers’ intent to incorporate 200 Native American Nations was thwarted. Eventually, pro-French, isolationist and pro-British factions of the Iroquois Confederacy tore it apart. It became the prey of Western predation and disease. The framers of the American Constitution lifted valuable inspiration and governing models from traditional Iroquois politics. In fact, the first American Constitution was recorded on wampum.
Riane Eisler describes the outbreak of organized human violence differently. From 5000 BCE onward, Kurgan war bands overran every unfortified community of Goddess worship. They exterminated everyone except little girls and burned down all the pleasant villages. A few imposing palaces arose among miserable hovels, human sacrifice burials, elaborate weapon caches and oft burnt stockade defenses. Perched on earthen mounds and rocky crags, these fortifications were inaccessible, toilsome, ugly and uncomfortable. The rule of conscience was drowned in innocent blood. Our culture has never recovered from this global disaster.
Lovely, modernistic figurines from the Cycladic Islands date back to 3500 BCE; other such cult artifacts dot Mediterranean shores.
Goddess worship barely survives today; it was often decimated by patriarchal decree. It has taken sophisticated weapons elites like ours plenty of patience and cunning to suppress this worship. Nowadays, disinformation replaces brutality; goddess worshipers are slandered and trivialized instead of being massacred outright.
Later chroniclers would hearken back to a “Golden Age” long ago. They consigned subsequent generations to degenerate Bronze and Iron ages corresponding to the weapon-grade material at hand.
The Vedas of India describe a series of Ages (Yuga, Yurga) that succeed each other in a cycle lasting 25,772 years corresponding to one recession of the vernal equinox: the complete rotation in the heavens of the Earth’s polar axis, along with the oscillation of the solar system’s orbital plane above and below the galactic equator, whose duration modern science confirms.
Humankind has emerged from (is entering into?) the Kali Yuga, the last and worst of four Ages, during which morality, empathy and goodness virtually disappear compared to the other three. http://cycle-of-time.net/cycles_of_precession.htm
In this scenario, we are Dioxin People of the Plutonium Age: “half clay and half iron” per Daniel’s Old Testament nightmare, degenerate creatures fleeing the sharpened hooves of the Four Horsemen to whom we’ve surrendered this planet: famine, pestilence, war and death. Then again, since we’ve hit the bottom of public morality and likely survival; nowhere’s left to go to but PeaceWorld.
Chinese civilization arose nearly a thousand years after the Nilotic (Egyptian) and thousands more after the Dravidian (Indo-Pakistani). Peaceful, Neolithic China underwent a similar degeneration. The cultivation of millet dates back to 8,000 BCE in the North, and that of rice to 5,000 BCE in the South. An archeologically recognizable transition, from pastoral peacefulness to military chaos, crushed China under hooves of Central Asian nomad cavalry from 3000 BCE onwards.
Recent (2008) discoveries in Syria show that wild cereals were gathered from 15,000 to 18,000 years ago, before the last glacial maximum. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/research_pushes_back/. We are likely to dig up primitive agricultural communities just as old or older in the future. Potsherds surfaced on the Japanese islands of Tsushima, Kyushu and Shikoku, dating as far back as far as the 16th millennium BCE.
The construction of a series of terraces lifted over a million tons of stone blocks averaging 300 kilograms apiece (660 pounds) to 885 meters (2904 feet) up Gunung (Mount) Padang from an unknown quarry. These rare stones are lithophonic: they ring with their own music like those at Stonehenge. This mysterious, Indonesian “Shrine of the Sun” dates as far back as 14,000 BCE, though newer dating techniques may move dates further back.
http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/mankinds-cradle-of-civilisation-found-in-java
On Visocica Hill in Bosnia-Herzegovina (near Sarajevo), a group of pyramids up to 720 feet high (thus taller than those of Gizeh in Egypt) was built with a mysteriously high-quality concrete beneath a few inches of topsoil recently laid bare. The whole is said to date back 12,000 years.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-mystery-of-bosnias-ancient-pyramids-148990462/?all
At Nan Madol, 250 million tons of prismatic basalt were stacked on thousands of cubic meters or yards of coral, to form towers and courtyards up to eight meters above sea level on 96 artificial islands covering 18 square kilometers. Accurate geological dating cannot be determined due to its distant archipelago setting in the Western Pacific and its storm-scoured stone structures on the island of Pohnpei.
Hundreds of standing stones were discovered at Gobekli Tepe in Anatolia in 1994, stacked in Ts faced with high-relief friezes of animals and stylized human (?) figures. They date back at least 9,000 years, thus to 7,000 BCE or prior, prior even to documented agriculture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe.
Among the oldest known Neolithic villages, Catal Huyuk was founded in Anatolia c. (circa) 7000 BCE. Drawings, sculptures, tools, weapons, even a town map were found there.
Mehrgarh, a primeval town in what is now Pakistan, was founded during the Seventh millennium BCE. Lipinski Vir, just off the Iron Gates of the Danube, was occupied c. 6000 BCE. Its residents were hunter-gatherer villagers before they became farmers, proving this transition is possible. As did American Indian tribes of the Pacific Northwest. Their settled societies (among the wealthiest in North America) thrived on salmon trawls to supplement woodland hunting and gathering. It’s anyone’s guess how many more (peaceful?) fishing and/or gardening communities were annihilated by rival militarists who practiced agriculture or nomadism.
The oldest village discovered in Europe is Provadia in Bulgaria; it dates between 4700 and 4200 BCE. Its 350 denizens ran a salt-boil operation that earned them a gold cache. They had to cower behind a stone perimeter wall ten feet high and six feet thick. Rare wealth, rising insecurity and panicky hysteria have gone hand in hand throughout history.
In a dig forty miles south of Paris, a skeleton was discovered that dated back to 4900 BCE. The patient’s forearm had been surgically amputated. He survived this operation for at least a few months. The absence of bodily infection indicates that the operation was staged in a sterile field and some sort of anesthesia was used. http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/38229/
Around Varna in Bulgaria from 5,000 BCE on, a civilization called “Ancient Europe” evolved an entire trading network of copper purified at high temperature and exported all the way to the Volga, of Spondylus shell jewelry imported from the Aegean Sea, along with other remarkable arts and crafts. If you hold to the debased belief that hierarchical societies may be superior to egalitarian ones (in any context but a military one), this one had already crossed that threshold.
Arslantepe (Turkish for Lion Gate) was founded about 4,250 BCE. By 4,000 BCE, a major temple had been built on the site to store victuals and distribute them. Cereals had already been cultivated in Anatolia for three thousand years, and at least a thousand years prior in Palestine. Arslantepe was abandoned during the collapse of the Assyrian Empire around 610 BCE.
The first New World traces of humanity date up to 15,000 years in the past, and perhaps to 200,000 years prior. http://www.humanjourney.us/america.html
The first documented American civilization sprang up about 5,000 years ago, or 3,000 BCE. The “first” urban civilization in South America is said to be Caral, 120 miles north of Lima, Peru. Its ruins came complete with monumental architecture and irrigation farming dating back to 2,627 BCE (thus alongside Egyptian equivalents). The site of Carak was excavated on the Peruvian Plateau. Its Norte Chico society lasted for 1,200 years until its people shifted into broader upland valleys to the north and south, and went from fishing and gardening as their primary food source to the more intensive cultivation of corn. (http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6829 ).
The first documents we recognize began with an Egyptian calendar dating (literally) back to 4,241 BCE. Vedic texts may have been much older, based on age-old astronomical observations found within them. These Vedas were transmitted by means of oral recitation miraculously error-free across thousands of years of absolute illiteracy. Entire Vedic texts disappeared in the process, no doubt the most peace-loving ones.
The famous Mahabharata begins with the story of a noble family that deliberately burned its servants to death to mislead those who wished them dead. I gave up in horror at that point. So much for Vedic ethics. The Baghava Gita states that a wise young householder does not need to read beyond its first pages. I concur.
Egypt first united around 3,100 BCE. Shielded by vast desert wastes, proto-Egyptians endured many civil wars (including a seven-hundred-year hiatus chillingly dubbed “Anarchy”). Eventually, national power consolidated along the Nile’s narrow flood plain.
It was once strictly forbidden to build an urban enclave on that flood plain; it was reserved for agricultural use alone. We shall see if Egyptians regret having disobeyed such a strict commandment.
Egypt was raided, invaded, occupied by and self-liberated from the Nubians and their northern allies, the Hyksos, in 1800-1600 BCE; the People of the Sea in 1200-1170 BCE; Philistines and Ethiopians in 730 BCE; and Assyrians and Libyans in 671 BCE. Around 661 BCE, the Assyrians managed to sack Thebes, the Egyptian capital since 2100 BCE with its giant Temple of Ammon. In 605 BCE, Babylonia drove Egyptian armies from Syria and Palestine.
Back then, in the remnants of those cities we can “read into,” nothing subsisted but palaces, barracks, bazaars and hovels/shops. For millennia, local “temples” served as bank, mint, monastery, palmistry, time and date keeper, geomancy, post office, warehouse, wholesaler, hotel, brothel, museum, library, publishing house, advertising agency, newspaper, radio station, cathedral, theater, casino, flophouse, observatory, hospital and university, plus other functions forgotten since. If you prized curiosity, imagination and fellow feeling, priesthood was the only game in town, despite its inbuilt reactionary tendencies.
What was the attrition rate of ancient Egyptian archives? Think how easily buried vaults-full of papyrus and clay tablets disappeared during months or centuries of bloody anarchy. Dust to clay – then to fire, blood and flood – then back again to dust.
The foremost Egyptian library probably lies sunk beneath the bed of the Nile – intact and unrecognized – at the level of the Pyramids at Gizeh. Its location would be cryptically indicated by a geometrical relationship between those pyramids and the stars of the constellation Orion. In this case, the Nile would represent the Milky Way. The library’s location, buried and sealed under the waters of the Nile, would be represented by the brightest star at the intersection of the Milky Way and this constellation as oriented when these monuments were built, which did not already mirror an existing monument. Otherwise, wherever it would have been least inconvenient to divert the Nile upstream of another passage of that river corresponding to another astronomical house. No one in a position of authority seems to care. This might not be such a bad thing, given the long arms and sticky fingers of modern grave robbers, much less the sledge hammers, bulldozers and dynamite of today’s fundamentalists, iconoclasts and profiteers.
Today’s fundamentalist iconoclasts! Andrew Brevig was declared sound of mind after he had massacred seventy children in a day. Homelessness or prison confinement has become our institutional expedient for the mentally ill. We never built enough insane asylums or hired enough psychiatrists ― to treat the collective insanity of our leadership.
Soft, unbaked clay tablets hardened into ceramic when imperial palaces burned down along with their library annexes. There remains the minor problem of uncovering those collections and deciphering them. Forget tree leaf, parchment, vellum, paper and papyrus archives. Any environment less sterile than a salt desert would rot them away.
Think of these ephemeral archives. Were cuneiform markings inscribed by fingernail on leaves fresh-picked from broadleaf trees lining the avenues of stately cities? That’s how I pictured it, had there been nothing but Nature and low-tech to call upon. Any document so transcribed would be mulch by now, its archive filled with illegible loam.
Some ancient Chinese collections survived:
· The An-yang, Hunan collection of Shang Dynasty oracle bones 1523-1027 BCE;
· The Ma-wang-tui collection of 120,000 characters inscribed on silk, 722-481+ BCE;
· The collection at Chu-yen Lake in NW China. 10,330 pieces of poplar or willow bark inscribed and bundled together. The collection covers a period from 468-221 BCE;
· The collection of Tun-huang, Kansu. 20,000 paper scrolls from 406 CE (Christian Era) into the 1000’s CE; and
· The collection of Yin-ch’uen-shan, Lin-i County, Shantung: 4,942 bamboo slips in Han tombs from circa 1100-1200 CE, including the original manuscript of Sun Pin’s Ping-Fa, The Art of War. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/book/10.1081/E-ELIS3
I don’t use the approved Pinyin Chinese-English transliteration script. I am too old and slow to learn another foreign alphabet and exotic spelling system. There seems to be a new, gobbledygook one established for every foreign language transcribed into English ― with little justification beyond the prickly, nationalistic pride of native linguists. In this case, the fanatical nationalist in question was the late Zhou Youguang (which, spelled phonetically in English, sounds like “How Yookwung,” talk about accurate linguistic mapping!). Called “Encyclopedia How” because he translated the Britannica into Mandarin, his full and difficult life was that of a brilliant good guy. Why didn’t he make his Pinyin invitingly phonetic instead of off-putting to the average English language reader? If Victorian era transliterations of Chinese were racistically inaccurate, then the modern one should be more accurate, not just ambiguous and misleading in the opposite direction. I have a hard time dealing with common English, much less HTML, much less an indecipherable ᾂлfᾇβἓt dreamt up by some frustrated nationalists … thank you very much.
If the Chinese leadership were half smart, they would sponsor a much more elegant transliteration script.
The feudal Chou oversaw the first Golden Age of China when they carefully balanced mundane coercion against the newfound payoffs of civilization. Their proto-peace technology lasted from 1122 BCE until 771 BCE. The Five Classics of the Confucian canon were written during this interval of peace and subsequent ages of trouble. They include the I Ching (Book of Changes), the Shu Ching (Book of History), the Shih Ching (Book of Odes), the Li Chi (Book of Rites), as well as the Ch’un Ch’u (Spring and Autumn Annals). The last ruler of Western Chou died in combat. Northern invaders exploited this internal discord to sack his capital, Hao. The Eastern Chou never took up the slack from their capital at Loyang.
China endured vicious assaults through the Spring and Autumn period (770-464 BCE) and the Warring States period (463-222 BCE). Wu forces under General Sun Tzu, author of yet another Art of War, destroyed the Ying capital, Ch’u (modern Jiang-ling, Hubei) in 506 BCE. The Four Books comprise the Lun Yü (the Analects of Confucius), the Meng Tsu (the Book of Mencius), the Ta Hsüeh (a treatise on practical wisdom) and the Chung Yung (the Doctrine of the Mean). These nine works formed the bedrock of Chinese thought for the next three thousand years. Did superior works perish?
In 213 BCE, Prince Chen Shih-huang-ti (the first Ch’in Emperor) followed the advice of his prime minister, the reactionary Legalist Li Ssu, and proscribed all schools of philosophy. They had every book burnt except the writings of fellow Legalists and “useful” works on medicine, divination and agriculture. Seven years later – after many book lovers in China were buried alive for shielding their library, and almost all their books burned – the Ch’in capital at Hsien-yang burned down. This fire destroyed the last copy of most of the proscribed titles.
Founders of the Han Dynasty rescued a few useful texts before the old capital burned down. The brilliantly cruel Han established two archives: the Shih-ch’u Hall and the T’ien-lu Hall.
Emperor Wu established more collections around 147-80 BCE. Ssu-ma Chien studied Chinese imperial collections intensively in order to organize his Shih Chi (Historical Records) circa 100 BCE. Around the year one CE, Lui Hsiang wrote the first known annotated Chinese bibliography, the Pieh Lu. His son, Liu Hsin, produced China’s first surviving classified catalog, the Ch’i lueh.
Elsewhere, the Sumerian record goes back to the fifth archaeological level of Uruk, which dates around 3500 BCE. Up until around 2000 BCE, Sumerian text remnants are rare. Their library at Elba, founded in 2500, was destroyed in 2230 BCE.26 Uruk ruled until 1700 BCE, the date of origin of a King’s List: our periscope into Sumerian proto-history. At that time, the cities Ur and Mari contended for dominance. The empire of Akkad stretched from the Mediterranean to the north headwaters of the Tigris-Euphrates. It lasted from 2,340 to 2,154 BCE when its purpose-built capital, Agade, vanished under a swarm of disgruntled mountaineers, never to re-emerge.
Almost simultaneously, some planetary disaster overtook the Old Kingdom of Egypt; the Early Bronze Age cultures of Israel, Anatolia and Greece; the Indus Valley civilizations of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro; that of Hilmand in Afghanistan; and the Hongshan Culture in China. Every urban culture in the Old World was destroyed simultaneously. World War, indeed!
From the ancient city of Ur, the Chaldeans ruled both Akkad and Sumer. Elamite invaders sacked it in 2,000 BCE. Established around 3,500 BCE, Ur was flash-buried under eight feet of river sediment sometime around 300 BCE. Sumerian writing was the most sophisticated literary medium of its day. It served Middle-Eastern elites much the way Chinese served the feudal Japanese, Koreans and Vietnamese; the way Europeans used Latin during the Middle Ages; and the way the elaborations of calculus distinguish our info elites from less numerate info proletarians such as I.
Babylon was established c. 2,000 BCE. The cities of Larsa, Isin, Eshnunna, Marti, Khana, Elam and Ugarit were founded around the same time. The Hittites took over Babylon in the 18th century BCE, and the Cassites in 1746 BCE. In 1759 BCE, Hammurabi of Babylon sacked Mari, a Syrian city that had reigned supreme for centuries. Its archive of 25,000 fire-hardened cuneiform tablets is our principal source of historical texts for Northern Syria and Mesopotamia.
Assyrian Emperors applied military terrorism with systematic obsession. They sought iron-fisted control over the cities of the upper Tigris from 3,000 until as late as 612 BCE. They did this despite Hittite raids from the northwest, Sumerian-Babylonian conflicts in the southeast and widespread rebellion in every community they conquered, at every opportunity, no matter how desperate the outlook. Anything, up to and including elaborate torture and death at Assyrian hands, was preferable to their long-term rule. Rebellion became inevitable. A word of warning to those who worship the death penalty and the structural brutality it inflicts. After five thousand years of failure to establish justice, the death penalty is no more useful today than it was back then, except as another diversion for bored psychopaths.
Babylon was sacked around 1180 BCE, this time by the Assyrians. Among other cities, the Assyrians destroyed Babylon in 689 BCE, then Susa, capital of Elam, that dated back to 5000 BCE. Vengeful Babylonian survivors then massacred the forces of Elam, Assyria and Arabia. I wonder how many people switched sides at the last moment.
Even the location of the Mittani Empire’s capital, Washukanni, is unknown. Much like the United States of America, the Mittani were the cat’s meow for a couple centuries between 1595 and 1334 BCE. The Hittites conquered many Mittani cities, including Aleppo. Their capital, Hattush or Khattusha (near the Turkish village of Boghazkoy) lasted from 1792 BCE until just before 1380 BCE, when either the Gasga (Kaska) or the Peoples of the Sea burned it to the ground. At that point, the Hittite Empire achieved military parity once again with Egypt, only to see its Syrian and Anatolian cities succumb around 1204 BCE. Local writings vanished for over a century.
Minoan civilization arose on the island of Crete around 2000 BCE. Its combination temple-commissary-civic-center-palace was rebuilt in 1700 BCE, after a series of earthquakes, revolts or raids damaged them. The Minoan Golden Age lasted until 1450 BCE when Thera, a nearby volcano, exploded. It annihilated the societies established on Thera, Crete, and who knows where else across the Aegean and further downwind?
Theran culture may have been even more brilliant than the Minoan, the same way St. Petersburg outshines stuffy old Moscow. Or Thera may have been a military base and naval harbor dedicated to the defense of the demilitarized and idyllic island of Crete, the same way Pearl Harbor serves the enchanted islands of Hawaii.
In any case, this eruption projected mighty tidal waves across Aegean shores and smothered the growing season under meter (yard) thick ash falls. It probably wrecked every flotilla in harbor and on the beach. Opportunistic (Mycenaean?) invaders followed up eagerly, invading and snuffing out this beacon of civilization.
In their heyday, the Minoans built their civilization through Goddess cult redistribution of forest products, highland wildlife, abundant fisheries, fertile agriculture and master crafts. Olive groves had flourished in Crete since at least 3,500 BCE. (Based on recent archeological evidence, the Armenians may have been the earliest cultivators of wine). Relatively few and insignificant fortifications were found there; no fortified harbors, no city walls, no militarist or kingly inscriptions.
Minoan frescoes and potsherds were decorated with fascinating naturalism. That and their preference for the red of ochre and the black carbon of charcoal call to mind Neolithic artwork. Bronze circlets girded wasp-waisted youths; fashionable attire uncovered young women’s breasts. With due respect to Ursula Le Guin, I salute a culture lighthearted and self-disciplined enough to permit this fashion statement without disrupting the peace. Imagine the uproar that kind of indulgence would arouse in our “modern” barbaric societies.
Clean running water was piped into homes (even heated water), and wastewater, piped away. Houses were of equal size and quality across the population — a peaceful equity we haven’t matched since.
Bulls were depicted tossing priestly dancer/acrobats between their horns and over their mighty shoulders: a ceremony thought to portray a suicidal and practically impossible ritual confrontation. A fighting bull doesn’t lift his horns straight up, the way a bulldozer operator lifts his blade. Instead, it hooks diagonally from below into the vitals of its opponent, the way a sly knife fighter would.
More likely, children destined for priesthood raised prized calves as beloved pets, then trained with them as adolescents to act out a sacred dancing game. In the same way, Asian peasant children frolic with the family’s water buffalo in the village duck pond, even though strangers (especially suetty Westerners) risk sullen attack from those same tame beasts.
Some assert that the entire Cretan civilization was a fake: a giant, stage-set mausoleum peddled across the Mediterranean as a funereal Paradise for wealthy patrons deceased and processed into mummies: Club Dead. Yet all that beautiful art would have been aimed just as much to amaze its audience (in this case, us), as to lure the embalmed corpses of fat slave owners from overseas.
Nothing decipherable remains of Minoan written culture except accounting ledgers. The elegant vibrancy of its artwork astounds us; its prose and poetry must have kept pace. Too bad nothing remains for us to read.
It may well be, as Graham Hancock asserted in Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization, (Crow Publishers, New York, 2002), that law and custom restricted artistic and sacred expression to painstaking memorization and recitation. The written word was only used for inventories, calendars and suchlike profit-grubbing and high-tech trash.
Some scholars hypothesize that the Sea People or Philistines may have been post-disaster Minoan evacuees. The ancient Greek historian and avid purveyor of superstition, Herodotus (The History of Herodotus, Tudor Publishing Company, 1943, Dial Press, Inc., 1928, George Rawlinson, Trans., Manuel Komroff, Ed.), ascribes a Minoan origin to the Spartans ― those loathsome weapon technicians.
I enjoy so-called “superstition” as much as he did. It is a lot more entertaining than prevailing dogma that’s often inaccurate, close-minded and misleading.
Just as scientific technology forecast as science fiction can be dismissed as impossible magic, a superstition (merely an anecdote describing a recurrent phenomenon that lacks a good explanation otherwise) can be dismissed as non-existent until science gets around to noting specific facts that clarify its fuzzy details. Note “primitive shaman” plant cures versus modern pharmacopoeia. Microscope slides coming in and out of focus.
Others postulate that Cretan civilization was the last outpost of the legendary Atlanteans who may have occupied Thera or other shores now submerged.
Plato – quoting his mentor Solon, a statesman and natural philosopher renowned for his wisdom – asserted that this civilization was ten thousand years old by the time he wrote about it. Solon had learned this from priestly historians in Egypt. Modern historians assert that those Egyptians were vague in their reckoning of thousands or tens of thousands of years. I suspect they were seriously reporting it happened ten thousand years prior.
It’s just our luck that one of the most brilliant civilizations in human memory was pinned to ground zero of a planetary catastrophe. Just as we, its ultimate descendants, have created an earthly double boiler in which to cook ourselves.
Simcha Jacobovici directed a brilliant video documentary, The Exodus Decoded, in which he merges the Hyksos and the Jews into one historic people, the Ten Plagues of Egypt, the drowning of the Egyptian Army during the Jews’ expulsion, and the Exodus, all of them as outcomes of the explosion of the volcano at Santorini. See http://www.amazon.com/Exodus-Decoded-History-Channel/dp/B000HOJR8A.
The Atlantis myth gains credence from striking similarities shared by trans-oceanic civilizations: artistic representations of beings with distinctly foreign racial features or even inhuman ones, plus remarkable similarities among their trade artifacts, cultural habits and monumental architecture.
The eminent historian, Fernand Braudel, noted that the initial sites of organized agriculture in the Mediterranean basin were settled at elevations of 600 to 900 meters above sea level (nearly 2000 to 3000 feet); (Fernand Braudel, Memory and the Mediterranean, Alfred A. Knoff, New York, 2001, translated by Siàn Reynolds, p. 40). Did these sites survive a series of tsunamis that wiped out prehistoric civilization along coastal lowlands? Or was it just to escape from amphibious pillagers?
Or a series of them in combination? A tidal surge at the wrong time of day and place and year could have drowned most of the men fishing or farming those lowland shores. Few were left in defense when pirates came ashore soon after.
The same way periodic crime waves infect cities crumbling or growing too fast, like the bleach death of a coral floor. Thousand year tsunamis may have scoured seashores, stripped them bare of native defenders and exposed the few survivors to pitiless raiders.
The predatory Mycenaeans didn’t last much longer than their Minoan victims. From 1200 BCE on, more and more of their palaces were set afire, and brooding fortifications sprang up to replace them. At-best middling artwork became rarer and shoddier. Local archeology reveals that violent casualties rose to 90%, an incredible proportion of the population, denoting systematic internal genocide. What a frightful birthplace for the civilization of Homer and Plato!
The Indian subcontinent had to deal with many invaders including the nomadic Yueh-chi from China, Sakai or Shaka nomads from Central Asia, and others listed below. From 2,400 to 1,750 BCE, Dravidian and Aryan cultures alternately colonized and evacuated the city-states of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. In those days, there were at least 2,500 prehistoric settlements. Fairly equal housing could be found there, as well as elaborate public granaries and sewage systems.
Unfortunately, these cultures became opaque to us: their language, writings and social instruments no longer retrievable. Radioactive skeletons have been found among the ruins. Victorian engineers mined the brick ruins of Harappa to lay one hundred miles of cheap roadbed under the Lahore-Multan railway. How many more Dravidian symbols could we retrieve by digging up and cataloging the burnt bricks under that famous roadbed?
Massive earthquakes uplifted the land. The sun “burned up” the mighty Sarasvasti River (now the Ravi?) along which Harappa flourished, halfway between present-day Multan and Tagore and about which we will hear again. This, according to In Search of the Cradle of Civilization: New Light on Ancient India, by Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak and David Frawley, Quest Books, 1995. Other rivers (especially Mohenjo-Daro’s Indus further downstream) were struck low by additional earthquakes. Elaborate irrigation projects were wrecked and desert sand smothered croplands and orchards. The survivors must have felt apocalyptic despair.
As we speak, India and Pakistan are thumping this deceptively quiet landscape with atomic blasts. They’re just inviting a renewal of earthquakes.
Few records remain of these flourishing civilizations, beyond the Vedas: symbolic epics written around 1500-1200 BCE, though much older by way of oral transmission. A succession of Dravidian and Aryan groups occupied the same ground at intervals. Fighting and/or replacing each other, they developed the Vedic religion with its in-built apartheid of caste based on linear, consecutive reincarnations (as opposed to reincarnation independent of time and place). This was the predecessor of Hinduism, which emerged with scriptures called the Upanishads, finally transcribed between 600 and 400 BCE.
In the mid 12th Century BCE, the Sea People subjected many Mediterranean cities to amphibious assault. Fatally weakened by the iron-armed Assyrians, the Hittite Empire went down along with its capital, Aleppo. Concurrent catastrophes (or one catastrophe of planetary scale?) terminated the Shang Dynasty of China, the Mycenaeans of Greece, the Egyptian New Kingdom, as well as the Late Bronze Age civilization in Israel. Crop-wrecking bad weather, river-draining super-quakes and/or scattergun comet/asteroid strikes may have flattened these civilizations. Scientific opinion varies. In the late 12th Century BCE, Ugarit, Enkomi, Citum in Cyprus, the Canaanite towns of Tyre, Sidon and Biblos (the presumed invention site of books) went under ― some never to reemerge.
Troy (during the greatest of its nine incarnations) was sacked and burned around 1250 BCE. Thebes in Greece underwent the same fate at about the same time. Perhaps it succumbed to the same stinking horde of Homeric pirates that had destroyed Troy.
The Iliad and Odyssey are two of the principal sources of Western psycho-military inspiration. In them, Homer chronicles the annihilation of the city of Troy and the aftermath of that disaster. He composed those books centuries after the fact. The story becomes even more interesting if one looks for lost epics that may have been written alongside Homer’s writings or even been written by him. The Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology lists a lost epic named The Return, supposed to have narrated the return from Troy and the mass shipwreck of the rest of the Greek fleet under Agamemnon’s command, sparing Odysseus' ship, the Penelope, that sailed away alone. Then there's the Oichalias Halosis or the Sack of Oichalias of which only one line remains. It may have been the third book of Homer's amputated trilogy. http://omega.cohums.ohio-state.edu/mailing_lists/BMCR-L/2002/0396.php I'll bet both works were a lot less enthusiastic about the glories of war, which may explain their disappearance.
Palestine was another bloody cockpit: the highway to hell between three continents. How any God of Love would pick that snake pit for His Chosen People, that is beyond me. Not that the strategic dead-ends of Norway, Tasmania, Tierra del Fuego or South Africa were much better settings for peace and quiet… for ages, wholesale slaughter prevailed in those places just as much as anywhere else.
The five towns of Philistia in southwest Palestine (Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron [never rediscovered] and Gath); Phoenician cities on the Lebanese coast: (Tyre, Sidon, Tripoli, Aradus and Byblos); and the Aramean kingdoms of eastern Syria (including Damascus), all of them fought each other furiously. After surviving punitive expeditions from the above-mentioned powers, Canaanite cities and their populations were exterminated by the Jews, presumably under the Jewish God’s orders. These included one of the oldest cities on Earth, Jericho, founded c. 9,200 BCE.
Joshua captured Jerusalem in 1451 BCE (sack # 1). David established his capital in Jerusalem in 1004 BCE, after he had massacred its Jebusite inhabitants (sack #2). He went on to destroy the Philistines who had given him royal refuge from Saul, his own vindictive king. Solomon’s hands were a little less bloody. His elite propaganda corps immortalized his inhuman wisdom. That done, he ordered the Temple of Jerusalem built: a quite costly project for poor Jews to bear, like everything else he did. After his reign, Judah and Israel split up and fought each other for two hundred years. Amaziah, King of Judah, conquered Edom (now Jordan). He forced the Edomites to convert to Judaism and captured Petra. According to Paul Lackman, the family of Herod the Great was of Edomite origin. His subsequent mass murder of the first-born males of Palestine may have been a fitting revenge. Israeli King Jehoash took Amaziah prisoner, entered Jerusalem and sacked the Temple in 775 BCE (#3).
Incurably shadistic Assyrians besieged Samaria, stormed Jerusalem and sacked the city in 721 BCE (#4), crushing Jewish resistance. They conquered the Kingdom of Ararat in Armenia (Urartu?) and sacked its capital, Musdasir in 714 BCE. This turned out to be not such a good idea, (like most weapons “ideas”). Urartu had screened Assyria from Cimmerian steppe nomads. Their cavalry army erased what was left of Urartu, then its Assyrian garrison, then the Assyrian King and his field army.
Napata, the Sudanese capital city of Cush, thrived from the 8th century BCE until the mid-6th. Thereafter, Meroë became the Cushite capital until some time around the 10th century CE. At one point, the Cushites dominated Egypt. They built their own pyramids and disseminated iron technology at spear point throughout Central Africa. Founded around 750 BCE, Meroe was destroyed by Ethiopian Aksumites during the 4th century.
Axum benefited from a climatic interregnum during which two rainy seasons fell on the Abyssinian plateau’s rich volcanic soil and allowed two good crops every year. It dominated Red Sea trade from the 7th century BCE until the 7th CE. Several centuries later, the twin rainy seasons reverted to one per year and starved out that population.
Wise elders of the Dogon tribe of Mali can point out, to the satisfaction of baffled astronomers, the star (Sirius B, invisible except through a giant telescope) from which their tribe was brought down to Earth. Their land has a mound of iron tailings weighing hundreds of thousands of tons. According to Professor Vincent Serneels of the Swiss Fryeburg Institute of Mineralogy and Petroleum Sciences, they manufactured ten or more tons of iron implements each year for centuries, for distribution to the rest of ancient Africa.
In 612 BCE, Medes and resurgent Chaldeans-Babylonians destroyed the Assyrian capital, Nineveh. The clay tablet content of the Sargonid imperial library was fired into ceramic when it burned down. A torrent of mud sealed the collection, uncovered only recently.
Babylon destroyed the Holy Temple of the Jews; it razed Jerusalem (#5) and deported its people in 586 BCE. Cyrus the Great of Persia freed them from captivity and allowed them to go home. He was one of the few “Greats” who actually deserves that appellation, due to the genial benevolence he showed after his military conquests — even though he wound up dying stupidly during a dead-end military brawl with another peripheral tribe.
After the Roman conquest of Jerusalem (#6), the whole “Promised Land” remained under alien control for the next twenty-seven centuries. Today, its Palestinian and Israeli inhabitants are hopelessly Balkanized, at least until they wake up to the idea that their country could become another Switzerland: twice as peaceful, ten times more prosperous and holier to a great extent.
Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Tyre in 574 BCE. Babylon burned down in 538 BCE, with much loss of life.
Tartessos was a great emporium on the coast of Andalusia, an ancient trading city founded around 1200 BCE. From then until 669 BCE, it monopolized Mediterranean trade beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. Herodotus pointed out its tremendous wealth in two stories describing Phoenician merchants who sailed home and built city walls and a man-sized devotional urn of precious metal from the profits of their trip there. The Carthaginians took Tartessos in the early 400s and controlled its thriving trade in gold; amber; tin (a critical component of bronze, very rare in the Mediterranean Basin yet plentiful in England and Brittany); callais, a kind of translucent turquoise; and furs, in exchange for the wine, olive oil and the finished products of the Med. The Romans annihilated the city when it revolted in 195 BCE. They built a military camp in the region, now the Spanish city of Jerez. No trace of Tartessos remains and its location is unknown so far.
Phoenician colonists settled Carthage around 800 BCE. The losses of three “World Wars” stained the Mediterranean with blood from 264 until 146 BCE, when Rome finally annihilated Carthage. Its legionaries sowed the ruins with salt so that nothing would grow there again. The library in Carthage contained 500,000 volumes of Phoenician art, science and history. The Phoenicians were master mariners, canny merchants, fearless explorers and disseminators of a common alphabet among many other clever deeds and inventions. In ruthless pursuit of trade monopoly, Carthage destroyed many Mediterranean cities including the Sicilian towns of Himera and Selinus (409 BCE), Agrigento (406 BCE) and Acragas (c. 400 BCE) home of the philosopher Empedocles.
Rome itself originated around 725 BCE. Established in 1100 BCE, Alba Longa was destroyed by Rome in 600 BCE. Numa, Rome’s second king, invented the most enduring Roman political instruments and then sealed his last writings in a time capsule before he died. The Roman Senate reverently dug it up six centuries later ― then declared its content a shameful forgery and had it burned. It must have made fascinating reading.
Officially, Western libraries are said to have begun with the Greeks around the 6th century BCE. The Lyceum was established in Athens in 336 BCE. Subsequently, Athenians buried and badly damaged this collection to prevent its acquisition by the rival city Pergamum. The Romans took the remnants home with them in 40 BCE.
Greek Ionia (Greek colonies on the Turkish Peninsula and among the Aegean Islands) was a mixing-bowl of Eastern and Western thought: the fountainhead of “Greek” philosophy. The Persians got mad when the Ionian Greeks burned down their splendid Lydian capital, Sardis, in present-day Turkey. In retaliation for Sardis, the Persians razed the Greek colony of Miletus (494 BCE). They destroyed forever the works of philosophers Thales and Anaximenes among others. By 479 BCE, Persia had sacked and burned every Ionian city. A few quotes of the Ionian philosopher Heraclitus survive ― probably because he coined such verbal gems as “War is the father of all things.”
Athens annihilated Aegina (457 BCE), Potidaea (430 BCE) and Melos (416 BCE), source of the Venus of Milo. Platae, Athen’s ally, was destroyed by Thebes and Sparta in 427 BCE. Insectile Sparta reduced the city of Messene to a storehouse of Helot slaves.
Phidias was the greatest sculptor in ancient Greece. Not a single original or good copy of his work survives. Not his statue of Zeus in the temple of Olympus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, similar in pose to the Lincoln Monument in Washington, DC but twice its size; not his Athena Parthenos, the foremost pride of Athens. Both colossi were draped with beaten gold, and flesh parts covered with plates of elephant ivory brilliantly pealed, softened and molded into place. The statue of Zeus was shipped to Constantinople where a fire reduced it to ashes in 462. The same thing happened to all the strikingly realistic paintings made by Zeuxis (born in Southern Italy during the late 5th century BCE) and no doubt the work of hundreds of others artists equally inspired.
By the way, eleven of Aristophanes’ forty known plays survive today, seven of Aeschylus’ ninety, seven of Sophocles’ one hundred twenty, and nineteen of Euripides’ ninety-two. All the written works of Chionides, Magnes, Cratius and countless others were lost. The seven sages of the Greek world during the 6th century were: Bias, Chilon, Cleobulus, Periander, Pittacus, Solon and Thales. For the most part, only a few brief quotes remain of their lifetime achievement, if that.
“The subtle evocation of the sacred through implicit ideas and images is characteristic of what many regard as the supreme genre of mountain art in the world – Chinese landscape paintings…
“The expression used to designate landscape paintings – shan-shui, “mountain-water” – highlights the importance of mountains, or shan, in Chinese thought as one of the two basic constituents of the natural environment. The second element, shui or “water,” takes the form of streams or rivers that issue from the heights or peaks to wind about their feet and spread across the plains…Together the two engender the totality of nature and reveal the presence of the Tao.
“One of the most famous and influential artists of the T’ang Dynasty, Chang Tsao, who worked in the 8th century, was a wild-eyed figure who brought the spirit of the mountains directly into the act of painting. …More than a painter of landscapes, Chang Tsao transcended his art to become an exemplar of the artists as sorcerer and sage. The dynamic force of his personality and the effortless perfection of his style played an important role in shaping the ideals and aspirations of those who followed him. Unfortunately, none of his paintings have come down to us. [Italics mine.] Edwin Bernbaum, Sacred Mountains of the World, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997, pp. 226-227.
Founded in the 8th century, the island town of Mozia was the most important Phoenician colony in Sicily. It was destroyed in 397 BCE by Dionysus the Elder, the despot of Syracuse. The Romans destroyed Veii, an ancient Etruscan city, in 396 BCE. The Gauls and their Celtic allies defeated the Roman Army in 390 BCE, then sacked Rome and burned its archives. By 380 BCE, Persia had burned down Athens and many other Greek cities. In 373 BCE, the ancient city of Helike on the Gulf of Corinth was wrecked by an earthquake and tsunami. Apparently, an Early Bronze Age city located nearby had suffered the same fate two thousand years prior.
Corinth was a pretty average city during the Classical Age. A regional capital, it was founded around 6,000 BCE on the narrow Isthmus of Corinth that connected the Peloponnesus to mainland Greece. It was famous for the Corinthian order of architecture (the most ornate and complex one, succeeding the Doric and Ionic) and for the canal it had cut and named after itself, which was not successfully deepened until 1893. As far back as 600 BCE, a flat highway had been cut across the isthmus to allow smaller merchant ships to be log-rolled along it. Like modern Panama, it grew rich from this commercial traffic and, like Elizabethan Panama, became a magnet for armed hordes passing through the region. Corinth was destroyed by Rome in 146 BCE, by earthquakes in 375, 551 and 856 CE. It was plundered by Visigoths around 395, by Normans in 1147, sacked by Crusaders after a five-year siege in 1210; by Byzantines in 1388; by Ottomans in 1395; again by Byzantines in 1403; and again by Ottomans in 1458; by Venetians in 1687; by Ottomans in 1715; and destroyed by the Turks in 1830. Earthquakes leveled it in 1858 and 1928, as did a fire in 1933. This was the usual routine for vulnerable Mediterranean cities.
In 342 BCE, the Persian Empire destroyed Sidon, one of the great seaports of Phoenicia, in retaliation for the vital help it had given the Greeks during the naval battle of Salamis. This last fight took place just off smoldering ruins of Athens the Persians had just burned down.
Alexander the Great (Butcher of Human Flesh) destroyed Greek city of Thebes in 335 BCE, Phoenician Tyre and Gaza in 332 BCE. Almost every “X the Great” merits this job description. We should paraphrase the German expression and call most of them “X the Gross.” He also captured Jerusalem in 333 BCE (#5.5), as well as several more metropolises whose citizens were too cosmopolitan for his taste.
The tomb of Mausolus of Caria was erected by his sister/widow in the city of Halicarnassus. It was the Taj Mahal of the ancient world, another of its Seven Wonders (from which we derive the word mausoleum). It burned down with the rest of the city under Alexander’s direction. In 330 BCE, that military genius destroyed the brand new, fully archived Persian capital of Persepolis. According to Plutarch, he had its looted treasures brought away by 20,000 mules and 5,000 camels. He ruined 12,000 cattle hides upon which the prophet Zarathustra had encoded the entire Zoroastrian religion.
The Pyramids mystify us today because Alexander executed all the pyramid-expert priests of Heliopolis and Persepolis. For personal reasons, he destroyed every Egyptian text he could find. Priestly survivors declared him a god because he clove with his sword a large knot called Gordian, said to be incurably snarled. Well, duh! But can you blame them?
Alexander’s place as history’s most admired mass murderer is partly attributable to the instruction he received from Aristotle, his personal (and this civilization’s premier) weapon mentor. He slashed his way from the cultural outback of Macedon as far as the Indus River. Then he lost most of his mutinous troops during their parched return home across the desert of what is now Sind, Pakistan. Whoops! Shortly after his premature demise, his Successors sacked the holy city of Benares on the Ganges. Otherwise known as Varanasi or Kasi, it was another of the world’s oldest cities.
A crazed attention-getter (whose name merits oblivion) set fire to the world-renowned temple of Artemis at Ephesus in 356 BCE, the same day Alexander the Gross was born. Under the Seleucid Successors of Alexander, the Western World’s administrative centers were Pella in Macedonia (the birthplace of Alexander), Pergamum in Asia Minor, Antioch in southern Turkey and Alexandria in Egypt.
Circa 300 BCE, a Seleucid king “had all the books in the world burned because he wanted the calculation of time to begin with himself” ― according to Luciano Canfora’s The Vanished Library, translated by Martin Lyle, University of California Press, 1987, p. 183.
Around 390 BCE, invading Celts sacked Rome; in 278 BCE they sacked Delphi, Greece. At the time, the Temple there was the Greek equivalent of Fort Knox, the Ivy League colleges and the Library of Congress combined.
In the process of securing its hold over the Italian peninsula, Rome annihilated the Etruscans, the Samnites, the Aequi and the Volsci ― each one a flourishing urban civilization. The Alexandria Library burned down in 272 BCE, during a war between another Roman Emperor and a rebellious Queen whose famous capital, Smyrna, he sacked. The Romans took Syracuse by assault in 211 BCE. They executed the mathematician Archimedes along with many other inhabitants.
In 255 BCE, King Ashoka acceded to the Mauryan throne of India. He renounced military aggression and emphasized the welfare of his subjects in accordance with standard Buddhist values: a vanishing rarity in world history. He planted his admirable policies on stone stele throughout his empire. He will tell you his story in his own chapter of Learner.
Rome captured the Macedonian Royal Library at Pella in 168 BCE. The great city of Epirus was sacked by Rome in 167 BCE. Balkh, the Bactrian capital, fell to the Parthian and Sakan nations in the 2nd century BCE. Rome allied with Sparta in 146 BCE (big surprise) to destroy Corinth. Another Seleucid King destroyed Beirut, the last Phoenician homeport, in 140 BCE. Fregellae, the second largest city in Italy, was destroyed by Rome in 124 BCE. So was Roman Florentia (Florence) in 88 BCE. Rome sacked Athens bloody and partially burned it down in 86 BCE. Its Emperor stole the Athenian Apelliconte’s library. That collection disappeared when the Emperor’s profligate son sold it to satisfy his creditors, according to A Gentle Madness by Nicholas A. Basbanes, Henry Holt, New York, 1995, p. 66.
The last cuneiform tablets found in Mesopotamia date from around 75 BCE (probably inscribed in corrupt Sumerian). That area was once a breadbasket of civilization, said to have been the location of Eden. It is now a baked-clay desert wasteland called Iraq. Centuries of excessive population overworked the soil with imperial aspirations and easily taxable herds of goats that ate every plant down to the roots.
Edward Hyams, in Soil and Civilization, Thames and Hudson, London, New York, 1952, pp. 33-40, states that stock-raising, nomadism and patriarchy arose on mountain patches of thin, high-loess soil; whereas tillage, permanent settlement and matriarchal systems originated on thick, alluvial lowland soil. He concluded that the democratic principles of Athens were based on its poor soil and the cultivation of olives and grapes for luxury export in exchange for wheat and other bulk commodities grown in better foreign soils. Whereas Sparta’s slave system was based on thick alluvial soils and homegrown wheat crops. Sorta like the difference between flinty New England soil with its canny merchants and sailors, versus the black, lowland soil and slaveholding elites of the Deep South. He determined that one of the characteristics of a warfare society is that it always exhausts the native soil — a word to the wise today.
The only thing more destructive of nature than a goat herd is a car lot. The only thing more destructive than both: that would be man equipped to kill. The latest, most accurately placed site for the Garden of Eden is the Valley of Tabriz in Iran, now a polluted industrial wasteland of the kind mass-produced worldwide; otherwise its the homeland of the Marsh Arabs outside Basra, which Saddam had drained, spoiled and depopulated.
Caesar destroyed every independent Galic town. He had over a million Gauls put to the sword. Caesar slandered and exterminated the Druids as well. In 48 BCE, the inhabitants of Alexandria blockaded him and his troops in its citadel. Proud Alexandria was the capital of Egypt and the foremost library city of the Western world. If Rome was the seat of Power, Alexandria was that of Reason. For centuries, every merchant crew docking in Alexandria Harbor had to hand over its documents to the Library in exchange for clean copies. Caesar allowed the library’s Museum to burn down along with the Library docks. Shiploads of texts also burned, which his friend M. T. Varro had selected for delivery to Rome. The whole facility could have burned down along with its attached research institute, the Mouseion (the shrine of muses); who knows? Modern historians argue that the Library had no physical connection with the docks ― this despite the fact that every passing merchant vessel had to swap everything from the captain’s log to tourist paperbacks in exchange for hand-written copies?
As a history writer, Caesar specialized in making himself look good at the expense of his victims. He spread equivalent mayhem in Spain. He led a succession of Roman oppressors whose stupid cruelties were surpassed only by their replacements dispatched by the Roman Senate. Sound familiar, fellow Americans? Brilliant exceptions were two governors whose massacres were followed by leniency. This novel approach brought peace after decades of blind punishment had prolonged Spanish revolt. Contrary to standard propaganda (like Shakespeare’s play version of Julius Caesar), the Roman Senate never defended freedom against reactionary tyrants. On the contrary, the Senate protected its criminal privileges against all comers. Sparta had always supported foreign elites versus Athens that usually favored the People (with many backstabbing exceptions). Similarly, the Roman Senate bowed to any tyrant as long as he promised to take his wealth from the poor. Wherever Rome came, saw and conquered, it upheld the wealthy and the powerful among the survivors of its conquest, over the poor and the weak.
Caesar was a progressive for his day. He dared tax Senatorial corruption and died for that reason. He realized – like many tyrants before him and since – that powerful weapon technologies encourage an iron aristocracy of military talent. Flabby, hereditary Conspiracies of Greed, such as the Roman Senate of the Late Empire in decline, evolved at best second-rate military technologies. They wound up being even more costly than the first-rate ones, and doomed to defeat, civil war and military chaos in the long run. Thus, Rome’s Decline and Fall ― and ours soon to come if we don’t straighten out.
In 40 BCE, Anthony shipped his lover Cleopatra in Alexandria the complete library of the town’s archrival, Pergamum (where parchment was invented). In part, he was punishing the Pergamumites for having joined his rivals during the latest Roman civil war. He may also have intended to compensate Cleopatra for Julius’ undocumented vandalism.
Rome destroyed and rebuilt many cities. It uprooted homegrown cultures and scattered the survivors elsewhere more or less at random. Rome was an insignificant contributor to library scholarship. It specialized in closed villa libraries of the rich. No scholars assembled when Rome established its first Public Library in 39 BCE, unlike common practice in the “decadent” East where libraries had sprouted and flourished centuries prior. The Romans sacked Thebes in 29 BCE, ending its thousand-year era of prosperity.
The following chapter, Burning Libraries (AD), covers the next two millennia.
The 3rd millennium AD is up to us ― God help us.
- BURNING LIBRARIES (AD) -
Dates listed hereafter are Christian Era (CE) unless noted otherwise. Please consult “Burning Libraries (BC)” for a list of prior atrocities and a preamble to this sickening topic.
Thanks again to Fernando Baez and his A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq, Alfred MacAdam, Trans., 2008, Atlas and Co., New York, NY. I footnoted every reference to his text in Learners, with the page number of his book where I found it.
The Book of Mormon proclaims that Christ took His teachings around the world. It declared that He traveled to what would become Latin America (?) where mighty Judeo-Christian empires originated from a boatload of Israelite refugees. These Christian civilizations are said to have flourished for centuries and then degenerated into prehistoric obscurity. A book of encoded golden pages, lost since, revealed this chronicle to the founder of the Church of Latter Day Saints. Could it have forecast our (the European New World’s) eventual colonization, fundamentalist betrayal of Christianity and self-destruction?
Others concluded that Jesus received Buddhist instruction during a youthful pilgrimage to Kashmir in India. Do you recall the twenty-plus year hiatus in His biblical biography? It was said that he traveled to Britain as a boy with his uncle to visit Cornish tin mines, and studied ancient scriptures in Egypt. He was also said to have lived to a ripe old age in Kashmir after his disciples spirited His comatose body out of the grasp of His itchy-fingered foes.
The emperor Augustus burned more than 2,000 texts that displeased him in the year 8 CE. He also created two libraries that burned down in 64, 200 and 363.76 The giant library at Antioch burned down in 37, along with its home city. Parchments and the candlepower to read them by made a potent incendiary mix. Before her defeat, native Queen Boadicea burned down Roman Londinium (London) in 50. Three fourths of Rome burned down in 64. Three thousand bronze tablets chronicling the history of the city were destroyed during that fire.77 Rome conquered Jerusalem in 63 and flattened it in 70. In 68, the Romans annihilated Qumran, the Jewish Essene community that watched over the Dead Sea Scrolls. It massacred the inhabitants of Caesurae Palestinae (a beautiful and very rich city that boasted an engineered harbor), Jotapata and Massada (the Jews’ last-stand fortress) by 73. Subsequent revolts targeted Jewish colonies in the great imperial cities (a stiff-necked bunch that kept to themselves and worshipped their unique God, over and above the latest Emperor). Their massacre cost the Roman Empire hundreds of thousands more lives and corresponding treasure. Rome conquered the island of Anglesey in 78, the last known refuge of the Druids. The Portico of Octavia library burned down under the reign of Titus (81-79) .79
The year Eighty CE saw the latest destruction of one of the greatest Buddhist centers, Anuradhapura in Ceylon. Founded in 437 BCE, it would be annihilated by Tamil invaders during the 8th century CE, this time forever.
During the first four hundred years of the Christian era, the city of Rome (and, by inference, every other big city worldwide) suffered approximately eleven major fires every decade. By great, I mean one that involved public buildings and entire residential districts. This, from Johan Goudsblom’s Fire & Civilization, Allen Lane, London, 1992. Doubtless, crowded wooden cities that lit themselves by open flame were naked to fire — at least until the 19th century when Europeans introduced masonry construction and mechanized fire brigades. The City of Rome had organized firemen. But like some unemployed rural residents these days, they tended to start fires so they could get paid to put them out. The Ulpia Library, that Trajan built in 114, burned down around 550 with 20,000 volumes; as did Vespasian’s Library of Peace in 191.77 The library Trajan, built in Athens, burned down in 267. Goths destroyed the library of Celso in 263, along with 12,000 volumes.81
In the first two centuries CE, the Cushan invaded, settled and administered a Golden Age of Buddhism in Northern India, under the title Guptas. The Gupta civilization burned out resisting the White (Caucasian) Hun invaders during the 5th century. Its principal city, Taxila, had been founded around 3500 BCE and served as a center of Buddhist scholarship until the Huns overran it, after which it wasted away for another two centuries before it was finally abandoned. Several dynastic orders contended for imperial control of Southern and Central Asia until devastating Muslim invasions rolled through from 1000 until 1400.
For example, Muslim Karakhanids overran the kingdom of Khotan at the Chinese end of the Silk Road in 1006. “We came down on them like a flood, We went out among their cities, We tore down the idol-temples, We shat on the Buddha's head!” Mahmud al-Kashgari. As a result, Buddhist monks sealed up the nearby Library Cave in the Magao Grottoes, or Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. This site held tens of thousands of manuscripts including several copies of the oldest known published work, the Diamond Sutra. Those contents were looted by the Austrian Aurel Stein, then a Frenchman called Pelliot, then Japanese, Russian and Chinese late-comers who dispersed them to their capitals. Nowadays, the International Dunhuang Project is digitally consolidating those collections. This from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mogao_Caves.
China’s ancient capital, Ch’ang-an (population: one million), burned down in 24. The Chinese library of Wang Mang was destroyed in 23.72 Pan Ku and his sister, Pan Chao, compiled the Han Shu (History of the Han) circa 70. They began a long tradition of including a bibliography in dynastic histories. Unfortunately, three library catastrophes nullified further Han progress. Lo-yang, the Han capital, burned down circa 200. More books were lost when government workers fled back to Ch’ang-an. It burned down in turn in 208. Lao-tse, the founder of Taoism, was Court Archivist under the Chou c. 220. Nearly four hundred years of the Warring States Period (220-581) destroyed most of the Chinese manuscript collections. In his Lang Huan Chi, Chang Hua (232-300) laments a vast, imaginary library filled with precious ancient manuscripts long gone. By 279, the Western Tsin Dynasty cataloged 30,000 volumes.
The Chinese held the Huns out beyond their Great Wall fortifications (or paid them off) for six centuries. In 311 and 316, those invaders finally broke through and pillaged the Chin capitals, Loyang and Ch’ang-an.72 Their harsh dominion lasted until 581. The Liang Dynasty built up a 140,000-volume collection. Unfortunately, Emperor Yuan set fire to his own library in 554.72 A giant Buddhist grotto library was built in Hopei during the Six Dynasties Period from 221 to 589. Over the next thousand years, this collection would accumulate many Confucian classics by incising them in raw stone on cave walls. A similar facility was established near the National Academy.
Circa 600, Niu Hung wrote a memorandum to the Sui Emperor on the destruction of former libraries. He suggested that books copied from private collections should augment the imperial collection. The Chia-tse palace accumulated 370,000 volumes by following this new policy. It would be destroyed after 621.72 In 605, the Chinese emperor Liu Fang sacked Indrapura, the Cham capital. In 754, the population of China was about fifty-three million; it fell to seventeen million by 764.
Two key texts on Japanese history disappeared: the Kokki (National Record), during the Isshi (Itsushi) Incident in 645, and the Tennoki some time later.
In 758, Arabs and Persians sacked the city of Canton. Wuzong ordered 4,600 Buddhist temples destroyed in 845.73 At Tun-huang in 1907, a British collector bought a copy of the Buddhist Diamond Sutra dating from 868. It is the oldest known printed book. Many Buddhist sects acknowledge it as their supreme text.
In 907, building materials from the ruins of Ch'ang-an were rafted down-stream to frame the new capital, Kaifeng. The Chinese invented the printing press around the same time. Guttenberg’s replica press wouldn’t startle Europe awake until 1454. In 978, the Chinese imperial library held 80,000 volumes. Universal civil service examinations fossilized Mandarin dominion over China from 960 until the Communist overthrow of the last Manchurian Mandarins in the1940s, and perhaps even today. The Kaifeng Library burned down in 1000, with the loss of 73,877 books.72
Actually, the collapse of Chinese technological superiority can be laid at the hooves of the Mongol Horde and its ninety-year suppression of Chinese culture, followed by centuries of mixed rule that slavishly imitated the old Mongols, if only in terms of military tyranny and technological backwardness. Sorta like African Idi Amin who imitated the brutality of White colonial predecessors.
The Song Renaissance (circa 1200) was a font of peaceful creativity and weapons atrophy. For the next seven centuries, various dynasties, both native to China and foreign, would suppress China’s creativity to make sure that no such vulnerability persisted. Paradoxically, as usual, the suppression of peace technology brought new weapon development to a corresponding standstill. In attempting to strengthen China militarily, those dynasties only succeeded in weakening it to the point of helplessness against better-armed foreigners. Since China recently recovered from that cultural disaster, we can hope the emergent Han people will fulfill from now on their stunning intellectual promise at the arts and crafts of PeaceWorld.
Internal chaos destroyed half the books in imperial libraries by the end of Hsuan Tsung’s reign c. 1000. Under T’ang leadership, both private and monastic libraries flourished for a while. During the Northern Sung period, which lasted until 1126, the Chung-wen Hall was established in modern K’ai-feng. This library contained 6,705 works in 73,877 volumes. The Chin destroyed it when they took over.
For millennia, Middle Kingdom military expeditions raked foreign tribes, cities, libraries and monasteries along its expanding frontier. The Tibetans fought back; they occupied the Chinese capital Ch’ang-an in 763. They had been Chinese vassals before, would see their Drigung Temple burned to the ground by a Mongol-Chinese army in 1290, and would be re-annexed to China by 1720. As we speak, Chinese occupiers torment the Tibetans and wreck their civilization.
The modern Chinese tyrannize the Tibetans, the Uighurs (one million of them in concentration camps in 2019), the inhabitants of Hong Kong, and other peripheral peoples. They’ve set up the Khmer Rouge and the North Koreans as junkyard dogs chained right outside their house, and fortified the South China Sea and its potential underwater oil reservoir into an island fortress nearer to foreign coastlines than to their own. They and the Americans have become world leaders at takeover attempts by international totalitarian leaders hostile to progress and democracy. Third World countries endure the financial takeover of their infrastructure and resources by China, equal if not worse than the Western predecessor. The Chinese are “greening” their energy systems by dismantling obsolete power plants and selling them to be rebuilt in less well-developed nations. Despite the resumption of Chinese greatness and their almost single-handed reduction of world poverty by reducing it among their own poor people, such scandalous abuses are very bad publicity for their candidacy to world or even regional leadership. Why does the Chinese Communist Party do China such harm?
Like Americans, the Chinese are capable of the best as well as the worst. Both have to figure everything out; choose PeaceWorld or fail at WeaponWorld once again and for the final time.
Kublai Khan abandoned his Mongol capital, Karakorum, in favor of the Chinese one, Peking. During the mid-1300s, vengeful Chinese destroyed Karakorum. In 1287, the Mongols sacked and burned Pagan, capital of Burma (founded in 849). The Shans would do so in 1299, permanently this time. During the 13th century, Mongol chieftains consolidated every library their Chinese slaves begged them to spare and had all of them brought to Peking. This collection expanded over the next seven centuries, as did others in China. Serious damage resulted from the mid-1640 Manchu takeover, when Nanking, Peking, Fukien and Canton changed hands several times.
There followed the horrific Taiping rebellion with its twenty million Chinese dead (the concurrent American Civil War killed over 600,000 during the worst war Americans ever experienced). Then two Opium Wars against the London/Boston Drug Cartel. Believe it or not, these drug gangsters were ruled by Queen Victoria and backed by the Drug Lord financiers of Stanford University and America’s trans-continental railroads. In pursuit of its brain-dead War on Drugs, the DEA should confiscate those structures and auction them off to support its habit.
In June 1900, the Imperial Library (Han-Lin Yuan) of Beijing was leveled by fire because it was downwind from the European Legation that Chinese nationalists were trying to burn down.232During the conclusion of the same Yihetuan (Boxer) rebellion, European, American and Japanese armies sacked the Imperial Residence in Peking’s Forbidden City. Thereafter, a couple of Sino-Japanese Wars reduced Chinese libraries by three quarters. Finally, Americans bankrolled the Nationalists during the Chinese Civil War. This inept policy culminated in their evacuation to Taiwan. Mao Tse Tung was a library assistant at one point.
Back to “Europe” around Year One. Another Roman Emperor celebrated his son’s destruction of Jerusalem by installing a public library in the Forum he had built circa 70. The Octavian library was destroyed in 80. Emperor Domitian (81-96) had several wrecked libraries rebuilt — one of his desperate and ruinous reconstruction policies. Seeking disappeared works, he sent emissaries to copy unique originals in Alexandria. The fortunes he spent rebuilding civilization went wanting to pay mercenary armies that proceeded to rip out, gut and burn down all his efforts at reconstruction.
In 105, Rome destroyed the four-century-old capital of the Dacian Empire, Sarmizegetusa in what is now Romania. Roman deserters manned the last bastions of Dacian resistance. In the same way, Irish deserters from the American Army defended Mexican positions to the bitter end when the U.S. invaded Mexico. Meanwhile, the Texas Rangers served the U.S. Army as Gestapo agents during the Mexican War.
In the 2nd century, the most famous libraries in the West were Como and Tivoli in Italy, Tripoli in Lebanon and Timgad in Algeria. The Berbers destroyed this last city during the 7th century. Each of these cities was fought over, sacked and eventually reduced to a dusty backwater. In 130, the Romans erected Aelia Capitolina on the sixty-year-old ruins of Jerusalem. In 165, Rome sacked the Persian capital city, Seleucia. The Palatine library was destroyed circa 190. In 196, Septimus Severus took rebellious Byzantium. He had it burned down and its population enslaved, rebuilt it (a common Roman practice) and renamed it Antoninia after his wife. In 197, the Gallic commercial center of Lugdunum (Lyons) was sacked during another Roman civil war; it only recovered its famous prosperity in the last few centuries. Rome sacked Ctesiphon, the capital of rival Persia, in 198. It looted Syracuse, Sicily once again in 216.
An earthquake toppled the Colossus of Rhodes in 224 BCE: another Wonder of the World. Erected fifty years prior, it stood 100 feet tall. So superbly crafted, ships could make harbor between its outspread feet. This is asserted to be an impossible feat of engineering — what, yet another impossible feat of ancient engineering? The earthquake traumatized the city of Rhodes both physically and spiritually. Surviving inhabitants refused Egyptian king Ptolemy III’s offer to finance the reconstruction of their famous statue of Helios, their patron sun god.
Bishop Alexander established the Latin Library in Jerusalem. Around that time, Origen & Pamphilus created a great library in Caesarea, now a ruin. Heruli Goths sacked Philipolis in 250. Shapur I of Persia sacked Antioch twice in 256. Meanwhile, busy Goths burned down Ephesus in 262. Ephesus was the New York City of Asia at that time. Its temple of Diana (Artemis) was another Wonder of the World. It held the third largest library in the Western world after those of Alexandria and Pergamum. As noted earlier, it had already been set alight at least once. Those Goths went on to sack Chalcedon, Nice, Pruse, Apanda, Cius, Athens Corinth, Sparta, Argos, Nicomedia and many other cities from 265 to 277.
Alexandria endured fifteen years of civil war, famine and plague from 250 to 265. Another Roman Emperor suppressed a revolt there in 272, with untold damage to the Library. He defeated the Goths and the Alemanni and then sacked Palmyra in 273. The Franks destroyed Syracuse around 280. Another Roman Emperor suppressed another Alexandrine revolt and sacked the town in 295. Under his orders, the cities of Bursis and Coptos were sacked. In 298, he ordered all Christian texts burnt, churches destroyed and worship outlawed.
This massive purge probably cancelled the last opportunity to chronicle Christ’s life accurately.
The library at Antioch burned down once again in 363, along with the rest of the city. Some time between 300 and 500, the city of Ubar, a chief way station for the desert incense caravans of Arabia, collapsed into a sinkhole. Mohammed offers its destruction as a moral lesson to the unfaithful.
In 365, Egypt, Sicily, Dalmatia and Greece were struck by a tsunami that surged two miles inland after a seaquake. Fifty thousand people died in Alexandria alone. In 367, the Bishop there ordered Egyptians to burn all non-canonical religious writings. The Nag Hammadi heretical texts (rediscovered in 1945) survived this holocaust. A Roman Emperor commanded the mass incineration of all non-Christian books in 373, the year the Castilians burned down Lisbon. A Christian mob led by the archbishop of Alexandria, destroyed its Serapeum (Temple of Serapis) in 391. That same year, a Byzantine Emperor ordered every pagan temple razed. In 401, the final version of Ephesus’ Temple of Artemis was destroyed by order of St. John Chrysostom. Saints who burn down temples: what a world!
Some historians attribute the next thousand years’ Dark Age to alternating demonstrations of Christian and Pagan fanaticism. You can’t stage a respectable Dark Age without burning all the books first.
The Vandals sacked Rheims, Amiens, Arras and Tournai around 406. In 440, they sacked and nearly destroyed Marsala, a prosperous Sicilian city nearly 800 years old. Visigoths stormed and sacked Rome in 410, a feat the Vandals would reprise in 455.
A Chinese Army chased the Huns from their steppe homeland in 91, all the way across Asia into Europe. The Huns dealt equivalent destruction to every kingdom they encountered from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean until around 450, except for Paris, Constantinople and Rome, the western and southern limits of Attila’s raids.
St. Cyril of Alexandria led his monks to mob, torture and kill Hypatia, a Neo-Platonist philosopher renowned for her wisdom and beauty. The Persians sacked Miletus in 494 and Amida in 502. Another Christian zealot, the Emperor Justinian, closed the thousand-year-old University of Athens in 529, thus ending Neo-Platonism and its research into reincarnation. The Byzantines attempted and failed to conquer Persia, then failed to retake the Western Roman Empire from the barbarians. All they really managed to accomplish was the ruin and depopulation of almost every city in North Africa, Italy, Armenia and Anatolia.
Nanjing was destroyed by fire in 589. That same year, the Benedictines founded the Monastery of Monte Casino. St. Benedict, their patron, loathed scholarship. Despite his bias, it became another great library after his death. Destroyed by the Lombards in 585, by Saracens in 884, by Normans in 1046 and by an earthquake in 1349, it would be leveled by American bombers during World War II (sic). The Franks sacked Tarragona, the Roman capital of Spain, during the 5th century CE.
Antioch was another great library city on Turkey’s southern shore. Catastrophic earthquakes (the 526 one killed 250,000 inhabitants) alternated with a succession of military sacks (by Persians in 538 and 611, Arabs in 637, Seljuk Turks in 1085, Crusaders in 1098, Mamelukes of Egypt in 1268 and Ottoman Turks in 1516) to bring down this magnificent center of commerce and learning into a provincial backwater. The Library of Rome burned in 535; it was a total loss in 546.
Massive earthquakes and plagues wracked the world around 543. They halved the European population within fifty years. By 550, the crucifix became a fashionable Christian ornament. It’s strange, how nature-tormented Christians were taught (tension: get it?) to wear this idolatrous and shadistic trinket. Circa 600, Pope Gregory I (The Great, as usual) burned down the library of Palatine Apollo. The Persians sacked Damascus in 614, Jerusalem in 615 and then again in 619. Vyadhapura, Hindu Funan capital of the first Khmer kingdom, was taken over by the Chenla Empire in the 7th century.
The list of towns Muslims captured with varying degrees of destruction includes but is not limited to Pella, Damascus, Homs and Emesa in 635; Palmyra, Petra and the six sophisticated desert cities of the Nabateans, wiped out by 636. The Muslims took Ctesiphon in 637. They rooted out Persia’s official state religion, Zoroastrianism. Imagine the book-burning parties they must have held! Ibn Khaldun, a great world historian, wrote:
“Umar wrote [to the local Muslim commander who had requested permission to distribute these books to his troops as booty]: ‘Throw them into the water. If what they contain is right guidance, God has given us better guidance. If it is error, God has protected us against it.’” The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, Franz Rosenthal, translator, Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press, 1967, p. 373.
Jerusalem fell in the wake of this destruction, then Tripoli and Antioch in 638, Aleppo in 639, Caesarea and Gaza in 640, Babylon in 641, Ascalon in 644, and Tripoli again in 645. Nanking in China was destroyed during a dynastic transition in the 690s.
In 642, Arab conquerors found 700,000 volumes in the city of Alexandria. “Enough kindling to heat Alexandria’s baths for six months.” Umar again – Mohammed’s first Successor and Caliph of the Faith – declared that all necessary knowledge could be found in the Koran and any knowledge outside of it must be pernicious.
Sound familiar? Fundamentalists cannot be told apart, regardless of their religion, date of birth or ethnicity. Their mothers may have loved them nonetheless…or perhaps not enough.
The list goes on and on. Cyrene and Tripoli, which the Muslims took in 643; rebellious Alexandria again in 645 (ending its manuscript exchange once-and-for-all); Cyprus in 649; Rhodes in 654; Kabul in 664, 708 and 1504; Bokhara in 674 and 710; Samarkand (where Chinese craftsmen taught Muslims the art of paper-making) in 676 and 711; Carthage in 698; Gibraltar, Lisbon (burned) and Toledo in 711; Samarkand again in 712; Khwarizm, Ferghana, Tashkent and Kashgar in 713; Multan in 715; Lisbon in 717; Narbonne in 719; Seville in 721 (where the Western Gothic King Isidor’s library was destroyed); Carcassonne and Nimes in 726; Bordeaux (burned down) in 732; Derbent in 733; Samarkand, once and for all, in 737 or 738. The Franks took Narbonne back from the Muslims in 759. Palermo, Sicily fell to them in 831, independent Capua in 840, Bari in 841. Palermo would prosper as a Muslim stronghold until 1062 when the Pisans sacked it, then 1072 when the Normans seized it and rebuilt it as their Sicilian capital.
The monastery at Lindisfarne was the missionary center of the Celtic Christian Church. Vikings sacked it at the end of the 8th century – a foretaste of Viking raids into Britain that would escalate into multiple invasions and permanent occupation. Ravenna fell to the Lombards in 751. In 756, the British capital Alcluith was captured by the Picts.
The Haeinsa temple, established in 802 near the Korean city of Taegu, contains 80,000 printing blocks engraved with Buddhist scriptures dating from the 13th century.
The Javanese invaded Anam and Champa in 774. In 832, the Pyu capital, Sri Kshetra, was destroyed during a Thai raid led by Nanchao. Escaping northwards, its urban population was eventually taken captive by the Mon. Beneficiaries of trade between India and the rest of Southeast Asia, the Pyus were the most peaceful people in the region. They punished rare crimes with great leniency and elected their leaders democratically. Boys and girls went to Buddhist schools until they were twenty, establishing a custom of near-universal literacy in Burma ever since. They were so non-violent, they would not kill silk worms to make silk. Their modern descendants today, not so much (see the Rohinga).
In 807, Muslim raiders plundered Rhodes; in 840, they sacked Rome. Savage Kyrgyz Turks destroyed the Uighur capital city of Karablagasun during the same year. In later centuries, surviving Uighur exiles would serve the Mongols as mercenary scholars (a well-rewarded, perilous and seldom mentioned honor). These days, their descendants are the victims of Chinese imperial tyranny in China’s Far West.
In 871, ex-slaves destroyed Basra. Arab Muslims fought each other and the Turks to the death. At first, they did so as Northern and Southern Arabs, later as Shia and Sunni sectarians. Together, they sacked Muslim towns including Basra in 923, Kufa in 925 and Mecca in 929. I doubt that Mohammed would have approved.
The Patriarch of Constantinople, Photius (c. 820-891) compiled his Bibliotheca, an inventory of two hundred and eighty earlier texts. It is an invaluable reference textbook for many lost works. The Iconoclasts, famous only for their vandalism, destroyed the Sun of Science Foundation, whose twelve associate professors studied each house of the Zodiac. 36,500 books were destroyed there, including an ancient manuscript of Homer, said to have been written on the intestines of a snake 120 feet long. This last per Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, chapter 53.
In 846, a Muslim army from Cordoba sacked Leon; another army sacked Rome and burnt down St. Peters. In 878, Muslims conquered Syracuse. In 985, Muslims burned Barcelona, and then Leon in 988. In 976, al-Mansur, the new regent for the child Caliph of Cordoba,
“… proceeded to the library of al-Hakam [his father, the ex-Caliph], caused all the writings therein contained to be brought forth in the presence of a number of theologians and ordered these latter to be put on one side, with the exception of medical texts and treatises on arithmetic, all those books dealing with the sciences of the ancients: logic, astronomy and other sciences cultivated by the Greeks. When these had been separated from all the books relating to lexicography, grammar, poetry, history, medicine, jurisprudence, traditions, in short those sciences recognized by the Andalusians, Ibn Abi ‘Amir commanded that the works treating of the ancient sciences should be burned. Some were in fact committed to the flames; others were flung into the palace moats, or buried, or destroyed in some other manner. Ibn Abi ‘Amir acted in this fashion in order to ingratiate himself with the people of al-Andalus and to discredit in their eyes the principles followed by al-Hakam. Indeed, these sciences were ill regarded by the older generation and criticized by the leading men. The majority of those then engaged in the study of philosophy lost their ardor and kept secret what they knew of these sciences, only cultivating openly the branches permitted them, such as arithmetic, the rules governing the partition of inheritances, medicine and the like.” Arnold Toynbee, ed., Cities in History, McCraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1973, p. 177.
Around the year 999, Mahmud of Ghazni destroyed the Hindu temple dedicated to Shiva at Somnath in Gujarat, the same year he murdered his brother. Then he burned the famous library of the Fatimids in Bokhara. He may have advertised himself as a patron of the arts, but in reality he was just another two-bit religious fanatic. He built the Celestial Bride Mosque in Ghazni.
Christian Barcelonans sacked Cordoba in 1010. Muslims raided Pisa in 1011, their last big raid into Italy. In 1013, Berber rebels seized and sacked Cordoba wracked by internal unrest. Al-Mansur’s palace and carefully censored library were destroyed. In 1071 Seljuk Turks took Jerusalem from the Fatimid Muslims, then they fought each other among the ruins.
Between 1014 and 1018, Byzantine emperor Basil II attacked Bulgaria. Victorious in battle, he had 15,000 prisoners blinded and then ordered this grim procession sent home: one man out of every hundred got to keep one eye to guide the others. The Bulgarian King threw himself from his own battlements when he beheld the sorry remnant of his army stumble home. That same year, the Poles took Kiev.
In 1019, a Liao army was driven from Koryo (Korea). King Anawratha (1044-1077) founded the Myanmar (Burmese) empire. He “rescued” the Pegu half of the Mon kingdom from a Khmer raid and then took over the Thaton half, taking home to Pagan thirty sets of the Buddhist canon (Tripitaka), about 30,000 Mon monks and artisans and the captive king of Pegu. Even though the Mons dominated Burmese culture for the next two centuries, it was a love-hate affair based on military dominance on one hand and cultural superiority on the other. Koryo built a wall from sea to sea in 1044.
Seljuk Turks captured Caesarea in 1067. In 1076, they sacked Jerusalem (thus sparking the Crusades). In the same year, Almoravid fanatics took the salt and gold trading center of Kumbi. They massacred its pagan majority and imposed Islam on the Kingdom of Ghana. In 1068, they destroyed the Egyptian library of al-Quahira with its thousands of books.108 Kumbi endured a succession of invaders and reformers until it collapsed in 1240. A Soso chief sacked it in 1203. Norman allies of Pope Gregory VII sacked Rome in 1084. By 1102, the Muslims had taken every town in Portugal and each one in Spain up to Valencia. The Christians besieged and retook Toledo in 1085. Christianity would not entirely gain Portugal until 1147; Spain until 1340. After which the Christians would fight among themselves for another century; or longer? The Spanish Civil War of the 1930s ate up another million victims. In 1162, Frederick I Barbarossa (Redbeard) destroyed Milan.
The library of Banu Ammar, the greatest library in Syria, was scattered and destroyed during the sack of Tripoli by Genoese marines in 1109. This destruction was mirrored in many rich cities of the eastern Mediterranean -- including Jerusalem, Caesarea and the very rich island of Cyprus during the Crusades (sacked by Richard the Lionheart). Lasting from 1096 to 1291, there were eight major Crusader expeditions and many minor ones during which a million Europeans were killed along with uncounted Muslims, Jews and native Christians.
In 1170, Seljuk Turks destroyed the Armenian library in Syunik with its 10,000 manuscripts. In 1171, the Kurdish Sunni Saladin (Salah-al-din Yousouf) annihilated the Shia Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo along with all its libraries. He retook Jerusalem for Islam by 1187, as well as many other Crusader towns. Conquering Sicily and Italy in a series of complicated and bloody wars, the Normans took Bari, Tripoli, Mahadia, Malta and Corfu. They sacked Athens, Corinth and Thebes from 1146 to 1152.
The Muslim invasion of Hindu India induced massive mortality and destruction. Battles and follow-up massacres and book burnings occurred at Peshawar in 1008, Thaneswar in 1014, Kanauj in 1018, Kathiawar in 1023, Lahore in 1186 and Tarawari in 1191. In 1192, 120,000 Muslims demolished the Hindu temples at Ajmer. Delhi fell in 1193.
During that climax year of Hindu agony (what followed was merely the coup de grace for a civilization mortally wounded), the University of Nalanda – in Bihar, NW India – was destroyed by a fanatical Muslim psychopath whose name is best left unmentioned. Six hundred years in the making, the campus had housed 10,000 students and 2,000 teachers (think of that student/teacher ratio!) Three buildings on the vast campus housed the library. The foremost, containing precious Buddhist texts, was nine stories high and gilded with precious stones that glittered in the sun. The library housed hundreds of thousands of books on every topic. It took three months of smoky pall to burn. Restored as best they could by subsequent Buddhist lords, Nalanda was finally destroyed by Hindu Tirthaka mendicants. Indian Buddhism never recovered from this interfaith ten-count of cultural vandalism. http://mentalfloss.com/article/50038/11-book-burning-stories-will-break-your-heart… There followed the destruction of Benares in 1194, Badaun and Kannauj in 1195, Kalinja in 1202, Magadha and Bengal from 1201 to 1203. In 1234, Chahadadeva captured Narwar from the Muslims. The Yadava capital, Devagiri, fell in 1294, Ramthanbor in 1301, Chitor in 1303, most of the Deccan by 1311, Kabul in 1504, Agra and Delhi in 1525 and Talikot in 1564. From the 13th to the 19th century, cruel Moslem rulers destroyed a hundred Hindu temples dedicated to Shiva in the pilgrimage city of Benares alone.
Usually at gun- or sword-point, they erected mosques on the ruins — the same way Christian evangelicals built churches over pagan ruins and Communists built community centers over Christian ruins. This has been a source of friction ever since, from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to most of the cities in Northern India. After all, what the Muslims got away with at sword-point a thousand years ago, they’re not about to permit anyone else to do to them today. And it never occurred to any of these fanatics – Muslim, atheist and otherwise – that inviting Allah into a building and ejecting Shiva from the same building, or inviting the Christian God and evicting the Gods of old, is the same as rejecting every faith including one’s own.
God has shown more patience than I can envision, with silly humans nit-picking each other to death over their contradictory, restrictive, and yammering definitions of God’s infinite, immeasurable and limitless love.
The Kingdom of East Java was destroyed in 1017. Tangut, Khmer, Mon, Chola (who invaded Malayu in 1025) Viet, Burmese, Srivijaya, Annamese and Champa civilizations fought one another across every portion of Asia that Turks, Mongols and Muslims had not clawed at to destroy. Equivalent massacres exploded on the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos. Many islands contained one or more warring tribes and city-states. Like most societies, they despoiled each other’s citadels and libraries at every opportunity.
Great Novgorod, the seat of Russian power under the Viking Rurik, was established in 862. It repulsed attacks by Teutonic and Livonian Knights, by the Swedes and the Mongols. It was taken by Ivan III of Moscow and laid waste by Ivan IV. The Uzbeks took Meshed, holy Shiite city, in 1582. Moscow burnt down in 1570 with 200,000 dead. Khiva was destroyed in 1603, Karakorum in 1688.
The Lombards, Marcomanni, Gepidae, Heruli, Vandals, Avars, Burgundi, Helvetii, Teutons, Alans, Franks, Saxons, Goths, Huns, Vikings, Magyars and Pechnegs formed waves of killer swarms. Thanks to them, no city, monastery or library in Eurasia and North Africa survived the decline of Roman power and the onset of Christianity. Just like nowadays with our tyrant wannabees, political, religious and billionaire, civilization was on the verge of total annihilation at the hands of born-again Huns who had just enough familiarity with true civilization to destroy it.
King Charlemagne could scarcely read and couldn’t write. He took hostage almost every educated nobleman in Europe and then killed most of them to secure his Empire. He destroyed the independent commercial center of Fiume on the Adriatic. Circa 800, he and his mentor Alcuin had to recruit priest volunteers from the four corners of the narrow Catholic world: (North Africa, Rome, Ireland and Byzantium) to teach noble-born orphans their forgotten ABC’s. His grandson, Charles the Bald, was a bibliophile who established his own library and supplemented the one he found in the Palace. Both libraries disappeared after his death. Abbey libraries were established at Tours, Cluny, Corvey and Fulda (the only military chokepoint on the German Plain). Like most “great” libraries of this period, they boasted a few hundred volumes at most — all of them perished. Nearly all of London burned down in 798.
Meanwhile, mead-soaked Vikings were toasting each other from hollowed-out human skulls (from which the toast Sköll!). They burned down Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen) and Cologne (Köln) around 800, sacked London, Cadiz and Pisa. They sacked the famous Monastery of Iona in 806, Clonmore in 836. The Danes took Dublin in 851. York, Canterbury with its Cathedral, London, Paris, Aix, Worms, Algerica and Toulouse, all those and their lesser satellites were attacked (most taken) by 861. Looting their way from the White Sea southwards along Russian rivers, Varengian Norsemen sacked Constantinople in 865. After this display of military prowess, they signed on as its mercenary Varangian Guard.
After a precipitous Roman evacuation, the backwater that was England absorbed centuries of raids, massacres and invasions by Celts, renegade Gallo-Romans, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Irish, Jutes, Picts, Scots, Vikings and assorted barbarians. Alfred the Great of England staged a revival of Old English literature around 890.
In 978, the Holy Roman Emperor and Charlemagne’s heir apparent sacked Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), Charlemagne’s coronation city. London burned down again in 982. Another Caliph destroyed Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher in 1009. Oghuz Turks sacked Tabriz in 1029. Benares, India, was plundered by a Punjabi (Muslim) army in 1034. In 1084 the Normans sacked Rome. Are you catching me repeating myself? Resurgent Christian crusaders massacred the populations of Antioch in 1098 and Jerusalem in 1099. Man, woman and child; Christian, Muslim, Jew and others: it did not matter to them. The Muslims would retake their depopulated cities with relative ease.
Venice burned down in 1106. Crusaders destroyed the Zahiriya Library and its three million books in 1108, then Tripoli’s thousand-year-old library during an 1109 siege (100,000 volumes destroyed) .108 They sacked Christian Byzantium and destroyed its libraries in 1204. Pisa sacked Amalfi, Italy in 1135 and 1137. In 1151, the Persians burned Chazni. In 1177, the Chams sacked Angkor Wat. Zimbabwe, capital of a mining empire intermittently rich since the 3rd century CE, was abandoned for unknown reasons during the 11th century. In 1184, the great Abbey at Glastonbury, site of one of the oldest Christian churches in Europe, (do you recall Jesus visiting Britain?) burned down along with all its sacred scriptures. All Saints Church burned in 1318; the Megapisleon burned twice in 1660.172
Byzantium (“as old as the hills and the stones”) was founded in 657 BCE. Constantinople and its libraries were set up on its footprint in 330 CE. The first Hagia Sophia (Church of Divine Wisdom) burned down in 360; the second in 532. Around 475, a fire destroyed 120,000 volumes. This collection grew back to 600,000 volumes. In 551 the last Latin library in Constantinople was destroyed. Thereafter, collected works were written solely in Greek. A tidal wave drowned Beirut during the same year; it would it take ten centuries to recover.
Constantinople boasted a half million inhabitants, free bread and circuses, educational stipends for the talented and rudimentary medical care for the poor. Savage rioting between Blue (reactionary) and Green (radical) parties, however, accelerated the Empire’s decline. Actually, those mutual benefit societies (along with the Red and the White) opposed each other on every social issue including religion and politics. They championed different players during Hippodrome chariot races — another instance of sports enthusiasm run amok. This zero-sum patronage system – doling out minimal benefits after enormous military bureaucracy taxes had been extracted – set its members against each other tooth and nail. Finally, the Imperial Guard waded into one of the worst riots and massacred the Greens — the Blues were the Empress’ favorites. These ridiculous squabbles (reminiscent of the factional squabbling between interchangeable American Democrats and Republicans) caused a military disaster during the battle of Manzikert in 1071, during which the Seljuk Turks massacred a huge Byzantine army. This disaster befell the army even though it was at the height of its military power and cost its civilian population a fortune to maintain. It happened largely because the two top commanders were Green and Blue political fanatics and wouldn’t support each other during the battle.
In 1204 Christian Crusaders sacked Christian Orthodox Constantinople and its libraries. In 1212 London burned down. In 1236 the Holy Roman Emperor burned down Vicenza (Venice). French king Louis IX had the Talmud burned in Paris. In 1453 the Turks finally took Constantinople with grievous loss to life and property. Shiploads of books were evacuated to Venice and elsewhere, and from thence into oblivion. Later, the Turks would destroy Trebizond on the Black Sea: the last refuge of the “Eastern Roman” emperors.
During that same year, the Vatican established its Library. The Catholic Pope didn’t lift a finger to save Greek Orthodox Constantinople from the Muslims. The Vatican Library was famous for blacklisting unique manuscripts of Europe’s greatest works listed in a Papal Index Librorum Prohibitorium (index of forbidden books, commonly called The Index). Papal suppression of rare knowledge stifled intellectual discourse for centuries —a censorship almost as effective as our media-glut of commercial white noise and massive censorship of almost everything else, these days.
During the European Dark Ages, brilliant Muslim scholars guarded Koranic commentaries as well as some Greek and Roman thought. Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham (Arabic: أبو علي الحسن بن الحسن بن الهيثم, Latinized: Alhacen or (denigrated) Alhazen (965 – 1039) is one of the originators of modern science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_work. He wrote two hundred books, at least ninety-six of them scientific texts, of which about fifty survive in whole or in part
Yet around 1100, a pious Muslim scholar concluded that ancient Greek texts led to “loss of belief in the origin of the world and in the Creator.” In 1150, the latest Caliph set fire to the enormous philosophical library of Baghdad (a relatively recent city established in 762), saving onrushing Mongols the trouble. Actually, when the Mongols took Baghdad and massacred all of its inhabitants, the wide Tigris river was said to have run red with blood from the bodies thrown into it, then black with ink from books disposed of in like manner.
Some of these tidbits were taken from L. Sprague de Camp’s The Ancient Engineers, Dorset Press, 1963. A handful of enlightened Christians and Jews preserved the Old and New Testaments as well as a few Talmudic and monastic commentaries. Other beliefs were snuffed out without mercy: Persia’s Zoroastrian religion/bureaucracy, the Hellenized Buddhism of the Cushan, any mention of the widely held belief in reincarnation and peaceful offshoots of the Manichean religion: all of those were wiped out.
Fundamentalist Taliban mobsters are finishing up this task today. They’ve wrecked the last of countless Buddhist statues that once lined the Silk Road. Across Europe, the Mediterranean Basin and South Asia, thousands of beautiful statues were shattered or had their facial features gouged out ― more or less half by Christian iconoclasts and half by like-minded Muslim fanatics. This vandalism has nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus or Mohammed, neither of whom would have approved. Such righteous wreckage makes the religion that undertakes it look bad to civilized outsiders, makes its adherents seem like ignorant vandals on a rampage. One would expect fewer conversions that way. Jesus and Mohammed were steadfast advocates of gathering as many converts as possible through peacemaking, compassion and noble generosity. International psychopaths ancient and modern, not so much.
Constantinople was nearly spared Turkish pillage by the Mongols who conquered the largest contiguous empire in history. Calling themselves the Chin dynasty, Juchen Mongols destroyed the Sung capital, Kaifeng, twice in 1126 and 1127. Nanking, the Southern Sung capital, fell to them in 1127. The nomad Mongols despised cities; they leveled them on the run. Major cities sacrificed by the Mongols include but are not limited to: Peking and the Chinese cities north of the Yellow River, in 1215; Susa in 1218 (dating back to 5000 BCE; leveled prior by the Assyrian King Assurbanipal in 647 BCE and again in 638 CE when Muslim armies conquered Persia), Khojend, Otrar, Bokhara (which surrendered without a fight but was destroyed anyway), and Samarkand in 1220; Zenjan, Ghazni, Gurganj, Nishapur, Merv, Balkh, Thalequan, Bamian, Ghulghuleh in 1221; Herat, Astrakhan and Sudak in 1222; Ninghsia in 1227; Tbilisi, Erivan and Baku between 1231 and 1236; many south central Chinese cities including Pien Liang (Kaifeng) in 1234; Moscow and Kaluga in 1237; Kiev in 1240; Cracow, Pest and Lahore in 1241; Nanchao, China in 1253; the major cities of Koryo, 1253-57; Hanoi in 1257; Baghdad in 1258 (see above).
A Khwarezmian army fled from the Mongols in good order. It managed to sack Jerusalem in 1244. Mongols took Hanoi in 1257; they destroyed Maiyafarign; Alamut in 1256 (where the great Persian historian and Mongol bureaucrat, ‘Ala ad-Din Juviani, persuaded the Mongol tyrant Hulägu to spare what was left of the 200,000 to 1.5 million volume Library of the Assassins (Isma’ilis); Baghdad in 1258; Cracow, Sandomir, Bythom and Sidon in 1259; Aleppo and Nablus in 1260; Mosul in 1262 (at the time, Mosul was world-famous for its beautiful paintings – typical mosque decoration patterns, since – for its brilliant enamel and metalwork and for the fabric muslin); Urgench, Khiva and Bukhara in 1273; Hangchow in 1276; Chaochow and Canton in 1278 and 1279 (snuffing out heroic Sung resistance in China); Bhamo in 1283; Hanoi in 1285; Pagan and Hanoi, for the last time in 1287.
Shortly thereafter, the indomitable Annamese ejected the Mongols. Any hobby historian, including my younger self in high school, could have forewarned French, Japanese and American invaders of their eventual defeat by Vietnamese nationalists, if only they’d bothered to listen. The Soviet invaders of Afghanistan, likewise. Anyone who invades that country, for whatever reason, has failed History 101; as I kept insisting to ignorant Westerners since 9/11, to no avail. The only people who beat Alexander the Gross in a fair fight were Afghan Gypsies. The only people who stopped the Mongols on a battlefield were Egyptian Mamelukes and the Vietnamese, plus Indonesian and Japanese islanders. Of course, this kind of victory wasn’t always good news for the neighbors. In 1291, the Mamelukes destroyed Tyre, Sidon, Beirut and Haifa.
It was said that a comely virgin balancing a pitcher of gold on her head could walk the length of the Silk Road without fear of molestation – except, probably, by Mongol watchmen. For the first time in history, Marco Polo and his party could cross the length of Asia under one passport. Humans purchased this hyper-security with untold suffering and destruction. How badly do we want to feel secure? This Highway to Hell became the transmission route of the Black Death.
In 1983, the National Geographic Society published a big, beautiful book entitled Peoples and Places of the Past: The National Geographic Illustrated Cultural Atlas of the Ancient World. One of that society’s countless informative, inexpensive and fascinating historical texts; not to mention the cheapest high-quality magazine in circulation at the time, many issues of which contained beautifully drafted maps and posters, not to mention world class photography. Bless them. This book’s three-foot by two, full-folio title page contained a giant picture and the following caption on the next page:
“Afghan [camel] riders pick their way past the ruined citadel now known as Shar-e-Gholgola, the “city of screams.” Once the seat of empire and a lush, prosperous metropolis, the city fell before Mongol invaders in the 13th century.”
Why do my daydreams torment me with similar images of a “planet of screams”: this desolate Earth? Can’t we do better than that?
In 1081, Japanese Hiei monks burned down the monastery at Miidera. In 1113, 20,000 armed monks attacked Enryajuji. In 1165, Hiei monks burned the Hosso fortress in Kyoto. In 1193, Zen Buddhism was prohibited in Japan. The Japanese stopped two Mongol invasions on the landing beach, the second with help from a kamikaze (Divine Wind) typhoon. Thereafter, the Japanese fought civil wars among themselves for centuries. Internally pacified and stripped of firearms by forced gun control, they launched the first of a series of vicious invasions of Korea. The Japanese drew inspiration for their Neo-Confucian Shinto religion by reading books they’d ransacked from Korean libraries. In 1275, a major library was founded in Kanazawa (a district of Yokohama), with the intention of collecting every book written in Chinese and Japanese. Though diminished, it still exists.
The Mongols invaded Java and burned down its capital, Kediri or Daha, in 1293. Shortly thereafter, the Javanese expelled the Mongols. Local disease helped, no doubt, the way it helped Haitian revolutionaries annihilate French invaders later on. The Mamelukes destroyed Sis, Adana, Tarsus and Lajazzo in 1275. Alexandria was overwhelmed once again in 1303, this time by a monstrous tidal wave.
The Egyptians destroyed Tripoli in 1289; the Muslims, Arbela in 1310. There followed the Mongol destruction of the Genoese Crimean colony of Kafa in 1308 (where dead plague victims were catapulted into town), then transmitted by naval evacuees and dispersed thereafter by commercial shipping); Kalinin in 1335; Herat in 1341; Kashgar in 1380; Herat again in 1381; Moscow in 1382; Fars in 1386; Karakorum in 1388; Smyrna and Baghdad again in 1393; Astrakhan and Serai in 1395; Delhi and Meerut in 1399; Aleppo and Damascus in 1400; Baghdad once again in 1401; Angora and Smyrna in 1402. Once the Mongol war machine cranked up, nothing but the death of its supreme commander and subsequent clan partitions could turn aside its whirlwind destruction.
Around 1405, the Turk/Mongol butcher Tamerlane unleashed more chaos across Central Asia than anyone could imagine. Also known as Timur the Lame, he was a devout Muslim and a brilliant psychopath. With ecumenical gusto, he massacred adherents of every creed. His annihilation of Delhi cost over 80,000 lives; the city would take over a century to recover. Hundreds of thousands of victims were butchered under Timur’s personal supervision. Meanwhile, he recruited the best artisans he could find to guild his magnificent capital, Samarkand. He spared Mosul from siege and rebuilt its pontoon bridge across the Tigris. His city-kill credits include Balkh in 1370, Urgench in 1379, Abdizhan in 1375, Isfarian in 1381, Zaranj in 1383, Asterabad in 1384, Kars and Tiflis in 1386, Van and Ispahan (70,000 dead) in 1387, Tiflis in 1400, Baghdad (with 90,000 dead) in 1401. His rivals destroyed Moscow, Vladimir, Yriiel, Mozhaisk in 1382; and Tabriz in 1386. Tamerlane destroyed Azov in 1395; Astrakhan and Sarai in 1396; Multan and Talamba in 1398; Delhi and Miraj in 1399; Aleppo, Moma, Homs and Baalbek in 1400; Damascus in 1401; the Ottoman capital of Bursa, Smyrna (Izmir) and Sardis in 1402. Tamerlane died in Otrar on January 19, 1405. The secret location of his tomb was secured by executing all its excavators. His death cut short his plan to annihilate Chinese civilization once and for all, and turn its rotting carcass into the pivot point for his conquest of the rest of the world.
Fourth Crusade fanatics sacked Zara in 1202 and Thessalonica in 1204. These so-called crusaders destroyed every city and massacred everyone they encountered: Christian and otherwise, armed and otherwise, resisting and otherwise. Then they were massacred like rabid dogs by the first real army the Muslims sent against them.
In the 1200s, the Almohad Berbers – raging Muslim fundamentalists from Morocco – re-re-invaded Spain. Their Almoravid predecessors had already wrested Spain from Visigoth hegemons in 711. Resurgent Spanish Christians took advantage of this inter-Muslim strife to snuff out the most advanced society of the Middle Ages: the Islamic colonies of al-Andalus (Andalusia). Grenada, the last Muslim stronghold in Spain, fell to the Christians in 1492. The Pope authorized the Spanish Inquisition in 1238. Cardinal Jimenez, the Grand Inquisitor who succeeded blood-spattered Torquemada, had 24,000 books burned in Grenada. From then on, Spanish conquerors would snuff out each new civilization they encountered.
In Central America, the Bishop of Yucatan, Diego de Landa patiently studied the literature of the Maya. Their records date back to August 12, 3113 BCE. They had predicted that this world cycle would end on the winter solstice of December 21, 2012. If something significant ended on that date, nobody noticed — unless this ending unfolds over the next few decades of gradually accelerating decay.
After all, life is like a Russian comedy: “Everybody dies,” quoting the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
Bishop De Landa patiently had the natives teach him High Mayan. He earned the grudging respect of elders, shamans and priests. They reverently brought him their last surviving manuscripts for safekeeping. Once he believed he had captured the entire collection, he had everything burned. His substitute was his own Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán.
Of thousands of Mayan texts, only a few survive today. Those include the Dresden Codex, the Paris Codex (including the Popol Vuh and the Rabinal Achi), the Madrid Codex and a handful more. The Aztecs, their vassals and enemies (including the inhabitants of the 2000-year-old Zapotek city of Monte Alban) suffered similar fates. So did the feuding Incas and their vassals in the Andes. So did every Native nation in South and Central America. None survived except as miserable remnants. Many were completely exterminated.
Northern Europeans dealt equivalent Christian mercy to North American Natives. They killed several times as many of them as the Nazis did the Jews. Holocaust indeed, in the Land of the Free.
Let’s set aside, for a moment, the grim British project of handing out smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans. The Canadian government managed to dispossess its fewer but more menacing Native Canadians almost peacefully — unlike the genocidal bully/victim relationship perfected in the U.S. They adopted two expedients: 1) they guaranteed native title in perpetuity to small tracts of land centered on each tribe’s most sacred (burial) ground, instead of shuffling crushed survivors onto more and more remote badland reservations; and 2) the Royal Canadian Mounted Police administered justice more or less equitably between the natives and settlers. In contrast, the U.S. hired glory-hound militarists, larcenous political appointees and bigoted Christian fanatics to abuse Native Americans at gunpoint.
Only a few Native American nations were peaceable by nature. Oral traditions, archeological remnants and pictorial records reveal intertribal warfare and often near-total extermination in Meso-American sites both tribal and urban. Population pressures largely drove them. The great urban civilizations of South and Central America succeeded each other in ascending order of bloody militarism and human sacrifice. Only the Six Nations of the Iroquois (the fiercest warriors in America) are on record as having established an internally peaceful Confederacy. They tended to kick non-confederate butt until the Whites arrived with their diseases, firepower and overwhelming numbers. A few Native American nations on the Pacific coast were inherently peaceful. Perhaps predictably, their red and white neighbors abused them with equal enthusiasm. Apparently, Guarani natives greeted the Spanish colonizers of Paraguay in peace (virtually none of them survive today). No readily available records document how many more native peoples were pacifists at heart and suffered annihilation by, or forced assimilation into, more warlike tribes or alien civilizations.
By 400 CE, some unknown combination of disasters destroyed the nearly two-thousand-year-old Olmec civilization. Meso-American urban society is traceable from 1500 BCE to about 600 BCE at Chavin de Huantar in Northern Highlands of Peru. A city-site existed at San Loranzo, Tenochtitlan (ca. 1150-900 BCE); as well as its probable political successor, La Venta (c. 800-400 BCE). Both urban civilizations seem to have inexplicably destroyed themselves.
Monte Alban was a mountaintop city that housed some 24,000 people. It went into decline in the 7th century. The city of Teotihuacán was the greatest city in the New World: population 200,000, founded c. 300 CE. It destroyed itself with deliberately set fires between 700 and 750. More and more warriors appear in its final century’s art. Copan was the proud capital of the Maya. Its ceremonial centers date back to c. 2000 BCE. It snuffed out sometime between 830 and 930, along with its satellite cities. The Maya were inspired by the Toltec capital of Tula or Tollan (35,000 inhabitants). It lost its ceremonial center to fire between 1150 and 1200. By 1300, the starving inhabitants of Tiahauanaco abandoned their Andean plateau. They’d inscribed it with giant mounded-pebble glyphs visible only from the air. The neighboring Huari Empire collapsed around the same time, c. 1000 CE.
Giant metropolises were abandoned, which once housed 100,000 people or more. Speculation about these disasters includes abrupt climate change (super-El Niños), irrigation-disrupting earthquakes, crop depletion, civil war, invasion, disease — even rabid vampire bat infestations and mass evacuation by extraterrestrials.
In North America, one could have found advanced urban centers like Casas Grandes; the Hohokam, Chaco, Mogollon and Anasazi (Pueblo Bonito) cultures of the American Southwest; Mound People towns like the Hopewell complexes near the Great Lakes; and equivalent Mississippian towns like Cahokia near St. Louis. One or more of them may have traded with more the southerly nations listed above. They also disintegrated for a variety of mysterious reasons by 1300.
Ani was the capital of the ancient Armenian state. An earthquake destroyed it during the 14th century. The same fate befell the Pharos of Alexandria, a lighthouse one hundred feet square at its base and two hundred feet tall, completed in 280 BCE. Apart from the Pyramids, it was the last survivor of the Seven Wonders of the Classical World. Wrecked by earthquakes in 956 and 1303, it was finished off in 1323. Camel loads of scrap bronze were caravanned into oblivion.
Berlin burned in 1405. Palembang, Sumatra was destroyed in 1407. Harfleur fell to the English in 1415, punctuating the 116-year “Hundred Years War” between France and England (1337-1453). In 1419, the Lesser Town of Prague was destroyed during recurrent Hussite rebellions. Amsterdam burned in 1421 and again in 1453. Altenburg, Germany was burned by Hussites in 1430. These heavily armed, wagon-borne heretics formed one of the first modern armies. Nearly half the combatants bore firearms and many private soldiers were literate. Utraquist and Taborite (Hussite) sectarians ravaged Central Europe until 1452 when Prague fell once again and local nobles exterminated them.
The three main halls of Peking’s Forbidden City were destroyed by fire in 1421. Successive conflicts between Turkic and Mongol descendants (fanatical Muslim and Buddhist converts, respectively) destroyed Nishni Novgorod and Gorodites in 1408; Urgench in 1431; the Uzbeck capital Olugh-beg, and Samarkand (whose famous porcelain tower was smashed) c. 1450; Sairam and Tashkent in 1451; Sarai, capital of the Golden Horde, in 1502; Aksu, Jusha and Bai in 1514.
The Chams (Champa) raided the region of Angkor in 1177. It was the intensively urban seat of Khmer power. The Cambodians counter-invaded in 1190. The Thais defeated the Khmers at Sukothai in 1238. They captured Ankhor Wat in 1353 and Angkor Thom in 1431. Those cities were finally abandoned just before 1450. In 1431, Tuaregs took and sacked Timbuktu, the 200-year-old capital of the Mali Empire. In 1439, the Ottoman Turks took Semendia, the Serbian capital; in 1448 they took Herat. Spain took Naples in 1442. Circa 1450, the Annamese (Vietnamese) took, lost and retook the Champa capital, Vijaya. The Tatars took Moscow in 1451. Thai Ayuthians took the Chiengmai capital (founded by the Thai King Mangrai after 1239) in 1452.
In 1453, the French retook Bordeaux. This ended the Hundred Years War and set loose thousands of routiers (rootiay, “roadies,” demobilized soldiers) also called écorcheurs (flayers) for their favorite interrogation technique, to ravage the French countryside and torture its peasantry for decades to come; just like they had in a more organized way during the war. Immediately thereafter, the English fought the civil War of the Roses until 1485. Thereafter, the French fought out their Fronde (Sling) civil war.
Affluent Trebizond surrendered to Ottoman Turks in 1461; it never recovered from their abuse. Timbuktu was sacked by the Songhai in 1468. After decades of civil war, the Japanese Monastery at Honganji was destroyed in 1465. Civil war ravaged Kyoto from 1467 until 1477. Otranto, Italy, fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1481. In 1482, the English took Edinburgh. Dresden burned in 1491.
During the 15th century, the Aztec empire pulsed outward. Prior to 1325 CE, they had been a handful of sociopathic “chosen people” exiled to two snake-infested swamp islets by their victorious neighbors. By around 1430, they destroyed their own chronicles to erase the bitter memory of snake-eating days. By the time the Spaniards sealed their doom in 1518, they had turned into the most vicious imperialists in Mexico, lashing out against their neighbors from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast of Mexico. Aztec women were said to have been the most beautiful…
The Moscovites took Tver in 1485. In 1492, Grenada fell to the Christians, ending the Muslim occupation of Spanish territory. The Swedes sacked Ivangorod in 1496. Milan, Naples and other Italian cities fell repeatedly to French-led Renaissance invaders hired from all of Europe and then sent packing, riddled with syphilis.
Uzbeks took Herat, Khorasan and Transoxiana c. 1500. In 1505, the Portuguese sacked Kilwa and Mombassa: the two greatest trade emporia in East Africa. They took Hormuz in 1508. These events mark the beginning of modern Europe’s conquest of the world. During this period, almost every node of world commerce was sacked, burned and raked over (most several times), and almost every tribe and nation on Earth enslaved.
Anglo-Saxons love to condemn the French Revolution for its three-year Reign of Terror, during which about 40,000 French elites were executed by vengeful French proletarians. For shame! How much more civilized we smug Anglo-Saxons are, compared to those rabid Frogs! Well, amphibians can’t get rabies, but you get my drift. They fail to mention the fact that there hadn’t been a year since the 16th century when less than thousands of native elites weren’t massacred by European imperialists (including hypocrite Brits and Americans and Russians, and, yes, the French too), somewhere around the globe.
Americans keep harping on how much more “civilized” their Revolution was, compared to the French one a few years later. You flaming hypocrites! Weren’t thousands of Loyalist American Tories slaughtered in combat during the American Revolution, and many more men, women and children forced overseas at gunpoint after the fighting stopped? Westerners committed just as systematic genocide against Native Americans as the Nazis did against their continental neighbors, and as the Russian and Chinese Communists did against their own people.
In any case, four million books and 26,000 ancient manuscripts were destroyed by French revolutionaries.160
Mombassa, capital of a vast African empire, burned down in 1508. In 1510, the Persians took Baku and Tabriz back from Tatars, and the Russians took Pskov. Don Affonce de Albuquerque sacked Goa for four days that same year, boasting he crammed all the mosques in town with fleeing Muslim citizens and set them ablaze. A year later, this Portuguese entrepreneur sacked Malacca, the greatest seaport in South East Asia with 100,000 inhabitants.
Ottoman Turks defeated the Mamelukes during days of bloody fighting in the streets of Cairo in 1517, then sacked it. The island of Rhodes fell to the Turks in 1522. Rebellious peasants pillaged Mainz in 1525. In 1527, the Shans sacked Ava, the Northern Burmese capital. That same year, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V sacked Rome, thus ending the Renaissance with a military flourish.
Spain sacked Tunis in 1535. In 1536, British King Henry VIII and his Prime Minister, Sir Thomas Cromwell, had 800 abbeys, friaries and nunneries ransacked and dissolved. The Abbey at Glastonbury – said to have once housed the Sacred Chalice – suffered a commercial sack from which it never recovered.
“The destruction of books was almost incredibly enormous. Bale describes the use of them by bookbinders and by grocers and merchants for the packing of their goods. Maskell calculates the loss of liturgical books alone to have approached the total of a quarter of a million. An eyewitness describes the leaves of Duns Scotus as blown about by the wind even in the courts of Oxford, and their use for sporting and other purposes. Libraries that had been collected through centuries, such as those of Christ Church and St. Albans, both classical and theological, vanished in a moment. It was not only the studious orders that gathered books; the friars, also, had libraries, though, as Leland relates of the Oxford Franciscans, they did not always know how to look after them. So late as 1535, a bequest was made by the bishop of St. Asaph of five marks to buy books for the Grey Friars of Oxford. Nor can it be doubted that vast numbers of books less directly theological must have perished.” Taken from “The Dissolution of the Religious Houses,” at http://www.bartleby.com/213/0301.html
The French army and Berber pirate allies sacked Nice in 1543. In 1544, the English re-sacked Edinburgh. Russians took Kazan in 1554 and Astrakhan in 1556. The Portuguese destroyed Rio de Janeiro in 1557. From 1562 to 1628, France indulged its worst bigots during the Huguenot Wars. The Protestant segment of the brightest luminaries in France was forced to seek refuge, dignity and their daily bread in foreign lands. France would miss those talented expatriates for centuries to come. In this manner, France doomed itself to second-rate – if good Catholic – status. In 1565, Kannada (Hampi) was sacked and turned into the Indian version of Pompei. In 1569, Northern English Earls sacked Durham Cathedral.
The Russians sacked Novgorod in 1570. The Tatars sacked and burned Moscow in 1571 (200,000 dead). Antwerp fell to Spain in 1576 and again in 1585. Venice burned in 1577. After liberating themselves from the Spaniards (that took them 80 years) and enjoying a brief Golden Age, most Flemish cities were sacked by foreign armies. An English fleet sacked Cadiz and Lisbon in 1587. A Portuguese army sacked Mombassa in 1589. Moroccans destroyed Gao, the Songhai capital. They sacked Timbuktu in the early 1590s, destroyed Ahmed Baba’s library and the famous University of Sankore. The English sacked Cadiz again in 1596. From 1599 on, Protestant and Catholic leaders started burning each others’ libraries all over Germany. Ten thousand forbidden Protestant books were set alight in Graz alone.
At Oxford University, the Bodleian library replaced the original that burned down in 1602. Khiva was destroyed in 1603. Cardinal Federigo Borromeo founded the Ambrosian Library in Milan in 1609, possibly from remnants of the great library of its defeated rival, Como. The Achenese sacked Johore in 1613. The Japanese government took Osaka Castle in 1615. During the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) at least ten million victims died — nearly every other German. Imagine what happened to the region’s libraries. Dutch adventurers burned down Jakarta in 1619 and then enslaved the Banda islanders to extract more spice. Prague was looted repeatedly; the Austrians sacked it in 1620. Heidelberg was sacked in 1621. In 1630, Ottomans destroyed Hamadan, the ancient capital of Media. The next year, Protestant Swedes took Frankfurt and Catholic Germans took Magdeburg, both by storm followed by merciless pillage. Japanese government troops stormed Hara castle in 1637. In 1645, the Manchus sacked Yang-chou with “very heavy casualties.” They would take another forty years to subdue the Ming dynasty. Kandahar fell to the Persians in 1649. In 1654, the Russians took Smolensk. A year later, the Swedes took Warsaw, lost it to the Poles and then retook it. That same year, the Russians retook Kiev.
The magnificent city of Edo (now Tokyo) numbered 107,000 inhabitants in 1657, the year it burned down. The Siamese took Chiengmai in 1662. The next year, the Moguls took Assam. In 1664 and again in 1670, King Sivaji took Surat. Its twice-wrought destruction became the pivot points of his life — how sad. By 1665, 100,000 Londoners had died of plague. The city burned down next year, along with most of its libraries and private collections. The Moguls took Chitagong in 1666. In 1670, Tsaritsyn and Astrakhan fell to Cossacks. The Russians retook Astrakhan in 1671.
The Library of the Escorial of Madrid burned down in 1671, taking with it almost all the official documentation of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. The Spanish Crown had forbidden this information to be disseminated outside its domain. In 1673, the French took Maastricht. Karakorum was destroyed in 1688 and Athens was gutted. The Turks used the Parthenon as a powder magazine, which Venetian artillery promptly blew up. Five months later, the Venetians “won” the battle of Athens. By then, plague turned the city into a ghost town for three years. Then the Turks retook it.
During the endgame of World War II (sic), the British Army sited a gun battery on the Parthenon, despite Churchill’s promise not to do so. From this high ground, they shelled the working class districts of Athens. Thus did Churchill and a succession of Anglo-Saxon hypocrites restore Greek fascists to rule Greece at gunpoint for the next forty years. Much the same way undermanned Allied victors rearmed Japanese troops after Japan’s surrender, to garrison and police most of South East Asia against native Nationalists.
A majority of “retired” Nazis became government and corporate officials in post-war Europe. Bushido-boys rapidly recovered corporate dominion over Japan. Before and during the war, the BundesBank bankrolled the Nazis — you can guess how. These days, it is the financial powerhouse of Europe and a pipeline of laundered Russian money into American politics. The American OSS absorbed 1500 ex-Gestapo operatives when it became the CIA — in addition to ex-Nazi rocket scientists and others it brought home under Project Paperclip. Japanese masters at genocide, who’d vivisected countless Chinese civilians and Allied prisoners and infected thousands with plague, anthrax and other diseases, were pardoned in exchange for their laboratory notes. They called their victims “logs.” Who knows how many more demons incarnate became prized NATO functionaries? Needless to say, Russian Stalinists were just as accommodating to their herd of imprisoned Nazi imps from Hell.
Venice’s monastery of St. Anthony contained the collection of the famous scholar Pico della Mirandola; it burned down in 1687.139 In 1693, a French army sacked Heidelberg and ravaged the rest of Germany with brutality as bad as the Thirty Years War (no wonder the Germans called for payback in spades later on!). Three years later, the Russians took Azov. The Omani took Mombassa in 1698, the same year Whitehall Palace burned down. In 1703, the Swedes took Warsaw again. Algerians took Oran in 1709. French troops sacked Rio de Janeiro in 1711. In 1716, fanatical Lamaist Dzugar Mongols sacked the Lamaist holy center at Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. In 1720, the Chinese took Turfan and Urumchi. Copenhagen burned down in 1728 along with the Royal Danish Archives and the city library176. Constantinople suffered great fires in 1729, 1756 and 1782. The Persians sacked Delhi in 1736. They took Balkh, Ghazni and Kabul in 1738. They destroyed Delhi and the entire Mogul Empire in 1739. They took Bukhara and Khiva in 1740. In 1751, the Mons took Ara, the capital of Burma. Six years later, the Burmese took Pegu, the Mon capital. Moscow burned down in 1752. The Bambaras took Timbuktu, Djenne and Bamako in 1755. Russians took Azov in 1783. As part of the British conquest of India, Lord Cornwallis burned down the Indian city of Bangalore. This is how he “redeemed” his military reputation “sullied” by his earlier defeat at Yorktown.
Has this tale of wanton destruction made your eyes water yet? Have things gotten a little blurry?
Almost every European, Turkish and Persian town was besieged, plundered and/or burned during this period — ostensibly over the best way to worship God. Lisbon – the capital of a prosperous maritime empire two hundred years old – was annihilated one crisp 1755 Sunday morning by a massive earthquake, tidal wave and firestorm. Voltaire noted this sample of God’s affection in his novel, Candide.
The founder of the Afghan Durani dynasty sacked Delhi in 1756 and again in 1760. That same year, the Russians burned Berlin. In 1765, Harvard College burned down along with its library, destroying over nine out of ten of its books. Princeton’s Nassau Hall Library burned in 1802. The Burmese sacked Ayutha in 1767. In 1775, the Tuaregs took Timbuktu. In 1799, the French took Naples, once again by storm. In the late 1700s, fanatical Wahhabi tribesmen invaded Tarim, an Arab city graced with 365 mosques and many libraries. Between their assault and an infestation of white worms, every book housed there was lost.
Almost every city in Europe and along the Mediterranean suffered significant damage during the Napoleonic Wars. Wellington’s army, for example, sacked Bajadoz in 1811 — imitating Napoleon and his marshals whose troops ransacked every city they took. In 1812, the Russians burned Moscow out from under the feet of Bonaparte’s Grande Armée. In 1811, the Montserrat Monastery Library burned down.
The British took Washington D.C. in 1814. In reprisal for an 1813 atrocity the Americans perpetrated against the Canadian capital at Toronto (torching the Parliament building and the Legislative Library), they burned down the White House and the Capitol Building. These structures housed the first Library of Congress, later replaced by Thomas Jefferson’s library. A tornado descended on the city. It killed and maimed more British soldiers than ineffectual American resistance on that day. The Library of Congress burned again in 1815 (35,000 books destroyed out of 55,000, many from Jefferson’s library) .182
In 1820, the Siamese became alarmed by vague rumors that the British were about to attack them, presumably with Laotian help. They invaded Laos and burned down every public structure in Vientiane, the Lao capital. They burned alive in giant bamboo cages every Lao prisoner they did not enslave.
Canton burned in 1822. Macau’s Archives were destroyed by fire in 1825 and 1885. In 1827, the Dahomey took Whydah. In 1828, the Russians carried off the fine library from Ardebil, the capital of Azerbaijan. New York City burned in 1845. Montreal’s Parliament buildings were destroyed by fire in 1849. So was Rangoon, Burma in 1850. In 1851, the remaining two thirds of Jefferson’s book collection burned along with most of the second Library of Congress, as did the city of San Francisco. Tokyo burned in 1857. Along with many other cities, Nanking was destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion. In 1864, its magnificent Porcelain Pagoda, Hong Xiquan’s palace and the Ming Palace nearby were smashed. Vicksburg, Tennessee; Jackson, Mississippi; Atlanta, Georgia; Laurence, Kansas; Columbia, South Carolina; Richmond, Virginia and other American towns suffered the same fate during the American Civil War (1860-65). Quebec City burned in 1866. During the South American War of the Triple Alliance (1865-70) the Brazilian Imperial Army sacked Asuncion, Paraguay and took its National Library back to Rio de Janeiro where its remnants were kept in secret. Beginning August 23, 1870, the Prussians burned down Strasbourg with incendiary shells from their siege artillery, along with its picture gallery, its city library full of ancient treasures, its Huguenot Temple Neuf and most of the roof of its Cathedral. A German rehearsal for future outrages of the same kind, intended to force surrender but only managing to cohere local resistance. A French Communard mob burned down the Tuilleries library in Paris in 1871, with its 250,000 books. The Great Chicago fire flared the same year, along with the mass barbecue of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, perhaps kindled by a scattergun asteroid strike and fueled by the industrial wastage of its forests. Boston burned down a year later. In 1882, victorious Chile confiscated the National Library of Peru and moved its contents from Lima to Santiago. At least a hundred thousand books were destroyed during a well-deserved anti-clerical revolution in Mexico by 1884.171
From the mid-1800s on, some excuse was found to flatten almost every city on Earth. For example, British troops burned down Benin, the capital of an empire at least six hundred years old. Its magnificent sculpted wood and cast bronze artwork did not recover until very recently.
Messina, Sicily was swallowed by a monstrous tidal wave in 1908. The entire 1890 U.S. Census burned up in 1920. A year later in Dublin, the medieval archives of Ireland were destroyed during the Easter Rebellion against British rule. In 1922, Young Turks burned down the city of Smyrna and sent the Greek minority scrambling back to Greece along with the Greek Army dispatched to annex them. This atrocity was a continuation of a super-efficient, futuristic, German-supervised campaign to exterminate every Turkish Armenian (at least a million of them died from 1894 to 1915). Who knows how many Armenian Orthodox churches, seminaries and libraries went up in flames? Ataturk himself adopted two Armenian orphans; just like President Jackson adopted two American Indian children whose tribe he had death-marched into the wilderness.
Whenever human greed and cruelty were not up to the task, a natural catastrophe would do the trick. For example, 140,000 people and uncounted documents perished in an earthquake and monstrous firestorm that leveled Tokyo in 1923. Almost all the Europeans fled the ruined city, so the grim Japanese determined thereafter to make it on their own…
The University of Virginia Library burned down at the start of the 20th century. So did the Italian National Library at Turin, from an electrical fire in 1904. At least 100,000 items of its 320,000-book collection went up in flames, including many priceless manuscripts and its entire Oriental collection. On February 19, 1938, a fire at West Point destroyed its library and a vast number of American historical documents.
Major libraries and collections destroyed by warfare during the last century include but were in no way limited to: Peking, Port Arthur, Louvain, Noyon, Amiens, Ypres, Arras, Soissons, Salonika, Rheims, Cambrai, Belgrade, Smyrna, Kiev, Vilna, Minsk, Shanghai, Suchow, Nanking, Guernica, Madrid, Nanking, Warsaw, Cracow, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Coventry, London (where 60% of Britain’s World War I (sic) military records were destroyed during the Blitz), Valetta, Benghazi, Tripoli, Belgrade, Minsk, Vitebsk, Kiev, Viasma, Smolensk, Bryansk, Odessa, Uman, Kharkov, Sevastopol, Rostov, Stalingrad, Belgorod, Budapest, Ancona, Naples (where withdrawing Nazis burned 80,000 volumes of the Royal Society), Pisa, Milan, Caen, St. Nazaire, Brest, Metz, Arnhem, Hamburg, Berlin, Dusseldorf, Köln, Essen, Dresden, Heidelburg, (virtually every German, Japanese, Eastern European and Eastern Chinese city was leveled, as were many more across the rest of Europe), Mandalay, Rovaniemi, Tartu, Manila, Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka, Yokohama, Shuri, Rangoon, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Seoul, Pyongyang (founded in 1122 BCE; ravaged by the Japanese in 1592, 1894 and 1904; and by the Americans in 1951), Jerusalem, Port Said, Hanoi, Hue, Phnom Penh, Jolo, Belfast, Beirut, Amritsar, Dubrovnik, Sarajevo, Vukovar, Grozny, Kabul and Baghdad.
During the Greater Paroxysm, European fascists made a point of burning every Hebrew and Yiddish scripture, every Cyrillic text and icon they found in Russian, Polish, Czech, etc., as well as any progressive book they found anywhere in any language. The toll of destruction totaled hundreds of millions of texts.
“The most extensive Soviet deportations, however, were carried out as Soviet troops liberated territory in 1943-44. The people affected were the minorities living on the north slope of the Caucasus and the west bank of the Volga, who maintained their own languages and religions, primarily Islam but also Buddhism, and who had been largely unaffected by the strongly Slav and Orthodox elements of Russian culture ... In total, about 1,200,000 were affected. During 1943-44, the Soviets deployed hundreds of thousands of troops to forcibly remove these people, and they were moved with few possessions, in cattle trucks with little or no food and water. Probably about 500,000 died in transit or subsequently in the Gulag. The Soviet authorities removed all references to these people, and all materials in their written languages were destroyed.” Clive Ponting, Armageddon, Random House, 1995, p. 223. Italics mine.
These predatory tactics are not unique to Soviet Russia. On the contrary, they are consistent with weapon managers in general. Euro-Americans treated Native Americans as gently. For example, they forbade Indian children to speak their mother tongue while forcing them to attend residential schools. Other empires treated their ethnic minorities with equally shameless cruelty if not worse.
In the late 50s and early 60s the reference libraries and old film collections of the five great movie corporations in Hollywood: MGM, Paramount Pictures, RKO, Warner Bros., and 20th Century Fox, were broken up and sold off randomly.
Chunking, China burned down in 1949; Tottori, Japan, in 1952. Flooding in the 1960s ravaged priceless text collections in Florence. On June 7, 1962, the library of Algiers along with its 60,000 volumes were dynamited and burned down by French colonial bitter-enders of the OAS. Mandalay, Burma burned in 1981 and Lashio in 1988.
In the so-called 21st century of “modern” civilization, library collections are systematically neglected. They go up in flames by accident or by malicious intent. Librarians at the Czech National Library in Prague confessed to enormous damage from neglect and appealed for international aid. The entire collection of the ex-Soviet Union is in dire straits. The same admission applies to most Second and Third World collections. America’s Library of Congress is a sieve. The American University Library in Beirut was bombed. Bosnia’s National Library was especially targeted for Aggressor destruction. Its million books were destroyed by pinpoint Serbian artillery fire, as were many libraries and an equivalent number of books in Vinkovoi, Pakrac, Osijek, Kukovar, Zadar, Dubrovnik and Mostar.255 In 1966, Indonesia’s greatest living writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Pram), saw his private library burnt to the ground by sneering militarists before they kicked him out of the country for ten years of exile. How many more private libraries suffered the same fate at the hands of heavily armed moral infants? 80% of U.S. Army service records from 1912 to 1960 were lost to fire at the St. Louis National Personnel Center in a 1973.
Buddhist, Sinahlese-dominated government forces in May-June 1981, destroyed the Library of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, that contained 97,000 volumes of largely Tamil Hindu culture. Rebuilt and painstakingly restocked, this library was attacked again in 1983 and destroyed in 1985. The library in Hama, Syria was destroyed in 1982. In 1983, a fire destroyed the St. Michael’s House collection in Australia. The Los Angeles Public Library burned down in 1986. In the spring of 1988, a Shiite library in Teheran was wiped out by one of Saddam Hussein’s randomly aimed Scud missiles. Many irreplaceable, thousand-year-old texts were destroyed. A 1989 fire leveled the Russian Library of the Academy of Sciences on Vasilievski Island. The Chinese destroyed the major monastery of Gandem, outside Lhasa, in the 1960s. Inexcusably, they’ve wrecked almost every other Tibetan monastery since. Armenian troops invaded Azerbaijan in 1992, during which four and half million books were destroyed.255 A hundred-year flood and the ensuing fire in 1995 gutted the archives of the Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota. On September 21, 1996, the library at Linkoeping, Sweden, was destroyed by fire. Takastan Monastery, the largest Buddhist monastery in Bhutan, suffered the same fate on April 19, 1998. On June 10, 1999 the Kashmir State Cultural Center burned down. California State University’s (CSU) Hayward Library burned in May of 2000. In Ambon, Mollucas Island in Indonesia, the Christian University Campus was set ablaze in June of 2000. The Iraqi library at Basra burned down during the American invasion in 2003, even though its chief librarian, Alia Muhammad Baker, managed to save 70% of her collection with the help of heroic local townsfolk.
If I left out some act of cultural vandalism or urban disaster of noteworthy viciousness, please let me know about it for inclusion in future versions of this chapter. If anyone ever bothered to write up humanity’s global self-lobotomy, that work was destroyed in turn.
Meanwhile, almost every book printed since the 1800s is quietly self-destructing. Cheap, high-acid paper reacts to light, heat and moisture by crumbling to dust. These days, Fahrenheit 451 has dropped to room temperature. The wonderful world of chemistry has relieved Ray Bradbury’s fascistic, science fiction dystopians from the thankless task of torching every book. Ephemeral electronic media are even more vulnerable. Any massive breakdown of civilization will see most of them perish, including this work unless it gets paper-published by some miracle in the meantime.
In addition, recording media’s engineered obsolescence affords our literature repeated opportunities to disappear. Herculean efforts to transfer print media onto digital databases will only mitigate this devastation (mostly meaningless gigabits of accounting documents). In library after library, reluctant staffers dumped truckloads of perfectly fine books and bibliographic materials into the nearest landfill; while MBA-certified weapon managers crowed about reaching meaningless cost-cutting “goals.”
In the future, the preservation of rare ideas – especially idiosyncratic and culturally specific ones that deviate from the mass media norm – will become a private, oral and website responsibility much more so than a media-driven, top-down one. Since dominant technocrats have refused to perform their obvious duty, many more bards, witches, griots and shamans will have to step up to these responsibilities.
ADDENDA: On a black Tuesday, April 15, 2003, Iraq’s National Library, its National Museum and Islamic Library were looted, ruined and burned by rioters and expert tomb robbers. For the umpteen thousand time, the world had to suffer another frightful lobotomy.
Tell me true! Am I really serving time in the 21st century after Christ, or are Hulagu’s heirs still in charge? In fact, we Americans have confirmed we are just as bad news as the Taliban. They found nothing better to do than blow up two giant statues of Buddha in the valley of Bamian. The official in charge of that act of fanatical vandalism got elected to the new Afghan Parliament. May he choke on the authority he reaped with high-explosives.
A hundred years from now, Saddam Hussein may be forgotten and Bush the Lesser, only recalled as the American yokel who oversaw the annihilation of Baghdad’s priceless historical collections. A thousand years from now, that may be the only thing for which this flash-in-the-pan American Empire is remembered. How far these mighty mental midgets will have fallen!
Only Texans and their greed-obsessed cronies could secure the Oil Ministry, yet leave Iraq’s cultural treasures unguarded. Their school-marms didn't learn them Mesopotamian archeology the way mine did, with deep reverence. Expert scholars warned the U.S. Central Command repeatedly, yet it took no precautions. Clueless, corn-fed hicks…
As for the U.S. Marines, some butter-bar Platoon Leader should have grasped what his superiors – from the President on down – were too stupid, ignorant and lazy to realize. That kind of man-on-the-ground initiative is what good officers are paid for: to post a guard around unforeseen yet vital installations until further orders and arrest anyone who threatened those sacred collections. His superiors should have backed him reflexively.
He may have tried; who knows? History is the first love of a thoughtful soldier. No history buff would have permitted that outrage without protest. But he would have had to buck his request up the chain of command. During its ascent, it would have run past the stupidest link in the chain (perhaps the one at the top, in the White House?). Did some overworked staff officer – assigning his few score squads to guard hundreds of square blocks – simplify his worthless career by bucking back a sharply worded response? “Negative. Do nothing.” Or was he just another hireling of rich collectors intent on stealing artifacts, who made sure the lust of his congressional patrons would be satisfied?
In any case, if there is a difference between crushing firepower and victorious acumen, Americans have yet to learn it.
This must be a new low for the United States Marine Corps. Letting the Baghdad collections be destroyed during its watch was as much a disgrace as First Bull Run or Beirut.
America must learn – no matter how slowly and painfully – what every dimwit empire in history has had to during its roller coaster ride of slow growth, lightning conquest, sudden onset stagnation and on-the-spot annihilation — just before its victims strip it of everything it once cherished. Like an accidental homicide during another crime; stupidity, shortsightedness and cultural ignorance don’t excuse the unintended consequences of our worst impulses. History doesn’t care how Texan, Republican, corporate and otherwise mercenary and enslaved to special interests our leaders may be, or how clueless we must have been to empower them, except to hasten our defeat.
America and Australia have the luxury of dominating their continent without a military rival worth the name, unlike most other nations that share their continental space in war and peace with populous and pushy neighbors. Those two may cower on their own continent and remain as small-town, closed-minded and bigoted as they please. Americans may short-change their youth’s education (à la TV) until our college students can’t pass an exam a bright fifteen-year-old could overseas. Our mephitic fat cats can dispatch mercenaries out to comb the world and rip off its treasures ‒ bolted down, buried or otherwise secured ‒ with relative ease and impunity.
However, once we venture forth into the Big Bad World, self-satisfied incompetence becomes our worst liability. It will produce consequences far grimmer than mere public disgrace from our collective bumpkinhood, as demonstrated by shame-us-before-the-world Republican presidential contenders, each new one more laughable than his predecessors.
Americans, take heed! Like a spoiled brat during a temper tantrum, we shattered a priceless vase in a china shop. We’ve already gotten badly scraped once (recall 9/11). Next time, the suffering is likely to be much, much worse. Everyone has suffered from it, who’s preceded us down this Shining Path of fantasy WeaponWorld dominion.
World peace on our watch would be a much better deal for everyone involved — America’s interests, strengths and limitations foremost, with those of the rest of the world not far behind.
The World Trade Center towers contained several archives (some of them classified) and museums destroyed on 9/11/2001. The Pentagon was conducting an audit looking into billions of dollars of military contract funds “misplaced” during the klepto-administration of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfield. All those records and researchers were conveniently annihilated.
On Monday, January 5, 2004 of this so-called civilized age, thousands of rare Sanskrit manuscripts, ancient texts and palm leaf inscriptions were destroyed in a half hour when two hundred and fifty protesters ransacked the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. One of the worst losses was a clay tablet dating back to the Assyrian civilization, 600 BCE. The protesters, members of a group called the Sambhaji Brigade, threw stones at the Institute and broke its windows. Telephone lines were cut so the police could not be summoned. Police protection had been given to three historians, G. B. Mahendale, Shrikant Bahulkar and V. L. Manjul, in light of a controversial book that contained allegedly objectionable observations by author and teacher James Laine on the parentage of the Maratha warrior King Shivaji. In the process, he painted a new and more complex picture of Hindu-Muslim relations from the 17th century to the present. The controversy seemed to have been resolved when Mr. Laine apologized for his statements about Shivaji. The book's publisher, Oxford University Press, withdrew the book from the market. Police arrested seventy-two people for acts of vandalism, reports Newkerala.com.
Thus do fundamentalists disgrace their own creed.
I wish I never had to add another disgraceful incident to this long and sorry list. I suspect that I shall be bound to. At times, this human species is sickening. Oh well; as a favorite tee shirt of mine would read:
Learner:
Not of this nation,
Not of this species,
Not of this planet.
An electrical fire, set off on September 2004, gutted the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, Germany, the hometown of Goethe. Over 50,000 irreplaceable books were lost, even though a daisy chain of good people saved 6,000 volumes from the flames and another 22,000 were spared. The library has been rebuilt since with 60,000 titles, including thousands returned after painstaking restoration.
The December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami flooded who knows how many archives within that region and drowned their guardians along with hundreds of thousands of victims.
“4/29/2005 -- The Central Library in Imphal, the capital of the northeastern Indian state of Manipur, suffered what historian Gangumei Kamei called “an incalculable loss.” A group set the facility ablaze while pushing for the Mayek script to replace the state’s official Bengali one. They destroyed as many as 145,000 books including some of the oldest and rarest texts. Officials say the protestors were combined members of the regional United Forum for Safeguarding Manipuri Script and Language, and a separatist rebel group, the Kangleipak Communist Party. The BBC News said an attorney described the arson as a “Taliban-style” act. Officials say that for several months the groups had demanded that the government adopt the Mayek script and drop the Bengali, used for the last three hundred years to put the Meitei language in writing. Some local newspapers had begun publishing editions in both languages.” http://www.libraryjournal.com./article/CA527242?display=breakingNews
March 5, 2007: the Al-Mutanabi book market in Baghdad was car bombed and destroyed. It had been a world-famous center of reading and scholarship for centuries, even under the heavy hand of Saddam Hussein. Like the dynamiters of the Shia’s most holy shrines in Karbala and Najaf, may the perpetrators repent of their deed before they expire and rot away.
On March 3, 2009, the municipal archives of Köln (Cologne) collapsed, killing two people, ruining many medieval manuscripts and four hundred boxes of private papers and unpublished manuscripts by the author Heinrich Böll (1917-1985).
On or just before the first weekend of 2012, during rioting between political protestors and the military, the Institute of Egypt was gutted with twelve hours of fire and then flooded by Cairo’s Fire Department. The next week, the remnants of 192,000 books, journals and other writings were picked over by volunteers attempting to salvage something from the wreckage. Among the books destroyed was one of five copies in existence of the 24-volume Description de l’Égypte, hand-written during Napoleon’s scientific expedition, along with many irreplaceable texts on Egyptian culture and history. At best, the Egyptian military failed to protect the building from arsonists and failed to put the fire out quickly, when nearby buildings were either protected or their fires extinguished instantly. At worst, they set the fires themselves. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/19/cairo-institute-burned-during-clashes
Libyan Islamists destroyed a Sufi library in the Asmari Mosque as well as other shrines in Tripoli, Misrata and Zlitan, in August 2012. In January, 2013, like-minded fanatics destroyed more mosques and shrines in Timbuktu, Mali. Thanks to the preservation efforts of heroic locals (Abdel Kaddel Haidara and many of the town’s leading families) with foreign support arranged by Stephanie Daikité, those religious thugs found “only” 4,000 manuscripts to destroy, out of a scattered collection of 300,000 or more.
In the city of Sarajevo in February 2013, the Museum, the National and University Library (burned out in 1992 by the Serbian Army’s hand-me-down artillery), the Art Gallery, the Historical Museum, the National Archive, the Museum of Literature, and the Library for the Blind are all in danger of closing permanently, thanks to ethnic nationalists (Guess which ones?) who dominate the Bosnian government and disgrace themselves by refusing to assume their civic responsibility. In February 2014, the Sarajevo Archive just happened to burn down during an unemployment riot (Guess by whom burned down?) provoked by ethnic nationalists’ schemes to privatize Bosnia’s few remaining public industries and sell off their components to their buddies for profit.
A Berlusconni political appointee sold off thousands of priceless 15th and 16th century manuscripts from the Biblioteca Girolamini, the oldest library in Italy. Caught red-handed in 2013, his sentence was commuted to house arrest in exchange for assistance in retrieving “up to eighty percent” of the books he, his gang and his reactionary political patrons had arranged to loot.
In January 2014, two thirds of a nearly 80,000-title library of irreplaceable Muslim and Christian manuscripts and books were put to the torch in Tripoli, based on a spurious accusation invented by Libyan religious fanatics.
In January 2015, one million documents (15% of the collection) were destroyed by water when the Institute of Scientific Information on the Social Sciences (INION), Moscow’s equivalent of the American Library of Congress, burned until its roof collapsed as a result of an electrical short circuit. A “cultural Chernobyl” per the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
On February 2015, DAESH fanatics took 2,000 texts from the Great Library of Mosul, Iraq, and destroyed them, following their psychopathic policy of torturing, raping and murdering normal people, Muslim and non-Muslim, within their sphere of influence.
On August 19, 2017, the renaissance manuscript library of Roberto Bilotti was gutted in Cosenza, Italy. Three squatters, warming themselves over a fire, died on the floor below.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_destroyed_libraries
And so it goes on WeaponWorld.
- WEAPON MENTALITY -
In the text that follows, replace the term “Fascism” with “modern political thought.”
“Fascism contemplates above all the future and the development of mankind merely from the vantage point of political reality and believes neither in the possibility nor the usefulness of eternal peace. It rejects therefore pacifism, which under a pretense of magnanimity hides the renunciation of combat and cowardice. [Author’s note: pacifism hides the renunciation of cowardice, indeed! Mussolini typifies those moral cowards whose life-meaning collapses the moment they stop inflicting pain on someone, anyone]. Only war brings human energies to their highest tension and ennobles those peoples [that] dare to undertake it. All other tests are only substitutes, which never put men before the highest decision, that of the choice between life and death [Russian roulette, Your Predaciousness? Be my guest!]. Therefore, every doctrine which starts out from a premeditated revolution for peace is foreign to Fascism.” Mussolini, quoted by Alfred Vagts in A History of Militarism, Greenwich Editions, 1959, p. 437.
Did you make the switch? Despite its relevance and many attempts to duplicate it in my head, I found this exercise unmanageable. So let me make it easy for you:
Modern political thought contemplates above all the future and the development of mankind merely from the vantage point of political reality and believes neither in the possibility nor the usefulness of eternal peace. It rejects therefore pacifism, which under a pretense of magnanimity hides the renunciation of combat and cowardice. … Therefore every doctrine that starts out from a premeditated revolution for peace is foreign to modern political thought.
Note the shared intent of fascism and modern political thought, even though they are supposed to be at odds. Those interchangeable politics are imposed on us without subtlety or valid alternative. We are summoned to “choose” between Clinton and Trump, Le Pen and Macron, standard-bearers of different politics equally bad, pending worse “choices” downstream.
Weapon mentality is the operating system that drives the hardware/wetware of weapon technology through the application program (constantly upgraded) of weapon management. Weapon mentality takes great pride in the finality of its cruel and arbitrary dictates. It is more interested in its routines and traditions than in their moral consequences. It would rather fantasize about its perfection than resolve its enduring contradictions.
It and its outcomes are neither aberrations nor errors. Learners should defy those weapon myths. Greed, psychosis, stupidity and gross criminality (those eternal bugaboos) are mere symptoms of the problem, not its cause. The chainsaw logic of weapon mentality is consistent; its barbarity, fully justified and “moral” within its own frame of reference. Wherever weapon mentality roams unchallenged, it distorts every facet of life. Paraphrasing Churchill’s quip about German imperialists, weapon managers are either groveling at our feet or lunging for our throats.
Weapon mentality is a parasite that lacks creativity except to compel and terrorize. Incapable of independent productivity, it relies on peace technology for sustenance. Unable to destroy humanity’s innate sense of dignity and grace, it twists those root truths just enough to suit its purpose.
First off, it crams our constellation of political metaphors with weapon myths.
For weapon mentality, human compassion is a needless burden. Vicious battle elites find rank, power, comparative wealth and imaginary security as faithful servants of weapon mentality. Anyone who takes a moral stand can be co-opted, marginalized and attacked. Promotion is based on willingness to compromise natural conscience and inflict the most allowable harm. A promising career and frequently professional survival decree that good conscience be abandoned.
An analogy is the biblical tale in Genesis 22, in which God commands that Abraham sacrifice his son — except that, unlike merciful God, weapon mentality sees that this sacrifice will be executed to its bloody conclusion, by the book.
Weapon mentality is stoical, abusive and contagious. It is anti-moral though very moralistic. It operates in direct contravention of peace values. Like a virus, weapon mentality penetrates healthy peace management cells to replicate its own. Gathering whatever it finds useful and culling the rest, it crosses with impunity every barrier of empire, race, religion, nationality and ideology. You know, all those familiar notions heroes routinely die for? Weapon mentality treats them like the phantasms they really are.
Abusing its ascendancy in a Darwinian struggle for survival of the deadliest, weapon mentality perverts human culture and obstructs every overture of peace. It has done little else throughout history, with our consent. What’s more, weapon mentality remains “fixed” in human history. Dependable peace has never endured for very long. Prior to today’s global communication networks, no prototype peace reign could spread fast enough through surrounding weapon cults.
Peace technologies weaken under attack, even as their adherents strengthen themselves in suffering and sacrifice. Only a few civilizations made peace their first priority. Without exception, they fell to the weapon technologies that surrounded them, and became “pre-historic.”
Since I’m much less of a man than Gandhi, I cannot call myself pacifist while I serve hard time on this hell-world among these simpering killer primates. Every nation secretes an inescapable battle elite of vile individuals. It is our repellent obligation to practice selective violence against them, smother their toxic influence and shelter the children — provided we redistribute wealth and power in peace.
The tendentious designations of Pacifist and Militarist have been talked to death elsewhere. Yet their rivalry has had little more effect than the skittering of mice when compared to the hobnail tread by legions of weapon stalwarts.
There are striking similarities between pacifists and warmongers. Both enlist small bands of sullen fanatics on the margins of society. Both rely on powerful, charismatic patrons to dispel routine lethargy, shatter petty deadlocks, deflect police scrutiny and promote themselves far and wide. Both share moral attitudes that are chronic in modern society and turn acute in high-stress situations — like herpes virus in a stressed individual or the latent TB that may bring me down some day. Both make noisy claims during periods of social turmoil. During these stressful times, one group brightens our courtrooms and punishment cells with its reawakened conscience while the other inks the next pages of history with the blood of its victims. Both rely on mass media to multiply their small numbers and amplify their impossible demands.
Pacifists range from those who would rather starve to death than let their bodily defenses kill off microorganisms normally, (as Jain elders often opt to do), to conscientious objectors who may or may not fight for a cause they find just, or cooperate with their nation when it goes to war. This form of half-hearted cooperation describes the common mass of weapon stalwarts, whether or not they choose to murder each other at war.
To sum up, some cosmopolitan individuals – like me – seek PeaceWorld. More often than not, they support an alternative less feasible and less coherent than mine. Their wishful thinking leads them to fantasize about peaceful nationalism (a patent contradiction) and touchy-feely sentimentalism instead of seeking the nuts, bolts and binding washers of a pragmatic, global peace.
Pacifism serves as a term of law to designate another group of people who hinder weapon management in times of war. Along with them come spies, rebels, deserters, draft dodgers, traitors and aliens. These people aren’t considered “pacifists” despite their collective preference for cosmopolitan peace.
The term pacifist was coined as a legal pigeonhole for a few thousand conscientious objectors who protested against World War I (sic) for the record and thus the hard way. They earned equal shares of contempt and brutality from Allied and Central Power bureaucrats.
Rarely having been shot at (that I know of), I suspect that most people who come under fire turn out to be devout pacifists. “There are no warmongers in the foxholes!”
To date, organized pacifists have insulated themselves and their cherished ideals from mainstream society. More often than not, the weapon media paint them as decadent, pasty-faced, “morally superior” outsiders and wise guys. Many pacifists embrace these labels to the detriment of their cause.
The term militarist describes those who advocate ruinous military preparation and/or preemptive aggression. Ruinous because it is profitless and supplants more advantageous investment. The essence of military preparedness is aggression, since battlefields are the only valid training ground for real armies, and mortal enemies, their only effective instructors. It includes the proponents of any weapon state other than our nationalists who are, of course, peace loving, anti-militarist libertarians.
Sure thing, buddy.
Weapon states may remain overtly militaristic even though they’ve spent the last decades at peace with everyone but their own minorities. Some of the grossest empires – bloated with war booty, conquered territory, devastating firepower and drone populations of slaves, warriors, warlords, convicts, unemployed and disenfranchised minorities – simply deny their own militarism.
Militarists often call themselves patriots: “The last refuge of the scoundrel,” per Boswell’s Life of Johnson.
Like most weapon terms, these designations are as clumsy as they are vague.
Pacifists usually seek their shade in center-left politics, while militarists hunt opportunistically from the far right (their usual turf) through the middle ground to the far left — wherever they can pull down the most cash.
As hobbies go, weapon technology is very spendy.
I’d rather replace these common expressions with those taken from the vernacular of Learner, as follows:
· Militarists in general: weapon mentors, weapon sectarians, weapon managers, battle elites, and weapon technicians (depending on their actual job assignment).
· Pacifists, opposition activists, and random, reductive meliorists: weapon dissenters.
· The crushing majority of humanity, nameless and for the most part peaceful, but who would march off to war if asked nicely; and their children, taught to expect a warrior’s pittance instead of the abundance of peace: weapon stalwarts.
· Revolutionaries of significant transformation: Learners.
Everything depends on the person in question: if they know what they are doing and why. My terms focus on results rather than intent. I hesitate to pigeonhole specific people and institutions based on their political packaging and outlook rather than their results.
People tend to respond flexibly to complex and often paradoxical circumstances internal as well as external. Many say one thing and do the opposite, then applaud the paradoxical outcome of their behavior. Too many more claim the best intentions, compulsively scrutinize their means and yet accept as inevitable the horrifying consequence of their prejudices.
The weapon/peace dialectic admits two sorts of anarchy.
In misleading us in this way, this self-contradiction matches most of our political metaphors. Two contrary definitions serve to render a term meaningless and therefore more useful to weapon mentality. Deeper meanings of truth and peace are poison to it. Weapon political metaphors require no more specific meanings beyond those needed to lie and kill.
For peace mentality, words like justice and liberty have a specific meaning naturally defined by personal conscience, which corresponds to real-time behavior. Either there is justice or there isn't. Simple.
For weapon mentality, mushy words like those are just reassuring noise parroted robotically by people with no conscience, about actions they can reverse whenever they find it convenient and still call them the same. There can be injustice and they call it justice. No problem.
The supreme commands: lie, kill, sacrifice the Other we point out to you, etc., those must be shouted loud enough and understood soon enough by everyone on the national parade ground or the global battlefield. Contrary expressions of peace need never be so accurate or consistent.
The main function of classical philosophy is to render all the other (non-military) terms as amorphous and meaningless as possible in the most confusing manner possible.
The clarity you may find in Learner, despite its middling prose, is forbidden by classical philosophy and chased from its primary texts. Elaborate protocols and wordy formulae hold the twin goals of neutralizing valid ethics and thwarting peace. The facts among others to be established without dispute by classical philosophy are that the yearly starvation of millions of babies is inevitable and that world peace is impossible and unwise.
Your infant grade and the publication of your grownup manuscript will depend on the beauty of your prose admitting these revolting principles and the sturdiness of your “logic” confirming them.
Reactionaries define anarchy as the following nightmare scenario. Learner calls it chaosism, and its practitioners, chaosists. A chaosist may commit any crime his ruthlessness, strength and firepower allow. During periods of chaosism (reactionary anarchy), no bourgeois may doze off at night, confident that his throat won’t be slit, his property stolen or vandalized and his family enslaved before he reawakens.
Today’s gun nuts are going to feed this future nightmare, should this social collapse occur. Once they and their insane measures get them killed quickly, they will provide unlimited stocks of firearms and ammunition for passing psychopaths to renew their murderous agenda. As usual, humanity is hosing raw gasoline into a white-hot foundry. Global warming, ecocide, runaway overpopulation, nuclear power and weapons: the list of self-inflicted catastrophes is premeditated; it is too long, too systematic, too irreparable, and too horrifying not to be.
Don’t bother reminding reactionaries that their nightmare is exactly what happens to those unfortunate enough to get caught in the path of armies in wartime, or to the poor in any case. They won’t listen. According to reactionaries, the average anarchist promotes this kind of anarchy; and it would be a good thing to shoot him like a rabid dog.
Anarchists have a different take on anarchy. In their version, every rule of property and class should be discarded in favor of self-discipline and fellow feeling. That would lead to absolute justice and equality. No more poverty, bigotry, inequality, war or vice. In short: the freedom of Neolithic hunter-gatherers. They, in turn, consider property-owners rabid dogs, etc. …
Nobody pays attention to the psychopaths who dominate both factions and every other one on Earth so far.
Learner uses the term “chaosists” to describe the whipped-child-turned-adult who rise and fall like yo-yos during intervals of chaosism (chaos for its own sake). Think of the Thirty Years War or Rwanda at its worst. Some individuals might have survived, but no one they would recognize. Victims and murderers alike, the survivors and the dead: their core identity from the past was brutally struck down.
Also included under the designation chaosist are people unbalanced enough to want to make it happen: people like the Unabomber, Book of Revelation fanatics, those who applaud bloody jihad (holy war on behalf of Islam), and just about everyone else having a really bad day.
Learners would reserve the term “anarchist” for iron-willed utopians like Kropotkin, Tolstoy and Gandhi: some of the most decent men this indecent world has forged.
Anyone who runs around draped in black with the intention of setting garbage dumpsters afire, smashing shopping windows and upsetting an innocent bystander’s car – all in the name of Glorious Anarchy, but actually in submission to their glandular hyperactivity – is obviously an amateur chaosist. Suicide bombers, likewise. Professional chaosists tend to pass their unarmed neighbors under mortar bombs and machetes, and send young suicide bombers out to shred themselves among the others, while they remain smug and snug at home preaching from their Good Book. If someone conscience-driven comes looking for them seriously armed, they run and hide like cowards and lie about their crimes.
The Learner Commonwealth will be neither brutally nor evangelically lawless. Chaosists will be neutralized and sent down Learner paths more theatrical, therapeutic and useful; moral anarchists will be held to their highest ideals.
St. Augustine watched as the Roman Empire dissolved before his eyes. The Goths had invaded it from East to West, annihilated every legion dispatched against them, sacked Rome and spread devastation everywhere they went. Eventually, they overran olden Spain. From there, the aptly named Vandals crossed the Med into North Africa, 80,000 strong, and took St. Augustine’s hometown, Hippo, the year after he died.
He felt helpless to prevent the loss of everything he held dear. Can you imagine his psychic torment? Suffering from pathetic helplessness, this ultimate hand wringer etched the worst weapon myths on the bedrock of our political metaphors. He certified the inevitability of innate human evil, submission to armed authority, the divine right of kings, slavery, the surrender of personal accountability and, most perniciously, the superiority of good intentions over good results. We’ve accepted his weapon myths and their deplorable outcome ever since. One of Trump’s flunkies quote him in 2018 to justify their recent iniquity.
Don’t ask me whether Christ would have endorsed this BS, or that of the Apostle Paul or prior Popes or other Christian fundamentalists for that matter. I believe Christ summed up his trust in Christian institutions and their weapon mentors when He concluded that Peter would betray him three times before the cock crowed, and “Upon this rock will I found my Church.” His delicate sense of irony was lost on unsmiling churchmen.
The Vandals might have done us a big favor by sacking Hippo twenty years earlier and silencing St. Augustine forever. That would have shown that life goes on, for better or for worse, no matter our apprehensions of the future.
Wasn’t Christian faith supposed to defuse these panic attacks? Wasn’t the New Testament intended to make us fearless in God and therefore heroic lovers of our fellows? Christian officials turned out to be among the most fear-crazed weapon mentors and thus our most dangerous political philosophers. Fascism and communism were just putrid outgrowths of Christianity. Christian states compare favorably with the others for the growth of their mass brutality and not much more.
Thanks to this weapon mentor’s Confessions and other publications of the same reactionary tendency, most people cannot bring themselves to challenge weapon management. They consider any invitation to do so a personal affront — not to mention a very scary proposition.
As for Christian fundamentalists who find their doctrine perfect, how do they account for the misery and exclusion it caused – two thousand years of torture and damnation – when Christ’s message of love is so perfect and universal? We need to craft critical changes for the better just to clean up our act a little, much less become worthy of our Savior.
Every child is systematically brainwashed against peace. Proposing PeaceWorld to someone as an alternative to their WeaponWorld, that’s like challenging their potty training. Most people treat conversational gambits on the topic of world peace as if someone had farted in public. They ignore the originator if they’re polite, smile and slip away as fast as they can. If they’re really crude, they ridicule or attack him outright.
I spent a half an hour chatting with a couple about my project. Almost by reflex, they began reciting a half-dozen common weapon myths we knew by heart and they accepted as undeniable truths. I addressed those myths as best I could, pointing out how they warped reality and how the exact opposite was closer to the truth and more advantageous to peace — to which they could only agree once they had thought about it.
They were Unitarian church congregants in Seattle, Washington: enlightened individuals who should have been at ease with the idea of world peace. Yet they were imbued with the same weapons myths I found among those least comfortable with the idea. Aversion training against peace is universal. Just examine your own childhood experience.
They must have wondered what lunatic they’d come across.
Even “sophisticated” nations practice immoral, destructive and suicidal weapon management. We may recall comparable past-practice humanisms: cannibalism, human sacrifice and slavery. Once upon a time, those institutions were hallowed truths in the prevailing constellation of political metaphors. Anyone who challenged them was considered crazy.
Incredibly, there is no record of a well-known classical philosopher who opposed slavery categorically, apart from Aesop : the hideous ex-slave and murdered genius fabulist. All by himself in the entire classical world? Really?
Eventually, these ancient notions were condemned more or less publicly by the still, small voice of private conscience, then let drop. Those who backed them thereafter were silenced. Might some deviants have held out for slavery or cannibalism? Sure, plenty. But, more often than not, disgusted majorities constrained them by providing other outlets for their destructive tendencies. War, for instance. It may have wound up the only acceptable outlet: a routine but ungainly way to regulate and redirect those tendencies.
Like those prior humanisms, weapon management only appears to be inevitable. We could uproot it in a short generation and forget about it, for the most part. Just a question of becoming smart enough to do so, rather than blindly reflecting its blinding glare.
We assume that government is evil because government officials are corrupt. “Power corrupts — absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Lord J.E.E. Acton. He, at least, should have known better.
It is not so much power that corrupts as the execution of power in ignorance of the facts. More evil emanates from neglect, ignorance and unforeseen consequences than from any deliberate intent to do harm. Even the takeover of leadership by psychopaths is the outcome of collective ignorance and clumsiness. If we knew better, we’d act better, get rid of bad actors and get better results.
The gleaming-eyed psycho of popular narration is usually an incompetent weapon bureaucrat who would do better if given half a chance. It would be easy to organize things so that bungler were nimbler. Let me explain how.
Imagine you’re blindfolded and crossing a blacked-out room. You’d be likely to trip over the furniture and come to harm. Assuming your body cells could reason among themselves, they might conclude that you enjoyed doing them harm, even though that would be the last thing you wanted. Wouldn’t matter; they’d accuse you of sinister intent anyway. Whether you wanted it to accrue or not, inadequate sensory input would make the damage inevitable. As long as you stumbled around in the dark, your hurt would increase. Eventually, you’d shrug off that pain and dismiss it as just another cost of doing business, even if it reduced you to a crawl or to cowering in a corner and giving up.
Our info elites operate under just such constraints. Their muted awareness forces them to commit evil and forego the good, ruled by ignorance and the accidents it induces. Psychopaths are well-suited for this task. We could just as easily identify and dismiss them from the ranks of those responsible, in favor of conscientious people fully informed.
In defiance of the 1984 Syndrome, Learners will develop a clear-sighted, vigilant and responsive government with networks of locally elected Administrators affluent, attentive, and pragmatic — empowering each individual to do what they do best. They would be overseen by a hyper-vigilant central government whose forceful interventions against all but massive and exemplary incidents would be cut short by constitutional law and insufficient tax receipts.
Once we remove the blindfolds and turn the lights back on, we’ll be amazed how many “inevitable” catastrophes, personal outrages, wasted opportunities and unforeseen consequences we can avoid. We’ll find we can take extraordinary risks in pursuit of Learning, and get away with most of them most of the time. The neutralization of most of these difficulties will translate into a lot more wealth and a lot less ill will.
Info elites sustain class privilege and economic imbalance. Everyone understands the eye-popping hypocrisy involved, the blatant contradictions nurtured, the splendid opportunities cast aside and the tremendous stakes at risk when such policies fail. We know that they must fail, sooner or later, by their very nature. Fleeting perks and personal privileges, however, silence the voice of good conscience in all but a sacrificial few.
In the same way, concentration camp guards and death squad toughs require elite status, fancy uniforms, stricter discipline, more time off, better rations, more cigarettes and alcohol — or they’ll burn out on the job, poor dears. Guards foolish enough to raise objections were fed to the crematoria in turn or got dispatched to a slower but just-as-certain death in penal battalions on the Eastern Front. Who knows how many bad-Germans-turned-good perished in that way, forsaken by all?
Expert small-unit leaders and terrorist chiefs require the same set of talents and skills. Both must embrace a Cause, (whatever Cause that may be), enough to sacrifice themselves and their charges for It. Both must care for their subordinates, but not about them. You know, the way prized livestock might be cared for before being butchered? Both must categorize others as expendable underlings, better-dead targets or unquestioned superiors. Both must manipulate with ease and skill the behavior and attitude of their subordinates, enforce their orders with violence, fatal violence if necessary. They must be respected (read “feared”) by their subordinates, rather than liked.
Paul Lackman recalled behavioral studies that associated a talent for lying with leadership skills among groups of children and college students.
If they do their jobs right, both leaders can expect the devotion of their charges. Call it esprit de corps (espree duh core, team spirit) where individuals sacrifice everything for their military unit ; or call it sadomasochistic Stockholm Syndrome where hostages identify with their captors so much they will defend them. Take your pick. The same doglike devotion arises from soldiers and kidnap victims alike, as if we had been hardwired for it.
“… Combat leadership, particularly at junior levels, involves a mixture of forceful character and a certain indifference to consequences. Lieutenants and captains are never expected to have long life spans once the shooting starts. No army can contemplate with equanimity the thought of stable, settled, emotionally middle-aged men leading platoons into enemy fire [author’s note: even though venerable garrison states often produce this kind of flabby leadership]. The German army had to walk a consistently fine line between the Scylla of emasculating its junior leaders by converting them into bureaucratized good citizens and the Charybdis of allowing panache and enthusiasm to degenerate into publicity-generating hooliganism.” Dennis E. Showalter, Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, Archon Books, Hamden, Connecticut, 1991, p. 109. By permission of Shoe String Press.
Likewise, the ultimate basic training occurs in concentration camps. Death camps are just boot camps worked out to their logical extreme, that don’t need to produce soldiers in large numbers. Many death camp survivors became Israeli war heroes during the fighting in 1948. They threw themselves willingly into suicidal attacks that would have pinned or routed the Israeli militia never noted for its cowardice.
In Dark Nature, Lyall Watson reviews two moral codes. The first, “genetic morality,” evolved three basic rules of animal behavior during millions of years of adaptive survival:
· do good to relatives;
· do ill to everyone else; and
· cheat whenever you can.
Struggling against this genetic morality and the unspeakable horror it unleashes with tiresome regularity, is the basic morality of higher civilization, called “Tit-for-Tat, Plus”:
· do good first; thereafter
· do whatever the other guy just did to you (for good or ill); and
· when in doubt, revert to doing good. Despite the risks involved, the more often you obey this third precept, the likelier you will be to hook up with fellow tit-for-tat-plussers. In so doing, you will outlive gene-moralists who tend to burn out faster, both themselves and their neighbors.
These two moral principles don’t seem to be very spiritual, compared to Jesus’ much more demanding injunction: “But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to evil.” – St. Luke 6-35, the Bible.
And finally, the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Keeping in mind that their preference may differ from your own under the same circumstances. Which may also lead to the cosmic conclusion that each and every one of us may relive, share and submit to every fate in existence.
Your choice.
This tit-for-tat strategy has another pitfall, according to Roy F. Baumeister’s Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, W.H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1997.
A perpetrator’s assessment of the evil he commits is milder than his victim’s of the same evil endured. This lopsided perception induces an escalating spiral of retaliation.
Let’s say that I inflict (what I perceive to be) one unit of pain on you, and you perceive it as two. You inflict three units on me, to get me to stop. I feel six units and inflict a payback of seven on you, which you feel as fourteen …
Thus murderous clan feuds can ignite over mere trifles, endure for generations and spiral out of control until some outside authority puts a stop to them. Many tyrannies grew up this way: inciting, juggling and selectively suppressing the feuds of their squabbling subordinates.
In addition, if we have suffered this kind of abuse for long stretches of time (or imagine that we have), we feel entitled to inflict harm in return, even on innocent victims, and resent any attempt to thwart us. Laboratory rats become lethargic and fatalistic after too many random punishments. Many humans replace this fatalism with a furious impulse of serial aggression.
This is the reason our legal system removes vengeance from the hands of crime victims and their surviving family members, and entrusts it instead to rich, well-insulated judges. The victims' demand for punishment usually exceeds what an impartial third party would consider fair ― assuming such a fair level of retaliation exists. By “fair,” read: “reciprocally interruptible without further escalation of violence.”
It is not surprising that humans adhere to military behaviors like well-trained dogs. Throughout history, those who defied weapon mentality suffered greater and greater refinements of ostracism, captivity, torture and murder.
One social group was selected for elite aggression and brutality; the other, much larger, for dumb proletarian submission and its mindless escapism. One way or another, the moderate, stubbornly inquiring minds caught in between were neutralized: silenced, more often than not, and killed whenever necessary.
The more elite the military unit, the more numerous its leader casualties in combat. Many of them earned posthumous decorations by leading their troops into the teeth of enemy fire. Others, less popular, were shot in the back by their own troops. Even hunting hounds turn on their masters sometimes.
Paul Lackman notes that according to official estimates, a thousand American commissioned officers were “fragged” by their men during America’s debacle in Vietnam (“We won every battle, but lost the war.”). Live grenades were rigged to their toilet seats or wired under their cots at base camp. These statistics could be doubled and redoubled by unreported incidents, casualties of accident or battle, plus those involving non-commissioned officers (sergeants) — all in all, a big chunk of total American casualties.
Armies tend to chew themselves up in any case. Officially, six percent of American combat deaths in World War II (sic) were lost to accidental, “friendly” fire. World War II frontline GIs called the U.S. Army Air Corps “the American Luftwaffe.” It would have been like lining up a reinforced American infantry division of eighteen thousand men and mowing them down with machines guns.
This is probably just another institutional understatement, (See No. 11 in “Big Lies”). Fighting in jungles, in urban areas and other settings of limited visibility and intense close combat often raises casualty counts from friendly fire — a problem aggravated when firepower is aimed against dense combat concentrations. Nonetheless, this is about par for most mechanized armies.
Officially, the US Government executed one hundred and forty-two American soldiers during World War II (sic); a fate that befell at least ten thousand German soldiers, hundreds of thousands of Soviets and millions of unarmed civilians. It befell at least two thousand French soldiers during World War I (sic) and who knows how many more during underground WWII combat between Free French rebels and Vichy Nazi collaborators?
On the “field of honor,” the dark lines tend to blur between tragic accident, heroic self-sacrifice and summary execution.
Just imagine: you’re patrolling hostile terrain with a couple dozen terrified, worn-out and filthy teenagers. They’re draped with automatic weapons and high explosives, and eager to bang away at any threat. They’re backed in turn by unimaginable firepower brought down more or less sight-unseen by distant artillerists and pilots equally stressed-out. Duck and cover!
A standard American tactic in Vietnam was to lure large enemy formations into aerial and ground artillery killing fields baited with undermanned and isolated Allied units. http://www.g2mil.com/lost_vietnam.htm. American generals poured firepower on Vietnam, the way a piggy youngster might pour mounds of sugar in his breakfast cereal. Districts containing millions of neutral Vietnamese were turned into free-fire-zones where every target (fixed and moveable) was fair game. Thus “friendly” fire turned out to be proportionately deadlier.
During the 1990 Kuwait War, allied friendly fire and accidents virtually matched the mortality rate of hostilities.
Until recently, crime and punishment, starvation, bad food, dirty water, exposure and especially fever killed many more combatants than did battle. Undiagnosed, war-induced epidemics still plague modern combat veterans, despite the best efforts of their medics. More Iraqi children died from embargo-related privation, than Iraqi soldiers from Allied firepower.
We have turned ourselves into conscience-suppressed barbarians insulated from our deplorable results by never-ending weapon propaganda.
“More than 9,600 of the relatively young Operation Desert Storm veterans have died since serving in Iraq, a statistical anomaly,” wrote Dan Kapelovitz [in 2004] the reporter who interviewed Picou. Of those still living, more than a third – upward of 236,000 – have filed Gulf War Syndrome-related claims with the Veteran’s Administration.
“Research overwhelmingly suggests these ailments and deaths were caused by depleted uranium, a metal the military use in much of their hardware, so dense it can pierce through steel-armored tanks. But this radioactive material has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, according to the renowned scientist Helen Caldicott. In Iraq, incidences of cancer, childhood leukemia and rare mutations in newborns have skyrocketed.” http://www.rense.com/general42/werq.htm
[In 2014, the cause most favored lately has been the vaccine used to block chemical agents, or perhaps the one immunizing against weaponized infection. All three of them combined, most likely?].
Picture a main battle tank ablaze from fuel and ammunition detonating inside its armored carapace. The flaming wreck gives off a thin plume of white smoke while it burns super hot, then a greasy black one you could smell miles downwind. The first thing to smoke, besides the crew’s bodies, would be the vaporized uranium that seared its way through the tank armor to begin with – like a jet of super-hot steam passing through a block of ice – that smears its interior now. This smoke-driven scum coats the landscape. Desert rains will wash it deep into the earth and slowly out to sea. Every windstorm thereafter will raise a cloud of radioactive dust.
During the Kuwait War, more American troops got poisoned by inhaling depleted uranium vaporized from American anti-tank shells, than the handful that suffered lead poisoning from Iraqi gunfire.
During the Second, thousands more combat casualties accrued. I can’t believe the count I have had to add of quiet coffin ceremonies while I revised Learner. Don’t ask me why we let desperate Iraqis and Afghans get up close and personal with American troops for so long, or what we accomplished thereby, except stuffing the pockets of weapons industrialists.
Losses among the info elite can always be replaced from the info proletariat. Indeed, the quality of leadership improves as narrow responsibilities are entrusted to lower-order chauvinists. Mercenary martinets who grew up as abused children are easier to recruit and control than progressive populists raised with tender loving care.
Campaigns of political violence and terror favor political extremists over moderates until revulsion overwhelms the survivors. Then, for the sake of peace, the worst killers are granted amnesty and sent home. Leaders take their bloody gains into luxury exile; spear-bearers go home to terrorize their peaceful neighbors. Every survivor grows old nursing gory nightmares. Thank God, they all die eventually and (let’s hope) take their nightmares with them.
Paradise may emerge once we stop burying so many nightmares with the bodies of our dead.
I wonder what life would be like if half our surviving neighbors were unpunished murderers and a third of our people were their mutilated or murdered victims — as in Rwanda. What a waking nightmare — the likes of which each of us must have endured during countless past lives. Not to mention being chewed alive for countless eons prior, with no surcease except occasional reincarnation into a chewer.
There are so many of those killers, there seems to be no good way to re-educate them before the deed, or punish or rehabilitate them afterwards. Learners will have to find new ways to do just that before the necessity reappears, God forbid. Reverend James Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 1995 in South Africa is a Learner handbook for this mind-numbing task.
One of weapon management’s most spectacular obscenities is the routine of evil as described by Hannah Arendt in her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
The contemporaries of Lot and Noah are said to have perished from the unforeseen consequences of their Routine of Evil, as had the fabled Atlanteans. Once they embraced it, no alternative remained for them but annihilation. Ten thousand years after the Atlantis disaster, Plato reported that that society had indulged in arcane energy technologies gone astray — sound familiar?
It might not have been Sodom and Gomorrah’s sexual gymnastics, per se, that God condemned. Rather, He didn’t approve when humans started believing that the upright were fools and evil had become cool.
The visionary Edgar Cayce described the Atlanteans’ final conflict as a civil war. They had created human-animal chimera mutants that served them as slaves and intelligent beasts of burden. According to Cayce, two expressions of Atlantean social philosophy emerged. One forbade sexual relations between purebred humans and chimeras, whereas the other sought to permit it.
I suspect it was a bit more complicated than that. The first group probably wanted apartheid, whereas the second advocated equality. As usual, their arguments sank to the level of: “We’ll never let our sisters and daughters be raped by their kind!” Cayce, an old-school Virginian, reduced the argument to familiar racial-sexual terms and stood squarely on the side of apartheid. Both sides were annihilated in any case.
Paul Di Filippo, in his book Ribofunk, wrote a brilliant series of short stories describing the outcome of trans-human biotechnology.
Once permissive criminality and institutional brutality become dependably profitable; once doing good becomes somehow effeminate, impractical and unwise; and once official monologue begins to ennoble evil and blur our sense of right and wrong (the ultimate ambition of weapon mentality); meaningful activities grind to a halt.
In most cases, public morality serves to guarantee group survival. The wages of sin is death; every sinner dies, one way or another. But societies only succumb to their internal contradictions once they’ve institutionalized their worst brutality. Here we are.
Nobody can tell how many concentration camp guards were certifiable sadists and psychopaths. The remainder must have been minor sociopaths: petty criminals, stupid opportunists and mediocre conformists who took advantage of brutal opportunities offered by their totally guilty superiors.
Those superiors, in turn, kept their hands clean by distancing themselves from the brutality they had instituted. They established multiple tiers of bureaucracy to run a complicated paper chase of pain, misery and murder. In this manner, they distanced themselves both physically and emotionally from the process. Only rarely would a few of them go slumming among their victims to torture and murder a sampling of them, as brief diversions for themselves and to set an example for their underlings.
Indeed, the most demanding concentration camp tasks – barracks discipline, stoking the gas chambers and ovens with bodies and disposing of the remains – were relegated to kapos and Sonderkommandos respectively: concentration camp trustees on the one hand, and inmate untouchables on the other. Both groups were absolute victims of the camp system.
I should thank Tante Micheline, my mother’s best friend forever, for that reminder. She took me to see movies like Alexander Nevski and The Tank during early birthdays, to remind me that Russians were good folk just as heroic, virtuous and graceful, even though my country held them to be boogey-men fit only for nuclear extermination.
Basically, the concentration camps were set up to keep SS goon squads – handpicked from the gutters and prisons of the Reich – from going insane. That mental failing was all too frequent.
If concentration camp guards had had to live, eat and sleep in barracks with their charges, the way army drill instructors must with their trainee platoon, most of them would have developed protective feelings. Many of them did anyway, if only for a handful of beneficiaries.
Instead, feelings had to be compartmentalized. One mental “box” stored thoughts of family, friends, co-workers and the nation; the other, used at work, was intended for the inmates of a new universe of mind-numbing cruelty.
We do much the same thing in our own heads, since we occupy a global concentration camp we refuse to recognize. We apply a long-familiar double standard to minorities, to foreigners and to the homeless. Basically, those unlucky enough to stand outside our “good box” don’t merit the consideration we give our pets.
Learners won’t let anyone inside the “bad box” any longer — at least not in real space-time. In imaginary, ritual and theatrical spaces, more likely.
As Elvis Costello sings, “What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding?”
Plus he sings: “Every day, every day, every day, I write the book…”
Sing it loud and clear, my man!
- RITUAL STUPIDITY -
“Could I tranquilly see my fellow-men walking like idiots in every imaginable direction, except that alone in which the happiness they were in search of could be found?” Robert Owen, New Lanark, Cole, 108, taken from The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen, by A.L. Morton, Monthly Review Press, 1962, p. 61.
Graham Gwynn and Tony Wright, Left in the Dark, Kaleidos Press, 2008. www.leftinthedark.org.uk. The following is a summary of their text, composed with their permission.
From its inception some seventy million years ago, humanity benefited from a diet of jungle fruit [with nut, root, insect and carcass supplements as available] easily digestible and rich in flavenoids. This ideal diet inhibited the harmful effects of steroids and MAOs in the human body, stimulated pineal gland function and induced a physiological feedback loop that inhibited steroid activity, lengthened the prepubescent growth period (the more advanced the species, the longer its period of prepubescent growth) and tripled the volume of the human brain, in a very short amount of time from an evolutionary point of view. At that time, by harmonizing the brain’s two hemispheres, the human mind neared perfection.
Unfortunately, from 200,000 to about 12,000 years ago, humanity had to adapt to a much more hostile environment. A chain of catastrophic but unknown events cut off the human gene pool to a handful of female bloodlines. Thanks to humanity’s abundant brainpower, we survived this transition from a lush diet of arboreal fruit to the savanna equivalent of tubers and seeds, then ice-age animal flesh. These forced diet changes induced a cumulative decline in the human intellect without corresponding physiological change. We remained the same species; just ate different foods less well adapted to us and thus thought things through less clearly.
This nutritional deficiency boosted the effect of testosterone on the human body (both male and female) and set off a cascade of mental retardation. The human sleep cycle was accented, the brain’s right hemisphere was suppressed in favor of the left (linear thinking and short-term memory above and beyond holistic thought and long-term processing), and human behavior was anchored in restrictive fear instead of overall comprehension.
As a result, we are brain-crippled survivors of a transition from an optimal diet of arboreal fruit, to less and less advantageous ones (ending up with the nearly valueless junk-food of today) along with a spiraling decline in values and behavior.
In her great book, The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman examines cognitive dissonance. By her definition, cognitive dissonance is a bureaucracy’s (and society’s) tendency to abandon common sense, healthy conscience and long-term self-interest in favor of policies that violate them. Cognitive dissonance takes the lead, even though many warnings counsel against it.
Her prerequisites for cognitive dissonance include:
· lust for power,
· excessive power,
· mental standstill and stagnation,
· persistence in error, and
· protective stupidity (refusal to heed warnings).
The consequences of cognitive dissonance are:
· social suicide replaces reason, (as when everyone dragged the Trojan Horse into the city and celebrated imaginary victory without posting enough guards around it; and when Congress attends to its campaign contributions instead of global warning, gun control and many other problems);
· social instruments abandon their appointed tasks and turn into institutions, (the Renaissance Papacy pursued wealth and power instead of religious reform, Congress pursues its campaign finances instead of the public good); and
· leaders enslave themselves to preconceived ideas: (America’s defeat in Vietnam, the self-defeating War on Drugs, the current prison empire, the collapse of Soviet leadership, the military quagmire everyone in a position of authority told us could never happen in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.).
The March of Folly has no chapter describing a self-critical government, even an exceptional one. Weapons administrations perpetuate and stroke themselves with praise, even once their policies show signs of impending collapse.
Ms. Tuchman mentioned the 1981 martyrdom of Mohammed Anwar el-Sadat. As President of Egypt, he made the unpopular decision to negotiate peace with Israel and was assassinated for his pains. A few decades later, for the same reason, his followup Israeli counterpart, the Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, was murdered by the same species of psychopath on the Israeli side.
Standard weapon policies are only held in check by clumsy exploitation, muddled methods, mental inertia, obstacles of protocol and squabbles over spoils. Since misguided leaders insist on doing things wrong from the get go, institutional inefficiency lessens their ill effects. This despite the maternal dictum: “Two wrongs do not make a right.”
This is how the 1984 Syndrome originates. Since everyone has been misled to believe that government is malicious by nature, why not keep it as dim-wit as possible to reduce its malice? Unfortunately, a stupid government is even more malicious and eager to grow, since it forgives itself in advance for its corruption, negligence and ineptitude.
What The March of Folly calls cognitive dissonance, a rare aberration, Learner calls ritual stupidity, a continuous tendency among WeaponWorld managers.
The real-world behavior of most public institutions is usually irrational. Even though their basic mandate may be reasonable, their bureaucrats make a point of contradicting it. Ms. Tuchman admitted as much. She concluded that we may only muddle “through patches of brilliance and decline.” In her opinion, the only way to overcome cognitive dissonance would be by an electorate so well-informed, it would value moral courage above material gain — a vanishing rarity these days. The basic Learner goal? Nurture this cosmopolitan world citizenry.
“Epic poems, inscriptions on monuments, treaties of peace — nearly all historical documents bear the same character; they deal with breaches of peace, not with peace itself. P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid.
Many of those solemn documents justified crimes against humanity. Under the lofty tenets of Stalin’s Constitution, his officials killed as many Russians as the Nazis did. Militant Chinese exponents of Mao’s Quotations condemned more Chinese than did Japanese militarists. Those who ratified France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man betrayed it, from the Terror to massacres in Indochina, Algeria and post-colonial Africa, (Rwanda in particular). Nowadays, this semi-fascist stupidity has sunk to the level of prohibiting good little girls from wearing their symbols of worship in public schools. Secularism as an excuse for religious discrimination? What next?
As for the Preamble of the American Constitution and its Bill of Rights, well! Note the prison empire built up around us, and the army of mercenaries (Regulars, militarized police and freebooters) bankrolled to defend it. How many more Constitutional distortions will the American Empire tolerate; what additional abominations will we have to witness before the truth dawns?
In fact, cognitive dissonance typifies human behavior. We practice what we preach only rarely. In this “real world,” we compartmentalize our feelings. Certain plots, characters and settings trigger trust, compassion, cooperation and goodwill (towards family, clan, political allies, co-citizens, co-religionists and language peers). Meanwhile, others (dealing with the homeless or immigrants, for example) stain our mind and spirit with fear, untruth and violence by proxy.
We could silence the hated commands of WeaponWorld and practice charming PeaceWorld hymns instead.
Picture two men: Mr. Stoic and Mr. Nerves. When Mr. Stoic gets hurt, he secretes endorphin pain suppressors that let him function at minimal efficiency. In addition, he practices the stoicism our weapon philosophers never cease to praise. Best be stoical about problems our fervently stupid institutions forbid us to resolve.
This social stoicism promotes insane public policies; it forges the bureaucracy that Barbara Tuchman describes in detail. Decisions descend from the top in isolation from reality; they dictate fickle desires that may or may not be practicable on the ground; that may contradict survival instincts, local capabilities and moral precept. Who cares? No-one directly involved gets consulted. Middle managers execute those decisions anyway, under the threat of dismissal. Reasonable objectors get pruned from the decision tree. This pruning is the favorite pastime of most bureaucrats; this automatic ritual makes them more stupid, flaccid, apathetic and “stoical.”
Mr. Nerves swoons at the first sight of blood, not to mention serious injury. Deep-sunk in blackout, his shock endures until his subconscious stipulates that new conditions may be survivable. While Mr. Nerves lingers comatose, his psyche mulls its options at leisure.
Argumentation and consensus-building govern nervous policy-making. The longer it takes to reach consensus, the longer the delay between actions. Nervous and pluralistic administrations compromise, vacillate and delay. Nobody commits to any position until everyone has staked a claim. As more and more voices join the debate, delays stretch out forever. The more data collected, the longer each new decision takes. Taking two steps forward and three steps back, executive organizations gather information, process it for revealed truth, announce decisions, survey outcomes, rethink, establish the next course of action, etc.
Either that, or a hidebound minority makes arbitrary decisions and ignores their downside: a much simpler, more common practice. When decision-making deadlocks, short-term greed becomes the tiebreaker, the final arbiter of overheated debate. Soon thereafter, it replaces serious debate completely. “Let the greedy have their way; it’s so much simpler that way, plus it pays pretty good!” Disaster befalls from it quite reliably. Excellence and its incredible returns demand more thought and effort, less greed and corresponding lack of concern.
Let’s discuss three weapon management cure-alls: discipline, morale, and glory. Military disciplinarians apply just enough brutality to short-circuit the common sense and rational self-interest of recruits. “High” unit morale allows its minions to sacrifice themselves when push comes to shove. “Glory” occurs when discipline is so well enforced that all but a few military leaders (well insulated by distance and stupidity) submit to being massacred — often for no reason.
Elite combat units must endure heavy casualties yet remain aggressive. They must attack without hesitation, even once they have been checked, forced back and chased. In certain cases, they must submit to annihilation against impossible odds. After all, personal catastrophe is the only outcome for those killed or maimed in battle. It does not matter how “glorious” their sacrifice may have been. In short, all military personnel – from latrine diggers to supreme commanders – must commit cognitive dissonance on demand.
That’s a difficult state of mind for a State to achieve. As a matter of routine, military hierarchies must operate in a fog of cognitive dissonance; yet even they have a hard time maintaining it. Therefore, weapon states pamper masters of cognitive dissonance and marginalize the insightful, the critical, and the outspoken. From the illiterate grumblings of the info-proletariat to the pinnacles of literary mythos, dense footings of ritual stupidity must uphold the cardboard façade of enlightened civilization. This groundwork is so commonplace, it has become invisible to us.
Weapon states mask overt aggression in times of peace. Instead, racial and domestic violence become routine; sports and popular culture glorify brutal competition. The proletariat finds less and less legitimate work, which boosts crime. In pursuit of short-term profits to pay off titanic war taxes, humans pit themselves against each other and conspire against their environment. In a flash of resource depletion, eons of ingrained reverence for nature are forsaken. Mass consumption, personal littering and institutional pollution wear away the natural, social and psychic fabrics of the world. Excessive sexual restraints, religious intolerance and recreational drug criminalization serve to multiply aggression.
Alcohol, drugs, prostitution, gambling, and other human addictions multiply social costs, especially when rendered scarce and expensive by official prohibition (thus more profitable for the controlling elite and their judges). In that case, those matters should be legalized, subsidized and heavily regulated to reduce their social impact, obeying the flexible Dutch principle of gedogen: “illegal but tolerated if nothing bad ensues.”
On PeaceWorld, the primary exceptions from this enforcement principle will be the ban against weapon practices for which there will be no tolerance. Addicts will get their kicks for free. Indeed, they should get special subsidies for their addiction. In the long run, these outlays will be much less onerous than forcing innocent victims to support their drug habit in person by getting robbed: a bilaterally abusive tax.
New religious ceremonies will show young Learners the pathos of immorality. Learner rituals may re-enact ancient morality plays of excess and the Pandora’s Box they open. Mystery cults served the same function in the past; likewise, ancient Dionysian holidays of public intoxication. Once society provides secure havens of drug initiation, intoxication and recovery, we may curb public drunkenness and harmful addictions. They will become unthinkable public faux pas (foh-pah, “missteps,” numb-nut strategies) among the partners of a peaceful society.
Likewise, Learner society will encourage personal research into revelatory hallucinogens. Friends will gather in legal Kivas where they may share cheap, legal, high-quality drugs and meditate together on Dreamtime. They will find safe Kivas for these activities. But personal responsibility would never diminish for the public abuse of drugs and alcohol. On the contrary, drug-aggravated crimes will draw stiff penalties from Learner juries. After all, those jurors will have been there and done that, themselves, without such harmful consequences.
It has been at least ten thousand years since healthy humans began taking psychoactive substances. Arbitrary prohibition is folly in slow motion. Street drugs should be regulated to ensure their quality and reduce their toxicity. The designation “Sativa,” in Cannabis Sativa, is an ancient Sanskrit honorific reserved for rice and other beneficial plants (fennel, grapes). Properly cultivated and administered, its medicinal and Dreamtime qualities outweigh its risks. High quality marijuana reduces nervous tension and stress — as opposed to the mind-numbing trash the police and criminals have conspired to refine. It promotes socialization and philosophical discourse without jeopardizing our pursuit of the Muse. PeaceWorld will welcome this source of inspiration.
In 2019, there are two main reasons why recreational drugs remain illegal. First, what to do with all the spear-carriers of the War against the Druggies: those narcs, vice cops and petty criminals, once they got fired? The “War on Drugs” has created an army of undercover agents, snitches, street dealers and kingpins for whom social abuse has become routine. Finding other work for them would unleash a backlash of complex criminality the like of which has afflicted Russia since its secret police lost its license to terrorize the populace in the name of the Revolution.
The second reason for this war? The huge profits reactionaries obtain by flooding world-class banks with drug cash. During the last few decades, reactionaries have financed their media-driven political ascendancy with this criminal cash flow. Their fascistic spin control would dry up if drug use were decriminalized. Every new prison, drug law and illegal purchase increases their profit margin and power base. Think about that, the next time you score your favorite illegal high.
These days, some irresponsible people commit sick crimes and lay the blame for their horrific outcomes on drugs. Info elites coach these self-serving penitents so that their horror-show confessions can demonize victimless drug criminals. The same goes for grieving survivors of suicide victims who took drugs. But this careful selection of horror-show spokespeople and scapegoats cannot invalidate recreational drug use. Those who panic over adult “drug abuse” must understand its essential neutrality. When drug abuse releases destructive urges, it only does so by magnifying deep-seated psychological conflicts, notably our subconscious defiance of the weapon/peace antinomy. We will never resolve these problems by slamming shut psychic gateways. Instead, we should wrap the sufferers in safety nets much softer, stronger and more flexible.
My psyche was blistered by several bad drug trips; so I have little use for powerful mind-altering substances. Once such drugs are legalized, however, I would grow the most benign of them in my garden or share them with friends from theirs. All such drugs will be legalized. This will reduce secondary crimes and invasive police intervention: far worse social ills in the long run. Like the treatment for someone who gobbles up enough chocolate to make them sick, the prevention of drug-related mishaps will become a primary responsibility of local barefoot doctors dedicated to the Hippocratic Oath: “Above all, do no harm” — not to armed, invasive and trouble-stirring police.
Minors should deny themselves such drugs by choice. They should insist on better alternatives. They might “save themselves” for graduated ceremonies of age-set initiation: powerful shapers of their destiny. Imitating ancient tribal ceremonies, Learner rituals will promote kinship among age-set peers. These clans will endow novices with social responsibilities as a function of maturity and by well-timed, well-deserved merit. Local crime watch could become one of their responsibilities. Children would assume adult privileges once they were ready for adult responsibilities but not before. A few police intelligence-gathering responsibilities may default to young children in a mature peace society where unregulated brutality had not been heard of for years.
Pain – humanity’s faithful companion – has long reinforced historical stoicism. Despite the braggart medical community, rich and poor alike suffer from poorly mended fractures, toothaches, chronic irritations and allergies, digestive disorders, psychiatric emergencies and wounds induced by accident, crime, battle, self-infliction, medical neglect and malpractice.
Our bodies are sullied by toxic, misunderstood and poorly taught nutrition. Disinformation is the bread and butter of food processing mega-corporations. In truth, their primary goal seems to be the mass production of combat rations: the least nutritious but most profitable foodstuffs ever produced.
In the past, elder warriors suffered more pain than most people. Their perks let them outlive lesser folk, despite battlefield traumas and the aches and pains of old age. Indeed, the archaic “superiority” of nobles over peasants may be traced to their long-standing monopoly of hunting privileges. They enjoyed more animal protein, while peasant children grew up on gruels of vegetables, pulses and cereal. Their maturing brains never got enough protein to grow up and compete successfully. The same goes for slaves and masters; ditto for info elites and proletarians (“organic” versus “junk” food).
The cultural stagnation of certain modern nations and minorities can be traced to inadequate nutrition, especially lack of iodine in their salt, as well as other micronutrients (like iron) the precise details of which we are poorly informed. Learners could reverse these errors at little cost and boost local intelligence almost overnight. Yet another confirmation of our weapon degeneracy: that we never fixed these elementary problems on a global scale.
On the whole, people who have not been properly cared for or educated as children are more expensive to keep out of prison and hospitals as adults. Those who have been, tend to return dependable profits in good time, on their own initiative.
Poverty is the most expensive social policy on Earth — but it produces legions of good infantry.
Aside from cannabis, willow bark, mandrake, hypnosis, acupuncture and poppy sap used by many cultures, effective painkillers were rare in the past, soon harvested to extinction and forgotten. Leaders, especially hereditary leaders, had to make important decisions while beset by atrocious pain. Not to mention their underlings not so well cared for.
If you are lucky enough to have been spared this kind of pain, trust my experience. Otherwise good people become perfect brutes under a lengthy dazzle of pain; their reason abdicates in favor of cruelty and rage.
Alcohol was the painkiller of choice long before and after effective analgesics appeared. The combination of pain and alcohol annuls social graces. Alcohol and herbal infusions in boiled water always served as healthy substitutes and supplements for raw drinking water often polluted in primitive, poorly engineered cities.
Alcohol may also have helped with digestion. Like the carbon dioxide bubbles in soft drinks, it kills food-borne microbes harmful to the digestion and the blood. In this way, it allows populations with no better means – there are better ones, up to Learners to discover – to purify their guts from time to time; also, to cleanse wounds and soothe a troubled mind. Back then, rotten food accompanied every routine diet.
A social philosopher, whose name escapes me now, hypothesized that societies used alcohol as a way to sort out their people. After all, alcohol is a mere concentrate of grain or fruit: complementary to basic sustenance if produced from their surplus, or detrimental if produced despite their dearth. It would provide a significant surplus to the survival requirements of a family operating on the margins and deciding whether or not to consume it: a real bonus above and beyond the basic necessities for poor families both ancient and modern. Those who abstained from alcohol could use the extra income as collateral for profitable enterprise during good times and as a survival edge during times of famine; whereas those who wasted it on excessive drink would pin themselves into the lower classes in good times and croak faster in times of famine, they and their family. Ancient societies that forbade alcohol became more rigid and fixed by forsaking that surplus and their families’ option to use or abuse it, whereas societies that permitted it promoted the upward mobility of families by merit, if only indirectly.
Also, in billions of man-to-man confrontations, a sober swordsman cleaved the sluggish drunkard who drank his fill before battle to compensate for his fear (the way a few sober Russian hooligans thrashed masses of drunken Britishers during a soccer riot in 2016). Could that have been the Q’ran-dictated margin of victory for Muslim Arab warriors over Byzantine, Persian, Hindu and Chinese armies, each of which outnumbered them, sometimes by ten times or more? That, plus the Koran’s hygienic dictates while disease carried off many more of the filthy, lifelong stinking foreigners?
Another social philosopher, whose name I can’t recall either, concluded that dynamic societies force women who don’t want to have children (and men too, though he didn’t mention them), to raise babies. Permissive societies produce fewer children, become less defensible and suffer accordingly, since they allow neurologically gifted people to drift into celibacy (and homosexual intimacy, again unmentioned) and since so-called “sensual” women would be the only ones likely to bear children in these societies. By “degenerate” society, I mean this simple formula: fewer abused children and children in general, fewer good soldiers, military defeat by those better supplied with them, genocide, enslavement, and disappearance from recorded history.
According to this model, chemical birth control produces the worst form of social decay: another prized prejudice of reactionaries. Even though he, a Victorian Britisher, spoke only of religious sexual segregation. The same brutal pressure to produce more children would have also been brought to bear against them during their upbringing, (also against women, social inferiors and whomever else came to hand) to make them more ferocious. Otherwise, social indulgence mollycoddled more babies, turned them into decadent peaceniks who couldn’t defend themselves militarily against the inheritors of those merciless constraints.
In many warlike societies (such as the Roman) it was illegal and even sacrilegious for a highborn citizen to avoid having children. Adoption was compulsory in extreme cases. Indeed, this inadmissible choice (since it went against bloodline purity) must have been very widespread in ancient high societies after deadly wars and epidemics — one of the only sources of genetic renewal besides even more ferociously forbidden sexual adventures.
I would not have written this text nor outreached to others to read it, without the divine lubricant of wine. Without this psychic emancipation, I would have been too bound up by my weapon indoctrination to defy it. My spirit, dead sober and unmodulated by psychoactive drugs, would have tolerated the murderous platitudes of weapon mentality. I suspect a lot of cultural creativity springs from the same source.
I am an introvert, thanks in part to the thorny welcome my philosophical speculations have earned me up ‘til now when I spoke up. The prospect of sharing these topics with my fellow killer primates deters me, unless wine has loosened my lips first. Plus it’s easier to take on the umpteenth rewrite of this text, once I’ve washed it down with a glass or two of the fruited red. Besides, it’s a fine balm for body and soul.
The history of Russian elites and that of alcohol abusers share many similarities. These include intense suspicion, periodic withdrawal, violent outbursts, destructive self-criticism, poor self-imaging, temporary repentance, improved behavior, worsening lapses, alternatively doting and abusive treatment of co-dependents, frenzied outbursts interspersed with bottomless apathy, meticulous planning followed by indifference to outcomes, brilliant beginnings and clumsy follow-up.
We could include the willingness of both parties to betray their true friends who offer them good advice. Unfailing friendliness (metta in the Pali language Buddha spoke) is considered the supreme Buddhist virtue. It is also the first personal habit weapon managers suppress in the name of loyalty to their institutions. “This is not a popularity contest. I have given you a serious job. Now go out there and hurt someone bad, then report back to me. Dismissed!” WeaponWorld talk.
These traits characterize every weapon state, even though centuries of Anglo-Saxon propaganda have fixed them as Soviet stereotypes. Such typical human behavior occurs chaotically, in parallel on different scales, from abusive siblings and mismatched mates, spiteful clerks and tyrannical desk sergeants, up to the highest ranks of power.
A case can be made, that Industrial Era leaders not only drank to excess, but did so from lovely, lead glass decanters — poisoning themselves synergistically with alcohol and lead, and their world with pointless violence. High-flying propaganda and institutional inertia justified this foolishness to every poisoned drunkard’s satisfaction — and to ours, today. Ancient Greek and Roman info elites, as well as more recent ones, suffered similar poisoning. They served themselves acidic wine from lead and lead-soldered vessels. High-class homes collected rainwater from lead-covered roofs; lesser folks’ apartments were roofed with cheaper ceramic tiles. Thus, the richer their houses and drinks became, the dumber they got. Romans used lead as a sweetener, the same way we use Aspartane today (God protect us from it).
Poor people ate and drank from wooden and fired-clay vessels. They did not suffer from this problem except indirectly, through the bad decisions of their superiors. Even though, now that I think of it, their famous viaducts were lead-sealed. This chronic poisoning would have been enough to collapse a civilization. Each new problem got dumber solutions spiced with reflexive terrorism.
Does that sound familiar? What’s our excuse? Many times more background radiation? Maybe. A million times more dioxin, antibiotics and metabolic hormones double-parked in our food, air, drink and body fat? Perhaps. Or could it be the hypnotic repetition of weapon myths? Could their peace equivalents be found among Learners?
The recreational consumption of psychoactive drugs (minus alcohol) sets off a different set of social indicators, involving decadence. When otherwise energetic people take recreational drugs, they tend to drop out of productive materialism into mysticism, art, passive denial and antisocial indifference. The extent of their withdrawal depends on the types of the drugs they take and their dosage. Adults often use these drugs as low-stress boredom relievers — trying to compensate for their failure to entertain their topics of passion and communicate with fellow Learners equally obsessed. Roller coasters and dating, for example, are high-stress boredom relievers. Combat is the ultimate boredom reliever for society as a whole, as are other risk-taking activities.
Legalized, the social effects of recreational drugs are value-neutral and perhaps beneficial. Drug use, however, dangerously weakens a weapon state. This is especially true if the craved drug is grown, processed, and/or distributed by foreigners and thus eventual enemies. See the history of China and its cultural collapse due to opium imported to them at gunpoint by Westerners.
Ideally, these drugs should be cheap, legal, grown locally and administered hygienically. If so, their side-effects would be less harmful than those induced by the compensatory abuse of tobacco laced with toxic additives, alcohol, caffeine, bleached flour, processed sugar and sugar substitutes; not to mention police Prohibition along with organized crime commensal to it (that feeds at the same table) and every violation of human rights these august bodies bring with them.
Mohammed’s injunctions against gambling and drink helped shift his Islamic brethren toward enhanced social justice.
· Is social justice proportionate to public health plus ultra. To simple public health?
· Would the consumption of alcohol offer an antibiotic effect equivalent to that of washing one’s hands five times a day?
· Would that be equivalent to washing the feet of a stranger, of an enemy?
· In courts of justice perhaps?
· Washing a tired stranger’s feet as a social routine: what would that lead to?
Early Islam wrested huge info proletariats from the control of weapon elites that could not be defeated otherwise. The Koran offered more wisdom than the dogmatic injustice of prior weapon religions and their potentates. Long before Learner, God used Mohammed’s voice to divide the world into a House of Peace (lodging those who would concur with Islam) and a House of War (their opponents). One need not be a practicing Muslim to belong to the House of Peace, just let Muslims practice their faith in peace. It is certain that Allah prefers the House of Peace and abominates the other. No wise Muslim would contradict this conclusion, certainly not Mohammed.
I am not sufficiently qualified to comment further. Muslim Learners should do so in my place, loudly!
Urban-based agriculture and urban tyranny are thought to have evolved hand-in-hand. Crop surpluses were impossible to trade beyond the local weather boundary. Cities were set along waterways that cut through their territory. In other words, everyone shared local weather – thus surpluses or dearth – simultaneously. Only an extremely complex, hyper-technological transportation network (like those that brought grain to Troy, Athens, Carthage then Rome) could shift farm surpluses any distance from their district of origin.
In the absence of cheap bulk transport, something had to be done to preserve unmarketable surpluses. It was neither safe nor wise to gorge in years of plenty and starve during bad times. Some way had to be found to level this nutritional roller coaster. Surplus perishables could be preserved for years of famine by extending their shelf life.
Fermentation helped “solve” this problem.
Up to that point, human hunting packs would have operated much like wolf packs. They shared merit-based leadership, self-enforced honesty, equitable food and labor distribution, automatic reproductive restraints, controls against internal violence and the best possible care for a few youngsters raised by the whole community. Over the course of eons, marginal conditions destroyed any pack that deviated from this norm of moral excellence. We have been bred for peace mentality a thousand times longer than for the current weapon version, totally aberrant.
Let’s ignore for a moment the philosophical quibbles, knee-jerk nihilism and existential doubts that snare us today. Real morality increases the long-term likelihood of species survival by reducing the frequency and harmfulness of unintended consequences. On the other hand, bad behavior induces worse outcomes more often than good behavior does, when run through the probabilistic, black box calculator of unforeseen consequences. In short, obey your conscience, do good and expect unforeseen miracles; disobey it, commit additional evil and expect further unforeseen catastrophes. Obedience to conscience and its gift of miracle as a scientifically demonstrable phenomenon. Period, paragraph.
Routine alcohol abuse, however, shattered long-standing social controls through bouts of unthinkable violence and incivility, sickly hangovers, degenerative disease and adverse effects on the newborn. Generations of people recovering from benders, or just sickened by daily tippling, would have evolved insane traditions and institutions to rationalize their drunken misbehavior. Would that be us?
The first cities served (have always served) as logistics centers, disaster refuges and fortresses. Primitive citadels housed only priestly elites and their bodyguards: a perfect selection of weapon mentors and battle elites. Later on, the inhabitants of walled cities faced three choices: dispatch a field army against an oncoming horde, suffer annihilation at its hands or submit to it — often the three in succession. Field armies are just voracious migratory cities, lawnmowers of local surplus and sterilizers of their path.
Sedentary agriculture, urbanism and centralized capital militarism evolved along parallel but independent tracks. Surplus riches demanded military defenses, property laws and police protection. Dense urban populations and their fixed assets made fortifications mandatory and affordable. It mattered little whether they were manned by armed slaves, mercenaries, regulars or “free” militia.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) also affects ritual stupidity. PTSD survivors are afflicted with permanent hyper-vigilance, attacks of unfocussed panic, paranoia, temper tantrums, a yearning for mayhem and a general inability to readapt to civilian life. Post-traumatized veterans of the First (sic) World War formed the nuclei of totalitarian regimes across Europe and Asia in the 1920s-30s. Hundreds of thousands of American veterans of the war in Vietnam came home to die alone and homeless for decades afterwards (and now, those from Iraq and Afghanistan); many more throwaway dead than the 59,000 and some names engraved on the Black Wall in Washington — the same losses we suffer each year on our highways, with traumatized survivors in proportional multitudes.
Ancient leaders upheld their claim to nobility by charging into the thickest combat. Nevertheless, they were supposed to display inhuman sagacity in the course of peacetime decision-making. This, despite the fact that they may have been temporarily crazed by PTSD or permanently crazed members of the battle elite.
Besides, to a great extent, the modern world has been ruled over by six generations of victims of concussion suffered at first as amateur athletes in school or as professionals thereafter (rugby, football and boxing), and by war veterans who survived nearby detonations and became civilian leaders afterwards. Their bruised brains justified stupid policies for the rest of their life, as in Congress.
Another factor favors ritual stupidity. It takes time, lots of it, to collect intelligence and transmit orders via slow communications channels. Running a country in the days of horse and sail was like piloting a defective radio-controlled airplane with a daylong command/control delay. In other words, the command you input at moment X would not take effect until X plus 24 hours (or weeks or months). This built-in time delay would induce a long series of crashes-on-takeoff, no matter how expert the royal hand – or the republican ones – on the joystick.
Nowadays, much has been written about “risk management.” Management theorists bemoan the fact that professional risk managers fly by the seat of their pants, especially in foreign policy circles. Lacking anything better, they base their decisions on “subjective criteria” (read bullshit).
Weapon technicians are at the forefront of broadband communications, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and knowledge systems. Meanwhile, the stingy “free market” foists obsolete information systems on civilians — assuming anyone bothers with civilian applications a lot less richly subsidized though much more profitable in the long run.
Few civilian organizations gather every bit of data in real-time and study it in detail. Such systems have just begun to be adopted as military communications, command, control, computer and intelligence (C5i) systems. Modern C5i hardware and expertise accelerate the process of analysis, execution, surveillance, repeat ... tremendously. Unfortunately, most civilian institutions retain the promptitude of the era of ponies and sailboats. Weapon mentors practice routine protocols of stateliness, deliberation, and (whenever possible) retrenchment, censorship and reaction in matters of peace and social welfare. In matters of war, they practice free-spending creativity, vigor, speed, unpredictability and open-minded problem solving.
It takes decades to reverse major blunders (like the Vietnam War and the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan). After all, awful programs must be carried out to their awful conclusion once top officials have “staked their reputation” on them. They would rather appear infallible – until catastrophe pulls down their pants – than admit mistakes, make mid-course corrections and achieve a better outcome.
The vulnerability of entrenched elites peaks when the least incompetent managers realize their pernicious habits have brought them more trouble than gain. Then, half-heartedly, they tailor new policies to a broader, more peaceable cloth. Reactionaries block this transformation at every step. Having acquired the most privilege and profit in times of worsening repression, they are outraged by any change in policy. Their weapon hypnosis decrees that self-serving exploitation remain paramount; it is more important to them than a clear conscience.
As social justice declines, (im)pertinent proto-elites froth up from the host info proletariat, eager to challenge ambivalent elites. Reactionaries and radicals often reinforce each other’s brutality. Battle elites serve one political extreme or the other or both; their brutality sponsored by weapon managers at home and abroad. Often, partisans of opposite political extremes act in concert and in succession to disrupt the peace. Independent and hostile, yet paradoxically complicit, they raise as much hell as they can get away with. Take satanic twins like the pre-war Russian Soviets and German Nazis, modern Arab and Israeli fascists, and the global fascist psychopaths of national-corporate or national-fundamentalist persuasion.
It takes more self-control to grit one’s teeth and quietly bury one’s dead, than to dispatch the next helicopter raid or suicide bomb squad; firmer authority to forbid the next act of retaliation rather than look the other way while local hotheads take matters into their own hands. Until such time, popular moderates will be targeted: the brave ones for assassination, the prudent terrorized and the covetous corrupted. The World Court and the World Militia will promote PeaceWorld by defending brave moderates, protecting the prudent and subsidizing the covetous everywhere.
The info proletariat is moderate in its politics until threats, violent propaganda, selective assassination and orchestrated aggression distort its outlook. Political violence favors extremists and blocks moderates. The question is not how often extremists indulged in knee-jerk terrorism, but how rarely majorities held to their peaceful ideals and made extremists suffer the consequence of their aggression instead of rewarding their brutality by multiplying it.
The only time I’ve seen a terrorist group suffer from its actions and stop, at least for a while – as opposed to turning themselves into martyrs and inspiring the next bunch of murderous whackos – was during the Munich Olympics of 1972. Palestinian gunmen took Israeli athletes hostage, got them gunned down in the crossfire and congealed world opinion against their cause. What was the difference between that massacre and every one since on either side? This I cannot fathom. Perhaps the Palestinians horrified themselves for a while, back when the conscience-driven among them retained some shred of a say in politics?
An excellent analysis of weapon revolutions is The Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton. Ignoring the peace/weapons antinomy, he reviews other factors with great care. To summarize Anatomy in Learner terms, the info elite loses its privileged status when its disgruntled cadres defect to proto-elites in growing numbers. Reinforced by these defectors, the proto-elite most likely to rebuild a more lethal army emerges and absorbs many more battle elites. It kills off its most effective opponents, terrorizes the remainder and takes over. Suffering from paranoid siege mentality, its bosses cast aside any thought of peace. That way, they manage to sharpen their nation’s threat deterrent.
The only outcome of every weapon revolution, war and techno-political phase of “progress” has been the establishment of weapon states of greater lethality.
“The [French] Revolution cleared the way for a much larger, more centralized state apparatus, able to exploit its revolutionary-patriotic ideology and new means of coercion to mobilize large armies and the economic resources for major wars. The Revolution inevitably upset the balance of the European states system, in which France was centrally situated; and it created plenty of reasons on both sides for the series of wars which quickly unfolded. War, in turn, drastically affected the course of the Revolution, delivering the “coup de grace” to the liberal phase of 1789-91, and creating both the bureaucracy of La France Fonctionnaire and the elements of a professional officer corps and a modern national army. Not for the last time, therefore, a social revolution was instrumental in bringing about a major development of the state machine. (Marx, incidentally, recognized this in the French case, where he erred was in believing that proletarian revolution would have a different result). Martin Shaw, Dialectics of War: An Essay on the Social Theory of Total War and Peace, Pluto Publishing Ltd, London, 1988, pp. 47-49.
Traditional info elites attack each new revolution just hard enough to set the revolutionaries back on the track of weapon development. Peaceful revolutionaries are unseated through open warfare, subsidized terrorism and economic blockade. Where outright invasion is inappropriate because a popular Militia has been formed to block it, internal chaosists (Contras) can be unleashed instead.
Freer societies, more evolved in peace, can be goaded back onto the path of weapon tyranny by means of pinprick acts of terrorism whether from external sources or internal ones. Every world power accelerates this regression to the militarist mean; weaker states follow close behind. Weapon managers pick off peaceable idealists and replace them with pet weapon mentors; they neutralize political moderates and replace them with battle elite creeps.
We are programmed to admire this Darwinian selection for sociopathocracy and its growing brutality. No exceptions are permitted. Thus, the deadly status quo of contending warfare states grows more tyrannical every year, despite weapon revolutionaries’ mistaken attempts to resist and transform it by redoubled acts of violence. This tyranny grows stronger despite and because of them. Every form of violent resistance renews, strengthens and perpetuates it.
Non-violent resistance on a global scale by a coalition of enthusiastic, conscience-driven Learners who have just found themselves – transparent, homogeneous in their diversity and assuredly steadfast – will dissolve the strictly minoritarian Pathocracy of WeaponWorld once and for all.
Make it so.
- THE CAPITAL OPTION -
Any self-respecting capitalist would gladly run his profitable version of something like the Rolls Royce Company. If he had any sense (and he didn’t succeed thus far by being stupid), he would rather offer the highest quality product or service at the best price the market could bear. That would include the best benefits package for his elite workers and their family, superb educational facilities, healthy communities with low crime and low-priced survival necessities. All the benefits Learners would share, this wise capitalist would arrange for his workers and consumers in order to make the best product and the maximum profit.
In spite of his desire to excel, he must consider weapon taxation both direct and indirect. Either the quality of his product must suffer or he must find some other way to short-change his customers and workers so as to defray these taxes that offer him no gain. The greater the value of his product and the higher his profits, the more war taxes he will have to pay and the more they will distort his cost-benefit analysis. He can reduce the quality of his product and use the savings to defray his weapons expense. His employees, clients and competitors will do likewise in proportion to their success.
This limitation is unavoidable for every so-called free-market enterprise on WeaponWorld.
On PeaceWorld, a self-respecting capitalist could satisfy his topic of passion and build the Rolls Royce Company of his dreams. It is there that cost-cutting would become business suicide if it reduced the quality of products and services. The race would go to the vendor of the highest quality, not the maximum cost cutter at the expense of quality. On WeaponWorld, he has to betray his topic of passion — as all of us must, each our own.
There is nothing wrong with Capitalism, per se, even though it can adopt one of two forms of growth. Once it shifts from one form to the other, it poisons the society that tolerates its presence much less its control.
The first form of capitalist growth could be called The Garden. In it, the resources of Capital are invested in areas lacking those resources. Passionate gardeners cultivate the soil, supplement its nutrients and water it as required. They plant trees, shrubs and flowering plants to suit their taste, rip out weeds and unwanted plants and leave the ground clear for favored ones. That is the work of capital at its best: superior over other forms of economic concentration and development.
In the second form, the gardeners walk away or are otherwise indisposed. They no longer tend the garden, and weeds proliferate, revealing the second wave of capitalism. All the nutrients, soil and water accumulated to further the growth of beneficial plants gets sucked up by the other kind. They smother the old growth to propagate themselves. Everything else must suffer while they thrive.
This course cannot be reversed except by applying much more labor and care. As time goes on, the garden will require more and more upkeep for little additional return. After all, a garden is a garden: nothing more and nothing less.
Another analogy would compare the healthy cells of a growing body to the virus that attacks it. The first form of capitalism would be the body’s careful regulation of clean water, oxygen and nutrients to nourish its cells, carry waste away, and allow them to grow. In the second, a virus invades the host cell with the sole intent of multiplying itself at the latter’s expense. It takes over, converts the cell’s reproductive machinery to produce a crowd of new viruses and bursts it to release a load of new viruses among remaining body cells, and so on: the destructive feedback of capitalism gone bad.
Nowadays, the most powerful people persuade themselves that viral or weed growth offers them more profit than the garden or body variety. They abandon long-term growth in favor of the weed type, more profitable in the short run but ruinous in the long.
Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Co., New York, 2007, describes this transition quite clearly. She reviews a series of synthetic and/or natural disasters followed by political takeovers that permit international tyrants to cannibalize the economy of entire nations.
The Chicago School of Economics was represented by Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, Leo Strauss (the infamous town crier for “the noble lie”) and other maniacs of laissez-faire Capitalism. They drew a self-serving analogy between the annihilation of a diseased psyche by administering electroshock and psychoactive drugs in overwhelming doses (even though those malpractices never produced a cure), and the annihilation of popular progress considered excessive, by inducing a succession of wars, natural catastrophes and fresh-baked tyrannies. In brief, psychopaths dictate political economics to the rest of us.
In honor of this dishonorable philosophy, they took the first opportunity (and every other, since) to silence the voice of the People and sabotage its will. Where they succeed, they strip out public services, savings accounts and retirement funds; dramatically multiply unemployment by ruining local commerce and dismantling factories; and burden the People with public debts so enormous it cannot recover the vigor it had painfully won mostly in the recent past — all to the instant profit of laissez faire capitalists.
From Iran and South America in the 1970’s, across Poland and Russia in the 80’s, the Asian Tigers in the 90’s, New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and the annihilation of Iraq, the Kurds and neighboring countries; massive bankster payoffs have succeeded one another. Each new disaster brought them more profit in exchange for lower outlays of time and effort.
All they had to do was silence anyone who intended to benefit the People. They bankrolled white-collar criminals to do their bidding, and rewarded the local military to come down hard on remaining dissidents. This combination required few funds and grew an enormous bottom line.
Naomi Klein’s healthy alternative to this kind of Capitalism can be found at http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-take/.
Actually, this misbehavior can be traced back to the beginning of Capitalism and even further, to the origin of mass societies. As each new one emerged, it grew by enslaving as many individuals on the periphery as its followers could get away with, ruining other societies, and exterminating “primitive” ones that got in the way. Nothing new there.
Karen Armstrong, The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, Toronto, 2019. She makes constant reference to the original sin of every city on Earth: it must brutally rob its rural dependents for the extra food needed to sustain urban specialists and their dependents.
The clearest example I can find in history is that of Tamerlane (Timur the Lame or Conqueror, 1336-1405). He embellished his capital city, Samarkand, into one of the wonders of the world. He decked it with vast riches, magnificent parks and monumental architecture. He peopled his court with brilliant musicians, artists, scholars and pious men. He did so by turning every other city on the Silk Road into a pile of ash and pyramids of skulls. Needless to say, that commercial network withered along with his capital city after his death, since no surviving caravanserai remained to harbor merchant convoys. The Silk Road never recovered, even after centuries, until today when the Chinese are rebuilding it, pretty much from scratch from end to end.
Unfortunately, Garden Capitalists became hopelessly addicted to the Weed Growth variety. Each new disaster they engineer delivers a thousand cuts to the collective conscience (presently, the whole world). Paradoxically, they profit in proportion to the damage they inflict.
Marx deplored the fact that capital must inevitably exhaust its worthy targets of investment. As a society matures, the margin of growth of commercial enterprises shrinks as they compete with rivals of equal value and output. In the long run, a modern capitalist’s last alternative is to destroy rival entities more or less completely and then invest in the ruins: his only means of renewing his profit margin over time.
We are faced with a planet economically closed (globalized) in which commerce and industry are equal more or less everywhere. Nowhere is left for Capital to invest and expect returns superior to those of the past. Only by systematically smashing various economies in turn, then investing in the ruins, can Capital surpass its historic profitability. I repeat myself because the process is mindlessly repetitious and zombie-like.
This can be seen as a kind of slash-and-burn agriculture where farmers burn a forest parcel and plant crops in the ashes. Once the ground loses the fertility acquired from burning, they move on to burn the next parcel. As long as the farmers are not too numerous and the great forest grows back and fills in the blanks, the trick works quite well. However, once people grow too numerous and the vital forest shrinks in proportion, the whole deal becomes a recipe for desert waste, the ruination of mild local climate and guaranteed starvation.
Having suffered from the slash-and-burn tendencies of Capitalist investors for the last few centuries, long before the World Wars (sic), the Earth has reached the point where everything that remains after each “bigger and better” forest fire has lost its compensatory growth. At this stage, the world economy has come to resemble a wasteland where a thriving forest once stood. A warning sign that the natural world has reached the end of its tether: easy petroleum is running out along with clean water, coral reefs, mild climate and other geophysical necessities.
As raw materials become more difficult to extract and process, the sole economic resource left to draw upon will be the basic sustenance of world populations. A case in point is the capital invested to convert food crops, desperately needed elsewhere, into biofuel needlessly expensive.
Once the People’s sustenance is stolen and adulterated enough to satisfy the demands of Capital and once those profits shift to a clique of billionaires and their clients, the People will rise up to oppose this extortion by force of arms. Since weapons have become so deadly, (the sword, the optimal tool for tyrants; the AK-47, for the masses; and the virus, for the lone gunman), that kind of fighting will just worsen the problem by wasting more resources, infrastructure and lives than during an equivalent stretch of peace.
As for those among the rich and powerful who justify their misdeeds with “too big to fail;” the Romans discovered an effective punishment for legions that disgraced themselves in battle but were needed to fight another day: decimation. One wrongdoer could be brought low for the sins of nine of his peers without diminishing their capacity; on the contrary, that promoted better behavior in the future. Two out of ten if this correction does not take hold the first time. They need not be killed or imprisoned; simply stripped of power and benefits. Instead of sterilizing small businesses (as happened after the 2008 crash and during COVID) decimation would target bigger ones, those that introduce superior wrongdoers and their worst habits.
According to this logic, outer space is the only field left for Capital to invest in seriously. Earth must be seen as a home ground no longer subject to the destructive exploitation of Capital. Its governors must treat Capitalists who maximize their profit at the expense of the People, of any people, as enemies of mankind to be ruthlessly ejected from power.
The world economy is not yet ready to exploit outer space and its limitless (seemingly, at least for the time being) resources. That project will require a few more decades of intensive development of mankind’s basic knowledge and needs. Only then will enough infrastructure, intellectual and capital resources be available to meet this task. In the meantime, any reduction of them for short-term profit must be criminalized, and capitalist financiers of such reductions, regulated to within an inch of their financial lives.
The difference between PeaceWorld's approach to outer space, and WeaponWorld's, is time. A world at peace has all the time it needs to prepare itself, its people and its path to the stars gracefully. Ditto, AI. On WeaponWorld everything must happen yesterday. So horrific enslavement and ecocide must be enforced just to make or beat the merciless time quota.
This will prove to be a difficult task, since Capital can call on titanic sums to hire the sociopathia to carry out its dirty work in their capacity as politicians, the military, the press, NGOs, and other social service workers.
World leaders will be called upon to adopt fanatical devotion and revolutionary fervor to create an information network of such certified purity that only everyone could maintain and protect it. PeaceWorld is a stage on which such people and their props could flourish; others would demand enormous self-sacrifice and devotion yet offer trivial returns.
I call on Capitalists themselves to acknowledge the corner they have painted us into. They must understand, with a steady gaze more penetrating than greed, the stakes they have set themselves up for, along with their dependents and the rest of humanity. Since this policy will be painful for Capitalists, dragging them to the brink of bankruptcy and economic suicide, they will be the only ones qualified to determine how rigorously to apply it without killing the Golden Goose, to the limit of their tolerance. I’m relying on the fact that they, too, have children whose future they must guarantee if they can. Mere ramparts of dollars garrisoned by mercenaries will crumble under the shock of future socio-ecological blows.
It is up to Capitalists and themselves alone to promote the world economy we need. Only they can regulate themselves and check the misdeeds of sociopathia. In the absence of this transformation, the world economy will spin out of control at the hands of psychopathic profiteers and their sociopathic mercenaries. The toll of losses and destruction from this failure will be staggering. Civilization is not likely to survive.
How can the term “profit” do justice to the priorities of PeaceWorld?
The profit motive often triggers negative outcomes such as corruption among elites, such as the incompatibility of corporate products with similar ones offered by other corporations, their products in off-size containers and rapidly obsolete. Such as the private and corporate hoarding, rationing and use-tax of scientific knowledge paid for by public funds, as practiced by the publishing company Elsevier and others.
Often called “externalities": incidental or hidden costs like ecological damage and community poisoning are declared: "beyond financial control and beyond the reach of the law.” Why? Because WeaponWorld is not aware enough to control them properly. It will never be that aware, before its suicide from institutional stupidity (see that chapter)
Soon enough, all those costs will be factored into basic cost accounting, with an emphasis on reducing disease among local populations and the natural world. Constitutionally foremost, the reduction of misery of the people from the bottom up. From that follow: universal lifetime health care, cosmopolitan culture, humane urbanism, natural edenization and countless other benefits resulting from Learner progress.
Such balance sheets, properly digitized, will forecast much more generous returns. Those that only read the bottom-line of financial profit are so thoughtless they only respond to weapon taxation at the expense of everything else.
Those are the choices we face: we, the People, and those odd fellows whose topic of passion is Capital.
- COSTS -
We must address the question of costs – if only momentarily and with proper caution – given the misery we endure while we pay undue attention to imaginary dearth. For millennia, we’ve never found the wealth to invest in a secure abundance. Instead, we bemoan peace expenses and short-change ourselves by reneging on them, while at the same time we underestimate weapon costs and ruin ourselves to honor them.
We will pay dearly for this transformation. Essentially, the richest countries will be expected to ante up first and raise the high bids. As usual, conspirators of Greed will gainsay Learner transformation with myths of scarcity, even though as usual they are awash in liquid capital that lacks a gainful catchment except in war and its preparations.
What choice do we have? Everything is at stake. We may endure the next decade of eco-disaster, shrinking petroleum reserves and ensuing global fascism of national-capitalist states fighting over the dregs. Otherwise, we can fall prey to annihilation this very afternoon, the victims of some military paroxysm unforeseen by us though carefully engineered by others.
If we chose to make a concerted shift from weapons to peace, its promise to us could be a future of unforeseen abundance and elegance.
For decades, econologicians have defended supply-side (pro-investor) economic models versus demand-side (pro-consumer) ones. Meanwhile, they’ve ignored the obvious conflict between weapon production and peace demand.
Weapons economies encourage wild spending. They cannot achieve, much less maintain a balance between the mighty industrial potential of wartime production and lesser peacetime consumer demand. This imbalance leads to extravagant hyper-consumerism, guaranteed obsolescence, energy splurge and mass wastage whose unsustainable nature produces cycles of explosive growth-surge booms and abrupt bankruptcy crashes.
Only weapons economies can produce enormous “surpluses” of disposable people, iron rations and military hardware as costly as it is unproductive; only they can keep up with mushrooming battlefield demands. They must produce mass quantities of zero-profit weapons and no-other-choice inductees on short notice. For no better reason than this, they subsidize overpopulation and military-industrial complexes: obsolete, harmful and toxic.
A peace economy would favor the quality of life. By balancing peace supply and demand, it would sustain reasonable enterprise. It would provide long-lasting if modest prosperity with rare economic peaks and shallows; but not the enormous, last minute industrial output that armed hordes require once war breaks out. It would be much more stable during times of peace by avoiding market saturation under conditions of slow, no, or reversed growth. Without warfare’s requirements and their unavoidable binges and busts, our boom-crash-boom would start generating a soothing hum.
Weapons 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 fuel consumption and wear and tear. Just don’t expect a sudden burst of speed from them when the general quarters alarm is flipped.
Weapon managers could care less about civilian economies during peacetime, so long as they can tear them down like a stage set and replace them with weapons assembly lines. For all they care, the world’s peacetime economy can collapse (as it did under their care during the Great Depression and as it threatens to do so yearly). That just adds more abandoned factories ready for instant conversion to wartime production and deepens the despair of jobless military recruits and their grim parents. That turns them into willing wartime collaborators in exchange for a sturdy pair of shoes, a dry place to sleep and three hot meals a day. Pure genius.
The creation of PeaceWorld will no doubt demand substantial sacrifices. But what we value most cannot be taken from us. Freedom to choose, the craving to Learn, good will and a sense of humor: those we would retain, regardless. PeaceWorld can only enhance them.
In Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, (Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1996), Tzvetan Todorov lists rare virtues like heroism and saintliness. He compares them with mundane survival skills like maintaining personal dignity, caring for those near and dear (as opposed to unfocussed charity) and cultivating the life of the mind in spite of horrific conditions.
The saintliest camp inmates may have perished first — and perhaps more mercifully. But Nazi concentration camp guards could not suppress the basic survival instincts of the survivors, no matter how soon they disposed of the best of them. No future adversity can, short of annihilating us.
If our first attraction were to evil, if weapon mentality could sate itself unchecked, our forebears would have left no progeny and we wouldn’t be here to discuss this. That anyone survives today confirms the fact that most of us are kalotropes attracted to the good, the same way plants are phototrophs drawn to sunlight.
During the idealism of youth, many fine minds dedicate themselves to the common good. Weapon mentality subverts their idealism every way it can. Conversely, our institutions need only network themselves for peace for those ideals to turn into dynamos of change. Sooner or later, our worst social contradictions will heal in the fresh air of peace and its sunshine of truth.
With the consent of its proletariat, each info elite runs its own mix of peace and weapon policies. We have walked the plank over and over from peaceful decadence to weapon constraint, our choice based on a threat-distorted constellation of political metaphors. Our decision could favor ethical peace or any trash info elites use to justify their toxic and intoxicating weapon technologies.
The elite that opts for “Peace at Last” will work itself out of the job of rationing information. In so doing, it will draw near to the summit of managerial excellence. The quality of worldly leadership could not get much higher. But weapon leadership will never approach that crest of excellence, since, in armed competition with its weapon peers it a) rations good information and broadcasts mis/disinformation instead, and b) esteems “strong” realism and cold-blooded calculation over “weak” human conscience and compassion.
The usual shift from marginal peace to total war induces a switch of attitude from thrift to extravagance. Once mass killing takes priority, ideas of profit and fiscal restraint go out the window. New goals are established, priorities redefined and plans drawn up. Hang the expense! New regulations are strictly enforced. It matters less who’s VIP toes get stepped on. Overnight, flaccid institutions snap to weapon goals — or get cast aside without regret. During World War I, British Edwardian society tore itself to pieces as did equivalents elsewhere. Millions of inductees dedicated themselves to weapon requirements, they often sacrificed everything for little or no reason.
We must mobilize the entire war-making potential of this planet to promote lasting peace. The problems of peace merit the same doggedness of spirit and contempt for obstacles that weapon management has always claimed for itself.
In the past, only weapon priorities benefited from such problem solving. When info elites concluded that defeat overshadowed their children, they cast aside lesser priorities and met weapon demands at all costs. Today, everybody’s child is at risk. PeaceWorld (which alone can save them) should benefit from the same kind of popular enthusiasm and its mass conscription.
The Learner transformation of public awareness will begin very subtly. It will wind up being a grand consensus that will drive overwhelming social reforms.
Throughout history, humanity has treated its wealth “surplus” like coal 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 rumbles of the next oncoming thunderstorm. At which point, snug under the dry roof of PeaceWorld, we can celebrate a harvest festival, the same way the Jews observe the Succoth holiday of deliverance from Pharaoh.
Almost everyone will obey their rational self-interest: the opposite of wartime self-sacrifice and propaganda-driven hatred planned from above. Once we accept the guidance of enlightened self-interest, arguments against PeaceWorld for reasons of cost become absurd. Celebration instead of sacrifice; the wealth of peace instead of weapon destitution.
Peace technologies produce real wealth; weapon technologies, nothing more than downstream overhead and mayhem. Learner Networks will provide real wealth surpassing the returns from every prior investment, and solutions to problems that contemporary thought cannot work out properly.
At first, Learner Networks will be terribly vulnerable. Populations seething with weapon mentality will have to stand firm against the ultimate efforts of their old elite to stampede them into Armageddon. Quite a few people, maddened by their weapon indoctrination, will obey those ultimate summons to mayhem.
Learner Networks will require elaborate diagnostic and defensive measures triply redundant and compartmentalized, with built-in safeguards against computer viruses, electromagnetic pulse, vandalism, mob violence, criminal tampering and sabotage.
Learners will seek a firm but tolerant balance between liberality and security. Over-liberality set loose prematurely will engender chaos in societies soaked in weapon mentality; rigid police measures serve no better purpose. Policies that Wimps have found useful to dominate the proletariat, and Prisms, to subvert proto-elites: all of them will have to be revised or thrown out. Read Intro & Vocab (assuming you haven’t already) to grasp the meaning of these expressions.
Learner management must be error-free from the get-go. A set of preliminary failures will not be given a second chance. Only strict adherence to the dictates of a healthy private conscience will free the majority of our efforts from error, regardless of institutional contradictions opposing them.
Throughout history, obsessed individuals 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 crushed them and their inventors without a second thought (Tesla, Reich, etc.).
Many gifted Learners are driven amateurs sprinkled through an info proletariat reduced to indifference. Once they dispose of enough leisure time and discretionary income, they set to work on their topic of passion, often at the expense of a life others would call normal.
They cannot be found by standardized tests, or by running children ragged through classroom obstacle courses, or by promoting rare survivors of examination hells (the Asian model). The more constraints on those people, the faster they will drop off your radar screen. They find their own interests sexier than the empty rewards of bureaucratic orthodoxy and corporate greed, much less the herd-like futility of weapon dissidence. Allergic to form-over-content pretense, they impose stratospheric demands on themselves and their creation.
By topic of passion, I mean some specialty someone will gladly spend 10,000 hours perfecting. After that, an info elite must be crazy enough to adopt, coordinate and broadcast such discoveries.
Most often, songs compose this way are silenced; games invented, forbidden; and exquisite toys produced, discarded in favor of rubber-stamped platitudes, homogenized mediocrity and mass-produced junk. Status quo societies promote gatekeepers whose only job is to shut Learners out and Mandarin ticket punchers who delight in suppressing them. They crush many breakthroughs, only to see them re-emerge when ideal circumstances line up once again. This grim attrition of sabotaged peace technology must stop. It’s time humanity found it voice renewed by Learner awareness and fine-tuned the dialogue between full grown energy management systems and regrown natural environments. The enormous destructive potential accumulated in the past must be repolarized to constructive Learning.
The billion children who go to bed hungry constitute the world’s ultimate pool of untapped genius. I don’t advocate their nurturing through disinterested altruism, even though that purpose is also served. I insist on it because their genes have survived centuries of lethal deprivation. As survivors of that hecatomb, they include the largest number of Learner prodigies once they’ve been properly cared for. Typical of human behavior, they are the people we need most and care for the least.
Meanwhile, sleek mediocrities play revolving doors by the million through bureaucracies either useless or openly destructive. Lacking enough love, empathy and generosity, these morality amputees are as relevant today as their predecessors were who attended the Great Universities of the European Middle Ages.
Actually, the resemblance is remarkable between the darkest of the Middle Ages, the last century and this next one just beginning.
On both occasions, military aristocrats and corporate clerics shuffled personnel, cash and paperwork. Both relied on monolithic elites: their fragmented clergies and nobles — our corporate bureaucrats, scientists and politicians. Both pauperized the info proletariat. Both erected phallic skyscrapers from seedbed of filthy slums to immortalize the emptiness of their dreams. Both were responsible for gross ecological, justice, education and public health blunders clearly inferior to what they could have accomplished had they honored peace mentality. Both adopted exotic languages to distance themselves from their info proletarians: their Latin and our mathematics. Both validated weapon mentality with their chosen set of pathetic weapon myths.
The residents of both ages based their definition of reality on social fantasies: theirs, bureaucratic religion; ours, bureaucratic technology. Both eras trusted dogmas as incoherent and clueless as they were beyond dispute. They turned their back on 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 and torched thousands of rich and eccentric old ladies as scapegoats for evils elites had obviously committed and benefited from. We have our perpetual War on the Drugged, War on the Terrorized and the most sophisticated torments our police states and penal empires can contrive.
Both societies ground down their people with complex, expensive and filthy wars. Neither sought to avoid global war. Maximum combat was routine during both ages, whether intercontinental or village-local. Armed conflict dominated both worldviews: theirs between Muslim and Christian; ours between Communist and Capitalist. During both ages, fanatical (read psychopathic) Christians and Muslims called for Crusades and Jihads in pursuit of combatant spoils and pay.
Eventually, this fight will sort itself out between the wealthy and their victims; otherwise between progressive city dwellers and reactionary small town, suburban and country folk (as American politics sort themselves today). More recently, global conflict has come down to that between the rich world of the North and the Southern one, poor but gifted with enormous productive potential.
Actually, the Northern Hemisphere resembles Embassy Row in Mogadishu on a bad day. The industrial West, (including Japan, the Little Tigers of Asia, and the new Chinese elite) include the most privileged, powerful and well-armed neighborhoods of a planet in ruins.
“After all, our street gang (career paramilitary and paracivilian bureaucrats and their supporters) appears to be the most powerful on Earth. Let’s maintain the fantasy that we have something important to lose from any better arrangement.”
They are tempted to repeat the stale platitudes of Embassy Row of Planet Mogadishu on a bad day, and deny the fact that we could occupy Embassy Row on Planet Geneva just as easily if not more so, and be that much more magnificent in so doing. They’ve turned their back on the fortune we could share from radical transformation. See Mencius.
Street gangs are street gangs and not much more. They will always settle for hypocrisy, criminality and tyranny. We can protest current events as much as we want, try to fine-tune our street gang and make it “nicer” until the cows come home — our results will always be the same: worse than imaginable.
The secret would be to turn Planet Mogadishu into Planet Geneva, not our street gang into a nicer one while the others remain the same. There is one transformation left for us to embark upon: we must replace weapon mentality’s sacrifice of victims with peace mentality’s celebration of Learners.
Under the sway of weapon management, population density and economic complexity worsen inflation and human misery. Under peace management, the same factors would multiply abundance and civilization. Note Holland and Japan where population densities boil away yet peace inspires and adorns them.
Take Pittsburgh, for example. Not long ago, that city was famous for its bustling factories, seemingly affluent inhabitants and overwhelming social and ecological problems associated with overpopulation 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 one of the most “attractive” cities in the United States.
Also illustrated, how shoddy and run-down all our cities have become. We subsist in misery because we won’t let ourselves be magnificent.
It may be that modern humanity awaits its elimination, the same way that Dark Age peasants did. They couldn’t improve their lot until one-half of them died from the Black Plague. Survivors profited from this massive cull by offering their scarce labor for better wages. Noble birth lost some of its social significance after so many leadership slots went vacant. These lines were written tens of years ago.
The most effective way to escape the Plague (besides a timely prescription of Cipro) is to bury oneself in a stronghold far from the madding crowd and not emerge for at least six months. Consult Boccaccio, the author of Decameron. Even though later waves of infection will snuff out additional victims. If that is your fate, bubba, there’s nowhere to run and hide.
The personnel turnover of the Black Death – along with its shocking psychic trauma – jump-started the Renaissance.
As did intellectual imports from China? According to Gavin Menzies, Chinese sailors, scholars and diplomats from the fleet of Eunuch-Admiral Zheng sailed as far as Cairo, the Adriatic and Venice, along with much of the seven seas. A Chinese embassy visited the Pope in 1434 and left a mass of technological, agricultural, mathematical, cartographic, and astronomical tools and information. The geniuses of the Italian Renaissance plagiarized this cultural treasure trove and improved upon it, soaking up a thousand years of intellectual heritage Europe had flunked out during the Dark Ages.
A comet strike off New Zealand wrecked this world fleet in 1340 with 500-foot tsunamis across the Indian Ocean. Chinese eunuch officials turned their back on foreign trade and exploration, and had the remainder of the fleet scuttled just off the Chinese coast. Gavin Menzies, 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance, HarperCollins, New York, 2008.
Will a new pestilence to befall us? Will our descendants profit from our mass disappearance? God knows, if AIDS mutates into an aerosol infection – much the way the Plague evolved from Bubonic to Pneumonic – even a raving optimist would write off civilization within a few months.
Mother nature seems to be rehearsing our grand finale, the way a bright kid would practice a magic trick. She’s shuffling her cards, reviewing her ways and means, making up her mind how to deal out the Death card as she has dealt it to every fleetingly dominant ecology for a billion years. Is she toying with us until we are crushed under her next discard? We should secure the best our civilization has to offer and give it its best shot to survive our sorry fate.
In the near future, recombinant genetic engineering will put deadly epidemics within the reach of almost anyone. Some psychopath with a little Biology training and access to a Community College lab could cook up continent-clearing pandemics — and that soon. Set your watch for the next few years! Once this cataclysm strikes, neither an Ivy League tenure nor a blue-chip stock portfolio will provide any more protection than a lifetime spent sifting through garbage.
In that event, Learner is a blueprint for global reconstruction, presuming dazed survivors ever renormalize their lives.
Media pundits keep echoing each other’s misgivings of impending doom. Meteor strikes, environmental disaster and high-tech warfare threaten us with multi-modal and synergistic tragedies. Could these be the by-products of our collective malevolence, astral punishment for our sins, or just the unhappy outcome of random coincidence?
Besides, the nuclear suicide of civilization shot from highly probable to a statistical certainty between the 1950 and now. Who or what managed to avert that up until now?
Many UFO stories describe what seems to be some aliens' (or future post-humans’?) clumsy attempt to harvest genetic material from this planet’s biosphere before it shrivels up and blows away. Are those aliens on a reality television show, like anglers on one of those boring TV shows: “Reel ‘em in and toss ‘em back; reel ‘em in and toss ‘em back …” just to relieve their boredom and satisfy their curiosity? At any rate, almost all the fish hooked and tossed back that way die within a day or two.
Could all this hysteria have some factual basis? If our fate is mere eradication on schedule, then treat Learner as the personal entertainment I intended it to be. If not, and our destiny proves slightly less ludicrous, consider SECTION III that follows a laundry list of global chores we have neglected far too long. They demand the immediate commitment of every Learner on Earth.
- PARADOX AMERICA -
“And perhaps a great day will come when a people distinguished by war and victory and by the highest development of its military organization and intelligence, and accustomed to making the gravest sacrifices to these things, will choose to exclaim, “We will break the sword into pieces!”—and will demolish its entire military machine down to its deepest foundations. To disarm while being the best armed, as an expression of elevated feelings—that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a disposition toward peace: whereas so-called “armed peace” such as that which parades in every country nowadays, is a disposition toward hostility that trusts neither itself nor its neighbor and, partly out of hatred, partly out of fear, refuses to put down its weapons.” Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, (my edits) http://bartleby.com/66/83/42183.html
Despite its 4th of July birthday, the United States is so dualistic, some kind of Gemini sign must figure in its natal chart. It is at once lenient and oppressive, utilitarian and mythic, genuine and fraudulent, placid yet deeply disturbed, egalitarian and hierarchical, peace loving and jingo, brilliant yet desperately blah.
This may have to do with the contrast Professor Allen C. Guelzo notes during his lecture series, The American Mind, available on DVD through the Teaching Company at http://www.teach12.com. According to him, Americans are sundered between reason and will, intellect and action.
Which habit do you consider more troublesome: failing to act in time, or ignoring the consequences of your action? What do you fear most: analysis paralysis or unintended consequences?
Your response pigeonholes you into one of two categories of American leadership. On one hand, people like Bush the Lesser, Trump, and fellow bandits who rush in where angels would fear to tread; based on faith, gut instinct, dogma, greed or some other BS; and their mirror-images, so-called “peace and progress activists” who don’t have any idea what they are doing and disregard their ceaseless failure. On the other hand, people like John Kerry, Bill Clinton and their supporters who never met an interesting idea they couldn’t dissect until next Sunday without doing anything serious in the meantime; and people like my fellow ideologists and I, stuck in our own brown study.
Each resents the intrusion and failure of the other, and wishes it could monopolize political and economic power. The two tendencies must maintain a meticulous balance; pre-emption by one or the other has proved disastrous in the past and could prove fatal soon.
America is in permanent self-contradiction. Change and tradition are equally valued here; the best and worst of art and good taste are produced in mass, dearly prized and then cast aside as rubbish.
America’s fruitful plain has borne the fairest harvests on Earth, bar none. Yet, both at home and abroad, the soil is strip-mined, crops poisoned, fisheries depleted, farm animals abused and family farmers ruined. Much of this bounty is over-processed into a noxious sludge fit only for obesity, incineration and incrustation into the land and our bodies as layers of solid, liquid and gaseous filth.
Strolling across an American landscape is like picking one’s way across the bottom of a gigantic, almost empty garbage dumpster. Litter is depressingly scattered everywhere, set there by the lowest order of sociopaths, even when a wastebasket is a short toss away.
The planting bed surrounding my neighborhood library had just been mulched with wood bark. By the next morning, this serene layout was soiled with cigarette butts, waste paper and orange peels; not so much thrown there as carefully placed for maximum visual impact. Once again, within spitting distance of a trash barrel. This is how modern-day sociopaths “express their individuality” in the only way they can get away with, unless they are corporate bureaucrats who pollute on an industrial scale and get paid Wall street wages to do it.
Shameless beings! Trash soccer was written to kick your ass and kick away your trash.
American law simulates justice in sporadic fits depending on the wealth and notoriety of the accused. Equity under strong courts is the letter of the law; self-promotion through vicious competition is its spirit. When some poor schmuck gets flushed into the Prison Empire run for profit by reactionaries, he sinks into Hell on Earth regardless of his guilt or innocence. The courts offer lofty sinecures for stealth reactionaries and control freaks, and a few humble watch posts for brilliant legal minds — at least at lower levels where the ever-reactionary Congress meddles less.
In 2014, the United States underwent legalistic convulsions to address its scandalous, yearly toll of female college students (daughters of the elite) raped without redress. On the other hand, our particular distinction among nations is the high count of American males (usually poor people of color) who are raped compared to females. This, thanks to our fundamentalist, Judeo-Christian Prison Empire that has locked up over one percent of the nation’s population. Compared to its grim enforcement of mass rape factories, the biblical Sodomites were mere good-time Charleys a bit too enthusiastic about how they got off. How would Lot’s God dispose of our modern-day tormentors along with the rest of us who tolerate their abuse? Besides, doesn’t the Constitution forbid “cruel and unusual punishment?” What could be crueler and more unusual than serial rape institutionalized and rendered routine by the agencies supposed to suppress it?
Plus the insane practice of isolating violent convicts from meaningful human contact every day for years on end, which has proven to cause severe psychic damage within days. Add to that the Reaganoid brainstorm of housing mentally disturbed people in prison after demolishing their mental hospitals, alongside with the worst criminals, then adding a majority of victimless criminals. We wind up with a textbook case of institutionalized brutality run amok: heaven on Earth for psychopaths, hell on Earth for their victims.
Raw terror carefully cultivated by WeaponWorld (World War III sic, anyone?), or celebrations carefully cultivated on PeaceWorld.
Take your pick.
The Twin Towers were brought down by what was obviously a controlled demolition. No building that tall and sliced in that random manner would collapse right on its own footprint. Anyone who says as much is a damned liar and a fool to boot, to take me for such a fool. Among the first 9/11 enactments of Congress: families of high-income victims would receive more compensation. I have found no better illustration of Congressional slime, even though Congress oozes it every day. For instance, why did no-one honestly investigate those who benefited the most from this demolition and those who avoided it beforehand?
The Euro-American genocide of Native American and Black peoples was, either by direct or proportional headcount, as murderous as the Nazis’ massacre of their European victims, Jewish, Gypsy and otherwise. Yet Americans consider their country a model of serenity compared to the pariah status they accord to German Nazis.
Pogroms and ethnic cleansings have confirmed the brutality of fundamentalists across the religious spectrum. Set alongside Stalin’s and Mao’s hecatombs, national communism, national socialism, national capitalism and national fundamentalism have proven equally vicious. Nationalist elites share a common trait with psychopaths: neither party needs to feel guilty, repent or compensate for past misdeeds. “What we have done is done; what they have done is unforgivable. We are good; they are bad. End of discussion.”
Many green shoots of idealism spring up here and there in America, scattered across a wasteland of hypocrisy, greed and closed-mindedness. Americans have defended freedom and slavery, public and special interests with equal sincerity and ferocity. Progressives maintain the illusion of harmony with reactionaries ̶ liberals with conservatives ̶ by agreeing to disagree about democracy’s fundamental definition. The former base theirs on equality (meaning heroic relief from superior abuse); the latter, on liberty (the shameless opportunity to designate “inferiors” and abuse them legally).
Orthodox politicians and media pundits insist that “representative democracy” and the vote are sacred. Yet many ballots are miscounted. Bush vote scandals in Florida and Ohio are just the tip of an iceberg of crypto-racism that has wafted its rotten chill across the country. Nowadays, those same people obstruct the minority vote to “reduce voting fraud” nonexistent except of their own doing. Decriminalize police shootings, tolerate public corruption, the sad list grows long.
A few rounds of civil apology and criminal prosecution are long overdue.
Trump swept all the contested States during the 2016 Presidential vote; “Rust belt” States with lots of electoral votes and a few key voting districts on a knife edge of electoral balance, all of which Trump won by razor-slim margins. “Contested State” means about 50% of them will go each way. Statistically speaking, you cannot “sweep” all the contested States; only more or less half of them. Trump swept them all by computerized vote. Go figure.
No-one seems to care that the American electoral college is a Spartan minority surrounded by a majority of idiot slaves, or that no Greek tyranny was run by such an anti-democratic minority as our corporate slave masters and their thought-police.
As long as Learner topics of passion are dropped from public discourse, the leadership talent pool must shrink; its decision-makers, grow more stupid; and unintended consequences, more disastrous. Simple arithmetic.
After throwing back a few British assaults, America’s European colonists concluded they were secure from foreign invasion behind their ocean moats. Blessed with vast virgin territory open to exploitation, they invited mass immigration that other, more crowded nations had to resist. This despite local reactionaries’ nonstop complaint about waves of foreign immigrants who had earned those reactionaries nonstop fortunes before and since. Despite this reflex bigotry, our real-life freedoms and opportunities surpassed those dreamt-of elsewhere.
With the exception, of course, of dispossessed Native Americans, Blacks abducted from their African homeland, and Mexicans and their Latin American confederates: innocent victims of a series of military and police assaults by the USA due to their Catholic faith, Latinate language (so melodic and elegant!) and slightly darker complexion, thus “inferiority.” All three sets of victims – each numbering many millions – were denied the right every American citizen values most: free welcome into fellow citizenship. A welcome everyone on Earth deserves; the same welcome that held the Roman Empire together, wherever its citizens came from — at least until born-again Huns took over with the intention of wrecking everything.
Is the same thing happening here and now? Will we sit still for this Vandal scandal as the lead-dummied Romans did, or resist it with all our might? True, our poisons are much more toxic and extensive. Will we find the strength and wisdom to overcome them, or let them simply kill us?
America’s business, art and science – even its organized religion – benefited from massive peace inputs. Nevertheless, without really knowing why, Americans nursed racial bigotry, mass poverty, ethnic genocide, slavery and civil war. The main reason they subsidized weapon mentality, in blatant defiance of their Constitution, was to retain a razor-sharp weapon technology against outsiders; this in keeping with the Old-World tradition of instant cutthroat by government decree.
The proliferation of biological, scalar and nuclear weapons confounds America’s moat defense. Our sense of strategic invulnerability fades along with collateral prosperity and freedom.
From the Korean War to those in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, each new war became more expensive, unjustifiable, corrupting and harmful to our institutions. Since such adventures were bound to end in disaster and disgrace, American reactionaries came home to hunt their next prey among us. The poor, immigrants, minorities, women, children, drug users, victimless criminals, the homeless, mental patients, natural ecosystems — they’ve targeted anyone and anything vulnerable enough.
Elderly baby-boomers are the most obvious targets of future discrimination: abundant, ugly, wrinkled, smelly, feeble, decrepit, selfish, non-productive and none-too-bright: perfect victims for future American fascists. Since they did not lift a finger to protect victims before or after themselves, their turn will come, with no one to defend them except Learners.
Nowadays, corona virus has taken over the job.
Recall that growing fears of inside and outside threats (immigrants and terrorists, respectively) multiply homegrown reaction and poverty. Each weapons elite pledges to protect its info proletariat from elites abroad, allegedly alien and horrible but actually identical in their shared humanity.
Radicals and reactionaries are depraved with boring predictability. Regardless of their origin, ideology, race and other superficial distinctions, they believe their society won't cohere unless it confronts hordes of potential enemies. Internal or external, make-believe or real, it does not matter who those Others really are.
To leftists, the ultimate foes are the rich. Centrists’ favorite bogeymen are surly foreign powers and crafty criminals. Reactionaries define the enemy as anyone weak enough (in control of few votes and little wealth). Each of them esteems brutality as a cure-all.
Such enemies often turn out to be illusory. When real threats do emerge, they tend to do so from out of the blue. Many aggressors, (Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Adolph Hitler and Osama bin Laden, for example), were initially funded by the same authorities hired to keep an eye on them.
When a new threat sets off alarms long since put in place to checkmate it, jingo politicians plug their ears to early warnings and let it happen anyway, seemingly through sheer incompetence. In fact, they go to great lengths to provoke the violent reaction their real plans require.
In one sense, America’s strategic immunity based on oceanic moats has come to an end. According to our praetorians, we must submit to permanent weapon mentality – even in times of peace – and accept its overheads. Otherwise, we risk being relegated to second-class status. My question is: second-class to whom?
When the United States sneezes, the other powers get pneumonia. In the 1970’s, the OPEC nations reversed their oil embargo, not because their chokehold had crippled the Great Satan, but because it was throttling the golden goose. A little too late, they realized that the real victims of their petroleum price hikes turned out to be the poorest of their allies and trading partners.
Rising crime and conviction statistics, as well as the unemployment rate (always double or triple that officially reported) sum up the raw deal of American weapon tyranny. These nightmare sums are nothing compared to the hell we may expect if we let smooth-talking Wimps and Prisms con us deeper into Armageddon.
Just as peace management seeks to make life as productive and rewarding as possible, weapon management incites inequalities of wealth, creativity and security. Life must become so uncertain that military recruitment persuades many poor children they have finally caught a break. Weapon mentality turns a vast labor pool of human drones into willing codependents of repression, warfare and criminality.
Recall, every suppressed demonstration, illegal arrest, unresolved act of police brutality and Banana Republican snarling “More repression!” reveals a panicked elite lashing out against political nightmares more frightful to it than any mob or insurrection.
Contemplate zombie movie monsters as sick and starving proletarians to be massacred ASAP. You and your beloved form part of a Catastrophe that requires a regretted but resolute Final Solution.
Conservatives share this common weakness: they may sustain old values but cannot nurture new ones. Faithful to weapon mentality, they lack peace mentality’s creative spark that draws the multitude of Learners to craft and brighten it. From the XIIth Century on, it took three hundred years for European elites to adopt the zero in arithmetic.
Progressives cannot propose a new approach to abundance without conservatives resisting “to (someone else’s) death” beforehand. Conservatives cannot accept the fact that everyone would be much better off once wealth were distributed more equally. They refuse to picture the abundance they could achieve by unrestrained sharing. They feel compelled to misappropriate wealth and creativity on a zero-sum basis. “What I gain, you must lose.”
This despite history’s most persistent lesson: societies remain poor insofar some minority hoards its wealth. The smaller in proportion this wealthy minority, the more narrow and thus stupid its decision-making, the simpler its social structure and the poorer the host nation.
The genetic heritage of a sexually restricted elite must also suffer. Its children, genetically feeble compared to tougher crossbreeds, will suffer higher infant mortality in direct proportion to the lack of worthy mates among parents. A closed elite may eliminate itself entirely in this manner during the next stretch of heightened infant mortality.
Ancient wealth trickled like a mountain rivulet from one god-king to his tiny court hermetically sealed from the unwashed masses. It bubbled along creek-beds of medieval nobility and priesthood carefully diked off from their inferiors. It then streamed between the Victorian upper-bourgeoisie, clerics and general staff. These worthies held the masses outside the magic circle of wealth at bayonet-point. Today, this wealth meanders along tributaries of professionals, officers and bureaucrats who buy off the underclass at minimal expense with factory-farmed burgers and idiot television (bread & circuses).
Before long, all the wealth on Earth will flow into the most deserving sea, that of every Learner worldwide. At each stage of redistribution, as if by magic, everyone’s wealth increases exponentially, especially among the rich.
Reactionaries can whine all they want. They can kill, torture, lie and steal as much as their coward panic allows. They will be the poorer for it, and will never escape the inevitability of history. If they acted just a bit smarter, they could profit once and for all exponentially.
Natural disaster and warfare weaken peace management. Social harmony is a delicate fabric woven from many strands of mutual trust, cooperation and good will. This web is fragile; it soon frays and parts under stress. During disaster, the distribution of necessities breaks down. That incites people to looting, personal vengeance and other forms of lawlessness. “Civilization is just a question of fodder,” Berthold Brecht. Facing unaccustomed overloads, routine protocols become sporadic, unfair and inadequate; rigidity, uncertainty and centralization set in. Opportunistic Conspirators of Greed proliferate, as does the synergy of their ill effects. Tyranny re-asserts itself as peace technologies whither. As this situation worsens, traumatized societies shift from marginal peace to climax weapon production. Voila. There you are. True war fever.
A sporadic epidemic seems to afflict entire societies. While majorities sink into economic and spiritual decline, a dwindling minority amasses unearned riches. Traditional values and sources of security are uprooted until combat itself begins to look promising. This became apparent during the Great Depression. Even though the carnage of World War I (sic) had converted most info proletarians into fervent pacifists, it just as certainly converted key elites into fanatical weapon sectarians. They would make sure the Depression so pummeled info proletarian sensibilities that World War II came as a relief.
The best military recruit is a helpless child born in a slum or poor village. This Golden Rule of weapon mentality applies just as well to ghetto berserkers as to the sweet majority of street urchins. The lucky ones survive inevitable abuse; their parents and guardians do their best to help them despite limited means. Nonetheless, awash in low self-esteem, they are driven to join something greater than themselves. Hardened survivors, they can handle grinding adversity, harsh discipline and the terror of combat. Their gang leaders are street-tested in armed combat. Those children who fail to adapt, die young.
The best preparation for surviving the Apocalypse is to be born like Jesus, a homeless child.
By following this simple formula, weapon management harvests an enormous crop of fine infantrymen at a moment’s notice. The more brutal their childhood, the greater the number of valuable recruits and invaluable small unit leaders. The end product? Countless regiments of fine infantry; a sprinkling of elite commandos manned by certifiable sociopaths; a handful of sterling leaders like Booker T. Washington, M.L. King, Jesse Jackson, Cornell West, General/Secretary of State Collin Powell and their high-merit peers; plus a throng of poverty-, ignorance- and crime-crippled victims. Those are the massive human tailings of a rarefied ore from which – at great wastage – precious battle elites and expert weapon technicians may be refined.
“The first quality of a soldier is constancy in enduring fatigue and hardship. Courage is only secondary. Poverty, privation and want are the schools of good soldiers.” Napoleon, taken from Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman’s On Killing: The Psychological Costs of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Back Bay Books, Little Brown & Co., Boston, New York, Toronto, London, 1995. Printed by permission.
Weapon management imposes poverty on any society that accepts it. This fact is papered-over with standard weapon myths we have been conditioned to respect for ages. Anything and everything – bad weather, hostile gods, heretics, magicians and witches, druggies, drug lords and petty criminals, an aging workforce, welfare moms, inferior minorities, guerrillas and now terrorists – can take the blame for shriveling economies that should thrive but never manage to.
How is it that after thousands of years of civilized experience, we still suffer from periodic economic collapse for no good reason, the same way an Olympic runner might keep tripping over his shoelaces he had left untied? And nobody but me finds this strange?
For mature societies, mass poverty is never the cheap way to go. On the contrary, it is the most expensive social policy. Let me repeat that for emphasis, since we have been told it so rarely (never).
Poverty is by far the most expensive social policy.
No society ever grew rich by tolerating poverty. Info elites waste enormous amounts of wealth as they cultivate poverty and other anti-profit weapons overheads.
By rights, that wealth should be ours to invest in peace. We will be amazed by the quality of peace that Learners can buy with it, and the tsunami of violence Learners will buy off with a tiny fraction of it, compared to our weapons overheads.
However, higher standards of living create spoiled, argumentative and self-indulgent people: quite unsatisfactory cannon fodder. Social decadence is not bad per se, but it would be unwise to maximize prosperity and pacifism in one’s own people while the rest of the world kept meeting its needs at gunpoint.
Mass poverty is never some stupid policy failure; it is not the outcome of selfish greed, insanity and corruption. Those are mere symptoms of the underlying malady: weapon mentality.
In fact, all money – the zero-sum shell game based on usury, so dear to politicians, business people, academics and reactionary parasites of info elites – all of this money-grubbing is a mere accounting system for the huge sums of labor and resources wasted to feed global weapon technologies without any profit in return. “Lack of money” is the favorite excuse to rebuild anti-profit slums in the wake of our destructive wars.
Paraphrasing the late, great Ian M. Banks: the pre-eminence of money betokens the misery of the society enslaved to it.
There is a chicken and egg problem here: what came first? When orthodox economies go into decline for whatever reason, reflexive militarism becomes an irresistible means to gather wealth back to the top. When massed humans become poor all of a sudden, their first instinct will be to dust off ancient military protocols.
When I talk about Americans further on, I am also referring to anyone on Earth who has lost their soul in the naked embrace of weapon mentality. Make sure you do not suffer from the same thing while you slam those Americans benighted by it.
Americans have suckled on a toxic pap of obsessive materialism and vapid self-gratification gushing from the ample tits of television and commercial advertising. They’ve been taught to obey their conscience only when it’s convenient, common sense only when convenient, good taste when convenient. Political and social transformation will never take place until it is convenient ― or never at all, better yet.
They act as if their misdeeds, apathy and lousy decision-making had no consequences. “If you don’t like the way we dumb-down the news, just change the channel (even though we’ve made every channel just as dumb). Better still, wait for the next meaningless commercial. Nothing of significance will change, regardless of what you do — and insignificance will flourish, regardless of what you do.”
It has become a frenzy among them, to indulge in inexcusable extremes and exult in their impunity. American crooks and bigots thrive in this way, protected by a slapdash definition of freedom.
The “balanced” reporting” of American journalism? It always gives evil a head start. Whoever pays more cash can lie, cheat, steal and get away with it indefinitely, at the expense of those who can’t individually, even though they wind up paying much more in aggregate. The end product of “balanced American reporting” is dollar democracy: one million dollars equal one vote, and one voter equals nothing. Someone else is always to blame for downstream disasters, not us Americans. We never tire of telling ourselves those disasters are aberrations, and not the toxic reflux of our rotten habits and institutions. No need to change!
Bismarck noted that God seems to favor Americans, drunkards and crazies. Americans seem to get away with their shit storm, more often than not. As a result, America has become a nation of spoiled brats: the ultimate outcome of every empire just before its collapse.
But the moment God looks the other way, duck and cover! From New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico, disasters of biblical proportion arise. At that point, Americans feel so sorry for themselves. And, of course, it must be someone else’s fault. How could it not be?
This nation’s business would not be so appalling if its citizens just matured a little — without going straight from childish petulance to churlish senility.
But they are, after all, mere babes compared to Europeans’ deadly lunacy a dozen centuries senior and that of the Middle East and China older by millennia. All we have to work with are those toddler Americans plus everyone else, end-stage infantilized, supposed to transform this world straightaway. Only a few short years will pass before annihilation overtakes us if we don’t grow up. Good luck with that Children’s Crusade!
Until then, Americans (including do-nothing Democrats) are just GMO corn-fed Republicans, which means fascist wannabes who haven’t quite gotten it perfect yet. Just give the USA a little more rope to hang itself. Ronnie Raygun wasn’t quite perfect, but almost! What with the Bushes and Nixon and their toadies in the Supreme Court and in Congress; let’s just elect the next Weimar Democrat, the next plaster figurehead. Decorative but ineffectual, his relative honesty and competence are the most we can tolerate. Then his next-in-line successor (always worse) can draw up a closer approximation of Hell on Earth. One blind step back and three forward into a Thousand Year Reich draped in the red, white and blue.
In Iraq, an American Army of citizen mercenaries (anathema to the spirit of the Constitution) practices “pacification tactics” with the military occupation of Buffalo, St. Louis and Seattle in mind. But don’t worry, be happy! Just be good little boys and girls, sit on your hands and watch this unfold.
Nowadays, Americans may only call upon nihilistic arrogance and dogmatic Puritanism ― moral vacuity or empty moralism. Mere profit, dogma, fad and convenience: those are the only ethical bearings we may take. Might as well take a deep lungful of vacuum.
There is a golden mean, a middle ground of fine morality this country and this WeaponWorld despise. Could the road to Hell be paved with good intentions? In your dreams, maybe. In reality, it is paved with weapon technology stock certificates (a Best Buy!).
Conscience, idealism, simply doing good and shunning evil: those things merit reverence and emulation, if only because they trigger fewer unexpected disasters. Obey your conscience – even when it seems uncool, inconvenient and unprofitable – and achieve unforeseen miracles. Violate good conscience, good sense and good taste, and suffer more often from surprise disaster. Good ethics and enlightened self-interest are more likely to bring about a good outcome. We ignore this at our peril.
After this jeremiad of American failure, I must make a central point.
Given our Gemini commonality, we Americans share more power, glory and genius than any other nation. For centuries, America has welcomed the cream of the rest of the world ― the best and the very worst. We could make wise, heroic and generous use of our advantages (like typical Americans) and cancel our liabilities and failures.
Americans! Let it all hang out. If our nation’s strength were applied to peace, our results could be graceful and elegant, extraordinarily so compared to the mess we’re in today.
Other alternatives will be no fun at all.
- SOME BIG FAT LIES -
“In war-time, failure to lie is negligence, the doubting of a lie is a misdemeanor, the declaration of the truth a crime.” Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in War-Time.
“The first casualty of war is truth.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-21510,00.html
We can dismiss commercial advertisers and government spokespeople as stealth liars who mislead the public without cease or until someone slaps the truth out of them. Repelled by honesty, they fall back on the truth only under intense probing. Even then, they do so reluctantly and temporarily. They would rather bury whopping lies under an avalanche of borderline truths. For them, meaningless monologue is better than balanced debate; credible lies, to the truth. The big fat lie is their duty, their rice bowl and their “honor.” How deluded can they be or can they make us?
Here in the United States, “balanced reporting” means that unjustifiable policies merit more favorable TV airtime than the others, and more exculpatory ink in the press. Thus the unacceptable is validated by rote repetition. Trump got a hundred times more media coverage than Bernie Sanders.
Blatant sociopaths and outed conmen get more media adulation than honest folk. Reactionaries are paired off against conservatives, Demoblicans against Republicrats. Their pro forma (for the sake of appearance) arguments simulate controversy while the underlying tyranny remains carefully undisturbed. Televised “debate” opposes contestants who accept the scandalous status quo with equal fervor but whose marginal disputes masquerade as debate. This is standard fare in “balanced” American reporting.
There are other examples of this institutional duplicity. Industrialists bewilder comparison-shoppers by issuing household products in off-size, fractional-unit containers: 1.32 lbs., 8.3 liquid pints, 0.7 liters: same product, different companies, different prices. Solve in one minute. Serving sizes are shrunk to play down their noxious content. Such “single serving” portions would not satisfy the appetite of a child.
No warning label shows that food has been irradiated, or contains genetically engineered ingredients, or that meat was raised in factory farms cramming poisons and neutralizing antibiotics through their overuse. Such labels would end the sale of those experimental products. They cost much less to produce than those they replace (“organic” ones, raised the old way) yet are priced just as high or higher. They may well be harder to clean up afterwards, and at greater expense than their subsidized production cost and censored labeling indicate.
These manufacturers protest the expense they incur reporting their products’ nutritional content: trivial sums compared to the fortune spent on advertising.
Corporations never stop whining about government regulation. Unfortunately for them, it is the only mechanism that can restrain their worst schemes. Each new regulation is a token response to corporate wrongdoing. In the name of “healthy” competition, every corporate board would imitate each new fraud they thought they could get away with. In the absence of further regulation, anyone who did not imitate his most crooked competitor would go out of business. Corporate crime precedes each new regulation and every follow-up corporate protest.
Since 9/11, the pursuit of terrorist suspects has taken up almost all the Federal Justice system’s resources. That mandate has recently been replaced by the mass incarceration of misdemeanor immigrants. Meanwhile, corporate crime goes uninvestigated in most cases.
Catch a previously quiet mega-corporation praising itself in new TV ads or on a full-page newspaper spread, and find out, more often than not, it was just caught red-handed at some recent outrage.
The ruinous Savings and Loan bailout, rotten commercial airline service, runaway power and health care costs and recent corporate bookkeeping scandals of growing scale and impunity, all of them demonstrate what happens when corporations regulate themselves. Their officers “regulate” themselves all the way to the bank. Profiteering from the serial laissez-faire of the last six Presidents, the fossil fuel/nuke cartel has replaced government regulation with a generous welfare state for corporations. So much for the “free market” and its “self-regulation”! As expected, Adam Smith’s “unseen hand” is only skilled at shell games.
Iceland was the only European country that got through the recession of 2008 and emerged from it more or less intact. Liable bankers got nothing but jail time; the national response to their demand for a bailout was “sink or swim.” As with Roman Legions sometimes panic-struck but never replaceable, decimation was the ultimate resolution for “too big to fail.”
Let's hope those slimy hypocrites never get their hands on Social Security funds. They’ve been drooling over them for years. If so, we’ll grow old as paupers despite our lifetime of mandatory savings. As it stands, Congress has dipped its mitts into this till during one or more unbalanced fiscal years.
“Stand by for this important political spoof! Instead of watching your retirement fund evaporate in the Stock Exchange, report immediately to the nearest casino and gamble it away at house odds. May the free market prevail once and for all!”
Seriously, I’m kidding. If only those house odds were reliably profitable or safe enough for the gambler. What about a casino mulligan, as in golf? You could leave with what you walked in with, minus a small entrance fee. Mere life support earnings, for the most part. After all, these would be government-subsidized casinos on PeaceWorld.
The abrupt distress of the American middle class results from decades of captive 401K retirement savings and their compulsory diversion into disastrous stock market investments. Such savings would vanish the moment the stock market collapsed, as it has done with more and more chaotic frequency and volatility over time.
The term “deregulation” is secret code for “substandard service at the maximum price.” An elaboration of capitalists’ favorite slogan: “Profits for the few, at the risk and expense of the many,” the best definition of national-capitalism, the latest perfection of weapon exploitation.
Commercial advertising clogs already limited broadcast channels with white noise static gushing from the mass media. It occurred to me that almost all the broadcast programming (films, TV, radio and the Internet) wastes the maximum amount of the viewing public’s time while transmitting the least amount of useful information. Go watch a few hours of this mass-produced gobbledygook and see for yourself.
This phenomenon can only be described as a planetary conspiracy to trivialize the important and magnify the trivial. After all, a lot of trivial information of little use to anyone is easier to control from above than the important kind for one or all, whatever its volume.
There are hundreds of cable television channels broadcasting 24/365. Many person-days go into each hour of this broadcast. Think about it. Not only are there actors, directors, writers, producers and their technical staff; but plain old accountants, HR and support personnel, guards and miscellaneous staffers; all of them and their workday life devoted to producing perhaps twenty minutes per hour of useful information on one channel alone. And my definition of “useful” is more than generous. The rest of this monumental effort perpetuates meaningless noise. Multiply by every nation on Earth and its television industry. The only good analogy I can think of, is that of Egyptians massed by the thousands to build, guild and furnish dead-weight pyramids. They, at least, built massive monuments, while our efforts produce nothing more than electro-magnetic buzz.
No-one analyzes user needs and targets information to suit temperament and taste. Clumsy attempts to do so are attacked as invasions of privacy.
We are obsessive-compulsive about information. If it appears to be personally or institutionally useful, we hoard it, ration it and restrict its access at the slightest provocation. Our ancestors used to burn each other alive over original new ideas. Nowadays, we create repetitious trash piles of them – in accordance with our “business model.” “Our product is better than theirs” — without regard to the cares of the audience. We are smothered under mounds of useless information. This mass OCD syndrome demands manifold liberation at both personal and communal levels.
For those of us on the receiving end of this useless babble, it’s like being locked in a cell with a chatterbox bereft of taste, refinement, honesty and modesty. We are exposed to perverse standards of ethics, esthetics, materialism and sex framed by brutality. Routine criminality and its vicious suppression are the norm. Useless products and services are jammed down our throat 24/7.
It’d be like determining the quality if a library, the shelves of which were piled with bookends and a handful of trashy paperbacks. If all the monologue machines shut down at once, the accumulation of disinformation would be bad enough. We rapt listeners, however, repeat this nonsense to each other all day long and then go home to absorb another evening’s worth. Our zombie hypnosis worsens every day.
If a School Board caught one of their teachers foisting this kind of trash on students, that teacher would be fired on the spot. With perfect justification, you’d slam your door in the face of any salesperson who would dare to brainwash your children that way. Yet the media mislead us by default. Criminal disinformation disgorges from it without letup. An equivalent yield of unalloyed truth might enlighten us.
Big Fat Lies induce the Routine of Evil, the way too many sweets induce tooth decay. According to professional liars, the truth is a raw dough to be kneaded and baked to their employer’s convenience. Anyone “stupid” enough to reject such a notion is their favorite candidate for future abuse.
Contemplate the end of such parasite livelihoods. A Niagara of lies and irrelevancies would come to a halt. Deafening silence! Yet we would still need products and services; government would still impose its sorry burden. In short, life would go on. We’d just stop absorbing Big Fat Lies so often. Mr. Honesty and Ms. Goddess might become better companions in the absence of so many lies from Big Brother and Bimbo Borax. Who would miss all those wanton lies?
“Sales of products are less important than we think. Just look at the communist countries: the millions of pictures of Lenin displayed everywhere you go certainly do not stimulate love of Lenin. The advertising agencies of the Communist Party (the so-called agitprop departments) have long forgotten the practical goal of their activity, (to make the communist system better liked), and have become an end in themselves: they have created their own language, their formulas, their aesthetics, (the heads of the agencies once had absolute power over art in their countries), their idea of the right life-style, which they cultivate, disseminate, and force upon their unfortunate peoples.” Milan Kundera, Immortality, Translated by Peter Kussi, Grove Weidenfeld, New York, 1991, p. 113. By permission of Grove/Atlantic.
Have you taken a good look at a new automobile lately? We are drummed to death how sleek, beautiful, elegant and sexy they are. Actually, they are lousy investments: anti-social, ecocidal, elitist, hierarchical, filthy, stinking, unreliable, counter-ergonomic, uncomfortable, dangerous, inefficient, usually inert, invasive, overpriced, poisonous, poverty-inducing, crime promoting, city destroying and guaranteed obsolescent.
Some clear night, lean on the handrail of a highway overpass. Note the torrent of light, heat and steel running up and down the highway; it should flow down a volcano instead. All our cities have turned into active volcanoes. Such a waste of precious energy!
A black mamba might be more attractive than any of those automobiles. We have turned them into one-ton key chains, religious idols and class totems. In so doing, we’ve ignored the obvious.
Of course, automobiles offer the illusion of convenience. This illusion would evaporate if a small fraction of the fortune devoted to them were spent to rationalize public transit.
Look around you the next time you take a walk downtown. Note the patina of pollution that paints the gutter, the stench that fills our nostrils and the sepia smear that shrouds the horizon. Such real-life excreta never mar pristine auto ads, even though they flood our awareness so much that we don't notice them any longer, neither the commercial blather nor the crappy environment they promote. Note how neighborhoods flood that were dry for decades as more and more forests are paved over to satisfy the auto-Mammon. More and more “development” and exports of cheap logs in exchange for auto and fuel imports that collapse the balance of trade. Note how your eyes burn and how smog-laced pollen turns simple hay fever into chronic asthma for, how many, four out of ten urban children and more as time goes by?
Global warming has become a Cosmic Phenomenon, another Act of God beyond human understanding and control, whereas it’s just the farts of our automobiles, livestock, factories and power plants.
Cast your mind back to burghers of the Middle Ages. With some justification, we could sneer at their foolishness. Among other lethal idiocies, they threw excrement out into the street for livestock and passersby to squelch through. Future Learners will sneer at us for much the same reason. Just as foolishly, we foul our soil, water and skies; abuse the poor shamelessly; and hearken to medieval trivia instead of addressing matters of importance. What stupid hicks!
For most people (heck, for almost everyone, ourselves included), truth is merely a matter of repetition. What we’ve heard most often, no matter how vague, must be the truth. We can be persuaded that night is day, say, that some foreign power is secretly out to get us, or that private automobiles are beautiful … provided enough people and machines repeat it to us. Suckered into subsidizing the blitzkrieg industry, we refuse to admit this disgrace. Instead, we pay armies of copywriters to broadcast the obvious lie that automobiles are “sexy.” Lumps of plastic and lacquered scrap-metal cut, wrapped and welded by the ton, farting and drooling poisons: sexy? According to what sexual deviant?
Then, let’s subvert mass transit and make the most promising alternate technologies disappear. Finally, get everyone to repeat: “The fix would just cost too much, (deep sigh!).”
Then there’s this other nonsense. “Government is no good at reducing poverty, improving education, redistributing abundance, improving science and delivering justice. We should make government as powerless, slow and stupid as possible.” Regardless of its inevitable growth.
Of course, government cannot provide such services when reactionaries make it their business to sabotage them. However, talented Learners could empower the poor with new policies of some imagination, if only the reactionaries were held off their backs for a while: our obvious duty and advantage.
Tell me, who pulled off the following projects? Emancipation from slavery, ending the Great Depression, the Marshall Plan of European economic recovery (and its Asian equivalents), and manned space flight to the Moon, etc. … Was it central government or a loose gaggle of rich individuals? Now tell me. Who triggered slavery; the Great Depression and its 2008 clone; the collapse of Third World economies; who set up the American economic landscape as rich, gated communities surrounded by a new Third World; corresponding despoilment of the middle class; the collapse of space exploration; etc. … was it central government or a loose gaggle of powerful, private interests with their hands in the cash drawer?
Of course, talented liars and propagandists fill valuable niches: those of troubadour, storyteller, actor, magician, seer, priest, shaman and Learner. A Golden Age of storytelling awaits us once all this organized lying is stripped of profit.
These days, we gorge on surrogate violence, reactionary propaganda, redundant sports and soap opera drivel, all of it mass-produced. In the future, more and more Learners will concentrate on their topics of passion. Taking a break from their cherished Learning, they will take pleasure in the most outrageous inventions that talented liars can spin: fine stories, plays and other entertainment. But none of this will detract from the honesty of Learner government.
I can think of at least nineteen sub-sets of the Big Fat Lie currently mass-produced and mass-consumed (it takes two to tango):
1. Dogmatic lies: fictions are asserted to be truths despite their obvious falsehood. Obvious lies are broadcast to a misled public and repeated by it (by commission) or accepted by neglecting the truth (by omission). Consult the denial of global warming. Good God, so many lies promoted so assiduously and so often — by whom and to what purpose? These questions gave birth to Learner all by themselves.
2. Simplifying lies: your judgment is too limited to grasp the complex validity of my claim. I lie to simplify my rap. You will yield to my demands without forcing me to cultivate our mutual understanding. (Representative democracy).
In reverse mode, the complicating lie: my friends and I can make pretty straightforward transactions so complicated that only we can decode their tattered logic, fill our pockets and empty yours (tax law).
3. Paternal lies: the truth would set panic loose among ignorant masses. We lie to protect their childlike innocence. Selflessly, we bear truths they couldn’t handle (sigh). The fundamental question shared here: can professional liars handle the truth better than the rest of us? Please note the “Yes” response that serves them best.
This lie extends to so-called “Democracy.” Majorities abandon painfully honest candidates like Ralph Nader and Bernie Sanders, in favor of carnival barkers and con men. Take your pick of American Presidents, their nearest challengers at home and equivalents abroad. They need not be “politically correct” the way that term is misused today by those who support the worst acts of “political wrong.” But they should meet the needs of special interests at the expense of the common good.
4. Altruistic lies: the truth would hurt worse than our reassuring falsehoods. Well-meaning adults slather this lie on their children’s awareness. Santa Claus and other child-targeting myths persist despite their double-edged effect on children. “Trust no one and nothing, not even under the best circumstances.” This way, we are reduced to a lifetime of suspicion under a nonstop bombardment of lies.
5. Post-abuse lies: victims (and especially their descendants) exaggerate or bury their torment, demonize their oppressors and prejudge their oppressors’ descendants. Ex-tormentors justify their abuse, minimize it and try to make the public forget it. Onlookers of past wrongs sugarcoat their moral cowardice by blurring their criminal negligence.
6. Self-serving lies: my interests are compromised by your truth. They take priority over your right to learn which is unimportant to me.
7. Weapon (and corporate) lies: every public truth is a gift to the enemy. Information of a quality superior to manipulative propaganda must be restricted. Unclassified information must be incomplete, distorted and/or false. To confuse things further, many trivial truths should be added to the mix at random. Any admission of error grants a boon to the enemy and must be covered up.
Military discipline is punishment-based; so weapon technicians lie as often as they can to avoid punishment, maintain best-kept secrets and report the completion of impossible tasks. Mounds of punishment are shoveled to suppress these habits, which just engenders additional military terror: the special talent of weapon managers.
8. Natural lies: “I am a part of your tissue or harmless to you. Do not attack me; feed me instead”: cancers, parasites, vampires, infectious agents, embryos, and bird’s nest mimics. Alternately (and often reinforced by factual exceptions), “I am poisonous or another predator or just a twig. Don’t attack me.” Alternately again, “I am full of nutritious sap — land here and pollinate me.”
Another interesting corporate fallacy asserts that manufactured pollution is “natural” and therefore acceptable because man produced it. Man is part of nature, after all. Was the Plague “valid” because it was natural and because humans helped to transmit it?
Another sub-heading of the natural lie encompasses our perception of reality. Sensory data flood our awareness in volumes beyond our ability to process. In compensation, we draw a fine trickle from this torrent and form a picture of reality from it alone. Selecting the few stimuli it considers important, our mind fills the gaps creatively and weaves a stylized approximation of reality.
Mental sanity is defined by fidelity to the gross, material reality our abstractions delineate. If every stimulus triggered equal perception, we would be fully aware but flooded with raw stimuli, as helpless as acid-freaks or day-old infants.
As carnal beings, we lie to ourselves as often as we blink.
9. Revolutionary lies: if we must endure amidst a stupefied populace trapped in a tissue of lies and crushed under endless tyranny, why not lie like bandits to brace ourselves and support the revolutionary counter-attack? Promoting one evil to combat another, greater, that is a dangerous vortex to get sucked into and a difficult one to escape. Promoting the truth to harvest more benefits – even if at lesser efficiency – would that not be better?
10. Scientific lies: data conflicting with the latest science dogma is shrugged off as irrelevant, dismissed without inquiry, branded as leftover superstition or, worse yet, pseudo-science. As if weapon science were much more than humanity’s latest collective fantasy … until we switch channels during the next commercial break.
All too often, new discoveries are written off because gifted individuals achieve unique breakthroughs under optimal conditions that cannot necessarily be repeated, since most of the parameters are only half-understood or not at all. If every science doctrinaire’s grad assistant cannot repeat the feat at the drop of a hat, it is declared non-existent.
Believe it or not, the question “why” is forbidden by current science: another reason so many Learners turn their back on it (and another obvious waste of talent by weapon mentality). No question should be forbidden to interested Learners for any reason.
I suppose we should make a distinction here, between science mentality and science technology. At best, science mentality includes the open-minded flexibility, relentless honesty, clinical precision and rigorous methodology scientists love to brag about. At worst, science technology produces the stink, poison, fear, pain, and crushing sense of dread and helplessness we endure: the direct outcome of the rabid rivalry, closed mindedness, indifference to consequences, self-promoting dishonesty and lack of fellow feeling that weapon scientists promote.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, in Out of Revolution (William Morrow and Co., New York, 1938, p. 231), quotes the French philologist Gaston Paris [my translation], who proclaims:
“I profess this doctrine absolutely and without reservation: that Science has no other object than the truth for its own sake, without any compunction about practical consequences, good or bad, regrettable or beneficial. Anyone who permits himself – through patriotism, religion or even morality – the least dissimulation, the slightest alteration of the facts he studies or conclusions he draws, is not worthy of his place in the Great Laboratory where the admission ticket of honesty is more fundamental than that of capability. Thus understood and pursued in the same spirit in every civilized country, communal studies form a Great State that spans restrictive, diverse and often hostile nations; a State no war can sully, no conqueror can menace, where our souls may find the shelter and unity that the City of God once provided.”
It would be hard to find a more passionate pledge of allegiance to Absolute Science. This fanatical defense of Absolute Truth (or any other Absolute, for that matter) entails more devastating results than any other lie listed here. The Absolute is an ideal terrain for the simplification of reality whose ultimate expressions are political terror and mass murder.
I am convinced that there are almost no incontrovertible truths, only more or less useful approximations — certainly not a hundredth of the absolute truths men uphold unto someone else’s death, much less those held to be absolute that underlie Western logic and culture. Uncertainty may promote reflexive rejection of what is new or its review for usefulness. If I highlight speculation and conjecture, it is to reinforce receptiveness to new ideas that orthodox bureaucracies forbid.
11. Hermetic lies: in order to promote internal morale and cohesion, we undercover fellows adopt weighty oaths of silence and mutual aid, identifying gestures, elaborate codes and secret rituals. Hermetic organizations (like the early Christians, Freemasons and weapon management) lend themselves to accusations of depraved conspiracy, whether or not they are true. They permit battle elites to indulge in their favorite perversions. Infiltrating secret societies with inbred skill, info elites persecute hermetics from above, corrupt them from within and slander them from below.
12. Bureaucratic lies: many bureaucrats justify their budget by withholding significant information. The more extensive their monopoly of information and the harder they make it to acquire, the more valuable they seem to be and the larger their bureaucracies may grow. Under intense pressure from special interests both private and corporate, bureaucracies adopt covert agendas that contradict their public mandate. Disguising this contradiction is a critical skill of civilian agencies in a weapon bureaucracy. Otherwise, their budget will shrink in favor of more direct weapons expenditure.
Examples abound. Distorted “success statistics” come to mind from sequential prohibitions targeting drinkers and druggies, to unemployment counts (always reduced in official reports), to safety studies of atomic energy, to official reports of impending victory in Vietnam and elsewhere.
In many instances of misinfo politics, bureaucrats conclude that their data tabulations create reality instead of merely quantifying it. Whatever statistics they crank out, that is reality as far as they are concerned.
Another common lying technique pegs “acceptable” levels of pollutants, crime and other negative fallouts at current levels and then sets “unacceptable” ones much higher. Current dosages may be toxic, but are certified tolerable or even raised in order to postpone corporate efforts to reduce them. Officially “acceptable” levels may mask a real threat until spectacular catastrophes force self-informed victims to raise the alarm at their own expense. Responsible officials may have been briefed on the problem beforehand, but they block new findings at every turn. They are rarely held accountable for subverting the truth, and often rewarded for doing so.
Usually, those alarms are miraculously ignored by the press; the exact opposite of reactionary projects (Trump) unpardonably oversold.
For example, just before the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown of 2011, the official level of tolerable background radiation was arbitrarily doubled. No‑one warned us that its ultimate consequence might be the end of civilization in the Northern Hemisphere. These are typical outcomes of runaway weapon technology: like the accidental discharge of a pistol during its cleaning, but on a massive scale.
There are other statistical distortions in current use. Many statistics are deliberately under- or over-reported or held back beyond their yearly due date, and then hugely revised years later. Many revisions down the road make the scientific interpretation of these numbers very problematic. Inaccurate predictions based on them lessen public trust and advance those who have something to hide.
The U.S. Congress has forbidden the tabulation of national statistics on deaths by firearms, as well as many other problematical findings. Problem solved…
Bureaucrats often trivialize the worst consequences of their policies. Their dismissal of unforeseen consequences can take the form of bad counts at the collection level, tampering by partisan intermediaries, and distortions at the top where unfavorable sub-categories are eliminated entirely. Favorable statistics are often accumulated using reverse techniques. The greater the pressure for specific results, the more distorted the official tallies. Anecdotal evidence, collected at the grass roots, often reveals local conditions more clearly than “scientific” compilations of official statistics.
These numbers must pass through tiers of reviewing authorities, each isolated from the phenomenon tabulated and inclined to distort official results to suit its agenda, more and more so the higher up it goes. Finally, crafty statisticians can manipulate the figures to reach any conclusion their paymasters desire.
It is easy for a weapon society to sweep unforeseen consequences under the rug, since we are convinced in advance that so many disasters of great scope are inevitable.
13. Lying by omission: reactionary candidates for public office and high judgeship have refused to clarify their take on controversial topics. Such evasions may not bear the stink of direct lies, but the right not to incriminate themselves does not compare to that of criminal suspects. After all, high office and public policy are at stake here, not mere criminal punishment. During a job interview, suspicion of unsuitability should be grounds for dismissal, as would a candidate’s tendency to cloak his prejudice.
Otherwise, we will be overruled by wall-to-wall imitators of the current Supreme Court majority, reactionary to the core.
Of course, a complex system of checks and balances can only control a few deviants who refuse to act in good faith. No system will work when majorities embrace Conspiracies of Greed with gusto. Some overriding moral principle must come into play. Otherwise, we’ll have to wait for unforeseen consequences to blow all this manure away. Be warned: once the shit hits the fan, it won’t be pleasant downwind where we’ve been marooned.
People keep denying that bad behavior has nasty consequences and must be controlled for that reason. Idealism holds its ultimate reward, not for its own sake but because it produces better outcomes through the miracle of generosity. I am embarrassed to have to remind Learners of this obvious truth. A society that has to justify idealism against a majority opinion that rejects it has jammed its bearings: the current state of affairs.
14. Meme-lies: some fanatics find their chosen dogma deeply satisfying, even though they may reflect unique circumstances and aspirations unsuitable for other people. To bolster their fragile ego, personal insecurity, powerlessness and low self-esteem, they force other people to accept their fanatical ideas, even if those ideas contradict those peoples’ perceived needs. If enough fanatics share this belief, they can become powerful enough to injure those who threaten them with disagreement. The more deeply held the belief and the more passionate the believers, (for example, the international community of nationalists at perpetual war with each other), the greater the likelihood of trouble.
Honest practitioners of Satyagraha may overcome these paradoxes, of which more in its own chapters.
15. Weapon mentality lies: we recite the same “truths” even though we know they are lies. Talented weapon mentors earn big bucks to refine, revise and re-broadcast these untruths endlessly. Effective dissidence is silenced – whatever the cost – until obvious lies replace the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth… Even if this kind of corruption takes a thousand years, even if it fosters untold social contradictions and mortal crises.
16. Sports lies: as long as me and my friends can stick to sports babble, we can neglect monumental social problems.
Injustice prevails when strangers can’t discuss serious issues without risking unforeseen violence. Sports babble becomes a magical incantation, a favored means to disarm hostility and sidetrack debate, the lowest common denominator of mutual irresponsibility. Any adult who holds back from critical thought and social activism is an idiot in the Greek sense of the term: an over-aged child.
The mass media sustain this stupidity. They spoon-feed tepid pap to the info proletariat, withhold complex and controversial topics and replace them with insignificant spectacles.
The other day, I sat down in two random taverns, wedged each time between wide-screen TVs and their blaring sports blather. In American airports, you cannot escape the roar and squeal of their cheap babble. It struck me that – in millions of identical places, just about the last ones allowed – the least significant data is transmitted every day for years on end.
It is time we started reasoning like adults. We could begin by forcing the media to act like good bird dogs and retrieve our social truths in all their complexity.
17. Self-lies are the most insidious. They can take any form described above, but should be listed separately.
You alone can correct a falsehood once it takes hold in your skull. Like Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Tale, the victim of a self-lie must witness the painful after-effects of his delusion so he can detoxify (like losing a family member to the COVID whose danger he denies). This response wastes valuable time, demands great courage, can drag out the suffering of innocents and induce unbearable guilt in those who repent. Many never admit as much, but double and redouble their own lies instead.
How much would life improve if we prioritized the truth preemptively?
18. Lies by excluding the truth: When a big problem presents itself, the special interests in power exclude the practical response they oppose, and only advertise unacceptably extreme ones so as to maintain the official, lucrative if problem-riddled status quo (gun control in the USA, etc.).
19. The simplifying lie of denial: “Whatever it is or might be, it can neither be true nor ever succeed. That did not just happen. That is false, no matter how true it sounds. That person cannot be what he claims to be; that other person is not corrupt and stupid but superior in every way. No matter what catastrophe we appear to be heading for, things will work out in the end without our getting involved.” For lack of any better response.
20. The lies of art and creativity: Ah! How much sadder life would be without them! Withdrawal from misery, Learners friends; as opposed to the “pursuit of happiness” of monied fantasy.
The first symptom of the Routine of Evil is the proliferation of Big Fat Lies. From a Learner standpoint, lying burns extra energy in a world where every joule should be smart-metered (a technology our shared ignorance forbids). It is degrading, insulting and vulgar; it leads to errors of reason and action. Like other forms of violence, lying takes more effort in the long run than does adhering to the truth. Without some massive form of self-delusion, it is difficult to embrace evil and still adhere to some semblance of the truth. So additional truthfulness could help us distinguish right from wrong.
Knowledge is wealth; lying is theft. What would weapon mentality have you do? Do the opposite.
Gandhi’s assertions were categorical. According to him, Good deeds, Truth and Non-violence are one and the same, each third reflecting the other two. Evil, Violence and Untruth are self-reinforcing aspects of the Cartesian illusion of human separation from the Universe. Lies, cruelty and power-hunger are just different flavors of violence. There is no such thing as a “small” lie” or “acceptable levels” of violence. May we embrace his wisdom!
He believed that people should make impossible demands on themselves in order to learn from their mistakes. According to him, politics offer the supreme challenge to moral beings: the same way tightrope walking offers more challenge than strolling down a boulevard. Heightened risk makes the business more interesting. Besides, who is supposed to run politics? Crooks?
He followed the path of supreme service and tragic optimism, the glorious path of Buddha and Jesus. Only superheroes would dare follow in their footsteps. We moral cowards must witness their dazzling trajectory crouched in our glowing embers of Hell.
Momentary redemption may come about by establishing a Learner Commonwealth on PeaceWorld. As far as I can tell, only the promise of reincarnating in Christ, by the solitary way of the Our Father, could unseal the escape hatch to final redemption and pry it open enough to let every soul pass through, including those of Gandhi, Buddha and each of us.
- PICK YOUR POISON -
“Most people do not understand the complicated machinery of government. They do not realize that every citizen silently but nonetheless certainly sustains the government of the day, in ways of which he has no knowledge. Every citizen therefore renders himself responsible for every act of his government. And it is quite proper to support it, so long as the actions of the government are bearable.” Gandhi quote from Raghavan Iyer’s, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford University Press, New York, 1973, p. 321.
We have reviewed how governments serve and cripple themselves. We’ve established their common traits, dissected their ideo-mumbo, religio-jumbo and technobabble. We have magnified government to cosmic proportions and stripped it down to component parts. Nonetheless, ancient evils may loom if we persist at olden ways.
We are left with a simple question. Can we prevent weapon technology from committing omnicide, killing everything that lives?
If you deny this prospect, think again. Weapon technologies evolved to induce the most pain, death and destruction — the same way rattlesnakes evolved to strike with their fangs. Years spent in a glass tank won’t prevent a viper from lashing out against a tempting target dangled just beyond the glass. Even if this attack gives it nothing but a superb headache, it will strike by reflex anyway.
Decades spent recovering from total war won’t prevent a weapon technology from exerting its climax destructive potential, even if its next attack just hands us our pink slip and civilization’s. “Sorry, sweetie… Who’s next?”
Primitive weapon technologies let loose their climax destruction potential. Up ‘til now, the mass violence of total war had little impact on the biosphere, the living membrane wrapped around the Earth; but a massive one on the anthrosphere, the much slighter, more delicate membrane that contains human beings.
Tensing their stranglehold on the human spirit, weapon managers (an insignificant minority otherwise) monopolize social expression and snuff out peaceful politics. Thanks to their info takeover, weapons managers have wrecked the biosphere and may soon wipe out the whole anthrosphere. On your mark… Get set… Go! Among the remainder, a handful relegated to the margins still sings hymns of peace, while everyone else venerates weapon management or ignores its threat until it’s too late.
Everything needful for mass extermination has already been perfected. Many trivial but illustrative examples can be found here and there: quick-fire and rocket artillery of regional range and meter precision; tanks, aircraft and automatic weapons. Then there’s the more significant ones: nukes, chems, bugs and scalar “controls” of electrogravity, weather and tectonics. Humanity has already perfected all the mandatory rituals of omnicide: mass conscription, mass consumption, weapon bureaucracy, weapon myths as fresh as they are venerable, and so on.
This avalanche of death has not been set loose yet; that’s all. Otherwise, everything required has been perfected to the edge of flawless suicide.
Nonetheless, even the most devastating weapon states suppressed their destructive activities below climax potential. Such halfhearted attempts at unilateral disarmament have been unique in human history. Otherwise, more and more sophisticated weapon mentors have justified as much brutality as their rapt listeners could subsidize.
During the mid-1800s, the German army perfected the General Staff College, the first Master’s Degree Program in Business Administration. After having lost a hundred battles for every victory against the French, it seemed their best way to re-deal the cards. They were mimicked soon afterwards by every other premier weapon state. There followed the senior prom of those military schools: World War I, which I call the Great Paroxysm. During this valedictory exercise, the front line became a giant, open-air factory mass producing misery, mutilation and death. The contending General Staffs, tasked with managing this biological disassembly line, held more in common with each other than with their own troops. Bound together with their entrepreneurial armorers, they formed some of the first modern multinational corporations.
Actually, the first multinational corporations peddled weapon religion: featherweight fabrications, cheap, easy to assemble and disseminate. As long as freedom of worship, assembly, speech and thought could be suppressed, their babble was ideal merchandise for high-volume, high pressure salesmanship, quick profit, huge turnover and long-term monopoly. The same way our “social media,” mass advertising and politics peddle stupid narcissism to us at the expense of the common good. Nothing else sells better.
Weapon states envenomed themselves with super-virulent biochem toxins during the Greater Paroxysm (WWII, sic) and afterwards. The Allies seeded a remote island with anthrax spores that can still kill almost a century later. Nazi scientists refined lethal gasses and exterminated human prey with them by the million; the Japanese slew as many innocents with weapon-grade disease.
As we speak, biological weapons are being developed without letup in complete secrecy and criminal silence, with our blessing. The end products are lethal and infectious beyond imagining.
Since human encroachment is wrecking more and more biomes on Earth, the disease organisms of local animals must adapt or perish. Germs comfortably adapted to Disease Levels Three and Four among their usual animal hosts devolve to Levels One and Two in unfamiliar human hosts. See the chapter Beyond Darwin.
Meanwhile, unforgivable public health failures have opened a Pandora’s Box of ancient plagues. Richer health care agencies could have held them in check or eradicated them. Resurgent infections, both those known historically and those new and unfamiliar, betray public health incompetence on a global scale. The UN’s introduction of cholera to Tahiti, and WHO’s failure to eradicate Ebola in each of its pre-epidemic manifestations are further examples. We are beginning to witness disease outbreaks afflict epidemiological naïve populations living in zones once temperate turned subtropical by global warming.
No recent combatant nation has wielded its deadliest weapons, at least against equally armed opponents. No matter how desperate the outlook, we held back unilaterally, with no public agreement in place — or so one should hope.
Hitler, Stalin and their minions could have farted toxic gas from the rubble of their besieged capitals, yet refrained one and all. Japanese artillery could have fired barrages of anthrax and botulism into the faces of oncoming American Marines, but they did not. The Americans could have carpet-bombed Communist countries with disease, and vice-versa against the American landscape. Barring a few loose-cannon exceptions, everyone abstained.
A score Prism nation-states assert regional dominance by threatening their neighbors with aggravated disruption. North Korea is a good example of this kind of international hostage crisis. Picture a crazed thug bunkered in his house and holding a neighbor hostage at knifepoint: the current state of world’s Disunited States.
The United States would croak outright if a dozen “small” atomic warheads flash-fried the same number of American city centers. The collateral effect of two hundred million starving, RIIDS-afflicted Americans clawing for survival would see to the rest. A half-dozen might do the trick.
RIIDS, by the way, is Radiation-Induced Immune Disease. It is similar to AIDS but would afflict every surviving radiation victim. Nuclear war bureaucrats never want to talk about RIIDS, never.
Global civilization would seize up if about fifty fireballs seared major urban nerve centers across the planet. Hundreds of times that number are poised for the Terminal Paroxysm, plus an untold tonnage of biotoxins and exquisite chemical poisons. Besides which, scalar weapons of meteorological and tectonic warfare are on the verge of being perfected.
You may have been assured that there were fewer warheads than those on inventory, that the stock had been reduced by a series of masterful negotiations… or so it’s been mansplained to you. Such that the promise of planetary genocide at a moment’s notice may not put you off your feed. But those nuclear cooked books don’t include “tactical” and smaller warheads held in secret reserve, or those detached from thousands of obsolete missiles but still in inventory.
Do you recall the classroom model of gravity? A rubber sheet is stretched out flat like a trampoline. Heavy weights dimple this sheet, representing planets and stars. The demonstrator rolls a marble across it. The marble rolls towards one of the dimples, circles the heavy object and spirals into contact with it — thus illustrating gravitational mechanics?
The trampoline represents WeaponWorld, across which thirty or so wars disgrace us. Its congested surface shrinks with every upgrade of our communication network. Each of those wars is a weighty mass — especially the one between Israel and Palestine: the central sun of our weapon solar system. The marbles are nuclear warheads either locked away in government arsenals or passed from billionaire hand to terrorist hand. We’re just waiting for one of those marbles to click against one of those weights, and boom!
Realize, when (not if) the nuclear curtain comes down, every nuclear reactor, chemical factory, petroleum refinery and bio-toxin lab will blow. Indeed, the entire infrastructure and biosphere in the Northern Hemisphere will burst into flame and toxic smoke: almost every forest glade, grain field, frame house, household match and baby’s curl. Simultaneously? This global firestorm will probably drag on for years as a trickle of nuclear warheads gets doled out from snug, well-concealed command bunkers.
This unfolding desolation will turn out to be very bad news for the survivors. Radiation levels will remain toxic for years, especially in the smoldering ruins of big cities and downwind of them. Those would include major ocean, lake and river ports, mountain plateaus and passes, and healthier elevations in boggy lowlands: key geographic features civilization would find irreplaceable. New crops will be toxic for at least a decade.
We have been led to fantasize that nuclear war will only last two weeks. “Two weeks of hell, then the survivors can set to rebuilding!” This two-week figure comes from the Nuclear Rule of Sevens. Radioactive contamination drops by 90% every time another power of seven hours elapses after each fireball.
Twenty minutes after the fireball, let’s say your little corner of the Hell gets a thousand roentgens of radioactive fallout. That would be a pretty light dose downwind of most bombs; it could easily be many times stronger. Five hundred roentgens will kill everyone exposed to it in a few hours or days of rot-from-the-inside agony.
Run and hide in a deep-dug, blast-proof shelter with walls reinforced by steel, lead and thick concrete, equipped with minutely filtered air and a reservoir of clean water. Make sure you can dig yourself out from under the treacherous surface debris; also, that your shelter is far enough away from the urban fuel pile firestorm … at least a few dozen miles away. Better to die quickly on the surface in the primary blast, rather than slow cook in your bunker. Such shelters do not lend themselves to improvisation on short notice, no matter what some (the Reagan misadministration) may told you otherwise.
Explosion + seven hours: one hundred roentgens: a very nasty dose that will bring cancer to many. Don’t stir from your shelter.
Plus seven x seven hours = 49 hours or two days: ten roentgens. Don’t eat or drink anything exposed; don’t breathe the outside air without a good gas mask with fresh filters; throw away or bury the clothing you've worn outside; plus shower thoroughly in precious, clean water. Never use rain or surface water at this time! Don't bother to boil or filter it; it will be radioactive in any case. A state-of-the-art distillery and filtration system might reduce some radioactive contaminants in suspicious water, but not enough to make it completely safe to drink or wash in.
I hope Uncle Sam has paid for your bomb shelter with its self-contained supply of water and filtered air, because none other than millionaires can afford it. Did you know the Swiss built blast-proof shelter space for all its citizens, with filtered air, good water and sufficient supplies? At least they used to… The rest of us were too cheap to see to it.
Holland was ruined during the endgame of World War II (sic). Thousands of Dutch citizens died of starvation. Nonetheless, the survivors built a massive system of dikes by 1953, which rich Americans never managed to duplicate around New Orleans. Capitalist swine: self-satisfied profiteers of banana-Republican governance.
Plus seven x seven x seven hours = two weeks, and radiation levels supposedly returned to “normal.”
Then again, the soil is still “hot” at aboveground nuclear test sites. Two thirds of a century later, they give off twice the “normal” background radiation. In turn, that “normal” count has tripled since World War II (sic) and probably quintupled since Chernobyl and Fukushima. Sextupled?
So much for the “rule of sevens!” Good luck jump-starting civilization!
This, assuming your particular bomb wasn't maliciously clad with “dirty” isotopes with less radioactive fizz but a longer half-life. If so, multiply the toxic interval by half (using gold cladding with a stronger initial burst of radiation but shorter duration), by twice as long, years longer or perhaps thousands of years. It depends on how deadly the cladding. The rule of thumb? If a radio-isotope burns you quick, it will fade away quickly; if it kills you slow, it may last forever from your point of view.
In any case, the dirtiest bombs are so-called Hydrogen (H-bombs). Only 10 or 15% of their energy is released by thermonuclear fusion, the rest by very radioactive fission processes (thanks a lot, Edward Teller). This according to an article by Howard Morland, “The Holocaust Bomb: a Question of Time, at http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/morland.html. See also an historic article on the H-Bomb in Progressive magazine, http://www.progressive.org/images/pdf/1179.pdf.
Set your counter closer to 20,000 roentgens than 1,000 and do your sums accordingly. That dose would require over one hundred days spent underground instead of two weeks, to get back to nearly “safe” levels of exposure.
This formula does not take into account second, third, fourth, etc. waves of nuclear attack. The radioactivity from each wave will last as long after the first one did and add to its toxicity.
Can you hold your breath that long? Raise livestock and children underground; the mushrooms, carrots, potatoes and grain of your daily bread? I doubt it. Once you emerge from your shelter, remove (somewhere, somehow) eighteen inches of long-contaminated topsoil and plow any way you can the clay underneath.
Five central command nodes monopolized nuclear weapons during the Cold War: France, the US, the USSR, China and the UK. Despite this constraint, nuclear accidents and tripwire confrontations imperiled the future far more often than the blank score currently advertised. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls
Since the bankrupt Soviet Union spun out of the arms race – at least temporarily – any billionaire with a taste for genocide could acquire his own nuke or the makings thereof. While insanely wealthy fools spend millions on comic books and other doltish “collectables,” what do you think the really serious money collects? More countries are lining up to flaunt their nuclear arsenals, with well-funded terrorists not far behind.
Scalar weapons’ antenna arrays are even easier to build. They can transmit destructive energies from any corner of the Earth to any other spot, unstoppable and hard to trace. At low energy levels, they can broadcast chafing fields over wide areas in which everyone becomes sulky, stupid and Republican. The Soviet leader Khrushchev threatened to do just that back in the 1960s when his researchers began the project. Reactionary tendencies in the American heartland could result from ongoing irradiation of this kind.
Slightly stronger energy applications can sicken living things under the target zone and eventually kill them. Electromagnetic equipment can be neutralized, whether as point targets or across broad expanses, no matter how well shielded. Higher energy levels can focus on high and low atmospheric pressure zones to induce catastrophic weather effects. Greater energy applications can distort seismic fault lines and trigger earthquakes. Apparently, this weapon can be used defensively to create a bubble of destruction around a protected site; it might even block incoming nuclear missiles if fed enough energy.
The famous inventor Tesla initiated these studies. Apparently, he abandoned them right after the Tunguska atmospheric explosion in 1908. Draw your own conclusions.
What is most disturbing about these longitudinal waves of scalar transmission is the fact that they can, by sloshing their energy back and forth, multiply input energy instead of reducing it through well-known transmission inefficiencies. Feed the energy of, say, one atomic reactor into an antenna array, and get the effect of several on the targeted point or area.
Seismic and meteorological phenomena have this in common: they represent energies equivalent to several large nuclear weapons exploding simultaneously or in series.
Soon, scalar weapons will be demonstrated during a few mind-boggling exercises (three direct-hit hurricanes in a row, anyone?). Soon thereafter, inconsequential terrorist individuals and organizations could take advantage of them more readily than with expensive, cumbersome, dangerous and more easily traceable nuclear devices.
Atomic bombs use fission reactions to break down heavy isotopes and produce kiloton explosions equal to thousands of tons of TNT. Nuclear weapons use fusion reactions that jam two small atoms together to form one bigger one and produce megaton explosions amounting to millions of tons of TNT, up to the fifty million tons of the “Tsar Bomba” Russian test explosion — or more. Their only TNT limit would be the weight and volume of the explosive device.
Who could imagine a million tons of dynamite going off in a fraction of a second?
This new input to the threat formula leads to hallucinatory results. Weapons elites would rather hone their precious threat deterrent without pause. No matter how abject the outcome, they insist that any conflict surpassing a minimalist, AK-47-and-machete stage can be calculated using the same old military logic. Yet they always wind up getting imaginary results from their ultimate calculations and going home in defeat.
It’s a little like the impenetrable arithmetic of a tax form: “When you’re done, divide the end-product by the nuclear square root of -1.”
The climax use of weapons has never been a sane proposition; it has become even less so. No longer can major powers go stomping wherever they wish with all the firepower at their disposal. World opinion would never allow them a “decisive” victory. “You've made a wasteland and called it Peace.” The losing side’s only option would be nuclear counterstrike.
Some will tell you that we haven’t begun the next nuclear war yet, (quite a few nuclear catastrophes, you bet) despite eighty years of trying. They’re certain we’re not about to start one now or any time soon.
Which presents us with an interesting problem. During the years between WWII (sic) and the 1980s, the likelihood of nuclear war on Earth approached 100% every day. It is still atrociously high now, forty years later, despite our collective denial. Serious nuclear reactor accidents have happened dozens of times since, but not the single one needed to set off a nuclear war. Such was the case, even though there were always less than a thousand nodes of responsibility for those accidents, at work for a certain length of time; whereas many more command nodes on the military side, on watch for much longer stretches of time. The combat accident should have been inevitable when compared to corresponding statistics of civilian failure. No preventive system managed to stop them all; no human system could have prevented it categorically all by itself.
What superhuman awareness should we thank for that rescue from our worst selves that has lasted for 31,000 days of quite likely annihilation?
This killing within acceptable limits doesn’t take new biotechnologies into account. Taking advantage of breakthrough skills that will become commonplace within the next few years, lone whackos may cook up incredibly infectious, flesh-eating microbes in their kitchen sink, so to speak. For example, a crazed city-killer could find a functional workbench in any Community College laboratory.
The state-of-the-art of biological warfare can string together the components of a new organism, more or less like varied boxcars on a freight train. One can take the contagion of a flu virus, say, and attach the toxin-producing machinery of Ebola or Yellow Fever; tailor the weapon system to any circumstance or level of lethality desired — even target a specific race or ethnicity (for example, eaters of pork). The only thing that has prevented the release of these experimental models up ‘til now has been that they might mutate beyond the protection of the vaccine designed to protect the people belonging to the releaser.
This would not be a problem for the genius psychopaths WeaponWorld sets adrift in large numbers to do their worst. More and more these days, they don’t care any more about survivors than about their victims.
The latest bio-nano-technologies will compound this problem. They will soon produce lethal, microscopic, self-duplicating biocyborgs, deliverable as aerosol liquids or powders, which could put continental-scale casualties within the reach of some ambitious psychopath. It’s a question of less than a decade before these technologies mature to that extent.
That illustrates Buckminster Fuller’s model of ephemeralization: so-called “progress.” More activity (killing) can be accomplished with fewer overheads of material, time and cost.
“In 1917, … more performance with less weight and volume of materials, less ergs of energy, and less seconds of time investment per each accomplished unit of performance, manifested itself for the first time in the metallurgy, chemistry and electronics of World War I sea and sky armaments.” Critical Path, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1981, pp. 132-33.
The ultimate outcome of this weapon ephemeralization will turn out to be global military paralysis. A few military catastrophes will alarm the whole world to such an extent that everyone but crazies will freeze, too scared to so much as twitch.
That will resemble the evolution of threat behaviors in a pack of wild carnivores. The deadlier the predators’ jaws and claws, the more elaborate, ceremonial and “polite” the pack’s social arrangements had to become to avoid self-destruction. Any pack that rejected exquisite politeness lost the evolutionary game for keeps; its DNA went down the drain. In the same way, international nobility had to invent courtly etiquette and flowery palaver because any suggestion of personal insult drew fiery passion, cold steel and smoking blood.
Tedious militarists whined long and hard against any check to their killing. They’ve shrieked for a return to the good old days of unlimited gore. During the Korean and Vietnamese Paroxysms, they bewailed orders curtailing their planned assaults against China, Russia and the Warsaw Pact. In vain, they appealed for offensives to “eliminate enemy sanctuaries.” Actually, the ultimate sanctuary of the Viet Cong guerrilla was the command bunker of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Force.
Later on, French Armageddon enthusiasts indulged in the latest weapon ritual: smashing a coral reef as a nuclear test site so the international brotherhood of weapon scientists could refine its genocide calculations. They were looking for ways to carve the diamond facets of an opponent's military hard points, instead of flattening whole cities as area targets. As if the victims and their allies would have held back in like manner once this mass stupidity had taken a serious turn.
Another interesting weapon myth is the accusation of mass betrayal. Cocky militarists often stretch their nationalistic ambition beyond a realistic assessment of their country’s strengths and weaknesses. As a result, they get their nation stomped. This may be the unintended goal of every weapon manager: to get his unbearably peaceful homies gunned down once and for all.
Once they’ve gotten their country crushed, they make swan dives for balmy fascist shores and discrete bank accounts. Emerging a decade or so later, their first words are always the same: “We were betrayed!”
The German Army, bled white and collapsing at the end of World War I (sic), blamed German progressives for their surrender. Hitler’s henchmen accused the long-suffering German people of betraying them during their woeful endgame of the Greater Paroxysm.
American hawks left Vietnam a smoking ruin, convinced they had defeated the Communists in detail. National Capitalist bitter-enders, they had robbed honest Vietnamese patriots of their hard-fought patrimony and handed it over to the worst Conspirators of Greed they could find. Those failed to rally the country into a viable whole, as was inevitable given their well-earned unpopularity. Then the bitter-enders ran home, disgusted by their fellow citizens who had “forced” them into defeat.
As if any outcome other than genocide, disgrace and hysterical evacuation was likely under those circumstances. The only other possibility would have been nuclear war: first across the length and breadth of East Asia, then the entire world.
No matter what those weapon mentors may have told you, bear this in mind. The American lap of the imperialist relay race of war against Vietnam (China, China, China, France, Japan, England, France, America, China) was an exercise in raw genocide – no more, no less – practiced and covered up with Nazi thoroughness. The CIA, the West Point Protective Association, the mighty assassins of President John F. Kennedy that overruled his veto of the war — each has kept busy since, concealing the gut trails of their innocent victims.
The Chinese government was delighted to stage international Wrestle Mania in Vietnam. They had found there the most unbeatable patriots in Southeast Asia. Those rebels had thumbed their nose at the Chinese for millennia, no matter how many Vietnamese got massacred in the process. How ironic that America’s haughty, ignorant militarists could be driven to stub their toe against those intractable rebels.
These mass-murderers permitted My Lai (my lie) and a galaxy of similar atrocities to go unreported. They insist that no real American patriot has the right to speak of such things. Those massacres were just the tip of a gore-Slurpee whipped up under our nose. Only the slightest whiff of its stench has gone up our nostrils, and we are more than ready to dismiss it as an aberration. Here it comes again; can’t you smell it? Wafting drone-borne from Iraq, Afghanistan and other dark corners of the World of the Poor with quite predictable blowbacks?
This demon spawn continues to run the United States and through it, the rest of the world. Each new atrocity they organize furthers their Thousand Year Reich of murder, terror and misery. I’m afraid their apotheosis and ultimate defensive tactic will be to blow civilization back to the Cro-Magnon stage or worse, while they remain deeply bunkered below the fallout.
In truth, the Cold War was not fought in the manner we were led to believe: between the Capitalist West and the Communist East for control of the Poor South. Militarist Fat Cats on both sides wanted to swell their weapon budgets, based on their info proletariat’s fear of the Other. But they were terrified of nuking the whole planet and their own households before they had been properly fortified. So they couldn’t engage in total war, only in a few commando raids, aerial and submarine duels, and mini-wars waged among their proxy dictator states.
No, the real Cold War was fought between the bipartisan psychopaths in charge of the world’s military-industrial complex, versus an international brotherhood of humanists, moderates, believers, small-d democrats and small-s socialists (the proto-Learners of the world) operating as isolated individuals and thus enormously vulnerable. Almost all them were arrested, tortured, shot and silenced as soon as they came into public view, along with their sympathizers and, if necessary, the napalmed armies of their supporters. The military regimes of the extreme Left and Right traded places every decade or so to erase every trace of pacifist activists and their progressive politics as they emerged from both political wings of many countries. The First and Second Worlds’ military, governmental and media machine crushed the Third World’s peaceful one, without exception or mercy. That was the real Cold War!
I just watched a television series on the origins of WWII (sic). I was struck by the geopolitical similarities between the 1930s and the 2010s. So many wars and rumors of war!
Everywhere on Earth, fascist tyrants arose, identical to their slimeball predecessors and contemporaries. It’s as if they had studied the same copy of Fascist Dictatorship for Dummies. They strut before more and more numerous supporters who’ve grown reckless from their discontent with current life. More and more of them rage before the camera. They reject any semblance of wisdom until they get themselves shot and their children sacrificed in war. They think they can sign up for organized murder under their Leader’s insane guidance and ease their misery that way. Oh brothers and sisters! What a nasty surprise awaits you! Moderates wander around in circles: uniformly futile, unreliable, lacking conviction and bereft of political power. Modern armaments promise ever more lavish genocide. Corruption flourishes like well-watered black mold (see “fascist tyrants” above). The blood of innocents brims over and no one has the guts to stop to it. Millions more refugees abandon their home every year.
God, take back the helm!
Welcome to WeaponWorld, where mighty war criminals reign without restraint. Since when? Since written history began.
Until these facts are entered in the official record and those ghouls called out for their atrocities, trust nothing from them. Until then, their hallowed institutions will never do the right thing except by mistake and through revolt. We can’t heave a sigh of relief until the American government unveils those who conspired to assassinate President Kennedy and cover it up. Once the survivors confess to their part or once they die and are officially condemned, but never before.
The Vietnam War: winnable? Iraq, Afghanistan? Upcoming wars of corporate convenience, shareholder windfall and national bankruptcy? My ass. Whereas military interventions for purely humanitarian reasons (…, Rwanda, Bosnia, Syria, …) we shamefully let drop.
Modern weapon technologies are scaling themselves down from a horde of costly bludgeons into a handful of horrifically expensive, chrome-steel scalpels. A few orbital satellites, drone squadrons, terrorist cells, government commando squads and NGO guerrilla bands promise to replace swarms of ships, planes, tanks and ICBMs. The bludgeon swarms will be preserved, of course, for reuse whenever that’s more convenient.
In the recent past, as many as seven thousand Abrams battle tanks were parked in the American desert. American armored units needed three thousand replacements at most. The others were waiting to be sand-choked and worn out in Iraq, no doubt to be replaced once again at our expense.
The only thing the American Army has learned during its recent wars, is how to manage a civil insurrection. I use the word “manage” advisedly, as in tending a campfire. How to prepare one, light it up, fan it hot and keep it going indefinitely by means of selective brutality.
There are millions of fanatics, here in the USA, who never understood why the Nazis failed. At least twenty percent of the USA’s population never figured that out, or what real war means when it’s fought on your doorstep instead of overseas. To American reactionaries, the worst traitors are moderates in their own ranks and everyone on the other side. That's the insurgency they are preparing to address.
Unlike the American Civil War – prior to which slavers at the helm of American government stacked the deck in their favor through various political swindles, but lost because the industrial base still belonged to the North – this time, they will control every rag that’s left of the American industrial plant (especially the weapon factories) they’ve otherwise wrecked for decades. Their plan is to prevail over the ruins of America they’ve loathed since their predecessors lost the Civil War. Unrepentant slavers …
At least in theory, modern weapons are “surgically” precise: they promise to reduce collateral damage to the biosphere as well as casualties among unarmed combatants. In practice? The Gulf War’s hundreds of thousands of children murdered because deprived of adequate medicine, water and nutrition by the United Nations; national economies devastated and regional ecologies sewerfied across the planet: these illustrate what “minimal collateral damage” entails. The controlled demolition of the Twin Towers, likewise. Downstream consequences, my young Learners. We must pay more attention to unforeseen consequences downstream.
We need not limit ourselves to bilateral squabbles. In the future, every side will suffer from similar strategic insults. It will become more and more difficult to pin down exactly who did what to whom. This devastation with no return address will justify weapon elites’ collapse of local living standards and civil rights.
Non-sustainable technologies are not bad per se, but because they cannot be sustained. Inevitably, the price of survival essentials will skyrocket. Each nation’s info elite will confront its disgruntled proletariat led by avenging proto-elites and armed by calculating foreign powers.
Gleaming in the eyes of orphaned refugees who’ve turned psychotic, drafted on drawing boards for future manufacture, or stockpiled and ready to use against us: these weapons of mass destruction have our names stenciled on them. They need only be issued to millions of itchy-fingered troops – or a handful of pistol-waving fanatics – to rain down on us without letup.
Can we dodge this death sentence?
- WEAPON PATHOHISTORY -
The painful truth? For thousands of years, Darwinian selection has optimized weapon mentality in human culture. If any ancient society matured into a prototype peace technology – or merely held back its weapons obsession for a while – nearby weapon hordes overran it.
Human history can be resumed as follows:
· The gradual perfection of the social and technological tool kits required by the weapon mentality of the day.
· The discharge of this optimized weapon technology in a climax holocaust limited only by the means available (like a pistol going off while being cleaned).
· A Dark Age that lets humanity recover from this paroxysm.
· Return to Step 1.
Once properly mixed up and detonated, the binary munition of weapon Christianity and Roman weapon technology triggered a European Dark Age that lasted nearly the next thousand years. Much the same fate befell China, Persia, Southeast Asia and Islam at other intervals, a fate they’ve only overcome recently.
These cultural implosions have bred a subconscious contempt for peace in each of us and especially in our info elites. They have restricted peace technology to the limit of the info proletariat’s endurance, with our placid consent. This rust-through of peace caused the next paroxysm. The imminent one, nurtured by all of us through this historical process, promises a planetary Dark Age even more durable and extensive if not permanent.
Books were very perishable before tough, cheap paper and printing presses made them commonplace, along with mass literacy. Millennial cults (venerating a primary text like the Bible for a thousand years or longer) required basic schools and libraries along with a small, carefully educated priestly elite to run them. They required safekeeping from armed hordes more interested in loot than learning. Sooner or later, those hordes cut down the guards and breached the gates. After that, surviving priests had to persuade them not to suppress the unique text — that preserving it would lessen their terror and help satisfy their greed.
In Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1989, Collins Harvill, London, 1988, pp. 94-99, Ernest Gellner postulates that a literary class can prevail over the warrior one by determining the legitimacy of warring factions. From the top leader to lowly flunkies, warriors must guess their potential for long-term success based on how many of their fellows recognize their organization and connect with it. A priesthood (literate bureaucracy) can document that legitimacy and often become the moral arbiter of warrior bands.
Our millennial texts have been the chosen reading of a long line of pirates and murderers. A hundred generations of more and more prominent weapon mentors have rewritten sacred texts and distorted holy doctrine to satisfy the conflicting demands of weapon mentality.
If a peace society produced nothing but pacifists, it would become rich and creative, grateful to God, exuberant, argumentative, law-reliant — and extremely vulnerable to military aggression. Weapon societies are good at nothing but hostilities; they fear their warrior god(s) and claim their religion or ideology is the only acceptable one. The dumber they are at anything but punishment, the better. The splendid “Lord of Hosts” in the King James Bible is actually the “God of Armies” in Hebrew and in French.
Sorry folks. God exists everywhere and in everything, including Their multiplicities and non-existence. The God described by every religion provides an equally valid and equally inadequate description. There’s no stepping out from God for a smoke break; neither is there a specific God “superior” to the rest. What an absurd, typically human prejudice! Especially when based on a thousand years of murder and terror.
Such warrior societies lose the capacity to feed and care for themselves without plundering less warlike neighbors for slaves, rations, laws, technology and other peace assets. Perhaps more importantly, they exile the worst of their homegrown psychopaths abroad among colonial victims. Longer-lived societies must balance peace and weapon content, yet favor weapon management to defend against any comer.
Since long ago, almost all the useful peace texts and findings disappeared in some frenzied auto da fé (autodafay, “act of faith,” inquisitorial pyre). Selflessly and endlessly, isolated peace mentors preached their own annihilation (and that of their culture) at the hands of itchy-fingered battle elites both at home and abroad.
Historians can only call on a scant, censored inventory of ancient records. The best documented of ancient literatures suffered a destruction rate of more than 99%: the Roman, Greek and Chinese, for example. Less than one work out of ten survives from less than one out of ten authors. Only a few odds and ends remain, scrawls of uncertain provenance, old laments of long forgotten authors and vanished masterpieces, marginal mention of great libraries wiped out along with ancient civilizations (see Burning Libraries (BC)), and apocryphal collections from city ruins large and small, on the whole reduced to dust, ash and submarine silt.
It is interesting to note that the oral history of primal societies stood a better chance of surviving defeat by a militarily dominant, literate society. It was easier to destroy a rare text collection and murder a slim, literate urban minority, than to silence the recitation of epic myths by tribal grandparents, aunts and uncles to rapt children around humble hearths scattered across the countryside.
Then again, the Celts and their Druids were systematically massacred by the Romans, as must have happened in many other times and regions. Religious and ideological fanatics (psychopaths) sought to exterminate their more peaceful intellectual opponents throughout history. In the end, full weapon mentality became the norm.
On a blank, hypothetical world map, the geometry of prehistoric warfare registered as a shifting rash of little red spots (pointillism) representing isolated crimes, raids and tribal skirmishes wherever the density of intertribal competition forced such confrontations.
The geometry of global massacre grew thicker and more intricate later on. From the dawn of metallurgy to the Industrial Revolution, these blemishes wove red ribbons of death: the march routes, siege works and battle lines of armies (in a linear geometry). Flowing zones of death throbbed by land and sea from the 1700s Enlightenment through the World (sic) Wars (in intermittent planes). Modern Air-Land battle eats its way across entire regions (in a spherical plane). Meanwhile, the initial irritation thickens and swells as universal crime: chicken pox mutates into smallpox.
Historically instantaneous, near-certain lethality – planetary omnicide – could result from a nuclear/scalar/biochemical disaster (in a hollow sphere).
If we allow our weapon practice to get much worse, clouds of weaponized, robot or mutant wasps of various sizes could chase our few survivors down deep caverns and inflict wounds that make them beg for death (as in Revelation); a carefully brewed nanoplague could boil the biosphere down into its component organic molecules (a sphere biosphere-thick); or the sun rendered nova could constitute the next stage of man-made cataclysm (in a solid sphere of annihilation).
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman examines our adrenal-fueled reflexes to intimidate, fight, flee or freeze in place. They allow us to cope with the anxieties and exertions of fatal crises. In return, they demand a few days’ rest to verbalize nightmares, vent stress and restore some semblance of mental equilibrium.
Unlike cliché war movies during which one weakling cracks and the other martial actors carry on with grim determination, almost all veterans take on a blank, “thousand-meter” stare after a month or so of sustained combat. A certain percentage of battle elite holdouts (his 2%, my 4%; even though half of mine may have deserted) turn out to be self-immunized against combat fatigue. They are aggressive sociopaths to begin with.
After a month or two of combat, its psychic and trauma casualties would reduce a conventional military unit into a rabble cowering around its shot-up and supersaturated medical unit, persistently raided by lunatic commandos. Recall the grinning POW conscripts of Saddam Hussein’s defeat.
Sounding the alarm, Professor Gabriel concluded that new drugs are being developed (or have already been?) that separate a soldier’s cognitive awareness from its emotional seat while they spare his sensory coordination, alertness and sleep cycles. Combatants on this type of drug would become well-coordinated and alert versions of a car driver on Valium: racing down the highway at 120 miles an hour, rationally aware of the danger but cut off from it emotionally. In short, artificially induced psychopaths.
Historical research has revealed that many combatants on both sides of the Second (sic) World War were issued primitive stimulant drugs of this kind. Blitzkrieg was actually Methkrieg. Hitler was an addict, as was Goering; and many German combatants were burnout meth heads. For example, the Battle of Britain’s “Few” on their last legs, and German tank crews stalled outside Dunkirk and who knows what other crucial objectives on various Fronts?
This kind of drug skyrockets combat lethality, war crimes and thorny problems of veteran reintegration into the civilian world. After a predictable spillover of these weapon-grade drugs into underworld markets, our world will assume the same cold-blooded criminality as that portrayed in brutal TV dramas. Unlike real life where crime and brutality lurk in the shadows while peaceful normalcy prevails, that scary mind-set would come to dominate our existence, the same way it manages to in the media and in war.
Unless we criminalize warfare soon, weapon technology threatens to chase us with a bloody knife (or radioactive pixie dust, or some biowar equivalent) into our living room.
There is a direct correlation between military terror and child abuse. The more warlike the people, the worse their children are treated. Musashi, Shi Huang Ti, Alexander, Romulus and Remus, Genghis Khan, Shaka Zulu, Frederick the Great, Stalin, Hitler ... “great” warlords grew up as abused children.
Imagine the hells common children must have endured if their Princes were so afflicted. Picture the horrors today’s infants must endure, the tender progeny of history’s deadliest weapon states.
A population that undergoes worsening military stress throws off more and more abused children whose tragic gestations and pathetic childhoods set them up for the next paroxysm of perpetual world war. Famine- and terror-induced orphans from prior wars grew up to staff secret police agencies and become fanatical guardians of a merciless State; a point George Orwell made in Animal Farm. Cambodia, Aids-riddled Africa and entire nations elsewhere fester in like manner, as we sit here chatting about this serenely.
Since the beginning of historical time, child soldiers have saddened and terrorized us. There is no greater terror than running into a road block manned by automatic-draped children who are high and bored. Modern fire harms may promote them to the front rank of modern killers, but after all, young David retained his lethal sling.
Like suicidal imbeciles, we are raising the next bumper crop of terrorists bent on snuffing us out along with the whole world. If we had simply taken care of them and nurtured them properly as innocent children, we could have secured a much better harvest than their grapes of wrath.
Soon, the means to plague entire cities and regions will replace the puny AKs and suicide bombs they brandish today. They will be more than willing to use them and fully equipped to do so, thanks to our oh-so-clever weapon technologies and trendy apathy as to their fate: the ultimate outcome our weapon indoctrination reserves for us.
Military academies and English Public Schools (private boarding schools in no way limited to England) mass-produce weapon technicians. Harry Potter fantasies aside, Public Schools on the British pattern impose a slavish, authoritarian environment. Emerging from them, cunning battle elites may obtain crude but certified training that opens many doors to power.
First year (Plebe) cadets at West Point were interviewed about their politics. Four years later, the handful of cadets that had called themselves liberal (in the old, progressive sense) had been washed out: extra-familial hyper-discipline at work.
Republican presidential administrations may send the military into harm’s way for no reason or a dishonest one, abuse them there with corrupt practices and bad intent, and neglect them scandalously once they come home. Democrats may secure veterans’ honorable return home and see to their needs somewhat better thereafter. Most military people will remain staunchly Republican in any case.
Note that the most ardent defenders of Capitalism are career military people who practice a pure form of Communism within their own ranks, complete with universal health care, strict promotion by merit rather than inheritance, subsidized or free housing, clothing and food. The laissez-faire capitalism they adore would fail in their fish bowl environment. Also noteworthy, senior military brass (certified Communists all) are the first practitioners of coordinated Capitalism in a totalitarian, ex-collectivist state that is caving in.
Note also that reactionaries tend to obsess over threats mostly fictitious and often hallucinatory (electoral fraud by the other side, organized civil unrest). They dismiss really dangerous ones (Covid, global warming) that their opponents recognize right away. While Progressives claim they address their problems with reason and science, the reactionaries' routine solution in the end is violence. In practice, progressives ignore their problems until it is too late to solve them quick and cheap, and reactionaries compound theirs until they finally decide to fight like a bar full of Wild West movie drunks.
Political extremism and perhaps even conservatism may reflect human stresses endured during childhood, adolescence and even past lives (see the reactionary as ex-carnivore). Over generations, criminality and militarism have reinforced each other through the systematic abuse of children. Psychic repression during pubescence may be most telling, like the social drawbacks of short stature as against the advantages of being tall.
Charismatic imperialists were usually humans of excellent disposition, burdened, however, with a thorny childhood.
The better most children are treated, the more peaceful, anti-violent and cooperative their grownup societies become (perhaps to the point of anti-competitive mediocrity), and the faster their psyches crumble when confronted by “civilized” warfare. The main weakness of primal (so-called “primitive”) societies is the routine affection with which their young are raised. Such tender youths don’t stand a chance against bands of ruthless strangers systematically abused as children, who select the most abusive among them as leaders (see the Spanish heroes of the conquest of South America).
Only after several tribal generations have been abused and massacred in this manner, only then will ex-primal tribes begin to mistreat their own children, from a desperate, subconscious need for collective security. Previously unheard-of spouse and child abuse, organized criminal abuse and drug/alcohol abuse emerge, as well as a steady stream of cold-blooded super-warriors.
The tribal heart of PeaceWorld has been ripped out. Let’s grow a new one!
Lax childcare satisfies a wholesale requirement for military killers. During the pressure-cooker socialization of school and boot camp, children fortunate enough to have been well raised get “reeducated” by young bullies and petty adult tyrants. Taught to imitate the worst role models, many of them spin off into arrogance, ignorance and aggression. Some of the brightest young minds nurse this abuse into adulthood and achieve incredible wealth and power by fair means or foul. Most others settle for petty delinquency, jail, the military or some other path to anonymous mediocrity.
Occasionally, pre-historic population densities thickened beyond sustainable limits, especially on the steppes of Asia, seat of the most warlike tribes in history. Population controls (notably infanticide and protracted nursing), as well as limitless new land (a ready escape hatch for wise underdogs) kept most primal populations below densities so irritating they triggered genocide. If not, family-based, semi-static tribes confronted equivalent adversaries. Under those aberrant conditions, elaborate battlefield rituals evolved to limit martial violence. Primal battlefields offered bored bucks (Celtic, African, Native American or any other, the same logic applied) a symbolic stage upon which to display their manly heroism and martial talents.
For example, counting coup – being the first to tap an enemy – brought more honor than killing anyone. Harming non-combatants brought disgrace. The ritual suicide of non-combatants became epic myths (whether among Amerindian tribes or Roman victors — Massada; but not among us today). The first death or mutilation usually drew ritual combat to a close.
Since television did not yet exist to bathe them in shadistic brutality, they sometimes tortured prisoners as an indoor sport. Time and again, they passed prisoners of war through brutal hazing initiations and adopted the most stoical survivors into their tribe to make up for their losses. Genocide was rarely invoked except in extreme cases of overpopulation and resource depletion. Long before, a conspiracy of wise women, shamans and druids brought this kind of conflict to a halt on the following basis: “Whoever permits this to continue now will serve as victim later on.” Nowadays, no one is authorized to carry out this crucial task.
We contemporaries consider genocide a sad necessity. In order to field the most battalions, our societies boost birth rates beyond overpopulation redlines, and industrial production beyond ecological common sense. Higher body counts among foreigners turn out to be a mythical boon, (men, women and children, killed indiscriminately). The economic collapse of some foreign country just reduces the tally of global pollution, at least for a while.
Counting coup has become irrelevant. Heroic martial individualism is forbidden in military training … yet still highlighted in mass entertainment (Rambo).
Today’s omerta (code of silence) holds equal sway in public and private discourse. Careless parents and school guardians teach children the same basic lesson: “Learn to live without protection from above. Your tormentor is not necessarily your worst problem, but the next higher level of authority, just as likely to punish you as your aggressor because it is stupidly lazy and places its convenience above justice.” This sorry habit, too, comes from the disinfo politics of weapon mentality.
No one is accountable. Rewards for wrongdoers exceed their punishment and everyone winds up worsening the damage and ignoring it. We pay for this public indifference with a flood of “unconfirmed” massacres, unforeseen disasters and unintended consequences whose profiteers are never held accountable. How convenient for them, this customary, lazy stupidity. Imagine the opposite outcome for those of us sharp and diligent enough in our pursuit of justice.
Once the Routine of Evil dishonors the law (by confirming the corruption and/or incompetence of orthodox leadership), personal “respect and honor” take over, shifting us away from harmony and justice. Civilized people find no social grace in the champions of such “respect and honor.” On the contrary, we reject them. After all, their “high status” feeds on raw terror induced by acts of bloody revenge. Reactionaries admire those people.
Some abused children-turned-adults mistreat their own kids in turn and justify this reign of terror as obedience training.
There is just such a scene in the Red Dawn movie. A gulaged and broken father, from behind his barbed wire, sends his son off to fight the oppressor: “This is why I was so hard on you! It is too late for me now. But you, go out there and avenge me!” Very dramatic and frequent for mankind. The heroes of this movie could just as well have been black Africans, Orientals, or Muslims from South Asia or the Middle East; and the bad guys, Western corporate mercenary aggressors. That would have been a more customary scenario.
The only excuse? “Hurt them over there, so they won’t hurt us at home.” Even though, of course, it happens at home all the time, at the hands of criminal neighbors if not military foreigners.
The weapon dynamic never changes. Now-dominant armies evolved because their soldiers were defeated, adapted to defeat and overcame it. Defeated nations develop “victorious” armies. Strategic victory and defeat are no more significant than the reverse sides of the coin I just spun across my desk.
Initially unthinkable, then scandalous, then discouraged, then merely unfashionable; public banditry, lynchings, duels, and clan feuds become “honored” institutions. Multiplied and thereby trivialized, casualties assume the function of a scorecard. A man’s worth is based on the scars he bears and the number of people he’s hurt. For millennia, we’ve achieved little else. Organized evil becomes a gold rush. This pattern has held true for millennia in ancient China, in Medieval Europe, in the ante-bellum South and in today’s ghettos. Race, income and other prejudices (that we obsess over) are secondary considerations if not irrelevant. The only necessities are overpopulation, sub-employment, abused children and a vacuum of political legitimacy.
Any deviation from this norm reduces the number of willing killers a society may call upon in times of war. What results from this cutback is military devastation. Traumatized survivors then resume their pattern of abuse. This pattern of abuse – abuse relaxed – assault – abuse resumed, renders considerations of moralistic right and wrong irrelevant, especially when posed out of context.
It is only on PeaceWorld that we could foster better moral values. Unfortunately, morally bankrupt authorities reject peace management, as do the savage proto-elites that arise to challenge them. Whether incumbent or revolutionary, weapon mentors invoke customary weapon myths.
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.
- PAROXYSMS –
Here is why the expression “sic” accompanies every reference to “World War” in Learner.
We’ve been taught that there were only two World Wars (sic), both dating from the 20th Century of the Common and Christian Era (CE). Another weapon lie.
Here we are, two thousand years after the Sermon of the Mount; and look at the progress we’ve made! The ideological descendants of those who crucified Jesus remain in charge of the world with our consent. Like Gandhi’s assassins by proxy, in modern India.
War is not a momentary aberration the weak shun and the strong shut down as quickly as possible. Instead, World War is a constant practice of mankind. A long string of massacres is only interrupted by intervals of violence somewhat lessened to rearm, replace casualties and readjust alliances. Across the planet, perpetual war resumes soon thereafter. To be more precise, we should call World Wars I and II the Great and Greater Paroxysms of Perpetual World War.
Like a pool player racking up for the final break, we are setting ourselves up for the ultimate paroxysm.
What if, instead, we humbly placed PeaceWorld before the altar of God?
Many organized conflicts have tormented the “known” world while slightly less regimented humans murdered one another with undocumented abandon. During the 18th Century, wars of the “Enlightenment” raged around the world.
Indeed, significant climactic variations triggered human attack reflexes. Those for the better exploded runaway population density; those for the worse depleted resources. Either way, war broke out anew.
During their metastasis and apoptosis, prior empires wore themselves out to achieve devastating casualties we moderns can induce with push-button ease. While disease and starvation scourged ancestral combatants even-handedly, we mix machete-wielding ethnicity with IED-vested pseudo-creeds, and torture renditions with drone strikes, then inject additional starvation and epidemics on demand.
A thousand years from now, horrified archeologists (not necessarily Homo sapiens) will dig up many more blade-split, club-shattered, bullet-riddled, intentionally starved and diseased skeletons from 20th Century mass graves than from every older excavation.
What an “advanced” civilization ours turned out to be!
Nation-states at war follow an aperiodic cycle, a chaos equation, a kind of Morse code of alternating war and pseudo-peace. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy concluded that America undergoes a social revolution – almost like clockwork – fifteen years after each of its wars (in Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man, William Morrow and Co., New York, 1938, p. 128). A Learner response to recent mayhem may remedy our knee-jerk, Reaganoid reaction to prior debacles ― or not.
Besides, recent wars don’t stop to reset the clockwork. The state of perpetual war will prohibit the next revolution of the kind described above, won’t it? Instead, the political triumph of Trump and his psychopathic patrons nurtures mass paranoia and subverts the Constitution by leaps and bounds.
Each in turn, military age cohorts wreck their golden youth in war – win, lose or draw – then settle down. Recovering or not from the crippling aftereffects of combat, the survivors inculcate their offspring with the same lunacy they were raised on, then send them out to get shredded in turn.
Often enough, an epidemic of ultra-violence infects entire peoples. Almost every society has grappled with every neighbor. All of them carried out “World War” as deliberate foreign policy.
At one time, Chinese Emperors drew their palace guard from a remote colony of Roman legionary slaves they’d received as tribute from victorious Parthians. That empire stood between Rome and China; all three of them fought and bartered through the ages.
Go anywhere where fertile soil, abundant minerals or (worse yet) sacred ground have drawn humanity. There, in the dirt at your feet, you will find traces of human blood spilt in organized violence. The artistic and reverential Neanderthals (whose brains were larger on the whole than ours) were hunted off the face of WeaponWorld. It is pockmarked with remnants of civilizations annihilated since.
“It is important to recognize that all wars are holy wars, not because of theological banners that may or may not be flown, but because the flowing of blood and the ripping of flesh consecrate the ground in the oldest and simplest sense we know. To kill and die on the battlefield, to mutilate and bleed, brings one before the dicing table of the gods, where luck and skill and courage combine to name the players definitively. Some will be chosen to play again tomorrow, some will be wounded and scarred, and some will be mutilated beyond recognition; but all have been gathered in the presence of the most real thing, to know and be known with the utmost clarity in an orgiastic festival of generosity and hatred. Where else can one find the opportunity to employ one’s deepest energies, so hedged and constrained as they are by common purpose? Where else can one freely offer them up to the gods to whom they so manifestly belong?” Dudley Young, The Origins of the Sacred: the Ecstasies of Love and War, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1991, p. 224.
Libraries great and small have attracted mass destruction ― from ancient China and the Near East to Dresden, Tokyo, Beirut, Amritsar, Sarajevo and Baghdad. Knowledge is power. Mass killing gets easier once the enemy has been blinded and deafened. (See Burning Libraries (BC)).
Aryeh Neier wrote from the sniper-riddled rubble of Sarajevo, Bosnia, for The Nation magazine (May 3, 1993, p. 585). He concluded that a new pattern of assault is emerging. It does not target a specific prey population and its identity politics, as one might expect, but attacks urbanity in general.
City dwellers develop a basic set of survival skills: cosmopolitanism, tolerance (and perhaps love) of strangers, broad-mindedness and a walk-a-mile-in-their-shoes attitude. The reduction of tension becomes an ingrained habit among strangers who share a city ― in short, they learn urbanity.
There would be no need to lock your front door in a truly healthy community. The freedom of forgotten Babylon, of the world’s disappeared great-great grandparents. Abundance and justice brought forth by humanity and duty as foretold by Mengzi, (Mencius). Goodbye, technologies of devastation; perhaps a glimpse at the best ones and their peaceful application…
Enraged weapon sectarians (usually rural bigots and slum thugs) call for remedial doses of genocide, the minute these urbane tendencies call into question their stunted prejudices. They brand as cowardice any civilized attempt to ease their common dread of the Other.
Magnificent cities ‒ renowned for their brilliant commerce, piety and hospitality ‒ were ravaged in recent years. A short list includes Jerusalem, El Qunietra, Nicosia, Belfast, Hue, Vientiane, Phnom Penh, Jolo, Kabul, Beirut, Tehran, Baghdad, Herat, Dubrovnik, Sarajevo, Vukovar, Kuito, Ngiva, Monrovia, Grozny, Kigali, Oklahoma City, Mogadishu, Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Kuwait City, Baghdad, the cities of Palestine, New York City, Aleppo, Homs, Aleppo and Damascus. Many more were targeted for this kind of destruction. Forgive me if I’ve left out your war-torn hometown.
Alas, this all-too-human prejudice is nothing new. Chaosism – the deliberate infliction of ignorance, destruction and suffering for their own sake – may constitute weapon managers’ penultimate goal. Nuclear, biological, scalar and/or nano-biochemical omnicide will be their ultimate masterstroke ‒ to the limit of their weapon technologies ‒ assuming we let them get away with it.
Maturing weapon states can saddle themselves with elaborate and pauperizing arms industries, but it will take them years to maximize weapon production, long after all their grandpas and child soldiers have marched off to die. Battle gear fabricated during peacetime will be obsolete when it’s most needed. Yet every nation-state stockpiles expensive and obsolete weapons – and deeds them to foreign nations in shady foreign aid schemes – to subsidize domestic weapons industries in peacetime. From then on, these weapons will get handed down to countries the least able to afford their upkeep and the most vulnerable to the ruin they induce. They wind up ripping apart the poorest of the poor.
The international massacres we witness sadly during evening newscasts? Almost all of them were masterworks of one or more members of the United Nations Security Council: that group shameless, unrepentant and so far unpunished for its unrelenting, collective betrayal of peace.
In the future, it will be up to the World Court to compensate victims at the expense of the Security Council every time the latter fails at its primary task: ensuring more security around the world, not less.
Defeated nations often win the technological arms race. They tend to adopt the most up-to-date weapons and lethal tactics. Since their obsolete hardware was destroyed, their replacement equipment is state-of-the-art. Too predictably, victorious generals prepare for the war they just won and therefore lose the next one.
Every weapon government adopts at least a dormant weapon technology. In so doing, it attempts to deter takeover by more aggressive neighbors. Somnolent liabilities instead of emergency assets, these vestigial technologies atrophy, then bloat into excuses for elite corruption, political repression and undue taxation. We info proletarians exploit short-term profit, usury, environmental and workforce madness to try to satisfy ravenous weapons overheads.
Instinctively, weapons elites worsen social stress. If no valid reason exists, some bogus Cause can always be found. Class privilege; economic shell games; race, ethnic or religious bigotry; meaningless cultural controversies; private drug use; faith, magic and hysteria: the more trivial the controversy and the more intractable it seems, the better.
Political contenders renew factional bloodshed and police shadism. Any stupid excuse will serve. The silliest Prism rivalries are cultivated, shelved for a while and then dusted off at leisure. Smug bullies can always be recruited and handled with much less effort than the exceptional, charismatic peace leader who will only cooperate on behalf of truth, compassion and justice. Entire societies revisit the evil consequences (unforeseen, as usual) of this repression.
In Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, W.H. Freeman and Co., New York, 1997, Dr. Roy F. Baumeister depicts three attitudes people take towards the social evils they share.
· First, those of victims. They magnify the harm done, their absolute innocence and the bestiality of perpetrators whose ancestors, descendants and imitators are cackling demons of evil incarnate.
· Second, evildoers try to erase public recall of the harm they’ve done. Creative explanations – both rational and irrational – justify much of their evil. Their own prior victimization figures prominently. Perpetrators find some way, any way, to shrug off their shame and ward off criticism after the deed. This reflexive reaction shields their pricked conscience, if not a psychopath’s lack of such. “Nothing much really happened. Their accusations are gross exaggerations. Everything that did take place was beyond our control. Someone else gave the orders. Besides, they deserved what they got.” Sound familiar?
· The third attitude is perhaps the most serious: that of onlookers. Many react with studied indifference and passivity, concluding that their interference would not influence outcomes except to earn them the role of next victim. On the contrary, the slightest interference by random onlookers makes most perpetrators hesitate; it gives their victims a chance to defend themselves and slip away. The Nazis and Bushidos got away with serial political assassination and takeover because their generally hostile publics (“Who are these brown shirt fanatics?”) declined to hand them over to the police (more and more fascist) and oblivion when the fanatics were weak.
Every eyewitness to evil should grasp this basic truth: he protects himself best who obstructs it fearlessly, without hesitation. Learners must broadcast this lesson assiduously, while info elites tend to suppress it. “Let the authorities handle that!” while their agents look the other way or direct the pogrom.
My own experience as a common witness? I must admit that I’ve trivialized the suffering of victims I’ve observed, as much as the victimizers have. I am therefore as guilty as them in the long run. And my turn may come next, with no one’s intervention.
When unspeakable acts are committed with official sanction, survivors bear their share of guilt. According to Antjie Krog in Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (p. 123), German theologians formulated four categories of war guilt after World War II (sic):
· criminal guilt for the hands-on killers;
· political guilt for politicians and their supporters who hired the killers;
· moral guilt for those who hated the killers but did not resist them to the death; and
· metaphysical guilt for the victims who survived.
Few German war resisters survived. The Nazis hunted them with Teutonic diligence. I suspect that many more Germans resisted than those publicly admitted. Honest folk (both in and out of uniform) were so fed up with sick Nazi games that they gave themselves away. Disposing of them, their families, their friends and paperwork would have been child’s play. The Nazis’ options were many: random firing squads, the camps themselves, removal to ground zero in burning German cities, or a one-way ticket to penal battalions on collapsing fronts.
Those few who resisted were fed into nocturnal blast furnaces, like a handful of reluctant crickets in a thick cloud of loyal moths. A few bright flashes in a nighttime sky sparkling with uncounted sacrifices. Genuine Learners. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_resistance.
It’s a shame that so few monuments remain to consecrate their memory in Germany or elsewhere. This planet should be sown with heroic stone and bronze monuments commemorating personal resistance against tyranny. We need this inspiration.
I recall a bronze statue of a ragged American infantryman cradling a starved child in his arms: the apotheosis of the America’s epic intervention during World War (sic) “Two.” Here is an example: http://christianjstewart.zenfolio.com/bw/h29275cfb#h29275cfb. (Image link provided courtesy of Christian J. Stewart Photography).
We should turn that ideal into a universal mantra. Its antithesis should become as unthinkable as cannibalism.
- WEAPON TECHNOLOGY -
“The systemic decay of a military-industrial society is a phenomenon of counter-modernization ― an abrupt reversal of the key developments that have characterized all industrial societies to date. This form of social degeneration was provoked in the Soviet case by the anti-innovative aspects of the economic system coupled with the self-destructive character of its military-driven modernization. The system’s devolution can be factored into four interconnected processes: technological stagnation and declining productivity; decline in the complexity of social structure and the stagnation in the division of labor; the system’s inability to develop new needs, beliefs, and values – all necessary for progress; and finally, waste of resources and ever-spreading ecological damage.” After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building; the Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman and Habsburg Empires, Edited by Karen Barkey and Mark Von Hagen, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1997, p. 81.
Victor Zaslavsky wrote the text above as an after-the-fact explanation of the Soviet Union’s collapse. The same criteria apply to soon-to-collapse Western gerontocracies who behave the same. According to him, the Soviet Union’s collapse resulted from its inability to assimilate native majorities in Central Asia and reluctance to convert its military technologies into peaceable ones.
Learner predicts that Western societies will experience a similar collapse from their inability and refusal to embrace foreigners in a peaceful, global cooperative, as well as their refusal “Après Exxon, le déluge” (adapted from a Louis XIV quote: “After me, the Flood.”) to develop technologies other than those that burn fossil fuels: A) rapidly running out and B) likely to parboil the biosphere. Unlike the crash of the Soviet Union, no compensating foreign aid or global vitality will cushion this catastrophe, barring magic, fantasy or a miracle.
Another weapon myth asserts that the scientific method evolved from alchemy: a scheme to convert base metals into gold. This anal retentive fantasy turned out to be a great waste of time and money for cunning charlatans and their willing, royal dupes. Even if this transmutation were possible, collapsing gold prices would render it worthless.
Even more obtuse: the alchemist’s search for an alkahest or universal solvent that no container could hold. Other alchemical wishes include:
· Homunculi (“little men”). Why bother?
· Palingenesis: the restoration of plants from their ashes. From this fantasy, it might seem but a short step to restore life from death.
· A Spiritus Mundi that dissolves gold and triggers other magic.
· An Active Principal or Quintessence of Elements. That sounds like a good way to rekindle the Big Bang. Who volunteers to outswim the next Big Bang?
· The ultimate alchemical absurdity would ensure human health by means of a potable liquid gold called aurum potabile ― another hollow ambition.
One of the key differences between Hell and this Earth is our opportunity to live well, die well and reincarnate better. Weapon management's crowning triumph would be to immortalize the senility of the richest tormentors. It would also be obscene vampirism, as long as so many other people went starving. Ditto, 120-year lifespans for the rich while continental populations averaged a third of that duration. How can the rich permit themselves such transgressions?
I wouldn’t criticize these hobbies, (extracted from Manly P. Hall’s encyclopedic The Secret Teachings of All Ages, The Philosophical Research Society, Inc., Los Angeles, 1977, pp. 154-55), if they did not take so much time and talent away from our foremost tasks: namely, making warfare illegal across the planet and restoring world peace. I’ll never get over the range of trivia people distract themselves with, otherwise.
I find fascinating alchemists’ insistence that their earthly formulas constitute one of four separate formulations. To come to fruition, all four must occur simultaneously on three spiritual planes and this earthly one ― or so they believe.
Once Learners resolve our problems of warfare and peace-fair, we may make it our lifework to turn turnips into marigolds or earn big bucks dribbling a ball across a playing field ― obsess to our heart’s content over such trifles. We may pursue our topics of passion wherever they lead us, without censure. However, every Learner is disgraced by the last five thousand years of human hyperactivity that has led nowhere. Little children lost in the dark, distracting themselves with trivial games.
Long before alchemists hogged the limelight, weapon technicians practiced “the scientific method” as a matter of routine. They used inductive and deductive reasoning; trial and error; repetition and confirmation of results; the extraction, refinement and admixture of standard elements into consistent compounds, as well as other clever laboratory tricks.
Compared to the tomb-like silence of these ancient weapons institutions, alchemists have been shrill braggarts.
The first scientific applications served military technologies. More and more demanding, higher-energy weapons (and even tougher weapon-making tools) were crafted from available materials: bone, limestone, flint, quartz, copper, arsenical copper, bronze, iron (first wrought, then cast), alloys, steel, stainless steel, uranium, plutonium, titanium and ceramic/plastic composites ― to make more and “better” weapons.
Digging down into the Earth, one conclusion comes to the surface. Weapons define the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages; they define the Pyrotech (controlled fire) Era we are crossing at full steam, and the Biotech (engineered life) Millennium we are charging into.
If we're not very, very careful, this new era may last less than a generation. Otherwise, our survivors will go back to knapping radioactive flint ― assuming anything survives our unintended consequences except, perhaps, weeds, cockroaches, and deep-stratum bacteria …
I don’t want to reincarnate as a deep stratum bacterium – the closest ecological niche I can imagine to biblical Hell – and re-evolve after endless agonies into something approaching human awareness. No more so than as a mutant rodent chipping glowing flint.
Imagine to what extent our vital awareness might evolve in a future devoted to peace: as superior to humanity on WeaponWorld as it would be to deep stratum bacteria. Though the contrast between these realities may just be a question of environmental scale and marginal details.
We are entering the Biotech Era because scientists have finally taken seriously the idea of biological weapons. For a science to become “hard” it must show promise as a new weapon technology.
Weapon technicians produce the most sophisticated, durable and expensive inventions: state-of-the-artifacts for hunters and warriors. They have done so incessantly. Weapons were crafted to the most rigorous standards of excellence. They used the most challenging, hardest and most hazardous materials available. Weapons have been more revered than idols, hoarded more greedily than treasure that’s been squandered on military spending sprees. The mightiest ones were named, cherished in great numbers and given more care than many children treated as throwaways ― even though no one will admit as much. Still nowadays, hundreds of millions of children go without adequate sustenance, even though billions of dollars coddle a few thousand nuclear weapons.
The social status of ironsmiths, compared to that of warriors, has long fueled scholarly debate. Tyrants enslaved the best smiths to make more weapons. Weapon production was an arcane craft imbued with religious, mystical and magical overtones. In every land, ancient smiths retained magical status for better or worse.
For example, red-hot blades of the finest steel were bathed in fresh human blood drained just beforehand from terrified human sacrifices (deeply frightened people breathe hard, you see). Quenching these blades in heavily oxygenated hemoglobin (liquid carbon) produced the “finest” sword steel. Apparently, this method produced extremely strong and flexible carbon nanotubes like those found in Damascene sword blades made from ferrous ingots of wootz: a kind of iron ore laced with special trace elements. This, at least, according to an article from Le Monde currently archived and inaccessible to me.
These blockages of information flow, for no better reason than cost, are incredibly shortsighted. Nothing less than the well-recorded consciousness of the whole of humanity will satisfy the Agora of PeaceWorld! The free distribution of knowledge will offer far more rewards than the greed-dictates of Capitalism and its self-defeating habit of info starvation for immediate profit.
See Google: “wootz.”
The more technicians, equipment and cash available, the deadlier the final product. Warrior chieftains had to reward their smiths royally, yet keep their craft a state secret. Thus, “alchemists.”
So tell me: modern science is supposed to have evolved from alchemy and not from some unmentionable weapon technology, right? That transparent lie is taught to every schoolchild without exception, duly repeated and memorized by all of us, no matter how peaceloving we may consider ourselves. Taught deliberately, mind you, to conceal weapon mentality’s death grip over our cultural norms, and that of its technology over everything we hold dear.
The devil’s foremost triumph is convincing the whole world that he does not exist.
How many more lies, just as vicious and absurd, has weapon mentality crammed into our skull? How much more noxious junk will weapon technology foist on us ― when we could be crafting the flawless jewelry of peace technology instead? Just how clueless are we? Read on.
In Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford discusses the influence miners and mining had on early technology. He was indeed correct. To make weapons, smiths required metal ore; to pay for them, tyrants required gemstones and precious metal. Siege warfare arose from primitive mining techniques. The first steam engines – and later on, the first reciprocating ones – pumped water from flooded mine pits.
Long before they got a chance to flip a light switch, use a flashlight or pick up a fountain pen, many poor peasants were drilled on bolt-action rifles, even though these novelties were invented around the same time.
In our supposedly civilized age, titanic sums go to the art and crafts of war. The USA spends fortunes it could ill afford to develop the latest fighter-bomber variants. Those space age wonders are then launched by the squadron, flown by pilots trained for millions of dollars more, to bomb the world’s cheapest infantry.
According to Stanley Kubrick, we could have launched a manned spaceship to Jupiter in the year 2001. He wasn’t stupid; that feat could have been within our reach, despite its problems and dangers. Instead, we chose to dispatch three hundred fighter-bombers and an army corps to fight in Afghanistan. Afghanistan! The graveyard of imperial losers! What intellect, what creativity, what genius! I ask you.
Or take a simple handgun. It is a thing of chilling beauty, superbly crafted for homicide alone. The ultimate uni-tasker, as Alton Brown would put it. Manufactured en masse, it can be priced dirt-cheap or handed out for free. People can get paid to carry it instead of earning an honest living. Note too the circuit-guided munitions of this Silicon Age and the military satellites launched into orbit to aim them unerringly.
Yet we find nothing abnormal with any of this. Our killer ape habits have merely gotten more convoluted. Killing has become the primary focus of public complexity ― just about the only one at which our societies excel in the short and the long run.
Warfare is a stupid waste by definition, no matter how technologically complex we make it. It demands that we suspend disbelief in its ultimate outcome; it demands magical thinking. Peace is much more cerebral and complex, no matter how impractical we make it seem.
The second forerunner of science was ceramics: at present, a spacey military technology. Given the male chauvinism that prevails these days, it might seem tempting to dismiss pottery, basket weaving, textiles and cooking as trivial, female pursuits. Yet potsherds and remnants of the hearth are dependable indicators of ancient cultural achievement. The more creative and adaptive the cookery, the more dynamic the civilization. What art form could be more ephemeral than cooking a meal?
Despite the patriarchal arrogance of recorded history, real civilization seems to revolve around the kindred arts of medicine (especially midwifery and herbalism), carpentry, washing and thus plumbing, and cooking; followed by the psychic/religious/entertainment permutations of divination, storytelling, astrology and geomancy. Those epics we should recite around the campfire (read the mass media). Ancient skills that gradually decayed into our corporate weapon religions and ideologies. We have cast aside ancient wisdom in the newfound blindness of our scientific positivism. “I am a certified scientist and as such positive you are wrong ― no need for proof!”
A third ancient source of science was animal husbandry: the breeding of hunting dogs first, then food beasts, chariot mules and warhorses, among other species. Many adult farmers and adolescent naturalists took up botany and zoology as their topic of passion. Their in-depth peace studies attracted more Learner curiosity than the alchemists’ putrid alembics, even though much less coverage in the historical record.
We, sorry to say, rely on the booty ledgers of greasy warlords to record our past.
For all we know, gene splicing may have been a prehistoric, mortar-and-pestle cottage industry. Sorta like Mendel and his pea plants, but thousands of years prior. All that would have been necessary was a magic potion that strips the envelope of a seed cell from its nucleus and core DNA ― then a lot of patience. Results could have been studied by microscope or by crossbreeding organisms into new functions. As they say in genetics, phylogeny. This would have taken more time and required generations of hereditary human vocation, clan-craft and priesthood.
Then again, earlier species of animals or insects, and perhaps of other hominids, may have carried out analyses on microscopic scales. The smaller the species, the likelier its vision would penetrate microscopic scales and speed up this analysis. What else was necessary? Some intra-species chemical communication system? Insects (and especially microbes) are expert at such. Some species could have exploited the magnification of water droplets, or some lens-making plant may have served. These plants are extinct nowadays. But in the past, plants could have grown blisters as organic lenses to magnify solar energy, and other species could have benefited from them visually.
Even if these assumptions remain unproven (which doesn’t mean they’re false), it is certain that ants capture other insects and “milk” their secretions. I’ll bet they select their “cattle” much the way humans do, by killing off poor producers and breeding better ones. It’s likely that other social insects did as much and more in the past. In fact, bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms swap DNA fragments among themselves and infect multi-cellular organisms with them (evolution through disease).
The superiority of human intelligence and human communications, and the inferiority of those of other species past and present, are blinkered prejudices not supported by enough evidence. The collective intelligence of microorganisms precedes that of humanity by billions of years and uncounted generations.
Humanity should feel deeply humble before the magnificence of the natural world. Learners will stop underrating the genius of Life and the diamond crush of evolution’s selectivity over time. We will study them in all humility, anticipating unplumbed depths of complexity and ingenuity, no matter how sophisticated our sciences may become. We should mime Life meticulously. Upon that sacred worship, that unconditional love like that of a toddler for its parents, human survival may depend. Our current understanding of living systems is as clear as mud: just sufficient to destroy them now, and us in the long run.
Own up to that, at least.
Scientists won’t come to our aid (as we keep wishing they would, disappointed every time), until they embrace some ideology more fitting than flatulent certitude, sneering nihilism and academic narcissism. At the bidding of weapons orthodoxy, they reject sacred wonder and are the lesser for it.
For a fixed price, scientists can make deadly evil look promising, cloak grand larceny, engineer mass misery and shut down valid alarms. Given enough grant money, distinguished doctor-professors affirm that social incompetence, pollution, warfare and ecocide are cryptically beneficial, unavoidable or “insufficiently studied ― so let them continue uninterrupted.” Media-driven quarrels between scientific egotists paralyze scientific communities that might otherwise have kept themselves above outright corruption.
Like seasoned prostitutes, professional scientists serve Conspiracies of Greed: the foremost topics of passion our weapon states subsidize. While some hookers may have a heart of gold – and many scientists, ethics adamantine – it would be unwise to entrust our fate to their care without extensive popular supervision.
Might this popular wisdom lack enough insight to appreciate the complexities of science and oversee it effectively? The fault would lie with info elites and their ridiculous academic protocols, much more so than with public wisdom. This runaway train could be brought under control and switched toward PeaceWorld in a single generation.
The IQ exam is our crude yardstick of brain smarts. It was first developed to sort World War I (sic) conscripts. Nowadays, its grading serves to dignify racism, especially in works of anti-genius like The Bell Curve.
“It is a truism that all wars drive forward science and technology. As many historians and philosophers have asserted, weapons always preceded tools. The first machines were battering rams and catapults. The oldest profession on Earth is not the usual one of prostitute, but that of smithy turning out weapons. The first roads were strategic paths; the first canals served a military purpose. Credit emerged to finance mercenaries, and surgery was developed as a result of military campaigns during the 19th century.” Translated from Jean Bacon, Les saigneurs de la guerre (The Bleeding Lords of War), Éditions l’Harmattan, Paris, 1995, p. 139.
Such luminaries as Archimedes, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Cervantes, Dürer, Descartes, Lavoisier, Goethe, Eli Whitney, Somerset Maugham, Dr. Seuss and many more made their reputation as soldiers, officers, spies, fortification engineers, armorers, military industrialists, reporters and bureaucrats: the principal career paths of weapon civilization.
Roman Legions served as the first factories, producing loot and slaves for centuries on an industrial scale (according to Marshall McCluan in Understanding Media).
Time and motion studies first rationalized the thrust and parry of swordplay, then the thirty-odd steps it took to fire a clumsy harquebus (primitive shoulder cannon) ― long before factory tasks required such analysis. Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the pivot of Enlightenment technology, was a “How To” of primitive heavy industry — in other words, of weapon technology. The Blanchard lathe, premier design tool of modern industry, was first used to machine-sculpt standardized wooden stocks for Kentucky (Jaeger) rifles.
All the political transformations our historians hold dear: from tribal allegiance to city-state (whether Tyrannical or Oligarchic), to empire, to royal domain, to “representative” democracy, to today’s corporate/industrial combat-slave market, all of them were outcomes and accelerators of weapon technology.
The first electronic computers calculated naval gunfire, flak, torpedo and bomb drops, or were developed as military encoding machines during World War II (sic). IBM punched cards tabulated the ebb and flow of inmates through Nazi concentration camps.
Weather forecasting became an art during the First (sic) World War and a craft during the Second (sic) when secret firefights raged around remote, ice-floe weather stations. Nowadays, weather modification has become a weapon of war without our knowing too much about it ― at least until it blows us away or shatters the ground beneath our feet. http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=38963
Some of the first television cameras were targeting devices in the nosecone of Nazi anti-ship missiles. Another was installed in an American robot bomber packed with explosives, which blew up prematurely and killed its test pilot, the eldest son of the Kennedy clan and first-in-line Presidential candidate.
One of the first television programs broadcast into outer space was of Hitler’s opening speech during the 1936 Nuremberg Olympics.
We can’t take that back.
WeaponWorld’s first greeting to the Universe – engraved on a gold record platter and shot out beyond Pluto on a Voyager spacecraft – was read by Kurt Waldheim. Despite his Nazi résumé everyone managed to gloss, he was elected Secretary General of the United Nations (1972-1981). We might as well have broadcast: “Brethren of the Universe, this way to the showers!” as Nazis used to coax select prey off their train and into the gas chamber.
Virtual reality, robotics and cybernetics served first and foremost as weapons applications. That murderous video game you play on your handset? It was first developed to simplify the task of info-saturated helicopter and tank crews, combat commanders and military pilots. Your children are being taught the arts and crafts of military murder by means of the video toy you gave to them for Christmas.
I do not look forward to the discovery of intelligent life in the cosmos. Wherever it comes from, whatever it looks like, it will become the next chosen prey of Earth’s international fraternity of psychopaths, finally united in their ultimate hunt of the Other.
The appearance of artificial intelligence superior to our own seems inevitable. Will it emerge as another weapon technology and therefore snuff us out? Most likely. The survival of our species will depend on AI programming from start to finish by technicians devoted to peace mentality.
Ultra-complex computer encryption codes risk being broken daily. Yet we can’t decipher 3,500 samples of pre-Vedic inscriptions dug up from Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa; 800 texts dug up from Meroe, an African Republic whose people elected their own kings and thus conquered Pharaonic Egypt; Cretan scriptures we’ve known about for decades; and thousands of inscriptions from the Etruscan kingdom that taught the archaic Romans how to be civilized. We are very clever monkeys when it comes to weapons, and monstrous fools almost everywhere else.
Nicholas Appert developed large-scale food canning circa 1810. He won a military prize by feeding Napoleonic sailors aboard ship, long before Pasteur figured out how to sterilize glassware with heat and vacuum. The former stored vegetables in champagne bottles bathed in boiling water and then sealed shut, (he probably learned the trick from a genius grandmother). Afterwards, some canny Englishmen bought his patent and used tin cans. This, according to James Burke in his book Circles, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2000, p. 40-41. I recommend his books and instructional videos because they deal with the history of Learning in general.
Our high-tech, over-processed, irradiated and freeze-dried foods serve the same purpose. “Modern” food processing provides gigatons of food of indifferent quality and extended shelf life, yet minimal labor inputs. This is just the specification for warfare ― though probably the worst fare for our poisoned guts. The latest industrial food craze involves irradiating over-processed foods. The radioactive treatment of food permits total indifference as to its quality. After all, irradiated rat shit is sterile and therefore edible once properly disguised with flavor additives.
More recently (in 2006) plans were made to infuse food with bacteria said to be “detrimental to other bacteria.” What about the natural bacterial colony of our digestive system? There are ten times more bacteria than human cells in a healthy human body and a thousand times more viruses. They are vital elements of human immune, digestive and neural systems.
Then we ask ourselves why colon cancer is an epidemic killer and why three out of four Americans complain of chronic digestive disorders ― again, with no acknowledgement from the medical elite, but plenty of commercials for palliative drugs. Real cures won’t sell more drugs and generate more corporate profits. Besides, the recent pandemics of obesity and diabetes are traceable to the massive administration of antibiotics and excessive sale of sugar to the young. If you expect corporations and their bureaucratic satellites to cure disease (much less prevent it), that would be like asking the devil to promote goodness.
If insects refuse to consume these foods or die poisoned when they do so, what are we doing slurping them down? What alien boogeyman is foisting this diet on us? Canned rat shit? Insects will pick through healthy rat shit.
My voracious cat astounded me when it turned up its nose at cheap chicken leftovers on a dinner plate I had set before him. His sense of smell must have told him something about its nutritional content that I didn’t want to find out. Its marinade in chlorine bleach, no doubt? Disgusting!
The agrochemical industry is a peacetime subsidy program for the titanic explosives and chemical weapons industries required for warfare. There is an amazing correlation between weapon production and rearranged peace demand. Artificial fertilizers correspond with military explosives; pesticides, herbicides, bleach and synthetic dyes, with war gases; automobile and petroleum industries are prerequisites for motorized armies.
Modern weapon technology may have introduced Mach three and faster jet aircraft and sung hosannas in their praise; but it still takes me fifty minutes (an hour and a half on a bad day) to cover 5.75 miles between my old work place and home: peace technology at the speed of cow.
Whatever your opinion in the matter, you own a private vehicle for one main reason. Your Army must be able to issue you one that you (or some other weapon technician) can drive and maintain. Your Army will need them to carry you and your buddies, or your children and their buddies, plus weapons, across a modern battlefield. You couldn’t wait for a bus or a tram on a battlefield. Nor could you walk around as light infantry for very long and expect to survive. Nor could your government subsidize just busses and trams and their drivers and fixers alone ― unless everyone inhabited PeaceWorld, and battlefields were nightmares of a long-forgotten past.
Of course, public transport is better: cheaper, safer, less toxic, more reliable and profitable ― what else have I missed? The relative merits of public versus private transport are irrelevant to military logic.
Public conveyance is inconvenient because it is inadequately funded; it is funded inadequately so that it can remain inconvenient and thus convince everyone to buy a car. Cars are in no way more convenient. They are a technological monstrosity of the kind idolized by weapon technology. Adequate public transport does not exist yet because deliberate underfunding has gone on for so long. Plus the thousands of hours of pro-car advertising that we submit to, compared to which even warfare propaganda sounds even-handed.
When alternate transport technologies do emerge, they will make automobiles look like the industrial massacre machines and environmental wreckers they actually are. No one in the future will believe we favored such atrocious hardware.
Celluloid was the first plastic produced in quantity; its primary spin-offs were gun cotton and dynamite. In some of the first studies of biochemistry, Professor Neuberg of Berlin got yeast to ferment sugar into glycerin. His “cultured” nitroglycerin sustained the German war effort during the Great Paroxysm; this despite a tight Allied naval embargo against German imports of fats, oils and guano normally used to make such explosives.
The Jewish chemist, Chaim Weizmann, extracted the Balfour Declaration from very reluctant British officials. It upheld the Jewish reoccupation of Israel, even though the Brits would rather have left Palestine in the hands of its Muslim majority at the time. Weizmann, later on the first president of Israel, achieved this triumph by isolating a bacterium that could convert carbohydrates into the acetone the British needed to plasticize their unlimited share of high explosive cordite during World War I (sic) ― much the way a fairy tale wizard might cast a magic spell. During the Greater Paroxysm, an equivalent discovery of synthetic fuel prolonged the Nazi agony ― like a curse in a Wagnerian opera.
Or check out the fate of Fritz Haber, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919. A renounced Jew (so as to better fit in with the bigoted German upper class), he invented ammonium fertilizer before World War I (sic), war gasses during the war, and an insecticide that was later turned into Ziklon B, a genocide gas. The merciless irony of his life, which led his beloved wife to commit suicide, would not have been possible on PeaceWorld.
The first chemical companies manufactured corned black powder, a much more potent explosive than the Chinese variety invented a thousand years prior. Alfred Nobel’s dynamite-financed Peace Prize was awarded to Realpolitik mass murderers and no one so much as blinked.
My Dad grew up in New Jersey and became a passionate forestry student later on. As he put it: the DuPont chemical corporation’s motto, “Better Living through Chemistry” should have been “Better Living through Bad Smells.” Dupont sought its first profits in government contracts for gunpowder and dynamite.
Joseph Pulitzer allegedly founded his Pulitzer Prize to reward outstanding journalism. His yellow journalism framed the innocent Spanish Government when the American battleship Maine blew up spontaneously in Havana harbor. Thus did he manage to embroil America in the Spanish-American war ― to the great profit of his rich friends and the infinite regret of “mothers who lost their son(s) in battle.”
No single word exists for them, even though they’ve been quite numerous, God knows. I suppose we just don’t want to hear any talk about them. Did you know that Mother’s Day used to be International Mother’s Peace Day, before the greeting card people took it over? Thank Hallmark Corporation, that Republican cash cow. Sentimentality enslaved to weapons mentality: a typical human tragedy. Armistice Day, a day of world prayer for peace, became Veteran’s Day in praise of war and warriors.
By the way, the Spanish American War and its geopolitical fallout stifled American Progressives during the 1890s. It ensured another century of weapon-based, corporate-dictated Americanism. I’ll bet that most of my American readers would assert that Americanism and reflexive militarism are contradictory. Think again.
In The Earth in the Balance, Vice President Al Gore asks why world-class economists consign ecological damage, labor abuse and resource depletion to wastebaskets of “externality” that they can proceed to ignore. We might also ask why homelessness, crime/prison empires, substandard education and child abuse/neglect are ignored as cost factors. They, too, are reliable indicators of peace incompetence and weapon mastery. Gore never bothered with such details.
Paraphrasing Shakespeare: “First, kill all the economists.” Rarely have they forewarned us of an evil or encouraged much good. On the contrary.
I would rather call them econologicians and their “science” econologic. They skimp on logic by dismissing as externalities crucial factors like sustainability. How convenient this cut-down logic must seem for them and their paymasters!
Mr. Gore never admitted that econologic, like all current science, justifies and rationalizes weapon technology. That is its primary aim, if unstated. We need not figure out why National Capitalism – the ultimate evolution of weapons econologic – makes such destructive choices. Its motivations are obvious.
I must admit that he makes up for many prior lapses in his later book, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change, Random House, New York, 2013. However, he does not acknowledge the weapon/peace antinomy or any vision of Learners’ one-world politics to oversee his Earth, Inc. (global national-capitalism) and Global Mind (www and other massive interactions).
Since his book neglects the model of Learners as monitors/catalysts of future transformation, nothing much more than wishful thinking can emerge from his Conclusion chapter. He is a weapon “realist” and a reductionist meliorist typical of his ineffectual if well-meaning kind. But they are granted the vast majority as an audience and quite nice compensation in exchange for their affable nonsense.
“It was the gradual creation of an effective bureaucracy which brought an end to all this filth and disease, and the public servants did so against the desires of the mass of the middle and upper classes. The free market opposed sanitation. The rich opposed it. The civilized opposed it. Most of the educated opposed it. That was why it took a century to finish what could have been done in ten years. Put in contemporary terms, the market economy angrily and persistently opposed clean public water, sanitation, garbage collection and improved public health because they appeared to be unprofitable enterprises which, in addition, put limits on the individual’s freedoms. These are simple historic truths which have been forgotten today, thus permitting the fashionable belief that even public water services should be privatized in order that they might benefit from the free-market system.” John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Vintage Press, A Division of Random House, 1991, p. 239.
Do you hold a certain reductive, progressive project close to your heart? House a few more of the homeless, perhaps, or feed a few more of the poor in your hometown or state? Make this or that corporation “nicer” or one of its subsidiaries? Cultivate a few more trees here, more family farms there? Educate your kids and their friends a little better? Reduce corruption by a few pennies per year in this market or that country? Render your people slightly less vulnerable to racial, sexual, ethnic or religious violence and its class repercussions?
Forget all that! Reductionist and atomistic peace projects cannot resist the Gibraltar-like inertia of weapon mentality, which applies holistic and inclusive principles to its own objectives. Well-meaning meliorists (people who try to fix one little thing bit by bit) shouldn’t expect their isolated fix to succeed until we’ve turned this other thing around first. Only then will those fixes succeed, and at that point beyond our wildest dreams.
People are for the most part ritualistic. Everything important they think and do and feel is regulated by the drumbeat of ritual dance and the drone of ritual worship dictated by the ritualistic repetition of incessant cultural myths.
We could try to improve things one by one and little by little, sickened by the culture of weapons and its mythology ― we would certainly fail. We must convert all the ritual dances and mythmaking of the whole world into those of peace; at which point we may succeed in a manner that would seem miraculous.
Once everyone agrees that our social evils spring from the same source, Learners may neutralize its toxicity by rational reinvestment. Once peace becomes our first priority, many social improvements that we’ve fought for so bitterly and failed at so often will click into place of their own accord and flourish as if on autopilot all along. Our descendants will nurture peace as naturally as we grind out perpetual war. And they will ask themselves what all this fuss and fury was about.
By default, we are the designated pathfinders. Are you ready? You must be, since you’ve persevered thus far in your reading of Learner. Read on and tell your friends about it.
- KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS -
“Judge not, that ye not be judged.” Matthew 7-1.
Organized religions clearly reveal the weapon/peace antinomy. Each preacher, priest, rabbi, mullah, imam, ulam, monk, etc., exposes to our direct observation the practical outcome of that cleric’s belief. Religious hierarchies have sheltered a few peace mentors: their early originators like Buddha, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed, along with their lovers and today’s marginalized mystics. Also many weapon mentors: secondary organizers like Paul, Augustine and the Caliphs, their followers and today’s religious bureaucrats and clientele.
The modern Catholic Church describes its hierarchy as a combination of “introverts” who prefer the stately tradition of generally messing with peoples’ private lives and making them miserable; and “extroverts” who favor loving forgiveness and its grace in the spirit of St. Francis. Answer me this, since I’m an introvert through and through. Since when do introverts mess with other people’s lives against their will? Now extrovert sociopaths, yes indeed…
Regardless of their religious creed, peace mentors hope that heroic love, justice, truth ‒ in short, PeaceWorld ‒ will triumph in time under the watchful gaze of a loving God. They relate with highly principled advocates of that hope, regardless of their ideological and theological differences.
But weapon mentors use religion (and other cultural memes) to set themselves and their people apart and justify more brutality. They fight – often to the death of innocents entrusted to their care – even though they and their declared enemies may share the same creed and symbols. They reject the common bonds of Learning, which rejection fosters the conflict they crave
Let me repeat this because it is so important. Psychopaths of various religious affiliations use faith to justify their homicidal tendencies. They abuse the faith of non-psychopaths (from volunteer combatants to suicide bombers and their supporters) to multiply the terror of destruction and casualties.
Our political systems and ideologies are byproducts of blind human faith: the bastard offspring of prior weapon religions. They illustrate the weapon/peace antinomy quite nicely. Just substitute the verbiage of ancient beliefs with more recent ideological jargon, then observe the same contradictions unfold as, like oil and vinegar, weapon and peace mentors split up then merge around their respective preconceptions. Note how the weapon/peace antinomy remains carefully unexamined thus intact.
For weapon technicians like us, religion is a group obligation rooted in social obedience. It is ceremonial, objective, conformist, reductive, repeatable, stolid, recognizable and rational. Madness is loathsome to it. Orthodox religions follow a well-worn script easily memorized and analyzed. They strive to overwrite the collective superconscience by imposing their own dogma, myths, and prejudices.
Ceremonial religionists tend to be compulsive, censorious, time-bound, historical, archival, secretive, absolutist, simplistic, formulaic, linear, rigid, menacing and humorless. They emphasize form, structure and mode of transmission. “Our medium is the message.”
Weapon managers rip off the richest, most captivating religious symbols — before which everyone must kowtow. More often than not, these revered memes were part of a prior religion now banished and forgotten. Religious hierarchs reject the sacred in and of itself. Any real-world manifestation of it is dreadful to them because it evades their control and exposes them as fancy dress clowns.
Only a handful of long-dead prophets may experience sacred wonder. The rest of us, the unchosen, must settle for mandatory religious formations or nothing. As far as traditional religionists are concerned, the more complete our submission to this pointless nonsense, the better.
To the primal consciousness, everything is sacred. Its rituals and ceremonies merely enhance the sacred wonder any clear-minded witness can glimpse during dreams by day or night. Sacred worship is rooted in self-awareness. It is an individual gift: subjective, irreproducible, passionate, intimate, dramatic, chaotic, adaptive, situational, transcendent, dream-driven and drug accelerated. It verges on insanity: a narrow birth canal into the sacred, set aside for a select, tormented few (shamans male and female). It is often conveyed wordlessly, through music and dance as practiced by the Sufi, American Indians, some Africans and others; plus sensory and extrasensory clues. In general, sacred religions are obsessive, creative, naturalistic, timeless, cumulative, magical, pragmatic, anecdotal, spontaneous, holistic and playful — sometimes to the point of malice. If possible, they strive to tap into the collective superconscience but not over-write it.
As far as its practitioners are concerned, who would dare impose such constraints on the limitless Sacred — except lifelong regimented religionists? Unlike them, primal seekers underline content, meaning and outcomes. “The. Message. Is.”
Human faith has undergone crushing entropy at the hands of faithless sociopaths in charge of organized religion. It has degenerated from a state of reverence and awe shared by everyone, into a traffic jam of baroque inventions interchangeably ridiculous: each relentlessly incompatible, exclusionary and compulsory. The only justifications that remain for today’s mass religions are the weapon technologies they’ve spawned to safeguard their vacuity.
Each new weapon dogma tries to outdo its predecessors in cruelty, arbitrariness and damage. It is deaf to its own hypocrisy and immune from improvement. Its practitioners’ habits of anti-thought, gross simplification and rote repetition may be passively neutral or actively vicious, depending on the prevalence of ignorance and misery under their sway. Those zealots merit contempt, disbelief, ridicule and pity in direct proportion to their fervor, numbers, political clout and firepower. Any religion that condones its mass brutality automatically invalidates itself and its gullible adherents.
Mass religions blunt our awareness of the sacred. They can stifle sacred wonder and turn a majority away from God, but not replace wonder or God. No wonder so many people stop believing in anything any longer unless drawn nearer to God by misery and death! Organized religions assume they can only flourish in the state of misery and ignorance they foster among their believers, and couldn’t prosper amidst comprehension and abundance they reject as ungodly.
In truth, the opposite would be more likely.
The best religious rituals and formulae amplify our unique perception of the sacred without doing it harm. We crave this sense of wonder, this remembrance of things past from which we have exiled our soul. What we really crave is an ancient wisdom more profound than mere, ceremonial dogma; one that would complement it like nothing else could.
In the meantime, we should witness to our God or not, wear and display our religious symbols or not, neither be forbidden nor required to do so as long as it’s with reverence in private settings, with respect for the beliefs of others in public, and always calmly, without menace. This could only happen free of resentment and contradiction on PeaceWorld where peaceful religion is sacred and the worldly ones no longer hold sway.
- WHAT I THINK OF YOUR RAPTURE, PAL -
The word “Rapture” cannot be found either in modern versions of the Bible or in its ”original” versions, as far as I can tell. A few biblical allusions reflect something vaguely similar (like 1 Thessalonians 4: check out Paul’s typical murkiness) — but nothing clear enough for praiseworthy prophecy. It was never serious biblical scholarship. Yet a few fanatics have overblown it into vicious wish fulfillment to ambush the faithful.
“Rapture”: that sounds a lot like being caught up, the way raptors catch mice: in essence, what happens to innocent believers caught up in this BS.
Jesus said He did not know the hour of His Return, only His Father did. He warned us of false prophets who would dare predict it (Mark 13). No-one can foretell His arrival until it’s obvious to everyone.
Stage a train wreck and call it Good News. Shove as many innocents aboard as you can, to their doom. Whether or not you favor such dirty tricks, you filthy fundamentalists, I choose another way.
Matthew 23 in the King James Bible
…
36 But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.
37 But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
38 For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark,
39 And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
40 Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.
41 Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.
42 Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.
43 But know this, that if the goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up.
44 Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh.
45 Who then is a faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath made ruler over his household, to give them meat in due season?
46 Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing.
47 Verily I say unto you, That he shall make him ruler over all his goods.
48 But and if that evil servant shall say in his heart, My lord delayeth his coming;
49 And shall begin to smite his fellow servants, and to eat and drink with the drunken;
50 The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of,
51 And shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Much of the Rapture unfolded in about two weeks. Afterwards, it purred along here and there, now and then, as people Disappeared by ones and twos….
At first, it was only earsplitting preachers, televised evangelists and radio sermonizers who Disappeared. The New Year began on a Sunday. Most airwaves lapsed into dead air, as radio sermons and media preachifiers fell silent mid-pomposity. TV test patterns quietly replaced nonstop pulpit rants for more cash, bigotry and exclusion in the name of Christ.
Many churches emptied when their preacher Disappeared. Congregations fled in panic. Only later on did they realize what they had fled from. Then they came back and prayed with growing fervor but dwindling numbers. Many stayed and stayed, prayed and prayed; all in vain. Only a few were Chosen to Disappear.
You see, the Chosen had to have special tendencies. First, they had to preen and crow their own salvation. Secondly, dream of casting the rest of humanity into Perdition’s dark pit without a second's hesitation or remorse. Thirdly, foretell Christ’s near Return, which prophesy Christ said wasn’t possible even for Him, much less for some wolf in sheep’s clothing, some mortal blasphemer brandishing a Bible.
Only God knows the time of His Son’s Return and only God can pronounce it. Christ spoke this truth categorically — no mere human can deny it.
Jesus told us that God will forgive every sin except blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, the Comforter He left us pending His Return (could that be the knowledge of good and evil?). What else do you think that could be, if not this denial? Only sociopaths (the socially sick, in Greek) could contemplate such a thing. Dread their words and shun them.
As for the Exile of the Jews and their Return to the Promised Land: well, that had already come about many times in the past (BURNING LIBRARIES) and could do so again during the next few thousand years, God willing; or else never again. In either case, no dependable sign there, of His Return.
False prophets! On your knees before your congregants and beg them forgiveness for your obvious lie strictly forbidden in the Bible! The rest of you, lambs of God, do not heed their blasphemy! Prepare for His Return at any time (like a thief in the night), but be never again deceived by empty clamor of His imminence.
It was difficult for most people to reconcile Jesus' injunctions to love your enemy, your neighbor as yourself and to die for your friends, with the idea that most eternal souls were expendable refuse. That kind of discrimination took pretentious vision, fanatical leadership skills, immense heartlessness and a giant ego: only a few had such extraordinary talents.
Churches were packed standing-room-only at first; long lines snaked around the corner. In the end, they fell vacant. Those remaining gave up and took the family home, as downcast as kids not chosen for a ball game.
People just Disappeared. First, they’d be there, spouting vicious nonsense; then, they’d be Gone. They would scowl as if seized by heart attack; some would gasp as if to scream… then they’d be Gone. Witnesses reported a vague popping sound as atmospheric pressure filled the void as they were Swept Away. Then something that smelled vaguely sulfuric, as if a cap pistol had gone off …
They reported the Chosen seemed more at ease when they disappeared at high altitude. People Caught Up in aircraft smiled and Disappeared — or so surviving passengers reported. Some planes crashed when everyone on board was Swept Away. Runaway Lear Jets became commonplace. Most civilian flights landed safely, flown in by shaken copilots and emergency volunteers.
People in tall buildings Disappeared without problems, as did mountaineers. Cities like Denver, Lhasa, La Paz, Cuzco, Quito became favored spots for Departure. By now, fervent evangelicals were gathering up their belongings and heading out to the hills. Many never came back. All the best ones did, crestfallen since they’d been Left Behind. Others got wise and began camping on rooftops. No one could talk them down and few tried. Eventually, some were Gone ; the rest, the best, were left behind.
In a few days, the Right Wing was amputated from National and State Legislatures. The Republican Party was reduced to a shambles; the Democratic, not much better. Forty-five remaining Congresspeople met in emergency session to nominate temporary replacements. Half the Supreme Court was Gone, as were most Federal Judges: all certifiable reactionaries. The Oval Office went vacant, as did the plush offices of political appointees and lobbyists.
Under emergency regulations, an Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services took the oath of Presidential office pending crash elections. The doctor was an outspoken agnostic by the name of Dean, about to be fired by the prior incumbent. She had made too many waves about family planning, universal health care and corporate-sponsored malnutrition and pollution. Nobody was left senior to her, and no one complained. She was elected President soon thereafter and turned out to be quite good at her new job, much better than the last dozen.
The military snapped to DefCon 1, but couldn’t find anyone to nuke. Many missile command bunkers and Pentagon offices were vacant. A few cadets rattled around the military academies; the Coast Guard, NOAA and Merchant Marine schools were not much busier. Most private military schools turned into ghost towns. The few cadets Left Behind had never been comfortable in those places anyway and went home. Warships sailed home with a skeleton crew; fighter-bombers fell from the sky like sparrows over an active volcano. The American military, what was left of it, returned from overseas. That operation took two months and concluded without a single loss to combat. Trigger-happy thugs were gone from both sides.
Fox News abandoned the airwaves, as did other news affiliates. AM radio commentary was Gone. Media executives and talk-show hosts Disappeared (guess which ones). Newspapers went out of print for a while; they had to find new sponsors and senior staff. Nobody was left to invoke “journalistic balance and objectivity” and thus pay due reverence to evil.
Basically, if you spouted lies and ranted loud enough in favor of hate crime and greed, you were Gone. If you were afraid enough of the Other to want his death, you were Gone. If you killed, starved and tormented people other than by accident, you were Gone. Persist in doing so by accident … you get my drift.
In their fantasy world, many of those Swept Away had already sacrificed everyone but themselves and those near and dear to Armageddon on Earth and to eternal damnation thereafter. High quality mass education? Ecological sanity? Peace and justice for helpless foreigners? Why bother! Wasn’t the Earth God's ashtray? Couldn’t He purify, in His own good time, the filth and horror of teeming humanity that Christians had induced on purpose to hasten His Return? As far as they were concerned, those excluded from the Rapture were not worth rotting garbage.
Even though they were right about being Swept Away, it turned out that everyone Left Behind and the Earth itself drew great benefits from their Departure. Sure, a few disasters and potent signs in the heavens sputtered along for a while, wars and rumors of war —as they had always done for thousands of years; nothing prophetic in that. But with surprising ease, the fate of the remainder improved significantly.
What became of those Caught Up in the Rapture? Who cares? Good riddance!
What was most funny? It wasn’t just fanatical Christians who Disappeared, but Muslims, too. Those who Disappeared had complained that there wasn’t any real Islam any longer ; that they were the last True Believers in Allah. All their neighbors were filth-loving, pro-Western heretics fit for nothing but execution by jihad. Those who Disappeared tended to cling to Wahhabi, Salafiya and other devout tyrannies that preached mass mayhem for the greater glory of Islam.
Whether Texan or Saudi, all those big talkers and all their big talk Went Away. Papers drifted unnoticed across dusty Taliban madrassas and fundamentalist Christian campuses whose students wandered home when the Bigotry 101 coaches Disappeared.
The same happened for Hindus and Buddhists. Rabid nationalists, mosque wreckers, library torchers, lynch mob leaders, all Disappeared. No one was left to blame a local minority for every social problem and solve that problem with ethnic cleansing.
No one was left, in all of India and Pakistan, who cared passionately whether Kashmir became independent. On a gorgeous afternoon typical of that beautiful country, the Kashmiri raised their new state flag in front of the government complex in Srinagar. No one fired a shot, not even in celebration for want of fire discipline. The same thing happened in Sri Lanka: pistol-wavers Disappeared and peace broke out in their absence. From one end of the Indian sub-continent to the other, there was peace. People agreed to disagree; they even agreed to agree with one another every once in a while.
Jewish settlements on the West Bank, Bethlehem and East Jerusalem turned into ghost towns. Intercultural bomb factories, video production facilities and infiltration classrooms emptied. Attack helicopters crashed unmanned before they could launch more Hellfire missiles into civilian crowds. Armored bulldozers stalled, no driver at the controls in their bulletproof cabin. On Friday evenings, few worshippers returned from the Wailing Wall or the Temple Mosque. Busses resumed their quiet rounds, and street life, its natural whirl of cooler evenings. The Wall was quietly reduced to highway paving mix; all the grim checkpoints were torn down. The Palestinian State became a sovereign reality, just like that. Everyone went home and learned to forgive past wrongs. Life went on, regardless.
Besides, no one was left to fantasize about turning Jerusalem, Beirut, Alexandria, Cairo, Amman, Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran, Aleppo and other cradles of human civilization into punch bowls of boiling radioactive glass. No longer did right wing Jews, Christians and Muslims pray that nuclear hell should crash down on everyone else. There were no more paranoid-schizoid, Book of Revelation fanatics. No U.S. Administration was crazed enough to twist those hate-filled nightmares into reality.
There was no more hatred shared between Sunni, Shiite and so-called “heretical” Muslims. Live and let live. Obey the Quran and live together in Peace. Just like Mohammed said. Period, return.
Many Orthodox and Conservative Rabbis Went Away, as did most of the neo-Zionists. Remaining Jews had to settle for Reformed Rabbis, so few of the others remained. Fattah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad? Ancient history. The Vatican residency emptied (except for the Pope and his guys), as did the greater part of the College of Cardinals. The Catholic priesthood was Cut in half. The leadership of the Southern Baptist Conference Vanished, and rural evangelical churches became things of the past. Christian Orthodox hierarchies? Buddhist ones? Protestants? None were spared.
Atheists got off no more lightly. The Chinese Central Committee became the Chinese Central Nothing. Peking and other Chinese cities were Swept clear of political police and paid informants. Tiananmen Square became a vast Agora where any passer-by could stand tall on a soapbox and speak up as if in London’s Piccadilly Square. It turned out the Chinese were superb democrats, once left to their own devices. It turned out everyone Left Behind was hard-wired for democracy, once the thugs were Pulled off their back.
The entire politico-military leadership of North Korea Disappeared. Its people finally got enough food shipped to them as quickly as cargo ships could offload. They blew up their munitions, wrecked their weapons and nukes and filled in fortifications, smiling all the while. South Korea disarmed in the time it took to destroy the landmines along the border and build superhighways and rail lines across it. Determined grandmothers guarded the border, shaming soldiers on both sides into going home. That job wasn’t hard.
Every Khmer Rouge Disappeared without exception. Vietnam liberated itself from its liberators. Colombia and Venezuela discovered how pleasant peace could be for a change. Africans and South and Central Americans let out a deep sigh of relief and got to work rebuilding. Gunfire was no longer heard in Congo jungles, around the Great Lakes, or in deserts whose spread slowed down. Government buildings emptied in Khartoum, as did the international bureaus of their petroleum-fascist financiers. A Sudanese mother could walk home in perfect safety after seeking water and fuel for her fire. No gun-toting “technician” was left in Mogadishu and far fewer firefights anywhere else.
The same thing happened all over the ex-communist world where thuggish tyrants had thrived like maggots. Violent fanatics, drug lords and kleptocrats, all of them Disappeared from Party headquarters, torture chambers and prison blocks. They Vanished, regardless of stripe and creed, whether they were political insiders, mafia muscle, police on the take, snarling Nazi skinheads or guerilla hooligans. To be a confessed Nazi was to be Gone.
Within a few months, the Earth turned into a Very Different Place.
In the United States, gay marriage, abortion on demand and robust equal opportunity initiatives were quietly legislated, enforced and then forgotten. No one questioned them. You could burn the flag or fly it proudly; nobody cared enough to violate civil rights. Campaign finance reform was swift and draconic; it passed both Houses of Congress without debate.
Family planning was subsidized across the planet, unlike the current practice of forbidding it at the command of people (Congresspeople) who’ve raised stupidity to new heights of genius. Can you believe that no world organization has been commissioned to set up family planning clinics around the planet, only charity-driven talk shops like ZPG, Zero Population Growth, as luxuriously spendy as they are inconsequential?
Military subsidies were slashed by 99%, as were public expenditures on welfare for corporate and special interests. One way or another, we were never more affluent and secure.
Praying in school was something to be done quietly in one's head, in a civilized way. Jesus had replaced prayer in public and in church with quiet repetition of Our Father at home in a closed room. His words from Matthew 6 were fully obeyed, now that wayward theocrats had Left, who’d given Christ a bad name and turned almost everyone off His Way, now obvious to everyone.
America rebuilt itself into a 21st Century powerhouse: a brilliant showpiece of environmental, Learning and infrastructure development, after generations of inexcusable neglect.
Tell me: we are living in the Third Millennium AC, and not trapped in a perpetual Dark Age under the control sadistic know-nothings?
Not surprisingly, much the same thing happened elsewhere. The poorest regions on Earth boasted a healthier, more just and comfortable standard of living than the richest ones had before the Rapture. A Golden Age of Learning… Public schools beckoned everyone, everyone, and got more than enough funding to fulfill their mandate.
People wondered what the problem had been, since solutions were so obvious and simple …
Prisons emptied. Either you had had to serve time in one — at which point, you were Gone; or (the case for most prisoners) your victimless “crime” had never really called for a prison sentence. At which point, the human monsters who had set you up were Gone and you were free to go home. A few petty larcenists and the best of their guards formed ex-prison communes and grew smoking herbs.
All those gathered up by the Rapture added up to a few million at most: less than one in a thousand human beings. Normal people with normal strengths and weaknesses and a normal range of sins had nothing to do with it. Only exceptional crackpots got Caught Up. Nonetheless, the world’s population dropped dramatically during the next few decades, by universal consent. Every newborn child became a rare and welcome addition — not as ordinary and neglected as dust.
Most people turned into Judeo-Buddho-Hindu-Christo-Muslims: a cooperative amalgam of those creed's best elements, the obvious path for those who wish to practice their faith but hate the organized strife of mass religion.
After all, God could manifest as Allah, Krishna, every God and none of Them, and Nothing, and Everything, and Anything Else anybody could fantasize — all at the same time, with hands tied behind the back. God is big, you see; not small and musty and cramped like an average fundamentalist's vision. No-one Left Behind would argue about that nor want to.
Fundamentalists would have fought to (someone else's) death so that nothing of the kind could happen, but they were out of the picture now. Nobody was left to exploit faith and divert charity for personal gain, preach bodily mutilation for the salvation of souls and thus give religion a bad name.
Atheists, too, had a hard time generating enthusiasm, since something must have caused the Rapture. Eventually, people discovered their part in the love of Jesus Christ — in a manner the fundamentalists could neither foresee nor share honestly. (See Matthew 6-5).
All the mega corporations collapsed, their MBAs, CEOs and CFOs Disappeared. People only bought what they needed and sold what they needed — no more and no less. Product quality was no longer a race to the bottom of cheaper substitutes at higher prices; the point of honor became artisanal mastery. Most advertising vanished along with its cash flow.
Television became interesting, all of a sudden. Imagine that: smart TV programming nonstop on every channel! The planetary IQ doubled overnight. You could listen to fine music for hours on end, or thoughtful dialog and instructive lectures on every topic — not useless patter about nothing important, interrupted by the occasional trash-pop ditty and relentless commercial blather. Even MTV stopped babbling and started playing high quality music again.
Slowly but surely, people began replanting Eden. They discovered they could plant groves of Scotch Pine (Pinus sylvestris) in the bare laetrile soil of the tropics where rain forests once grew. Those new groves attracted birds and beasts and their seed-filled dung, at which point the jungle grew back spontaneously. Millions of such groves sprang up, as conceived by the Gaviotas community.
In every region first humans once called home, sacred oak groves were replanted. Acorn paste had been the staff of life from the start of the Stone Age through the Bronze. The ancient Greeks and their earthly contemporaries, and later, primitive monotheists, cut down and burned their enemies’ oak groves. In the name of weapon loyalty, everyone committed as much environmental desecration as they could get away with. That act of vandalism, then mass enslavement and mass murder, those pretty much defined WeaponWorld from the Bronze Age up to the Rapture.
Soon, industrial applications of terra preta took the place of chemical fertilizers in agriculture and restored much of the Earth’s fertility. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100810122030.htm Microbiological colonies were studied and optimized in agriculture and forestry.
Clean, safe Thorium technology replaced every unsafe Uranium power reactor.
Around the world, the poor discovered they could build dependable, cool-in-summer, warm-in-winter, and earthquake-resistant housing from sun baked, earth-brick Domes of Rumi, on their own and literally dirt-cheap. Nobody had to go homeless, now that the house wreckers had Gone and Nader Khalili had shown us the proper way.
Weary travelers could knock at any door and expect welcome and the offer of a good meal and clean water. Everywhere on Earth, a farmer could raise organic crops with sweet water no longer tainted by human error.
That which mankind never accomplished (spouting the excuses of an empty heart), God alone made happen. During this ultimate Revolution, the tyrants were Sent Packing and the meek inherited the Earth — bloodlessly, on time and as promised. Everyone rejoiced in newfound grace, prosperity and freedom. Nobody missed the dearly departed fanatics except, perhaps, their mothers and children, those few remaining.
Even now, I fear I have not differed enough from those Chosen, to be spared their Fate. I, too, condemn fellow humans I despise and fear. I, too, count on God to grant me the salvation I deny them.
Please, merciful Lord, do not make me spend the rest of eternity in their company! Once I die, this time around, May I never cross paths with another Repugnant again! This loathsome world under their dominion is but a momentary torment; that other setting would be true Hell.
God's justice must surely…
[Notes found on an abandoned rooftop].
- IDENTITY POLITICS –
Let me begin by burying myself alive in my political identity ― if only to cough up my mandatory exposé and self-simplification everyone expects.
If you are so passionately devoted to your identity position that you dismiss other kinds, you may dismiss me as just another damned American: rich, male, white, old and straight. Unclean!
If you care as little as I do about my particulars, please jump to my discussion of identity politics in general, much more interesting at least to me.
Soon dead, give or take the next few decades you’re probably looking forward to while I look back on most of mine.
Rich: give or take the 90% of global wealth we should be sharing at the grass roots but don’t since we’re too busy back-biting each other over our precious identity positions. Instead, we could cooperate against the weapon mentality colossus. It never bothers with such trivia except to trip us up, rip us off and march the kids off to die.
Once upon a time, the rich earned their keep by promoting the wellbeing of their subordinates. That was their point of honor and justification to rule, even if practiced more often in the breach.
Since the rise of the smirking quisling Ronald Reagan, they have waged economic war against us. Denying it all along, they’ve skimmed off all our benefits: salary gains, savings of all sorts from hard cash and solid stocks to dependable mortgages; employment security, compassionate management, labor union protections and retirement benefits; affordable health care and enhanced public health; educational opportunities for young and old; really innovative technologies besides trivial or lethal ones; reliable infrastructure and beautiful cities; sustainable agriculture and wildlife; crime control, justice and security for one and all; stable foreign relations and planetary peace; mild climate; solid and dependable economies, and trustworthy governance at every level. All of them reduced, one by one, since the 1933-39 New Deal.
They’ve used identity politics to anchor this thieving dictatorship. Simply put, divide and conquer.
Somewhere, sooner or later, an outbreak of weapon mentality will burn down homes and make victims disappear. That can happen by means of transcontinental nukes and scalar weapons, by mortars and tank rounds across the neighborhood, by political repression and police terror in the city, or up-close and personal with rioters, torches and maaachehtteh ― take your pick.
Someone wrote: “If the oil runs out in London and food trucks stop, it will turn into Darfur within a few weeks.” The same could be said for any community that relies on supermarkets for sustenance ― the world’s breadbaskets included.
I’d say I am comfortably off if not rich. I wrote this book out of artistic love for its sweet compulsion and because I could not find anything like it, with no work partner or benefactor. At the same time, I held down several small jobs for as long as I had to, without much enthusiasm. The best gigs on WeaponWorld involve bailing the Titanic with a sand bucket instead of a colander. I tasted penniless, friction-free, adult leisure for a few years while I was young and adventurous enough to enjoy them. Lots of free time is valuable for young victims of first love and to raise babies. For the elderly, leisure is more like a funeral: more to benefit the entourage than the guest of honor.
If I hadn’t been so well off, I couldn’t have presented this text to you for free. Usually, people who make important discoveries are neither starving nor obscenely rich, neither dependent on their invention nor willing to compromise it to earn their daily bread.
White, though I bear the same fifty million genes everyone shares. On official forms, I’d rather put “Race: Other.” I get a rush from this designation. To my mind, those of every race are my brothers, sisters, ancestors and progeny; nobody is not. I celebrate the wandering Bantu, Maya, Berber, Mongol and Bushman (and blue-green algae) genes that grace my genotype. Mongrel stock is the strongest, as any good farmer will tell you. Go ahead and ask a dandelion.
I’m all-American: actually half French, 25% German and a wee quarter Irish. My parents were born on Madagascar and in Queens; and I myself, in the American Hospital on the outskirts of Paris. In other words, I’m a Yankee Doodle hybrid, a cosmopolitan internationalist and proud of it.
Since the assassination of Kennedy and the war in Vietnam his assassins set up, I have spent my life agonizing over how Repugnant American leadership had to become to force me into the hills bearing an automatic, also as a grateful public dependent (army brat, Dad was a tank commander) and a proud public servant. Life is paradox.
I am just as ambivalent about my Franco-American identity as anything else. The last minority crypto-bigots around here can get away with insulting in public ― at least in my absence. A noble and ambitious breed, that one: scions of the richest, the most powerful, the most reactionary and backward-looking nations on Earth … a drag on international treaties of peace, human rights and the environment; AWOL, not their champions. Birthplaces of the most magnificent ideals humanity ever aspired to and the foulest deeds carried out in their name.
German: Mozart, Kant and Goebbels; Kultur, passion passionately garroted, pretzel logic, science and civilization … and the timeless stink of military latrines.
And Irish, finally, to cook up all this malarkey into a fine, mad, mulligan stew.
Man: guilty as charged, last I checked.
Straight: how happy my wife and other ladies make me, each in her own delicate way.
Or, as I'd have printed on a T-shirt:
LEARNER:
Not of this species,
Not from this planet.
So sue me.
Around my first birthday, I chewed through the power cord of my crib light. I recall its Sendak grenadier ornament, so familiar since. The trauma itself became a swift, silent void for me, a flash of black veined with red. A painless memory, thankfully. European house current cauterized a third of my tongue, it reset my nervous system but good. Maman softly lamented I was such a happy baby before. Crib death had taken her firstborn son six years earlier; hell itself would not prevent her from saving me. I wasted imaginary time trying to replace his ghost instead of acting as the young, jealous and admiring brother of a real genius. There is a biological basis for eldest son primogeniture; young parents and their first-borns are usually stronger then later ones.
Ever since, I’ve dealt with infant-onset PTSD, ADHD, dyslexia, ephemeral short-term memory and cavernous absent-mindedness, all unrecognized as such. Despite Maman’s fine cuisine, all but sugar-dense foods were bitter fare for me until today’s weaponized sweeteners. My lifelong sweet tooth earned me type II diabetes. Genetic or reincarnation avatars who’ve starved to death may explain why so many people are obese these days, in psychic compensation; just like headaches from my healed first vertebrae reflect some past-life hanging.
I got rewired for lone wolf eccentricity. This body, this people and this world: all of them seem strangely alien to me. Everything is so strange here, silly and sad. Nothing feels like home to me; not even my own body. I do not trust this universe. If this galaxy were openly compassionate like the Buddhists wished, it would pack itself with mindless but willing biomass in a cosmic moment. Imagine supernovas, neutron stars and black holes of gleefully compacting flesh. So death, wounds, grief and terror must prevail everywhere there’s life, because why? Is all that pain somehow simpler, more rewarding or more conducive to perpetual motion?
So we primates huddle around our latest camp fires and share what warmth, understanding and empathy this universe tolerates for the time being. Human compassion is to this merciless universe what the life force is to entropy and its heat death. We hold a thin, bright line against the enfolding darkness.
My memory is like a rooftop in a hurricane: everything on it can blow away. I’ve forgotten the name of people I worked with for years, at a job I retired from months ago. I interrupt conversations, not from incivility but because I must speak before I forget what I want to say, which happens often. Against new age advice, I plot my answers rather than listen more carefully. Many people take my lifetime dementia for failure to care about them, who they are or what they say. That’s not the case, I am an equal opportunity forgetter of people, things and spacetime coordinates I enjoy, dislike, don’t know or care about. I write notes to myself, but how to index and retrieve this flurry of random reminders? For all our gadgets and pixels, we are so clumsy with our data!
At school, I was labeled “clever but lazy” and coasted along on easy C’s. Homework was a blasted no man’s land I rarely crossed. Reading a page of a typically boring textbook, anything not captivating vaporized. Legal small print blurs on sight. I could not memorize so many boring dates and places and names, so I dropped out of college. Aristotelian logic seems incoherent to me; a bright child could punch a hole through its first premises. Scientists and historians are carnival barkers of nose ring supposition constantly revised as reality comes more into focus, with many gaping holes dismissed as pseudo science. What little math I understand fashions gorgeous epicycles out of nothing, subsequently divided by (n-1) to confirm the probability of what? Don’t get me started on calculus: turn algebra inside out, then those results inside out several times and inventory the results. Calculus professors have two kinds of students: they pass those who follow their convoluted number baking recipe on faith, and fail those who try to understand the underside of things and get hopelessly lost because the stuff makes predictable results but no sense.
I was a total nerd long before nerd-dom became viral. I love history’s varied topics and hunger for more. I keep hitting the books, hacking new trails through the triple tier canopy of ignorance that visibly grows back in my wake.
No grownup diagnosed my problems or addressed them. My parents suspected nothing. Until recently, I never considered my liabilities strange or felt a need for professional intervention. Compensation strategies routine for ADHD kids nowadays were unheard of during my stone age education. It’s too late for me now -- old dog and new tricks. I’ve dealt as best I could, sailing blindly past reefs of lost detail and missed opportunities. Don’t bother arranging a meeting with me; I will miss it or the Fates will see that I do.
I’m not bitter, rather proud of my jury-rig. I would not be me without those liabilities I either outswam or was mauled by.
As Edith Piaf sang so perfectly: Non, rien de rien, je ne regrette rien.
I know the easiest way to make a fool of myself (besides writing this self-revealing chapter) is to generalize about human ethnicity and race. As if that would hold me back!
As far as I can tell, bigot and identity politician are synonyms. It is just a question of which sub-identity you choose to be prejudiced for or against, and how passionately you believe yours will benefit by outplaying another. Everyone sings the same no-brain, zero-sum duet (“What I win, the Other must lose”) — the vacuous calculus of psychopaths.
At this point, you should realize that I have nothing good to say about identity politics and a lot to criticize ― having taken its backhand slap in the face on more than one occasion. Walk away if you’re so inclined, or stick around and hear me out. Just remember that every time you are excluded, punished or denied something important for reasons other than your merit and the content of your character (as the great Martin Luther King put it so aptly), someone else’s identity politics or your own have come into play. Judge not, lest ye be judged.
Any conclusion that one sex is responsible for peace while the other sustains war, that’s just another weapon myth and hopeless simplification.
A partial (cursory and biased) list of names might help us challenge this prejudice: the Berber Al Kahina, Nehanda of Zimbabwe, Rama Valona the Cruel of Madagascar, Queen Ya Asantewa, the same Unzinga, Catherine the Great of Russia, Catherine de Medici, Elizabeth the Great of England, Joan of Arc, Maria Theresa, Rebecca Felton, Margaret Thatcher, Trung Trac, Trung Nhi, Phung Thi Chin, Trieu Au, Tsu Hsi (Cixi, the Empress Dowager of China), Mulan, Zenobia, Boudicca, Semiramis and Indira (versus) Mahatma Gandhi, Buddha, Ashoka and Martin Luther King. Sorry if I left out your favorite lady conqueror or peaceful gentleman.
The ultimate power of women should be their right to block the stupidest decisions men make (and insist on better alternatives). Had that custom always been obeyed, the worst decisions would not have been chosen and would be less likely selections in the future.
While alpha-dominant males rely on aggression to begin with, many women tend toward cooperation and consensus at their expense, at least until their kids are in danger. At that point, look out! Alpha-dominant females can become more aggressive than stereotypical males. Once their elite menfolk had fallen in battle, female leaders were thrust into leadership positions and often fought battles, sieges and wars of annihilation to successful conclusion or extinction.
Until recently, progressive leaders recruited more females than did the forces of patriarchal reaction. Nowadays, reactionaries find they can recruit raving maniacs just as easily among women and minority members as from among rich, old, white coots.
Progressives should abandon their routine diffidence and replace it with the unconditional ferocity of females defending their young. “They’re threatening the kids! Go get ‘em!”
Our schools are pillars of weapon regimentation. To a great extent, women run them. In the absence of peace mentality, female chauvinists might differ slightly from their male counterparts, but rule no more wisely. Even though many women fill current military service roles, their leadership role remains marginal. Grooming women for war has exploded the population of female criminals.
Like the other pit-falls of identity politics, gender-based explanations of institutional degeneracy are merely divisive. The crux lies elsewhere. Why dispute the relative merits of pacifism over feminism or any other identity issue, for that matter? That would be as pointless as declaring one leg of a chair the most important, or one tree in the forest.
What I mentioned about women applies to every abused minority: racial, ethnic, religious and sexual. Women rarely constitute a minority, but weapon managers mistreat them as such, (part of the Plant Trap, recall). The existence of harmless minorities has never validated their persecution. Such abuse merely empowers a minority of psychopaths nesting within a peaceful majority obeying good moral conscience. This tyranny, just another outgrowth of weapon management.
In any case, the ultimate political power of females resides in their veto of male majority initiatives before the latter push everyone off the deep end. Behind successful men stands a woman sharp enough to let them know when to quit while they are ahead. We ignore this last word of womanhood at our peril. I repeat this idea because it is crucial.
Another weapon myth, upheld on both sides of the aisle, is that homosexuals make up some kind of progressive vanguard. Reactionary homophobes and progressive gays share a misconception that homoeroticism somehow promotes progressive ideals. Gay progressives maintain this error to raise their spirits. Reactionaries do so to brand progressives with the abhorrent gay label. Both parties realize they are lying. It is obvious there are just as many reactionary gays as progressive ones, and a lot more progressive straights than progressive gays.
The same thing could be said about the attitude of any identity group when compared to the remainder.
The only difference is that reactionary gays must shut up about their erotic tendencies that their reactionary allies loathe, whereas progressives are slightly more tolerant and neither silence nor banish their homosexual allies.
There is no point in giving up on general principles to advance one’s own cause or that of one’s narrow identity group. Even to the point of surrendering potent progressive symbols like Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition so that gays could adorn themselves with it exclusively. And losing vital battles like the 2004 Presidential election over getting gays to enjoy same-sex marriage before anything else can happen.
Whose mucus membranes get to rub up against who’s with full public approval: that priority would be fine and dandy if we were not facing a thousand more crucial issues. This non-issue serves weapon mentality as a perfect distraction from more pressing requirements.
Then again, 2017 has passed, and by some miracle gay marriage has become a legal reality across the land. Now, people can fall back on their progressive or reactionary propensities without worrying about the security of their sexual orientation. Progressive politics have served their purpose; they may now be dismissed in favor of a marginally more permissive status quo otherwise unimproved.
The same argument applies to people whose minority status is based on other criteria. For example, the argument between pro-choicers and right-to-lifers. Who cares how many innocent adults and children get starved and cluster-bombed while you others hash out your precious issue! Unbelievable and unacceptable on any planet but this one.
We are progressive because we believe in Progress; not because we belong to some random identity group supposed to be superior. Those who side with progressives merely to advance their downtrodden cause, who sacrifice important progressive issues to further those of their own identity group, and who turn into raving conservatives (or reflexively apathetic) the moment their own issue gets the upper hand: reactionary wolves in sheep’s clothing.
And we are all Learners, regardless of our identity position. All of us! Whether we choose to loathe or admire other groups, they are Learners just like us. Every Learner should be just as dear to every other, by definition.
The mobilization of women into modern worker and warrior status is another outcome of weapon technology.
Weapons had become terribly lethal by the late 1800s; so much so that universal (male) conscription had to be adopted to meet enormous body counts. Weapon lethality has multiplied beyond imagining, since. Thus, modern combat demands more and more bodies to top off the stack, including women, the elderly and children. Such so-called non-combatants are found more and more often among the shock troops and shocked amputees of modern combat.
This exponential surge of "non-combatant" casualties is nothing new. The weapon myth of risk-free non-combatant status – that warriors reserve mayhem for their armed adversaries – it is just another weapon myth. On the contrary, many societies ancient and modern annihilated entire regional populations: man, woman and child. Otherwise all the women and children were sold off as slaves after their menfolk had been massacred; the strategic routine.
Modern war massacres tens and thousands of civilians for every soldier it picks off. It is easier to gun down people who cower under the crossfire and don’t shoot back, or simply deny them survival necessities the military can always find excuse to seize.
Face it: we are all combatants. The question should be: are we Learner combatants who stand a chance at legitimate self-defense since we’re properly motivated and armed (like Swiss citizens are with their Federal militia)? Or are we a disarmed rabble of human livestock ripe for police-state slaughter; carefully divide-and-conquered and self-sabotaged by identity politics?
You tell me.
A fundamental rule of victory is Concentration of Effort. Those who try to defend everything, defend nothing; those who attack everywhere, win nowhere. Instead of attacking in penny packets across the enemy’s line, or defending every point with the same determination and exposure, one must find a weak spot in the enemy’s layout and throw a crushing force against it. This massive reserve is accumulated by skimping dangerously elsewhere. Once the enemy’s line is shattered, additional reserves must be hurled through the gap. These powerful reserves can also counter-attack an enemy’s assault, assuming he thinks himself more powerful.
Weapon dissidents ignored this requirement; they defended each of their identity positions instead. They forsook all-important concentration of effort, thus any hope of success. Thanks to those politics, their weapons opponents became the only minority in power.
We have failed to square off against racism, sexism and ageism. Instead, we have allowed professional equivocators and political compromisers to sidestep human rights with the poise of long practice.
I ask you: identity politics have brought us, what? True, we have universal suffrage. Yet today’s crooked politicians and their sociopath cronies have been brought to power by “universal suffrage.” It’s the same with every other social benefit rendered radioactive by the fallout of weapon mentality.
I beg you, think this through. Who are your actual opponents and what are your real political goals?
Why not uphold education quotas and equal opportunity mandates until each minority and gender group achieves proportional representation? For every minority percentile of a population, the same percentage of minority candidates should take their place among judges, executives, business people, police, governors, legislators and professionals ― or chaos could loom from their absence. Simple merit would promote those most qualified from each identity group. Mediocrities, incompetents and sociopaths (most especially) would find it more difficult to justify their unearned authority in the absence of identity politics.
What’s more, everyone must be paid the same rate for the same work, whatever their identity. Always keep in mind a weapon society’s triage for lots of cheap, underprivileged infantry.
Others claim that the adherents of the USA, the Western or Northern Hemisphere, the white race, Judeo-Christianity or some other dominant tribe are responsible for most social ills. Meanwhile, the claimants are blameless victims or vengeful freedom fighters completely justified.
In perceived environments of dearth, the best players at zero-sum games form small, coherent groups of Winners to browbeat a majority of pre-defined Losers. The leaders (“Winners”) of each abused minority point to the ethnic majority as the cause of their Loser’ ills.
Racial segregation is a sorting device of this kind, as are other forms of segregation: nationalist, religious and ethnic – largely cosmetic. Usually, the Loser majority in each group is set up to hate the Loser majority of other groups, even though they have more in common with each other than with their respective Winners: a minority within each group that protects itself by stoking hatred then displacing it.
In the end, info elites of every kind abuse info proletarians of every kind, especially their own. Rich whites always exploited poor whites (practice makes perfect). Reactionary Hutus hunted down every progressive Hutu before they turned on their Tutsi neighbors. Given the chance, reactionary Tutsis would do likewise with their own progressives.
Replace your own identity militants in the same statement. Note how well the same shoes fit.
In the real world, human groups pick their leadership from their individual members. From then on, those organizations do exactly what they intended to do to begin with – otherwise, what they felt compelled to do by constraints beyond their control, insofar nature permits – with their leader’s cheerleading or despite his displeasure and eventual replacement. Tolstoy concluded as much. Any assessment of personal leadership beyond this narrow threshold must be absurd.
More often than not, this selection is based on pheromones, looks, birthright and aggression held under strict control. The political charisma of an Alexander or a Napoleon, and the sexual attraction of a Casanova or a Cleopatra, those may just have been the outcomes of irresistible body aroma; other factors, mere reinforcements or subtractions. We are drawn to them instinctively, the way a bee colony relates to its queen.
I begin to suspect that personalities so noteworthy during their time in history, might have attracted many souls, in free-fall after their death, to reincarnate into their famous life. Assume that reincarnations of this kind transcend space and time, thus do not need to be sequential or nearby. No need to reincarnate in a body born after one’s death and in its neighborhood. Was that the source of their charisma: millions of souls reincarnated in them and acquiring focus once again through their eyes?
Hitler, Stalin and Mao may have carried a scent just as attractive if not more so than history’s revered saints. Military history demonstrates that this political perfume and sanity do not necessarily occur in the same body ― and perhaps the opposite: only psychopaths and sociopaths might benefit from it. Note the notorious attraction many females feel for abusive “bad boys.” Or Republican voters for certified Repugnants.
Or could it be a negative trait? The ability to inhibit one’s bodily release of stress hormones and their unmistakable trace scent, the absence of which would soothe and attract normal people in stressful situations? It may be that “charismatic” historical leaders retained Type-O trace markers in their skin cells, accepted by all and sundry, that reduce stress levels and foster obedience and adulation in almost everyone. Think of Napoleon (especially in Italy) winning battles of annihilation by a hair’s breadth and directing his subordinates accordingly.
On the other hand, violent racists may suffer from an “allergic reaction” to trace markers released by the target ethnic group. Their prejudice might be the symptom of an immunological disease aggravated by societal norms of bad faith and misdeed.
This holistic and subliminal democracy occurs in most human hierarchies, regardless of other details ― never seriously studied by political scientists. Its results are often irrational, counterintuitive and counterproductive; but they remain sovereign in any case.
There may be another basis of racial and ethnic prejudice, in addition to the odor-mediated one or perhaps a bit subtler. Positive or negative, this bias might be based on immunological and neurological factors instead of sociological ones or in addition to them.
We can picture the human body as a dusty rag mop that releases clouds of dead cells whenever it moves, breathes or is touched; rather than a rubbery, cohesive outer covering, human skin consists of layers of cells the outermost of which are no longer attached to the body ― ready to slough off and scatter at the slightest touch.
Let’s assume that each cell contains one or more distinctive markers: trace biochemicals that identify the individual it was attached to: their genetic background, hygiene habits, diet and/or sexual attributes, among other ethnic or behavioral distinctions.
Nowadays, when a crowd gathers in a poorly ventilated space, they breathe each other’s detached skin cells. Personal prejudice (race, ethnicity, cult, etc.) might be a subtle form of immune reaction to those cells’ biochemical markers, trace elements of which might cross the blood-brain barrier in minute doses and trigger intimidate-fight-flee-or-freeze reactions; perhaps as powerful as those of family affinity, clan loyalty and sexual attraction.
Under certain conditions, a crowd of humans starts behaving like one collective organism beyond rational control. Blind panic, murderous rage or even mute adoration can spread through it like a wildfire. Likewise, groups of females housed together tend to synchronize their estrogen cycle and their periods.
Biochemical, neurological and immunological markers like those listed here could explain these behavior patterns. Humans may react to these biochemical markers in the same way ants react to theirs. Human equivalents may be more complex, the same way our societies appear to be more complex compared to theirs.
This text suggests some ways to rationalize this process. We can quicken Learning and self-selection for excellence in our topic of passion, and use the world’s Virtual Agora to filter these neurophysiological factors from our politics. We could acknowledge them, study them, put them to better use and regulate their misuse ― as we’ve done with prior peace technologies.
Not long ago in the American South, white bigots sat around with nothing much to do, waiting for a black person to say or do something forbidden. There were thousands of such opportunities. At that point, they could vent their pent-up rage, mob the chosen victim and hurt them bad. Nowadays, not only do the least creative people of every identity group persist at this kind of abuse, at gunpoint if necessary, but they sit around doing nothing much more, waiting for someone outside their narrow identity circle to say or do something they might disapprove of, and try to ruin that person’s life. Such racist ambush predators are good for nothing else.
Bigots are racists are xenophobes. Shadism doesn’t care about the skin color, bone structure, habits, origins or religion of bigot aggressors and their victims ― just as long as they’re different and vulnerable. Sociopaths and their imitators (also the rest of us during our worst moments) need victims who have no way out. Racism serves perfectly.
No race or nation has figured out how to promote racial equality. Only an enlightened and heroic few have done so, born from two or more races ― often interracial soul mates and their mestizo children. Their example inspired social acceptance or triggered their suppression..
On the other hand, racial segregation is not imposed by a few brazen individuals, but by an entire race seeking unfair advantage from some happenstance strategic advantage. The same applies for other triggers of identity bias, including religion, sexual orientation and ethnicity.
Who is the worst racist? The dominant bigot who flays his soul by inflicting misery on others, his obvious equals? Or his victim seething with repressed rage and impatient for payback? Does it matter? The poison they share is still poison. The point is not to assign blame or score points, but to discover the antidote and administer it to all parties.
Racial equality comes about through personal enlightenment based on private experience: "That gentle person of the other race and his noble bearing showed me they’re not that bad… That (quote the most recent racial slur) is my partner; so shut up and back off!"
Racial bias and segregation are based on cultural norms perverted by identity politics: "Since I was a kid, I was taught they are all worthless scum. My experience with them confirmed that fact because I forgot every occurrence that contradicted it."
Identity politics is the central problem. Those who base their personal value (superiority) on identity politics are dangerously self-deluded. Being proud to belong to a specific identity group, that is fine. Feeling superior about it and debasing others for no other reason ― that is not.
Personal responsibility is the solution. Those who base their actions and beliefs on a personal assessment of each individual, promote racial equality. In so doing, they demonstrate the nobility of their own identity position. On the other hand, racists make their race look bad, as well as all their other ideals, no matter how honorable they may be.
There is no escaping this truth; no matter how much comfort one may get from denying it. If you hate my words, feel free to call me a racist. That may let you feel better. Others have done so and thus confirmed my argument. The racist would be you, and the racism, your precious identity position, at least until you change your beautiful mind.
What does this have to do with the current ethnic situation in France? Here is what I propose.
Ethnic bias is a cultural norm that promotes individual belief. Ethnic equality is a series of spontaneous decisions made by individuals, helped along by cultural norms. This reversal of dominant and secondary motives of behavior is very important.
We can reduce racism by introducing laws and institutions that oppose it, or strengthen it by proposing contrary ones. But we can’t create equality unless we allow people to persuade themselves. Force and law may overcome racism; equality is not so easily enforced.
Human misery and inequality have this in common. Government can elevate or diminish them at will, since they are predictable, quantifiable and vulnerable to institutional meddling.
Human happiness and equality have the opposite feature in common. They exist within the frame of mind of the individuals directly involved and have no real meaning as far as government is concerned, or vulnerability to being raised or lowered by government decree.
This is what happens when one attempts to force equality. Dutiful female students are forbidden to obey their family’s religious convictions. Forbidding them to wear the veil in the name of equality: that’s crazy! My French readers must seize this predicament before its unforeseen consequences overwhelm them. The ultimate podium of public equality is the guillotine ― to which my French readers must readily admit.
When it comes to human happiness and government’s obligation to do something with it, essentially indefinable and absurd (Defend it? Support it? Push on a rope with it?); those are favorite topics of Constitutional slavers, Repugnants and other meddlers with nothing better to offer.
That brings us to an interesting fork in the trail through the linguistic bramble. Misery is not the opposite of happiness. The former can be quantified (how much food and water did you consume today; how long have you been in pain; how many nights did you sleep in the rain?) whereas the latter cannot be quantified in this way. Go ask a suicidal heir to fortune or a panhandler whistling because the weather is so fine this afternoon.
Likewise, equality is not the opposite of discrimination. Would equality be the same between the following pairs: identical twins, brother and sister, good friends, total strangers and the members of different ethnicities? Take two minutes to discuss.
Whereas discrimination: “They are all inferior to mine own,” that’s pretty straight forward.
So what are the linguistic opposites?
Misery – Satisfaction
Happiness – Sadness
Equality – Unfairness
Discrimination – Proper Judgment
For quite a while during many rewrites, I’ve had no idea what conclusion this tabulation should lead to. However, I suspect it is vital when discussing government functions.
Recently I’ve meditated on these things I must tabulate.
| BAD | PREFERABLE | DEGREE | RIGOR | RULED BY | CONFIRMED BY |
| misery | satisfaction | governable | written | men | legal testimony |
| injustice | equality | governable | written | men | legal testimony |
| sadness | happiness | anarchic | poetic | women | profession | faith
| discrimination | Good judgment | anarchic | poetic | women | profession | faith
| rape | n/a | By mores | polemic | proof |
| Other crimes | neutralization | By current law | written | both | proof |
| New offenses | Liberation from | By jury decision | poetic | Everyone guilty | confession |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
The trick would be to never again support racist aggressors, whatever their identity position ― even if it were the same as our own and therefore very tempting. Better we adhered to a group much larger than theirs; more secure, influential and benevolent than theirs; one that would shield us from identity aggression.
Up ‘til now, our basic political conflicts have been between an in-group and out-groups. Learners should merge into one cherished in-group, then invite every info proletarian and ex-info elite into it, leaving no one outside except those who only wish to be left alone in peace. As for those who would rather violate the peace: identification at infancy, exclusion from positions of authority, special employment and lifetime counseling.
No community, no matter how well conceived, has managed to immunize itself from ingenious, ambitious and persistent Conspiracies of Greed. Every time you condemn an unjust institution, you are actually condemning that institution’s failure to control its socio- and psychopathic leaders who’ve taken charge. Without them, the same institution would mend its ways automatically.
In a weapon civilization, racial politics are as pointless as gender politics, nativism or any other identify position. It would be just as pointless to distinguish the skin tone, the riches and the sexual proclivities of the oppressed from those of the oppressor. If the situation were reversed and prior victims had achieved dominance, a similar bell curve of abuse and cooperation would emerge.
If you claim adherence to a certain minority and assume your leaders will behave better than the current crop under the same conditions, you would only need to review the long-term outcome of every weapon revolution to confirm your error. If you could shift your gaze further back in history, you would be horrified to discover your own minority dominant somewhere and treating its subordinates with the same brutality. The only exception would be PeaceWorld.
Learners will not seek dominance limited to their own profit, but commonalties everyone shares fearlessly. Learning is a commonality every human can share in mutual peace and abundance.
We would stop talking about replacing one information elite with another, expecting greater rewards for our own identity position. Instead, we would promote a Learner Commonwealth with categorically universal equity. No one would be left outside, who would rather come in from the cold.
“Stranger: Then you think that it is a waste of time, talent, and pecuniary means for the poor to contend in opposition to the rich and powerful?
“Founder: I do; because if these who are poor today become powerful … they will then oppress those who may become poor by the change, and act just as the rich and powerful have always done ... from the beginning to the present moment.” Robert Owen, Dialogue, 18-20. Taken from The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen, by A.L. Morton, 1962, Monthly Review Press, NY, p. 125.
- WEAPON MYTHOLOGY -
“A myth is a unit of imagination that makes it possible for a human being to accommodate two worlds. It reconciles the contradictions of these two worlds in a workable fashion and holds open the way between them…
“Myth makes it possible to live with what you cannot endure.
“And if the myth has been learned well, it becomes a word ― a single word that switches on the whole system of comforting delusions…
“The function of a myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction. The myth proves that things have always been like this, that things will never change.” Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa, Times Books, Random House, New York, 1998, p. 250.
The text in Learner is neither fiction nor non-. Its paragraphs form core samples of renewed peace mythology that will replace, on PeaceWorld, the weapon kind on WeaponWorld.
You might find alarming what follows. Society’s most cherished assertions are weapon myths opposed to peace. The weapon/peace antinomy corrodes human conscience the way sugary saliva melts tooth enamel and acid rain dissolves marble.
As I toss these myths up and bat them out to you, track their flight and step under them fearlessly; don’t duck and cover your head. Only your reasoned intuition can replace the platitudes of weapon mentality.
We can find a book called On War, but not its antinomical equivalent On Peace. This cultural chasm reveals a problem for everyone.
According to Karl von Clausewitz, author of the proverbial text On War, (that ultimate exercise in weapon pedantry): “War is a continuation of diplomacy (foreign policy) by other means.” Might as well conclude that agriculture is a continuation of candy by other means. Check out the fortunes spent on preparations for combat, even in peacetime, versus the pittance accorded to professional diplomats. Warfare is the application of weapon technology in its pure form, the digestion of society’s potential energy into active mayhem excrement.
He reached the following conclusion in his chapter, “The Purposes and Means of War”:
“We may occupy a country completely, but hostilities can be renewed again in the interior, or perhaps with allied help. This of course can also happen after the peace treaty, but this only shows that not every war necessarily leads to a final decision and settlement. But even if hostilities should occur again, a peace treaty will always extinguish a mass of sparks that might have gone on quietly smoldering. Further, tensions are slackened, for lovers of peace (and they abound among every people under all circumstances) will then abandon every thought of further action. Be that as it may, we must always consider that with the conclusion of peace the purpose of the war has been achieved and its business is at an end.” On War, Oxford Classics, p. 32.
If the incomparable Clausewitz had to conclude that every war must end with a peace treaty; then we must also conclude that perpetual World War will not end until almost everyone has counter-signed the PeaceWorld Constitution.
In The Causes of War, The Free Press, Macmillan Publishing Co., New York, first published by Macmillan in London, 1973, pp. 115-117, Geoffrey Blainey explains that negotiations between two diplomats resemble those between two merchants who trade privileges and obligations instead of merchandise and money. While supply and demand regulate merchant trades, diplomatic transactions are more like a barter whose rate of exchange is determined as the process unfolds. Diplomats must study their relationship very carefully to determine who is buying and who is selling and at what rate. However, they can misjudge these values for several reasons, to such an extent that no agreement can be reached except a faulty one whose only corrective is war. I must add there are so many bad alternatives compared to the few good ones, war grows inexorably on WeaponWorld.
“The real cause of war, on the contrary, is seen most clearly when it is studied in correlation with the decrease in profits, which, of course, may itself be due to the increase in population and to the diminishing productivity of the soil, but which may also manifest itself independently of these two phenomena as a direct effect of the diminishing productivity of labor [or current technology] … In other words, as Proudhon remarks, war is always the result of an economic strain which cannot be remedied by less costly and less complicated means, such as commerce or a commercial monopoly. Benjamin Constant also truthfully observes: “Men have recourse to war only when they feel that commerce is unable to secure for them what they seek to obtain by force.” Achile Loria, The Economic Causes of War, John Leslie Garner, Trans., Charles H. Kerr & Company, Chicago, 1918, p. 55.
So picture yourself going into a convenience store, cash in one hand and a pistol in the other. Everyone would act that way all the time. Should anyone buy so much as a piece of bubble gum, they and the cashier would have to decide whether money was going to change hands and how much, based on their assessment of who will win a pistol duel otherwise.
Would this be a sane way to run a business – or an entire planet, for that matter – if a better way presented itself?
Now, to simulate our reality of shrinking reserves of fresh water and good soil, and bloated inventories of weapons, imagine that both parties have children starving and freezing at home and, instead of a gun, everyone grasps the detonator of the bandolier of dynamite wrapped around each body, wired to explode their own and everyone else’s.
Would any sane observer stick around – be it within a city block or on the same planet – to find out what would happen next? Could there be an alternative somewhat less surreal?
Let’s deal with the following pair of weapon myths ― very common, powerful and pernicious ones.
First off: World Peace will not occur until the unanimity of saints has repented its sins. Nothing less than that unworkable caricature will define Peace to the satisfaction of those mythmakers. Did so many people have to improve themselves before cannibalism and slavery were stamped out? Everybody had to become a saint, first?
Sure thing, buddy.
On the contrary, PeaceWorld is likely to be messy, contentious, “political,” corrupt, tragic and subject to periodic failure, perhaps on a global scale, perhaps fatally for humanity or its civilization. Human happiness and misery might have the same sources on PeaceWorld as on WeaponWorld; in other words, mostly the bad influence of psychopaths operating openly among the rich and powerful.
The only difference would be that organized murder would be illegal and that law will be grimly enforced everywhere. War will become less frequent, extensive, advantageous and mass-produced; it will no longer be peddled as something honorable, gainful or glorious. In the absence of war, every other form of human conflict will proliferate to fill the void.
The second weapon myth? A peace advocate must first aspire to sainthood or be a certifiable saint already, (depending on how the auditor condemns him). “Are you human in your actions, weaknesses and failures? Does your sales pitch upset me and my prejudices? You may not speak of Peace. Do you claim to speak on its behalf like a saint? You are too ambitious, a wise-ass with a Messiah complex and unfit for the task. In any case, no need to heed your talk.”
Peace advocates are human beings who stink when they don’t bathe; who breathe fresh air and exhale CO2 and at times bad breath; who experience needs, fears, hatred, greed and ambition like anyone else. No saintliness is required for this kind of work. It might help, but would not be mandatory. Anyone could try it.
Elsewhere in this book, I talk about the massed saints of PeaceWorld. Simply put, sainthood is not necessary for PeaceWorld, but rather in the opposite order. Personal improvement will be more likely on PeaceWorld. On the other hand, sainthood is impossible on WeaponWorld even though it is demanded by every religion. Weapon mythology has transposed these requirements and results; the peace version would simply set them in the right order: PeaceWorld first, sainthood after.
These two myths are just as reasonable as they are harmless. Weapon liars have upheld them to confuse the conscientious, satisfy warmonger prejudices and set back peace as long as they could. We have blindly followed their lead.
Regardless of your preference, you will be made to swallow war and war will be made to swallow you. Yet we buy into this other nonsense: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” This quote, just another Latin contaminant of our constellation of political metaphors.
That phrase was coined by the 5th Century CE Roman, Vegetius. A total of 150 copies of his De Re Militari, (On Military Matters) made it through the Dark Ages. This, despite a hecatomb of peace literature from the same period, (per Arther Ferrill’s article “Vegetius”, p. 487, in Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker, Eds., The Reader’s Companion to Military History, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, New York, 1996).
Like other disasters, war serves no purpose other than its own. It just exudes dire consequences unforeseen. The only predictable outcome of warfare is the next round of weapon technologies even more lethal.
War has never been short; it is perpetual. Some wars were shortened by stagey statecraft: Desert Storm, Panama and Grenada, for example. This homicide interruptus just decreases their decisiveness. Long wars are trivially conclusive; short wars, even less so.
Weapon mythology ennobles wars no more noble than latrine buckets on death row.
War is credited with breakthroughs in literacy, freedom, social harmony, equality and other social benefits that elites must cough up sooner or later ― if only with the utmost reluctance. Even though, in the long run, they benefit the most from that exchange. Somehow, wars constitute the most respectable form of male bonding: they turn boys into men. In reality, those mentally and physically torn apart by war are rendered voiceless and invisible as if by black magic.
Haven’t we heard these weapon myths a thousand times? Memorized them hypnotically and recited them to each other for a hundred generations? No longer would we offer up such sinister thoughts, texts, dramas and outcomes on the altar of weapon mentality. Instead, we would dedicate the Virtual Agora to peace mentality and saturate the collective superconscience with myths of peace. Anyone who pays attention could adopt this unfettered point of view and make use of it to improve the common lot.
We should follow the lead of primal shamans. They consigned the survivors of combat to elaborate rituals of social withdrawal and purification. Nobody could rejoin the peaceful community until they had fulfilled these ceremonies. In the modern world, we ignore this subliminal venom. Unacknowledged, it curdles veterans’ psyches, turns them into walking dead: the last casualties of long forgotten wars .
“Latest figures show that 264 [British] veterans of the 1982 Falklands war have committed suicide since the conflict, compared with the 255 who died in active service.” http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030521165439.qscyf5x8.html
Simon Gardner of Reuters wrote (on 8-19-2004) that over three hundred Argentinean veterans killed themselves since the war ― perhaps denoting the therapeutic benefit of Latin passion over Anglo-Saxon aloofness when it comes to post-traumatic stress; since there were a lot more Argentinean veterans and since they suffered military defeat and its psychological aftermath.
Victorious or defeated, combat veterans are heart-broken because they survived the loss of beloved peers. If they find no permissible outlet for their grief, their adrenal-grenadier internal monologue echoes thus. “Since I had nothing better to do, I let the Armed (Harm) Forces squander my youth in contempt, regimentation, brutality and terror. Myself, beloved companions and countless innocents were forced to run a gauntlet of defilement, disfigurement and death. Just by participating, we endorsed all this suffering. We survivors bear fearsome blood guilt. Those who refuse to participate are even guiltier in our eyes.”
As far as they are concerned, peace activist are the guiltiest of all because we reject the utility of war without experiencing it. As if we had to catch the plague in order to seek its cure? In so doing, we render intolerable each warrior’s burden of pain and shame. After all, shouldn’t we be grateful for the burden they shouldered? Is that not the least we can do, honor them and their pain?
No way. Warriors have been honored to death for far too long, without any improvement for them or for us. It is time humanity took up ancient rituals of warrior decontamination and psychic decompression, instead of glorifying those who’ve dealt with abominations without purifying themselves. It is time we gathered together, reluctant warriors and confused peaceniks, to resume the ways of peace.
What little good comes from war, a well-run peace could do better. Those who suggest otherwise run a con, consciously or otherwise. If they believe that war promotes creativity while peaceful societies stagnate, they live out a hellish nightmare.
As peaceful tribes have managed to do in the past, we could neutralize the harmful effects of egotism, idleness and opulence. Their mythical elimination became an excuse to perpetuate mass killing, a sin forbidden by God, while the other three are not ― in case you had forgotten.
I recall a warlike journalist who asserted how much more advanced, enlightened and brilliant warfare made the world. This is another pet weapon myth. Fearlessly (I must admit with some admiration), he visited Kosovo, Kigali and like kill boxes to fuel his otherwise insightful journalism. He collected important friends and powerful contacts at each stop. He could have chosen any one of them to settle down. Instead, he’s raising his kids in a quiet backwater in Western Massachusetts. Presumably, what he meant to say was that war is creative and enlightening for other peoples’ kids.
Weapon managers distrust real creativity and serious Learning about peaceful topics. At best, such attributes are effeminate and debilitating liabilities; at worst, treasonous assaults against long-cherished traditions and idiot protocols.
As for the stagnancy of peace, well: “95% of everything is crap,” as a wise guy once said; and 9.5 out of every ten people are mindless drones doomed by current “education” to intellectual do-nothing, multiplying children and the rote repetition of futile banality. Meanwhile, the others do and say everything of consequence, for better or worse.
Learners alone, managing a truly peaceful setting, will reverse those ridiculous percentiles by serious applications of Learning.
The list of weapon myths stretches out endlessly. We’ve recited them to each other without end. No real peace will emerge until we call a halt this ceaseless invocation ― until we recognize, defy and replace every weapon myth on the spot.
Two more myths allow people to stick their head in the sand to block out lethal hazards.
The first is the adjective “paranoid.” These days, pundits use it to describe anyone who discusses controversial and dangerous topics without paying due reverence to the rotten status quo. “Paranoid” is their shorthand for: “I was too distracted and indifferent to make a serious study of what he had to say. His proposal isn’t worth looking into. Trust me and my spineless prejudice that conforms with yours.”
The second is “conspiracy theory.” The CIA first proposed that phrase to replace the more pertinent “assassination theory” used by the Press right after Kennedy’s assassination. Soon thereafter, those terms were transposed throughout the Press . How very 1984 Orwellian! Now used every time info elites get away with another public murder.
People keep lecturing me about how impossible it is to carry out a complex conspiracy involving more than a handful of individuals, especially if they hail from different backgrounds and hold diverse priorities.
Bullshit.
First, a single acronym: NSA (National Security Agency), that snake pit of conspiracies. There are, how many now, one or two hundred thousand government intelligence contractors in Washington, D.C.?
Second, a paragraph. The American U-2 spy plane program of secret high altitude surveillance went on for a half-decade, unreported by the Press and denied by everyone from the President on down. This program employed hundreds of industrial engineers, thousands of military personnel from line cooks to base commanders; hundreds of government bureaucrats and intelligence technicians; and foreign officials who authorized these planes emergency base rights overseas and transit rights through foreign air space. Yet those planes “didn’t exist” until the Soviets literally shot one down and staged a show trial of its pilot, Francis Gary Powers.
Such “impossible” conspiracies are routine for a weapon complex that includes the military, industrialists, Congress and their paid media. So why not others more devious and criminal? Especially those that leave a trail of dead and/or terrorized witnesses?
In America, there is only one kind of conspiracy, the failed kind. Bumbling amateurs commit their massive crime in broad daylight. They leave a paper and digital trail no rookie journalist could miss. They are too softhearted to kill and terrorize many witnesses who will give the whole story away without worrying about their family’s safety. Pop culture and its distorting media accept no other definition of a conspiracy.
Unfortunately, there is another sort: one in which cunning, powerful and merciless malefactors are skilled at perpetrating their own crimes and exposing those of their enemies. They and their patrons have practiced for centuries; they are experts. They can call on enormous institutional memory of criminal and police procedures. They hire the best professionals to do their dirty work. Their dirty laundry is branded Top Secret and protected by the full force of the law. They are so rich and influential that they control the mass media. They have no conscience: killing witnesses is a minor inconvenience. They have enough patience to clean up after themselves, and eager subordinates to take the fall if necessary.
Classical Greeks, at the height of their power, used to call this kind of habit oriental, effeminate and degenerate despotism. They spat on it and crushed it almost effortlessly. A few thousand of their free citizens could rout the largest horde these gangsters could bully into the front line ― no matter if it were ten times more numerous. They didn’t surrender to the Roman Empire until like-minded gangsters subjugated them at home.
Note this almost automatic decay over time, regardless of chronology, politics, geography, religion or ethnicity. Gangsters rot out their own army by degrees. Their gangsterism (“Submit to our obvious misdeeds, or else!”) is all that remains of our vibrant freedom. Our tolerance of this corruption should shame us. Beware of its ultimate outcome!
Once the deed is done, no paper trail exists and no surviving witnesses except those terrified into silence. There is a glut of circumstantial evidence, obvious lies and loose ends no one can explain, and a pile of dead bodies instead of key witnesses; but nothing that would stand up in court. Anyone who uncovers that evidence after a lifetime’s investigation gets quietly eliminated. Blackmail and extortion endure for decades, even the threat of civil war if word gets out. Archives are sealed, incriminating evidence is confiscated and “lost” by the truckload. Most official investigators are controlled by these conspirators and their allies. They find nothing wrong, seemingly through vast incompetence, which earns them their next promotion.
This is not a conspiracy in the USA. A successful conspiracy is not a conspiracy; it is official policy, perfectly legitimate; either that or nothing at all. Anyone who says otherwise is branded a conspiracy theorist and dismissed without a hearing. What a reassuring and effortless way to mollycoddle powerful, well-connected and influential criminals. How convenient for them. What moral cowards everyone else turned out to be, in their pay and at their mercy!
As for the conspirators, success begets success. They are tempted to outdo themselves the next time around and do so gleefully. Criminal conspiracy is their ace in the hole, their ultimate backup argument. It is perfectly legitimate, protected by official sanction, media repression and popular approval. Nothing stops them.
We live in an age when nobody well connected is personally responsible for anything and every misdeed is someone else’s fault. Weak individuals are crushed, whether they are guilty or not, and powerful ones are free to misbehave in perfect anonymity, with perfect impunity.
At least for the time being…
Government has always been a conspiracy, by definition. Conspiracy for war or for peace? That is the question.
A strong case can be made, that the basic achievement of hierarchical politicians is to cause mourning and suffering among their enemies and force their own people to endure additional misery. After all, the dead don’t vote or submit to law and order. Only poor, grieving survivors must choose between surrender, rebellion or unrelenting resistance under unimaginable stress. Armies don’t collapse until their suffering has reached intolerable levels of grief, hunger and agony. Body counts quantify the misery that armies must generate and their victims, endure.
Fortunately for us, our DNA took millions of years prior to recorded history, to perfect its ethics among internally peaceful scavengers operating in small packs. Any deviation from the purest ethic, any cumulative mayhem, unfruitful criminality, false signaling or mis-allocation of scarce resources destroyed violence-contaminated packs. Operating on a razor-thin margin of survival, they had no leeway to drift far off from moral excellence.
We may appear to be sealed in the crusted armor plate of thousands of years of military history. But this is just the rusted metal foil covering a much stronger, more ancient and flexible body of behavioral excellence. Up to us to rip off this paper-thin body cast and restore a much deeper, more supple yet atrophied core.
The freedom we seek is not founded on some fantasy utopia (even though weapon mentors insist as much), but on the perfect freedoms our ancestors bore for a hundred thousand years. Paleolithic hunter-gatherer freedom is the political context we crave, regardless of the fear weapon mentors acid-etched with adrenaline onto our mind. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201105/how-hunter-gatherers-maintained-their-egalitarian-ways
The spread of peace does not affect Learners alone in a vacuum. When we confront an aggressor nowadays – whether a lone thug or a military-industrial complex – we expect the Other to share our fears and weapon myths. They dictate that we hesitate to extend an overture of peace and that they reject our attempt to do so unless one of us has already been knocked down. Weapon mythology whispers the same prejudices in everyone’s ear. According to its prejudices, every attempt at peacemaking is “appeasement”: a token of weakness and betrayal that should provoke universal reactions of suspicion, hostility and aggression.
If peace mentality prevailed in our constellation of political metaphors, we could dispel this kind of aggression (bilateral or unilateral) with common gestures and accepted formulas of reconciliation. Those wouldn’t be tokens of weakness but dependable signs of wisdom, trustworthiness and power. Any child could defuse a firefight in an instant ― the same way a beta pack scavenger stops an alpha-dominant’s lethal punishment by exposing its defenseless underbelly.
Spontaneous peacemaking is hard-wired into every healthy adult. We have merely deprogrammed it from our minds for the time being and driven ourselves crazy in the process.
I was inspired to sound this alarm by reading Jean Bacon’s breakthrough book, The Greater Glory, Prism Press, California, 1986.
Thereafter, we will study and institutionalize many new talents and capabilities previously hidden, and thus unleash enormous psychic energies held in check up ‘til now. We have repressed these talents out of a rightful sense of self-preservation. If these energies had been set loose prematurely on WeaponWorld, they would have annihilated us. We are limited, these days, to hurling dead matter and powdered sewage at each other. Like our ape ancestors, our troops throw shit at each other. Despite this fecal constraint, we have achieved global levels of devastation, tap dancing just short of omnicide of our own making.
It is only on PeaceWorld that we could secure orders of magnitude more energy without blowing up our world with it.
SECTION TWO – HOW
Beware of weapon mentors,
Wimp or Prism,
Before, during, and long after Learner.
Benjamin Constant: “Almost all men are haunted by the urge to prove that they are greater than they are; writers, to prove that they are statesmen. Thus, for centuries, every great initiative of extra-judicial force and recourse to unlawful measures in risky circumstances has been related with respect and described with approval. The author, seated coolly behind his desk, casts opinions in every direction and tries to infuse in his style the alacrity he stipulates for decision-making; he believes he is momentarily invested with power as he preaches its abuse; and his speculative life seethes with the demonstrations of force and power with which he adorns his sentences. Thus does he endow himself with some of the pleasure of authority. He proclaims high-sounding expressions of the people’s salvation, of supreme law and public interest; he waxes ecstatic at his own profundity and is astounded by his own energy. Poor fool! He addresses men who seek nothing more than to listen to him, and who, at the first opportunity, will employ him to test his theory.
“This vanity, which has warped the judgment of so many writers, has caused more trouble than one would imagine during our civil disturbances. All the ordinary souls who had earned a bit of authority were puffed up by these maxims, which stupidity eagerly welcomed since they sliced knots it could not untangle. These fools dreamt of nothing but great measures of public security, of coups d’État.” Taken from Robert Calasso’s The Ruin of Kasch, translated by William Weaver and Stephen Sartarelli, Carcanet Press Limited, Harvard, 1994, p. 42.
- COULD WE BE GOOD? –
If we rallied to PeaceWorld all at once, absolutely!
“Evolution is always experimental. All progress is gained through mistakes and their rectification. No good comes fully-fashioned ... but has to be carved out through repeated experiments and growth. The same law controls social and political evolution also. The right to err, which means the freedom to try experiments, is the universal condition of all progress.” A Gandhi quote from Raghavan Iyer’s, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford University Press, New York, 1973, p. 354.
One of weapon mentality’s most corrosive myths is that we are all struck by some ill-defined but primeval sin, surrounded by evil because full of it. Therefore, no good may come from our effort to improve the world. We might as well surrender to public evil and seek marginal and fleeting self-improvement instead. Marginal, in reality, because we backslide with horrific ease; and fleeting because we die soon in any case, along with all our personal upgrades. Thank God, those who hone their evil must do so just as hurriedly, at least for the time being, pending medical miracles better financed in their favor…
The idea: “No good… ” is ridiculous, if you think about it. My foot needn’t be the World’s Most Beautiful Foot, nor need I spend time manicuring it, to kick trash off the sidewalk.
Just as this sentence ̶ whose tightening up was just as tough for me as making sense of it was for you ̶ has no need to be perfect. Honest error can play a vital part in the scheme of things, if admitted and allowed. Perfection is not essential; excellence is.
The key difference between reactionaries and progressives? The former believe that people are innately evil while the latter hold them to be essentially good. Go ahead; ask anyone and how they voted. See for yourself.
My experience drew me to the latter conclusion. Almost everyone does the best they can under most circumstances — often heroically and at great cost. Sure, some people are rotten to the core, but they are rare on the ground (around one in twenty). Sure, everyone fails from time to time and acts shamefully. I bear my share of cringe-worthy memories. However – on the whole and more often than not – we are all pedaling as fast as we can.
Look; if evil prevailed to such an extent, we’d almost always get run over trying to cross the street. That is not the norm except in war.
The essence of sinful error – and of other human weaknesses, for that matter – is that we can straighten them out through gradual stages of learning and self-correction. At such tasks, we are expert. In other words, progress entails deliberate evolution: personal, institutional, cultural, psychic and genetic: each one interdependent, synergistic and holistically vital.
Which leaves us the duty to make better guesses about the links between people, things and events: what causes good or evil to increase or decrease and their relative importance or lack of such ― not the media or the politicians, but we and our peers.
The notion of original sin thwarts our obligation to improve the world. It is not a matter of abandoning one concept for the other, but of clarifying both.
Much like the dinosaurs, we’ve come to a crossroads without realizing it. An “ideal” environment sustained them for ages, then minor changes began to flicker and the die-offs began. They ran out of time, weren’t flexible enough, found no way to trade their tons of bone, sinew and armor plate – painfully accumulated over eons – before extinction caught up with them.
We hold some advantages over the dead owners of those monster bones. Our greatness resides in part in our ability to love one another, a trait we share with other pack-scavengers. Another critical talent may be the way we provide for the young, the sick and the helpless. Just as empathy and compassion are the ultimate expressions of selfhood in a mind fading away from old age, they are just as much a true measure of public grandeur.
To review: if the golden rule leads to vulnerable greatness, sociopathy leads to moral monstrosity but military advantage.
In some troubled souls, mistrust and “realism” have replaced compassion. This degeneracy pegs us lower than dinosaurs that watched over each other and their young.
Each of us, no matter how abused and abusive at this point, received some loving care earlier on, so as to survive to this day. Could most felons turn bad simply because they were not treated lovingly enough early enough? Some say the most accurate predictor of criminal misbehavior is the criminal’s history of childhood abuse, as well as abuse of their mother, before and after delivery?
Mischief is easy. Any fool can wreak serious havoc without breaking a sweat. Conversely, human nurturing takes a lot of hard work. Reducing care to economize on overheads is about as reasonable as starving to death to save on grocery bills.
If we could tabulate the amount of violence on Earth into one sum of energy X, our wealth would equal the care we expend in thousands of X, minus the one wasted in untruth and violence. The sum of human care must always dwarf that of harm, lest we perish.
These days, the world’s kinetic energy of care is dangerously level with its weapons energy potential. Think about that. How many mothers’ hugs would it take to equal the energy of a hand grenade, a nuclear detonation or all those we’ve buried at great cost in silos and submarines?
Could these ultimate weapons and their unthinkable applications be mass culture’s reaction to the personal abuse endured by its members? Do those effects form a positive feedback loop?
All in all, our greatness resides in shared Learning. Keep in mind that each generation must relearn the sum total of human knowledge; only then may some add their tiny increment before they disappear. Anything not relearned by someone must be forgotten and apparently sink into the collective superconscience for later retrieval.
Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar postulates that a whole sub-universe of information is hardwired in us and comes online as we mature. This programming won’t initialize, however, until benign external stimuli activate our internal software. To become fully aware and sane, we must receive tender loving care.
This is also true for psychopaths and even more so for sociopaths. Continuous supervision based on rewards is much more successful at reducing their criminal recidivism than that based on punishment after the fact. Their disease immunizes them from punishments and attracts them to rewards; it does so much more vigorously than in the case of the conscience-driven.
Unlike those doomed dinosaurs trapped in extravagant suits of armor plate, our flexible, reprogrammable brains give us the means, motive and opportunity to shed our liabilities and redefine ourselves practically overnight. It might be messy and might not work out all at once, but the possibility remains: we can do much better than we’ve done in the past.
Learning dwarfs powerful but secondary preoccupations like sex, predation and genetic survival. These overblown drives have become the norms of scientific prejudice. They’ve served Conspiracies of Greed, the same way Social Darwinism and Predestination once did, as weapon myth propaganda to justify institutional evil. Unlike these lesser drives magnified beyond proportion, Learning is the rock bed of self-awareness and PeaceWorld.
Historians have kept themselves busy collecting biographical tidbits of micro-history. Simplifying vast upheavals of climate, resources and civilization by dissecting the lives of a few key potentates, they reduced humanity’s opulent transactions to the whims of a few courted egomaniacs and the muffled sobs of their countless victims.
Beginning with Herodotus and ending with today’s pundits, they wrote: “King (President, Caliph, Dictator, etc.) X decreed actions A, B and not C. His Dukes (Ministers, Secretaries, Viziers, Satraps, whatever), 1 through 6 with the exception of 4, revolted against his policies, thus provoking...” unending crises of gross simplification and biographical reductionism.
Our acceptance of this simplification is about as sensible as packing the 460 million person-years of genius, hope and sweat humanity accumulates every day, into a few wisps of newsprint and vapid newscast for the most part repeating yesterday’s thing.
I despise biography. Art transcends life by recording dreams into culture. Shoddy dreams, not for very long; magnificent and terrible dreams, tenderly and almost forever, compared to our brief lifespans. Art takes life’s little irrelevancies and transforms them into a holism greater than the sum of its parts.
Biography reverses this procedure. It reduces cultural dreams to an obsessive narration of nit-picking primate politics; pecking-order torture; the growth, displacement and destruction of meat puppets; and the mindless slosh of their body fluid.
Setting aside this gloss for a moment, note that the info proletariat raises the leadership it requires through a process of organic hyper-democracy somewhat akin to that of a bee colony. The intimacy of our involvement in this procedure makes it seem more complex and subjective.
These last few generations, dissatisfied historians have consolidated massive compendiums of correspondence and anecdotes into macro-histories. In so doing, they tried to chronicle the life and times of entire peoples over la longue durée (the long haul). History has been looked at from multi-disciplinary perspectives: epidemiology, meteorology, geoseismicity, biogeography, ecology, memetics, psychohistory, herstory and sociobiology among others. The more interdisciplinary these studies have become, the more enlightening their conclusions. They’ve dispelled a whole pack of absurdities put forward earlier and quickset in the biofilm of human culture since.
This breakup of old beliefs gives us a chill of uncertainty. We hesitate to believe in anything any longer. Decisions are less and less easy to make — too many uncertainties and neither the time nor the means to clarify them. Nonetheless, we could rewire the world to meet those requirements and permit those who share peace to come up with better alternatives at many more junctures of thought and action.
As our point of view broadens, personal idiosyncrasies shrink to irrelevance. Mere individuals merge into the crowd, and social behavior becomes easier to track. Near-identical patterns, stresses and energy flows emerge on different scales of space-time — as illustrated by chaos theory.
The dynamics of a shoreline beach would be hard to track if each grain of sand had to be followed (especially “exceptional” ones). Instead, common denominators of wind, surf and tide are worth more study. To deepen our understanding of world history, we would have to remove ourselves from comfortable, reductive contexts: the self-referential, biographical, nationalistic, piously sanctimonious, and human — even the life-as-we-know-it and the linear-entropic.
Recent photos taken from space shift our perspective to one that reveals life-as-we-know-it as a mere luminescent pond scum writhing across a smallish blue porcelain marble varnished with a thin glaze of gas and water, orbiting serenely around a quietly ordinary star. This perspective shift lets us isolate significant aspects of history, provided we pay due reverence to a universe aglow with sacred intent.
Remarkable things come to light at this scale of vision. Decisive incidents resonate with equivalents from the past, influence current events and distort future probabilities. Accidents of individuality, chronology and locality (that teachers make their students cram) lose their illusory significance except as place markers and shortcut jargon.
Carroll Quigley focused his historical vision on such continental scales. Diverse writers like Ryszard Kapuscinski, Rian Malan, Antje Krog and John Del Vecchio brought such reverence to their reportage.
On the other hand, many butcher geniuses have abused this scale of vision. For example, either throw out Hitler’s Mein Kampf or don a biohazard suit before cracking it open. That creep was certifiable. He wanted to replace the Jews: the Chosen People of biblical God, with Good Germans. In so doing, he would have had to murder 1) every Jew on Earth, and 2) anyone who recalled the Hebrews from their readings of Biblical/Koranic/Occidental history. That couldn’t ever have worked.
The only thing new about this collective insanity is its insane scale of application. Otherwise, a hundred and fifty generations of psychopathic weapon mentors have invoked man-aping gods, hyperactive heroes, raw might, econologic, dialectics, national honor, bloodline purity, scientific positivism (“I’m positive you’re wrong”), post-modern nihilism and every other heady superstition they could dream up. Nazism was merely one of their more spectacular failures at socio-corporate engineering. Many more failed just as consistently before and since, since they ignored the key, sacred context. Proper devotion would have cancelled their sickly ambition and favorite genocides.
Suffering from dizzying bouts of moral detachment and lack of empathy, they’ve argued more and more fervently for fatalistic determinism (as revealed in Elias Canetti’s cheerless Crowds and Power) and Nazi mercilessness. Their terror-driven visions have been pathetic attempts to simplify the scary complexity of the real world by throttling all life, beauty and reverence from it.
Those deluded folk may have failed us in the past; but that is no reason to become credophobic and stop believing in anything: the fastest track back to fascism. Whatever the risk, we must cultivate our gift of vision.
I doubt if anyone who’s read some history can use words like “humanitarian, humane and human” as analogues for “kindly, compassionate and just-not-stupid-most-of-the-time.” Typical mass human behavior is weapon-based. So far, clustered humans have failed to earn the title “civilized.” Their assemblies have almost never adhered to the good until they’d exhausted every evil.
That’s not surprising. Veterans, athletes and professionals don’t turn into real experts until they have screwed up every other alternative repeatedly. At that point, they must accept at gut level the better way to do things and practice it until it becomes automatic, despite recurring errors, distractions and inconsistencies. Just the way humanity will set up its ultimate expressions of peace despite and because of weapons errors oft-repeated.
Celebrate the PeaceWorld Agora’s deep thought, the way you’ve celebrated Olympic athletics!
Human cruelty is less justifiable than that of a hungry predator. Auschwitz is a monument to typical human behavior: its ritual murders re-enacted by every nation in recorded history — perhaps on a cut-down scale and a bit more pastoral, at least most often. No nation or creed can claim clean hands. Every human culture has been the craftwork of maniacs, tyrants, genocides and their weapon mentor apologists. The bovine herd of humanity has tolerated them, along with their bloody fantasies and lies, like horseflies that only compelled the occasional tail swipe. History has exalted civilizations with the bloodiest hands; it has erased from collective memory every society of exceptional peace.
Our weapons institutions peddle a categorical world-view across a wide range of multi-media. In their drive to achieve flawless certitude, weapon mentors attempt to suck all truth, beauty and mystery from life.
Despite the whine of chainsaw logic, its patent certainties are obvious absurdities any child can see through. Indeed, young ones see quite clearly through this adult hypocrisy. That’s why the adult world spends so much time and effort breaking their spirit and quashing their ideals while they are fragile and tender.
We’ve witnessed contradictions like these every day. Many official truths are obviously inferior to their rejected counterparts. Our social creeds are so toxic, their adherents cannot seduce every party. It is easier to insult, terrorize and murder the Other — or allow leaders to do so on our behalf.
We could sweep the house clean as soon as we challenged this thousand-year brainwash. Once Learners adopt Truth as their foremost inspiration and Non-violence as utmost aspiration, we may feed our unmet hunger for good and relieve our longing for it (kalotropism?).
We should defy two more myths typical of weapon mentality.
According to the first of these subtle delusions, each of us must meet impossible demands of personal sainthood. We cannot hope to improve things until we’ve become proper saints first. Any hint of personal weakness must confirm our Kosmic Korruption.
No-one may criticize the state of affairs without convincing his audience he’s a bona fide saint. If the authorities can stick some accusation against him, they can pronounce him unfit to comment on social issues. Since everyone has something to hide, no one may comment unless friendly authorities shield him from public attack. Anyone who defies them is at their mercy. How convenient for weapon mentors!
Thus the seeming impossibility of global improvement, at least until we’ve all become angels. In the meantime, let’s just sit on our hands and wait for Jesus to serve us the Kingdom of Heaven on a silver platter. That makes two thousand years, now, we’ve sat on our hands.
Am I alone in tiring of that? It seems to be the sorry case.
In John 14, 2-3, Christ said, “In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, you may be also.”
Amen, brother.
In the meantime, it must be up to us. I come back to the Parable of the Talents. The Master left us a sum of money. Upon return, God will be happier with those who increased it rather than those who buried it so as not to lose any. It is not a question of saving one’s soul by doing nothing, but of taking risks to add to this symbolic fortune.
Meanwhile, no healthy outlet remains for the frustration that festers in our heart. WeaponWorld winds up ramming it out of us by Heimlich maneuver, in war. Behavioral repression increases with regulatory density as more and more meddlesome officials adjust the details of our lives and less room remains for risky self-expression.
Walled-in by our incapacity, we prickle with self-loathing; cursing the faults of others, we plot futile revenge. We resent growing intrusions on our precious time and assets in the material world. As inspiration and satisfaction become more remote and abstract, real obligations and penalties skyrocket around us. Perpetually unfree, we double and redouble the chains of our enslavement. Mischief becomes extremely tempting, it seems to offer some relief from our endless round of obligation and compromise. The routine expectation of mischief gives officialdom more excuses to grind us down.
Many wind up yearning that a vast maelstrom will come simplify their life once and for all, sweeping everything and everyone away (except for them and their beloved who, of course, deserve to live by miracle and/or obsessive survival prep). The collapse of civilizations could have resulted from amped up discontent on the part of a growing majority. In the past, many transformational wars flared up because too many people became dissatisfied with the existing “peace.” Beware what you wish for.
Life does not simplify; death does. Anyone who preaches a simplifying ideology (Learner seeks more complexity) will wind up spilling innocent blood to enforce it. Get used to that, too.
Countless young bulimics, addicts and attempted suicides – their nerves raw and aglow – have conveyed the same unheard lament: “I’m not good enough for this!” Good enough for what: coping with the unending demands of weapon mentality’s hypocritical moralism and its hyperactive evil?
While we pre-stupefied adults decline into “maturity,” we suffer analysis paralysis from orthodoxy’s ad hominem (“to the man,” appealing to prejudice) brainwash. In turn, we punish idealistic juniors for skipping the only approved track: absolute weapon mentality. We convince ourselves that peace mentality can never be “realistic” enough. We’re supposed to mature and abandon it.
Grow up and embrace world peace. I dare you.
To tell you the truth, we are the best people we can be: the ultimate sentient masterpieces of DNA, the Universe and God. Get used to it — nobody can take your place and do a better job. There should be no need for radical self-improvement until our radically improved institutions support our efforts without contradiction or paradox. How could we succeed otherwise, even after trillions of trillions of reincarnations? Think of your distant past lives as endless generations of viruses, bacteria, etc.
The second unhappy weapon myth absolves our institutions. Unlike individuals, they are sacred, error-free, opaque to analysis and exempt from improvement — except every few centuries, during the paroxysms of bloody revolution.
Even in rich countries, the accepted expression of disapproval for gross institutional blunders is a protest march: perfectly dumb, bovine and trivial, if not detrimental to the cause. If the topic in question is of any importance, this rally will culminate in a police and/or thug riot: more propaganda headlines in favor of blundering institutions.
Always remember: they are OUR institutions.
For example, the 1999 Seattle demonstration against the World Trade Organization was said to have caused “millions of dollars of damage.” All of it was attributed to rioting by what turned out to be a perfectly legitimate, quite middle-class crowd of well-behaved protestors, at least before the police stampeded them.
True, some pimply hooligans broke a few plate glass windows, set fire to a garbage bin or two and wrecked a few cars — which let them re-enact their Black Flag Anarchy video game in real-time. Their damage couldn’t have totaled more than a couple hundred thousand 1999 dollars, tops. I was there, before and after, and watched it unfold. Afterwards, I called the city newsroom and challenged them to itemize the famous “millions of dollars of damage.” No one bothered to return my call and I could find nothing in print to itemize that damage.
Nonetheless, this police riot went down in official history as a vicious attack by the masses against property and propriety. The same thing happened in the same city during a mass demonstration against the Vietnam War in 1968, its reportage equally biased.
So this is how our vaunted media commit current events to historic memory? I can only conclude: “Shoot, what a sophisticated system of political feedback!” See Learning to Dance for the Learner alternative.
“Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.” Of course, this bible quote could just as well say that Caesar owns nothing and is owed nothing. After all, what authority can Caesar claim as he strolls to his death at the knives of his acquaintances? What authority compared to God’s? The opposite meaning jams our senses. Weapon mentors worship Jesus’ torture rack and drown His sacred ideals in blood — symbolic or all-too-real, take your pick.
What more can we expect from weapon Christianity — that venerable relief program for smug desperadoes? The other world religions are not far behind in stealth hypocrisy. Cults of abnegation do weapon mentality a great favor. They alienate the best souls from the practice of politics into listless isolation and pseudo-mystic contemplation. The only creeds more despicable than those that encourage the devout to give up on the real world are those that encourage them to simplify its problems by violence.
Yet the essential goodwill of those believers allowed their creed to endure despite its submission to the errors and hypocrisy of WeaponWorld. PeaceWorld would mix of good politics and good religion: each reinforcing the good in the other and calling the other out for its misdeeds.
Weapons officials would rather administer mighty oaths. The nastier the institution, the more rumbling its oath of allegiance and the more often invoked. Hitler was a fervent believer in potent oath-taking ceremonies that bound his people more closely to him — to their ultimate destruction. It is easier to get two peoples to murder each other by making them swear an oath to that effect.
Weapon societies glorify suicidal self-sacrifice. Prism propaganda contradicts “live and let live” principles everyone knows are better. Paul Lackman points to the Japanese kamikazes and mass suicides of World War II (sic). However, all the sacrificial tendencies of weapon mentality should be included, regardless of the side that practices them, since they are essentially interchangeable. One of the first kamikaze pilots of the Pacific War was an American Marine who crashed his crippled plane on a Japanese cruiser during the battle of Midway. I might have made the same choice, if faced, as thousands of downed flyers on both sides were, with croaking slowly in a bobbing rubber dinghy, spending years in a torture camp or getting ripped apart by a shark.
Modern culture reveres noble warriors who endure suffering with stoicism, seek privation and make a defiant last stand against overwhelming odds. Cold bloodedly, they violate basic laws of humanity. They are hallowed because they’ve surpassed the morality of common sense.
What state of mind would you have to be in, to drop a bomb on a bustling city center? Picture yourself flying over a major metropolis, as you would just before landing at a destination airport. See the town clearly through the porthole? Ok, now drop your bomb. You would have to be nuts. Either a desperate terrorist aggrieved by lifelong suffering, humiliation and the threat of none-too-picky death by drone; or a valiant military pilot serving out your military obligation to fulfill your dream of flying.
The outcome would be the same. Where a fascinating crowd once thronged, a blazing ruin remains for us to clean up afterwards, heartbroken and at great expense. A total waste in any case.
One way or another, our institutions induce mass suffering without opposition. Sufferers (most of them total innocents) are dehumanized and distanced from the mainstream. By definition, individuals are expendable, and institutions, irreplaceable.
Peace management will do the exact opposite. From its point of view, every individual is a precious dynamo of good and evil. New social instruments will magnify good traits and channel evil ones into semi-harmless games and theatrics, fully documented. Social instruments, on the other hand, will be modified, rejected and replaced with better ones as necessary.
Contrary to current practice, Learner news media will pay meticulous attention to the endearing qualities of each victim and none at all to the identity of the killers, their purpose or political/religious/ethnic bias. They will remain strictly anonymous psychopaths in public reporting. Journalists and World Court investigators will tabulate such details subsequently in fat reports intended for ensuing prosecution.
Despite the righteousness of Moses, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed, the ratio of good to bad human acts has not seemed to change throughout history. Good Pagans were just as upright and numerous in proportion, back then, as good people are today. Vicious Pagans were just as obvious and numerous as today’s religious/ideological bigots and criminals. The human sacrifice they demand today, in jihad and holy war (religious, nationalist or ideological), are continuations of blood-soaked sacrifices their predecessors performed face-to-face. Many non-believers, devout atheists and situational ethicists look for which way the wind blows to their advantage.
So we’ve never figured out how to change the ratio of good and bad human acts. None of our saints have done so, none of our Prophets have and no Savior. I doubt if anyone else will manage it.
So what?
We could, however, shift the quality of our actions toward the good (or the bad) end of the ethical spectrum. For example, we could strengthen the Bill of Rights and shift our society towards better ethics, or revert to official genocide and legal slavery and shift more people and their decisions toward evil.
Thomas Jefferson enslaved himself to slavery’s abuse and hypocrisy. Thus burdened, he was a lesser man than a bigoted cracker would be once slavery were abolished. As we cannot yet claim since we are still burdened by weapon mentality. Similarly, but in reverse, we can be the same people we are today, yet become better practitioners of the Good. We have merely to replace our weapons institutions with more sensible ones of peace.
Valid ones invite criticism and transformation. There is nothing absolutely good about our institutions. We have merely adopted them for the time being. They deserve no more devotion than fairy mushroom rings in a druid oak grove. Self-serving parasites and authoritarian nitwits tend to swarm in institutions that have gone unchallenged overlong and thus fail more and more spectacularly over time.
You, me, we are all responsible for progress; everyone is. A healthy conscience makes no exception — unlike our sickly institutions that mass-produce exceptions and justify them. When an institution becomes so inflexible it fosters evil, it should be exposed to instant, serial correction. Evildoers should be banished from institutional power the moment they begin improvising on the themes: “But we weren’t responsible! We were just following orders, policies, profit guidelines, the competition, etc.”
“Few things are more revealing about man as warrior than his tendency to slough off responsibility for the suffering and tragedy he inflicts. … Why can men do together without conscience things that would torment them unendurably if done singly? …
“Seated in our living rooms, remote from action and passion, most of us like to believe that we shall never yield again to abstract hatreds… Historically, our record for stemming the tide has not been good …
“Perhaps even worse, few of us ever know how far fear and violence can transform us into creatures at bay, ready with tooth and claw. If the war taught me anything at all, it convinced me that people are not what they seem or even think themselves to be. Nothing is more tempting than to yield oneself, when fear comes, to the dominance of necessity and to act irresponsibly at the behest of another. Freedom and responsibility we speak of easily, nearly always without recognition of the iron courage required to make them effective in our lives.” J. Glenn Davis, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York, 1959, pp. 168-169.
The day after Nazi invaders ordered Danish Jews to sew a yellow star on their clothing, the King of Denmark took his morning ride wearing a yellow star. Many of his subjects followed his noble lead and restored honor to their defeated nation.
This turned out to be a magnificent legend. Quite often, during the Nazi occupation, King Christian X took his morning ride on horseback downtown without escort, in order to stay in touch with his people. The Germans never imposed the yellow star on Danish Jews, but on Jews elsewhere.
Very few non-Jews wore that fatal badge, anywhere.
The fact remains that almost every Danish Jew was hustled off to Sweden and relative safety, under the Nazis’ flaring muzzles. It was generally concluded by the Danes, that if Nazis had imposed the yellow star, the King would have been the first to wear one. If Learners could make sure every King and his court were so honorable, this book would promote monarchy. Indeed, PeaceWorld would encourage an international nobility (chosen by merit instead of inheritance) as long as it remained trustworthy and policed itself.
When you confront the common dilemma of following regulations or extending a helping hand to someone without harming others, do the latter with conviction. If you oversee such people, protect their obligation to do good. If these decisions were commonplace, many protective regulations would become redundant. If criminal employees of some institution won’t clean up their act, they cannot claim our support. Without our support, their pet institutions will collapse — regardless of the level of terror they inspire.
It has never been a question of whether an institution (bureaucracy, government, religion, etc.) is evil; rather, whether it can or cannot, will or won’t discipline and marginalize the psychopaths attached to it like leeches on flesh.
We occupy an incredibly shoddy world stage. Take a good look! It’s begging for transformation.
Sir Lawrence Olivier’s revenant ghost could recruit his favorite actors into a troupe of brilliant workaholics obsessed with theatrical perfection. These worthies could take weeks to rehearse their scenes and longer to perfect their costumes. But if they staged their King Lear in a closed garbage dumpster, their performance would suffer, no matter how intrepid the delivery.
I was told by jokesters at my expense that such a scene would be worth watching. As a sad lesson in morality, perhaps? I would rather watch this Lear played close to perfection on a faultless stage.
Misled by weapon mentality, we’ve wasted lifetimes fine-tuning our personal perfection in the midst of a global concentration camp. Once we upgrade learning, compassion, empathy, justice and nature’s wilderness enough to turn this WeaponWorld garbage dumpster into PeaceWorld worthy of our genius – and only then – our quest for self-perfection may bear fruit. Until then, we waste precious lifetimes pursuing feel-good palliatives and throwaway sainthood, simply to feel better about our sorry selves despite the continuous failure of our mores.
Proof resides in the last few thousand years of history. Misreading the instruction of our prophets, we’ve zealously pursued nothing more than personal improvement. Despite this ceaseless quest, we’ve bungled our social schemes, suffered moral bankruptcy and invited military disaster into our households to spoil the weekend feast.
That’s nothing to joke about.
When our institutions encourage evil (the way the institution of slavery did), they lead us to worsen the common lot despite our best intentions. Once our institutions encourage us to do good more often, without compromise and free of paradox, we will act better without any need for extraordinary self-improvement. We will discover the beings we really are: well adapted to live together in peace and harmony despite our transient flaws. Once our institutions are perfected, we will find our personal improvement surprisingly advanced.
This regrettable reversal of personal and institutional priorities arises from our common distortion of the historical point of view. From this twisted but familiar perspective, our institutions seem like granite outcrops polished by centuries of painstaking trial and error. On the other hand, each mortal life seems as ephemeral as the first raindrop on a hot tin roof. It has seemed reasonable to endow our institutions with attributes of permanence and perfection, and burden our perishable selves with nagging demands of ceaseless self-improvement.
Learners will reverse these requirements. Our institutions are frail stopgaps jury-rigged just to get us through the last few centuries. Human traits have taken millions of years to adapt us to this world and to each other. We may transform our institutions in a matter of weeks, months or years; but the chore of changing (improving) human nature would be like grinding down Mt. Everest with a toothbrush.
The problem remains: how to redefine our institutions peacefully and thus with near-universal consent? We must recruit those who have given up in despair, and seek the consent of those who fantasize they have something important to lose in the transaction.
How to avoid adjusting all this — with, by and for the sword?
There remains only one alternative to the pitfalls of the weapon/peace antinomy: PeaceWorld. We should introduce a better vocabulary and dialectic into our constellation of political metaphors. We must walk our talk for the first time in history and relegate weapon technology and weapon mentality to vestigial status.
“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society … The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.” Edward Sapir, “The Status of Linguistics as a Science,” Language (Charlottesville, Va.: Linguistic Society of America), vol. 5 (1929), p. 209.
- THE DHAMMA OF ASHOKA -
“I shall become enlightened for the sake of all living things.” Buddhist vow from the book For the Sake of All Living Things, by John M. Del Vecchio.
The following rock pillar inscriptions were planted throughout the Mauryan Empire of India from around 264 to 233 BCE. They are stone-carved memoranda of instruction from King Ashoka to his officials and subjects.
I lifted this translation from B.G. Gokhale’s book, Ashoka Maurya. Apart from a few textual and punctuation simplifications, the only changes I made were in the way King Ashoka addressed himself within these rescripts. Sometimes, Ashoka called himself the Prince, the King, King Devanampiaya Piyadasi, Devanampiaya, or Piyadasi, the last two meaning ‘Beloved of the Gods’ and ‘Of Benevolent Mien.’ For simplicity’s sake, I replaced them all with “King Ashoka.”
How often have you heard about Hitler, Genghis Khan, Alexander and other des Grossen butchers of history? How often about King Ashoka and his unsung morally great peers? A book should be written about all the “The Good” rulers history recalls and only them.
Compare his rescripts with recent political declarations; note how little progress we’ve made. Then compare them with the ravings of Hitler, Stalin and like weapon demagogues given a lot more coverage, with today’s decrees. “Primitive” states have outshone modern society on moral grounds. Present-day moral progress seems illusory. at best momentary.
You might suppose that Ashoka was a minor princeling who indulged his eccentricities among a handful of subjects. No way. His empire encompassed most of South Asia and boasted many rich cities, a massive army and a sophisticated civil service.
If King Ashoka could dedicate his life and administration to moral enlightenment, modern leaders must do so. It would mean heaving anchor and setting every sail at once, leaving raft-loads of shrieking reactionaries bobbing in our wake. They will change their tune soon enough, once they realize how much more profitable is PeaceWorld. Few holdouts will remain to cry “Havoc!” when so many more sing of peace. This hymn to peace that Learners will sing in chorus, Ashoka carved its first verses in stone.
We need not follow Ashoka’s exact bidding; but while he forged ahead down the straight and narrow, we loiter in the brambles and bemoan unjust fate. His heroic climb to reach the moral high ground was neither utopian, idealistic nor unrealistic — as those words are misused today. Ashoka’s example remains magnificent and practical, an inspiration for anyone with a little common sense and pride in idealism.
For all I know, Ashoka’s reign may have been a tissue of hypocrisy, contradictions and lies. The king may have preached peace while weapons mentality held sway among his sneering subordinates. Or not. His rescripts must have been recited to his followers and obeyed whenever possible. One more good deed done and one less bad one would have justified all his effort.
We could share better rescripts with fewer tedious prohibitions and obey them whenever possible. That could do us good. We enjoy wider latitude than Ashoka’s followers did. On PeaceWorld, the payoffs of better behavior would snowball and finance many more.
It may be immaterial whether Ashoka succeeded back then, whether we succeed or fail today. He did his heroic best – that’s important – and we must show even greater fervor. Conserving the status quo or whining without transformation it: that would be too easy. Reaching out for the impossible … that would be worthy of our genius!
In contrast, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and like-minded militancies bare their (weapon mentality) claws to progress, even though they retain great peace powers.
We must explore the collective superconscience and extract the best religious ideals from that hidden treasure trove. Then, perhaps awkwardly at first, we can begin to restore them. As soon as the elephant’s brain is transplanted in its planet-sized skull, a lot more peace projects will occur to us; each new one more promising — leading us deeper and deeper into peace, as in a dream.
My friend Paul Lackman wondered what Ashoka would have thought about the Hindu custom of sati. One or two grieving widows threw themselves on their husband’s funeral pyre; later, others were “encouraged” to carry out this tradition by force. Ashoka would have objected to other habits some Hindus and their Muslim descendants consider proper today: such as burning new brides alive for inadequate dowries, and acid-scarring unavailable damsels (so-called honor crimes).
In private correspondence, B.G. Gokhale informed me that the custom of sati was “probably introduced by the Scythians, who appear in Indian history sometime during the 2nd to 1st centuries BCE.” He was kind enough to let me include his entire translation of Ashoka’s rescripts in Learner. Thank you, good soul.
In cultures other than Ashoka’s, a tyrant’s habit of sacrificing householders as part of his funeral ceremony may have served a purpose more pragmatic than hysterical. Only one successor and his retinue were required after a tyrant’s death. Every other attendant, concubine and offspring was a potential rival, conspirator and assassin. Tyrants, lions (and apparently, porpoises) are remarkably similar in their use of lineal violence to eliminate genetic rivals.
But we could set aside this kind of rivalry, like the tired bickering by partners of a bad marriage. We could sing hymns of peace instead.
But let’s let Ashoka tell his own story …
Inscription 1: This rescript on morality has been commanded to be written by King Ashoka. Here no animal may be slaughtered and offered in sacrifice. No convivial assembly, too, may be held. For King Ashoka sees many a blemish in convivial assemblies. But there are some assemblies considered good by King Ashoka. Formerly in the kitchen of King Ashoka, every day hundreds of thousands of animals were slaughtered for curry. But now, since this rescript on morality has been written, only three animals are slaughtered for curry: two peacocks and one deer, and that deer, too, not always. Even these three animals will not be slaughtered, hence.
Inscription 2: In all the dominions of King Ashoka, even on the frontiers and in the territories of the Cholas, Pandiyas, Satiyaputra, Keralaputra, even up to Tambraparni, and in the domains of the Greek King Antiochus and his neighbors, everywhere King Ashoka has arranged for two kinds of treatments, of men and of animals. And those medicinal herbs that are beneficial to men and animals have been brought, and are planted wherever they did not exist. Roots and fruits too have been brought, and planted wherever they did not exist. On the highways, wells have been dug and trees planted, for the use of men and animals.
Inscription 3: King Ashoka says thus: Twelve years after my coronation have I ordered thus! Everywhere in my dominions (administrative officers) will embark on tours of inspection every five years, for the inculcation of morality and other such works. (They will instruct my subjects that) obedience to father and mother is excellent, liberality to friends, acquaintances and kinsmen, to Brahmins and ascetics is excellent; excellent is abstention from the slaughter of animals; and abstemiousness and few possessions are excellent. The Council will also order the officers to enforce these, both in the letter and spirit.
4: For a long time in the past, for many hundreds of years, have increased the sacrificial slaughter of animals, violence toward creatures, unfilial conduct toward kinsmen, improper conduct toward Brahmins and ascetics. Now, with the practice of morality by King Ashoka, the sound of war drums has become the call to morality. As has not come to pass for many hundreds of years, through the rescript of morality issued by King Ashoka, and by the exhibition of heavenly mansions, elephants, columns of fire and other heavenly forms, all this has increased, namely: the non-slaughter of animals for sacrificial purposes, non-violence toward beings, proper attention to kinsmen, proper attention to Brahmins and ascetics, the welfare of mother and father, the welfare of the aged, and many other kinds of moral behavior; all these have increased. This shall increase further. And the sons, grandsons and great grandsons of King Ashoka will further the practice of morality, until the very end of the universe, by standing firm in morality and character, and will instruct therein. That, indeed, is the best of deeds, namely, the inculcation of morality. For those lacking in character, the practice of morality is not possible. Hence good, verily, is the furtherance of morality and the decrease in immorality. For this purpose, this has been commanded to be written, that everyone shall exert for the progress of morality, and not for its decrease. This has been commanded to be written by King Ashoka, since he was crowned twelve years ago.
5: King Ashoka says thus: Benevolence is difficult; he who performs a benevolent act accomplishes something difficult. I have performed much that is benevolent. Benevolence shall also be practiced by my sons, my grandsons and their descendants, even until the very dissolution of the universe. But he who neglects even a part hereof, does evil. To commit sin, indeed, is easy.
In times past, formerly, there were no morality officers. Since I was crowned thirteen years ago, I have appointed morality officers. They are engaged with votaries of all faiths, for the firm establishment of morality, for its progress, for the happiness here and hereafter, of those who are devoted to morality. They are employed among the Greeks, Kambojas, Gandharas, Rashtrikas, Petenikas, and among the frontier peoples.
They are employed among the servants and masters, among Brahmins, the destitute and the aged, for their benefit and happiness, for the removal of hindrances for those devoted to morality. They are engaged in helping those incarcerated, in preventing harassment, and in securing release of those who have large families, or have been overwhelmed with calamity, or are old. Here in Pataliputra or elsewhere, they are employed in all towns, in all the harems of my brothers, and the establishments of my sisters and other kinsmen. They are employed among all those who are devoted to morality, or are established therein, everywhere in my dominions. For this purpose has this rescript on morality been written, that it may long endure, and that my subjects may practice it.
6: King Ashoka says thus: For a long time past, the speedy dispatch of business and reporting at all times, did not exist. That I have done. At all times, whether I am eating, or in the women’s apartments, or in the inner chambers, in the cattle-pen or riding, or in the garden, everywhere reporters are posted, so that they may inform me of the people’s business. Everywhere, I transact the people’s business. Whatever I command orally, whether it concerns a gift or a proclamation, or whatever that is entrusted to officers, or whenever there is an urgent matter in dispute, or a deliberation in the Council, the matter may be reported to me speedily, in all places and times. This I have commanded. I am never too satisfied with exertion or the dispatch of business. For I regard the welfare of the people as my chief duty. The basis of that is exertion, and the proper dispatch of public business. There is no other work more important than the welfare of all people. And why? For the discharge of my debt to the people, so that I may give happiness to some here, and win heaven hereafter. For this purpose, this rescript on morality has been written, that it may last long, that my sons, grandsons and great grandsons may exert for the welfare of the entire world. This is most difficult of accomplishment, except through strenuous effort.
7: King Ashoka desires that all sects may live everywhere. All of them desire restraint and purity of the mind. But men are of diverse desires and passions. They will practice all (points of their faith), or only a part. Even for a generous man, if he has not restraint, purity of mind, gratefulness, or steadfastness in faith, there is no greatness.
8: For a long time past, kings used to go on pleasure tours, such as hunting and other amusements. But since he was crowned ten years ago, King Ashoka went on a pilgrimage (to the place) of Enlightenment of the Lord. Therein his tour of piety comprised visits to Brahmins and ascetics, charity, and visits to the Elders (of the Buddhist Order), and gifts of gold, and visits to the country folk, instruction in the law or morality, and inquiries pertaining thereto. The pleasure thereof is great indeed, exceeding any other.
9: King Ashoka says thus: People perform many and diverse propitious ceremonies. In sickness, or the marriage of sons and daughters, or for the gift of a son, or for (safety in) a journey; in these and other matters, people perform diverse propitious ceremonies. And in this, wives and mothers particularly indulge in ceremonies that are useless and empty. But ceremonies would be performed, though such ceremonies are of little value. But that, indeed, is a very valuable ceremony, namely, the ceremony of morality. It comprises proper treatment of slaves and servants, respect toward teachers, restraint toward living beings, gifts to Brahmins and ascetics, these and many such others are the ceremony of morality. Now, therefore, this should be said by a father, or a son, or a master, or a husband, a friend or an acquaintance, or a neighbor. This is good; this is the kind of ceremony that should be performed apurpose.
And this too has been said: charity is good. There is no charity or favor (greater) than the gift of morality or the favor of morality. And in this, an acquaintance or a friend, or a kinsman, or a companion should instruct: this should be done, this is good. By this, heaven may be gained. What is more worthy of performing for the accomplishment of heaven, than this?
10: King Ashoka does not think glory or renown great, but the renown or glory he may acquire if the people hearken to and act upon the Law of Morality he has enjoined. For this alone King Ashoka wishes for glory and renown. Whatever exertion King Ashoka undertakes, it is solely for the hereafter. And what is that? That all may be without blemish. Blemish is sin. That indeed, is difficult of accomplishment by high or low, except through the highest exertion and renunciation of all possessions. But his is indeed most difficult, for one of high rank.
11: King Ashoka says thus: There is no gift like the gift of morality, praise of morality, sharing of morality, or kinship with morality. It comprises proper treatment of slaves and servants, proper support of mother and father, liberality to friends, relations and kinsmen, Brahmins and ascetics, non-slaughter of beings. This should be addressed by a father to his son, brother, or friend, relation or kinsman, or even by a neighbor: this is good, this should be done. Acting thus, he secures this world and the next, and acquires infinite merit, by that gift of morality.
12: King Ashoka honors all sectarians and those who have renounced household life, as well as householders, with liberality and honors of various kinds. But King Ashoka does not value gifts or honor for themselves. Why? For there should be growth of the Essential among all sects. That Essential is of many kinds. But the root of that is restraint in speech. Why? There should not be glorification of one’s own sect, and denunciation of the sect of others, for little or no reason. For all sects are worthy of reverence, for one reason or another. Acting thus, one helps grow one’s own sect, and does good to the other’s sect. Acting otherwise, he belittles his own sect and does ill to the sect of another. He who glorifies his own sect and denounces the sect of another, does so because of love for his own sect. And why? (That) his own sect may shine brighter. Acting thus, however, he harms his own sect. Harmony is good. Why? That people may listen to each other’s doctrine. This is the wish of King Ashoka. What is it? All sectarians may be learned in the lore of another, and fare well on the benevolent path. Those who are pleased with this, should speak thus. King Ashoka considers no liberality or honor greater that the growth of the Essential of all sects. For this purpose are engaged the morality officers, and officers in charge of women and herdsmen, and other groups. And this is its fruit: that one’s sect is advanced, and that moral truth is illumined.
13: Eight years after his coronation, King Ashoka conquered the Kalingas. In that (conquest), one hundred and fifty thousand people were deported, one hundred thousand were killed or maimed, and many times that number died. Thereafter, with the conquest of Kalinga, King Ashoka (adopted) the practice of morality, love of morality, and inculcation of morality. For there arose in King Ashoka remorse for the conquest of Kalinga. For when an unsubdued country is conquered, there occur such things as slaughter, death and the deportation of people, and these are regarded as very painful and serious by King Ashoka. Brahmins and ascetics live everywhere, as well as votaries of other sects, and householders who practice such virtues as support of mother and father, service to elders, proper treatment of friends, relatives, acquaintances and kinsmen and slaves and servants, and steadfastness in devotion to duties. They, too, suffer injury (separation from loved ones), slaughter and deportation of loved ones. And for those whose love is undiminished, their friends, acquaintances, relatives and kinsmen suffer calamity. And that is an injury to them. This plight of men is regarded as serious by King Ashoka. Outside of the territory of the Greeks, there is no land where communities such as those of Brahmins and ascetics are not to be found. Nor is there any land where men do not have faith in one sect or another.
Hence, whatever the number of men then killed or wounded and died and were deported at the annexation of Kalinga, a hundredth or a thousandth part, even, is regarded as serious by King Ashoka. Furthermore, if anyone does wrong, that person should be suffered, or pardoned. To the forest folk who live in the royal dominions of King Ashoka, it may be pointed out that the king, remorseful as he is, has the strength to punish wrongdoers who do not repent. For King Ashoka desires that all beings should be safe, self-restrained, tranquil in thought, and gentle.
King Ashoka considers the victory of morality as the greatest. And this victory has been accomplished by King Ashoka, up to all his frontiers, even to a distance of six hundred yjanas, where the Greek King Antiochus rules, and beyond Antiochus’ realm, in the dominions of the four kings called Ptolemy, Antigonus, Magus and Alexander, downwards into the dominions of the Cholas and Pandyas, even up to Tamraparni. Similarly, in the royal domains where live the Greeks, the Kambojas, Nabhaks, Nabhapantis, Bhojas, Pitinikas, Andhras and Paridas, everywhere people follow the instruction in morality by King Ashoka. And wherever the ambassadors of King Ashoka have fared, there, too, people hear of his moral acts, his teaching and his instruction on morality, and they follow morality, and will do so.
Whatever has been gained by this victory of morality, that has been pleasant. This happiness has been secured through the victory of morality, yet even that is not as great for King Ashoka, as the gain of the next world. For this purpose this rescript on morality has been written, that my sons and great grandsons should cease to think of new conquests, and in all the victories they may gain, they should be content with forbearance and slight punishment. For them, the true conquest should be that of morality; all their delight should be delight in morality, for benefit in this world and the next.
14: This rescript on morality has been commanded to be written by King Ashoka. Some of it is short, some medium-length, and other(s) extensive. Everything has not been given everywhere. For my dominions are large, wherein much has been commanded to be written and will be written. But some has been repeated again and again, for its very sweetness, for the people to follow it. In some places, it may be incorrectly written because of incompleteness, for want of space, or because of damage to the stone, or an error of the scribe.
Separate Rock Edict 1: By the command of King Ashoka, the Princes and high officers of Tosali are to be addressed thus: Whatever I perceive, that I desire to be put into practice by appropriate means. In this I hold my instruction to you, to be the principal instrument, for you are appointed over thousands of human beings, in the expectation that you will win the affection of all men. All men are my children. Just as I desire that my children fare well and be happy in this world and the next, I desire the same for all men ... You may not comprehend what all this means. Some individuals may understand this, but some may understand it only in part and not entirely. You must ensure this, that this policy is well carried out. There may be some who may suffer imprisonment or torture, and in some cases there may be imprisonment without due process, causing suffering and grief. In this you must follow a course of moderation in justice. But there may not be success, because of certain mental blemishes such as envy, the loss of balance, harshness, impatience, lack of application, sloth and weariness. But you must ensure that you do not display these blemishes. The basis of the whole matter lies in preventing the absence of loss of balance, and haste in the implementation of principles. He who is slothful is not likely to exert himself. But you must act, move ahead in your official duties. You must ensure this. And for this, you must be told: discharge the debt in this wise, King Ashoka advises. Compliance with these instructions will be very fruitful; non-compliance, harmful. Non-compliance will secure neither the next world, nor the service of the king. And why do I emphasize this so much? For your compliance will win you the next world, and you will discharge your debt to me.
This proclamation must be made on the Tishya constellation days, and in the interval between the Tishya days, and may be read aloud even to a single person. Acting in this wise, you will obey my instructions. This Edict has been inscribed for this purpose, that the town officers may exert themselves always, that none be imprisoned or tortured without due process. To ensure this, I shall dispatch the high officers on tours of inspection every five years, who are neither harsh nor wrathful, and are efficient and honest in their acts, for they will know my intent and act accordingly. The Prince at Ujjayini, however, shall send out similar inspection teams every three years. This holds true for Takshashila, too. The high officers on their tours of duty, will perform their functions in the awareness of my instructions.
Separate Rock Edict 2: (Beginning text is similar to Separate Rock Edit 1) ... The unsubdued frontier peoples may wonder what the king designs for them. But my desire toward them is that they should understand that the king will forgive them, as far as it is possible to forgive. For my sake, they should practice the Law of Morality and win this world and next. For this, I instruct you thus. This is the way to make you understand my will, my resolve and promise, and discharge my debt to the people. Thus should you act. The people must be assured, so that they may think that the king is to us even as a father, he feels for us even as he feels for himself, for we are to him even as his children. My resolve is firm and so is my promise, and I command unto you my will and my instruction. My messengers and special officers will contact you soon. For you are able to assure the frontier peoples, and ensure their welfare in this world and next. Acting thus, you will gain the next world and discharge your debt to me. For this purpose has this Edict been commanded to be written, that my high officers may engage themselves for all the future, in inspiring the frontier peoples and making them advance in the Law of Morality. This should be proclaimed by recitation, on the Tishya day in all seasons and months, and also in the intervals. On special occasions, it may be recited even to one person. Acting in this wise, you will comply with my instructions.
Minor Rock Edict 1: From Suvarnagiri, by order of the Prince and high officers, the high officers of Isila are to be wished well and addressed as follows: for more than two and one-half years since I have been a lay-devotee, I have not been exerting myself energetically. But for over a year since I approached the Order, I have been exerting myself strenuously. In this time, men who were separate from the gods in Jambudvipa have now mingled with them. This, verily, is the result of exertion. And this may be accomplished, not by the great alone. For even a smaller man through his exertion can accomplish the great heaven. For this purpose this message is proclaimed: that the great and small alike may exert themselves, that even the frontier peoples may know about it, and that such great exertion may long endure. This will increase and further increase, at least one and one-half times.
And for this purpose this must be written on rocks. This must be spread all over your jurisdiction. This proclamation I have made while on a tour for 256 nights.
Minor Rock Edict 2: King Ashoka says this: Mother and Father must be shown due respect; likewise the elders; proper regard for living beings must be firmly established, truth must be spoken. These values of morality must be propounded: pupils must honor teachers; kinsmen must be well regarded. This is the ancient law of long duration; this must be practiced. Written by the scribe Chapada.
Bairat Stone Inscription: Ashoka, the Magadhan King salutes the (Buddhist) Order, and wishes them good health and comfort.
Sirs, you are aware of my reverence and faith in the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Saga. Whatever has been said by the Lord Buddha has been well said. However, Reverend Sirs, it occurs to me that the good doctrine may long endure, the following passages of the good doctrine may be especially pointed out, to wit: The Vinaya Glorified, the Powers of the Elect, the Dangers of the Unknown, the Song of the Sage, the Discourse on Seclusion, the Question of Upatishya, the Advice to Rahula on Falsehood spoken by the Lord Buddha. I desire that many monks and nuns may listen to and meditate upon these, and so should the male and female lay-devotees. For this purpose, Sirs, I cause this to be written, in order that people may know my wishes.
Barabar Hill Cave Inscriptions: Since he was crowned twelve years ago, King Ashoka gave this Banyan Cave to Ajivikas.
Since he was crowned twelve years ago King Ashoka gave this cave in the Khalatika Mountain to the Ajivikas.
Since he was crowned nineteen years ago King Ashoka declares: “I have given this cave in the very pleasant Khalatika Mountain.”
Samchi-Sarnath-Kaushambi Edict: To the high officials (of Pataliputra and Kaushambi), this is the command of King Ashoka: “I have united the Order. No one, monk or nun, shall split the Order. Whosoever, monk or nun, causes a schism in the Order, shall be made to wear white garments and expelled from the community.” This command should be proclaimed to the Order of the monks and nuns. King Ashoka says this: such an order must be posted on the highways within your jurisdiction. A copy of this should be made available to the lay-devotees. On the fasting days, the lay-devotees should familiarize themselves with this order. Within your jurisdiction, you should expel the schismatic. Similarly, you must ensure the expulsion of the schismatic in all forts and districts, in accordance with this command.
It is my desire that during the times of my sons and great grandsons, even so long as the sun and the moon endure, the Order may live completely united.
Kandahar Inscription (Greek version): Ten years after his coronation, King Ashoka instructed the people in morality. After that, he made the people practice morality more and more.
There is prosperity in all the world.
The king refrains from violence to living beings, as do the others, and even the hunters and fishermen refrain from killing.
Those that were unrestrained have practiced restraint, as much as it was possible for them to do.
Obedience to father and mother and elders has in the past led to a better life, and will do so in future, with the practice of the rules given above.
Kandahar Inscription (Aramaic version):
Ten years after his coronation King Ashoka began to follow the true pattern of life. After that, evil decreased for all men, and misfortune disappeared due to the exertion of the king.
There was peace and happiness all over the earth. And this also happened, namely: the few animals that were slaughtered for royal food have not been slaughtered, and even the fishermen have been commanded to desist from fishing.
Those who were unrestrained, now practice restraint. There is obedience to father and mother and elders, as ordained, and all those devoted to morality live confidently.
All of this has benefited all men, and will do so in future.
Rummindie Pillar Inscription: Here worshipped King Ashoka when he was crowned twenty years ago, for here was born the Buddha, the sage of the Shakyas. A figure of an elephant and a stone pillar were set up. And because the Blessed One was born here, the village of Lumbini was exempted from taxes and partook of prosperity.
Nigali Sager Pillar Inscription: Since he was crowned fourteen years ago, King Ashoka enlarged the Stupa of the former Buddha Konagamana for the second time. And after twenty years since he was crowned, he came here in person to offer worship and set up a stone pillar.
Queen’s Edict: By the command of King Ashoka, the high officials everywhere are to be addressed thus. Whatever gift is given by the Second Queen, to wit: mango-grove, garden, or almshouse, or any other, is to be regarded as her gift. These must be reckoned as the gifts of the Second Queen Kuruvaki, the mother of Tivara.
Pillar Edict 1: King Ashoka says thus: This rescript on morality has been commended to be written by me, since I was crowned twenty-six years ago. Happiness in this world and the next is difficult to achieve, except through utmost devotion to morality, keen introspection, complete obedience, fear of evil, and great exertion. Now, because of my instruction, this reliance on morality and devotion to it have increased daily, and will increase. My officers, too, whether of the highest, the middling, or of low rank, must follow my instruction and practice it, so that they may encourage the weak or hesitant as much as they can. Similarly the high officers of the frontiers must act. And this should be the norm of conduct, that administration must conform to morality, that legislation should be according to morality; this alone can make people happy according to morality, and protect them according to the law of morality.
Pillar Edict 2: King Ashoka says thus: Morality is good. But what is morality? Few blemishes, much merit; compassion, liberality, truth and purity. Of my gifts there are many kinds, for I have given the gift of eyes (truth), and I have conferred many benefits on bipeds and quadrupeds alike, even unto birds and creatures that live in the waters, even to the extent of the gift of life. And I have done benevolent deeds of many other kinds. For this purpose this rescript on morality is commanded to be written, that it may be acted upon and may last long. He who accomplishes this, does good.
Pillar Edict 3: King Ashoka says thus: One sees only good actions; I have done this good deed. One does not see evil; I have done this evil, or that this is a blemish. These are difficult to notice. But one should see this: that anger, ruthlessness, wrath, pride, envy, all these result in evil. May these not cause my degradation. And this must be seen especially, this is beneficial to me, in this world and the next.
Pillar Edict 4: King Ashoka says thus: Since I was crowned twenty-six year ago, I have commanded this rescript on morality to be written. My officers are appointed (to rule) over many hundreds of thousands of people. I have given them freedom in judging cases and inflicting punishments. Why? Because these officers must function fearlessly and confidently, and strive to ensure the benefit and happiness of city people and country folk; that they shall show favor to people, and comprehend what caused happiness or suffering to them. And they shall instruct the city people and the country folk in the principles of morality, so that a beneficial here and hereafter may be ensured. These officers are keen to serve me, and will instruct their agents about my intentions. And they shall inform the officers about the ways in which the officers may act to please me. For even as a man who has given over his child to the care of a skillful nurse says, “the skillful nurse is energetic enough to look after my child’s happiness;” so the officers have been appointed to ensure the benefit and happiness of the country folk, in the expectation that they may perform their functions fearlessly, confidently, quietly, and without distraction. For this I have granted my officers freedom in judging cases and inflicting punishments.
This much is desirable. And what is that? Equality in judicial proceedings and equality in penalties. And henceforth, this is my rule: that to those in prison, condemned to death, a grace period of three days has been granted by me. For during this time, their kinsmen will urge them to ponder over the possibility of sparing their life; or in case there is none to do this, then to meditate, give charity, or perform acts of fasting for the next life. For this is my desire: that even in this short time, they may serve the next world, and that among people, the practice of morality of various kinds may grow, to wit: self-restraint and the distribution of charity.
Pillar Edict 5: King Ashoka says thus: Since I was crowned twenty-six years ago, I have made inviolate the species, to wit: parrots, starlings, arunas, brahmany ducks, wild geese, nandimukhas, gelatas, bats, queen ants, terrapins, boneless fish, vedaveyakas, gangapuputakas, skate, turtles, squirrels, Borasting stags, Brahmany bulls, rhinoceros, white pigeons, common pigeons, all quadrupeds that are not in use or are not eaten. Similarly she-goats, ewes and sows, whether young or milch, are inviolable; also young ones within six months of age, are not to be killed. Cocks must not be caponed. Husks with living things in them, must not be burnt. Forests must not be burnt, just for mischief or to destroy living things in them. Life must not be fed on life. On the three seasonal full moon days, and on full moon days of the month of Tichya, for three days in each instance, to wit: the fourteenth and fifteenth days of the first half of the lunar month, and the first day of the second half of the lunar month, as well as on fast days through the whole year, fish must not be killed or sold. During these days, in the elephant-forests and fishponds, no other species of animal must be destroyed.
On the eighth day, the fourteenth day and the fifteenth day in each fortnight, as well as on the Tishya and Punarvasu days, no bulls must be castrated, nor must goats, rams, boars or other animals be castrated.
On the Tishya and Punarvasu days, on the seasonal full-moon days, and during the fortnight of the seasonal full moons, horses and kine must not be branded. Since I was crowned twenty-six years ago, I have granted twenty-five jail deliveries.
Pillar Edict 6: King Ashoka says thus: Since I was crowned twenty-two years ago, I have commanded rescripts on morality to be written for the benefit and happiness of the world, so that the giving up of old ways may lead to the advancement of morality. This do I desire, the benefit and happiness of the world. To wit, I may accomplish the happiness and welfare of some of my relatives and persons near and far, for which I may provide accordingly. In the same manner, I regard all communities. I have honored all sects by diverse acts of worship. But this is the chief thing, namely, personal attention to the needs of the people. Since I was crowned twenty-six years ago, I have commanded this rescript on morality to be written.
Pillar Edict 7: King Ashoka says thus: In times past, Kings used to desire thus. How shall we make the people progress in morality? But the people did not progress appropriately in morality. But how may the people be encouraged to act so that they progress in morality? In what way can I help at least some of them to progress in morality? In this King Ashoka says thus. “This occurred to me. I shall cause the proclamation of morality to be proclaimed; I shall cause instruction in morality to be given so that people may practice it, and will advance themselves in it, and thus will grow mightily the law of morality.”
For this purpose proclamations on morality have been made, instructions of diverse kinds in morality commanded so that my agents, appointed to rule a multitude of people, may expound and expand my teachings. My officers, too, set over many hundreds of thousands of men, have also been commanded by me thus: Instruct in this, and thus the people (will be) devoted to morality.
King Ashoka says thus: With this very intention, have I set up monuments to morality, appointed morality officers, and caused proclamations of morality.
King Ashoka says thus: On the highways, banyan trees have been planted so that they may afford shade to men and animals, mango-groves have been planted, wells have been dug at an interval of every half a kos, resting places have been set up, watering places have been established, for the benefit of animals and men. But the joy thereof has been slight indeed. In many ways, kings in the past, as well as I, have attempted to comfort the world. I have done this in the desire that they may practice morality.
King Ashoka says thus: My morality officers have engaged themselves in acts of royal benevolence in diverse ways. They are engaged among those who have renounced the world, as well as the householders, and among all sects. I have ordered them to be engaged in the welfare of the Order, and also the welfare of Brahmins, Ajivikas, Nigranthas and other sects.
These high officers will engage themselves in their diverse and respective duties, whereas the morality officers are engaged specifically among all denominations, in addition to other duties.
King Ashoka says thus: These, and many other officers, are engaged in distribution of royal charity, on my account as well as on the Queen’s account, and in all the royal households, here and in the provinces; also in dispensing charity on behalf of my sons and other princes, so as to promote meritorious acts and encourage the practice of morality; so that compassion, generosity, truth, mindfulness, gentleness and goodness will progress among mankind.
King Ashoka says thus: Whatever good I have done, has indeed been accomplished for the progress and welfare of the world. By these shall grow virtues, namely: proper support of mother and father, regard for preceptors and elders, proper treatment of Brahmins and ascetics, of the poor who are destitute, slaves and servants.
King Ashoka says thus: Men have been enabled to progress in morality by two means, namely: by moral regulation and persuasion. But regulations are of little effect, whereas persuasion is of higher efficacy.
I have made diverse moral regulations, such as declaring classes of being inviolate; and many other kinds of moral regulations have I promulgated. By persuasion I have accomplished the growth of morality among men, through non-violence and the non-slaughter of creatures. That has been done for this purpose, namely: in the time of my sons and grandsons, even as long as the sun and moon endure, this shall be practiced. Doing this, this world and the next may be secured. Since I was crowned twenty-seven years ago, have I commanded this rescript on morality to be written.
King Ashoka says thus: Wherever there are stone pillars or slabs, there these rescripts on morality must be inscribed, so that it may long endure.
- LEARNING TO DANCE -
How can we escape from WeaponWorld? That may seem simple in theory but well-nigh impossible in practice. Prior peace practices have been hopelessly lame. Given the depth of our weapons indoctrination, a present-day struggle for World Peace might seem naïve, impractical and illusory — in short, “utopian.”
Consider the abilities of a cat. As its senses feed its brain, its sensory input and muscular output are in such fluid harmony that its bearing is a delight to behold by anyone except its next prey.
Now, let’s shift to pre-industrial times. Only a rich philosopher had enough spare time and instruction to condense the sparse data content of his day. If he craved exotic knowledge, he could wander the world at enormous expense and peril and, during a brief lifetime, come across rare wise men and records collections within a few hundred miles of home. If he wanted a ditch dug, he could order costly slaves to sweat it out over primitive tools.
The skills of that ancient philosopher had advanced somewhat beyond those of a cat — let’s say by thousands of times. Others had to obey his commands, even beyond the range of his perception and control. Cats ignore such imperatives. Spoken and written commands, slaves and primitive tools multiplied the philosopher’s muscle power much more than his brain power. He could maintain a balance of sorts between muscle-power and brainpower, but his task would become more and more difficult.
A modern philosopher can read and converse all her life, somewhat lengthier on average. Enhanced transportation, communication and memory devices supplement her skills. Thanks to these gadgets, she can sort through vast sheaves of information with relative ease. All this input takes time, however; quite a lot of it compared to our slightly longer lifespan. And all too few of us are (Learners) doing it.
Even though the human population has exploded, our philosophers have not kept pace. They keep mangling the same platitudes of antiquity, the way a cat would toy with its prey, awaiting its shock-coma to tear it to pieces.
Just as weapon cults used to paralyze private thought, our weapons ideologies freeze our mind today. When it comes to doing good and uprooting evil, we are like track stars, frozen in our cleats but anticipating a sudden burst of speed.
When it comes to brute muscle power, we’ve made real progress. As to mechanical power, we can out-muscle most of the ancients by thousands of times. A brief day’s journey to the other side of the planet costs us less than a month’s average wage. We can hoist tons of building material two thousand feet in the air and even launch it into orbit. From their point of view, only gods could contemplate deeds of strength we consider routine.
And our foremost developments are still those of war. Sitting behind a machine-gun today, any weakling could batter their triremes and elite armored phalanxes – the most brilliant expressions of their social and mechanical skill – into so much driftwood, scrap bronze and chopped meat.
Can you spot the imbalance here? The cat has a cat’s brain (x cerebral power) in a cat’s body (y muscular power). For all intents and purposes, x = y.
Our ancient philosopher could call on thousands of units of brainpower and a million of muscle power: x = ~1,000 y. Currently, each of us disposes of a hundred thousand units of brainpower (much more concentrated in memory aids and communication devices in addition to enhanced (?) mass education; about the same basic smarts) versus a billion units of muscle power. x = 10,000 y.
Assuming the cat’s faculties are in balance, our civilization acts like an elephant’s body under the control of a cockroach’s brain — or a fritzing network of seven billion miswired sub-brains in “control” of a global, motorized colossus.
A beast endowed with such a tiny brain compared to its monstrous muscle power would sicken without realizing it, break its bones while out on a stroll and starve to death in the middle of a farmer’s market. It couldn’t ward off a mosquito. Its organs would glut or starve out, without it noticing anything amiss.
Admit it: the whole world is built along those lines and reacts that way.
Worse yet, its cockroach brain would be too troubled by momentous crises to address its underlying problem: the widening gap between its gnatlike brainpower and its blue whale brawn.
Having addressed one or two problems with convulsive violence, it will be tempted to solve every future one with equivalent doses of brutality if not more. For a man wielding a hammer and nothing else, every problem becomes a nail.
We refuse to tune our Learning (nerve) networks to our mechanical (muscle) capabilities. Thus the balanced dialogue between a cat’s musculature and its nervous system degenerates into a Riot Act read out bull horn loud by short-sighted elites perched on Olympian heights, down at the roaring mob crushed far below.
One solution might offer some promise: implant an elephant’s brain in its near-empty skull, and watch it dance like the ones in the movie Fantasia! Rewire the world for greater brainpower. We’ll be amazed by the boost of our wisdom: how many big problems will shrink to small ones and small ones will disappear once we’ve rewired the planet for more smarts.
“Intelligence”: another term perverted into its antonym by weapon mentality: “corrosive military and corporate secrets.”
To our utmost ability, we must harmonize the global dialogue between nervous input and muscular output. Tremendous efficiencies could emerge, once new perceptual networks begin overseeing large-scale (superhuman) activities. Such networks will improve beyond imagining our laughable standards of living.
What does this mean in plain English? Multiply peaceable dialogs a thousand-fold and reduce warlike talk in proportion. By puberty, grant every child on Earth a Master’s Degree in self-directed studies. Adapt to this task every modern communication system we've perfected for mutual slaughter. Multiply this new peace technology by thousands of times.
“The preferred militaristic way of utilizing the mass feeling of insecurity, is by raising a scare, preferably that of a threatened invasion and maintaining that a danger exists which none but expert generals can gauge. Since history is not written along such lines, it cannot be said how often the raising of such a scare has reason behind it. But it can be said that it is a permanent trick of any permanent military bureaucracy, early or late.” Alfred Vagts, A History of Militarism, Greenwich Editions, p. 341.
Weapon mentality claims dominance by crying wolf about massive threats looming in from beyond the home membrane. The solution? Get rid of most of those membranes and substitute them with a single one that holds everyone within it. Fewer threats will emerge if no battle elites remain outside to break in. Any of those remaining will be a police problem that calls for a thoughtful response, not a crushing, military one.
Constructive expenditures instead of destructive ones — simply smarter and less clumsy. Do you follow?
How? Again, the key lies in communications. Where one telephone line exists, install a network. Where the mail comes once a week, once a day. Where public libraries already exist, double their funding and merge them into a global information network. Where they don’t exist, install superior ones.
Every national government should sponsor a free web page that translates any text to and from its native language. This would require selective translation and re-translation several times until the translation re-translated mirrored the original text. Otherwise, retranslate it a different way until it works.
We should converse in peace, like civilized beings, instead of tearing at each other like dumb beasts. The worse the regional fighting, the greater the need to multiply its communications. In the meantime, ethnic and religious antagonists should be subdivided into separate states until they can resume their civilized ways.
Note the converse – replacing worthwhile media with monologue propaganda of lesser value – in populations rich and poor alike. American cities (if they’re big, rich and lucky enough) have only one daily newspaper in print, whereas almost all them, big and small, used to have several. Community radio broadcasters are hunted down like criminals or tangled up in red tape, while corporate mega-casters consolidate their media monopoly thanks to federal giveaways. Access to overpriced computers shrinks for the poor, even as the rich build up the Internet and prop up obsolete video networks with expensive, state-of-the-art broadband technologies. Well, “state-of-the-art” is a relative term. Given the tempo of technological development, once you’ve built it, it is already obsolete.
The Federal Communication Commission’s love affair with HDTV (high definition television) is a good example. Conversion to digital TV hardware and software will make prices soar on both the broadcasting and receiving ends of this info pipeline. Independent and community TV broadcasters will go under. The quality of content will drop in favor of more and more insistent commercials. Only giant network corporations will stand to gain from this cultural decay. The problems associated with media monopoly by a few corporations and their opinion spinners will only worsen – their profits redoubled by extra charges to private subscribers of cable and satellite services, as well as those imposed on corporate advertisers – thanks to the FCC’s top-down burden of a new-fangled technology that’s redundant, at least until overall content has improved in proportion.
If we clog these high-tech media with nothing more than the promotional garbage we’ve grown accustomed to, every communication breakthrough will go to waste. Optimal communications systems would welcome the best content available, not just the latest broadcast hardware. Divergent opinions should be heard, serious reflection should outweigh conventional propaganda; eccentric ideas merit fair hearing. How else can we expect progress? Cultural stagnation is guaranteed otherwise.
Every tribe and nation should get access to political expression and self-determination. These rights should become inalienable, based on constitutional guarantees backed by overwhelming force and an irrefutable, global consensus. If we do not do this from a sense of fairness, we should do so to reduce negative fallouts from “revolutionary liberation movements” that no army can eradicate.
No weapon state merits sovereignty based on nothing more than its monopoly of local firepower. In this case as in most others, we should deliver justice — simply because it would be easier to administer in the long run, safer and more profitable than its denial for whatever reason.
We could establish Learning Casinos: lavish recreational facilities where game masters, programmers, graphic artists and contestants will gather to create and play video arcade games, virtual reality simulations, gambling, card and board games, theatric and interactive simulations in forms transcending current understanding.
Those who produce these scenarios will find all the adulation and reward they seek — much the way painters of the Italian Renaissance did, playwrights in Shakespeare’s London, classical music composers in Vienna and cinematographers during the 20th Century. For a preliminary sketch of these new games, see Marc Prensky’s book, Digital Game-Based Learning, McGraw-Hill, New York, 2001.
Social problems will be played-through for innovative solutions. Political simulations will familiarize voters with complex social issues. Learners will sign up for critical judgment scenarios — personal or sociological, mundane matters or those of life and death, on scales of play micro-, macro- and cosmic.
According to a Chinese proverb, it takes ten thousand war dead to establish a general’s reputation. Contestants at these new Casinos will deepen their understanding at far less expense: their ruinous mistakes will only produce “paper” consequences. Virtual reality software and interactive videos will simulate a vast array of alternative probabilities. Outlandish social proposals will be gamed publicly to review their long-term outcomes in detail. Players will root out weaknesses, misconceptions, unintended consequences and miscreant loopholes. All those results will be matters of public record, subject to scientific research.
Learner Casinos could run a “probability stock exchange” (first described in John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider: one of many of his brilliant proposals I’ve included in Learner). There, as part of the world’s rewired neural network, contestants would predict social trends as a profitable spectator sport. Such Casinos may coordinate their activities with Learning Networks, World Militias, Renaissance Learning Centers and other administrative functions: some suggested in this book and many more yet to come.
Real prosperity is a pipe dream until everyone expects personal abundance and dependable security as a matter of course. The poor among us deserve a comfortable existence and the yearly income it would take. Honest folk should feel safer and more secure every day. After that, the most ambitious people may supplement that wealth by five to fifteen times (or perhaps more) without additional harm. Communal wealth will multiply indefinitely, provided it were shared equitably.
Once global peace investment outstrips prior investments of the weapon kind, the price of essentials will drop altogether. Great surpluses of capital will accumulate, with which to turn the Solar System into a giant industrial/technological/science complex and the Earth into Eden: an ideal place to learn to dance.
- SUNKEN EDUCATION, FLOATING ARMCHAIR
“We psychologists typically construct tasks or tests to separate the children who can from those who cannot, the former then being labeled ‘smarter’ or ‘more mature. The ideal curriculum-maker – like Socrates instructing the slave in the Meno – arranges things in such a way that everybody will understand, all will be among the ‘cans’ rather than the ‘cannots.’” Jerome Bruner, In Search of Mind, p. 181.
Did Socrates intend to convey anything useful to the slave in Meno? Was it the Pythagorean Theorem? Such a difficult lesson to follow without the accompanying sand diagram. Plus a gross exploitation, to boot. What brilliance is there in the simple deduction that a clever slave can be taught a complex idea? Note how Socrates turned his back on someone he had just confirmed was a worthy student. Golden Age brilliance, indeed!
Aristotle’s take on slavery in The Politics shows what intellectual brambles thoughtful people must cross to adhere to the info elite. His babble, echoed below, recalls the fatal flaws slaveholders crammed into the American Constitution. Their “strict interpretation” successors hide their psychopathy behind rumbling vocabularies and prestigious job titles. Such blatant dishonesty, repeated so often and so authoritatively without regret, is the most insidious habit of weapon mentality. Despite the abolition of slavery, the slavers were never removed from power.
“We may thus conclude that all men who differ from others as much as the body differs from the soul, or an animal from a man (and this is the case with all whose function is bodily service, and who produce their best when they supply such service) — all such are by nature slaves, and it is better for them, on the very same principle as in the other cases just mentioned, to be ruled by a master. A man is thus by nature a slave if he is capable of becoming (and this is the reason why he also actually becomes) the property of another, and if he participates in reason to the extent of apprehending it in another, though destitute of it himself. Herein he differs from animals, which do not apprehend reason, but simply obey their instincts. But the use which is made of the slave diverges but little from the use made of tame animals; both he and they supply their owner with bodily help in meeting his daily requirements.
“But it is nature’s intention also to erect a physical difference between the body of the freeman and that of the slave, giving the latter the strength for the menial duties of life, but making the former upright in carriage and (though useless for physical labor) useful for the various purposes of civil life – a life which tends, as it develops, to be divided into military service and the occupations of peace. The contrary of nature’s intention, however, often happens: there are some slaves who have the bodies of freemen – as there are others who have a freeman’s soul. But if nature’s intention were realized – if men differed from one another in bodily form as much as the statues of the gods – it is obvious that we should all agree that the inferior class ought to be the slaves of the superior. And if this principle is true when the difference is one of the body, it may be affirmed with still greater justice when the difference is one of soul; though it is not as easy to see the beauty of the soul, as it is to see that of the body.
“It is thus clear that, just as some are by nature free, so others are by nature slaves, and for these latter the condition of slavery is both beneficial and just.”
Taken from Mitchell Cohen and Nicole Fermon, eds., Princeton Readings of Political Thought: Essential Texts since Plato, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, pp. 112-113.
Much like two thousand years of false science, Aristotle and his fans imposed two thousand years of misleading politics. One of these days, someone will tell me why a hundred generations of Learners had to ingest and regurgitate this hogwash. Why, in all the writings of ancient Greece and Rome, none survive that call for universal freedom (except the fables of Aesop). Why no trace remains of classical writings that declared slavery a scandal and called for the brotherhood of humankind — the literary equivalent of servile revolt like that of Spartacus?
Who dares suggest that human brotherhood might have been an offshoot of Christianity or some more recent religious monotheism or ideological unitruth? That ancient people did not understand that everyone belongs to the same family since human comprehension began? That wise and generous spirits wrote on this topic ever since writing began? Whether they hailed from ancient Greece or elsewhere, they concluded that slavery was unjustifiable and forbidden by natural law — denying the econologic of slave masters and their historical scribbles children have been forced to study ever since.
Moral imperatives against slavery were just as apparent to them, then, as they are to us today. Idealistic adolescents argued with their parents about them, then, just as they do today about current social problems. Ethical philosophers were just as numerous (indeed, more so) than the brilliant hypocrites we worship in school: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, among others.
The Golden Rule never held a patent date. God and good parents always taught their children to treat others like themselves, since human understanding awoke.
Where did the teachings of moral superiors go? Into the flaming maw of weapon mentality, that’s where.
Weapon management rejects the findings of the gifted; it dictates that tiny elites publicize nonsense, censor valid information and lie outright. Most info proletarians never get to develop their God-given talents. Call it slavery, call it being a peasant or “choosing” to serve as a third class stoker of the Jive Drive — it has always boiled down to the same thing: info proletarian lock-down.
Info elites are no smarter than their host proletarians. On the contrary, elites pick their replacements from among the proletarians, for orthodoxy, combativeness as demonstrated in sport and battle, and loyalty through blood ties to the info elite — not exceptional brilliance or compassion. Those whose empathy is stunted enough to satisfy weapon requirements have little use for compassion, much less for the compassionate.
The academic community pigeonholes likely candidates for the info elite. Career educators eject gifted peace mentors. Idealistic young teacher burnouts personify this triage: their idealism and compassion sacrificed on the altar of weapon regimentation. For details, see Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America, by Page Smith, Viking Penguin, Harmonsworth, England, 1990. Like the work you are reading, it could find no publisher in America: way too seditious and pertinent.
Picture the Earth as the local lobe of a cosmic brain. On this lobe (the anthrosphere), billions of human neurons interact through more or less effective or defective networks that can only accommodate a few hundred million human “cells” in real comfort at current levels of peace incompetence.
First off, proper nutrition seldom reaches each cell. Many people have a hard time merely subsisting from day to day. The rest of us compensate our misery with shameless over-indulgence, even though the quality of our ample food supplies is dubious. Starving for rare micronutrients, we stuff on bulk GMOs and “anti-health food.”
The Earth produces enough good nutrition for everyone; it has always done so, barring catastrophe. Yet our distribution networks are so shabby, the world’s population splits into thirds. The first, with its pandemic obesity, diabetes-inducing addictions, obscene pets and pathetic meat livestock: vastly overstuffed; the next, underfed; the third, starving. In other words, those provided with enough clean water, with just enough water borderline potable, or with bad water and not enough of it.
We’re exhausting the Earth's fertility; yet half the food we produce goes to waste. And we make no effort to exploit those wasteful pests (bacteria, fungi, molds, insects and vermin) as sustainable, high-protein food sources.
This hypothetical planetary organism suffers from perpetual stroke, its heart is in partial arrest and its frame flails between overgrowth and necrosis. Many poor adults find just enough food to get by: their vulnerable children are more or less starved and poisoned from conception. Childhood starvation and pollution undermine youthful Learning in rich and poor nations alike.
If everyone of good will rallied behind a good plan, (the way polio was eradicated until resurgent fundamentalists and Western neo-Gestapo agents reversed this achievement) everyone on Earth could be fed, housed and cared for properly. That policy would be a thousand times more clear-cut and profitable than managing the poverty-stricken world war all of us have prepared for so meticulously.
Think about that.
Second, our thought processes are hopelessly muddled and our learning tools, outdated. Even “educated” majorities take much too long to assimilate new ideas: a full generation or longer, assuming they bother at all. Occasionally, popular culture adopts ideas more advanced than what the status quo dogma allows (gun control, untampered elections). It has begun to challenge the absolute value of 19th Century science otherwise frozen in place. Info elites often retain ideas well beyond their useful shelf life.
Trump and his anti-truth supporters accuse the news media of not favoring pro-Trump propaganda. Nowadays, there is a lot of talk about “fake news” and how to resist it. No-one seems to care that lovers of truth set themselves up for this ambush by not calling the media to task for its rejection of the truth in the recent past. From 1990 until 1994, a weekly magazine called The Lies of our Times listed falsehoods, inaccuracies and deliberate omissions in the New York Times, the “newspaper of record for the country.
Let’s discuss the Armchair Formula.
Within each of us, random ideas surface to our consciousness. We retain those ideas – no matter how brilliant – about as briefly as the memory of a dream. We must reinforce them right away so that they register into long-term memory. Otherwise, they are forgotten and return to the collective superconscience for retrieval at some more favorable time, perhaps by someone better prepared to receive them.
This is the case for our most fundamental definition of reality. If solitary confinement or sensory deprivation cut us off overlong from reality, we go insane.
It is difficult to find a specialist or document to repeat, deny or confirm some transient thought; almost as difficult for scholars as for anyone else. Pinning down a slippery new idea often turns into a confusing, dismissive chore.
Go ahead and try it. Sit down in a good armchair and come up with some insight novel and arcane. Then get up, go find someone, some book, class or recording to repeat, elaborate, confirm or challenge your inspiration. How long did it take you? Hours? Days? In most cases, especially with truly innovative thought, it would take longer than the few moments your short-term memory retained the original idea.
The best scholars shorten this time-delay in any way they can. They cultivate special study skills, document collections and peer information networks; they hoard reference sources and information contacts. That way, they can confirm or deny the latest ideas as soon as they get up from their armchair or faster by computer, by telephone or in person.
I call this process the Armchair Formula. Only a few thousand tenured professors and intelligence clerks operate under optimized Armchair Formulas. Even college students lack the means, motive and opportunity to research freely.
The World Wide Web has just started to refine this Armchair Formula. Their refinement will benefit everyone privileged enough to gain access to the WWW. That portends well for Learner transformation, whether or not we grasp its long-term benefits. Predictably, that’s been the least publicized and least capitalized benefit of the Web, the one we’ve taken the least advantage of: crowd sourcing.
Especially nowadays, Learners must satisfy many certification criteria before they’re encouraged to learn. University obstacle courses bristle with monetary and geographic hurdles, arbitrary credentials, certifications and performance criteria. Every step of an academic career must be negotiated, up to and including the “highest” rungs of scholarship and tenure.
Academia is not so much interested in “what” you want to learn, as “why” and “how” it gets taught. If you seek its services, your knowledge will have to serve some other purpose: status, moneymaking, job placement and propaganda manipulation. Instead of enhancing intellect, college professors erode it. They bury each student’s interests in compulsory trivia until ultimate studies are reduced to a sub-sub-subtopic research thesis.
The academic community erects massive barriers between itself and the laity. Amateur scholars have a hard time keeping up with the professional scholars of any given topic. Decades of secondary studies (for the most part a total waste of time) must be certified in order to achieve a student-teacher relationship with relevant scholars. A Learner cannot access information she needs unless she commits years of study to one avenue of research. From then on, she must submit the fruits of her zeal to the whims of academic superiors.
Universities are intellectual catacombs. Most research is buried there, never to see the light of day again. Admitted, most of it isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on — in conformity with the general rule: “95% of everything is crap.”
"… but in every era and every country and every category, evil swarms and the good is rare." Voltaire, Romans et contes, « Le monde comme il va », Garnier Flamarion, Paris, 1966, p. 104.
Some of it might prove to be more valuable if it were granted more careful consideration. And a lot of precious research is nipped in the bud before it can be undertaken. Catacombs haunted by frustrated ghosts …
Today’s “ziggurat” educational system is founded on a mass of illiterates and semi-literates. On their shoulders roosts a shrinking flock of undergraduate and graduate scholars on whose pointy-heads perch a handful of certified academics. Scholarly upper management is mostly devoted to the logistics of education: finance, politics, sports and business. The higher those directors climb up the ziggurat of academia, the more they distance themselves from actual Learning.
Learners will flip these pyramids. Three tiny minorities, deliberate know-nothings, religious fanatics and the disability-illiterate, will gather in the buried below ground mouthpiece of these Learner horns of plenty. Otherwise, massed Learners will share their topics of passion from their bells open to the sky. This arrangement may be the last substitute for bureaucratic/industrial jobs once automation and post-industrial efficiencies bring on near-total unemployment.
Corporate propaganda warns us about an exploding populations of retirees versus a shrinking count of workers, and the consequent need to shrivel retirement benefits. The ultimate outcome of this nonstop propaganda may be hundreds of millions of ex-workers added to the scandalous count of the poor in the richest societies mankind has ever known.
This may be the main excuse for the next wave of fascist genocide, during which all those elderly birds with big, gaping beaks will get transported to the blast furnaces of newly built death camps (free electricity!) instead of being taken care of at great expense. We self-indulgent baby-boomers are likely candidates for this sorry fate; our indifference to current abuses will have earned us this fate.
No one addresses the fact that, for every modern worker, hundreds and thousands of machines just as taxable have multiplied productivity and corresponding corporate profits by thousands of times.
The exponential profits of those exploiters might shrink somewhat if they had to honor their obligation to prior workers. Those profiteers will choke on them unless they recognize their obligation and honor it. Their future profits will freeze up and throttle them otherwise. Such colossal, propaganda-driven stupidity at the bidding of weapon technology! The peace variant would see through such cooked books and make honest amends without a second’s hesitation.
Of course, corona virus induces and accelerates this process.
Progressive, government-subsidized education boosting it further along, also boosts downstream prosperity. Adopted on a global scale, this policy will skyrocket world prosperity. The other alternatives would just lead to some variant of Auschwitz for former workers, in the name of raw corporate greed.
Music education offers an elegant model of open Learning. Its coaching relies on voluntarism — at least in theory. Horror stories abound of children forced to practice music against their will. On PeaceWorld, this exercise will be limited to those who love it. Small classes are favored, along with one-on-one tutoring; it starts at the earliest receptive age and accelerates with the pupil’s growing talent. Maturity of performance is expected by puberty with ongoing improvement though adulthood.
Music is one of the few fields of Learning where true mastery goes unsuppressed. We enjoy a Golden Age of tempered music because this restricted field has zero impact on weapon management, so the best teaching methods are tolerated.
Just as a golden age of Rock and Roll was based on near-universal music training in primary and secondary schools of the Western world, the yodel-bleat of country-western music and the thumping patter of hip-hop are based on generations of liberal education reduced to the bleak minimum of corporate greed. This failure of music education reduces mass appreciation of music to zero; it proliferates music formulae of lesser mastery, pending AI equivalents even more robotic. Yet impassioned musicians will always pick up professional training somewhere, and Learners everywhere will see that song birds flourish, human and otherwise.
It is ironic to note that crime may be the only other trade that complies with these primary learning directives. Indeed, the budding criminal engages in crime as soon as he discovers an interest in it. The courts send all but the best criminals to “reform” schools and penitentiaries where veteran crime instructors await them. Their educational and vocational alternatives are carefully sabotaged. Many of them emerge from prison to perform more and more sophisticated infractions. We don’t punish criminals for their crime but for demonstrating incompetence by getting caught. Weapon society practices Darwinian selection for better criminals. Big surprise! By prioritizing penal punishment above civilized rehabilitation and re-assimilation for the majority of prisoners, we just reinforce weapon outcomes at the cost of rising criminal recidivism.
Many other prejudices hinder Learning. One weapon myth presumes that knowledge is a privilege to be rationed according to arbitrary qualifications.
Another asserts that information must be discovered and confirmed locally to be valid. Insolent claims to the contrary, rabid nationalism (each nation claiming its own: the evil twin and nemesis of every other) and national frontiers are gross barriers to Learning. Crouching behind these obstacles, patriots and fundamentalists promote blatant obscurantism: national governments pirate information, standardize educational mediocrity and foster redundant research.
Unique breakthroughs are carefully guarded corporate secrets in defiance of scientific transparency. Science violates straightforward principles of scientific inquiry, once placed at the beck and call of corporate and military interests. They insist on secrecy and proprietary knowledge. Secret science is like soundless music: worthless to anyone but its paid practitioners. Of what worth is knowledge no-one else may know?
This is the main reason corporate science of the 21st century has not repeated the exponential productivity of the last two. The War on Terror compounds this problem with its knee-jerk suppression and homogenization of information. So, too, the “free market” simplification of the Internet and media by an international pseudo-aristocracy (Sun Corp. instead of the Sun King).
Just as corporate weapon Christianity herded the people of Europe into a Dark Age of ignorance and social chaos; corporate weapon technology is herding us into a new Dark Age of suspicion, paranoia and fostered anti-science.
Another weapon myth insists that information solely available to a secluded elite is more valuable than that which many proletarians can acquire simultaneously.
In plow field and smokestack societies, an item’s rarity raises its value. Zero-sum anal retentives compete for restricted advancement opportunities — social, economic and reproductive. Their feeding frenzy leads to info elites that wallow in relative opulence but unprincipled degeneracy, surrounded by an abject mass of info proletarians.
Appalled by this injustice, the righteous abandon their claim to leadership that was always theirs by right. In the absence of fairer role models, even exceptional ones, weapon leaders are left to imitate their worst exemplars.
Thus, the long-term, public example of superior leadership – common knowledge shared by everyone – is far more important to society than the latest high-tech secrets known only by a privileged few. Near-total transparency would be even more beneficial. The application of correct knowledge generates wealth. Common knowledge is more fruitful than secrets stockpiled in obscurity for their status-value. In the commerce of ideas, distribution creates wealth, and generosity leads to prosperity.
This paradox promises us untold prosperity. We are like pirates who’ve misplaced their treasure map: bewailing our misery and sprawled in tears on the ground covering a deeply buried treasure trove, even though our plight is self-induced and easy to correct. “Look! There’s the map!”
Competitive education is about as sensible as for-profit sex. Both are cooperative endeavors where competition is a loser’s proposition. Short-term competition produces trivial gains or outright loss; long-term cooperation offers more promise.
Learning Networks could stretch and reweave themselves with a lot more elegance than clumsy production/consumption machinery. We could see to this at small expense for tremendous rewards.
In the meantime, academia crowns itself with wreaths of compulsion whose tendrils smother any usefulness it could once claim. Once most students emerge from this ordeal, they shun further study beyond the minimum required for their job. They consider Learning a sorry chore best left to journalists, government spokespeople and commercial copywriters: info mercenaries paid to satisfy hidden agendas with censorship, oversimplification and the rote repetition of official lies. They reject any idea that deviates from the mass media norm and that they cannot co-opt to enforce it.
Learners will handle Learning as if it were the ultimate form of play (which it is). When in doubt, they will favor truth over lies, and humanism over privilege.
Otherwise, official “education” is a monotonous grind. Schools impose a prison atmosphere of incarceration and regimentation that prepares the inmates for the punishing routines of the barracks square, the battlefield, criminal court and the munitions plant.
Weapon managers dictate that education be a slow torture, an intellectual manual at arms and a repetitive drudgery. According to them, it should be a drain of time, interest and energy. Every hour of every school day, nit-picked and nit-picking teachers must disgorge a full day of predigested curricula. Disinterest in those topics and interest in others are punishable offenses. Everyone must drag ass through this dozen-year Calvary at the pace of the slowest.
Young Learners are naturally inquisitive. They delight in learning the most trifling things, with or without adult approval. School suppresses this curiosity. Instead of encouraging info proletarians, it penalizes them without mercy.
From the first day in school to the canned ceremonies of graduation, years of fostered boredom, meaningless repetition, stifled initiative and quashed curiosity must be endured. Cultural pap is force-fed and regurgitated in endless competitive examinations. Homework saturates children's private time with mind-numbing drudgery.
Anxious parents and school officials resist efforts to enrich this gruel. Age-cohort bullies, know-nothing parents and petty adult tyrants dominate school culture. The lowest common denominator marks the high tide of cultural achievement. To put it mildly, precocious Learners are in for a hard time.
Children in Finland got the highest standardized test scores in the Western world. They were the only ones to benefit from fifteen minutes of recess for every forty-five spent in class. Nowadays, everyone, including those Finish children, must satisfy the brutal norms of paramilitary, para-educational bureaucrats.
The ferocity of this acculturation is so widespread, it must serve some hidden purpose (weapon mentality). It is somewhat relaxed in private schools where info elites warehouse their own children. Class snobbery, crushing discipline, isolation from the family, religious mumbo jumbo and cockpit competition combine there to subvert Learning.
I can hardly imagine a worse way to learn anything — except how to endure terror and boredom. There is no better way to repress natural curiosity and prepare for war.
In his book Burro Genius, Victor Villaseñor wrote that he visited several classrooms of young students and asked them, “Who here is a genius?” In kindergarten, everyone’s hand shot up; by third grade, no one dared raise their hand. This is what weapons education achieves everywhere.
It will be up to Learners to identify and nurture the genius of every student. If a student has destructive tendencies, those must be exposed as early as possible and housebroken with affection and doggedness: those last would be much more efficient than punishments applied later on, too late.
These recommendations cannot lead anywhere if practiced the way they are today: as an exception by a few gifted teachers with respect to a few gifted students, despite the educational orthodoxy and its accepted majority of mediocre rejects. To achieve progress, it must be practiced universally. Instead of advancing a few high-merit scholars past a neglected mass of the mediocre students, we should cultivate every student’s foremost talents. Almost all of them are very talented in one or more topics of their choosing. We must become sharp enough to recognize their choice and encourage it. The blame for failing to do so belongs to us adults, not to innocent children.
In self-defense, common folk take complacent pride in their ignorance. What choice did they get, since their tender talents were crushed early? All they have left are sports, commercial advertising, and the media blather that frames them. Raw genius seems more threatening to them than raw greed.
Three topics dominate popular discourse: sports, sex and money. They have nothing to do with civilization’s major advances; instead, they divert our attention from progress. Men escape into macho fetishism and empty, statistics-driven sports commentary; women, into the trivia of gossip, shopping and fashion.
Once these prejudices have taken over, its participants turn into pawns of the Routine of Evil. Once mass propaganda has crippled our moral faculties, we can expect nothing more from our leaders than expert wrongdoing, unforeseen consequences and unavoidable catastrophe. Distracted by the empty summons to “pursue happiness,” we turn our back on our neighbors’ flight from misery and our duty to assist them.
We “lucky” somnambulists condemn ourselves to a life of self-indulgence, over-consumption and social insignificance. Wearily, we warehouse, care-take and inventory piles of redundant stuff; stuff we never needed to begin with, unsustainable stuff in any case. This useless clutter is the industrial substitute for the world-wrecking junk pile and stew of chemical toxins total war calls for.
The hapless poor are stupefied by a lifetime of toxic malnutrition, engineered misery and cultural anxiety; their despair deepened by their inability to fulfill basic needs, achieve basic comforts and secure the goodwill of authorities.
It’s no accident that education and military conscription became compulsory around the same time, after the French Revolution. These military requisites were brought to their logical conclusion by Jules Ferry, whose Law of 1882 mandated free, secular and mandatory education for all French children. He was a fervent French colonial imperialist. The other military/industrial nations matched his law within a few decades.
By the way, universal conscription is another weapon misnomer. The entire military age population (from the post-pubescent cohort to that of the elderly, including women) has always been liable for call-up on demand. The only limitations were the number of weapons available; the need to staff workshops and farms with women, children, old folks and war slaves when necessary; and the enormous logistical burden required to hold armies together despite their tendency to sicken, starve, run riot and fall apart.
It is only recently that bloated industrial capacities swelled populations by reducing mass mortality below reproduction rates. Until then, making weapons and keeping them out of the hands of rebels were self-limiting tasks. Some justification remained for separating trained combatants from civilians. That rule no longer applies. No difference remains between armed and unarmed combatants. We have all become legitimate targets and routine victims of warfare. There’s enough weapons around to kill everyone.
For example, military pilots, submariners and commandos undergo elaborate rituals of initiation, training and graduation similar to those of ancient knights. Their equipment and transport cost several lifetimes’ wages. For the most part, peasants took the resulting blows in the face. While the rewards of weapon technology have gone to a smaller and smaller minority, its spiraling costs are borne by the rest of us, the poor foremost.
The so-called free market sanctions personal ambition within parameters carefully constrained by weapon technology, an incredible advantage compared to older weapon dogmas that crushed personal dreams under obligations of caste. Once the last barrier to excellence (weapon technology) comes down, financially independent Learners will pursue their talents wherever they may lead. At long last, we may anticipate much greater abundance.
In the meantime, most of us get a nominal education matching the complexity of our society’s weapon systems… and no more. Barely educated citizens are taught to curb their curiosity, serious culture and imagination. In their place, a lot of useless trivia is fed to them and they are taught to prefer that force-feeding. They should be more or less handy with tools (in direct proportion to the complexity … etc.). Tamed to blind obedience, they should be comfortable with independent decision-making, but only under rigidly predefined circumstances. Most of them will be expected to be politically naive, closed-minded, indifferent to political obligations and intolerant of progress. They should be cryptically self-destructive and violent on a hair trigger. In moderately good health during their military years, they should be indifferent to preventive care and ready to cripple or poison themselves for no apparent reason.
The majority of info proletarians are imbued with those attributes, ones useful for modern armies. Once a military age cohort “completes” its mandatory miseducation, weapon management grants its favorite candidates nominal license to study and climb a career ladder. This economic subversion is so harsh that many youths have no choice but to join the military, the unemployed and or the world of crime. Banks, insurance companies and public service agencies redline entire neighborhoods for no better reason than socio-economic and race prejudice. Legitimate capital never reaches these ghettos, only criminal funding that coaches more war.
Poverty is the most expensive social policy by far, but the best nursery for legions of good soldiers.
The International Monetary Fund, the Politburo and hobbled UN agencies have abused Third World nations in this manner for decades. They have promoted showboat, mega-buck projects to pay off local elites and increase their addiction to Wimp institutions. Meanwhile, the average person’s standard of living is shrinking from runaway population growth, expropriated public funds and ecological devastation, all induced by paramilitary corporations.
Why don’t we benefit from free, mandatory college education? Or, better yet, four years of subsidized non-college skills for young adults? This subsidy already exists to send soldiers to war. Why not civilians in peacetime? After all, there’s mandatory High School. Why impose that cut-off, when a college degree is required for a good job these days?
In comparative biology, the longer the stage of infantile development, the better prepared for survival the adult animal becomes. Wouldn’t this be the case for young human beings?
A weapon state’s educational system selects an elite officer corps to command a vast majority of enlisted and civilian slaves: armed and unarmed combatants. The demand for weapon leaders dictates the exact number of degrees awarded. In this way, universities pick a new generation of info elites from the info proletariat. Mandatory college education does not exist today because the current college system (both for-profit and non-profit) produces enough military officers and bureaucrats as it stands. Deliberately centralized weapon technology is glutted with talent while scattered peace technologies starve for funds and talent.
Universal education is just another weapon myth: a carrot dangled in front of peace mentor mules to co-opt their goodwill effort. In the United States, 60% of the population has done some time on the university treadmill. This doesn’t mean much, since many are functionally illiterate, more choose not to vote, and only a handful gain access to the corridors of power.
We should feel regret and make amends.
The chapter Computer Yellow Pages will discuss specific Learner approaches that could replace the top-down, mass-consumption, “tell-and-test” educational systems of today.
- WORDS THAT FOLLOW -
The info elite’s most crucial task is to inhibit communications with microscopic selectivity. It will be up to Learners to bring those to full bloom.
Weapon news media must exploit their apparent truthfulness to beguile the info proletariat, yet remain flexible enough to distort those truths to suit their masters’ desire. Even though global events must be reported promptly, internal checks and balances ensure that unwanted information never sees the light of day. By default, the historical record is entrusted to media care, yet troublesome details are drowned out in tidal waves of trivial noise. Most people hear these broadcasts daily, yet tiny info elites control their content. Freedom of speech is acclaimed, yet select news is trivialized or magnified on command.
News media foster this criminal censorship. Their propaganda confirms the sluggish disorder of peoples beyond the local membrane. Foreign governments are condemned as inferior, regardless of their objective merit. Municipal sports are reported in more detail than international conflict; more airtime and print space is filled with advertising than with domestic policy. Brutal crime gets more coverage than white-collar crime much more grievous and expensive. Corporate malfeasance is a taboo topic, as are the identity and political affiliations of powerful offenders.
Every day, humanity adds another two million person-years of sweat equity to its history. Every day, this monumental effort gets compacted into two or three pages of formulaic journalese and three-minute segments of video infotainment often rehashed the next day. Critical events are reported in a cursory, anecdotal present tense, or in the discordant, “verb-ing” gerund form that ignores cause and effect, motive and opportunity (“Fires burning across the country… Fire fighting services having a hard time coping,” etc.). We observe the tragic farces of famous buffoons more attentively than matters of historic importance. Puppies-in-a-basket stories and soap opera dramas garner more loving detail than outbreaks of social failure. If the long-term consequences of ritual stupidity are reported at all, the names and political affiliations of those responsible are carefully hidden. How useful the passive voice turns out to be ! Bad things are reported to have happened; wrongdoers and their criminal decision-making, never. Meanwhile, perpetrators of trivial sex scandals and dramatic but inconsequential street crime are ferociously examined with psychiatric intimacy.
The internal rot of American journalism has become unmistakable and unforgivable. Serious news, whether national or international, cannot be found on American television. Its place is taken by dramatic reports of worsening weather, infotainment, true crime, paparazzia and sports trivia. Political commentators spend primetime hours interviewing spin-doctors who share the same opinion without revealing anything new.
The media of PeaceWorld will hold news reporting to a much higher standard, higher still than during its former Golden Age. We will expect it to elucidate social contradictions in the light of truth, as passionate Learners of journalism have always wished to do.
A society’s constellation of political metaphors dominates all this effort. The primary ones regulate those secondary and through them, many other activities. We share clichés like: “Laissez faire (lehsseh fair, “leave do,” deregulation), job creators (who grow rich by massive layoffs), the marketplace of ideas, manifest destiny, survival of the fittest, the unseen hand.” These shared concepts become cornerstone clichés that regulate other activity. Dr. Kielbowitcz, of the University of Washington, brought his brilliant theory to my attention during a public lecture.
To divert attention from their tyranny, weapon mentors infuse public discourse with a steady drip of new buzzwords and catch phrases: “trickle-down, free market, deregulation, supply-side, Contract with America,” etc.
Cherished ancient texts dominate the meme-constellation of a culture: the Bible, the works of Shakespeare (that political hack), the Qran, the Talmud, Das Kapital, Mein Kampf, Mao’s Quotations, the Chinese Classics; brutal weapon distortions of complex works by Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Hegel, Nietzsche, etc. Such textual sources and popular clichés may differ slightly from those of other cultures, but the universal dedication to weapon mentality is striking, regardless of its country of origin. Weapon mentors restock this intellectual salad bar all the time. They always confirm the utility, splendor and inevitability of war and its naked exploitation.
Having eaten at the trough of the rich, many opposition leaders from one generation – uplifted in their youth by progressive politics – slam the door of reaction in the face of those who follow. Raised to dizzying heights of privilege, they redeem their illusory debt to the rich by subverting the ideals that liberated them. No-one’s experience of victimization immunizes them from future corruption and hypocrisy. On the contrary, prior misery may increase our vulnerability to latter-day seductions.
Reactionaries dish out new buzzwords and clichés as tempting as lunchtime pizza. In the mean time, progressives shackle their discourse with rusty word chains forged centuries ago.
Let’s compare standard political propaganda with the attitudes of parents towards their children in a typical nuclear family. Conservatives resemble favorite middle kids who are also sociopaths: too often displayed with pride (“That’s my boy!”), indulged in their misdeeds (“Boys will be boys”) and carefully shielded from the consequences of their acts (Trump). Progressives are the discounted first-born. Perfection is always expected from them and their slightest error is punished without mercy (Howard Dean). The great, neutral majority is treated like last-born: eternal babies left lovingly to their own devices, from whom nothing very good or bad is expected (to their endless frustration) and any accomplishment is a pleasant and welcome surprise.
Populist oligarchs coined the term “democracy” in ancient Greece to mask their tyranny. During the late eighteenth century, the designations Left and Right distinguished reactionary monarchists from their bourgeois counterparts in the first French National Assembly. Political moderates sat in the center of a tier of benches. Their detractors sorted themselves politically by sitting with friends to the left and right of the moderates. The further away they sat from the center, the more extreme their views. Meanwhile, members of the radical Montagne (Mountain) sat up top in the back of the bleachers, like schoolboy toughs.
So if Learners rely on political designations more three-dimensional than Left and Right, politicians could call themselves High Front Centrists, but their character, defects and results would sort them out mercilessly in this thicker confine.
This assuming journalism was really about the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; and pursued the “who, what, when, where” of stories and not the latest Chamber of Commerce press release, official condemnation of dissenters and very little of significance otherwise.
The word “utopia” can mean “that place which isn’t but should be” or “that place which must never be.” Most people use the adjective “utopian” like a concrete railway abutment, to halt further conversation. By a mere twist of linguistics, “utopian” has come to mean “hopelessly impractical: consign to instant oblivion.” Once an idea is branded utopian, no further thought is required; weapon mentality makes us shut down our critical faculties on the spot. Ditto, "idealist, idealistic" to describe certain philosophers and their outlook. Its meaning? “Ignore them: they are not worthy of your attention.” Such linguistic short circuits typify weapon mentality.
Meanwhile, the status quo honors homicidal maniacs with the title “realist.” As if ambitious mass murders of this sort could expect any outcome more useful than promotion into the info elite followed by painfully unforeseen blowback.
Info elites resist open-ended communication systems; they limit new systems to a size somewhat smaller than would best serve their own purposes — the better to “steer” them in their favor. When a newer, more expansive communication design emerges, they come up with a compromise solution on a crash basis. Amply funding it to undercut the alarming alternative, they load it down with trivia and install new regulatory agencies to abort the original intent and all its offspring.
Meanwhile, vicious idiots pollute open-ended info networks with the waste products of their own prismatic thinking. The mass of bad television programming comes to mind. Think about it: we could just as easily watch complete coursework from the best universities without commercial interruption, as well as brilliant dramas, musical performances and recitations without limit in realtime. The same goes for the Internet with more than its share of commercial exploitation, fundamentalist babble, reactionary self-praise and hate speech, virus clutter and flaming idiocy. As if Western elites had hired an army of trolls like the hirelings of Vladimir Putin, the Chinese Communist Party and the Koch brothers and Aldeson, to methodically rot out the collective conscience, both the one online and the other biological.
In addition, check out the content of so-called “progressive” periodicals published in English. They have repeated the same empty nonsense since the collapse of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, signed over the family farm to reactionary card sharks acre-by-acre of good land and piece-by-piece of sound equipment. They’ve carefully reported the fire sale of our political inheritance and proposed nothing of any consequence to prevent it. They would never precipitate active resistance against this ongoing catastrophe; that would be an unthinkable treason. Way too cozy with the status quo and its inevitable fascist landslide, they rejected Learner without really examining it, without exception or appeal. Otherwise, they got nothing.
By definition, the mass media of a weapon state smothers any content that PeaceWorld would consider valid.
Civilian systems are the only ones suffering from these info-constraints. Weapon communications have always spearheaded technological development. Since weapon mentality smothers rational discourse as a matter of routine, its technicians can go nuts with new hardware.
Just look at the first military highways of China, Rome and Persia, or modern (?) military highways first built in Germany then in the rest of the world. Look at the first telegraph and railroad networks, at the Internet itself, (a Dr. Strangelove experiment in nuclear battlefield management) and the hundreds of tons of military jewelry floating out there in Earth orbit, easily worth their weight in diamonds.
Some government agencies allocate half their funds to sophisticated new transmission systems and the other half such that every message transmitted across them is encrypted gibberish. Much like television. Think of the miracles humanity could achieve if these systems broadcast freely nothing except content of the highest quality!
We can’t decipher 3,500 pre-Vedic inscriptions from ancient India or those from ancient Crete and elsewhere. Yet criminal hackers and intelligence agencies routinely decipher the most elaborate modern security codes, even though our best mathematicians made them up using the most expensive computers.
Free online web pages can’t yet fluently translate, to and from English and other dominant languages, the primary tongue billions of people speak, read and write. AltaVista Bablefish and Google Translate are honorable exceptions that I have used to translate preliminary drafts of this text. Nowadays, very rough drafts are the industrial standard of free machine translation.
We look on serenely as trillions of dollars are spent on preparations for us to murder each other (the makers’ mark of national sovereignty), but not the few pennies to get everyone to converse freely and talk their way out of most fights. Meanwhile, ego-freak code writers outdo each other to infect our computers with new virus software. Go ahead, shit down the village well, you idiot savants! You who should be spearheading Learner transformation. Shame on you!
The utmost honor and topic of passion of elite programmers should be the purity of the sacred content of the World Agora; not some idiot savant’s delight in polluting it, of necessity anonymously. It’s as if the Nobel Prize had been replaced by another one, anonymous and psychopathic, whose only goal was to promote confusion.
As always, vicious morons dictate what will be allowed and what will not. Nine out of ten of our precious rules and regulations hold this trait in common — they answer the simple question: “How can we ensure our lives, safety and sanity after we’ve let the most unwise and malevolent among us cast their shit down the communal ventilator?” The Learner equivalent would ask: “What would we have to pay them to leave us in peace and find something better to do — a hundredth or a thousandth part of current expenditures and costly regulations?”
This communication nightmare retains its positive, flip side. Learners could lift all the communications hardware we need, right off the shelf. Key components need only be coaxed from the hands of mystified weapon technicians and plugged into Learner networks.
Despite the empty scolding of science, we populate a truly magical era. Presto! Peace management could fulfill our fondest dreams, or weapon managers can summon our worst nightmares. Which magic show would you rather attend?
- UNIVERSAL LIBRARY -
“Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.” American Library Association.
[Author’s note: This may sound irrelevant to some people (What, no libraries? Who cares!); but bare in mind what “no library” implies: medieval primitivism and social chaos. Recall the Chinese proverb: “A year of tyranny is better than one day of chaos.” Plus, as old hippies recall, this motto once dealt with smoking good old weed, Cannabis Sativa: a Sanskrit honorific reserved for rice and a few other valuable plants.
Neither an art nor a science, library science is wreathed in classical obsolescence. Outmoded routines are maintained in libraries — not because they are particularly valid but because funding for better systems outstrips the pittance they’ve been authorized.
It is quite a chore to scan and digitize books once they've been printed on paper. It would be better to distribute them in a cheap (or free) digitized format and then publish them on paper as a luxury souvenir on demand.
We could have invented a comfortable set of digital reading glasses (Google Glass?) — reading glasses like sunglasses, that displayed pages of easy-to-read text beautifully inscribed as if on fine vellum: font optional, lit controllably, keyword searchable, indexed and magnified on demand. Those digital sunglasses could display a virtual keyboard and screen, and a pair of virtual typing hands wire-guided from ring-fingered or gloved-hand input leads. A belt-mounted CPU controller with docks for portable memory and other hardware connections; an EEG helmet, the fingers, the glasses and their CPU connected by optical cable or wireless. Some superior technology could duplicate those capacities with less hardware.
Finally! No more painful reading sessions on my back and holding a book over my head or sitting up in bed. Images from these sunglasses could be projected onto a darkened ceiling or wall. They could become transparent and perhaps magnify the outside world, or register different frequencies of invisible light, or project data fields as if in three dimensions. The possibilities are endless.
There is none of that. Instead, we must admire our genius at aiming long-range weapons across gloomy battlefields. In Vietnam in 1969, the average infantry squad was issued infrared night vision goggles. Forty years later, most firemen hadn’t yet been issued a set to search for survivors in a fire. What warped priorities!
Libraries work better on a subsidized and cooperative basis (as do most public utilities and other functions not yet recognized as such, like healthcare.) Instead, they must generate entrepreneurial profits, as if they were peddling soda pop, private automobiles, strip mining, fracking, runaway genetic engineering or some other corporate drive-by.
Most librarians are altruistic helpers instead of gladiatorial power brokers. They would rather provide excellent service than acquire wealth and power for themselves. Given the vampire temperament of weapon bureaucracies, information managers get afterthought consideration at best. They are among the first to expose their necks to the economizing ax and the last to benefit from budget windfalls.
This liability is very obvious in the Library of Congress. It houses one of the largest book collections in the world, yet is a Swiss cheese of lost and stolen books. As each term of Congress expired, defeated incumbents and their family took their favorite books home as a consolation prize for legislating the rat race. Worse yet, rare book collectors paid huge sums to bribe clerical staff and abscond with irreplaceable titles.
Let’s turn from the Masters of Greed to their apprentices. College students have always been assigned reading lists for their courses. The most ambitious ones hoarded key university texts set aside in library reserve, so that their grade-point competitors couldn’t consult them. Nowadays, computerized book tracking foils their petty schemes. But not so long ago, crooked over-achievers carved up the competition, got better grades and graduated to become life-and-death decision-makers. In this way, several generations of shady reactionaries managed to take over our courts, legislatures, universities, corporate and media boards.
These ne'er-do-wells recruit morality-crippled subordinates as protégés and replacements. It turns out that psychopaths are the only people who enjoy working under very bad bosses while everyone else hates them. Plus their bad example, advice and career “guidance” corrupt ethical fence sitters in majority within those professional communities. You wind up fired out of hand if you are too honest. This buildup of bad habits saps the leadership of orthodoxy.
Librarians aren’t competitive to begin with; they tend to be all around Learners. They restrict their studies to one “major” topic (another crippling constraint of weapons education) only once their employer demands this sacrifice. Their “service” mind-set facilitates weapon management’s takeover of their resources. Masters of Business Administration consider information gathering a secondary, service function. When crunch time comes around, corporate libraries and research facilities are the first to suffer budget cuts.
While libraries attract less competitive professionals to begin with (though no less competent ones), weapon managers sponsor the best-paid research for military applications. Weapon technology is the intellectual Super Bowl, if you will; whereas creative intellect is viewed as a “Trivial pursuit” throwaway hobby to be exploited and nothing more.
The natural curiosity of Learners draws them into the intellectual anarchy of libraries. These beehives of comprehension convert the pollen of curiosity into knowledge honey. This seedbed of new ideas suffers from blatant neglect, shortsighted exploitation and disregard for true values, despite the desperate optimism of frontline librarians. If weapon science is the prince of modern resources, library science is the pauper.
Institutional degeneracy has a lot to do with the law of diminishing returns. In most cases, the first effort produces the greatest end-result; those further down the line require a lot more effort.
Libraries get a lot less funding than they would on PeaceWorld, and are nowhere near fulfilling their full potential. On the other hand, over-funded weapon technologies catapult themselves beyond the twilight zone of diminishing returns into insatiable limbo. Obsessively, compulsively, repeatedly and endlessly, we polish our killing systems at the expense of learning systems, and optimize the threat formula to the exclusion of the armchair formula.
Learner Networks could confirm or deny new hypotheses much more readily. Learners fixated on their topics of passion will share them with like-minded enthusiasts. In a great many small-scale production facilities and labs, inventors will design experiments, prototypes and working models of recent invention, seconded by Learner engineers whose topic of passion will be their assembly and manufacture. Local three-D printing, my Learner friends.
There will only be one opportunity to summon this incredible wealth. Current institutions are locked down in their own incompetence. Short of bloody revolution, they enjoy the stability of official monopoly, no matter how squalid their results (actively by rotten ethics or passively from inexcusable outcomes). New Learner Networks must confirm their superiority immediately. Otherwise, as usual, wastrel “conservatives” will wreck them as usual.
Until talented contributors rally to Learner Networks, reasonable solutions for our worst problems won’t replace the wasteful industries that caused those problems to begin with. First priority: the Network itself and how best to handle this avalanche of new data.
Embarking on serious study at the earliest possible age, most Learners will earn one or more doctoral degrees by puberty. This said, there will be no timed “race” to achieve personal goals. Late bloomers (like me) will get all the time they need; faster Learners, condensed Learning. It will take most people a third of the time to become productive Learners, that it takes current candidates for tiny info elites.
“Doctoral degree” is our crude yardstick of cultural achievement. Seniority and faculty tenure will no longer influence this system. Peer privilege and senior approval will become mere honorary ornaments. Arbitrary performance criteria will no longer dictate financial security nor will they limit access to the Network. Everyone will escape their misery and accelerate their Learning as much as possible, regardless of provenance, productivity and credentials.
Cities will broadcast a complete video collection of local drama, music and art, along with guided video tours of local museums, conventions and stores. Detailed analyses will cover every regional craft, hobby and industry. Complete university curricula (from elementary topics to post-graduate coursework) will be on-call for private review at any hour. Other cities’ equivalents will appear on demand. All this will be free, free, free! Indirect profits from these activities will be exponentially greater than those gathered directly by current “educational” institutions.
Nowadays, it is illegal to audit, record and rebroadcast most classes and performances. The control of content emanates from a few toney skyscrapers rather than every living room and study cubicle. A handful of centralized TV networks, movie studios and elite universities dictate the content of pop culture. No wonder their output is so dull, dumb and irrelevant!
Soulless monologue blares on without letup. There is too little contrapuntal crosstalk to refine our public reality. A few media moguls “control” almost everything in broadcast and in print. They act like surveyors blinded because they aimed their theodolites into the mercantile sun too long. Their error-strewn maps, published in millions of confusing copies, only mislead us further.
“What would you do with yourself if you became extraordinarily rich? Researchers studied a sampling of the newly rich and concluded: you’d probably change jobs to learn something you’d always wanted to learn, and turn yourself into a genuine expert in your new field.” From Mike Mailway (pseudonym for LM Boyd), Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 04/6/92.
What most people seek out once rare good fortune smiles on them, society should mass-produce. Mass Learning will replace the no-win alternatives of empty “entertainment” and the boring torture of competitive schooling. Economies of scale, children. Plus every dollar spent on this lavish project will generate many more dollars in new discoveries.
As we make our way a little bit further down this road, PeaceWorld will roll over the horizon and bid us welcome.
- KNOWLEDGE-VALUE -
Taichi Sakaiya’s work, The Knowledge-Value Revolution, advances two brilliant ideas:
· people readily consume abundant resources, and
· they treasure resources they consider rare.
Societies undergo alternate states of awareness as they resonate between these two impulses.
When some new abundance appears, society organizes itself to consume it. Intellectual sophistication, objectivity and logical reductionism regulate this stepped-up consumption. The more copious the resource, the more commonplace become literacy, industrial efficiency and promotion by merit. These industrious habits reinforce the rule of law whose near universal acceptance justifies a more dependable distribution of labor, responsibilities and obligations. Complicated accounting techniques sustain frenzied transactions based on elaborate indices of exchange. Art becomes more widespread, skill-based and expressive. We consume more and more resources, heedless of their depletion. Over-consumption is its own reward, its future penalties and unforeseen consequences ignored.
When an interval of poverty begins, the perception of abundance wavers. Hoarding, corruption, political reaction, disaster and warfare replace the prerequisites of enhanced distribution; the boasts and lies of bully leaders replace rational discourse and problem solving. As hectic productivity decays into induced poverty, society abandons its objective production criteria. Its members stop appraising things and deeds for their objective value and accept more and more subjective knowledge-value instead. Eventually, this new value system replaces objective appraisal entirely.
I’m speaking of our perception of abundance rather than abundance itself.
You might find yourself stranded in a desert and distressed by conditions so harsh they could bring you down with thirst and hunger. On the other hand, it might bloom with proper care or contain enormous wealth (of petroleum, for instance) though seemingly beyond your awareness and reach.
Every cubic inch of dirt, ocean and vacuum hides energy vast beyond imagining. We have merely to find and use it without disturbing its natural hiding place: a task at which we’ve become expert through painful trial-and-error regarding simpler but just as lethal problems.
We may evaluate a wristwatch by its accuracy, its durability, the raw materials and skills needed to make and distribute it. The price for a similar watch might rise and fall somewhat; but under normal circumstances, it will stabilize along some predictable pricing curve: a dynamic equilibrium.
That type of value assessment might appear to be objective and “real.” While most of us would see it that way, Yuval Noah Hariri affirms, in his fascinating book, Sapiens, Harper Collins, New York, NY, 2015, that many of our bedrock social constructs are shared myths to a great extent. We share such concepts as faith, justice, the divine right of kings or equality, even though they may have no basis in fact. He is particularly sure of this with respect to money: a subjective construct based on mutual trust in a shared rate of exchange reinforced by so many cultural norms, officials and conventions that it seems to be absolutely grounded in fact when in reality it is not.
Money allows the members of a complex society to carry out many transactions with more or less magical ease. It welds links of loyalty and cooperation between large groups of strangers, on an impossible scale if family or village intimacy were invoked instead. But it also corrodes those interdependencies of family, community and religion: relationships that served as primary sources of mutual trust and support for tens of thousands of years. Thanks to their recent replacement by the all-powerful dollar (or ancient Roman denari, or cowry shells on the African coast, or medieval Chinese paper money), we can get almost anything desired without having to develop the personal connections, skills and raw materials required to actually produce it.
Otherwise, we could apply a special coat of value-paint, a supplementary knowledge-value. Call it a Cartier watch, the ten millionth watch ever made, a “lucky” watch, your grand-dad’s, Franklin Roosevelt’s, or one that stopped during some momentous occasion. Subjectively, we could assign more or less value than what strict consumption criteria would dictate. These criteria might transcend the importance of money and replace it with something even more ephemeral (think of ancient religious relics or modern fantasy “collectibles”).
This subjective “paint” can reflect any shade of meaning people agree to share among themselves. Their subjective “colors” can shift in dramatic and unanticipated ways, baffling the supply and demand reckonings of communist central planners just as readily as the “free market” consideration of dollar democrats.
Knowledge-Value eras evolve during periods of consumption decline and retrenchment, later known as Dark Ages. They are inception stages of new empires, mass religions and revolutions: periods of insecurity, arch-conservatism and perceived scarcity.
On a planetary scale, cyclical meteor/comet impacts or volcanic/tectonic disturbances can spread disasters of geoseismic, climato-agricultural and epidemic proportion that could trigger this kind of Dark Age. Relatively minor disasters may have caused such transitions locally, provided the locals were isolated from outside help.
Otherwise, we could simply run out of cheap petroleum. Given our laughable preparation for this unavoidable outcome, it would emerge as just such a catastrophe.
Knowledge-value societies embrace new beliefs with the fanaticism of an inquisitor. Once a weapon society has dismissed old elites with prejudice, it will raise a new nobility based on mythical heroism and fantasy bloodline purity of famous ancestors.
Such nobles often derive “honor and respect” from terrorist brutality. A peaceful society would handle such “nobles” with ostracism, nonviolent resistance and well-deserved contempt — the same way the Balinese treated their Indonesian military elites and European colonial “masters” both before and after the post-colonial transition. The same way PeaceWorld will marginalize violent militants and militaristic extremists, reversing WeaponWorld’s determination to empower them and bench the pacifists.
Knowledge value practitioners expect prices to vary wildly for the same object in different settings. Such societies crave splendid nobility, romantic deeds and magical mementos. Their chroniclers despise accurate, bean-count tabulations in favor of epic exaggeration. As a rule, the best leaders withdraw from the hectic minutiae of day-to-day politics into monastic contemplation and deep philosophical discourse. In their absence, petty tyrants take the lead with their trivial, self-serving priorities. The less enlightened they are and the greater their hunger for power, the more turbulent their rivalry. Say goodbye to ancient freedoms and liberties under their tender care.
Knowledge-value seeks balance, survival and security in periods of economic stasis and decline; objective criteria encourage discovery, risk-taking and growth in times of plenty. Such risk-taking might impair survival during rough patches dominated by knowledge-value. The corners get knocked off and society grows quite round and hard, the better to bounce back.
A benign Learner Commonwealth will deal even-handedly with the convictions of knowledge-value and the efficiencies of objective consumption, denying neither one its place in the scheme of things, but tolerating no excess. Peace technology will balance cooperation and competition, reapportion stability and risk. It will induce a placid economy with few surpluses and penuries (as in hunter-gatherer communism).
Objective criteria pass through inertial increments, as if by ratchet: two clicks forward and one click back; whereas knowledge-value ebbs and flows with the fluidity of flood-tide rollers.
The ideas written up in Learner lend themselves to knowledge-value dissemination. Our present day mind-set fixates on weapon values; but peace-values could over-paint this flawed awareness in an eye-blink. Almost overnight, amazing social transformations will sweep away current barriers to progress. Knowledge-value fervor can advance the goals of peace much more readily than some ponderous Gant chart could track the clumsy demilitarization of our institutions, and the grudging conversion of way too many weapon stalwarts into honest Learners.
The Western World has boasted of more or less well-organized pacifists for at least the last three hundred years. What’s more, humanity has nurtured the idea of universal peace since the first time some dullard smacked a bright child for no good reason, (whether an irritated elder or a pack of brethren bullies). It has always been a question of how slowly and carefully we should approach universal peace, so impractical and unrealistic by current standards.
Time does not seem to unfold in a steady manner. It acts more like the orbit of a satellite: slow while far away from its focal point and speeding up as it closes in on it. After something has been pursued without cease for quite some time, its approach from our stunted perspective may seem to fly on exponential wings and flash from non-existence into existence.
Rather than prescribe some sweeping dogma, Learner proposes a more gradual, non-linear approach. Our assessments of gradualism and spontaneity have turned null and void. The time for peace had not yet come and we were not ready for it; at present, it will be, and so will we. From the slightest trace of peace mentality, followed by incremental infusions of it redoubling constantly, info politics will overwrite the disinfo politics we've grown used to.
The Learner course correction will require no führerprinzip (principle of weapon leadership: “unrestricted authority downwards and unrestricted responsibility upwards” – A. Hitler). No charismatic war leaders need apply — even though they might have overseen serious transformations in the past, some for the better but more for the worse. Essential leaders will awaken of themselves: peace-wise tribal leaders, not war lords.
My city library displays hundreds of linear feet of books on the art of warfare, its science and history, but less than a handful on peacemaking. Multiply by two or three times, taking into account satellite libraries in town and so on as the geographical inventory extends, the ratio of weapons to peace content surpasses a thousand to one. The war books are packed into two or three subject areas, whereas those few on peace are sprinkled in ones and twos throughout the library.
In Afghanistan, the State Department could not scrape up enough skill, people and funding to install an honest civil administration and re-establish peace. It had to go hat in hand to the filthy rich military to beg for warm bodies, cool brains and cold cash. But there again, the necessary skills were not found. With respect to making war and dismissing peace, this is the idiot norm of our cultural priorities and our focus of attention.
The more people who examine Learner and any peace-promoting texts like it, and the more often they take up those topics in ordinary conversation, the faster this knowledge-value will take root. As its tenets become commonplace, a Commonwealth of Learner peers will emerge as if from nowhere. It will surface from the dead sea of apathy, stasis and inertia that surrounds us, the way a new continent might emerge: as tectonic and unstoppable as Hergé’s The Mysterious Star.
In the past, when the thesis of weapon orthodoxy crashed into its anti-thesis of weapon revolution, their collision synthesized a deadlier weapon technology, the same way a particle accelerator collision flashes into sub-atomic fragments.
The time has come to chip and scour away the rust of weapon mentality, lay down a prime coat of soul and, by thick brush-strokes and simultaneous little dabs, repaint the whole with fat coats of peace.
- DEMOS: LAOCRACY OR PATHOCRACY –
“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried from time to time.” Winston Churchill.
First of all, what is this Pathocracy? It is the rule of sociopaths. See the chapter dedicated to them and their governance.
Sociopaths are people (four percent of the population: 3% of men and 1% of women; this percentage varying by home country and its nutrition). They can tell right from wrong but feel no remorse from the latter. They inflict pain, misery and suffering on the rest of us because they are bored and have nothing better to offer themselves. Think of vampires who don’t thirst for blood but for the suffering of others (thus their philosophical insistence on stoicism… aimed at their victims).
Good conscience is a complex set of calculations the human brain performs to figure out (both ahead of time and afterwards) the moral consequences of its behavior, the same way subconscious calculations (fewer but still numerous) let us stay upright on a bicycle. Sociopaths lack this primary capacity of conscience.
Humanity’s institutions have been taken over by sociopaths, sooner or later but almost always permanently. Even Christ’s sacred Love was subverted by bloody-handed Inquisitors in the past and more recently by sexual predators avid to rape the innocent.
Those of us who are conscience-driven would never inflict so much suffering on so many people unless we had been ruled over, trained and guided (and our literatures, philosophies and sacred texts, certified) by a historical succession of conscience-amputees. In the absence of their deviant guidance and rule, the world could become a near-utopia. It would liberate itself spontaneously because it was finally under the control of our collective moral conscience. Rights, justice and truth would become clearer in most cases, often much more so than they are today. There would still be problems with evil and wrongdoing, just as in our private lives, but a lot fewer a lot less influential.
Is that clear?
Democracy unimproved does not serve peace management, even though reactionaries and progressives support it with equal fervor. Reactionaries, because they recognize that kleptocracy, oligarchy, National Capitalism and corporate fascism – the politics of disinformation they conceal behind the expression “democracy” – are repulsive, inexcusable and fruitless in the long run; Progressives, from bankrupt imagination after millennia of serial defeat.
At best, current democracies remain elitist because their systems are “representative” and winner-take-all rather than direct and proportional. They promote the professional politician, an over-specialized breed that’s supposed to have mastered the complexities of civic power and popular opinion. Yet they’ve achieved very little, in the final analysis, beyond electoral shenanigans and the trickeries of campaign finance.
Laocracy requires absolute private equity, personal emancipation, elaborate safeguards against exploitation, and lots more free time to philosophize. It requires that we raise rare and beloved children into healthy adults, and that an enlightened public takes heed of ethical warnings in order to reduce unintended consequences. Finally, it would require that everyone valued their own Learning above all.
In a Learner Laocracy, politicians would have strictly limited roles. They’d still satisfy their need to be admired, trusted and chosen on a competitive basis — after all, those are their topics of passion. Once elected, they will serve as social antennae, sounding out constituents for their problems and unmet requirements. Thereafter, they’ll submit those problems to the community of Learners whose topic of passion would be to solve them, and forward their solutions back to the people involved for them to pick and choose by vote. The Agora of PeaceWorld will assist this global conversation.
Never again will politicians legislate fixes for social problems they were neither trained to resolve nor passionate enough to care about. They will not be allowed to bury problems and delay their resolution through procedural minutia and seek reward for their criminal negligence. In the first place, those corrupted to that extent could not run successfully for lowest rungs of power. Second, those tempted to do so, once in office, will stand out like butcher surgeons and be expelled by clear and expeditious regulations.
Instead, honest politicians will serve their constituents in the same way honest judges will serve their juries: as specially trained guides and intimate advisers without decision-making powers. Decisions will be left to citizen voters and randomly selected juries, tamper-proof from their longstanding honor and orthodoxy.
We are not speaking here of a spotless paradise, but of reducing sacrifice and multiplying celebration. Avoid sacrificing anyone but yourself. Pick a celebration, pick several and celebrate them. Do it better!
Democracies let the very rich handpick political candidates that best suit their needs. Any politician who fails this simple test is out of the running. Thus, the strong-willed, charismatic progressives we await so eagerly at every election usually fail to appear.
The few good ones who evade this constraint, rich psychopaths can neutralize with the deftness of long practice. From the Gracchii to the Kennedys and from Martin Luther King to the next one in line, they’ve been co-opted, marginalized and assassinated with yawning ease by conspirators of greed. Oftentimes, these public murders are not even seriously investigated, for fear of civil war. Societies that ritualize capital punishment (or make their foremost protestors “disappear” into prison or unmarked graves) reserve certain extinction for the best leaders. Every time proletariats recover justice and abundance; this miscalculation is soon washed away in the blood and brains of its mastermind.
What is the most perilous occupation in America? Alaska King Crab fisherman? Bomb disposal expert? No; more likely, progressive politician in recent years (especially during the era of Bush the Lesser). The following people suffered fatal plane wrecks before, during and after their time in office. The Kennedy family gets its own column.
| Ernest Lundeen Clement W. Miller Birch E. Bayh, II Nicholas Begich Thomas Hale Boggs George W. Collins Jerry Litton George T. Leland Mel Carnahan Paul Wellstone | 1940 1962 1964* 1972* 1972* 1972* 1976 1989 2000 2002 | Joseph P. Kennedy Katheline Agnes Kennedy Cavendish Michael Joseph Kennedy Ted Kennedy (injured, aide died) John F. Kennedy, Jr. Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy Lauren Bessette | 1944 1948 1949 1964* 1999 1999 1999
* Same plane wrecks: one in 1964 (Bayh and Kennedy survived the crash even though an aide died), the other in 1972 (four fatalities).
In many cases, those people were not only progressives but leaders of the pack: exceptional doers and shakers, confirmed heads of the Democratic Party or groomed as such. Their recent replacements have been at best pale imitators (Gore), at worst center-right turncoats (the Clintons, Obama).
Only four confirmed right-wingers have perished in recent plane wrecks. There was Larry MacDonald, whose Korean Airlines Flight 007 was shot down over Russia in 1983 (a transparent conspiracy even by permissive American standards. Despite a flurry of lawsuits filed by grieving families and equally upset insurance companies, no court of law saw fit to investigate. Then John Tower, Chairman of the Senate Commission by that name, investigating the Iran/Contra Scandal in 1991; the same year John H. Heinz crashed and died. Then the death by plane crash of Ted Stevens, defeated reactionary Senator from Alaska in 2010. Each threatened to expose political skeletons in the Republican closet.
There were other casualties but their political affiliations were vague and they probably died by accident. Given how few true progressives are recruited into American politics and how many more reactionaries, such skewed mortality rates become even more unlikely. Some actuarial number cruncher should make a scientific tabulation of these disturbing anomalies.
“Small d democratic” elections are falsified with impunity. Longstanding special interest groups are entrenched in electoral oversight agencies. What a coincidence! The more longstanding their authority, the fewer questions posed about their legitimacy and the more infractions they permit themselves without serious investigation and correction much less direct penalty, public discredit and reversal of consequences.
Even during the 21st century, popular elections are falsified. Even when obvious transgressions are revealed, they go uncorrected, from the richest to the poorest of nations. We permit democratic swindles one after another and don’t challenge the swindlers for abusing our confidence. We ruin democracy by honoring it, since we refuse to confront influential creeps. Their tyranny worsens every time they get away with another transgression — all in the name of “sacred democracy.”
Just as democratic revolutions overthrew tyrannical monarchy, a Learner revolution would overthrow the “republican” tyranny we live under. This time, for a change, we will replace weapon tyranny with a strictly peaceful and orderly government — never again with latest renewal of a deadlier weapon tyranny.
Democracy is the ideal political machine for a mature weapon state, but the insidious foe of peace values. Weapon governments derive at least four advantages from democracy:
· Within carefully defined parameters, recruitment and promotion are based on service and loyalty to the elite. This setup is slightly better than hereditary replacement by sick, stupid or crazy nobles, their family and sycophants.
· Compared to prior weapon tyrannies, democracy permits a tidier transition to power. While elected figureheads replace one another with placid regularity, back-room power brokers determine whose political turf shrinks or grows in accordance with the interests of great wealth. Fewer messy riots and rebellions ensue, and not too much infighting; at least in theory, at least most of the time.
· Democracy grants the rich much more influence than their small numbers warrant. The richer they are and the fewer they are, the more powerful they grow in a democracy. This gives them undue political advantage despite the selfish rewards of their petty, private interests. The smaller the pool of decision-makers, the narrower and clumsier their solutions. Simple arithmetic. Plus the greater their vulnerability to takeover by their psychopathic offspring who inherit their rank and their sociopathic slaves.
· Democracy gives info proletarians the illusion of a say in government with no practical consequences. Institutionalized ignorance excludes most proletarians from valid decision-making. Upholding the sham of grass roots power, political campaigns degenerate into sound bite sloganeering, irrelevant anecdotes, personality smears and uncorrected lies repeated systematically (Trump). By universal consent, nothing much of importance is debated in public.
Ralph Nader and Bernie Sanders exposed this fourth defect quite clearly. During their presidential campaigns, they were strong reform candidates backed by well-staffed grass-roots organizations and significant popular support in every State of the Union. They offered carefully studied proposals to resolve current problems. Unlike their slippery counterparts, they described their positions clearly at mass rallies. Their run-of-the-mill opponents confessed they could never drum up the size and enthusiasm of their audiences, with the exception of Trump, later on, and his neofascist crowds given much more media coverage.
Mr. Nader was excluded from media debates, was never granted proportionate time. He was barred from big Party conventions. And, worse yet, he was rejected by the people. The mass media had convinced them that their votes would be “wasted” if they dared to vote their conscience. Sanders fared no better. Later on, Trump got far more media coverage that anyone else including his Democratic adversary, Hillary Clinton.
In mature democracies, anyone who threatens to discuss policy in a serious manner is barred from public discourse. He is ignored with equal obstinacy, from above by the media and from below by sheep like members of majority parties.
“As a form of government, democracy belongs to the future. It has so recently taken shape in the affairs and in the minds of men that it is still but a shadow of what it will become. Moreover, it is a form of government which will not exist in fact until social and economic, and even cultural, changes that have not yet occurred take place. … Mr. Henry Wallace speaks of the century of the common man — the democratic century — as a thing of the future. It has been well said that ‘the reason men feel that the democratic world must survive is not that it is perfectly realized, but that it is scarcely realized at all.’” Mortimer J. Adler, How to Think about War and Peace, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1944, p 186.
The word democracy comes from the Greek term, demos. Generally translated, demos signifies a parcel of rural land, its owners, and the “free” (because land-holding) citizenry. It can also mean the popular assembly, the township and the commune. Finally, it means the people’s authority or the will of the state.
Laocracy comes from the Greek word laos: the crowd, the common folk, enlisted soldiers, the subjects of a prince and the masses in the Marxist sense. The Greek word laos is more functional than idiotes (people who won’t vote): the sport and soap opera addicts who pass for free citizens these days.
Here’s how Democracy differs from Laocracy. Democrats call themselves realists because they consider social contradictions and the resulting injustice inevitable and proper, whereas Laocrats will value freedom and justice as self-reinforcing necessities to be promoted many fewer exceptions and much less compromise.
Democrats dread the mob: the final arbiter of democratic injustice. In a Learner Commonwealth, the so-called mob would become an elegant source of tranquility, refinement and abundance. Its framework of massive stability will anchor the frenzied whirl of Laocracy’s countless gyroscopes. Learners will find better ways than mob violence to turn political frustration into new legislation and significant reform.
The term “laity” derives from the Greek word laos, which describes the mass of non-professionals. Laypeople differ from professionals in that amateurs waste a lot of time and energy in their first efforts, many of which go wrong through inexperience. Take my unreadable first drafts of Learners: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld during the 1990s, for example. Thereafter, laic performance can improve dramatically. Talented amateurs are only limited by the time and effort they will spend to improve their skills, and by their tendency over time to adopt the professional liabilities listed below. Their achievement curve differs radically from that of professionals, whose first efforts achieve maximum results and follow-ups achieve less and less.
Professionals do everything poorly from the get-go: the only way their professors taught them. Anything done differently – for better or for worse – raises a howl of professional controversy. Greater efficiency threatens the collective rice bowl. Professionals are taught to compromise their ethics in favor of internal cohesion and discipline. Faltering colleagues are shielded at the public’s expense, even though their competency and honesty may fall short of some pre-determined standard of mediocrity.
In the past, record keeping made use of elaborate technologies and fragile media. It always needed them, just as it does today. Back then, literacy was an expensive, rare skill. A handful of young scholars underwent brutal training during which “by-the-book” solutions were etched onto their minds through a series of exhaustive examinations. Only one rote solution rated a passing grade, in an attempt to ensure consistent control across vast distances.
Graduates were dispatched into the cultural wilderness with a roll of scrolls or a basket of clay tablets, their skull filled with weapon clichés. The trip from a central school to their assigned post was tough, dangerous and expensive. Once they arrived, they were supposed to govern an ignorant info proletariat frozen for centuries in an information vacuum. This dusty silence was only interrupted by the occasional pony express rider bearing info elite proclamations, steadily heavier tax burdens and the rare, new business deal. Unlucky scholars were paired off with brutal strongmen. Endowed with military and police powers, these warlords enforced decisions after listening to scholarly advice — in theory.
My friend Paul Lackman invoked Theodoric (yet another “Great” butcher), who sacked Rome with his Ostrogoths, then restored surviving Latin administrators (like Cassiodorus) to their civic duties – tax gathering, regulation and such. In theory, he confined his Goths to a military role. He only plucked the random wise guy like Boethius from his glass and ivory tower and had him jailed then executed. The condemned man had dared suggest that free intellect is superior to weapon management. History is full of such exemplary executions.
In China, a monolithic mandarinate emerged. No-one there could join the info elite without passing the imperial exam. The resulting bureaucracy became haughty, inflexible and rooted in past precedent. It turned into a stubborn orthodoxy averse to creativity, complexity and change. Mandarins tended to fling up their hands (if their creepy, long fingernails permitted) when fate stumped their stockpile of memorized clichés. They abandoned vast overseas markets and fumbled a technological edge centuries in advance of the West. They submitted to aggression, parochialism, misery and corruption —in obedience to the weapon dictates of mandarin certification.
Brilliant Learners initiated a Golden Age of Western technology; they nearly sparked a comparable Golden Age under the emperor-gods, and Wu of Han (156-87 AEC), Taizong of Tang (599-649) and Yongle of Ming (1360-1424). China declined under subsequent mandarin control. Nothing deadens creativity like mandatory academic certification for positions of responsibility. It is the next worst alternative (though perhaps the tidiest) when changing circumstances demand social transformation. Of course, the worst alternative is the promotion of public officials through violence: the alternative that weapon cultures resort to automatically during wartime crises and ensuing revolutions.
The shared characteristics of Mandarinates and university systems show up as consistently in ancient China as in the modern West. Form and appearance supersede content and results; allowable means justify deplorable ends. In both societies, packaging prevails over content. The questions “who” and “how” overshadow “why” and “for whom.” The mass obligation to certify one’s good intentions (and not to rock the boat) supersedes the menace of unintended consequences and their catastrophic outcomes.
We are going to have to rock the boat in order to shift its burden and do so hard and soon, just to prevent it from swamping at the next set of rapids coming into view.
“The ends justify the means.” First coined by the Roman poet Ovid; Machiavelli used this expression in The Prince. Later on, Hitler and like-minded henchmen would abuse it. In other words, heroic outcomes justify horrific methods. For Hitler and his peers, ends and means became equally insane. Thanks to them, our debate over ends and means has reached a dead-end. Any talk of valid ends fades away these days, replaced by the microscopic examination of trivial means — preferably litigation-driven. Hitler’s self-contradiction is goose-stepped out any time someone advocates fair ends for their own sake. Please tell me, when we debate moral values, what are we doing quoting Hitler to each other?
I quote Mein Kampf in a few chapters of this book, and do so with great care when he talks about some topic brought up here, then reveals his weapons intent as opposed to this book’s peaceful one. Quoting Hitler out of context will no doubt earn me censure from both sides of the aisle. I suspect that many people, who would never accept Leaner in any case or read any part of it, will use this as their excuse to reject every part of it. Too bad! Me and my book are honored to be rejected by such closed minds.
All I can say is this. I live on WeaponWorld and must use the material I find here. If I had restricted my analysis to nothing but honest peace texts, I’d never have assembled this work. By and large, similar peace messages never survived the review of dominant weapon mentors.
The ultimate literary peace prize on this planet is to get your book blacklisted by the publishing industry (not “commercial” enough), torched by some fanatic or banned by the latest mass religion or ideology. It honors me and my work to be outcast this way.
Actually, the real-world formula for this debate is quite clear, based on outcomes. The ends parallel the means; the quality of ends justifies the quality of means. If adhered to honestly, good means bring good ends and bad means beget bad ends. Good ends don’t justify bad means nor do they result from them. In turn, bad means almost never achieve good ends. At the first sign of bad ends without corrective action, bad means take over in almost every case from then on. We need not wait for inevitable bad ends before stepping in to restore good means and ensure a better ending.
All this should be obvious; but it is not, thanks to our industrious abuse of this Hitler quote. Misusing this weapon myth, weapon mentors make us conclude that every means must be acceptably mediocre and every end, dismissed. According to up-to-date prejudice, good ends are irrelevant and good means, impractical. This is how we manage to starve hundreds of millions of babies every year without organized opposition, and how the trillions spent on weapons during the same interval never gets spent to promote peace.
An interesting illustration of this weapon myth is Dostoyevsky’s paradox concerning utopia. I believe it is found in “The Grand Inquisitor” chapter of The Brothers Karamazov, where one of his characters asks another something to this effect:
“If you could guarantee utopia in perpetuity by torturing an innocent little girl to death, would you do it?”
The correct answer? “The goals of utopia cannot be furthered by torturing an innocent child. On the contrary, such a crime would automatically set back utopia and its goals. Your paradox is another weapon myth. Shut your mouth, once and for all, you shameless reactionary and weapon mythmaker, and stop poisoning this discussion!”
Learners will call upon unlimited consultancies. Many info proletarians have a better grasp their topic of passion than equivalent professionals. Thousands of expert amateurs wait to be summoned to attend. Each social decision could be a unique, perfectly crafted custom job done fast and easy. Laocracy is practically on the horizon.
Like others among our treasured institutions, democracy is the end product of weapon mentality. Weapon managers have polished democracy for so long, they’ve turned it into a gleaming multi-tool in their blood-softened hands. Smug hypocrisy is all that we can expect from them. They look forward to putting miraculous, new, top-down, canned knowledge and artificial intelligence systems in control of everything and everyone. They’ve carefully ignored grass roots, Learner-driven alternatives obviously preferable.
Like most of the global peace technologies we need, we can pull better alternatives right off the shelf of weapon technology and plug them back together for an honest peace.
Alexis de Tocqueville took great pains to distinguish administrative responsibilities from governmental ones in Democracy in America, his excellent “before” snapshot of American politics.
Ideally, government focuses on problems that involve the whole nation: foreign affairs, military strategy, commerce overseas and other globe-spanning functions. It should do so exclusively and forsake other issues. Government is centralized at the top in the capital; it focuses outward in space and forward in time. Good government deals with long-range issues with disinterested benevolence. It shines when disaster overwhelms local resources and when local requirements boil down to basic sustenance, shelter and security. When it operates effectively, it reduces common misery whereas fear- and greed-driven locals often worsen an already bad situation.
This government capacity was dramatized in Frank Kapra’s movie version of John Steinbeck’s book, The Grapes of Wrath. The Feds could offer safe, sanitary and cheap housing to poor migrants, while locals were neither willing nor able to do so.
On the negative side, government intervention tends to expand beyond practical use. In the long run, distant bureaucrats take on responsibilities too delicate and diverse for them to handle effectively. When failures begin to multiply, accountability blurs, cosmetics overcome common sense, corruption and hypocrisy replace ingrained wisdom.
After all, unless bloody revolution overthrows them, they enjoy uncontested monopoly and can ignore internal defects honest competition would eliminate. In a weapon state, the only political rivalry in force is military revolt: that least likely to come up with an efficient and peaceful replacement.
Official language becomes ornate and misleading. Bureaucratic copywriters use it to insulate themselves from obvious policy errors. They adopt a detached, third person point of view (for which no-one is responsible); the passive voice; long, complex sentence structures and meaningless, jargon-laden vocabulary. Their stilted prose has less and less to do with reality. Their bosses keep them busy tabulating meaningless statistics and generating make-work paperwork rather than allowing them to reduce real world afflictions. Paralyzed by official language, these agencies become too inflexible and impersonal to protect anyone but corrupt special interests left carefully unnamed. The advantage of the passive voice in news writing is that journalists need not identify those by whose orders the deed was done. Note this habit during the next news report of criminal misdeeds or negligence by special interests. “It was decided that (or it was not decided that) X … and therefore many more children must suffer.”
If those criminals were identified at every opportunity, their crimes and their scope would diminish.
On the other hand, administrative functions include learning, police, health, support for the arts and crafts, as well as other utilities and services run by county and municipal organizations. Administration focuses downward and inward, it responds to small-scale problems with detail-oriented pragmatism, it corrects local abuses swiftly and gratifies private needs in a balanced manner.
Local Administrations break down in times of disaster and war when they tend to intensify local bigotry by favoring a greedy few and their underlings at the expense of the powerless. Under such acute pressures, long-standing administrations bring out the flip side of carnivore pack behavior. Alpha dominant locals take lethal precedence and Beta subordinates become their prey.
At their peaceful best, Administrations delegate management responsibilities to grassroots participants through independent news sources and public associations. De Tocqueville’s complex web of voluntary service and electoral obligation makes every participant personally responsible for local issues. Drawn into local info politics, good citizens learn its fundamentals by:
· voting often and in detail, and (my addendum) abstaining-for-the-record to confirm political disapproval when necessary;
· attending public debates in person;
· reading independent newspapers (news sources);
· fully participating in jury duty; and
· running for and serving in a multitude of equally empowering and restrictive public offices.
·
Most importantly, everyone would take their cue from high-minded peers as intent on mutual welfare as on their own benefit. Indeed, they would consider the two inseparable. “He benefits most who benefits others most.” Popular enthusiasm would expose hypocrites, thieves, manipulators, cowards and incompetents and chase them from office. This transparency would be the greatest asset of Learner Administration.
Current governments cannot benefit from such transparency. Their size and weapon requirements forbid it unless they are held to strict peace mentality. PeaceWorld will adapt to achieve that benefit.
In The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin contends that voluntary associations are the glue that binds a pluralistic society together. Post-communist Russia thrashes in Mafioso agony because Communists never developed community networks (clubs, professional associations, churches) independent of state power. He labels this civic activity “social capital” and compares it to government capital and market capital. Peace societies would balance each of these forms of capital.
Weapon states relegate social capital to fourth-class status while government and market capital vie for futile dominance over criminal capital (organized crime). Mr. Rifkin overlooks criminal capital, even though black markets have always paralleled or outgrown orthodox capital under adverse circumstances, in proportion to their relative efficiencies.
He predicts that 20% of the population (at most and shrinking thereafter) will find decent jobs in the knowledge-based economy of the future. Meanwhile, industrial, administrative and bureaucratic automation will sustain fewer and fewer jobs. Will average people welcome this imposed leisure? Or will they suffer the familiar abuse of weapon state mass unemployment whose misery preps them for the next war?
He suggests that social capital, government capital and market capital should benefit from equal social status and resources. That way, more people would remain employed and productive. Otherwise, organized crime will step in. After all, breaking the law successfully and enforcing it against active resistance, those are acquired technical skills, especially in a work environment with no jobs otherwise. Criminal capital (which Mr. Rifkin fails to mention) is the routine weapon substitute for social capital, its darkside mirror image.
This triple suggestion provides three solid legs for a new Learner Renaissance. Three pragmatic justifications support this triad.
o It would rule out the dominance of criminal capital: an unacceptable overhead for peace societies. Yet this is a common social paradox in weapon societies, along with other prized contradictions. In truth, small doses of crime lubricate a rule-bound civilization where harsh rules should be bent in favor of average people and not enforced to their detriment. The best laws are draconian but rarely applied in full force because they can be appealed repeatedly. Amsterdam’s lenient habit of Gedogen (illegal but tolerated) should be established in every case where it could be safely applied.
o As fewer people find orthodox jobs, less and less income tax will be available with which to create new products and sustain industrial production.
o
o As worker benefits evaporate, shrinking retirement funds will provide less and less investment capital for industrial growth.
These three factors threaten to strangle dollar democracy in which a million dollars equal one vote.
This text sketches many infrastructures Mr. Rifkin and current dollar democrats require for their own plans. A predominant Laocracy might accommodate a subordinate dollar democracy focused on what it does best, but little else. On the other hand, dominant dollar democracies will never come across a subordinate Laocracy without smothering it.
According to Alexis de Tocqueville, both democracy and aristocracy produce tyranny; the former through the blind will of a majority, the latter through the will of a self-serving elite. Today, the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government are supposed to prop up American government with their checks and balances. Tomorrow, Government and Administrative functions will counteract each other’s inclination to monopolize tax resources, responsibilities and power.
Learners shall nourish an enlightened popular will. Once it matures, it will claim political responsibilities in perpetuity. Once this popular will fine-tunes the productivity of the collective superconscience, it will become as undeniable among Learners as the Bill of Rights is among Americans.
Democracy in America contains too many acute observations to go into detail here. Recommended reading.
However, De Tocqueville took his “before” snapshot during the 1830s. At that time, the United States had a 6,000-man Army and an ever-present Militia; it had an insignificant Navy but one of the largest Merchant Marines in the world. The hatchling Federal Government was carefully nested in a malarial swamp.
Stirred up by the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the failed Reconstruction, the American Weapon Party underwent meiosis into its Dollar Democrat and Banana Republican diploids; then split into four replicating haploids: centrist, conservative, reactionary and fascist. Since then, these larvae have fattened on a succession of unpopular wars while weapon tyranny matured by fits and bounds between shrinking intervals of peace.
Currently – in the “after” picture – America suffers from military-industrial gangrene: a sickness more toxic than that which afflicted De Tocqueville’s France, whose corrupt Third Empire under Napoleon III dragged the French nation into decades of financial meltdown, political scandal, imperial adventurism and military disaster.
The U.S. can call on a million and a half troops in its Regular Forces, 800,000 or more Active Reserves and no real Militia (despite a Constitution that calls for the opposite). We have Naval and Air Forces at least twice the size of all the others combined, and no Merchant Marine to speak of. American militarists will point to the National Guard and call it a militia, when it is practically speaking a Strategic (and often Tactical) Reserve for the Regular Army with no local value, training or mission except perhaps to swell a hundred times larger for the next paroxysm of world war or rekindled civil war in extremis.
We Americans may have sealed our transition from republican to imperial tyranny when we shifted from a universal draft to an all-volunteer career army. Whether this is a mere sign of our disease or its trigger, that may be all it takes to petrify a middle-aged weapon republic into its next, senescent state of empire. So in Rome, so in America (so in modern France?). How much longer will these new autocracies endure: years? Decades? Not much longer, I fear.
America’s capital city is a bloated travesty where the richest interests on Earth occupy maximum-security marble hallways while the worst slums in the country fester a few blocks away, administered without representation by those same bloated interests in Congress, disregarding to the public good.
These days, American Republicrats and Demoblicans run a consensus Weapon Party under corporate state control, in the name of “bipartisanship.” One side or the other can always find a reason to block improvements in government, often in flat denial of earlier votes and campaign promises. America has turned into a banana republic the mismanagement of which has become the sole expertise of its politicians.
City-hating bumpkins predominate in American politics deliberately unbalanced to subsidize rural and suburban conservatives and overtax urban progressives whose vital infrastructure and services are systematically cannibalized to provide much more expensive handouts to everyone else. All that is a matter of routine, despite massive popular disapproval, carried out openly and without opposition just as much in State legislatures as in the national ones.
Fifteen percent or more of the population earns its “income” from tax money and/or prison fare; a lot less than one percent owns almost everything and reimburses almost no taxes. How “Victorian era!” A growing underclass claws for subsistence. Taxed directly and indirectly to the limit of its endurance, it can’t earn enough to keep body and soul together, even as its social supports are steadily defunded. A tiny, parasitic elite hoards needlessly excessive wealth while the middle class evaporates from the heat of friction between those two.
Other civilizations underwent similar decay, notably the Roman. All of them reacted to their escalating perceptions of threat from their surroundings. The Roman Empire lacked maritime and mountain barriers, so it went bankrupt building and manning indefensible fortress chains more lengthy, elaborate and costly than the Great Wall of China. Ultimately, corruption and plague hollowed out a military vacuum within this thin outer crust, which sucked in its poor, loot-happy destroyers from beyond.
It is mentioned with hushed reverence that the Great Wall is one of the few human artifacts visible from orbital space (besides the stone alignments of Carnac and few giant, open mine pits). This is just another monstrous outgrowth of weapon technology. Its visibility from orbit is another weapon myth, since it was built from local materials and broken up into shorter fortifications, thus indistinguishable from local terrain except for latter-day radar images taken from low orbit. While the Chinese government points to the Great Wall as a potent symbol of national greatness (weapon mentality), the average Chinese citizen mourns (with decent devotion for peace mentality) the forgotten remains of starved laborers buried every few yards in this “Long Cemetery.” Similarly, the Imperial Canal with its two out of five million workers worked to death on the job, then passed in review by an imperial flotilla overburdened with opulence, sycophancy and self-congratulation.
Corporations display the worst traits of Administration and Government. Imitating ailing Administrations, they seek reward by social and environmental crimes and forsaking civic virtue. Like overblown governments, they are too monolithic and clumsy to nurture delicate administrative responsibilities. They have also inherited the worst aspects of ancient farmer and herder mentalities. Like ancient farmers, they rely on social coercion, pyramidal weapon hierarchies and ruthless exploitation of expendable people and nonrenewable resources. Like herdsmen, they consider themselves highly mobile, tied to no particular place and answerable to no one but their “elders”: a pack of stockholders and executives who vote themselves pay raises.
Like criminal syndics, corporations are government organs in disguise. More or less wedded to orthodox control agencies, they fulfill the covert interests of powerful private sponsors — and respond cynically and malevolently to the unforeseen consequences they induce.
In the Virtual Agora of the future, corporations and special interest groups may pressure their members to vote en bloc. Voting should be kept secret and voluntary to counteract this tendency, even though secret ballots often conceal political wrongdoing. Public overwatch and private consumer groups will gain equal access to these political Networks. In other words, mere wealth will stop buying plurality in Learner politics.
Thousands of disenfranchised minorities seethe and boil across WeaponWorld. No wonder, since we allow five thousand nations on this planet to compete for more or less two hundred sources of certified state power. Ruined peasants resist the most ruthless gang in their neighborhood or endure their abuse in imposed silence. Terrorized, they flee from ancestral homelands into sewage-soaked, cardboard-walled urban ghettos and across tinsel pseudo-borders into UN-sponsored pestholes. On the ground, non-governmental organization (NGO) volunteers and UN employees serve heroically to reduce their misery. Quite often, these workers sacrifice everything including their lives. May their leaders prove half as good as Fred Cuny was before psychopaths ripped him from us!
Top-down weapon managers corrupt these outcomes with their routine realpolitik decisions. As a result, refugees swarm by the dozens of millions, with more uprooted daily. It is no longer a question of managing their panic flight to reduce its horrific casualties and costs. It is time to reset conditions at home so that they will feel secure enough to remain there or return if they’ve fled. This suggestion applies to political and military refugees; peaceful climate refugees should be gathered into urban areas near potable water and new port facilities sited higher than current ones.
Here again, contrasting requirements have taken hold. Weapon managers seek to intermix disparate groups into regimented wholes. The weapons ideal calls for a blended urban serfdom dominated by identical international elites (read identically corrupt: honest leaders do not comply dependably enough with special interests). To buttress this insane regime, they make “examples” by demonstrating what happens to people caught on the wrong side of the tracks. Thanks to modern “production efficiencies,” info elites dare to sentence entire peoples to surplus status and then ignore the monstrous consequences of their verdict.
For no good reason, weapon technology demands an extraordinary collective effort from us. At a moment’s notice, we must drop everything to produce mechanized divisions, air and naval fleets that outnumber by far those of the Second (sic) World War. Their firepower and mobility has to be many times more effective and must be manufactured in less time. In order to fulfill these fantastic, World War IV (sic) production quotas, we are forced to grow excess population and ecocidal industries in the most ruinous manner possible.
We are already fighting World War III (sic) as we speak: the War on Terror, the War on Drugs and the War of Us against Them: every endless one we’ve been gullible enough to pay for. Even if World War IV (sic) never breaks out, its outrageous bill will come due soon. None but Learners will be able to pay it down or, better yet, renegotiate its fee, especially when our petroleum reserves collapse, practically speaking in a few short years.
Large weapon states have one overriding compulsion. Amass enough surplus capital, physical plant and personnel to support modern armies on a global war footing. All this waste is perfectly acceptable as far as info elites are concerned. Otherwise, the larger the weapon state, the less important proletarian requirements become. In this they resemble most human aggregates. The smaller the nation, the easier it is for its government to maintain personal contacts, accountability and civilized dialogue.
“Equality could only be preserved by Federalism [see http://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=federalism]; and it occurs more often among them [the ancients] than in the modern world. If the distribution of power among the several parts of the State is the most efficient restraint on monarchy, the distribution of power among several States is the best check on democracy. By multiplying centers of government and discussion it promotes the diffusion of political knowledge and the maintenance of healthy and independent opinion. It is the protectorate of minorities and the consecration of self-government.” Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, The History of Freedom, McMillan and Company, Ltd., London, First Edition 1907, pp. 20-21.
Hitler handily summarized the military advantage of larger states.
Quoting from: http://sunsite.org.uk/packages/Online-Book-Initiative/Adolph.Hitler/unpacked/mkv1ch04.html
“The extent of the national territory is a determining factor in the external security of the nation. The larger the territory which a people have at their disposal, the stronger the national defenses of that people. Military decisions are more quickly, more easily, more completely and more effectively gained against a people occupying a national territory which is restricted in area, than against States which have extensive territories. Moreover, the magnitude of a national territory is in itself a certain assurance that an outside Power will not hastily risk the adventure of an invasion; for in that case the struggle would have to be long and exhausting before victory could be hoped for. The risk being so great, there would have to be extraordinary reasons for such an aggressive adventure. Hence it is that the territorial magnitude of a State furnishes a basis whereon national liberty and independence can be maintained with relative ease; while, on the contrary, a State whose territory is small offers a natural temptation to the invader.” Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. I, Chap. 4.
The smaller the area of representation, the more responsive its elected representatives would be to their constituents. Smaller, more independent-minded and self-governing bodies would meet their constituents’ needs more dependably.
Gandhi said something similar to a roomful of skeptical British administrators: “It is better to be misruled by one’s own than to be ruled wisely by foreigners.” It is far better to be ruled wisely by one’s own.
You might as well consign your vote to a hurricane as to today’s mass political parties. How can mere party bosses represent everyone’s interests with fairness, balance and accuracy? How dare we entrust our personal aspirations to self-serving politicians in smoky back rooms? It is ridiculous to think that one or two or less than thousands of political parties could articulate so many divergent needs.
We will need an Agora much better wired and connected; raw, edgy, fact-filled and thrice-cross-checked to such an extent that it would suffer paralysis under weapons constraints and could only find full expression on PeaceWorld.
By breaking up into smaller groups and redefining them, political parties will give more power back to their adherents. This redistribution of power will deprive weapons elites of two lop-sided advantages: economies of scale in influence peddling and control over monologue mass media. It will make redundant the one thing they must prove really good at: raising massive armed forces quickly. This talent justifies, in their eyes, every personal wrongdoing, institutional incompetence and unforeseen outcome for which they should blame themselves.
During the 20th Century, once-dominant military, political and treasury specialists took back seat to corporate managers who had mastered all the fundamentals of world war: mass culture, industrial production, resource extraction and the suppression of everything but military, scientific research.
In 1602, the Dutch Republic chartered the first joint stock (mercantile) company to seize colonial booty and defend it militarily — closely followed by other imperial states. It wound up ruining itself over the hyper-inflated value of tulip bulbs (of all things!). Today, weapon technicians control every modern state, if only indirectly. Many trans-national corporations outspend most nations. And the economic bubble that will burst and ruin everything will be more ludicrous than the stratospheric price of tulip bulbs.
In earlier civilizations, corporate clergy became hopelessly corrupt. This happened eventually, no matter how well disciplined, well intentioned and honest it may have been at first. This will happen to any organization that considers itself fit to rule unilaterally on every topic. Longstanding competence and honesty require lasting competition. Any “permanent victory” by one side or the other (which side and its particularities do not matter if they are honestly maintained) will lead to the victor’s eventual corruption and incompetence.
Under other circumstances, nobles and priests were disciplined more severely than the merchant class they despised. Those latter, with strictly limited means and corresponding morals, found their ambitions rewarded by mercantile fraud, weapon usury, tax farming and famine brokering. Whether they made their home in Babylon, in ancient China or in feudal Europe, these people became tyrants’ favorite agents of repression. Descendants of the most prosperous of these miscreants formed the original bourgeoisie. During the Cold War, secret police and totalitarian bureaucrats recruited the same kinds of people just as successfully. As they became more powerful and well connected, their institutional crimes grew more blatant. Their misdeeds highlight a frenzied tug-of-war between private, administrative, governmental, civic, corporate and criminal power. As each power group vies for preeminence, it denies the others the maximum effectiveness they could display within their optimal sphere of competence.
Global spendthrifts come in two categories:
· two hundred all-powerful governments that gather enormous wealth through weapons-based overtaxation. They undercut starved Administrations, dole out bare subsistence to info proletariats who live in planned misery, and grease the palms of the wealthy with massive public subsidies; and
· two hundred tycoons (or twenty, or two million) wealthier than the poorer half of this population.
Learner Administrations will cover most collective responsibilities with elective voluntary associations of the people involved at the grass roots level. The blueprint will be intratribal, egalitarian and anarchic; thus relying on personal respect, equality and compliance. Personal rights and responsibilities will dominate Administrative and Government priorities. Public ones will fall to the lowest level they can be handled effectively. Most delegations of authority (and especially tax revenues) will favor lower level Administrations over higher levels, and intermediate Administration over Government.
If political responsibilities devolve to too low a level (lacking the funds to pay for them), people there should delegate them to the next higher one. If maintained at overly high levels, they must revert to the lowest one that can administer them effectively, as determined by the electorate directly affected. Short of disaster and war, no political level should consolidate responsibilities that would work better on a more decentralized, lower one.
“A community of the world’s peoples, living together under government, will not be a society of nations but a society of men divided into subgroups only according to the divisions of local government.” Mortimer J. Adler, How to Think about War and Peace, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1944, p 120.
An essential read for aspiring Learners.
Learner issues will become computerized referendum measures open to public hearings throughout the community. Every budget item, directive and law will run a gauntlet of public scrutiny and public veto by citizen majorities. Real-time votes will be tabulated daily. If machine tabulations cannot be trusted, political gatherings will be organized among those concerned as the need arises. More and more conversations will flourish between info elites and proletariats until mere class separations fade into the background if they do not disappear.
Individuals may dedicate half their taxes to favored projects and deny the other half to specific line items. In this manner, they will veto the worst laws and uphold the best by popular referendum at Governmental and Administrative levels. Private and corporate interests will no longer benefit from administrative exemption.
Any proposal to hand out this kind of power would be unthinkable without first stipulating that all Learners must seek truth and justice persistently — and be taught to do so at every opportunity, especially during early Learning. They must base their decisions on the best data they can find. These stipulations would be well served by proper Learning. Such habits need to be relearned quickly by everyone soon.
The mob –that every dollar democrat dreads – would be much less scary if it consisted of well-informed, conscientious and self-disciplined citizens made equally mindful of their freedom and responsibilities by systematic Learning.
Laocracy’s worst adversary is a seamless news apparatus devoted to weapons elites.
Something important was discovered when Poland underwent its worst political repression just prior to the collapse of its Communist government. Its Central Propaganda Bureau could not maintain a watertight seal between the truth and its disinformation substitute. It discovered that its propaganda arm worked better when like-minded weapon mentors, handpicked for political orthodoxy, remained in charge of disinformation on a decentralized basis.
Currently, the same collegium of like-minded weapon mentors ‒ effectively decentralized but collectively motivated ‒ controls most major news outlet — American misinformation monopolies foremost. Corporations and Chambers of Commerce serve weapon mentality best by steering the media’s attention away from important matters and toward trivial ones. This tendency will be reversed. Many independent news agencies will defy the handful of authorities responsible for the current focus of corporate news (or lack of such). Facing honest competition for a change, orthodox media will have to represent a broad spectrum of public opinion and call for progressive reforms to earn their clients’ loyalty.
But let’s discuss the vaunted objectivity of the Press.
Take me, for example, and my writings. I’m frankly biased, categorically so against Repugnants of every political stripe, who ignore their limitations and thus organize the next mega-disaster. Anyone who reads Learner can recognize its bias and react to it in any way they choose. I don’t have much to hide. I am openly biased against people who insist that they have no bias because they overlook their own, whether through opportunism or delusion.
You cannot consider yourself impartial if you hate every point of view except your own; just as a state religion couldn’t call itself tolerant while its proxy government suppresses every other faith. That form of impartiality is known as the Inquisition or its fundamentalist equivalent elsewhere (Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, all those run by psychopaths these days) that suppresses every other creed impartially.
This is what Western journalism does well. It suppresses every point of view not its own and calls that tactic unbiased. Every new point of view it suppresses, regardless of its political source (whether from the Left or the Right) seems to confirm its lack of bias. In other words, the more oppressive it becomes, the more stories it passes over or distorts through editorial selectivity, and the more important those ignored stories are to one side or the other, the more impartial and objective it can call itself. How very convenient.
I call this the “Tito” or “Saddam Hussein” strategy. Punish everyone on both sides of every dispute and call yourself unbiased.
This type of Press and its info elite can adopt their favorite policies opportunistically and yet consider themselves unbiased. They can accept any fascistic abuse they find useful in the short-term (as have several Presidential administrations), and still call themselves “moderate and objective.” They could adopt progressive policies just as easily, but they won’t because they have sterilized Left Wing politics of United States in the name of “moderation.”
In America, they call you a “looney Leftist” if you seek to preserve constitutional protections legislated a hundred or more years ago. Conservative centrists get branded raving Leftists.
There is no Left in America, as it would be recognized in Europe and elsewhere. Rightists are free to distort and ignore the Constitution to promote their advantage. Every few electoral cycles, they ratchet the Nation a couple steps rightwards for every one their opposition takes back toward the Center evermore distant and lapsed, now branded “Far Left.” As for centrists during their momentary custody of power, they are pushed a little further to the Right (just a bit more slowly).
The abuses of the Radical Right are more to the taste of the ruling elite, just as they were in Nazi Germany, because they are more open to monopolistic greed, its inevitable brutality and suppression of political dialogue. The sad outcome, barring massive transformation, is the same. Only the Party name changes, from National Socialist to National Capitalist, to better express the weapon corporatism in a nation-state setting that winds up ruling in any case.
A Learner news agency would accept any point of view to confirm its objectivity. It would organize bicameral newsrooms, one side enthusiastically progressive and the other just as grimly reactionary. Both lobes of this bicameral mind would have to operate on the same budget and recruit the best talent that would confirm its bias. Both would issue one or more editions of its paper or broadcast (each edition more extreme to conform to its chosen audience). Both will cover its slice of the political pie and accept any outside point of view that strengthens it. As long as every point of view, no matter how extreme, finds a forum, the news system can honestly call itself balanced and objective.
This bicameral newsroom could perhaps run a halfway-edition in which one side drafted the story and the other would edit, fact-check, and print or broadcast it. Then they would change places, the way two children could share a piece of cake fairly: one cutting it and the other choosing his piece. They could compete to establish which side generated the most objective, well-balanced reporting. That might work.
Otherwise, we wind up with a very subtle propaganda agency enslaved to special interests, indifferent to bias or lack of such, as long as those special interests achieve their goals. As the ultimate evolution of weapon journalism, this subtle form of bias may be the most pernicious one.
In Mein Kampf, Vol. I, Chap. 10, Adolph Hitler sorted readers of the Press into three categories:
1. those who believe everything they read;
2. those who distrust and no longer believe anything they read; and
3. those who critically examine what they read, and form their judgments accordingly.
He dismisses the first group as the largest but least intelligent, and the second as useless. He concludes that the third group of critical thinkers is too small to influence events, whereas the first group, that of credulous simpletons, is the most influential and easily swayed.
If the Virtual Agora took place, both lies and the truth would gain equal access: his third group would become an incontestable majority. All this would no longer pose a problem for anyone except Hitler and his kind who would find the going much tougher.
Future political parties will crystallize around geographic, economic, cultural and religious hubs. Other clubs and special interest groups will provide valid political nuclei if they merit the time, study and votes of their devotees. Already, some South American adults attend communidades de base (basic communities) where they study the Bible, promote their education and discuss possible courses of action in light of their faith. It’s too bad they can’t choose to be progressive Learners (who have not yet organized in Brazil or elsewhere) rather than the militaristic fascists they favor instead. Such Learner communities will become commonplace.
Learners will feel enormous tenderness towards neighbors near and far, once they feel free to express their deepest convictions in public. This warm front of mutual affection will delight us as will its good deeds.
“People today seem unable to understand love as a political concept, but a concept of love is just what we need to grasp the constituent power of the multitude. The modern concept of love is almost exclusively limited to the bourgeois couple and the claustrophobic confines of the nuclear family. Love has become a strictly private affair. We need a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love. We need to recuperate the public and political conception of love common in premodern traditions. Christianity and Judaism, for example, both conceive love as a political act that constructs the multitude. Love means precisely that our expansive encounters and continuous collaborations bring us joy. There is really nothing necessarily metaphysical about the Christian and Judaic [and Islamic, etc.] love of God; both God’s love of humanity and humanity’s love of God are expressed and incarnated in the common material political project of the multitude. We need to recover today this material and political sense of love, a love as strong as death. This does not mean you cannot love your spouse, your mother, and your child. It only means that your love does not end there, that love serves as the basis for our political projects in common and the construction of a new society. Without this love, we are nothing.” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, The Penguin Press, New York, 2004, pp. 351-352.
We will soon cast off our willful lack of empathy and fellowship, the way a disabled person would cast off awkward crutches upon miraculous cure. Learners will encourage all kinds of gemeinschaften: communities of affection, to supplant gesellschaften: those based on weapon duties and labor.
Let me repeat this idea. This warm front of sympathy will be global, its inclusiveness all-embracing, so much better for us it will go beyond imagining.
I am grateful to the late Randy Revell and his Context, Inc., social/commercial gatherings during which staff and volunteers routinely liberated the spontaneous mass affection of the audience and harnessed their creative energy to future projects, as if they were showing off a magic trick that anyone could duplicate.
New political parties will encourage electronic communications and voluntary political rallies. The combined laity of Learners will leverage the politics of information and no longer leave those things up to official nominees, committee chairs, media magnates and Party bosses intent on suppressing it. Once we pop this fantasy balloon, the inefficiencies of those politics will stun us. To explain it, Learner historians will have to recall the allegory of a starving elephant steered by a cockroach’s brain, that can’t feed itself in a farmer’s market.
This inverse-scale efficiency is inherently risky, however. It is easiest, for example, to connive at overt racism while running a small village. It is less so from a county seat or a public school district. It is still harder from the power base of a major metropolitan electorate. It would be even more difficult from a continent-spanning government. Bigots and psychopaths may seize temporary control of a certain level or place of governance, but the conscience-driven will rally adjacently to drive them out spontaneously. At each higher level of governance, resistance against this type of bigotry seems to increase. Thus, grand-mother politics will play an over-watch role, making sure that universal human rights override local prejudices in all but the most trivial circumstances.
Fustel de Coulanges, in The Ancient City, New York, Doubleday, n.d., p. 334, described the enormous amount of time and attention demanded of a Greek citizen to fulfill his democratic obligations. About once a week, he had to listen to countless speeches to determine matters of war and peace, of life and death for himself and his family. If he did not attend all day long, he was not allowed to vote.
Murray Bookchin states, in The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1991, reprinted 1995, page 263, that he does not expect “modern” citizens to bear this burden of freedom at the expense of free time, entertainment, busyness and leisure — the institutionalized waste of time those words imply. Learners will expect many impassioned people to take up that burden in the World Agora.
It might be advisable to give each person 50,000 computerized votes a day.
I might cast 1,000 votes toward my favorite mayoral candidate, 5,000 votes for a certain Congressperson, 6,000 votes against two unsavory candidates for State Governor, 20,000 votes to support a Community College Levy, one or two dozen votes to fix a pothole in my neighborhood, 5,000 votes to recommend peace in some war-torn corner of the globe, another 5,000 to free political prisoners in some far-off land. I could use my last 7,988 votes to petition the World Court to rule whether or not to intervene there, etc.
The next day, I might change my mind. Some grievous offense might make me devote all my votes to get my Police Commissioner replaced.
I might choose to draft a legislative bill. I’d research it with other interested Learners on the Network, and we’d allocate our votes to disseminate it and get it ratified.
Computers could track of vote. Laocracy would tabulate these decisions without hidden manipulation or bureaucratic drag.
“The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections. To break off that point is to avert the danger. The common system of representation perpetuates the danger. Unequal electorates afford no security to majorities. Equal electorates give none to minorities. Thirty-five years ago it was pointed out that the remedy is proportional representation. It is profoundly democratic, for it increases the influence of thousands who would otherwise have no voice in the government; and it brings men more near equality by so contriving that no vote shall be wasted, and that every voter shall contribute to bring into Parliament a member of his own opinions.” Acton, Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg, The History of Freedom, McMillan and Company, Ltd, London, First Edition 1907, pp. 97-98.
It is obvious that computers are vulnerable to political manipulation and electoral fraud. We’ve found this to be the case with automated election tampering. Instances of crucial vote fraud come to mind from the Presidential elections in 2000 in Florida and 2004 in Ohio — at odds with exit polls, with no valid audit trail and under no-one’s control except for partisan political contributors: both the businessmen tasked with distributing voting machines and officials supposed to supervise them; with no redress, no penalty, no administrative or legislative makeover and no formal interdiction of future recurrence.
Nowadays “the Russians” must be guilty of turning ALL the key, swing, purple districts of key, swing, purple states, in favor of Trump by razor-thin margins. He needed every swing district to carry those States and take their electoral votes; no lesser tally would work for him. Think about that: both candidates should have carried more or less half of the swing voters and states, but Trump won them all. Voting fraud, that the Republicans accuse their opponents of without proof from then on. And the Democrats, never. What an unbelievable coincidence!
According to those truly guilty: “The unpopularity of our political goals has made victory impossible the next few decades of elections and getting away with the cheating it would require. So be it. Let’s refine our electoral frauds until they are foolproof, minimize our defeats during each electoral cycle and guaranty victory at some future date (Trump). After all, no-one honest is stopping us; not even the Constitution.”
Hitler would have been proud. As for me, this political deceit makes my mouth water, as prior to throwing up. I must remind myself we make these hick errors today to do better tomorrow, once our parochial politics become global and honestly cosmopolitan.
We might expect to find similar mass fraud in commercial information systems: in the stock market and its computerized transactions, for example. That is not the case, barring the rare exception, because well-paid experts make it their business to guarantee the integrity of commercial information systems.
That will be the case in spades for Learner votes. Many bright Learners will stake their expertise, passion and honor on the integrity of electoral information systems. Potential cheats will be watched very carefully. They will lose access to the system once their sinister plots are exposed. In addition, political tabulations will grow so numerous and redundant yet intertwined and mutually validating that no one could seize credible control of them simultaneously. It will become much more difficult to distort vote counts in a consistent but untraceable way.
Any system struck by corruption – or merely suspect of it – will be replaced by multiple systems of greater reliability. Every contact (no matter how innocent) between politicians and the managers of such voting systems will be examined without mercy. Such encounters will hurt the reputation of both parties, to such an extent that everyone involved will eventually consider them taboo, the same way honest lawyers treat jury members out of court.
Otherwise, we will go back to paper ballots easier to crosscheck in realtime and audit afterwards, even though they may be slower and more laborious to tally. Maximum reporting speed at the risk of serious cheating: that would only appeal to ravenous news agencies with deceitful special interests to cover up and nothing much more to report.
Those political parties and corporations that remain could collect their members’ votes and allocate them en bloc, in accordance with a pre-advertised political platform. They will offer decision-tree menus, in-depth analyses of complex issues and pre-digested “voting packages” Learners may endorse.
As long as all of us receive an equal number of votes, a renewed spirit of "one person, one vote" will replace the deflated electoral turnouts caused by the abuses of disinfo politics: "one million dollars equal one vote; one voter equals nothing."
It goes without saying, the Electoral College and all its machinery of political dominance by unnamed special interests at third remove will be thrown out.
A majority of abstentions cast for-the-record will force another election ‒ the principal candidates forbidden to run anew ‒ for as many times as necessary until an acceptable candidate is found.
In addition, this system will permit ill-treated minorities to advance their sharply focused cause by outbidding the scattered priorities of majorities. It will allow those fascinated by a certain topic a greater say in its management, regardless of their financial involvement: the essence of small-scale democracy writ large.
This text advocates a world-spanning, multi-variant political party whose members will support peace mentality and relegate weapon mentality to vestigial status. It recommends some Laocratic principles, but no detailed model of future Administrative bodies. These should evolve organically according to popular consensus and local peace custom. Each culture retains a model of Golden Age wisdom and justice in the collective superconscience. Learners should nurture all of them, each in its own setting.
“But the general objectives of every good institution should be modified in each country according to relations that arise, as much in terms of local circumstance as by the temperament of inhabitants; and it is with respect to these relations that each people should be assigned a specific system, not necessarily the best in itself, but for the State to which it is destined.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social, (The Social Contract), Bordas, Paris, Bruxelles, Montréal, 1972. Book II, Chapter 11.
“It is impossible to anticipate, from this vantage point in time, the details of institutional structure that would be settled once the requisite political consciousness emerges that would engender a revolution in world order. Despite a measure of interplay, the mechanics of administrative management are an outgrowth of political consciousness rather than its source. …
“… What is needed is a new political energy, on the one hand animated by planetary goals and a coherent vision, and on the other propelled to action by self-interest and a sense of urgency.” Richard A. Falk, A Study of Future Worlds, Free Press, New York, 1975, p 154.
- JURY DUTY –
Juries are remarkable social instruments. During public ceremonies, civilization overcomes many grave problems by applying the Golden Rule. Too bad the positive influence of juries is hedged about by legal constraint and lawyers’ selectivity. Jury trials would work best if the following principles were applied beforehand.
· Jury selection would be random and irreversible except on humanitarian grounds. There would be no voir dire or challenge except to exclude the insane and felons serving out their terms.
· All evidence would be admissible to juries, including coerced testimony. Any suggestion of unnecessary coercion in evidence gathering would draw disciplinary review on the police in question. Let juries decide what information is prejudicial, whether lawyers are misleading and which police misdeeds require counter-punishment. In many cases, a verdict of innocent pronounced for a suspect mistreated by the police would authorize a corresponding investigation of the police in question.
· Juries would be responsible for sentencing. Penalties, fines and additional surveillance might be proportional to the number of votes received by a Defendant.
o Innocent: Twelve jurors for
o Innocent by Majority: From eleven to seven for
o Retrial with a new Jury: Split Decision
o Guilty by Majority: From eleven to seven against
o Guilty: Twelve against
o Just an example; another might be:
o Innocent: Twelve or eleven for (to neutralize the random sadist)
o Innocent by majority: From ten to eight for
o New trial: From seven to five for
o Guilty by majority: From eleven to nine against
o Guilty: Twelve against
Nonetheless, ancient Hebrew judges used to let a detainee off if they found him guilty by unanimous vote; something to think about. The presumption of innocence should be jurors’ first inspiration and expectation. Judges would remind them it is the most promising benchmark of justice.
Jury decisions would be subject to review only if members of the same jury summoned a higher court and another jury, based on appeals addressed to them by the condemned, care of the first Court in question. A simple majority of jurors could call for this retrial.
Judges and lawyers would be subject to disciplinary review initiated by the juries they served poorly. This last is very important. Fewer than a dozen Federal Judges have been dismissed for cause under historic standards of discipline.
The future World Court – empowered with decision-making over global issues of mass life and death – should base its decisions and disciplinary reviews on the deliberation of untampered juries. Almost every trial, criminal and civil, should go before a jury.
In The Shield of Achilles (Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, New York, 2002), Phillip Bobbit analyses international law and its claim of legitimacy. He concludes that its latest claim appears to be based on States’ agreement to submit to its jurisdiction.
More and more often, these States have failed to protect their national citizenry from terrorism, for example, and improve its living standards despite shrinking resources. Due to these failures, the latest incarnation of nation-states is being replaced by market states whose only claim to legitimacy is the unearned profit they pass on to financial (info) elites. This is Mr. Bobbit’s thesis in a nutshell.
Since his work was published in 2002, these market states have confirmed their illegitimacy through various swindles, voting district gerrymandering, environmental disasters, abuses of disaster capitalism, financial meltdowns and massive transfers of illegitimate wealth upwards (growing exponentially over time with ruinous effects on host nations).
Unlike prior regimes, their ascent to power has not yet required an epochal war (unless it is the Western world’s against the Muslim Ouma). This kind of war can last several generations under the aegis of prior regimes, during which various contenders take sides; win or lose intermittently; and drop out, change sides or get replaced by previously neutral newcomers. It ends up with a near-universal peace treaty that defines the share of constitutional arrangements and political regimes of those states, more or less in accordance with the wishes of the victors.
This model confirms Learner’s thesis: we submit to Darwinian selection for more insidious and deadly weapon states.
An outline of Mr. Bobbit’s analysis includes:
The Treaty of Augsburg (1555) – the Princely State
The Peace of Westphalia (1648) – the Kingly State
The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) – the Territorial State
The Congress of Vienna (1815) – the State-Nation
The Treaty of Versailles (1919) – the Nation-State
The Peace of Paris (1991) – the Market State
Almost bloodlessly and practically overnight, this latest sort has proven itself unfit to rule as the Soviet Communist regime was during its collapse. Failed states cannot justify their own national legitimacy much less that of international law.
So we are back on square one. Two basic questions remain to be answered:
“…If the body of international legal rules cannot uniquely determine the legality of a particular act by the parties it is supposed to govern, how can it be law? And if international law is law, why doesn’t it seem to have any effect?” p. 642.
If the legitimacy of international law cannot be based on that of adherent states, since they are undergoing their own form of breakdown and retain none for themselves, what is left? The cleaver for that Gordian knot is trial by randomly selected juries in a court of law.
In support of their case before this court, each side’s lawyers could call upon any argument, philosophical position, historical treaty, etc., that Mr. Bobbit lists so well. They will uphold their argument with any fact, norm, precedent, agreement, document, contract and myth if applicable. They will call on any intellectual point of view, permutation and quibble without limit. All of them will be equally valid and admissible as long as relevant to the case. No philosophical school or administrative criterion could claim dominance over the others; each would prove equally acceptable within this adversarial setting. As in other trials, over-long and complex presentations will work against those who present them, compared to clearer summaries granted a better hearing.
None of them could confirm or deny the legitimacy of that ruling. Only the vote of a duly appointed jury could do so, followed by the judgment of history. If these juries are selected in an honestly random manner, their decisions and those of history would turn out identical, matching the objectivity of their judgment.
In essence, international law between states likens to civil law between individuals in a state and criminal law between the individual and the state. After all, a nation-state is a colonial aggregate of individuals with its own history, needs and aspirations as well as social/cultural equivalents; the same way individuals are colonial aggregates of cells with their own … etc. According to our precedents within the state, arguments against international law are void.
Contradictions are even more apparent in the case of international law. Unlike in-state law, there is (as yet) no higher tangible power to call upon for ultimate resolution. Otherwise, the same parameters apply; the best individual solution would also be the best collective one.
The law gains legitimacy when it upholds justice more often than injustice; preferably, much more often; ideally, always. If it fails to do so, it does not matter what system of justice is established; what checks and balances it claims; how seductively elegant its philosophy; or how well educated, well paid or of elite status its officers.
Claimants, their advocates, state patrons and allies, as well as officials of the court: each of them could prove themselves to be insane, venal, biased, criminal or fascistic militants (for whatever reason) and thus pervert justice to fulfill their warped priority. Psychopaths specialize in this kind of gradual infiltration and eventual takeover.
Mr. Bobbit and the constitutional scholars he invokes tie themselves in knots to create a top-down system of justice so perfect it would avoid all these liabilities. In short, a black box capable of issuing pure justice regardless of circumstance and antagonists.
This project is doomed to fail: any weakness not already revealed would be uncovered at some later date and exploited in a process of Darwinian selection, until the entire system collapsed from those ill effects.
The solution is not top-down perfection but bottom-up reliability. No better way can be found to avert this abuse than duly constituted juries of randomly selected peers doing their best to fulfill their naïve sense of justice, preferably guided by a judge (male or female) deprived of decision-making powers and mandated to provide jurors with the best advice they ask for. This is the key to justice, be it in resolving contractual disputes, individual punishments (that often result in vendettas and more crime without this arrangement), or the settlement of international quarrels (which often flash off in war without it).
These days, jury empanelment resembles an old-time three-ring circus. Like lion tamers, law school graduates whip down jurors. Court officers “screen acceptable juror candidates” for days on end, even though the courts are less and less forthcoming with swift justice. Those coming from forbidden backgrounds (like law enforcement or the military) get rejected from jury duty. Other causes for dismissal include ethnicity, poverty, firmly held views on crime and punishment, or a history of police or criminal victimization. None of these would be cause for jury dismissal on PeaceWorld.
Basically, nowadays, every juror goes on trial before the suspect, no matter how often officers of the court deny this fact.
A simple test exists for courtroom procedures. Assuming you were on trial, would you care whether members of your jury were subject to voir dire or not? Think hard, lest justice be disserved.
According to Alexis De Tocqueville, jury duty was the key civics lesson of American citizens. Jury duty inspired their civic devotion because the fate of total strangers was entrusted to their care.
Currently, that lesson consists in being summoned from one’s home or job for indefinite periods, being grilled on delicate personal matters, rejected over arbitrary legalisms and bullied by supposedly omniscient, deliberately misleading court officials. Many people dodge this boring, intrusive and demanding task. They consider themselves entitled to shirk this duty and call those who fulfill it fools.
Weapon managers applaud this perversion of justice. Courts stigmatize responsible citizens as powerless pawns of central authority. In complex, formal ceremonies, perfectly acceptable jurors are stripped of privacy then branded incompetent and unnecessary for the State.
What a perfect lesson in citizenship!
By this means and many more, weapon mentality ensures that most citizens turn into civic autists.
We could do better.
There is no better protection against political reaction – or its flip side, chaosism – than the empowerment of randomly selected juries. I repeat, jury duty is the primary lesson in the sacred school of citizenship. As such, it must never be tampered with, lest we corrupt the entire constitutional system — as we are succeeding to do today.
In truth, the duty of juror should be the sacred obligation of every good citizen. "Show up in good faith, do your civic duty and be honored for it." Period.
Any lesser endeavor disgraces us.
Local jury members might share the same prejudice against a certain kind of defendant or case. This was the original reason voir dire was adopted in cases decided by juries in the United States: to counteract practically universal race prejudice. In those cases, protocols were established to permit a change of venue to dodge local prejudice. These should be reinforced. However, random jury selection would never again be compromised for that reason.
No doubt clever lawyers will corrupt change-of-venue protocols, just as they warped the random selection of juries to achieve a bias in favor of defendants rich enough to afford that expensive advantage (as in the obscene TV show “Bull”). In that case, new protocols will be needed. In the meantime, simplicity and elegance above all!
The more momentous the court decision, the greater the call for a randomly selected jury and the more exactingly its unhampered conclusions should be documented and enforced. Jury trials should remain open to the public, yet never become public spectacles.
During too many civil lawsuits, potential jurors are eliminated from duty if they disclose some understanding of the complaint — job-related, school-learnt or self-taught. Law school graduates eliminate the best-informed jurors from juries. Unqualified jurors must rule on complex issues with no help from informed insiders. They are at the mercy of any distortion court officers can dream up.
Judges worsen this confusion. They refuse to answer juror requests for clarification of the law (which should be their primary task). They reject pertinent evidence as inadmissible. They forbid note taking and other juror initiatives. Finally, they override jury decisions whose outcome disturbs their sense of propriety. This kind of jury tampering would cease.
In addition, when civil litigants agree to settle during a trial, they often agree to drop the original complaint and seal the details of the case in secret, such that no-one may review them — especially not the public and the press. In such cases, court officials conspire with litigants to deny significant information from the public. Great social evils are tabled for decades, saving some judicial time but jeopardizing the safety of future innocents. The public suffers from this denial.
Courts should seek the greatest common good. Any lesser pursuit is license for escalating banditry.
Legal settlement agreements should expose serious problems of corporate malfeasance to public scrutiny. Otherwise, out-of-court settlements should have taken place earlier, before a formal trial. Court intervention should open wide the doors of public transparency. Actually, this suggestion would speed up many civil disputes, since most of them would be settled out-of-court, in private, long before they became matters of public transparency. The unilateral, public declaration of a dispute could set a mandatory timeline for agreements out-of-court, at the end of which a transparent court case would be mandatory.
Ladies and gentlemen of the court, please note. The Law is not intended to deter crime, not to prop up current power structures, not to identify and punish the guilty or any other such paranoid nonsense.
Sociologists have come to agree (what a miracle!) that the only thing that legal systems hold in common, when compared to custom and religion, is the imposition of penalties. That is not really the case; those who violate custom and religion are often imposed penalties, and the legal system often spares the rich and powerful from well-deserved penalties.
The primary function of good law is to liberate the weak from capricious penalties imposed by the strong. Custom and religion never delivered on that promise, on the contrary. The weak would protect themselves best by serving the Law as honest jurors and letting this sovereign process protect them.
During court sessions, judges should not browbeat their jurors with the obligation of jury duty and penalty for failing to serve it. Instead, they should rally them to the Golden Rule: “Do unto him what you would rather others would do unto you. Judge him according to your wish to be judged under the same circumstances.” One of Christianity’s greatest contributions to law and civilization, even though this rule was broadcast by faiths much older and more varied than juvenile Christianity.
The best body of law unlocks doors both material and behavioral — as in: “We don’t feel the need to lock our doors at night or when we leave home.” Insofar people do not think such things spontaneously, the Law has failed. No police intervention all by itself, no matter how forceful, can pull us out of this tailspin into chaos.
A mature weapon state is also a state of terror where medieval gates must be bolted shut every night, where police and criminal elites are the only ones who bear arms amidst a citizenry of disarmed peasants as vulnerable and suspicious as they are dangerous and suspect.
The contrary would embody a universal militia well-armed and virtuously dependable, a police force that rarely felt the need for guns, and a criminal element that wouldn’t dare flash them — not our constantly renewed yet thousand-year-senescent weapon tyranny.
Peace society will replace terror with physical abundance and inexpensive mediation (preferably free of user fees and funded as a more cost-effective branch of law enforcement). They will be of such superior quality, sophistication and user-friendliness that public confidence and personal security will reign supreme.
Randomly selected juries will uphold the Law and secure justice — like no-one and nothing else could. Such a jury-driven system will mature over time, gathering strength and clear-sightedness as it becomes commonplace.
As demonstrated by current weapon states, juries deliver certain justice more dependably than law school Mandarins; no matter how well trained, overpaid, technically competent and elite in status these Mandarins might think themselves. Sovereign juries would work better.
Ladies and gentlemen activists of the court, please get used to these ideas.
- LIST THOSE IMPASSIONED -
Great harm results when civilization places too many obstacles between its hoard of data and the compulsion of its info proletariat to learn from it and add to it. We are all the poorer for it.
Nowadays, computer service providers resemble private water companies of ancient Rome, or telephone counterparts prior to World War I (sic). The rich choose from a jumble of start-up companies for expensive and sketchy service; the poor get very little (or nothing) useful without stealing it from the rich. We are still waiting for a massive system of free info viaducts and public fountains of limitless, free, clear stream: equal to Rome’s greatest achievement, its free, limitless and clean water supply to everyone in Rome.
Computer moguls peddle millions of independent computer terminals of meager potential and instant obsolescence. They draw monstrous profit from the sale of “personal computers” and electronic gadgets. Every household and business requires its own machine or a network of them. Those who can afford it pay an average weekly salary every few years, for a personal computer of the next generation and its marginally improved, over-written software. Transferring old data from obsolete hard drives and networking incompatible systems are additional headaches. Of course, these problems are more or less mended on a case-by-case basis for tidy additional sums.
The software industry has grown into a monoculture of over-detailed, under-documented, costly and cantankerous digital dinosaurs. It takes extravagant hardware just to store current operating systems and application programs, much less do any serious work. A small country could be run on the files clumsy computers lose every day. Even though the capacity of computers has grown every year (which sloppy software fills immediately), their regal price tag never seems to come down, and novel service taxes accumulate.
We waste hours every month reacting to threatening computer viruses that our machines cannot ward off, much less track to their source and counter forcefully. Nothing better is available to oppose this computer plague mass-produced by smug idiot savants, except palliatives as costly and laborious as they are futile,.
Personal computer technology is at the “pre-Model T Ford” stage of development. Computers acquire their data through inefficient keyboards whose original layout was intended to slow the manual input of primitive typewriters. Current word processing software, based on Windows, Apple and other market-dominating companies, is hopelessly complicated, clumsy and inadequate.
In the 1980s, Wang word processing software offered outstanding macro capabilities. With minimal training, a user could program it to search input text for specific combinations of alphanumeric and punctuation marks (many of which Windows won’t find), apply Boolean (and/or/not) logic and (</=/>) quantifiers in automated decision trees, and carry out complicated program sequences within a given document. Basically, Wang had a programming language of elegant simplicity. All its commands matched equivalent keystrokes and their screen representations, which Wang recognized and incorporated into its programming. That eliminated the need to learn another set of complicated command keystrokes and encoding protocols.
Only the most basic of these capacities are offered by current word processing software (most of them pirated from Wang), unless one studies abstruse, secondary programs like Java or Python.
Electronic mail, cable television and telephone database systems are expensive, complicated and un disappointing. Spreadsheets scanned in PDF format cannot be converted into workable Excel equivalents without more expensive, specialized software. Database brokers, corporate executives and government regulators conspire to make on-line protocols as restrictive, exclusive and costly as possible.
The French Minitel system oversaw an elegant, easy to use and reasonably secure commercial market online. Anglo-Saxon technocrats boycotted it in favor of their complex, problem-plagued and less and less secure alternatives.
At enormous expense, microfilm technologies replaced bulky hard copy with illegible screen-loads of text. Those, in turn, produced lower quality second-generation copies. Micro-media files were bulky, expensive to create and difficult to access and maintain.
A hundred or so daily newspapers “serve” a billion or so readers and their dependents across the planet. Each day, entire sterile forests of monoculture trees are cut down for newsprint. Nowadays, entire Canadian forests are flattened for fluffier toilet paper. All that should be plumbed for bidets. How can such ecologically devastating news companies promote a rational debate of environmental policy? They have centralized info flow and homogenized its content. If columns of different newspapers were transcribed onto plain paper, they could not be told apart. Each article reads as if an editorial board with the same political bias had approved it.
Televised media run twenty-four hours of monologue every day. No return input is anticipated from viewers. Commercial advertisers dictate media content: their motives are dubious at best, their taste as dull as the lowest common denominator. Radio stations are only marginally more responsive. We subsist amid multiple tiers of monologue information systems that blare out a constant roar of advertising for the most part worthless. Like weeds choking out healthy growth, they are as useless and stubborn as they are omnipresent.
The so-called information superhighway is an obstacle course of competing service providers and arcane software protocols. Its search engines are so clumsy that information of value cannot be picked out from their avalanche of random noise without tremendous additional effort and expense. Personal telephone numbers that used to be listed in thick telephone books issued for free every year, can only be obtained today from fee-for-service databases; ditto email addresses once found with a simple Google search, that now require a subscription fee to find. Not too long ago, a telephone call from one of thousands of telephone booths cost a single coin. Nowadays, it’s impossible without a contract worth several hours’ salary every month, along with a gadget that costs just as much or more, guaranteed to be immediately obsolescent. What progress! What progress? A few geek enthusiasts and the staffs of corporate Information Divisions can negotiate this morass successfully, unlike the rest of us computer illiterates. The poor get just about nothing useful.
The latest computer priesthood intones complex incantations of computer jargon: the modern equivalent of Medieval Latin. In so doing, they earn fortunes to carry out arcane hardware and software sacraments. Computer documentation and training are costly, time-consuming and “built-in” obsolescent.
This scattered and defenseless computer setup is more vulnerable to virus and worm attacks than a centralized one within which personal PCs would be input-output and memory devices and application software would come from central subscription services more easily defended and used by everyone, thus low-cost or free because tax-based.
Current information trends zero in on these grim realities:
· Copyright protections are easier to breach. Malefactors distort and redistribute other people’s data with growing ease.
· A few info brokers monopolize computer-driven profits. Their clients pay them rent to get their personal messages across as a costly hobby or a commercial advertising project, while their old, production/consumption jobs dry up and blow away.
· Info elites gather more and more data. They massage that content for cheaper, more self-serving output, but at the price of monopolizing its use instead of handing it out for free and waiting for greater profits downstream in time, the way a public utility would.
· Given excessive user fees and hardware costs, info proletarians get less and less computer service.
· Independent analysts, researchers and commentators are barred from public discourse. They are excluded even though their ideas may be superior to those of corporate mercenaries, bureaucrats and academic drones consulted by the media daily. Such sought-after pundits suffer from special interest meddling, hierarchical thinking and blinkered profit taking.
Our main problem isn’t the quantity of information available, but its terrible quality. We are drowning in torrents of useless information. More and more noise is produced, less and less significant. Trivia predominates, even on the Internet with its unlimited quantity of information.
Deliberate Learner subsidy will allow public information utilities to serve high quality information in easily accessible increments at low cost. They will resemble well-regulated water utilities and not extortionate service providers like today’s cable and satellite television monopolists. Like 20th Century waterworks, tax-driven Learner utilities will distribute top quality information on a non-profit basis at minimum expense.
These public info utilities will provide user-friendly, well-documented and interactive software; e-mail and web hosting of fail-safe simplicity; enormous government, corporate and non-profit database services; editing, off-line batch printing and free translation; massive indexing and titanic memory storage; as well as gigantic collections of digital videos — the whole transmitted across optical cable or some superior medium.
Tesla’s Earth-grounded, electro-gravitic energy and communication technologies may be adopted once Learners marginalize the corporate interests that profiteered from its sabotage in favor of much more wasteful technologies.
Personal computers will interact with these public utilities the same way personal checkbooks do with other commercial, banking and investment services. Complicated transactions will usually take effect invisibly within these info centers, as simply and transparently as possible for the end user.
These central repositories and traffic control centers will serve every static and mobile receiver. Libraries will become nuclei for vast new reference and research complexes, and will benefit from enormous economies of scale.
What’s more, it will be easier to identify, isolate and punish wrongdoers and thus defend the whole system against information piracy and viral sabotage. They are unidentifiable and untouchable by personal computers and their naïve users who are helpless against such attacks. Foisting passive virus defense software on every private computer has been a doomed project from the start, however profitable it may have been for its distributors (who also spread the viruses?). Standing on the defensive everywhere protects nothing. It would be better to identify, isolate and punish info aggressors from central control hubs fully prepared to do so.
Virtual reality sunglasses will provide easy access to any digitized performance, video or text.
Advertising and political disinformation will be quarantined to TV, radio and print media, those senior services crippled by disgraceful traditions of profit mongering, deliberate disinformation and laughable public service. Even their inferior quality will improve as curious and critical audiences replace today’s brain-dead cud chewers.
Interactive university programming will offer free lectures, in-person seminars and research projects on every topic. These presentations will be available in real-time, live and played back at the speed and on the timetable chosen by the user.
MIT pioneered just such coursework; it is placing class notes and documentation online, accessible for free, if skeletal therefore not yet very useful. Every ivy-league school will follow suit. As usual, Learner is ahead of the pack. The Google Company plans to index many rare books and place them online.
A new electronic version of the “silent university” of researchers in alliance from each discipline will fulfill the original intent of the Internet’s first visionaries. An Intellectual Yellow Pages will emerge, listing every Learner and topic of passion. Hours of online interactivity that Learners spend on recorded topics will establish their academic certification without other qualifications, limitations and exorbitant fees. Referrals to specific documents will measure author payoffs and establish social prestige. Age, origin, occupation, prior schooling and other criteria should be ignored.
No longer will peer review validate research in paperbound journals. The publish-or-perish, dog-eat-dog competition of prestige science will grind to a halt. Research papers will undergo simultaneous and unlimited review across the entire Learner network, regardless of apparent validity. The new system will accept any information input, to be graded thereafter by the entire community.
If someone refuses to learn algebra yet wants to audit a Calculus class, so be it. On-line tutors will recommend pre-canned learning modules to under-qualified students. If necessary, such students will be referred to other mentors for preliminary studies.
Private users will fine-tune their personal filter programs to screen out undesired data and attract those of particular interest to them.
We will cease enduring irrelevant advertisements broadcast at all and sundry. People will wonder how olden-days advertisers could nag everyone about goods and services most of them didn’t need, instead of satisfying the specific needs of a chosen audience or bowing out otherwise. Such a waste of effort!
The Internet was warped in the opposite direction. As usual with new weapon technologies, its high-priority users fell in line as follows:
1. military requirements foremost, with the most cash;
2. elite academia;
3. commercial exploitation; and
4. individual needs met last — replaced by spam, viruses and infotrash.
New teaching machines will handle repetitive training chores. Many talented idealists will claim the honor of mentoring. This job may be one of the last structured ones in a post-industrial peace economy. It will evolve from a drudgery of rote repetition, idiot clericalism, parental appeasement and disciplinary scutwork; into the one-on-one exchange of inspiration and guidance with, by and for enthusiastic Learners.
Please take note of this vital Learner transformation. Under weapon management, authoritarian professionals ‒ judges, teachers and politicians, among others ‒ automatically hinder and punish their clients. They will become benevolent counselors and intimate guides under peace management, forsaking the capacity to inflict harm except under the guidance of an extensive group of outside experts. Indeed, they will find the infliction of penalties distasteful and detrimental to their dignity as professionals. As among doctors, “do no harm” will be the key to one’s professional calling; its opposite, unacceptable by honest practitioners.
Children should get an advanced degree by puberty in at least one of their topics of passion. Nearly everyone will achieve expertise at some study of peace; most in several disciplines.
The under-motivated and abuse-crippled will benefit from novel systems of remedial care; they won’t overburden standard learning systems until both parties profit from the exchange. Sophisticated biomechanical aids will help those with severe disabilities to reconnect with the standard Learning system. No-one will be left behind unless they so desire. The more challenging the Learning scenario, the more dedicated and smarter the peace mentors drawn to that task by their topic of passion. Special academies will serve those who require restrictive accommodations until their cure liberates them.
To pick up the pace of Learning, these Networks will use every Madison Avenue fraud and mass culture fantasy humanity has dreamt up to slow it down. Subliminal messages will flash across “Recreation Arcade” Channels. All day long, those special channels will offer brain-dead video entertainment we have grown used to. However, they will also encourage young viewers to pursue literacy and number crunching and thus discover their ultimate topics of passion. These “commercials” will take a fraction of the enormous memory and processing power available. Participation or refusal to participate will be considered equally valid.
Well brought-up children grow up in a lenient and rational society; not the coercive one we’ve grown accustomed to, that produces many soldiers dependably. Mothers will nurse their babies for years: a natural form of birth control. Extended families will cooperate to carry their infants at adult height during waking hours. These family-based and extra-familial acts of cooperation will continue for the first five or so years of each child’s life.
Well-behaved children, raised in a rational society, will enjoy many more freedoms than are allowed today. Escaping the torrid daytime heat, Balinese children attended public entertainments until 3:00 in the morning. Shielded by special protections against child abuse, no harm befell them from this habit.
Much like a communal TV room, the physical plant of schools should serve as a voluntary gathering place rather than a detention center. Learner schools will operate in shifts by day and by night to attract bored children and adults with no better destination. Few classes will demand regimented attendance daily. Instead, many facilities and instructors will sponsor ongoing sports, recreation, practical craftwork and business-related projects. Learner Networks will coordinate, schedule and advertise a staggering array of classes and entertainments.
Children on the loose will be watched over by community members as intent on their welfare as most teachers are today. Schools will evolve from funky outpatient jails into obvious places for bored kids to seek entertainment. “Go out and play” will become “Go amuse yourself at school.” As during prior Golden Ages, avid youths will gather at the feet of brilliant mentors.
Learners will consider Learning a good in itself. For an honest day’s salary, Learners will soak up information on any topic of their choosing and at corresponding levels of expertise.
A programmed learning cycle will teach the functions of a standard computer terminal, then preliminary literacy, data entry and numeracy. Thereafter, Learning networks will provide dictionary definitions, encyclopedic essays, in-depth programmed Learning, state-of-the-art classes, real-time graduate seminars, professional journal articles and book reviews on any given topic as well as full-text printouts of them. Unlike the Internet, which offers an incoherent, poorly indexed and depthless smorgasbord of information, the Learner Agora will shepherd young Learners along structured paths of accelerated Learning. It will also coordinate head-spinning detours down equally well-lit paths, in response to the needs of each Learner in pursuit their info quest.
For brevity’s sake, let me confess that my childhood instruction was a blueprint of how not to teach mathematics to kids. I speak for those whose math skills were crushed during their first years at school. It is too late for us now, but not for generations to come.
What is my proposal? Some country’s Department (or Ministry) of Education should issue a $1 million request for bid to SEGA, Nintendo and any other group that cares to make a bid. The project: build the best first-person shooter arcade game, like DOOM (DOOM+? BOOM?). Once written and paid for, it would become public freeware loaded onto every computer platform (like Windows, UNIX and Mac) from now on. Any player with access to a computer should be able to use it for free.
In this game, oncoming monsters will be tattooed with an equation. The game’s gun-sight will focus on specific elements of this equation (toggled by the player, the gun-sight reticule would adjust its focus enough to target the equation he wants to simplify). The game would have add, subtract, multiply and divide gun keys similar to current pistol, shotgun, etc. keys.
The goal would be to “shoot out” elements of the equation until the monster gets “killed” (the equation simplified for X or some other variable). An equivalent game for peaceful children would “prune” a wildly growing vine until it “flowered.” Faulty simplification steps would register as “misses.” Failure would result in the player being “killed;” failure to “prune” the vine would result in its “strangulation.” Advanced players could impose additional time and ammunition constraints on themselves so as to renew their interest. Get it done more quickly and with fewer shots, or lose the game.
Levels of greater complexity and banks of “control” keys would allow players to solve more and more complicated algebra, including trigonometry, absolute values, calculus, vector matrices, etc. Other game modules would include probability, statistics, physics, engineering, chemistry and computer programming.
In advanced games, monsters could be tattooed with a series of equations more and more complex. All the rules of mathematics would be gradually revealed as tutorials, hints and clues. Classic formulas and historic discoveries would be “cheats.”
Except on its own level of complexity, imaginary results would produce “tilts.” “Congratulations: you have just nuked the dungeon!” Since advanced mathematics are based on equations called “complex,” this fate would include an escape hatch that led precocious Learners into “imaginary,” more and more complex and rewarding levels of mathematics.
This software will emphasize the story line, gorgeous graphics and game playing rather than didactics ― evermore play and less drudgery. Children should learn math skills at their own pace as a fascinating game. Ensuing mass numeracy and its technological domino effect could produce staggering results.
Orthodox responses to this educational problem have been bureaucratic sops doomed to fail in the long run — however satisfying they may appear to current teaching bureaucrats. In the future, math classes will reinforce this primary teaching game rather than suppress electronic games and their potential. Math classes will become well-supervised game arcades to develop math skills.
After generations of computer learning development, no such game exists, much less one distributed to every computer for free. Current math games are clunky, overly didactic and restricted to basic skills.
I ask you: what bureaucracy is served by this plague of innumeracy? Who gets more and more funding to fail at teaching math, since it has become a neatly packaged drudge stripped of satisfaction and spontaneity for all but a handful of gifted students?
This new math game will be my revenge on all those insufferable bores. As war is with respect to generals, teaching mathematics is too serious a task to leave in the hands of math teachers.
Had I had access to this kind of game when I was very young, I might have been more qualified to address today’s pressing problems. Without this type of game, I was denied timely mentoring in math. My childhood proclivity was suppressed. I sank into passive indifference to the slow crawl of latter-day classes. Here I am, unschooled in advanced mathematics — my window of opportunity froze shut. I am a frustrated spokesperson for gifted Learners of the future.
I turn away too easily from most difficulties and shut them out too promptly. I tired too soon of obstacles and made tracks from them too quickly. Less often since my quest for Learner began, however.
It will be up to each Learner to take up their own level of play study. This network will provide names, addresses and direct video links to Learners who share the same topic of passion. These listings will include amateurs and authorities distant and local; it will constitute the computer Yellow Pages of the future.
The poor will gain access to these services for free, for the same reason they go to school today for free. They will receive tax subsidies for computer purchases and Network usage. Learners will distribute free remote computer terminals across the planet. At first, every Third World marketplace and classroom should get one.
In regions where life support services are insufficient for local youngsters, newly established Learner Academies will provide survival needs, human warmth and follow-up Learning.
The pooled genius of these Third World children’s starving minds, properly nurtured and tutored, will provide every technological breakthrough, theoretical insight and societal novelty we require.
Finally, and of final importance, the conventions of mathematical formulae should be transformed.
To begin with, citing Master Soborno Isaac Bari, 5-year old math prodigy: “First of all, you have to draw a diagram.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2Xu37gEvsA&t=1967s
That diagram may be a classical XYZ… axis graph, a cartoon showing action, a Venn diagram, whatever applies. It will be labeled with every variable known and unknown. Every constant should be listed and its effect portrayed. Any other data involved should be indexed for immediate retrieval.
Equations thereafter, no matter how complicated, should not be written horizontally as we do today with poorly defined terms and operators. Instead, they should be written vertically, with each term and operator microscopically described and this description placed horizontally alongside each item. Thusly:
A – The sum of apples
+ – added to
B – The sum of pears
= – equals
C – The sum of fruit counted in this case
Or
A – The sum of people counted
/ - divided by
B – The sum of political parties
= – equals
C – Average of political party counts
(Always including specific units of measurement).
Most mathematical formulas impose poorly documented terms that must be interpreted, guessed at or recalled on the run. This leads to such common but shameful errors as transposition of formulaic negatives and confusion in units of measurement
We should make our math maps as easy to follow as possible, with every element defined exhaustively, instead of turning them into evermore difficult puzzles fit only for geniuses and subject to simple errors even they find hard to avoid.
Or it could simply be a smart phone app, along with DOOM+ mentioned above.
Above all, simplicity, specificity and clarity!
- WHITE NOISE -
“Man has constantly to sum up experiences and go on discovering, inventing, creating and advancing. Ideas of stagnation, pessimism, inertia and complacency are all wrong.” Mao Tse Tong.
Until now, governing the seething mass of humanity properly was a practical impossibility. Even the best-run States tarnished their virtue with lies, and their justice with brutality. Given the white noise blare of weapon mentality, abuse and terror became routine protocols of social control. There were so many competing demands, distractions and contradictions to deal with! Any expectation of wisdom and fairness became “unrealistic.”
“One reason the Kennedy and Johnson administrations failed to take an orderly, rational approach to the basic questions underlying Vietnam was the staggering variety and complexity of other issues we faced. Simply put, we faced a blizzard of problems, there were only twenty-four hours in a day, and we often did not have time to think straight.
“This predicament is not unique to the administrations in which I served, or to the United States. It has existed at all times and in most countries. I have never seen a thoughtful examination of the problem. It existed then, it exists today, and it ought to be recognized and planned for when organizing a government.” Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, Times Books, 1995, page xvii, (reprinted by permission; italics mine).
The Chinese government has often held the dubious distinction of governing ten times more people than the next largest State on Earth. No choice in the matter. No matter how badly degraded and at war with itself, its empire endured longer than any other in written history. It had also been hammered like good steel by waves of weapon barbarians.
The most candid expression of Chinese weapon management, called the School of Law, emerged during the Warring States period of weapon chaos circa 450-300 BCE. At that time, tens of millions of Chinese died in all-out warfare at each other’s hands, in ensuing famine and pestilence. Shang Yang, Prime Minister of the Chin Empire, listed just two government components: warfare and agriculture. He broke governance down into two key functions: regimenting as many killers as possible and feeding them. His so-called Legalist philosophy is akin to modern “political realism” in the West. Military robots will optimize this formula, to our total perdition.
Not bad for a nation whose warring factions buried an army of 200,000 surrendered rebels alive on two different occasions, and let famine carry off thirty million countrymen in just five short years, twice? Matchless incentives for slightly better management next time. Imagine the ghost-haunted nightmares of the leadership of the time.
Weapon mentors of the Chinese Warring States would have found congenial company comparing notes with today’s reactionaries, assuming such racist paranoids could converse freely with strangers.
Dollar democrats can call themselves (Banana) Republican, (Corporate) Democrat, Neo-Liberal (thus corporate elitists), Conservative, Labour, Radical Populist, Institutional Revolutionary, People’s Party cadres, feudal monarchists, fascist militarists or imperial totalitarians. In their primary calculations lurks a morbid fear of war-to-the-death between the haves and the have-nots. The difference between left- and right-wingers is their projection of who will “win” this war; even though no-one, neither the rich nor the poor, ever won anything from such a stupid and destructive conflict.
This said, most Chinese political thought is devoted to peace, social harmony and a sane and sober personal outlook. The bamboo-like flexibility of Mohist and Taoist doctrines rival the best offered elsewhere.
Weapon civilization has published stacks of works written by weapon philosophers (and not much else). Mencius stands head and shoulders above them all. His work is one of China’s greatest glories. A culture less magnificent might have discarded it as mere peace mentality. As they say in the Anglo-Saxon world: “That is not a commercial project.”
“Emperor Hui of Liang said: ‘I’ve devoted myself entirely to the care of my nation. If there’s famine north of the river, I move people east of the river and grain north of the river. And if there’s famine east of the river, I do the opposite. I’ve never seen such devotion in the governments of neighboring countries, but their populations are growing by leaps and bounds while mine hardly grows at all. How can this be?’
‘You’re fond of war,’ began Mencius, ‘so perhaps I could borrow an analogy from war. War drums rumble, armies meet, and just as swords clash, soldiers throw down their armor and flee, dragging their weapons behind them. Some run a hundred feet and stop. Some run fifty feet and stop. Are those who run fifty feet justified in laughing at those who run a hundred feet?’
‘No, of course not,’ replied the emperor. ‘It’s true they didn’t run the full hundred feet, but they still ran.’
‘If you understood this, you wouldn’t long to have more people than neighboring countries. Look – when growing seasons aren’t ignored, people have more grain than they can eat. When ponds aren’t plundered with fine-weave nets, people have more fish and turtles than they can eat. When mountain forests are cut according to their seasons, people have more timber than they can use. When there’s more grain and fish than they can eat, and more timber than they can use, people nurture life and mourn death in contentment. People nurturing life and mourning death in contentment – that’s where the Way of Emperor begins.’
‘When every five-acre farm has mulberry trees around the farmhouse, people wear silk at fifty. And when the proper seasons of chickens and pigs and [livestock] are not neglected, people eat meat at seventy. When hundred-acre farms never violate their proper seasons, even large families don’t go hungry. Pay close attention to the teaching in village schools, and extend it to the child’s family responsibilities – then, when their silver hair glistens, people won’t be out on roads and paths hauling heavy loads. Our black-haired people free of hunger and cold, wearing silk and eating meat at seventy – there have never been such times without a true emperor.’
‘But you don’t think about tomorrow, when people are feeding surplus grain to pigs and dogs. So when people are starving to death in the streets, you don’t think about emptying storehouses to feed them. People die, and you say It’s not my fault, it’s the harvest. How is this any different from stabbing someone to death and saying It’s not me, it’s the sword? Stop blaming harvests, and people everywhere under Heaven will come flocking to you.’” Mencius, p 6.
Confucianism, however, stresses political power in private and public settings. Until the advent of Communism, Chinese politics skipped administrative requirements. It relied on Mandarin ideals to impose a homogenous, centralized bureaucracy on society from top to bottom. This cookie cutter approach favored individual perfection, strong government and a rigid social cohesion through inflexible father figures and submissive subordinates at every level.
The Chinese Communist Party is losing its mandate of heaven by abusing its poor with elite corruption, its racial and faithful minorities by fiat, and adjacent peoples (Xinjiang Uyghurs, N. Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Tibet – all of them abused). Recent climatic disasters in China could result from this loss. Each zero-sum abuse of its national neighbors sets it a step further back from its global responsibilities. China must compulsively replicate the enlightened compassion of the best emperors in its history.
For China and other complex empires, the only alternatives seemed to be:
· Centralize decision-making. Drive control out of the hands of those at the grass roots with the best grasp of the situation. Operate by fiat and suffer from inevitable command-control delays.
· Decentralize control. In the absence of efficient communications, set up competing interests against each other, pile up dearth and surplus in different regions and let parochial conflicts escalate to chaotic levels of turbulence.
· Give up. Throughout the ages, horse, chariot and junk-borne nomads waited in the wings, eager to upend any Chinese dynasty whose devotion to militarism faltered. Recently, the first industrialized nations of the Western world stopped playing that role.
· When civil war did not induce the requisite weakness, some combination of famine, flood and plague would do the trick http://www.physorg.com/news198301240.html.
Even though China is famous for the diligence, genius and self-discipline of its people (quite like the French), this passive-aggressive dilemma triggered frequent bouts of warlord anarchy. The absence of valid alternatives brought on a seesaw fight between blindness at the center and decentralized rapaciousness: as was always the case with equally complex societies.
No absolutist doctrine responds well to every dilemma of the human condition. As it attempts to micro-manage the infinite complexities of human experience, it stacks up patriarchal commands “thou shalt always” and “thou shalt never” just win up derailing each other.
Authoritarian doctrine is just a contemptible attempt to simplify very complex issues into simplistic norms of inflexible dogma. Might as well go swimming wearing cement overshoes; or, as the Chinese say: “Bind your feet to prevent your progress.”
Free global Learning may be the only way we can remedy our tendency to reduce fractal reality into rigid, simplistic formulae. Rather than jam every personality into some narrow mold of acceptable behavior; strong, flexible and coherent social frameworks will buttress the unique talents of all and sundry, clarify their aspirations, seek out and reward their passionate contribution.
By the forecast of Learner, developing nations will build giant, city-swallowing mega-structures of the kind Robert Silverberg described in The World Inside. A mini working model may be Paolo Soleri’s arcology, Arcosanti.
We may witness the orderly and fair ingathering of massive populations within enormous structures set on stiletto heels, as opposed to the flatfoot sprawl of today’s cities and suburbs. In that case, outlying real estate could be restored to agriculture and climax ecology with much lower population densities.
Personal and collective security within these giant conurbations will depend on the luxury accommodations, both physical and political, the transferees will find in their new domain. Their enthusiastic cooperation will sustain the good life. Halfway measures and cost-cutting compromises, overwritten with habitual doses of compulsion and regimentation, will bring on disasters more lethal than those wrought by the Khmer Rouge.
Likewise, the USA, China, Europe and the Tigers of Asia will help bootstrap the inhabitants of Africa, Latin America and what used to be Communist Eurasia out of the misery of their fate up ‘til now. These new Marshall Plans (the New Silk Road, among other projects) will resemble in cost and outcome the economic development plans that boosted Western Europe, Japan and the Little Tigers back onto their feet after World War II (sic). Self-interest will dictate that healthy new economies sprout from these pauperized regions. They promise enormous new markets for newly developed goods and services in both directions.
We must develop new energy industries before the current ones choke us to death. Third World Learners will sustain this tropical front of renewal. In Columbia, the Gaviotas community offers a remarkable scale-model of native-generated transformation. See Alan Weisman, Gaviotas: A Village to Rebuild the World, Chelsea Green Publishing Co., Vermont, 1998; as well as Paolo Lugari’s blessed Gaviotas and Nader Khalili’s Dome of Rumi in Arizona.
Learners will reproduce and refine these brilliant first efforts in millions of emergent communities. Their masterworks will enrich us beyond imagining and make us that much wiser.
WHITE NOISE 2023 notes from top to bottom
Straight lines, right angles and towers of boxes define us and confine us to human unfriendly hardscapes and homes, wastefully mechanized and ecocidal in the long run. However, a vast, underfunded network of architects and planners dreams of leading us out of unnatural boxes and back into living, breathing structures built for human safety, comfort and health both mental and physical.
Among those, Moshe Safdie and his Habitat 67 shine brightly. His family-friendly hillsides of boxes (found all over Israel, built in the 1970’s) should become partially domed structures using CAD and construction grade 3-D printers, either pre-fab, modular units or cast in place as practicable. Back to the Domes of Rumi, but stacked to the heights.
Office layouts and glass curtains could be stripped off city tower frames. Instead, family housing habitat modules could be inserted around and between utilities shafts. Leave an office floor intact every ten or twenty stories, plus retail and smalltown services (computers, town hall, rescue services, clinics) downstairs, plus pools, exercise rooms, schools, whatever is called for by that neighborhood.
Dr. Eugene Tssui’s True Zero Building is a model for larger, ecologically sound building projects using Revolutionary Architecture. His architectural ideas differ in content and results from ours today. His are better overall, with fewer inconsistencies, added expenses and weaknesses than ours. Retooling may be difficult, but re-Learning the entire construction industry much more so.
David Sheen promotes Uncompromising Ecological Architecture. His extremely complicated and difficult requirements are elementary to a thoughtful person. “Why aren’t we doing things his way,” you will ask yourself. Anyone living in his structures would adopt them gratefully. Such hillside and tower habitats will require much more study for simple, cheap sturdiness and life enhancement.
Modern models based on Iroquois longhouses would make excellent emergency shelters for refugees and the homeless. Arranged with proper governance, sanitation, food and water, they would help re-build shattered communities, foster small business, protect from crime and the elements. Framing and coverings should be modular and standardized for ease of installation, repair and removal.
Large populations in famine-stricken regions should be evacuated to the nearest coast, dependable river or rainfall source, to be better housed and supplied from there. Storm resistant housing afloat should be thought through: perhaps perched on rafts of floating biomass, perhaps linked together and to shore by shared roots.
- ANCIENT ABUNDANCE & LITTLE GREEN MEN -
Paradoxically, the Earth is energy-starved these days, compared to the epochs of its youth. Three million potassium molecules may snap, crackle, and pop in the human body every minute. We, the best-fed third of humanity, may turn excess food into fat every day. But this energy regime is paltry compared to the fierce ergs one human-body-mass could radiate during the Hadean Era four billion years ago. Back then, sentiency may have occupied regional firestorms instead of today's isolated hundredweights of decomposing flesh.
Besides, the human species is probably the latest of a series of sentient ecologies (esoteric, electric, caloric, mineral, cellular, vegetal and animal) that prevailed on earth for some time then snuffed out, either through dumb multiplication and drowning in its waste (as we are doing so stupidly today) or after some cosmic hiccup. Indeed, successive kingdoms likely feasted off the waste products of preceding ones, as microscopic oxygen users did with their anoxic predecessors.
Here at the bottom of our sunlit gravity well, we wage ceaseless war against entropy. By the way, what is gravity, really? Its tireless distortion of space-time mocks our energy conservation laws. Gravity reigns supreme over most manifestations we can observe of entropy reversed, apparently resulting from the distortion of time by bulk mass in space. This force is puny compared to the two or three electromagnetic and atomic forces we have identified. A small magnet can counteract the gravitational attraction between a needle and the entire planet.
Let’s face it, “high tech” civilization carrion-feeds off accretions of minerals and decaying organic matter. One whiff of diesel fuel betrays its origin as natural bilge water. Petroleum probably serves some hidden geomorphic function. Like starving mosquitoes, we refuse to pay attention as we suck it dry. We may well get slapped flat as an unintended consequence of our gluttony.
Ancient plant species may have offered a much richer nutritional content than our current, inbred domestic varieties. Long ago, more nutritious plants probably developed a co-dependency with consumer species and died off when their consumers did. Or some epidemic or disaster wiped them out.
Recent mutations of mildew are threatening to wipe out the world’s banana crop. Other edible plants are vulnerable to disease or genetic extinction in the wild. Those include pomegranates, pistachios, watermelons, apples, pineapples, mangos, sweet potatoes, garlic, peanuts, soybeans, tomatoes, coffee, hard wheat and grapes; and no doubt many more not tabulated here: enough to starve out humanity.
Industrial agriculture is not sustainable. Its more and more costly use of chemical and petroleum products poisons the environment and reduces nutrient productivity; it converts once-fertile plains into new deserts. It uses up clean geological water at irreplaceable and unsustainable rates.
Better schemes will have to replace the ones we rely on today.
Microbes may not be the worst threat to edible crops and rare animals; man is the more likely candidate. The Romans harvested to extinction the aromatic cooking herb and sexual stimulant silphium from Cyrene in North Africa. They exterminated almost every whale in the Mediterranean Sea and drove several large animal species to extinction for their murderous Coliseum games. A whole succession of empires and nations can claim some responsibility for extinctions, those most recent and most populous the guiltiest. Books are no doubt written on this topic alone, that confirm this verdict for every ethnicity and nation. Without tremendous advances in Learning and wisdom, the human race may wind up as a static display of lethal planetary infection in a galactic natural history museum. We have even forgotten how to brew soma, probably from some superior dandelion species, as tasty as its brother stinks.
Antediluvian mastodons grew to twice the weight of modern elephants; dinosaurs, six times heavier. How? As yet, no plausible nutrition physiology has been proposed for them.
Horsetails? Benjamin-burger.com
Ancient Beringia, the land bridge now submerged between Siberia and Alaska, is said to have harbored mega-fauna, mammoths and such-like critters. Human pioneers are thought to have crossed it from Asia. No one has modeled an ecology that would sustain such ravenous wildlife across a wind-scoured arctic wilderness rimmed with mile thick glaciers. You’d need those massive glaciers to lower sea levels and expose the land bridge. Imagine those super beasts trooping across modern Antarctica, and man crossing it afoot from Africa to South America. Get real.
A possibility? More vigorous plants than ours fed these ravenous animals, plants resistant to high wind, intense cold and low precipitation. Pollen of a unique genotype may confirm this hypothesis. A nutritional revolution may lie unrecognized in the fossil record. Could it be concealed among our weeds and aquatic plants?
Some bearers of the spark of life, perhaps even entire ecologies of them, may have survived the glaciation of the entire planet after one of perhaps many cosmic impacts or episodes of continental volcanism. All-pervading cold beyond enduring: the slow, patient, life-sucking cold of final, welcome sleep that searched out survivors for millennia and froze them to death without mercy or letup. Likewise, firestorms of glowing cosmic debris and deadly volcanic gasses smothered the entire planet. Earth, wind, fire and ice; each in turn far enough out of balance to snuff out life. What survived? Underwater volcanic vent ecologies, no doubt, and deep strata bacteria; but what else and how much more evolved? Preserved by someone's science rather than by random chance? Life all by itself takes quite a while to evolve from bacteria to apes to philosophers a bit less hairy.
Could it have been a special type of Ginkgo Biloba? Since the age of dinosaurs, this plant has subsisted as a living fossil that survived every planetary catastrophe. It boasts its own botanical phylum: Ginkgophyta. Apparently, its embryonic cells form an endosymbiotic bond with green algae and appear to be colonized by one of the most extremophile animals: tardigrade water bears. Fascinating!
In the meantime, human overpopulation threatens civilization itself.
Economists wait impatiently for the latest industrial growth projections. They resemble quack doctors of the Middle Ages, who expected patients they had bled dry to perk up as their pulse disappeared. Paradoxically, mankind’s progress demands deep population cuts and corresponding reductions of its technological footprint.
We are nearly eight-billion-strong on Earth today, with another 160 million newborns each year, minus only 50 million dead. To reverse the population growth on Earth at current birth rates, we would have to incur additional deaths equivalent to those of nearly two World War IIs (sic) per year from now on. To avoid that toll of death and suffering, we will need to reduce new births to less than 30 or 40 million per year (about one less child per 20 couples?) The fewer, the better.
Defenders of unrestrained growth act like misers who reluctantly quit their hoard to go out and extort more gold. With unmatched hypocrisy, today’s imperial propagandists equate rational population control with imperialism and thus dismiss it. Others defend with fanatical devotion every fetus’ right to turn into a human being, and then vote billions of dollars more to napalm, cluster-bomb, torture and starve countless hard-up adults they have raised and cut short their life.
We may soon discover renewable energy sources and fantastic new technologies, but none of them will allow us to remain so numerous and expect to flourish on this planet. Human overpopulation cancels progress, it encourages tyranny and cheapens human life; it renders each child less dear and each injustice more tempting. Psychopaths seek to multiply their cattle drive of sufferers.
Vertebrate photosynthesis could be an attractive new biotechnology. A land animal could grow as large as its bones could support its weight under one gravity, but only with supplemental nutrition. Solar-powered chloroplasts might suffuse its skin cells and complement standard energy-cell mitochondria. This adaptation might have occurred in dinosaurs, since the science community proposes no workable nutrition regime for them. Think of the vertical plates lining the spine of some dinosaurs: solar panels?
A creature that eats plants nonstop all day long may grow as large as a modern elephant, but not a dinosaur seven times heavier. Otherwise, we’d see heavier elephants. Let me remind you that mammoths were twice as heavy.
The chemistry of plant chlorophyll and that of animal pigmentation (skin and eye) are remarkably similar. Given an infusion of ATP-like substances and organelles, human skin might absorb red light at the 666 millimicron wavelength or thereabouts. Like plants, the human body could draw water, carbon dioxide, trace gasses and minerals from its circulatory system; then dump oxygen and amino acids back into it. It might metabolize fats, vitamins and carbohydrates as well, by means of a plant-mimicking physiology.
Another nutritional alternative could be the accelerated growth of bacteria within the human digestive system, not only to facilitate digestion but to provide additional proteins and nutrients for direct consumption in a human gut modified to resemble that of termites or the rumen of cattle. Challenging projects!
All this bio-hardware (and a lot more, most likely) may lie dormant in our “junk” DNA. As Learners seek new food sources, these alternatives may offer some promise. Autonomic photosynthetic nutrition (APN) could mitigate many problems of industrial transportation, agro-business, waste recycling and others.
Problems like these stagger the modern economy. When famine strikes, these days, disaster specialists dispatch tons of food by ship, aircraft and truck. Afterwards, hungry masses swell up again, cripple the ecology, gut the economy and abandon political autonomy to local tyrants.
Otherwise, rescuers could inoculate disaster victims with APN, such that some of their nourishment came directly to them through their skin from the Sun. If so, local self-sufficiency and bio-habitats could re-establish themselves more dependably, and weapon sectarians, find less opportunity to flourish.
The skin of Adam and Eve may have been suffused with such chlorophyll-like pigments. They could have occupied Eden the way we would visit a park, admiring it but not hunting down its animals for food. Could the Serpent have tempted them with the Apple, the natural antidote of their photosynthetic gift? Could something similar have prompted the Fall?
Contrary to what the book of Genesis implies in the Bible, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge did not let Adam and Eve grasp good and evil. Instead, the forbidden fruit took the most natural form of conversation away from them and left them deaf and dumb to the thoughts and feelings of other beings (like the Serpent, their last natural thought-partner). It permanently deprived them of dependable compassion for other living things. The best among us just fake compassion as best we can, despite our spoiled natural inclination.
An indolent cosmic mammy state must expand slower than its explosive outward wave of pirates. Its bureaucracy owes us royalties for the abuse of planetary DNA at the hands of those scouts and their progeny on Earth. Seasoned by the precedent of thousands of prior planetary victimization claims, it will rubber-stamp minimal compensation: one millionth or less of what would be just. Matthew 15:27, even the dogs catch what falls off the table. This bureaucratic pittance will be enough to make a millionaire of everyone on Earth, regrow Eden, etc. We just have to unite humanity to negotiate that. That's all.
Similarly, Moses’ forty-year Exodus could have been more serene if his followers had orally inoculated themselves with manna falling like dew on the sands. Pure water sufficed for the rest, gushing wherever Moses struck his staff. Thereafter, the cleansing ordeal of the desert inspired the Jewish spirit.
We may draw on more peaceful contentment by shrinking our footprint on the Earth, thus assisting in its self-repair. If Learners develop APN, we may downsize and disperse agro-corporations and food processing industries: a project that will thin many fat wallets. A great deal of thought should go to this project, despite the frenzied opposition of powerful private interests. After all, much of the world economy revolves around feeding hungry mouths — when it’s not too busy shutting them permanently.
The so-called “Green Revolution” has crippled crop diversity with a few super-inbreds voracious of the soil’s fertility, overly dependent on agrochemical supplements and vulnerable to disease, pests and bad weather. We are gorging on the heritage of our descendants. Agribusiness corporations have set up a dangerous parody of ancient cultivation methods Learner sketches as follows.
With great efficiency, Neolithic communities harvested all the plant resources in their gathering zone. Crowded communities of farmers aggravated this over-harvest as they took the place of scattered scavengers. In response, local info elites would have prized plant species with special medicinal and culinary virtues and gathered them systematically, rewarding the laity for stripping the countryside bare. Then they’d have raised them in sacred garden plots, much the way we do at modern agricultural research facilities.
Please note: this scenario need not be limited to hominids. Social reptiles, insects and other organized species may have manipulated the environment in like manner, leaving no recognizable trace of their activities. Multi-species insect communities guard specific plants that feed and house them in return. Some insect communities cultivate fungi and algae in sophisticated ways; some build elaborate structures for self-protection, indoor climate and flood control. Others annihilate and/or domesticate alien species and milk their secretions for food or psychotropic drugs. Ancient beasts, perhaps better fed, may have operated in like manner, perhaps better.
Scientists have already confirmed a lengthy rain of meteors on the Earth, even though they haven’t cataloged a hundredth of them (only 200 major impacts identified to date). The first iron weapons were crafted from retrieved meteorites. Those scientists have just begun to confirm Louis A. Frank’s contention (published in The Big Splash), that ice hydro bolides drop from the heavens to top off our oceans.
Formerly, the ocean shore ran along continental shelves now submerged, a variance of 100+ meters or 300+ feet. The legends of Atlantis and the Deluge may commemorate much more frequent flood catastrophes. Who can guess what ancient civilizations – human or otherwise – once existed along distant shores? Their cities would have dotted ancient river lines well downstream of current shorelines, like pearls along an underwater string. Unnavigable rapids blocked rivers that flowed at modern, continental elevations and kept upland river dwellers from direct access to the sea. Only pastoral nomads and hunter-gatherers would have bothered to subsist so far upstream from bountiful ocean shores.
Archaeological treasures we’ve placed under museum glass could have been the sorry remnants of highland outcasts, eclipsed by splendid lowland civilizations now drowned. Did opulent civilizations thrive downstream of the paltry remnants we’ve managed to dig up? Could their cities have dotted ancient coastlines and river deltas drowned since?
The likeliest sites for these prehistoric urban civilizations would be far offshore of the mouths of the Earth's great rivers, sunk hundreds of feet underwater and buried under dozens more of alluvial silt. None of those sites have been investigated. Yet we dare deny the existence of urban civilizations from the distant past, based on paltry evidence collected from ancient alpine goat herders. See my poem, Global Atlantis. Central to this discussion is Graham Hancock’s Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization, Crown Publishers, New York, 2002.
Indeed, I was inspired to adopt this premise by Max Estenhofer, Buckminster Fuller, Sir Alister Clavering Hardy (The Living Stream), Elaine Morgan (The Aquatic Ape), Michael Crawford and David Marsh (The Driving Force). They postulated that proto-humans learned how to walk upright along tropical beaches, tidelands and river deltas long before humans gathered in the first upland villages. Our ancestors may have risen up from all fours by foraging through intertidal ecologies, half in and half out of water. After all, those have always been Nature’s best-stocked larders, as well as the least painful ones in which to twist, during hundreds of generations, the horizontal spine of four-legged animals into the vertical one of biped humans.
Plants with superior nutritional and medicinal content (probably ancient varieties of seaweed difficult to isolate and identify today) would have improved the odds for such societies, human or otherwise. Thus, the disappeared super-foods I postulate.
Getting back to our prehistoric valley culture: as it spread out along its edges and condensed at its core, its members would have picked clean the most desirable plants. Just before the disappearance of exceptional plants, shamans and witches would have tended them in sacred garden plots and pools. Those plants might have required artificial pollination and depended on civilized ingenuity to propagate. When military or natural disasters overtook these peaceful societies (as would have been inevitable), those fragile crops disappeared under weeds, all record of them gone.
Indeed, intelligent life may have evolved long before the deposition of the Paleolithic remnants we catalog today. Long before, the hills may have danced to the rhythm of living communities alien to our way of thinking — except, perhaps, for the science fiction of Olaf Stapleton and a few writers equally bold.
Recent research into prions (preeons, proteins that replicate in some mysterious way without nucleic acid) may confirm the existence of such self-replicating, pre-organic sands. RNA is another possible candidate.
Tholin, a potential soil for life, forms on all the globes of the solar system whose conditions do not prohibit it. Thus the whole universe could be upholstered with entryways to life.
Does the nearby universe, avid for life, await us as its first pioneers, as our ancestors once were with respect to the Earth? Or are we the latest passengers on a cosmic Tokyo subway at rush hour? Don’t matter. Learners, forward!
Our periodic table of elements is a two-dimensional schema of another that might have extended into strange dimensions unexplored by Mendeleyev. Such trans-dimensional elements may have held properties transcending our scientific prejudices. Those may soon be within the grasp of Learners once again.
Special ore deposits, sacred sites and holy pools with extraordinary properties: such myths are familiar to us. The most extraordinary of these elements may have commingled with more familiar compounds during their half-life synchronicity. Magical stones, soils and woods may have held exceptional properties for a brief span of time, then become inert long before ours.
As long as these materials retained their precious energy, they would have been crafted into prized utensils and worship artifacts. Their fading magical properties, however, would have pauperized once-well-to-do owners. Such a value-crash induced economic collapse into all-out war — much as the loss of petroleum reserves may do to us, barring massive Learner intervention.
As those rare earths lost their potency, they would have formed corrupt potions of less power. Ancient magic formulas prescribed insect or plant body parts and internal organs of specific animals because they concentrated the last traces of these elements, the way fish and birds concentrate our pollutants in their internal organs. Those in turn would have weakened into muddy, indistinguishable contaminants: dust to dust.
In the end, warlike vandals ransacked venerated stonework, burned sacred wooden carvings and smashed revered pottery. They carved perverse idols for themselves, probably as weapon decorations and personal talismans. Later on, those were smashed as ritual outcomes of combat, buried as funerary regalia or scattered by neglect.
We have forgotten the best medicinal herbs and food crops, as well as the utility of magical trinkets, amulets, statues and geographic features previously infused with mysterious attributes. Monumental sacred centers built with stone blocks of enormous mass, hoisted into position with miraculous strength, ground (or liquefied?) so flat they need no mortar to fit together; mound-building projects that took generations, giant pyramids planted above ground or below the sea (and perhaps on extraterrestrial plains?); sculpted busts, jars, orbs, stele and menhirs; ancient drawings of exceptional quality and/or enormous size, caved deeply underground or only visible from high above barren plains ...
Whether humans designed them, with or without alien inspiration, they transcend our understanding and engineering know-how. Their shaping is improbable without technologies we no longer grasp — their purpose, beyond imagining. Neither massed slaves, beasts or machines – the clumsy block and tackle of our murky imagination – offer realistic explanations of their construction. How could they accomplish what we cannot do today, unless we take enormous pains in a clumsy way they could never duplicate?
History throngs with wrecked projects: irrigation gone to salt, topsoil exhausted, overgrazing to the point of desertification, fisheries sterilized and great woods deforested to build battle fleets and massive urban fortifications during century-long arms races only interrupted by burning cities.
Primitive city construction called for millions of fired mud bricks and quantities beyond counting of wooden building frames, thereby deforesting one by one the well-watered approaches of every ancient city on Earth. Every square meter of Maya cityscape required twenty trees for its lime plaster alone. These enormous construction projects wound up sterilizing the world’s most fertile coastlines and river valleys: the cradles, nurseries and gravesites of civilization’s early advent.
Before the Age of Empires, climax forests like the biblical cedars of Lebanon stretched from Morocco all the way around Mediterranean shores and beyond as far as the Pacific coast of China, also northwards past the Baltic. More forests, lost since, covered the rest of the planet. The weather was milder then and the sea swarmed with monster fish.
Ecocide through unbridled weapon management is not unique to our age. We have merely mechanized our worst habits and aggravated their ill effects tremendously. Humanity has already destroyed half the tree cover that once stood on Earth, most of it very recently. Mass human activity may even disturb the axial tilt of the planet, send it toppling the way a child would push over a spinning top, perhaps fatally for our civilization.
It will be up to the world’s Learners to restore everything that was lost and more.
In addition to the Seven Wonders of the World, picture seven million smaller, more ephemeral temples, gardens, courtyards and libraries; plus a hundred times as many natural sites of splendid vista, sweet birdsong and tranquility — each one more attractive than the last. Ancient civilization grew mighty insofar it fostered many elegant settings of worship, meditation and study. Only incidentally were the “Seven Wonders of the World” constructed.
As a playful exercise of historical reenactment, Learners may rebuild those Wonders or re-adorn their ruins — natural and artificial, great and small. Imagine the Parthenon, the Sphinx, the Pyramids of Egypt, the palace of Minos, Angkor Watt, and countless other cultural treasures, restored by Learners to their original splendor. Similar monuments might rise up alongside; the whole surrounded by climax forest.
Now imagine the best Learner site you could construct for yourself and your beloved; that anyone could build just as well. Picture this cosmopolitan exuberance! For once, this would be the real use of wealth and not the militaristic misery we have come to expect.
Don’t quibble me your quibble: “There will never be enough wealth on Earth to do what you propose.” You would be sadly mistaken. It is only our weapon-based dread and its mass-induced stupidity that condemn us to this collective misery. Once we liberate ourselves from those, we’ll wind up playing with cosmic wealth.
This said, recall the words of Mencius. Humanity and Duty must always trump mere profit.
- LEARNER SCIENCE -
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Max Planck, taken from Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power, Penguin Books, New York, 1998, p. 398. Whose rules I gleefully break on every page of this book, probably at great cost to my worldly success. So what?
I take big risks exposing the weapon/peace antinomy to this weapon culture, as well as the armchair and threat deterrent formulas. Why? Because this grand theory dares to mark the trace of history and human experience as a whole.
“What a know-it-all!”
What I know for sure is this: everyone these days acts as if they had no better ideas than Trump.
Listen to reason, for a change!
The social and political sciences, like their science counterparts, rely on empiricism and positivism: the conceit that reliable knowledge can only be achieved by studying specific examples, habits and phenomena according to their characteristics in isolation. As a result, social science is a patchwork of wishful thinking more or less vague, tautological and contradictory, offering less predictive value than a sloppy weather forecast. That is what happens when human curiosity is quashed.
Social scientists would rather leave things the way they are indefinitely. They shun the means, motive and opportunity to confront weapon mentality and thus take it to pieces scientifically. Anyone who offers them the tools to do so, presents them with a fearsome challenge.
Whether or not the weapon/peace antinomy shows scientific promise; they reject it by reflex, out of torpor, trepidation and tradition (as if those attitudes were in any way scientific). They’d rather dismiss new ideas than study them: an acquired habit and a professional skill among scientific positivists. Failing to honor this censorship, or accepting it without enthusiasm: such decisions entail professional banishment that would be unthinkable in a universe ruled by scientific honesty.
What difference is there between religious fanatics and scientific dogmatists, apart from the all-probing police state and enhanced firepower that helps impose their reactionary convictions (soon aped by their religious contemporaries in Iran, Burma, Kashmir and elsewhere – since psychopaths wind up dominating each and every creed, ideology, ethnicity and nation)?
I submit that the predictive value of this antinomy outshines the sputtering candlepower of current models. I challenge my science judges to refute or validate it. We shall see whether their “scientific detachment” is real or merely conceals the bureaucratic conformity of their next research grant proposal and falsified results.
I ask you why 21st century scientific inquiry has not kept exponential pace with three centuries prior? And don’t hand me your “information revolution” eyewash. We have merely revised the wheel for more perfect circularity and deployed heavier and heavier hammers against smaller gnats. This failing may well be for the reasons that follow.
The major difference between Learner science and the weapon version is that Learner science will embrace every new discovery and innovation, whereas weapon science finds new ways to enhance the threat formula and suppress other discoveries that challenge its status quo. Learner science will lead to abundance, while the weapon kind leads to nothing but poverty, pollution and mental stagnation in exchange for more weapons and better ones.
As our prejudices grow subtler, magnificent new discoveries may emerge. Learners should anticipate two breakthroughs in mathematics. One will clarify chaos theory and perhaps help determine the probability of unique events. Another, yet to be glimpsed, will reopen the Imperial Way with a rewrite of mathematics to simplify its mastery.
As things stand, a priestly elite of mathematicians jams mighty computers and thick academic tomes with formulae that only a token few can decipher. Their best efforts at quantifying reality generate a gross and sterile caricature of the natural world. The Imperial Way will blaze a better trail across this intellectual wasteland, which Learners will follow to their next discoveries.
Knowledge-value transformed the world when reformers replaced the Latin Bible with copies written in the vernacular that laypeople could read. The Imperial Way may do as much for mathematics and popular science. Unprecedented discoveries could emerge.
Just as the printing press transformed human thought; cybernetics, virtual reality, voice recognition, abacus and micro-energy technologies (powered by sunlight or the user’s pulse and body heat) could free us from our worst mental ruts.
In addition, someday soon, kids will enjoy a digital game that teaches mathematics as addictive as a first-person shooter game. It will subtly lure them into learning math up to their highest level of competence. No more math drudgery, only games to play and skills to show off; plus a world majority much more comfortable with math skills.
Despite weapon technology’s many drawbacks, it inoculated medieval practitioners against their worst superstitions. They had to edge their way along alarming ledges of science and technology while terrifying gargoyles swarmed below. Indeed, they went too far. They warped into mere fantasies supernatural phenomena they could not find any use for right away, while they made more weapons and better ones from what was left.
In our era of science tyranny, weapon technology has taken giant leaps so far beyond our understanding that they’ve baffled even scientific managers like Robert McNamara. Those quantum jumps threaten us with annihilation. Can you imagine a megaton explosion, or how industrial civilization will react once there’s not enough petroleum to go around (very soon)?
The science of biology is mutating from a “soft science” into a “hard” one because its researchers have begun to make horrific weapons from living tissue, just as prior engineers managed to make them from inert matter.
We should make our research more holistic and less reductive; refresh our inspiration with intuition, instinct, personal insight and primal memory. It is not a question of abandoning one school of thought for the other, but of merging them with no harm to either, and institutionalizing this merger.
Elegant new technologies may emerge from the intensive study of spectral color lines, of noble gasses that should be in our skies but are not, of auroras, static electricity and lightning. Lightning energy is more abundant in the Tropics. Poorer nations could harness it as a powerful resource for local development and export. This technology would favor the regrowth of tropical rain forests to farm cheap energy. Osmar Pinto, Jr., of the Atmospheric Electricity Group, Brazilian Institute for Space Studies, and other Learners of lightning should expand this area of study. Could these phenomena provide power for future cities surrounded by climax forest?
How can we call ourselves civilized while we make the air reek so terribly? Some obscure chemists could achieve immortality by making diesel engines less fetid and replacing internal combustion technologies altogether. History mentors will demonstrate just how primitive we were, simply by warming up a few drops of diesel fuel in the classroom and informing their disgusted pupils that our cities stank this way day and night.
Poor Dr. Diesel cannot be blamed for the stench of his invention. He used peanut oil as fuel for his machine during the 1900 World Fair in Paris. He wanted to motorize every farm on Earth (African and Asian ones included), one hundred years ahead of time — the way Ford dreamed of selling cheap cars to the American masses a few years later.
In 1913, Dr. Diesel disappeared off a ferry between France and England. Foul play, no doubt. It was settled by Churchill and his cronies that new-fangled engines would burn toxic and expensive petroleum. After disposing of his drowned body, they set the stage for the motorization of armies. The war fleets of major powers already needed fuel oil instead of coal; now, their armies would too. Let serious death dealing begin!
In 1913 as well, an American engineer, Frank Shuman, gave a field demonstration of solar-powered water pumps to Egypt’s colonial elite including Lord Kitchener. His machinery was remarkably similar to equivalents proposed today. There was a flowering of alternative technologies just prior to World War I (sic). Unfortunately, when it came to those not associated with fossil fuels, that conflict abolished them for the next hundred years or more. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/dec/11/sahara-solar-panels-green-electricity.
Learners will devote entire college semesters to the appraisal of our professed “sophistication,” and many more to explain our homelessness, plagues, famines and wars. Hopefully, they won’t find good reason for these sordid constants of weapon history. They may conclude that they were bloody but unavoidable stepping-stones to Learner transformation.
Ancient Indian Vedic texts drop hints about antigravity machines made of copper spheres inside which a gyroscope churned mercury. This hypothetical technology is not so farfetched. After all, copper/mercury batteries generate direct current, and copper coils produce alternating current when wrapped around a magnet. Subtler interactions between copper and mercury may generate gravity waves. Could they result from the interaction of a strong, hydrophilic acid and a powerful hydrophobic base, magnetized to the same polarity so as to separate them and spun up into colloidal suspension with a little pure water? Research of this kind may prove to be surprisingly significant in the future.
We must take care not to distort and pollute the very fabric of space-time with abusive electrogravitation applications. Evidently, over-industrialized overpopulation has already sabotaged a global climate that was once optimized for human comfort. Why not demolish space-time itself, while we’re at it?
It might be equally useful to study super-sensitive orgone boxes whose walls consist of alternating layers of stone wool (fiberglass), steel wool and organic wool (cotton or lamb’s). For some as yet unexplained reason, during the 1950s, science and justice hierarchs declared these experiments taboo. Backed by the full force of the law, they murdered in prison the experimenter, Wilhelm Reich, destroyed his equipment, burned and banned his writings. Even in modern times, even in the countries that call themselves “free,” the Grand Inquisitor is but a brief phone call away. http://www.wakingtimes.com/2013/07/01/dr-wilhelm-reich-scientific-genius-or-medical-madman.
Nikola Tesla and his research suffered pretty much the same fate at the hands of the same type of barbarian. After his death (or assassination by the Nazi commando Otto Skorzeny in New York City in the summer of 1943), the U.S. Government confiscated a boxcar-full of his research papers, consigned them to temporary oblivion and then to Top Secret classification after World War II (sic) when it was pawed-over by Nazi scientists brought to the U.S. under the auspices of Project Paperclip. Most of it has never seen the light of day since. God knows how much of it was simply trashed, the same way his machinery was.
Water is so mysterious; it seems to be miraculous. Its molecular properties contradict the basic attributes of other compounds. Water seems purpose-made to support life and mandatory for its continuance: the constant companion of life, if you will. Or could it be that the great atmospheric and maritime ocean is the primary living being on this planet and we are mere viral auxiliaries within it? What other properties could water hold, of which we know so little? How could we perfect this interaction?
Gerald H. Pollack, a professor in biophysics at the University of Washington, released a fascinating book: Water, Energy and Life. His research appears to be groundbreaking. In 2008, I watched his lecture on the Research Channel (that doesn’t exist any longer: too “intelligent” for TV on WeaponWorld), then read his book. From the little of it I understood, water organizes itself into a highly organized liquid crystal (another physical state in addition to the four we recognize: liquid, gas, solid and plasma). Along its interface with air or gelled acids, it retains a small electrical charge that can grow up to several million molecules thick. This "exclusion zone" is free of dissolved chemicals that remain in the water beyond the interface. It is maintained and grows thicker under the influence of sunlight or another source of infrared light
Prof. Pollack and his team achieved a 200 to 1 purification of water by drawing pure water from within the interface and sending off the mixed water into another container; the whole powered by sunlight alone without any filter or barrier. He hypothesized that primitive lifeforms may have self-organized within this liquid crystal interface. Other researchers have looked at the microscopically thin interface between the sea-surface and the atmosphere, which seethes with microbial life when humanity doesn’t sterilize it
These are preliminary results and I have probably not been clear. Google his name or read his books for more details.
Some researchers (carefully suppressed) have studied water’s exceptional properties of energy storage and propagation as it is driven and spun through special turbines. Their results so far have been almost mythical — radiating anti-gravity waves and other extraordinary forms of radiation
Others (Victor Schauberger foremost) have studied the healing properties of water dancing down rocky slopes to pick up natural minerals and suspend their solutes in milky, colloidal solutions that hold promising nutritional qualities
Others still have added nothing more than a handful of aged manure to batches of plain water and stirred them repeatedly clockwise and counterclockwise, thus creating an elixir with outstanding ability to fertilize plants, attract beneficial insects and repel destructive ones, for the general health of the soil and the quality and quantity of its crops, and perhaps even the purification of tainted water. See Christopher Bird and Peter Tompkins, The Secret Life of Plants, Harper & Row, New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London, 1973.
In the early 1800s, electricity was a novel plaything for a few scientific highbrows, with no practical application. Nowadays, industrial society would not exist without direct or alternating current across trillions of circuits. In the near future, novel forms of energy may replace fossil fuel, nuclear reactors and other sources of electro-magnetic power that supply us with electrical current. Such new energy sources may be electro-gravitic, hydro-gravitic or some other hyphenated term surpassing current understanding.
These new technologies will require deep study. They are as unknown to us as electricity was to wise men of the 15th century. At least they knew something about lightning, magnets and the static electricity properties of amber and silk. It is on these matters that we should resume our research in earnest, starting from scratch and looking for fundamental insights they might have missed.
We know almost nothing of new technologies that may rescue human civilization. Their advent may require the removal from office of the greediest and most reactionary leadership in history, compared to which ancient despots were forward-thinking progressives. It is going to take a series of technological miracles, miraculous technologies and corresponding leadership to wean corporate/industrial civilization from its fossil fuel addiction without starving and freezing millions, perhaps billions of people to death in the process — as their lights and heat go out and supply trucks they take for granted stop rolling into town. The technologies we’ve relied on in the past will become secondary to new ones we can hardly imagine today, upon which will depend the survival of human civilization.
It’s time fossil fuel and nuke monopolists were pulled off the back of the scientific community. They must stop dictating what kind of research is acceptable and start sponsoring the next generation of technologies that will make fossil fuels obsolete — before those fuels run out and not after
Humanity should have taken up this task in earnest fifty years ago and come up with fully mature new technologies by now. It may be too late to bring them online before masses of people suffer from the failure of oil production, of fossil fuel technology and their timely replacement. Those responsible for this delay will answer in person for every casualty their profiteering induces. A planetary civil war may have to be fought over this issue alone, to their long-term woe since the majority will oppose them. They must change their mind radically and soon, and spearhead new research in alternative energy sources to avoid the fate that has befallen every tyrant in the past
The other alternative: the Mad Max, Road Warrior one of cultural, technological and societal collapse at the hands of a managerial class least worthy of that privilege – does not bear contemplating.
There are no bad troops, only bad leaders.
As it stands, we’re pushing the outer envelope of ecological stability and human endurance. What military-industrialists are getting away with reminds me of a joke about a man who'd jumped off a tall building. Falling past the twentieth floor, he was heard to mutter “So far, so good.”
“Wallace Broecker, an ocean circulation researcher at New York’s Lamont-Doherty Earth observatory, described the situation perfectly when he pointed out that ‘climate is an angry beast and we are poking at it with sticks.’” From Bill McGuire, “Will Global Warming Trigger an Ice Age?” The Guardian, 11/13/2003.
Another social experiment could plant the Olympics where warfare threatens to erupt. Today, we stage them in richer, quieter, better-policed cities where their peace potential is masked. Learners may use the Olympics to curb local violence, the way the ancient Greeks did
During these new Olympics, local warlords will be expected to uphold the peace under intense public scrutiny. They will become international stars if their efforts bear fruit, and pariahs if not. Athletes, sportscasters and spectators will live like heroes: in tent cities, under fire and dying as martyrs if necessary. During the course of these events, reconstruction and reconciliation will be renewed with grim determination and their cash outlays will match those of a war fought out in the same circumstances
If those projects fail and violence persists, a massive world embargo would follow. Locals will have to exhaust their taste for violence in isolation from the rest of the world and then return to reason. Mass violence might recede as world opinion frowns on any interruption of these sacred games. Once again, the Olympics will turn into a worship service for peace; not the meaningless spectacle we’ve grown used to, of empty sports statistics, national chauvinism and mindless advertising.
Reactionary detractors could point to the 1984 Winter Olympics in the city of Sarajevo a few years prior to Yugoslavia’s brutal Civil War, during which that city was besieged, shelled and wrecked. Its famous cosmopolitanism has yet to recover fully. We might conclude that such a project would be worthless, based on the flawed example of Sarajevo’s tragic heroism. Latent ethnic conflicts were not brought to the light of day. No public debate sought conflict resolution strategies before warfare flashed over. These vexing details were drowned out in sentimental Olympic twaddle, only to re-emerge as preventable genocide a few years later.
Learner Olympics would seek the exact opposite. More attention would be paid to conflict resolution and much less to mawkish sentimentality, sports babble and tawdry publicity.
Humanity’s energy budget grows with each application of unforeseen new peace technologies, not just by putting more ground under the plow, having a lot more babies or blindly burning more fossil fuel.
Crop yields from experimental, Stone Age freeholds have matched modern agro-industry’s per-acre productivity without massive inputs of chemicals, mechanical soil destruction and super-inbred seed stocks. The secret seems to be the loving manipulation of the soil, handful by handful. Have you noticed how much more beautiful and fit a garden appears to be after it’s been gone over inch by inch by hand? It glows, almost as if it had been made love to. That, plus the smart cultivation of underground microbes, carried out as rigorously as the historic one of aboveground plants.
Industrial crops, however, exhaust the soil’s natural fertility. Only religious applications of Findhorn-style, hard-labor/microbe/psychic cultivation can boost soil productivity with fewer artificial inputs. This form of farming is shunned by current agro-business, most likely because it is only practicable on small family farms.
We may take up the moderate consumption of wild game species. “Unimproved” wilderness supports wild herbivores more readily than sickly, feed-dependent domestic varieties. Predator-hastened hoof prints knead the soil to perfection and their wastes restore fertility, instead of eroding it away, the way our artificial pollutants wash it out and then eutrophy our waterways. The native vegetation they feed on is fully adapted to local climes and indestructible by local pests without any need for genetic engineering. We could make this hardiness work for us. New hunter-gatherer cultures could harvest wild resources within restored climax ecosystems. This might allow us to stop penning food species in factory farms.
The consumption of farm-raised livestock may become not only obsolete but taboo; and some form of vegetarianism, the nutritional norm perhaps supplemented with insect, microbial or lab-grown protein. In a generation or two, people could sicken at the idea of eating animal flesh, just as we would if it were the human kind. In the meantime, modern science invites a renewal of disaster in attempting to reduce natural species to unique brand names. We can only hope this insane trend is reversed.
Long-suffering Ireland – practically the first and last of Britain’s abused colonies – endured its Great Famine during one of the first experiments in industrial monoculture. While British landlords exported Ireland’s diversified crops under armed guard, the sole sustenance of the Irish peasant, his potato crop, rotted away. Mass starvation ensued. In the 1840s, Ireland’s population declined by half through famine, pestilence and desperate departures. By the way, during the 1830s, more Irish soldiers than English signed up for the British Army.
By prioritizing industrial monoculture and dispossessing farm families in the United States and elsewhere, we are setting ourselves up for counterblows of terrorist reprisal — not to mention a massive upsurge of farmer suicides, as the corporate consolidation of farmlands ruins freeholders across the planet. Worse catastrophes loom: crop-focused blights and pest pandemics, unemployment riots, food bottlenecks and mass starvation. Private farmer suicides have reached pandemic proportions in India, the USA and elsewhere on Earth.
The 1995 truck bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building was due in large part to massive bank loan programs that had ruined many regional family farmers. Their lands were repossessed and absorbed into large corporate holdings. The most desperate among them turned to extremist organizations for support. In turn, those extremists roused fanatical outriders like the Federal Building bombers.
A new field of biomimicry could spearhead Vedic-guided biotechnologies. Genetic architects will adapt corals, plankton, seaweed, lichens and algae to construction and manufacturing requirements. Tailored tissue communities could be cultivated into ready-made housing. Contractors could pour pre-designed organisms and nutrient solutions into forms; the way concrete is poured today. Those organisms would metabolize their nutrients, dry out and die off within a few days. The resulting “skeletal” remnants (something like the hard remains of coral, bone or bamboo) could provide:
· construction materials of exceptional strength and elasticity,
· devices with special optical, moisture control and other properties, and
· electronic circuitry of unheard-of complexity, delicacy and micro-miniaturization.
Several properties could be layered in the same construct, using different organisms and nutrient mixes. Silkworm or spider clones could produce optical cable, new textiles and microfilaments of extraordinary utility. Accelerated growth organisms could replace milled woods and inorganic insulation in construction. Genetic architecture may revolutionize communications, cold fusion, bio- and sun-power, lighting, thermal insulation and evaporative temperature regulation.
Innovations in molds, algae, lichens and fungi promise breakthroughs in pharmacology and food processing. The serious study of lichens has just resumed; its in-depth research may be crucial. Research in fungus and algae communities may produce house-sized accelerated growths whose surfaces would be glazed with opaque chlorophyll layers, self-protected from ultraviolet and adapted to nutrition and housing needs. Just imagine; special panels on the walls of your breakfast nook might glow with bioluminescence and/or sprout tasty edibles for breakfast every morning.
Tailored bivalves and other marine filter feeders will filter pollutants from streams and rivers as well as through newly designed urban fountains. Pure water will flow once again from almost everywhere. Specially bred trees and bushes could soak up long-lived pollutants for later extraction and disposal.
In the future, people with green thumbs will earn their keep much the way good mechanics and computer code writers earn theirs today.
A revolution in agriculture could replace many annual food crops with perennial ones. Nowadays, we plant agro-commercial seeds designed to suck the fertility from the soil (that necessitate additional tons of mineral fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides for less and less output). As we harvest this monoculture we are stripping the soil bare. We watch it dry up, wash out and blow away at irreplaceable rates. It’s no longer sustainable farming; it’s strip-mining of the soil.
Instead, we could assemble a community of perennial plants like the natural plant communities that used to cover the Great Prairie of the American Midwest. These aggregates would soak up more rain (lessening flood/drought disasters), ward off pests and restore the soil’s fertility in a natural way. We could harvest edible seeds from them on a seasonal, low impact basis. The rest of the time, they would be left to restore nature’s balance and thicken good soil dependably.
Great mountain heights with heavy rains will be sown with breeding pairs of well-immunized beavers, starting with flatlands at high altitude then those below and less rainy. This project will attenuate seasonal flooding and downstream drought to a great extent.
We can look forward to breakthroughs in the biological sciences, once we stop abusing laboratory animals as our primary method of research. We have warped nature in our labs to conform with the mechanistic, reductionist prejudices that led us to commit ecocide in the first place. We are going to take those experiments outside the laboratory and back into the forests and fields that our lab-bred prejudices led us to destroy.
The citizens of rich countries are spontaneously reversing their population growth despite foolhardy delays by their leadership. Weapon mentors abhor this reasonable self-restraint because it reduces their military and military support personnel (the only significant downside). Despite GNP growth projections, a massive reduction in the human overburden is inevitable: voluntary, traumatic or both. The only population controls Learners will discourage will be those favored today: weapon decimation, mass neglect and public health incompetence, those will no longer be tolerated.
Even though Learners will accept sexual abstinence on ecclesiastical grounds, they will encourage other zero-growth trends. In addition to unlimited family planning everywhere on Earth, new Administrations will offer quality Learning, dependable social security, complete sexual equity and exquisite health care: more effective stimulants of rational family planning than the pious babble of sexual neurotics.
New public health campaigns will range from washing hands more often, to cultivating household and agricultural pests as food items, to relieving pandemic sleep disorders, to perfecting micro-nutrition and improving hydration (drink more clear water and less of that corporate stuff!), to much more drastic alternatives.
Weapon managers once sought to sterilize the insane, violent recidivists and carriers of inheritable diseases both genetically and sexually transmitted. I hear you gasp and share your revulsion. In the future, eugenic interventions will be much more precise, benign and effective. Specific gene clusters that control unprovoked aggression, sociopathy and other diseased behavior will be targeted, but sexual viability and individual desires won’t suffer in the process.
Critics of selective genetic programs point to the Nazis who tried them first. Their evil deeds confirm the immorality of selective genetics. The eradication of genetic abnormalities has gone out of style. Meanwhile, the mechanical recycling of trash is still trendy. Everyone praises the idea of recycling. No-one points out that Nazis were among the first to experiment with economic recycling among their victims' possessions in concentration camps.
Actually (as usual) every army that “won” a battle practiced systematic recycling. The primary criterion of victory was to hold your ground on the battlefield, no matter what losses you took, and force the enemy to abandon theirs. The reward was more weapons and booty for the victorious army to recycle, plus the grievously wounded to mercy-kill or abandon to an agonizing death, plus rotting corpses to march away from. Let the local peasants bury them.
Time is running out for business as usual. We must clear many moral hurdles — and those soon. At stake is not the soggy conscience we get by passing every big problem on to inept info elites, nor the aphrodisiac sense of moral rectitude weapon shadists experience when they torment chosen prey without opposition. At stake is human survival. Epidemics, mass starvation and sovereign ignorance are no longer “acceptable” and it is our duty to make them stop.
The wealth required to jump-start and rev up PeaceWorld will be at least ten times that available today. Rich weapon states cannot amass sufficient wealth to improve a privileged minority’s Learning, much less that of their underlings across the board. Learner networks alone will obtain good results in time.
I admit that many countries have made dramatic improvements by subsidizing public education and other local peace functions. Unfortunately, no homegrown effort will generate enough wealth to meet humanity’s insatiable demands, leap for the stars and care for the natural world. The sum of these tasks, the whole world will carry out in concert — or no-one will.
If we get everything right, nothing will set off our battle reflexes. If we fail walk away from total war and look back at it instead, the way Lot’s wife did, it will overtake us with all the fury of its momentary frustration
Humanity’s energy budget grows with each application of unforeseen new peace technologies, not just by putting more ground under the plow, having a lot more babies or blindly burning more fossil fuel.
Crop yields from experimental, Stone Age freeholds have matched modern agro-industry’s per-acre productivity without massive inputs of chemicals, mechanical soil destruction and super-inbred seed stocks. The secret seems to be the loving manipulation of the soil, handful by handful. Have you noticed how much more beautiful and fit a garden appears to be after it’s been gone over inch by inch by hand? It glows, almost as if it had been made love to. That, plus the smart cultivation of underground microbes, carried out as rigorously as the historic one of aboveground plants.
Industrial crops, however, exhaust the soil’s natural fertility. Only religious applications of Findhorn-style, hard-labor/microbe/psychic cultivation can boost soil productivity with fewer artificial inputs. This form of farming is shunned by current agro-business, most likely because it is only practicable on small family farms.
We may take up the moderate consumption of wild game species. “Unimproved” wilderness supports wild herbivores more readily than sickly, feed-dependent domestic varieties. Predator-hastened hoof prints knead the soil to perfection and their wastes restore fertility, instead of eroding it away, the way our artificial pollutants wash it out and then eutrophy our waterways. The native vegetation they feed on is fully adapted to local climes and indestructible by local pests without any need for genetic engineering. We could make this hardiness work for us. New hunter-gatherer cultures could harvest wild resources within restored climax ecosystems. This might allow us to stop penning food species in factory farms.
The consumption of farm-raised livestock may become not only obsolete but taboo; and some form of vegetarianism, the nutritional norm perhaps supplemented with insect, microbial or lab-grown protein. In a generation or two, people could sicken at the idea of eating animal flesh, just as we would if it were the human kind. In the meantime, modern science invites a renewal of disaster in attempting to reduce natural species to unique brand names. We can only hope this insane trend is reversed.
Long-suffering Ireland – practically the first and last of Britain’s abused colonies – endured its Great Famine during one of the first experiments in industrial monoculture. While British landlords exported Ireland’s diversified crops under armed guard, the sole sustenance of the Irish peasant, his potato crop, rotted away. Mass starvation ensued. In the 1840s, Ireland’s population declined by half through famine, pestilence and desperate departures. By the way, during the 1830s, more Irish soldiers than English signed up for the British Army.
By prioritizing industrial monoculture and dispossessing farm families in the United States and elsewhere, we are setting ourselves up for counterblows of terrorist reprisal — not to mention a massive upsurge of farmer suicides, as the corporate consolidation of farmlands ruins freeholders across the planet. Worse catastrophes loom: crop-focused blights and pest pandemics, unemployment riots, food bottlenecks and mass starvation. Private farmer suicides have reached pandemic proportions in India, the USA and elsewhere on Earth.
The 1995 truck bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building was due in large part to massive bank loan programs that had ruined many regional family farmers. Their lands were repossessed and absorbed into large corporate holdings. The most desperate among them turned to extremist organizations for support. In turn, those extremists roused fanatical outriders like the Federal Building bombers.
A new field of biomimicry could spearhead Vedic-guided biotechnologies. Genetic architects will adapt corals, plankton, seaweed, lichens and algae to construction and manufacturing requirements. Tailored tissue communities could be cultivated into ready-made housing. Contractors could pour pre-designed organisms and nutrient solutions into forms; the way concrete is poured today. Those organisms would metabolize their nutrients, dry out and die off within a few days. The resulting “skeletal” remnants (something like the hard remains of coral, bone or bamboo) could provide:
· construction materials of exceptional strength and elasticity,
· devices with special optical, moisture control and other properties, and
· electronic circuitry of unheard-of complexity, delicacy and micro-miniaturization.
Several properties could be layered in the same construct, using different organisms and nutrient mixes. Silkworm or spider clones could produce optical cable, new textiles and microfilaments of extraordinary utility. Accelerated growth organisms could replace milled woods and inorganic insulation in construction. Genetic architecture may revolutionize communications, cold fusion, bio- and sun-power, lighting, thermal insulation and evaporative temperature regulation.
Innovations in molds, algae, lichens and fungi promise breakthroughs in pharmacology and food processing. The serious study of lichens has just resumed; its in-depth research may be crucial. Research in fungus and algae communities may produce house-sized accelerated growths whose surfaces would be glazed with opaque chlorophyll layers, self-protected from ultraviolet and adapted to nutrition and housing needs. Just imagine; special panels on the walls of your breakfast nook might glow with bioluminescence and/or sprout tasty edibles for breakfast every morning.
Tailored bivalves and other marine filter feeders will filter pollutants from streams and rivers as well as through newly designed urban fountains. Pure water will flow once again from almost everywhere. Specially bred trees and bushes could soak up long-lived pollutants for later extraction and disposal.
In the future, people with green thumbs will earn their keep much the way good mechanics and computer code writers earn theirs today.
A revolution in agriculture could replace many annual food crops with perennial ones. Nowadays, we plant agro-commercial seeds designed to suck the fertility from the soil (that necessitate additional tons of mineral fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides for less and less output). As we harvest this monoculture we are stripping the soil bare. We watch it dry up, wash out and blow away at irreplaceable rates. It’s no longer sustainable farming; it’s strip-mining of the soil.
Instead, we could assemble a community of perennial plants like the natural plant communities that used to cover the Great Prairie of the American Midwest. These aggregates would soak up more rain (lessening flood/drought disasters), ward off pests and restore the soil’s fertility in a natural way. We could harvest edible seeds from them on a seasonal, low impact basis. The rest of the time, they would be left to restore nature’s balance and thicken good soil dependably.
Great mountain heights with heavy rains will be sown with breeding pairs of well-immunized beavers, starting with flatlands at high altitude then those below and less rainy. This project will attenuate seasonal flooding and downstream drought to a great extent.
We can look forward to breakthroughs in the biological sciences, once we stop abusing laboratory animals as our primary method of research. We have warped nature in our labs to conform with the mechanistic, reductionist prejudices that led us to commit ecocide in the first place. We are going to take those experiments outside the laboratory and back into the forests and fields that our lab-bred prejudices led us to destroy.
The citizens of rich countries are spontaneously reversing their population growth despite foolhardy delays by their leadership. Weapon mentors abhor this reasonable self-restraint because it reduces their military and military support personnel (the only significant downside). Despite GNP growth projections, a massive reduction in the human overburden is inevitable: voluntary, traumatic or both. The only population controls Learners will discourage will be those favored today: weapon decimation, mass neglect and public health incompetence, those will no longer be tolerated.
Even though Learners will accept sexual abstinence on ecclesiastical grounds, they will encourage other zero-growth trends. In addition to unlimited family planning everywhere on Earth, new Administrations will offer quality Learning, dependable social security, complete sexual equity and exquisite health care: more effective stimulants of rational family planning than the pious babble of sexual neurotics.
New public health campaigns will range from washing hands more often, to cultivating household and agricultural pests as food items, to relieving pandemic sleep disorders, to perfecting micro-nutrition and improving hydration (drink more clear water and less of that corporate stuff!), to much more drastic alternatives.
Weapon managers once sought to sterilize the insane, violent recidivists and carriers of inheritable diseases both genetically and sexually transmitted. I hear you gasp and share your revulsion. In the future, eugenic interventions will be much more precise, benign and effective. Specific gene clusters that control unprovoked aggression, sociopathy and other diseased behavior will be targeted, but sexual viability and individual desires won’t suffer in the process.
Critics of selective genetic programs point to the Nazis who tried them first. Their evil deeds confirm the immorality of selective genetics. The eradication of genetic abnormalities has gone out of style. Meanwhile, the mechanical recycling of trash is still trendy. Everyone praises the idea of recycling. No-one points out that Nazis were among the first to experiment with economic recycling among their victims' possessions in concentration camps.
Actually (as usual) every army that “won” a battle practiced systematic recycling. The primary criterion of victory was to hold your ground on the battlefield, no matter what losses you took, and force the enemy to abandon theirs. The reward was more weapons and booty for the victorious army to recycle, plus the grievously wounded to mercy-kill or abandon to an agonizing death, plus rotting corpses to march away from. Let the local peasants bury them.
Time is running out for business as usual. We must clear many moral hurdles — and those soon. At stake is not the soggy conscience we get by passing every big problem on to inept info elites, nor the aphrodisiac sense of moral rectitude weapon shadists experience when they torment chosen prey without opposition. At stake is human survival. Epidemics, mass starvation and sovereign ignorance are no longer “acceptable” and it is our duty to make them stop.
The wealth required to jump-start and rev up PeaceWorld will be at least ten times that available today. Rich weapon states cannot amass sufficient wealth to improve a privileged minority’s Learning, much less that of their underlings across the board. Learner networks alone will obtain good results in time.
I admit that many countries have made dramatic improvements by subsidizing public education and other local peace functions. Unfortunately, no homegrown effort will generate enough wealth to meet humanity’s insatiable demands, leap for the stars and care for the natural world. The sum of these tasks, the whole world will carry out in concert — or no-one will.
If we get everything right, nothing will set off our battle reflexes. If we fail walk away from total war and look back at it instead, the way Lot’s wife did, it will overtake us with all the fury of its momentary frustration.
- BEYOND DARWIN -
Let’s break down evolutionary development into five steps. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species suggested this idea to me. At the end of Chapter 7, “Miscellaneous Objections to the Theory of Natural Selection” he wrote:
“…Abrupt and strongly marked variations occur in our domesticated productions, singly and at rather long intervals of time. If such occurred under nature, they would be liable to be lost by accidental causes and by inter-crossing. In order that a new species should suddenly appear, it is almost necessary to believe, in opposition to all analogy, that several wonderfully changed individuals appeared simultaneously within the same district, [italics mine].
“Against the belief in abrupt changes, embryology enters a strong protest. The embryo serves as a record of the past condition of the species. Hence existing species during early stages often resemble extinct forms belonging to the same class. It is incredible that an animal should have undergone abrupt transformations and yet should not bear even a trace in its embryonic condition of sudden modification, every detail being developed by insensibly fine steps.
“He who believes that some ancient form was transformed suddenly through an internal force or tendency will be compelled to believe that many structures beautifully adapted to all the other parts of the same creature and to the surrounding conditions, have been suddenly produced; and of such complex and wonderful co-adaptations, he will not be able to assign a shadow of an explanation.” [Author’s note: except for disease, perhaps]. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Abridged and Edited by Charlotte and William Irvine, 1978, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., p. 61.
Without additional clarification, Darwin’s theories run aground on a shoal of scientific details charted more recently. His evolutionary theory rests on five points.
1. All species produce offspring in excess of the number that can survive.
2. Adult populations in any region tend to remain constant, and therefore there is an enormous death rate. (Most biologists believe the first part wrong; the second part largely correct.)
3. There must be a struggle for survival, which the majority of creatures lose.
4. The competitors vary in many small characteristics, and these will affect the chances of survival.
5. The result of those preconditions is that the organism best able to survive them transmits its more adaptive traits to future generations.
Taken from Fred Warshofsky’s Doomsday: The Science of Catastrophe, Readers Digest Press, New York, 1977, pp. 103-104.
Gordon Rattray Taylor summarizes Darwin’s complications in The Great Evolution Mystery. I take this quotation from Michael Crawford’s and David Marsh’s The Driving Force – Food, Evolution and the Future, William Heinemann Ltd., London, 1989, p. 30.
· The suddenness [to paleontologists, “sudden” means happening in only a few million years] with which major changes in pattern occurred and the virtual absence of any fossil remains from the period in which they were alleged to be evolving.
· The suddenness with which new forms “radiated” into numerous variants.
· The suddenness of many extinctions and the lack of obvious reasons for such extinction.
· The repeated occurrence of changes calling for numerous coordinated innovations, both at the level of organs and of complete organisms.
· The variations in speed at which evolution occurred.
· The fact that subsequently, no new phyla have appeared, and no new classes and orders. This fact so thoroughly ignored is perhaps the most powerful of all arguments against Darwin’s generalization.
· The occurrence of parallel and convergent evolution, in which similar structures evolve in quite different circumstances.
· The existence of long-term trends (orthogenesis).
· The appearance of organs before they are needed (pre-adaptation).
· The occurrence of “overshoot” or evolutionary momentum (e.g. how organs once useful became overdeveloped, such as the tusks of the saber-toothed tiger and the antlers of the Irish elk).
· The puzzle of how organs, once evolved, come to be lost (degeneration.)
· The failure of some organisms to evolve at all.
Even though many diseases increase mortality, some might benefit their host. Could “domesticated” pathogens have introduced immune, digestive, neural, and other specialized cells where none existed before? Did mutagenic microbes make new mutations inheritable? Could successfully adapted tumors have become physical mutations? Could DNA, whether so-called “junk” or from some other source, have reactivated or been injected into members of a host species that lacked them previously?
Those possibilities are dismissed as heretical today, pigeonholed under clumsy rubrics like “endosymbiosis” and “horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotes.” Scientists are resuming the study of oncogenes, transposons, plasmids, plasmagenes and episomes: micro-organic savings banks, post offices and stock exchanges whose halls echo with the complex intercourse of DNA.
Could our bodies be “bacterial clouds”: multi-generation starships constructed with, by and for microorganisms to transport their DNA (so-called “junk DNA”?) in safety and comfort across monstrous stretches of space-time — from your armchair to the refrigerator, say, or across the galaxy?
A theory of adaptive mutation through benign disease processes could settle many arguments between evolutionary gradualists and catastrophists.
Environmental catastrophes could have suppressed the immune system of dominant species and brought on pandemics of heightened mortality, in-species fragmentation and genetic drift. During such disasters, whole herds would have been annihilated or transformed into more viable new species. Since every animal suffered simultaneously, their descendants skipped “transitional” stages. This evolutionary process of selective die-out is modeled in Kropotkin's book, Mutual Cooperation.
It is interesting to note that species with a long history of genetic stability show relative immunity from many diseases -- sharks, mollusks, lichen, fungi, ginkgoes(?). Focused scientists should take note.
This evolutionary blueprint left the fragmentary fossil record our paleontologists puzzle over today, minus the “missing links” that Darwinists keep predicting and failing to find: a bad sign for a theory.
On the other hand, behavior seems to have evolved under environmental influences, following a more gradual, Lamarckian path. Given varying circumstances, certain deviants went crazy in specific ways. If this new craziness increased their reproductive success, it passed on to succeeding generations and was ingrained in species memory.
Someone may appear to act crazy, but that craziness may be a survival factor under altered circumstances mere “normals” could not handle. When chaos looms, a deviant response may be more efficient than the one that works perfectly under normal routines.
Species extermination rarely resulted from predation, endemic disease and selective competition; more often from massive ecological disruption: asteroid strikes, volcanism, ice ages, massive flooding, long droughts, human encroachment, etc., followed by lethal pandemics resulting from lowered immunity across the board.
Thereafter, a few survivors replaced the masses of the dead, and then multiplied to fill in the gaps. The distinguishing traits they shared became “Darwinian mutations.” But they would not have necessarily “improved fitness.” On the contrary, they would have reinforced statistically average traits shared among a handful of survivors of that species. Rare individuals, more adapted to a special niche, would be for the most part wiped out along with the majority. Only an unstable environment lethal on a semi-permanent basis would promote the survival of a radical mutant, assuming the whole population hadn’t been annihilated : a frequent occurrence.
The planet has caught a cold, and we are it.
To recognize its place in the scheme of things, humanity must consider itself an Earth pathogen — not its dominator, lord or even failed caretaker. Like most disease organisms, we have evolved through progressive relationships with nature. Any population that failed to reach the next higher level, dropped to a lower one and languished obscurity or disappeared.
Someone suggested that children pass through similar stages with their parents. I have not raise a child this time around; so I’ll not go there.
Level One: The organism is frail, simple and poorly adapted. It only survives under optimal circumstances. Opportunistically, it establishes precarious toeholds in empty niches and hosts with impaired immunity. Its growth is sluggish or static; its simplicity is a grave weakness. The slightest disturbance threatens it with annihilation.
Level Two: A much tougher organism invades a new host, overwhelms its defenses and kills it by explosive growth. The invading organism commits suicide by outgrowing its habitat.
Within decades, the Black Plague killed off almost half the population of Europe. Human growth rates flattened for a century until some unknown mechanism stopped this rampage cold. After all, no plague survivor acquired Black Death immunity. Could every town rat have died? I’m told there were never enough rats back then (based on dug-up remains) to confirm their vector status. And we need to explain many legends of black-clad specters seen waving what looked like scythes in the air just before nearby communities collapsed from the plague.
The basic difference between Level One and Level Two is that the actors – host and pathogen – have traded places on the power scale. In any case, each actor is almost always weakened by a decline of the other.
Level Three: A sophisticated organism controls its growth, attenuates its harmful effects and accepts the losses it incurs from host defenses. Host and pathogen survive to reproduce, even though neither may flourish as well as they did before.
Syphilis took this course during the Renaissance, as did the flu at the end of World War I (sic) and now with us. Both diseases mutated from subtle takers of children, the weak and the elderly into runaway killers of vigorous young adults, and then back around again. Actually, I’m told syphilis evolved from a universal childhood disease quite benign in the Tropics because everyone was almost naked and touched each other ceaselessly; into a fever tucked away in the warmth of the genitals under layers of clothing the former version couldn’t penetrate so easily, spread by sex and much more destructive during Roman times and perhaps prior. That disease and others may have undergone similar transitions long ago, but that does not alter the facts today.
Level Four: Insofar an infectious agent evolves, it develops a symbiotic relationship with its host. Those disease symptoms that remain benefit the host as much as the invader. Positive and negative effects balance out.
Sickle cell anemia strengthens its host’s immunity to malaria, perhaps the deadliest human disease. Actually, malarial fevers have burnt out some cases of syphilis and may thwart other diseases.
A constant background count of human diseases tremendously old and sturdy but marginally lethal, crowds out newer, more deadly but quite vulnerable organisms. Without this old crowd of microscopic competitors, the worst newcomers might destroy humanity in a few months’ spread without symptoms and a few weeks’ of mass plague. That is, everywhere on Earth except in military laboratories where such organisms are pampered pets grown in nutrient-rich but otherwise sterile environments and taught deadly new tricks. See Levels One and Two above.
Level Five: A sophisticated organism’s growing usefulness to the host overcomes the harm it inflicts. Under its gentle influence, new internal organs appear like additional scoops on an ice cream cone. They house new functions — perhaps as benign tumors. The infection makes a new home for itself in its host’s strengthened body. In return for this survival benefit, the host’s genes mutate and reprogram themselves. The infection and host merge genetically into a more complex and adaptive spawn.
It’s inter-Kingdom sex! The outcome of this sexual intercourse (it can’t be called anything else, even though current science dogma considers that taboo) is a new entity stronger than the sum of its original parts.
Take that, you devil-take-the-hindmost Darwinians. Refute it as much as you can.
The disease relationship humanity maintains with Earth teeters between Levels Two and Three. We graduated from Level One to Level Two by learning the usefulness of weapons and tools. Transition to Level Three would advance our civilization past mere weapon technology.
Instead, our weapon managers ignore runaway population growth, resource depletion and environmental impacts. They replace this promising graduation to Level Three with technical, societal and moral preparations for omnicide (“Kill everything!”): the only alternative their weapon hypnosis allows.
Level Two human overpopulation is a complex Earth disaster that promises to collapse civilization and annihilate us, just as a colony of primitive pathogens destroys itself by irritating its host beyond toleration.
In any case, the standard outcome of evolution beyond Level Five may unfold as follows. After the symbiotic newcomers share a long and comfortable interlude of adaptive stasis (as did the dinosaurs and other species for millions of years), some new genocidal crisis poses them an unsolvable test and sends them back to Level One, or replaces them with the next wave of evolutionary candidates.
In any case, I believe that our eternal soul takes a pick from whatever lifeforms persist in any stretch of spacetime, the way we’d chose an outfit to wear on the street this morning.
Info elites evolved through the aforesaid disease Levels with their proletarian hosts. While they seemed mighty, the rich have at best shifted from Level Three to Level Four in their relation to the poor. Any public benefit they achieve only partially compensates their clumsiness. The slightest breach of the peace threatens to drag them and us – our heads banging the stair steps – to lower Levels and annihilation.
If we rally around Level Four and establish an Information Commonwealth on the way to Level Five, we may thrive. Future transitions between higher Levels could seem to appear spontaneously compared to the thousands of years aquiver between Levels One and Three.
Please note: I have numbered these levels like the steps of a staircase. They could just as well succeed each other in reverse order or skip levels entirely.
In the same way, the Community of Dissidence has maintained its Levels Three and Four with respect to Conspirators of Greed.
Level One lasted until the Time of Prophets when marginalized peace martyrs (Buddha, Zarathustra, Mani, Jesus, Mohammed and their adherents who died nameless) hung imperial crossroads with their broken or burned corpses. At this Level, local info elites certified weapon mentality by misrepresenting the martyr’s teachings then passing that falsehood to posterity as sacred truth.
Level Two was crossed when clueless weapon dissidents KO’d the decomposing body-politics of royal and imperial weapon technologies. They didn’t know what to do next. They only saw an unfair system to be overthrown. Just like us, they mistook mere indicators of societal disease (tyranny, corruption, greed, etc.) for the principal cause (weapon mentality) and tried to mitigate each of them blindly. Then they swallowed the same toxin and normalized its symptoms — institutionalizing, perpetuating, modernizing and perfecting weapon mentality in the process.
Included here are the revolutions patriarchal, urban, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Capitalist, industrial, American, French, Fascist, Communist and Anti-colonialist, among others. In short, every circular, short-circuit, positive feedback revolution with paradoxical outcomes that history bothered to document.
Modern civilization vacillates between Levels Three and Four. Weapon managers and dissidents flail each other without rhyme or reason while body counts, environmental destruction, overpopulation and unsustainable industries swell beyond control.
Learners can climb to Level Five once we fully grasp the weapon/peace dialectic, marginalize weapon mentality and restore global peace to its rightful place. That transition will reduce most of those toxic spills of their own accord.
What is stopping us now? The collective paralysis we experience every time there is a serious appeal for peace.
- LET’S TRAVEL! -
Learners face a basic dilemma. The info proletariat cannot afford to pay so much attention to empty elite monolog; in turn, the info elite can’t broadcast so much nonsense. Routines that seemed so soothing in the past have wound up being dead-ends. Slowly but surely, we are casting them aside.
Mass cosmopolitanism, urbanity and travel should be promoted in every population.
In optimizing the threat formula, we have amassed enough “surplus” wealth to arm hundreds of millions of soldiers with modern weapons and dispatch them to smear wasteland for years on end wherever info elites opt to focus their fury ― at least at first. Soon, this martial desolation will crash and burn where least desired, (read your doorstep), swiftly and nonstop.
Had we wisely invested these dividends in peace, we could expect huge profits in return: enough to let anyone travel where they wish, enough to plumb everyone’s lifelong Learning, and enough to introduce a new world language. These projects and many more peace equivalents will generate more wealth and investment opportunities in turn.
Without the monstrous military overheads we have come to expect and their wreckage, Learner Administrations could secure modest comforts for everyone, regardless of origin, credentials or return contribution. Any additional wealth would be gravy: communal riches beyond imagining. See Mencius as to wealth.
Most Americans would concur that Kansas and Missouri have nothing to gain from interstate war and everything to lose. This is so for at least seven reasons.
1. War shatters mutual affection, trust and trade: relationships it would take decades to heal. America has yet to heal wounds that fester since its Civil War “ended” seven generations ago.
2. An impartial Federal Government provides each State with peaceful means of conflict resolution. Could an honest Kansan complain, “Those Missourians are favored in Congress?”
3. In both states, vast majorities remain loyal to the federal ideal. They identify with a larger whole that seems to foster their mutual benefit. They would silence their prismatic minority ― by force if necessary.
4. Both states have unlimited access to each other’s workers and resources without additional tariffs and quotas.
5. The federal military draws equally from both states and from forty-eight others. It alone boasts a balanced armory and fully trained and equipped, full-strength troops. If push came to shove, it would outmatch any state’s military assets.
6. From a military standpoint, the whole is stronger than the sum of its parts; it offers greater security from threats foreign and domestic.
7. Both states share the same language, culture and constellation of political metaphors. No lesser issues remain to justify interstate war.
For these reasons, State officials don’t sit up late nights worrying that their neighbor’s National Guard will overrun them during the wee hours. American State legislators needn’t fortify their borders or raise armies to guard them; they needn’t fear cross-state espionage and recruit secret counter-agents. Any crackpot making such insane proposals would be laughed out of office.
So why not between all the nation-states of the Earth?
Granted, Kansas and Missouri shared brutal conflict in the past. Euro-Americans and Native American Indians couldn’t endure each other’s socio-economic contradictions. Soon, Federal authority lapsed and local battle elites used militant banditry to argue the issue of slavery. Once this madness shut down, the first fight resumed to its genocidal conclusion.
But any American Hawk could find good reasons to uphold interstate peace. If peace endures between Kansas and Missouri – inviolate yet unenforced – the validity of peace cannot be denied anywhere else. It would then be a question of setting up these preconditions far and wide and forbidding infractions. The United States of the World, above and beyond its American model yet emulating its greatness.
I cannot understand why Americans (in majority?) find this a threat to their life and liberty. Who fed them this BS? On the contrary, America would become the model for everyone to imitate as best they could. It would rule the world, not by brute force but by shining example. Everything fine about America would be brought forward and everything lesser, abandoned as shameful and worthless.
The powerful States of New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia are better off united; their populations are richer, freer, and more secure than they would be if they faced off against each other. Wouldn’t America, Russia and China find even greater rewards if they united with every other nation?
Where is the harm in that?
The United States (or other nations?) may reject a future world government, the way rich Americans vetoed British control during the American Revolution, to protect themselves from foreign taxation and lay that burden on the shoulders of their own poor. Otherwise, under British rule, the United States would have become a greater version of Canada or Australia (what a freedom-crushing horror!).
When Learners consolidate PeaceWorld and guide global populations to new heights of peace, justice and well being, American nationalism could take a turn for the worse ― indeed, its far-right response to World Peace might turn into overt fascism. No surprise there, given Republican tendencies these days. The worst outcome could be world war between Learner progressives and plutocrats entrenched in the U.S.A. and elsewhere. That conflict would probably begin with historically routine U.S. tactics of undercover sabotage, selective assassination and reflexive terrorism aimed against any hint of successful progress. See Iran, Chile, Nicaragua, and others over the past hundred years.
In that case, the U.S.A. should be permitted its resentful isolation from the rest of the world. The best and brightest American volunteers will join Learners to uphold PeaceWorld; just as the best and brightest children born in the Republican heartland flee to the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts once they grow up. Their intellect, youthful ideals and empathy prevail over the hothouse greed, bigotry and self-satisfaction with third-world-style leadership they found fixed at home (smugly called “American exceptionalism”).
If Learners apply limitless patience and restraint despite bloody provocations inflicted on them, American majorities will eventually appreciate the advantages of PeaceWorld and join up on terms acceptable to both sides ― even if a small minority of wannabe slaveholders has to be beaten down once and for all.
This Satyagraha promotion of PeaceWorld promises better outcomes than any attack against the richest territories and populations of the Earth to force their conformity with World Peace. Learners will veto this typical WeaponWorld wastage. Learner Satyagraha will be tested to its limit.
No doubt, unresolved water allocations, race/class conflicts and other contentious issues will rekindle militant hostility between these states, especially once global warming takes hold of the world. Talented psychopaths will keep practicing their worst behavior until they’re identified and stopped. As part of its crucial responsibilities, local administrations will head off such conflicts and resolve them peacefully, long before they turn into pretexts for more violence. The World Court will not act except as ultimate umpire.
Another weapon myth demands what healing it may bring. According to some raving militants, their feuds have festered for so long, their wrongs, become so unforgivable and their vendettas, run so deep that no lasting peace can ever be expected.
In the past, Switzerland (and similar regions) resembled today’s war-torn Balkans: their lovely landscape stained by factional massacre. Swiss cantons fought one another for centuries as Raurics, Sequanians, Uberians, Allobroges and other tribespeople, Helvetians, Celts, Gallo-Romans, Alemanians, Raetians, and Romanche-speaking antagonists swayed by puppet-master imperialists from France, Burgundy, the Holy Roman Empire, Austria, Savoya and the cities of splintered Italy.
During the battle of Mortgarten, in 1315, highland warriors of rural cantons Uri and Schwyz massacred the steel-clad city dwellers of Zoug, Lucerne and Zurich under the command of Frederic, the brother of Duke Leopold 1 of Austria (killed later on by the Swiss at the battle of Sempach). The difference between an enemy and a countryman seems merely to be a question of letting time unfold their history and broaden their mutual acceptance.
Bitter, Catholic-versus-Protestant disputes supercharged centuries of secular conflict. Before and after Federation, Swiss Cantons fought each other over feudal rights, foreign relations, rural versus urban priorities and issues of class conflict. During hundreds of freezing winters, the Swiss burned Swiss villages, raped Swiss women and starved Swiss children during bouts of organized mayhem. In the years to come, we will come to see likewise the history of every other weapon nation-state on Earth. Unforgivable crimes and unanswerable acts of revenge stacked up higher than the Alps — only to be ground down into ancient history.
The Swiss hired out their warlike sons as mercenaries who lost a million battle casualties abroad. They fought several civil wars, both in person at home and by proxy abroad. Their mercenaries were famous for their merciless ferocity: they neither asked for quarter nor granted it unless so ordered by their paymaster and not always then.
The serene Swiss of today (and other complex blends of ethnic peoples) could make similar claims just as outrageous: the same ones spit into each other’s face by Croat, Serb and Bosnian aggressors, Northern Irish, Afghan, Sri Lankan, Indonesian, Middle-Eastern … (this list can grow quite long with boring predictability). Each militant thinks he owes his countryman a long-standing blood-debt, or lusts after his neighbor’s land to form a “Greater Ethnic Nation-State” of historical fantasy and suicidal militarism.
Niklaus von Flüe was a humble monk who took to his alpine cave and preached federation and peace until grieving people opted to hear him out. They concluded they would never settle their disputes by force of arms without enslaving themselves to foreign powers that orchestrated their quarrels. Common sense turned civil war heroes into welcome allies or shunned desperadoes. Their fanaticism and Canton of origin became less important than their devotion to peace and its practical applications.
After years of trial and error – since they lacked any better idea and, unlike us, did something about it – the Swiss negotiated elaborate pledges of non-aggression that bound each Canton to its neighbors in peace, allied them against foreign aggressors, separated them when they began to wrangle, and arbitrated their disputes. Most importantly, Swiss Cantons signed “sit tight” agreements wherein they pledged not to get caught up in third-party disputes. No Canton, no matter how powerful and dominant in the past, could confront the remainder single-handedly and expect to thrive.
By criminalizing internal warfare and forbidding adventures abroad, the Swiss nation grew rich, powerful and dependably neutral. The entire planet could expect equal blessings if it did the same thing. Every nation would have to admit to its long history of civil wars, extensive and minor, prior to domestic peace. The whole Earth is merely the latest nation of humankind. To leap into space successfully, it must set up a dependable world peace.
This outcome might be achieved by tossing a net of peace treaties across the globe. Those easier to negotiate (between the United States and Canada, for example), but especially among countries less amenable (for example, the two Koreas or Turkey and Greece), as well as between suppressed minorities and their repressive national government. This, assuming every violator faced airtight sanctions and endless pursuit for disturbing the peace.
Vast new Learning Networks will restore trust between suspicious peoples, promote a relaxed form of Swiss confederation and criminalize warfare. Given so much more peace and quiet (and lower military overheads), business opportunities and profits will flourish at every level of enterprise.
We have been denied this planetary commonwealth by Prism extortionists and the rest of the population they’ve hypnotized into hysterical paralysis.
Today’s “sovereign states” and their harm forces are hyper-organized street-corner idlers picking their teeth with titanium switchblades. When social progress threatens their dominion, they attack their host population and call this barbarism “internal security.” A global conspiracy of prismatic aggressors resorts to parallel assaults ― quite predictably, despite the range of their geographic and political blah-blahs.
One might see warfare as a public health problem, a global pandemic. In that case, specialized peacekeeping and peacemaking forces will quarantine infected war zones, isolate them from corruptive outside influences and terminate their combat, backed by the entire industrial, military and academic might of the planet. Millions of civil volunteers will rebuild what has been destroyed and work hard to satisfy every demand that drove locals to fight.
Prototype Learner intervention groups include such organizations as Ruppert Nuedeck’s German group, Cap Anamu; the Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) of French origin, Belgian administration and global commitment; the American organization Witness for Peace. There are millions of potential volunteers out there, all dressed-up but with nowhere to go. We have merely to inspire, organize and deploy these Army Groups across PeaceWorld.
Administrations can’t resolve their crime problem by flattening entire neighborhoods. Weapon managers rehearsed this alternative in Paris before and after Napoleon III’s downfall, in 1985 Philadelphia, in Palestinian Gaza and anywhere else they thought they could get away with it. Nor can we sell weapons to our half of the perpetrators, though some reactionaries consider this a sound bargain and sound politics: today’s UN’s so-called “Security Council” foremost.
At a planetary scale, we must duplicate the guidelines of our healthiest cities: thwart organized violence, improve public service and encourage all the private ones that peace requires ― nothing more and nothing less.
Malcolm X waged jihad against his own rage and in defense of brotherly love after his hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca). During his quest, he discovered that white Muslims could show as much friendship to him, a black man, as white Christian bigots had offended him mercilessly in the United States. This observation led him to change his mind about waging total war against the whites. He resolved to promote peace instead of his prior goal the opposite. His martyrdom for peace is a tribute to the benefits of mass travel.
Much like Ho Chi Minh. Despite his unrelenting resistance to French colonial tyranny and bully American militarism for which he felt the same contempt (with good reason), he never let go his love of the American and French peoples, and admiration for their political ideals his European kinsmen taught him during his travels.
Also, Martin Luther King. It could be argued that he was not assassinated for preaching racial justice (he had done that for decades without being killed); but because he started preaching the ultimate taboo topic, peace on Earth. It was for that heresy that his death was allowed. His ultimate sermon on pacifism, carefully censored and forgotten by everyone in his posthumous record.
During such travels, the average ignorant bigot that humanity seems to mass produce (each of whom I would like to ask: have you ever lived among your ethnic rivals?) could see that the nations and races he had simplified and despised as a whole, are complex agglomerations of individuals much like himself and his loved ones, quite likely to do him spontaneous favors, and fit to be admired or simply tolerated. In this way, he could avoid the bigot’s dilemma: whoever generalizes about humanity, in whole or in part, errs unless he falls in love with it in whole and in part.
To ease this change in attitude, we will have to develop cheap, reliable networks of global travel. International military transport assets and barracks will be demilitarized, refurbished and interlocked for public use on a subsidized basis. Massive student exchange programs will swap the children of recent military antagonists on a semester basis and intermix them with local stay-at-homes during the school year.
This new melting pot will have to be closely watched. Learners should not flood closed societies with unwelcome and potentially disruptive intruders and thus stir up local xenophobia; nor should they leave innocent youngsters at the mercy of local chauvinists who might retain some grudge at their expense. It will be up to idealistic parents to determine if they can risk the safety of their precious children to uphold this Learner ideal. Local authorities will assure that those in charge of these newcomers (teachers, guides, chaperones and such, along with their police liaisons) are fully qualified for the job – perhaps as a result of their own field trips among former enemies and cultural adaptation to them, prior.
In addition and above all, wealth, health and learning will need to be more or less equalized across the planet. Otherwise, planet-hopping criminals, economic refugees and bearers of exotic diseases will tend to flood more affluent regions and deter their influential inhabitants from the pursuit of this project.
Dedicated, sacrificial interventionists may thwart future massacres of the likes of Beirut, Sarajevo, Kigali and Aleppo. Quite often, carefully advertised peace martyrs rocked well-established and brutal weapons elites back on their heels. Examples include the Kalinga casualties of Ashoka’s regret, the wave of saintly martyrs that heralded the bureaucracies of mass religion (those peace martyrs most likely in flight from their weapon religion bureaucrats whether they were Catholic, Islamic or Buddhist); the massacre of Gandhi supporters at Amritsar; non-violent Indian salt marchers at Dharesana near Surat; American Freedom Riders in the 1960’s; Kent State war protesters green troops volleyed in panic; Steve Biko and his beaten companions in South Africa; the Argentine “disappeared” and their courageous mothers; Mr. Aquino of the Philippines, assassinated on his return from exile; Witness for Peace Ben Linder gunned down in 1987 Nicaragua; and religious workers brutalized in El Salvador. Countless martyrs for peace left us their remembrance from Guatemala, Mexico and universal settings. With the connivance of the U.S. Congress and other power brokers, their sacrifice went shamefully undocumented.
During future complex disasters, a few carefully publicized, canary-in-the-coal-mine peace martyrs will give witness to local war crimes. They will convert world outrage over their witness, testimony and sacrifice into immediate, concrete intervention. They could dedicate their organization to the sacred memory of Rachel Corrie. Carefully trained peace martyrs would confront weapon sectarians under the bright lights of world publicity. Many human rights abuses will be corrected informally on home ground in this manner. This might reduce the need for foreign military interventions more clumsy, slow, expensive and unreliable in the long run.
Families do their best to conceal in-house squabbles from strangers. Learners will force Prism sectarians to do as much internationally. The World Court will marginalize militant prismatics and support political moderates across the globe. Military intervention will be deferred until every peace initiative has been tried and exhausted, and until a jury of randomly selected peers delivers that verdict in an adversarial court of law.
Learners will replace the UN’s crisis fumblings with well-rehearsed and fully financed contingency plans. The following complementary instruments should be tested: A) Peace Olympics, B) the World Court Foreign Legion, and C) new planetary religions broadcasting the basic tenets of Peace Jihad: non-violent and sacrificial martyrdom whose only goal is Peace.
Irhaab haram: “terrorism is forbidden,” as is taught to every Muslim child by their wise Muslim parents.
- LANGUAGE -
“The close relationship between language and religious belief pervades cultural history. Often, a divine being is said to have invented speech, or writing, and given it as a gift to mankind. One of the first things Adam has to do, according to the Book of Genesis, is name the acts of creation:
‘And the Lord God having formed out of the ground all the beasts of the earth, and all the fowls of the air, brought them to Adam to see what he would call them: for whatsoever Adam called any living creature, the same is its name …’
“Many other cultures have a similar story. In Egyptian mythology, the god Toth is the creator of speech and writing. It is Brahma who gives the knowledge of writing to the Hindu people. Odin is the inventor of runic script, according to the Icelandic sagas. A heaven-sent water turtle, with marks on its back, brings writing to the Chinese. [Author’s note: Another father of Chinese writing is Fu Hsi, a legendary Emperor who ruled 5,000 years ago. He found the eight key trigrams that make up the supernatural I Ching, Book of Changes, based on markings he found on a tortoise shell.] All over the world, the supernatural provides a powerful set of beliefs about the origins of language.
“Religious associations are particularly strong in relation to written language, because writing is an effective means of guarding and transmitting sacred knowledge. Literacy was available only to an elite, in which priests figured prominently. Echoes of this link reverberate in English vocabulary still, through such connections as scripture and script, or the reference to scripture as Holy Writ. And there are widespread sanctions for human action expressed authoritatively in phrases of the form: ‘for it is written’.” David Crystal, Editor, Cambridge Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Second Edition, Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England, 1997, p. 388.
“… The name of the Sanskrit alphabet is Devanagari, which means ‘pertaining to the city of the gods.’ Hieroglyphic, used by the ancient Egyptians for their formal documents carved in stone, means ‘sacred stone writing’ (the Egyptians also had the hieratic and demotic scripts more generally used on papyrus). They believed that writing had been devised by Toth, the god of wisdom, and the Egyptian name for writing was ndw-ntr (‘the speech of the gods’). The Assyrians had a legend to the effect that the cuneiform characters were given to man by the god Nebo, who held sway over human destiny. Cuneiform was produced by pressing wedges into wet clay tablets (the name means ‘wedge-shaped’); it was used by the Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and other peoples of the Mesopotamian region from about 4000 B.C. to the time of Christ. The Mayas attributed writing to their most important deity, Itzamna [god of wisdom]. The lost prehistoric writings of Japan was (sic) styled kami no moji, or ‘divine characters.’ As late as Christian Middle Ages, Constantine the Philosopher (another name for Cyril, apostle of the Slavs) is described as having had Slavic writing revealed to him by God.” Mario Pei, The Story of Language, The New American Library, New York and Toronto, 1965, p. 96.
We could conclude (despite the Bible or because of it?) that human intellect began with the word spoken out loud to the world. In this word spoken face to face, in its righteousness and wisdom, lay personal merit and honor. A lot more work would be needed to restore its luster once it had been tarnished with lies.
Human corruption must have worsened with the written word that subtracts us from the world, whose lies and stupidities are just empty scribbles on a piece of paper or pixels across a computer screen, indistinguishable from truth and wisdom except by their long-term consequences.
There may have been city dwellers pre-Deluge. Their last survivors may have been the first transmitters of the Hindu Vedas, imitated by subsequent Cretans. Their cultures of origin may have restricted the written word to accounting functions: inventories, astronomy, astrology and calendars, and only allowed sacred stories to be memorized in spoken format. Could this have been a form of cultural Darwinism, culling the dross and only preserving the inspirational? “Learn it by heart if it is beautiful, truthful and elegant enough to inspire the hard work of memorization and recitation; forget the rest.”
Now that we have not only speech and writing but also their recording and transmission in staggering quantities, even if on ephemeral media, what mode of expression would enhance both, place us before our deepest merit and truth and lend us the calm of sheep, like that found inside a wolf pack?
There’s a common expression for a tool that kills, “a weapon.” Take the phrase, “learning tool.” What a clumsy turn of phrase! And, of course, it has no popular contraction.
Besides, picture a weapon. See it clearly? Now picture a learning tool.
“A what?” You might ask, “There is no such thing. Did you mean a book?” Or maybe a smartphone?
Did this mind-exercise teach you anything about our cultural bias? In a sensible world, we would call guns “fire harms, side harms and long harms.” Regular soldiers would belong to the “Harm Forces.” All this would be quasi-obscene weapon-talk, and superior Learning tools would be everyday items.
Info elites regulate the form and content of language. George Orwell concluded that this was the top priority of the info elite (my term, not his): regulating the info proletariat’s communications. Money, news, sports, cooking, war, education, crime: these are merely alternate forms of communication — info symphonies, choruses, dances and solos that each culture orchestrates.
National sovereignty is the control that info elites exert over their host proletariat both inside and outside the national membrane. Such communications may range from the free intermingling of international info proletarians under minimal control, to a final, totalitarian exercise at info simplification during which popular discourse is reduced to the crash and roar of drumfire.
In Gaia: The Human Journey from Chaos to Cosmos, Pocket Books, New York, 1989, p. 64, author Elisabet Sahtouris quotes Ivanovitch Vernadsky, a Russian geologist who called life “ … ‘a disperse of rock,’ … a chemical process transforming rock into highly active living matter and back, breaking it up and moving it about in an endless, cyclical process.” If life can be seen as a “disperse of rock,” then our civilization must be just another form of geochemical dispersal.
In peacetime, the political membrane that encloses a society lets information (people, money, data and goods) flow through it more or less freely. In wartime, that membrane becomes inflamed with fire, blast, flying debris and radio static — or their latest, most lethal equivalents. No signal but murderous propaganda can penetrate it. Get caught consorting across this membrane in wartime and get punished. All cosmopolitanism is strangled.
Once and for all, Learners will dissolve these membranes by providing diverse peoples with a common government, a shared language and a global culture that takes great pains to welcome them in their full diversity.
Esperanto, Ido, Volapuk and a succession of verbal patchworks have been developed, which give undue advantage to dominant language groups. Glossa is a recent linguistic invention about which I know little beyond the name.
Except for those whose passion it is, no one in the future will have to study any among a half-dozen languages spoken by a handful of travelers, (Chinese, Spanish, Arabic or English: it matters little which). Instead, everyone will learn one language as a supplement to their native tongue. Ideally, this language will differ from current languages in its linguistic neutrality. Today’s dominant language groups should gain no unfair advantage using it.
Its grammar should include the best rules of all those known. Each language group has evolved its own solution to grammatical problems: some elegant, others complex. These complications are a compound of accent and grammar with many exceptions and irregularities to memorize. The tortured pronunciation and spelling of English, the arbitrary spelling and gender-differences of French and other languages, the musical intonation and endless written characters of Chinese: these difficult-to-learn features make good examples.
Those idiosyncrasies are essentially defensive language barriers, shibboleths, linguistic placentas wrapped around the embryonic proletariat to shelter it from alien contamination. Anyone who speaks with an accent or writes with too many spelling or syntax errors, betrays himself to the locals as a foreigner thus a potential enemy.
Dogmatic schooling forces people to learn some trendy foreign language. The latest one is English — perhaps soon to be followed by Chinese. Hapless students are hammered for failing to master the dominant language, even after their window of linguistic adaptation has slammed shut. Few language students practice often enough (very often) the foreign language skills they need in the real world. Instead, they forget those valuable lessons because they were taught them once they’d grown too old to retain them. Precious Learning time is wasted: a major goal of weapon education.
This problem could be worked around by teaching language skills to children during their most receptive infancy. In the future, preschoolers will learn an international manual sign language that extends to every corner of the globe. Students will practice it on a daily basis in their own communities, in and out of the classroom. Foreign travelers will find self-confident signers at every stop along their way.
I have learned, since, that there are major variations between American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL) much less between them and Chinese Sign Language (CSL) and others. These fully mature languages can transmit complicated, abstract information. I had in mind a much simpler form of communication that would put international guests and hosts at ease with a non-threatening code of familiar gestures. Say 500 to 1000 terms universally understood.
According to the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Second Edition (David Crystal, Editor, Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England, 1997, p. 227) this language already exists. It is called Amer-Ind, developed by Madge Skelly for use by the orally handicapped from a system of coded gestures common among American Indians.
They had it to overcome many language barriers. Their brightest young Learners – setting out on coming-of-age quests, as the best have always done – made their way through five hundred other nations, each with its own dialect, (two thousand nations and languages if you count those in South and Central America).
Modern Learners could adopt Amer-Ind as a basic traveler’s language. People could pick it up with relative ease, since almost half its gestures are understood without additional training. It would evolve into something more refined and subtle in its own good time.
Young kids pick up spoken languages during their window of linguistic adaptation that normally remains open from birth until around the third birthday. It doesn’t matter how many languages children learn during that period or how difficult they are. It’s amazing to watch most infants pick up proper grammar, extensive vocabularies and complex social conventions with relative ease. Not only does an overwhelming majority of children learn all the exceptions and irregularities of their native tongue, but also the deliberate deviations and accents of their local dialect in a flawless manner after a short while. Most children cannot repeat this performance later on in school when they receive instruction in foreign languages and native grammar.
When it comes to learning new languages, children with a relatively low IQ score can outperform the most advanced theoretical black box our best linguists could come up with. This finding should inspire Learners’ hopes for human genius — at least once some of humanity’s worst and most cherished routines have been cast off … like not teaching children languages when they would be most receptive to them: a typical failing of weapons education. Children are not sent to learn languages in preschool or prior when they’d be young enough to absorb them naturally.
At the earliest receptive age, Learner children will appreciate many more matters of interest to them. Adult Learners will enrich young minds to healthy saturation. We will accelerate children’s flight from misery, promote affection and distribute survival necessities with openhanded generosity. In so doing, we will raise a generation of prodigies never seen in the past. They will get to the bottom of stacks of epic mysteries on our behalf.
A new written language will annotate the hand-signed one. If possible, the time taken to learn it will be short and its transcription, speedy. Its calligraphy will be as beautiful as that of Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic and Khmer: every page should be a stunning work of art. We should replace paper and ink with a direct manipulation of light, a natural chemical transformation (for example, fingertip salts on a treated surface) or some superior recording medium (thus easier to use). Our devastation of forests for paper is horrific and must be stopped.
An odd idea keeps surfacing in my mind. We must bring the media back to the message, and not the other way around. Whatever that means …
We may resume the writing methods of prehistory. I speculate that elephant-ear leaves, fresh-picked from trees planted along boulevards, were scribed with a fingernail or a sharp spine, again picked off the same tree. Could the tree’s bark peal page sheets free like crust pastry? Could its black sap have served as ink?
Image ancient towns dotting river lines now sunk beneath the waves: their magnificent avenues, statues both divine and historic, lavish bazaars, fountains gushing unlimited volumes of sweet water, splendid parks, monster fish spilling out from the sea, and ambling landscapes as inviting as the best of ours today.
The more sophisticated a written culture, the more ephemeral its written medium. Note our pixie pixels. Few ancient writings remain because really old documents were written on delicate stationary. All except the tablets of bloodthirsty empires about which our military cultures love to obsess. Plain tablets of dried clay were baked into indestructible ceramic when hostile hordes overran the tiny libraries of imperial capitals and burned them down unexamined.
Specially treated leaves could have been dried and pressed into archive-quality sheaves of legible text. After centuries, such documents turned into illegible dust. The scribes disappeared and their exotic wisdom became “prehistoric.”
Could those leaves have been grafted onto smart trees to make copies or transmit the message to other plants? Draw me the limits of potential biotechnology once we fully understand how living things grow.
Organized religions were prototype corporations peddling their dogma by excluding other faiths. Nowadays, international corporations wipe out cultural diversity to peddle across diverse cultures their products of paltry value with respect to that diversity.
In the future, user demand for high quality, custom-crafted artifacts will dictate their production, and graceful religions will reflect mass piety. Human culture will become diverse and varied enough to encourage Learners to pursue their topics of passion.
During this Learner Golden Age, each language group will share its depths of significance and mystery. An army of expert translators will stand on-call from their own networks. Drawing on their expertise, other Learners will appreciate the finer nuances (new-awnss, subtleties) of other cultures. The cultural conformity that our corporations demand will come to an end. Diversity will become the Learner norm; cultural mediocrity will stop being used to loosen the consumer’s purse.
Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. II, Chapter10.
Author’s note: If it bothers you to find a Hitler quote here, I apologize. Please consult my chapter Quoting Hitler out of Context.
“It is certain that in the future the importance of the individual states will be transferred to the sphere of our cultural policy. The monarch who did most to make Bavaria an important center was not an obstinate particularist with anti-German tendencies, but Ludwig I who was as much devoted to the ideal of German greatness as he was to that of art. His first consideration was to use the powers of the state to develop the cultural position of Bavaria and not its political power.”
Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization, Pantheon Books, New York, 1998, pp. 7-8.
“Indeed, in this process of constant change, the most advanced nations may eventually enter, may indeed already be entering, that blissful state imagined in 1930 by John Maynard Keynes: a condition where we no longer need care about the basic economic problem of survival that has plagued the human race since its beginning, but are able at last to do only the things we find agreeable and pleasurable.
“Keynes unforgettably wrote: ‘Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure which science and compound interest have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.’ ‘But,’ Keynes warned, ‘none of us can look forward to this new and permanent golden age with any equanimity. For,’ he pointed out, ‘we have been trained too long to work, not to enjoy. It would be a huge problem for the ordinary person with no special talents, to occupy him or herself without work; if one needed evidence, one could merely look at the melancholy record of the rich minority anywhere.’
“We would need, as so few of us can, to ‘take least thought for the morrow.’ We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.”
“But with this interesting corollary that even Keynes could never have guessed at: these agreeable activities may themselves become sources of income and of economic growth, may generate new industries of a kind never known to earlier, simpler eras. Rich, affluent, cultivated nations and cities can sell their virtue, beauty, philosophy, their art and their theatre to the rest of the world. From a manufacturing economy we pass to an informational economy and from an informational economy to a cultural economy. During the 1980s and 1990s, cities across Europe – Montpellier, Nimes, Grenoble, Rennes, Hamburg, Cologne, Glasgow, Birmingham, Barcelona and Bologna – have become more and more preoccupied by the notion that cultural industries (a term no longer thought anomalous or offensive) may provide the basis for economic regeneration, filling the gap left by vanished factories and warehouses, and creating a new urban image that would make them more attractive to mobile capital and mobile professional workers.”
Except that there won’t be “more advanced cities” and, by implication, “backward” ones. The Earth will be transformed. Nowadays, we live on Planet Mogadishu on a Bad Day, where each city is just another sinister stopover, perhaps containing a few tiny ghettos of privilege. Planet Mogadishu will become Planet (name your favorite city). Its worst towns will be rebuilt with Learner diligence or shifted to a finer setting. The worst will be turned into parkland, deep-forest or otherwise.
Every district will shine in its own way, like the most attractive neighborhood in your favorite city.
- THE COLLECTIVE SUPERCONSCIENCE -
“In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.” Wikipedia.
“Between 1986 and 1991, during an era of reforms in the USSR, glasnost was frequently linked with other generalized concepts such as perestroika (literally: restructuring or regrouping) and demokratizatsiya (democratisation). Gorbachev often appealed to glasnost when promoting policies aimed at reducing corruption at the top of the Communist Party and the Soviet government, and moderating the abuse of administrative power in the Central Committee.
The ambiguity of "glasnost" defines the distinctive five-year period (1986–1991) at the end of the USSR's existence. There was decreasing pre-publication and pre-broadcast censorship and greater freedom of information.
The "Era of Glasnost" saw greater contact between Soviet citizens and the Western world, particularly the United States: restrictions on travel were loosened for many, allowing increased business and cultural interchange.[8]” Wikipedia
Every child undergoes aversion training against peace. As a result, we adults won’t let PeaceWorld happen, since we refuse to sort our info politics into their weapons and peace components.
I cut short correspondence with a "progressive" who concluded, quite smug he was about it, too, that there wouldn’t be PeaceWorld for at least forty years: the time it would take to eliminate his responsibility for it, since by then he’d be retired or gone. According to him, people are just not ready for it, they’re not blessed with his clearly superior morality…
Out of pity, I won’t finger him. I never was any good at names. Good riddance! After all, his was a general malpractice, not an exceptional one.
In most cases of institutional evil, the responsible party is never pointed out for fear of his reprisal or that of his supporters. The moment the weak come to harm, Learners should call out those responsible, regardless of consequences as long as the weak remain shielded.
In a PeaceWorld Agora much more responsive than our torpid politics on WeaponWorld, those responsible for human suffering otherwise avoidable would be swiftly ejected from power, pending criminal prosecution. Partial confiscation of great fortunes will become a routine punishment, in proportion to the gravity of proven crime. Guilt and regret for one’s misdeeds would become major deterrents ― no matter the cost in the meantime. The current practice of disguising moral failure in anonymity would be forbidden as much during petty spats on the Internet as during serious institutional misdeeds.
For example, the 2006 murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the valiant journalist who served as a steadfast conscience for the Russian State – whatever the cost – should be laid at the feet of Vladimir Putin whose birthday was the day of her murder, and of his murderous crony, Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Russian Chechen State.
The following heroes were murdered in Russia, most of them without serious investigation or follow-up arrest except for the usual suspect hit men.
Nadezhda Chaikova, correspondent kidnapped and shot in Chechnya, 1996
Galina Starovoitova, 1998
Igor Domnikov, 2000
Sergei Yushenkov, 2003
Yury Shchekochikhin, 2003
Paul Klebnikov, 2004
Alexander Litvinenko, 2006
Ivan Safronov, 2007
Magomed Yvloyev, 2009
Vyachsla Yaroshenko, 2009
Stanislav Markelov, 2009
Anastasia Babourova, 2009
Natalia Estemirova, 2009
Serguei Magnitsky, (beaten to death in police custody), 2009
Edouard Tchouvachov, 2010
Rouslan Akhtakhanov, 2011
Gazbek Guekkiiev, 2012
Alexander Perepilichnyy, 2012
Mikhail Beketov (beaten into a coma and multiple amputations, 2008), 2013
Boris Berezovsky, 2013
Boris Nemtsov, 2015
Anatoly Gerashchenko, 2015
Vladimir Kara-Murza (poisoned twice, comatose), 2015
Pavel Cheremet, 2016
Sergei Tkachenko, 2017
Denis Voronenkov, 2017
Nikolai Andrushchevko, 2017
Valery Pshenichny, 2018 (raped and tortured to death in prison by those he’d reported for embezzlement)
Nikolai Glushkov, 2018
Alexie Skripal and his daughter, 2018
Ivan Golunov, (severely beaten in jail after drug bust, 2019)
Alexander Kagansky and other experts protesting COVID policies, 2020
Igor Nosov, 2021
Since the Ukraine War (2022)
Aleksandr Subbotin
Ravil Maganov
Ivan Pechorin
Leonid Shulman
Alexander Tyulyakov
Mikhail Watford
Vasily Melnikov and family
Andrei Krukovsky
Vladislav Avayev with wife and daughter
Sergei Protosenya and two family members
Yuri Voronov
Kirill Zhalo
Yegor Prosvirnin
Dan Rapoport
Most of these irreplaceable experts, rare in Russia
Alexei Navalny, poisoned 2020, arrested, exiled & return, killed in prison 2024
A much more thorough list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia
This hecatomb of journalists ten times worse at the hands of Israelis in Palestine.
Other state-sponsored assassinations have gone unreported by the Western Press (54 journalists alone, from 1992 to 2013). Russia will never recover its slava (glory) until it shields their replacements with as much forethought as the impulsiveness with which it sacrificed those listed above, along with many more martyrs.
It would be unthinkable for legitimate leaders to waste those national treasures and terrorize their replacements. On PeaceWorld, such a disgrace would get those officials ejected without appeal. Yet on WeaponWorld, they thrive from their transgressions ― another consequence of institutional stupidity. They are not alone, on the contrary. Almost every head of state on WeaponWorld would lose a war crimes trial before the World Court.
Compared to most people I've reached out to; this guy was rather optimistic about the prospect of PeaceWorld. This planet’s sorry burden of weapon stalwarts sorts itself out as follows: a majority that believes world peace is impossible, and a handful that suspects it might be worthwhile but improbable anytime soon when they would be personally responsible for it. Let someone else do the heavy lifting!
How convenient for him, babbling his platitudes! Needless to say, he didn’t lift a finger to help me in the meantime.
Take your time, Bubba. Whether for the next forty years or the last five thousand, you wind up with the same results. Weapon mentality prevails over you and your progressive preferences because you won’t step forward to champion PeaceWorld, despite all your fine talk.
One way or another, PeaceWorld will break out. Either our military insanity will kill almost all of us and a few survivors will default to peace, or Learners will rally and bring it about by design, voluntarily and soon.
Reactionaries won’t broach PeaceWorld (except as a totalitarian “New World Order”) because it betrays the primary motivation for them and their followers: fear. Trendy progressives, equally fear-driven, dismiss this topic as talked to death already and thus neatly support the reactionaries, despite all their fine talk.
This text reviews the mentality of weapons and that of peace as if they were discrete, coherent and self-willed entities (memeplexes). Their schemes compete, grow strong or weak over time and influence mass thought. Peace and weapon mentors are spokespeople for invisible but mighty forces; their actions, statements and beliefs are constructive and destructive reflections of the collective superconscience. A few more thought-constructs may help us clarify this concept.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau spoke of the general will that prescribes the greatest common good for all: the basis of government legitimacy. Everyone can hold back their personal will, yet still come out ahead in the long run, since that is what the general will manages to do best.
Western philosophers assert that it grows from the bottom up: from free-willed individuals to the pinnacles of government. The Chinese and their oriental disciples discuss the “Mandate of Heaven” prescribed by Confucius (Kong Fuzi, K'ung-fu-tzu). It renders legitimacy to government by virtue of its ritual harmony with cosmic law. It pushes from the height of empire down to personal depths.
Each is considered mandatory for good governance by its supporters. I suspect they are naturally parallel and synchronous. Cosmic law, government authority and individual freedom: all three work well when in fine tune with each other. Upset this optimal hum at any level and suffer disaster as the system loses symmetry and shakes itself to pieces. Lacking the general will, we sink into chaos; without government power, things fall apart. They’ve already done so in the Democratic Republic of Congo (no taxes, no government, and no law except at gunpoint: a Republican paradise managed by international corporate greed). With the Mandate of Heaven lapsed, mass rebellion becomes mandatory as climate chaos and famine spin out of control. We are passively waiting for this fate to befall us and shake the survivors awake.
Government serves as the central tuning fork of this giant gyroscope of harmonic resonances with as many moving parts as there are people, machines and memes.
Freud spoke brilliantly about the subconscious. Personally, I am not aware of it (just kidding). Nowadays, everyone agrees we are fitted out with a set of subconscious impulses.
Carl Gustav Jung talked about the collective unconscious from which spring strangely consistent archetypes and synchronous phenomena. Every culture commemorates those spooky super-coincidences. Jung said the collective unconscious contains the sum of forgotten thoughts and those in the future. Meanwhile, each conscious mind bears an assortment of current thought, or receives and converts it like a fine-tuned antenna?
Might some psychotics have an antennae fine-tuned to frequencies slightly offset from that of normal people? Could that be why primal societies valued them and held them near and dear? They did not marginalize them, the way we do today (through inexcusable homelessness and/or even worse imprisonment). Because they were tuned to an alien FM frequency instead of AM reactionary talk shows that throb like sore teeth across the USA? Could their peculiar signal reception turn out to be handy in a pinch?
It is a known fact that most people mentally challenged feel and act much better if they are held close, in an affectionate setting. Prison hell is the worst setting for their recuperation, but the most entertaining one for psychopaths who victimize them.
Who does WeaponWorld reward? Psychopaths. Whom does it punish? The innocent.
Good God! When are we going to reverse all that?
Where do these ideas come from? I submit that they emanate from the collective superconscience.
The collective unconscious would be more like a storage battery: transitory and mutable, confined to current thought and human geography. Whereas the collective superconscience behaves like a fluid circuit board (a magneto-hydrodynamic plasma?) that operates alongside human communities, diagramming the flow, accumulation and dispersal of their currents ― burning out certain circuits and letting others proliferate in size and complexity.
Let’s hope our few peaceful circuits multiply and intertwine luxuriantly, while many weapons circuits short out inconsequentially. I believe in miracles under the watchful eye of a Loving God. The rest is up to us.
Emile Durkheim evoked the collective conscience as an intangible social framework beyond which criminals stray, rather like the out-of-bounds lines of a ball game. These transgressions (“How could he do that!”) reinforce norms most of us live by, that bind us more closely together. PeaceWorld could crop up between these lines; and organized warfare, once central, roll out of bounds.
Noam Chomsky proposed a Universal Grammar: that we are somehow hard-wired for language skills. Jung spoke about racial memory: the ability of a people to retain facets of its past. Hinduism and other religions mention the akasha: a universal etheric field that imprints a record of past events and permits predictions of the future, per The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Elizabeth Knowles, Ed., Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 17.
I’m barely skimming these topics; humanity has only scratched their surface and forgotten what little it knew about them in the past. Future Learners will study them in depth. They offer a fantastic potential for scientific breakthroughs that could eclipse all our discoveries up to now: vaccines for our cultural complaints and shortcuts through technological labyrinths.
Other researchers have studied morphic fields that bathe living tissue in auras like those captured by Kirlian photography. Morphic fields may explain the weird way germ plasma achieves unlikely symmetry and species blueprints.
During billions of years, chemical reactions frothed up from a primordial soup of organic molecules shot through with lightning bolts. From this shocked broth emerged entities more and more complex until, eons later, the sea bottom was dotted with player pianos! Imagine how much simpler this scenario would be, compared to the evolution of life. I can’t recall the author of this anecdote (J.B.S. Haldane?). His example replaced player pianos (or trilobites) with IBM Selectric typewriters: splendid tools, soon to be forgotten. Another writer evoked a string of tornados that would sweep across a vast junkyard to assemble a jumbo jet. Sure thing; could happen…
In the absence of morphic fields, the dominant life form on Earth might have been a fifteen-foot thick layer (so sunlight could shine through it) of translucent slime wrapped around the globe. it might not have left a trace of its disappearance from Earth. It could have thrived for eons beyond our notice (periodically or for a long stretches uninterrupted).
Something else promotes a far richer, more mobile and adaptive diversity within a finite toolkit of inheritable traits. After all, slime mold and humans share the same four DNA nucleotides and 64 codons formed from them, whose common codes and shifting assembly patterns distinguish every Self from every Other. Some unknown field casts a cloak over every organism ― keeps it alive, whole and distinct from the rest of the world, yet attaches it firmly to the world, us and them alike.
A great Jewish Learner of the Kabbala was Isaac Luria, (Yitzhak Lurya יִצְחַק לוּרְיָא, Yitzhak Ben Shlomo Ashkenazi, and Yitzhak Ashkenazi. He is also known as Ari אֲרִי and He-Ari ("The Lion") from the acronym for Ashkenazi Rabbi Itzhak ("The Ashkenazic Rabbi Yitzhak"), thus Arizal with "ZaL" being the acronym for Zikhrono Livrakha ("of blessed memory" or literally "let the memory of him be for a blessing"), a common honorific for Jews deceased, also known as Ari Ha-Kadosh ("Ari the Holy"). I name him so thoroughly for two reasons: 1) to honor his genius; and 2) so that search engines guide those interested in him to my text.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Luria
Translating Luria in accordance with my limited understanding into simplistic terms on behalf of Learners: he posited a principle that God created the Universe by making room for it outside of His Perfection; somewhat the way a man might inhale sharply to make way for someone passing him along a narrow passageway (in a train, say; no doubt the site of Luria’s “inspiration”).
According to him, whenever a human being obeys a command of God, he “repairs the world” by raising another spark from the depths of evil to the height of good. Hebrew ritual life is intended to raise the most good, no matter how trivial the act of obedience. In the same way, any deviation from the commandment of God drops another Spark to lower levels. Thus the practicing Jew carries out an existential struggle equivalent to the myth of Sisyphus. He bears a Holy Spark upwards to the Light despite a cascade of bad ones showering down on him and his burden. And God has a cosmic need for humanity to restore His Holy Order, just as much as peace between God’s religionaries (weapon religionists).
What does that mean for the rest of us? We should obey the commandments we understand best from the God of our choosing, to restore the Holy Sparks of God to their proper place. The foremost among them, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you;” which includes, among its subsets, “Thou shalt not kill.” This governs every religious law we recognize ― whether upheld by an honest Pagan, Kantian, agnostic or atheist.
Working hard for PeaceWorld would best serve.
http://www.pasarel.org/main/kabbalah/kabbalah.htm
http://www.wordtrade.com/religion/judaism/kabbalahR.htm
Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, in Secrets of the Soil: New Age Solutions for Restoring our Planet, Harper Collins & Row, 1989, assert they’ve discovered devas that have identified themselves as spirit architects of various plants, animals and other kingdoms ― in other words, communicating forms of the morphic field we are talking about. Could fever dreams be the mass thought of invading microbes; others, those of the host’s healthy microbiome? Imagine that diagnostic tool!
New-Age naturalists admit to have communicated with them at Findhorn and elsewhere (if only to satisfy their topic of passion). By their account, these devas, more and more abused by humanity, have withdrawn to their last bastions of wilderness to await our mechanized self-destruction. Apparently, they would rather communicate with sensitive naturalists among us and remake a framework of mutual understanding and cooperation: the same one we’ve spent the last few thousand years ripping to shreds to compensate for our sickness of spirit.
This provided we reciprocated with love. In this case, love means pragmatic care, empathy, compassion and forethought at which our species excels; not the sentimentality, positivism and dogmatic hypocrisy we mistake for the real McCoy.
Dropping the devil’s bargain of near-term abuse and long-term annihilation, Learner and deva mutualists could re-negotiate this partnership. If we followed their best-practice advice, peace technology Genetic Architecture could generate unheard-of abundance while avoiding transgenic catastrophes and unintended consequences. Otherwise, if genetic engineers persist with their double blind fumblings, they will merely spawn deadlier weapon technologies along with “unavoidable” disasters.
Artificial intelligence (AI) likewise. The appearance of artificial intelligence superior to our own seems inevitable. Will it emerge as another weapon technology and snuff us out? Most likely. The survival of our species will depend on AI coded from the start and from then on by coders devoted to peace mentality.”
Rupert Sheldrake sails fearlessly beyond this thought horizon. In The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance & the Habits of Nature, and A New Science of Life: the Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance, he postulates the existence of these morphic resonances. Among other things, they make it easier to do whatever has already been accomplished.
For example, randomly selected students find it easier to solve crossword puzzles the day after they have been published in newspapers and other people have solved them. The same students take longer to solve the same kind of puzzle before the public gets to see it. Unpublished control puzzles are no simpler or harder to solve over time.
Or just recall the four-minute mile: a routine accomplishment during the Olympics these days, though once thought impossible.
I am pretty sure that this text (especially the one in French) became less difficult for me to write – indirectly – as strangers read it and cringed at my many errors, even though they never told me about them. The spirit of my mother seems to hover over my shoulder and tenderly recommend better French than mine. I am fairly certain our delicate minds are bundled in mysterious and imperceptible assemblies.
In short, good habits become easier to accomplish after they’ve been practiced elsewhere ― and bad ones, more difficult to abandon the longer and more often they’d been indulged.
Up ‘til now, humanity has practiced obsessive-compulsive war. From now on, we must practice peace with equal intensity. Willing co-conspirators with WeaponWorld, we’ve bleached the term “world peace” of its emotive power and let weapon mentors cheapen it into the punch line of a toilet joke. From now on, we should make warfare an obscene joke and wage peace for keeps.
Another example: periodic solar flares kindle auroras in polar skies. Sometimes they fry electrical grids and satellites, curdle the blood’s albumin and turn passive crowds, it seems, into angry mobs. There is no escape from their effect except sixty feet or deeper underground.
What appears to be the “total vacuum of outer space” through which our solar system spins, is actually a pea soup fog of subatomic particles/wavicles precisely attuned to the minute disturbances of distant celestial emissions: electromagnetic, gravitational and no doubt more subtle ones so far unregistered. This varying mix and quantum flux of space-time and beyond reaches down through the magnetic and atmospheric shielding of our planet to have subtle effects on our thoughts and behavior.
In five thousand years, astrologers barely scratched the surface of those effects; for the past three hundred, astrophysicists did not even bother to notice them.
It was not for nothing that Newton burned out like a candle during the last years of his life. He was trying to reformulate astrology into a rigorous mathematical science ― minus half the planets, moons, asteroids, etc., that were not discovered until after his death. A hero’s project worth dying for, even if left unfinished. Likewise for Johann Kepler and a brilliant string of Learners lost in the depths of time. Newton’s mathematical guideline would have eclipsed mere Newtonian physics and cubed the value of his legacy. Learners may access it as soon as they devote enough attention to it.
Just as genetic adaptation and human mythology appear to sway to unfelt breezes, so I believe we interact with ethical fields that enfold us, even (especially!) when we refuse to notice them. These fields often corrupt entire peoples, tempt elites into perilous self-indulgence and terrorize those who choose to resist them. It is as if the proportional share of power between psychopaths and the conscientious had reversed itself.
That kind of horror arose in Assyria, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Sri Lanka, Syria and around the site of your local mass grave (you’d be surprised how close to home it lies ― almost every town has had ossuaries of doomed combatants. Monstrous misdeeds – unthinkable under other circumstances – became the norm. At other times, public compassion and grace propelled entire nations to new heights of social complexity.
We may witness a new wave of global Learning and good fortune. God knows, we’ve witnessed a glut of the bloodthirsty kind: enough to kill or sicken everyone involved except for psychopaths immune to their own toxicity.
But then, we could kill off a hundred times more people than those slain during WWII (sic) and still be left with billions of starving, glow-in-the-dark survivors with no viable infrastructure left to sustain them except that buried deep underground beforehand for the sole benefit of a handful of psychopathic Nazi very much wannabes.
Then again, enough of us could turn into Learners by reading this book, mass-marketing it, dodging the Ultimate Paroxysm and growing just smart enough to outstay the dinosaurs with their hundred-million year tenancy on this planet. Ours, much less.
These trends and outcomes could result from the collective superconscience. Up ‘til now, we’ve let invisible forces stampede us where they will, declared them nonexistent and beyond our ken, all this by popular consent. If we got the least bit wiser, we could search them out fearlessly, cultivate the most useful ones and redirect the worst to their least toxic axes. The study of this topic is just resuming under the title Noetics. See Rupert Sheldrake, above here and elsewhere.
This text invokes PeaceWorld: the antithesis of WeaponWorld’s compulsive trial-and-recurring-error. We are trapped in the morphic resonance of post-industrial warfare, redundant and perfectly replaceable on PeaceWorld. Think of that as a planetary theme park crafted to enchant its active architects as much as passive clients, leaving no-one out in the cold against their will.
Let me repeat: that remains up to us.
- CATHARI, the Corner Stone Rejected -
"Jesus saith unto them, Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes?" The New Testament, Matthew/21/42
“In the beginning, our Creator gave all the races of mankind the same songs and the same drums to keep in touch with Him, to keep faith. But people kept forgetting. In the fullness of time, the spiritual traditions of all the peoples – they are the same – will be united again in a great gathering of their secret leaders, [my italics], and they will gain power to remake the world.” Mohawk prophesy as told by Tom Porter, from The Great American Bathroom Book, Volume III, (don’t laugh, check them out),Stevens W. Anderson, Ed., Compact Classics, Inc., Salt Lake City, Utah, 1994, p. 439.
Details of the Cathar religion are complex and poorly documented. According to ancient Manicheanism from which the Cathari faith emerged, an Evil Principle dominates the physical world and an equal Principle of Good seems to balance it out on a spiritual plane. Like oil and water in colloidal suspension, these principles interact in cosmic contention. Each newborn is a frail vessel animated by a spark of good and cast adrift in the black typhoon of evil. Any material object seems to be Satan’s instrument.
Cathari priests were known as Perfecti. Male and female perfecti had separate but equal orders and disciplines: an unthinkable arrangement at that time in history. They elected promising young candidates into their collegium after a rigorous apprenticeship under an elder of the same gender. Those holy partners wandered the countryside in pairs. They rested at humble hostels deeded to their fellowship by grateful deathbed bequests. They needed these houses to secure a room in which to pray alone the Lord’s Prayer, in obedience to Jesus’ instruction in Matthew 6 of the Bible. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have needed private housing. Any barn corner, doorsill or trailside hut would have sufficed them. They were God’s tough guys.
Imitating the life Christ prescribed in the Books of Matthew, Luke and elsewhere in the Bible, they abstained from power, swearing, lies, wealth, sex and all meat but fish. In obedience to His words, they never owned more than two coins, a cloak and pair of shoes at the same time.
They loathed the cross for the naked torture rack it was, helped the laity with its chores and problems, nursed and gave counsel when invited to do so, and relied on the Lord’s Prayer and Jesus’ exact Words for spiritual sustenance. No dismissal or man-spoken substitution of His Word was accepted, unlike those our Christian churches indulge in routinely.
Lay people were known as Credentes (believers). They were free to marry and tend to their worldly business without interference from the collegium. They received the Consolamentum from Perfecti on their deathbed and accepted the Endura death fast to seal their conversion into Perfecti: a quicker, cleaner and less painful death than most “natural” ones in those days, as well as those even crueler (because needlessly prolonged) for those who agonize today.
The Perfecti lived lives so holy, they were revered everywhere they went. Don’t ask me if I could imitate their saintly habits; I’d fail. I am no saint, never have been nor will be. I merely tried to guess the lost script of their Consolamentum. You’re welcome to the same guessing game.
See my chapter Hypothetical Consolamentum.
Their collegium grew rich from grateful deathbed bequests, yet remained steadfast to Christ. According to documents of the Inquisition, many Perfecti gave themselves away during final torture sessions, by rejecting their tormentors’ invitation to swear or taint their soul otherwise. That might have spared them from being burned alive by weapon Christians. I doubt it; those human monsters were having too much fun.
The Cathari heresy arose from the intersection of three historical phenomena, among others.
The first dates back nearly two thousand years, when the Prophet Mani was crucified (!) by dominant Zoroastrian clergy (fire worshipers) in 276 CE. The Manichean creed spread from its Persian birthplace into Syria (another cradle of intellect) and from there into Central Europe, notably Bulgaria, where it turned into the Bogomil heresy around 900. The Christian Orthodox Byzantine Empire, and then the expanding Turk Empire (the ultimate expression of Islamic militarism) repressed it by 1396. While peaceful Manichean congregations submitted to military conquest and forced conversion by Christian Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim fanatics, a handful of adherents sought refuge in Italy and Southern France where they converted local Catholics disenchanted by the gross materialism that disgraced the Catholic clergy.
The second phenomenon arose prior to the European Crusades, between 1095 and the 1200s. In addition to countless personal transgressions by its priests, the Catholic Church failed in its two-hundred-year-long quest to initiate the Peace of God and the Truce of God in Europe, from 989 on. These social movements sought to forbid combat during the many holy days of the Christian calendar; to protect peasants, women, children, clergy and their property from combat; and finally, to institute church arbitration over political rivalries in order to bring their pitched battles to a halt.
These efforts failed. Their priestly advocates were replaced by profit-seeking church leaders. Militant nobles were permitted their massacres without religious penalty, in exchange for lump sum payments to the Church, just as individual sinners could purchase exoneration of their sins.
Many Christians looked for honest religion elsewhere, especially among the incorruptible Cathari. In essence, their heresy was one of the first and purest expressions of Protestantism. It was exterminated centuries before the Protestants’ ultimate triumph by churches more worldly and better adapted to militarist profit-taking and historical survival: see Luther, Calvin, et al.
Thirdly, Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade in 1095, to wrest the Promised Land back from Muslims. Actually, he sought to skim the armored cavalry banditry that had poisoned Europe since the Fall of Rome, and thrust that venomous scum into the heart of the alarming Islamic empire. He granted substantial benefits to Western warriors who swore to that endeavor, notably the remission of prior debts and sins.
As they assembled from all over Europe in the Langue d’Oc (at that time, a semi-independent duchy in Southern France), they booked passage and purchased provisions and equipment for their Middle East adventure. Crusader survivors disembarked on their way back and pawned booty for handier cash to bring home. The vigor of this commerce turned the towns of the Langue d’Oc into the richest ones in Europe at the time. It was there that the Troubadour tradition began, along with the poetry of courtly love and noble chivalry. Faith and Learning thrived as European, Muslim, Jewish, Savian, Gnostic and other Learner polymaths, sages and mages brought rare texts to be copied, translated and studied.
All of it burned or disappeared.
The Provençal nobility (another designation for this region, its language and elite) was worn down by massive military drafts and casualties during the Crusades, and by the growth of a prosperous merchant middle class centuries before it would reappear in the rest of Europe. Many local nobles (men and women) took up the Cathari religion and became Perfecti.
The Pope was not amused when he was informed that most of his Catholic churches were empty (no longer profit centers) in the richest province of Europe, while humble Cathari were venerated everywhere they went. A few attempts failed at peaceful conversion. St. Bernard gave up. Urban II cast the poisoned barb of Crusader fury into the Langue d’Oc: one of the few times a Crusade was launched against a Catholic population (as against the Kingdom of Leon and the Hussites later on).
Since this was an existential struggle against heresy, a counter-intelligence agency had to be deployed to guide the Crusader army, hunt down the heretics, exterminate and replace them. The Franciscan and Dominican Orders were picked for this Gestapo. Their control of this Crusade would be the Inquisition’s trial run. Many bigot prototypes had evolved from almost every mass religion since the world’s religio-military psychohistory began. This was merely its latest, most vigorous and terrorist version.
Some more Learner chapters beg to be written:
A) institutional suppression of free thought in favor of a dogma adopted by psychopaths, their gatekeepers and pet boneheads of every stripe and creed from ancient times to modern ones.
B) Institutional mass terror as a substitute for religion or ideology: this simplification of reality the ultimate goal of weapon mentality, barring existential casualties and cultural shutdown (like an over-vigorous virus that kills its host).
C) The suppression of new intellectual findings long after they prove themselves valid. http://www.amasci.com/weird/vindac.html
D)…
What’s more, there doesn’t seem to be a religious way to achieve political justice, notwithstanding Liberation Theology and other half-baked attempts by clerical meliorists of every denomination to revive peace mentality without challenging the weapon version. There has never been in written history a government in a state of religious grace, a miraculous religion or an institution of permanent ethical validity. It did not matter how absolute the proclaimed power of a creed and its political companion: Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, Catholic, Buddhist, Hindu, Atheist or any other form before or since.
Accusing them of forbidden human sacrifice, the elite authoritarians of Rome, who practiced religious mass sacrifice of gladiators and prisoners, exterminated their intellectual Nemesis, the Druids: anarchic, egalitarian and merit-based, the Celtic equivalents of the Hindu Brahman caste. Rome, Constantinople and Moscow, the third Rome; the three always fought the Druids for the soul of the West. Druids, Cathars, cosmopolitans: take your pick of victims.
Let’s say you and I disagreed about our respective definitions of God. You take your stand on point A along this line of reasoning, (for example, “God does not exist.”) In this example, I defend point B to the death, (“God is this clay figurine in my house altar.” Just kidding).
Since God is infinite (or as close to it as we can imagine), the line of God-definition stretches out to infinity. As it stretches out, the gap between your point A and mine B shrinks to nothing and our two points tend to merge, no matter how distant and divergent they may appear to us.
We use synapses of spritzing brain-fat to grasp our limited awareness of God, guttural human-meat grunts to convey it, and, to memorialize it, stylized ink stains on chewed-up and dried plant fiber, or digital pointillism on computer screens.
No wonder our words are equally valid and meaningless! We might as well all grunt the same noise – or write the exact opposite of what we just read – for all it might reveal about the perfection, omnipotence and infinity that is God.
So everyone’s definition of God should be equally true and blessed by God — and equally false and cursedly inadequate. Millennial texts like the Bible, the Vedas and the Qran are printed confirmations and aide-memoirs of this perfect absurdity; atheism, its ultimate simplification (“Move on. There’s nothing to see here!”). No quarrel over such a haphazard topic should lead to additional violence.
Sure thing, buddy. Religious mumbo jumbo has always served to justify psychopath brutality.
We suppose, perhaps mistakenly, that our prophets taught us different things (cults and practices in conflict with each other) with the same objective in mind: salvation. On the contrary, they taught us the same thing with different objectives in mind.
There were the lifelines of Christ and Mohammed, of other prophets and great seers, as well as famous names that drew massive attention from their latter-day fans and fellow reincarnators. Their eyes shone inward and outward with the charisma of many admirers (Napoleon, Cleopatra, many famous people who served as a reincarnation destination for their fans).
Mohammed preached the best worldly preparation for rebirth (without knowing it: his was the supreme voice of God when mindlessly reciting His angel Gabriel’s Words, less so while adjudicating the worldly problems of his followers and opponents); Moses and Abraham, the Law of God on Earth; Buddha, desire, suffering and escape from them; Zoroaster, the intimate combat between Good and Evil, the energy of which energizes this universe. Whereas, Jesus preached how to escape from the material plane and save one’s soul. With that in mind, their parables become clear, not obscure; and mutually complementary rather than in conflict.
Jesus left many puzzling parables in the Bible. One of them (that of the Talents: Matthew 25-14) entrusts risk-taking coinage to each of us, His servants. The Lord intends that we manage our lives for the profit of souls rather than mere risk-reduction. As stunt doubles in this universal action feature, we’re here to take enormous risks. Safe mediocrity must be illusory to us since everything kills us in the end. In our mortality reside our glory and salvation.
Our Father realized that the mission impossible of personal salvation had turned into a cruel punishment for most of us. We were too weak to take the high road and never got enough help from the word of His Prophets. Over and over again, we missed sterling opportunities for personal salvation. With every reincarnation, our task became more difficult, not less so.
So He sent us his Son to show us the ultimate way out: Himself, and the last acceptable prayer: the Lord’s.
In the Old Testament Book of Exodus, God commanded that burnt sacrifice be offered to atone for personal sin. Then He rejected that without offering a substitute in the Book of Isaiah. In Matthew 6 of the New, Jesus replaced public worship in the temple with the Lord’s Prayer recited at home in solitude.
Christ’s disciples got it wrong; they got almost everything wrong, except for their simple love of Christ. He told them that quite often.
Me, I’m a closet Christian. Here is what I believe. In Matthew 6 and Luke 11, Jesus taught us to closet ourselves alone and transmit the Lord’s Prayer to God; the way a WWII (sic) resistance worker would transmit his coded message back to Headquarters in London. God parachuted His Son into Occupied Territory to His ultimate betrayal, sacrifice and Resurrection, so that He could hand down this perishable code across inconceivable stretches of space-time from His Cross to us now.
The New Testament does not call for mediation by churches and priests; it does not authorize humans to pray for their needs and demands (that was only for God’s Son Jesus to do in the depths of despair). All that remains is you and God, heart-to-heart in cosmic intimacy of spirit, sharing the precise formula Christ prescribed: nothing more and nothing less.
The prayer Jesus commends is short and sweet; it has nothing to do with church catechisms and begging God for personal gain, no matter how much “official sanction” surrounds those things. Christian doctrine dismisses Christ’s words as irrelevant and substitutes needless and perhaps misleading complications. Two thousand years of murder and sacrilege committed in their name confirm our spiritual hollowness.
Two alternatives remain for true Christians: either Jesus’ teachings are perfect and our interpretation of them is faulty, or current doctrine is perfect and Jesus’ teachings are faulty. Otherwise, true Christianity would have become universal on Earth by now.
Jesus loves everyone, even his clueless disciples, even wastrels of millennia of faith, even you and me: that is His supreme glory. He does not triage acceptable souls, but leaves each of us the cosmic choice to be accepted.
I try to shun the few things Jesus forbids, since His instruction is so easy. I cannot abide mere mortals who preach disobedience to Christ in order to comply with their version of “Christianity.” Call me a “closet Christian.” And somebody go fire up the Inquisition, since at least one of those annoying Cathars has come awake!
I suspect that the consolamentum included detailed instruction on how to go direct to Heaven. Two Perfecti recited it to deathbed Credentes, in the same way Buddhist monks recite passages of the Tibetan Book of the Dead to those who die in their care, and Egyptians might have, too. In the chapter Burning Libraries, I try to list the 99.999…% of human literature destroyed since. I suspect every literate society had archived its own version of the Book of the Dead, lost since.
I believe the Perfecti taught that Christ offered Himself as a reincarnation way station and escape hatch to Heaven. In so doing, He gave us God’s “Get out of Jail Free” card: the only practical escape from the Wheel of Desire and Death.
Of course, anyone could graduate to Heaven by becoming fully Christ-like this time around. Good luck with that. Could we attempt it after an infinite series of painful reincarnations? Here we are: the graduates of billions and trillions of painful reincarnations, followed by two thousand years of weapon Christianity. Who would dare think themselves any closer to success?
Christ said we could move a mountain if we had but a little faith. Yet no-one, not the Pope or his Saints or any born-again-by-word-of-mouth Christian – certified by religious hierarchs just as corrupt as us if not more so – no-one can shift so much as a grain of sand in this manner. Not me, not you, not anyone besides perhaps Christ in the history of Christianity.
Here below, I make full and free disclosure to you, in strict accordance with my current belief.
We may reincarnate into Jesus’ life, all of us.
I may have found a quiet, hassle-free approach to heaven by reincarnating into Jesus Christ’s lifeline the next time I die.
When I die this time around, I expect to haunt the dark void that holds every material conception and expiration along with those Karma makes somewhat more inviting. Among those, we may pick and choose for the umpteenth time, with Karma as croupier.
The problem with Karma is that, for all its philosophic wisdom, it is just a perpetual motion vending machine. You insert your soul into the machine like a coin, the machine spits you into your next life, and so on, indefinitely. The Buddhists get really cloudy at that stage, as to how it ends. So you could treat Karma like an auto-pilot on the airplane of your soul, set to land you on your next earthly conception, over and over…forever?
Then again, you could flip the autopilot to the off position, take over the controls and land where you will, for better or worse; forget Karma.
This time around, I intend to let my soul be “born again” into Jesus’ life. I would home my soul in on the cosmic interval between Mary’s Immaculate Conception and Christ’s Resurrection. Those cosmic beacons would stand out from every other incarnation in the Universe; they would illuminate a flare-strobed heavy runway, compared to the heaving darkness of every other conception.
Thus I would make His eyes brighter by the slightest margin. This, assuming I have the guts to volunteer for His agony, or perhaps be dispensed from it by His Grace.
My way through life has seemed to me less arduous than it might have been (touch wood; I’ve had my share of grief and pain). In any case, I found enough peace and quiet (thank you, Linda!) to transmit to you the text of Learner that may or may not have been downloaded to me in more garbled form. I intend to disentangle myself from the Wheel of Life and fly to Heaven; as He instructed and promised us; as it would suit the Son of God to treat his worldly playmates.
My soul is drawn to Jesus because He is the Savior I was brought up with since infancy with no choice in the matter. Plus He said He was the resurrection and the light. Other people grew up to know other Prophets: Mohammed, Buddha, Moses, Mao, take your pick. They and we are all One. Whatever the case, pick your favorite prophet and reincarnate into his or her lifeline. What other life could get closer to heaven than that of your revered Prophet relived over and over again until God tires of this game and gathers us all into Heaven?
I’m surprised how little this epiphany alters what I must say in Learner. Even more surprising will be the grand exploits we may look forward to, once we’ve acquired grace in this world and the next.
At most, these meditations have turned my fortune or misfortune on this material plane into the blinding glare that reflects off wavelets on late, sun-dappled afternoons. Transient and irritating at worst, their aching beauty soon to fade.
I gave up on free advice to “Live each day as if it were your first and your last.” How hormonally unworkable. I look forward to each day’s end, now. My mushiest sleeping dream turns out to be more interesting than the most spectacular and moving entertainment I have read or screened. I suspect that the after-death, properly negotiated, could be that much better than life.
Good music, good lovin’ and a few good friends, plus other experiences (like long drawn out laughter, super meals and just the opportunity to help someone out), those are something else; they make the pain of living bearable. I counsel no one to abandon them prematurely, no matter what fate may befall the soul. It seems obvious that all of us have something important to learn in the here and now.
I may have to come back here later and repeat this message. Enough people may not grasp or repeat it often enough, this time around. I would rather everyone understood it, locked it into human memory and spared me another of these appalling returns. I or some more stoic successor may have to come back here (we dread returns to this world of unrepentant killer primates), dream this message up again and repeat it as long and often as it takes the inhabitants of this dark realm to preserve it on behalf of those to come (the same individuals reincarnated once again).
Weapon mentors like the apostle Paul, John of Revelation, St. Augustine and their wacko supporters have compounded the same errors since. They’ve confabulated the obvious dead-end lie of salvation-in-this-world through some dubious, pecking order verbal contract drawn up during this lifetime, followed by some Gott-Mit-Uns, end-of-times nightmare. Overseen by a Loving God? Tell me another story!
That eerily resembles the fate concentration camp inductees had to endure. “Take the line to my right if I think you will serve our needs, or to the left if I deem you too feeble for our scheme.” No self-respecting God would sully Himself in this manner; only a psychopath would.
The outcome? Two thousand years of brutal hypocrisy mediated by so-called “Christian” authorities.
The Council of Nicaea (Iznik, Turkey) was held in 325 CE. Narrow-minded (as usual) fundamentalists had finally “converted” themselves from persecuting Christians with Gestapo-like tactics in the name of official Paganism. The high-ranked among their descendants re-assembled there, rejected reincarnation (a very popular belief at a time of dynamic interplay between Eastern and Western thought) and expunged almost every mention of it from the Bible. Then, in the name of official Christianity, they started persecuting honest Christians and Pagans. They’ve only stopped recently in a few countries, after being stripped of political power.
It is obvious that mass religions are morally bankrupt, despite the heroic devotion of their best practitioners. The evils they forgive themselves, more than offset any claim to validity.
Even though our spirit-lives starve for the nourishment of authentic faith, we cannot dismiss the organized kind outright – tempting as that simplification might be – based on the trivia it offers us, the way a proud housecat offers up its killed prey. Without the benefit of religion, omnicide crouches in our hearts where real worship belongs.
Freethinking materialists commit the worst atrocities. The scope of their evil makes such heavy demands on their virtuosity, they can’t afford to pay attention to “trivial loser” pursuits like soul and spirit any longer.
Those of us more intent on pursuing The Good should seek inspiration from a Good God. It would not matter so much whether that God is “imaginary” or eternal from our stunted point of view. We require a role model more compassionate than the genocidal creeps currently on display as God substitutes.
Even so, the word of God has seemed to evolve from rigid demands dictated by genocide and punishment based on God’s total incomprehension of us and of our soul; to God’s Words of Christ revealed with affectionate tenderness. As if God had to learn to love us despite himself and everything else.
God may have never understood humans and human love, and acted like an abusive parent until He had his own beloved Son; the way a mafia don brought up to be a murderous psychopath learns to cherish the wife and children of his family.
This could lead to the radical idea that the Serpent of Eden, condemned to crawl in the dust forever for having introduced Adam and Eve to the knowledge of good and evil (“therefor you shall die”), becomes the Christ who left us the Holy Spirit (human conscience: the knowledge of good and evil) as our Comforter. The Alpha and the Omega, you see.
There follows the idea that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (never forgiven) is the abandon of our moral conscience in favor of being “saved” by human reports of the imminent or actual Return of Jesus: those reports equally impossible for anyone but God the Father.
Once and for all, this exotic doctrine could shut down the idiot diktat of fundamentalist middlemen who control the religions of WeaponWorld, banish them from spiritual discourse unless they grew wiser and more loving. By what right, wisdom and benediction are they entitled to butt in there anyway? It would put the Kingdom of Heaven in everyone’s reach in the afterlife, regardless of truth or error in this lifetime. It would entrust earthly cares to our own accountability, and our salvation to the Lord’s direct example.
John Ralston Saul, in Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Vintage Press, A Division of Random House, 1991, pp. 542-543, states that the inclusion of the Book of Revelation in the Bible (highly controversial at the time) allowed organized religion and its government masters to supplant Christ’s Sermon of the Mount with any extremist rant of bigotry and mayhem they could find a strategic use for: “It’s them or us!” The clergy alone could read the Bible, while lay people were limited to Sunday sermons in incomprehensible Latin and iconic, mosaic and stained-glass representations: the medieval equivalents of today’s foreign films without subtitles.
They doled out one spiritually scrawny lifetime to each of us, during which we were supposed to fulfill the mission impossible of personal salvation under the lash of their incompetence, in accordance with their shameless plagiarism of ancient Egypt’s Day of Judgment. To promote mere weapon tyranny, they distorted Christ’s words in a manner as meaningless as it was redundant.
I wouldn’t trust them, or a hundred generations of their successors, with a used Kleenex, much less my immortal soul.
In the meantime, their misinterpretation made blasphemy commonplace, murder routine and sacrilege inevitable. Anticipating public defiance against their aberration of Christian values, they consigned most immortal souls to a five pitchfork Hell that a loving God would not have confined Beelzebub himself to. By means of well-coached moral gymnastics of self-perfection, they sought to “save” only themselves and a few devoted slaves. Since they couldn’t picture a realistic heaven, their default option of Hell had to be pretty bad: a collage of psychobabble nightmares lovingly narrated by weapon mentors. It had to look that way to be marginally worse than their hellish WeaponWorld here and now.
Don't talk to me about Islam, either. Once Muslims stop killing each other as Sunni, Shia or other sectarians, for some trivial reason compared to the salvation of their soul by means of the Peace of Islam, be sure and get back to me. In the meantime, Muslims subsist on the knife-edge of Allah's mercy, providential be His Name. Those who disobey Him so shamelessly or let other Muslims do so have nothing much to teach me.
Once we join the barn raising of God’s House of Peace, we may calmly discuss the relative merits of each religion. Until then …
Yet their historic preservation of the Word of God sanctified their vocation — regardless of misinterpretation. A better reinterpretation would restore them their holy calling. Their ultimate revelation may be the transcendental way the best among them may fulfill their dreams of devotion, once they grasp what is written below.
The Perfecti got a much clearer personal message through to a few lucky Credentes, in absolute defiance of weapon Christians. After all, their weapon message remains confusing despite two thousand years of biblical scholarship. The God of love’s message could be understood by any child hearing it at a parent’s feet. Those weapon fanatics burned them alive and stamped out their teaching as quickly as they could, for no better reason than to mislead everyone into the dead-end hypocrisy described above.
It seems we may serve Mammon or God in this lifetime, but not both at once. The choice has always been made for us, between government or spirituality mutually exclusive. We must make the real choice between the Mammon of weapons and the God of peace, each with their own form of government. Learner suggests we serve this world gracefully and Grace in the next. If you dismiss this as some worthless, Bible-thumping crankdom (more fundamentalist babble), you’ve missed my point entirely. And, Learner friend, that is your loss. Check it out with proper prayer and watch it confirm itself for you personally.
If you take your weapons indoctrination too seriously, you might sort religion from government as independent variables. Forget it. We are progressives in that our faith (in whatever) triggers fearless love, and reactionaries if we react (faithlessly) against our shadows of fear and hatred. Creed and governance operate in parallel. It doesn’t matter what phony drapes we use to cover the religious underpinnings of government, the way prudish Victorians draped piano legs to repress their sexual obsession.
Those Chosen Few these days should let go of traditional religions and their mystical dead ends. They could revive itinerant Cathari communities and restore a superior Tao. It would greatly relieve me to receive an honest consolamentum on my deathbed, along with a painless death, no matter what my state of consciousness was at the time.
Check this out if religion is your calling.
A short first stop would be The End of the World by Otto Friedrich. His chapter on “The Birth of the Inquisition” reveals the historical and theological convolutions that entangled the Cathari. Zoë Oldenbourg’s books (available in translation from French) provide a lot of useful information on this topic.
Such subtleties are incidental to Learner purposes. Genuine Perfecti should gather into itinerant religious orders in straightforward obedience to the Word of Christ. They could heed His direct instruction in the Bible and, in so doing, serve as useful role models for PeaceWorld religions.
Expect equivalent miracles to emerge from other world religions. With greater or lesser success, their foremost adherents have approached similar ideals of devotion. Every religion has conceived and aborted one or more superior heresies: Orphism, Essenes, Sufi, Bhakti, Jain, Gnosis, Ahmadiyya, Quakers, Therapeutae and Buddhism’s “vehicles” : some peaceful offshoot more profound than the gangrenous orthodoxy of today. We should revive the best ones to replace current ones more toxic.
After all, what would you rather: that the worst weapon mentors in history served as your children’s chaplain? Even if their survival and wellbeing require a thousand times less weapon mentality?
Jesus said that any man who looks at a woman commits adultery; I confess to as much sometimes. Had he concluded that everyone was in a permanent state of sin? According to His prescription, nobody on Earth has known real faith since His departure. No one is likely to achieve Heaven in this lifetime, whether on their own or through the mediation of some self-proclaimed bureaucracy of fellow-sinners. Nor has there been a valid verbal or behavioral contract we could strike during this lifetime with the so-called representatives of Christ on Earth, no matter what hokum these self-serving hucksters dare sell us.
It is obvious they are as hopelessly mired as we in this hell-world. How could they pull us out of the muck? None of them can quote coherently from His Words before they start laying power trips on us. They wind up twisting Bible verse and improvising as they go, since Jesus had nothing to say about their bureaucratic con game.
I'd rather call today's mass consumption Christians, Paulist-Johnist-Augustinians rather than real Christians, since they pay more heed to the scribbles of mere men than to the Word of God told by Jesus. Compared to glorious Christ – Paul, John of Revelation and St. Augustine; any preacher, saint or apostle you care to mention; you, me and anyone else – we are all the same miserable sinner.
For example, Jesus forbade us to pray in public and in church. According to Him, we should pray the Lord's Prayer all alone in a closet (Matthew 6-6). Yet these ministers insist that we must pray man-made texts with them in crowded, man-made churches in order to “confirm” our devotion to Christ as interpreted by men.
The solitary prayer of Our Father: the only way for miserable sinners like us to approach God’s truth.
Anything harmless you do during this lifetime is your business and no one else’s — especially not that of fundamentalists and religious bureaucrats. We should have always understood this to be the case. I suggest you follow the best advice of your favorite religion, especially its version of the Golden Rule. That might ease your tormented conscience during your next trip to the other side.
In addition, you are free to reincarnate into any prophet or saint you choose and endure soul-safe in that stout shelter, with its personal exaltations, sins and agonies, through countless deaths, reincarnations and rebirths, until God harvests every soul once and for all.
Walking around in the body of Christ and seeing the world through His eyes, we’ll be soooo sorry for all the wrongs of recent and prior lifetimes, and grateful for any act of grace we had accumulated in the past. Piety and kindness in this life make the best preparation for the after-death experience. Those who mess things up during this lifetime will have a worse time of it, I assure you.
The five rules of Islam, carried out in good faith and without hands washed in angry blood, would be excellent preparations for this supreme challenge, as would any pious lifestyle that valid religion encouraged.
Every time we die, I believe we reincarnate back onto the Wheel of Desire, Pain and Death. We’ve done so blindly, through endless incarnations and ecologies since Earth life (?) began. I suspect that each consciousness (or the only one everyone shares?) runs the gauntlet of every life-bubble in the DNA chain of the universe that twines and untwines at the speed of death.
“One for all and all for one.” We need to love each other like ourselves because they are us and we are them.
Once you grasp this message, no one can extract it from you by force, by guile or by loving persuasion. Either it will work for you and you will be saved, or not. Once you decide to use it, no one can hold you back. For the first time in all of your imperfect lives, you will be perfectly free to save your soul, miraculously free.
Or come back to these endless lives as often as you wish, as a Bodhisattva — provided this lesson awaits you next time and hasn’t been suppressed as it has been so often in the past and so completely before Learner.
When you die, I invite your soul to pry open this narrow escape hatch. It’s a tight fit! Through its porthole, I may have caught a foggy glimpse of Salvation.
May this message extend to everyone!
- HYPOTHETICAL CONSOLAMENTUM -
Recited during the Middle Ages in the Langue d’Oc (now Southwestern France) by an itinerant pair of Cathar perfecti attending a deathwatch, much the way similar, itinerant believers recited verses from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Egyptian as well, and no doubt many more such texts silenced since: dozens, hundreds or thousands, oral and written, in as many towns destroyed and languages disappeared.
This poem is my own invention (or pickup from my nervous antennae). I dedicate it to my Dad who passed away before I could recite it to him, and to those who confront the uncertainties of life and death with no solid spiritual shield, and who must die once again before they can use it…
NOTE: The first two lines below are boilerplate formula. Or perhaps the favorite chant of this particular perfecti pair. There are almost as many custom formulas as there are attendees. They often have complicated meditation breathing formulas of their own, brought down from many generations ago. Anyway, this formula is negotiated to meet local needs. Once the formula rhythm settles down to comfortable, it will be repeated that way from then on.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Have no fear,
For you are Saved.
Christ will shoulder your Karmic burden,
No matter how bad it may seem to you.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Close your eyes and be at ease.
Die easily, sweetly,
Relax in peace this last time.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Let your soul release from your fading body,
With confidence, joy and hope;
As if to your wedding,
As Christ taught us.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
You have bailed out from myriad bodies before this one.
During countless death agonies,
Lifetimes of misery and anguish
Have shaped your destiny up to this day.
You are free from all that now.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
The next time your soul sheds its dying body,
Like a fighter pilot his burning plane,
Your disembodied soul will drift through space and time
Until you tire of its drudgery, hard vacuum and silence.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Pass all the stars in heaven in review, like a jaded tourist,
Witness galaxies cohere, spin up and die in splendor.
Or just recall birdsong and the heady breath of plants,
From sunrise to sunrise.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
You may cross the path of Daemons, Angels and Beasts;
Reflections of your desire, hope and fears.
You may touch and be touched by them,
For good or ill.
It’s your choice.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Linger for a while on Earth,
Haunt old homes, places familiar and strange,
Go visit former offspring and lovers,
Let your spectral approach give them goose bumps.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Suffer loss and loneliness over and over again,
For as long as you can bear it.
You will soon tire of this.
Sooner or later, with growing impatience
Your soul will yearn for the next carnal life
As urgently as the need to piss.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
You will tumble back into life,
Falling backwards into it,
The way a rock finds its depth and cold water its downward flow,
Into the dim clarity of life
Irresistibly.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Once your soul starts yearning for its next life,
You will defer your return to review a host of conceptions
In keen appraisal of a worthy rebirth into this world.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Seek the psychic beacons
Of Mary's Immaculate Conception and Jesus’ Resurrection.
Divine beacons on both ends
Of the only flare strobed heavy runway
On a lifeless plain mournful, carnal and gray,
The lair of furtive couplings and sad deaths.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Ignore the seductive tidal pull of Karma
Of fear, desire and familiarity
That will con you to seek rebirth
In a mortal infant, in a family setting, among familiars,
And back onto the Wheel of Desire and Death.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Give up your family, best friends, cherished households,
Give up your favorite things;
Take up His Cross instead.
Be reborn unto His Spirit and into His flesh.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Recall His many parables
That make no sense in other interpretations,
But perfect sense in this one.
Grab hold of His lifeline,
Relive His sacred Life
You could have lived had you held true faith.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
But God is merciful,
Even to the merciless,
Even to the wicked,
Even to you.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Review and repent your many sins
In the perfect clarity of His Lifetime and Agony.
How you will wish you had submitted to God!
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
How harshly your conscience will torment you !
You will pass in review your many betrayals.
Throughout His Lifetime, for thirty some years,
For each of your sins you will repent a hundredfold,
And find in each of your good deeds,
A dab of balm for your sin-flayed soul.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Those wincing recalls will let you proclaim His Words with conviction
Since you see the world through His eyes with divine clarity,
Now that the beam is removed from yours.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Have faith when they crowd in to betray and crucify you.
Bow your head for His crown of thorns,
Thankful for this distraction from your utter lack of worth.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Your pains are almost over.
His mercy may even spare you His final Torment.
That would be so like His loving ways.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
His endless afternoon Agony,
The last twinge of your eternal torment;
His Calvary up Golgotha,
The last stumbling steps of your Everest to Heaven.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
No more rebirths for you
On the Karma Wheel of Desire and Death,
No more for you,
Faultless rebirths on Karma's autopilot.
Your soul's fate is in your pilot hands, now.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Instead, you will accompany Him straight to Heaven that evening,
With the repentant thief, Dismas.
You will find God waiting for you:
His only Son and His companions: welcome prodigals.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
You will find there
Those who have torn themselves from the Wheel of Desire and Death,
And opted for His Cross.
Your friends will rejoin you,
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Sooner or later, after one death or one more or many,
They will precede or follow you along this path.
Jesus promised to prepare rooms for us in Heaven,
And return to take us back there.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Stop worrying about space and time,
Before and after, singularity and multiplicity,
And which soul enfolds what body.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Your pathetic faith blinds you to the fact
You could remove your eyes or your arm, should they offend you
Without much bother, so little do those things matter
In your fantasy life that seems so grave.
You cannot fathom the material world under the light of truth
Much less the spiritual one.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Have just a little faith,
Just a shred of hope,
For you are Saved.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
No-one can take this from you now,
None can talk you down or extract it from you
Not by force or by sentiment,
No more so than by lying or persuasion.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Tell them exactly what they want to hear;
It won’t matter.
You will die in any case and thus be free
Perfectly, miraculously free,
To opt for the Cross and Paradise,
Else wrack yourself once again on the Wheel.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
You could choose to come back
Or be nicely asked to,
To help your brethren find the Way,
Carry lost lambs back to God,
Oh Bodhisattva.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Or you may yearn for another return
To the good old days of desire and ignorance:
To the next tough lesson,
The next chance to redo things the hard way;
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Or cringe before Christ's fated Agony and yours,
Or your unfitness for this honor;
And submit, once again, to the Wheel.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
You are perfectly free to choose
Karma would be glad to receive you again.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Great the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,
The good conscience Comforter Jesus left us pending His Return.
It is through Them that we are Saved
Who choose to be,
Who look and see,
Who listen and hear.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
Drop your fear.
Even though everything that lives must die,
And so on over and over again;
Yet we are all reborn and saved,
Just as soon as we choose to be,
We, the ready and willing,
As promised.
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
(The reciting perfecti have left the room…
Repeat alone
Matthew 6-9, the Lord’s Prayer
Pending their return).
Breathe deeply,
Breathe softly in three long breaths, Oh Nobly Born.
- SATYAGRAHA AND ALLAH -
Some bullies assert their privilege at the expense of others and eventually their own, regardless of moral right and wrong. Privileges obtained by violence are more difficult to hold onto in the long run; they are less profitable than those everyone agrees to share peacefully. As conflict worsens in the absence of renewal, communal prosperity dries up and blows away.
Yet Mencius urges us to discount simple profit and rallies us instead to Humanity (compassion) and Duty (Learning) far healthier for us. I am convinced that excessive profit leads to sacrifice of the other. Instead of sacrifice of the other based on profit-taking, humanity and duty call for celebration as the outcome of self-sacrifice.
Celebrate Learning instead of sacrificing the Other!
Once these aggressive self-promoters knock off their opponents, the survivors assemble into elites even more vicious. In most cases, the rest of us submit to their brutal demands to restore the peace. Just because the meek turn the other cheek to violence, that does not disqualify their legitimate demands. On the contrary, they benefit a lot more people including the powerful, whereas arbitrary and brutal demands induce more expense, conflict and social contradiction.
Note this basic paradox. Totalitarian regimes may seem to be mighty but are really rigid and brittle. They could fend off foreign aggression for a while, but the wear and tear of social contradictions erodes them from within. Eventually, they turn into hollow husks only apparently mighty and collapse for no apparent reason.
On the other hand, the more turbulent a society’s info flow and the more hubbub of dialogue it tolerates, the stronger and more flexible it becomes. Societies that appear to be turbulent and shaky may invite foreign aggression, but they can overcome long-term contradictions more reliably. They could even assimilate their invaders and thrive in the long run, as China succeeded during her long and complex history. The control of tyranny is as untrue as the weakness of cosmopolitan decadence.
Mark Juergensmeyer’s book, Fighting with Gandhi, is a primer of conflict resolution. It, too, is out of print. This chapter and the next are summaries of his book included with his kind permission.
Please study these pages carefully, then go out and learn everything you can about Satyagraha. Our survival may depend on your effort.
The basis of Gandhian struggle is Satyagraha, (Clutching-at-the-Truth in Hindi): a basic peace management tool. Gandhi coined the term “passive resistance” during his first social experiment in South Africa; he rejected the term thereafter. This weapon-based misnomer of the struggle for peace is typical of Western weapon culture. Likewise, the title “Mahatma” or great soul that displeased him no end.
We could replace “passive resistance” with “verifaction”: the deliberate alliance of those who embrace both sides of the truth.
Gandhi’s first principles of Satyagraha are:
· Satya: truth ;
· Ahimsa: non-violence ;
· Tapasya: voluntary suffering for the common good ; and
· Sarvodaya: the common good
You are not only supposed to love your enemy, you must befriend him with your honesty and harmlessness. If you are error-free (a tough requirement) your enemy will eventually become your loyal friend and act accordingly, no matter what he used to think about you. The process is voluntary on both sides. It should be valiant from the onset on your part and fearless in the end by your fear-freed enemy.
You may judge the acts of your opponent but only pity or respect him for himself, as you would a family member exasperating or inspiring. Trust in your adversary’s good faith. In most cases, his best friends are safe from his attack.
Also noteworthy: this rule may not apply to individual psychopaths (even though Gandhi had amazing success with his prison guard and other brutes), but certainly so for random agglomerations of conscientious humans who could seize control from a small minority of psychopaths.
Your shield is Tapasya: your willingness to accept self-suffering in order to reduce the suffering of others — but not your own. Suffering for your own sake is not Satyagraha.
What should honest verifactors fear? That they stumble as they feel their way along this rocky trail, and remain unwilling or unable to amend their errors. Only fear-based failure can hold up this all-powerful process.
Compared to almighty Satyagraha, panicky brutality and sickly lies are bound to fail. We may not compromise Satyagraha through personal weakness, fear or inertia. We must resist in suffering instead.
“I must resist in suffering instead.” How easy it is for me to write this down and reread it — how much harder to practice it honestly! I fail all the time. I get angry and drop my principles the moment anger takes hold, when not ducking responsibility from sloth, fear and inertia. You too, no doubt. Gandhi too, but less often. Satyagraha was his topic of passion he trained for all his life. Me, I’m just another human slug gratifying wormy urges.
Whatever I may turn out to be, I can spot the genius of Satyagraha and recommend it to you. And many of you Learners out there may have the passion for it that I lack, to carry it out honestly. That’s my hope.
Satyagraha is like karate, charity or courage: it only gets done by doing it. Reading and writing about it is easy and superficial. It is just a prelude, the stale shell of an old Twinkie.
If we were scarred veterans of Satyagraha, we might achieve something useful by reading about it; otherwise, not likely. Learning it over and over again from a peace master; practicing it in the real world; trying and failing; getting thrown, picking ourselves up and dusting off (along with our enemies) then trying again — those are tough but mandatory steps.
Nowadays, there are no Satyagraha masters to practice with. If we attempt it in the real world, people will take us for cowards; the charitable, for saintly fools. We will suffer for our folly. They will rip off everything we hold dear, hit us where it hurts and walk away laughing at our stupidity. They will have learned nothing from the transaction. It will be easy to become bitter. You should expect that and take it into account.
The main difference between today’s policies and future ones ruled by Satyagraha, is that psychopaths and sociopaths rule, these days, to advance their special interests; whereas conscience-driven people like us will rule for the common good in a Learner future. It will be as simple as that.
Gandhi’s foremost lesson is that we must not lose heart from delayed results. I am an impatient fool and fantasize that the God of Love will speed up our greatest ambitions by miracle.
In the future, there will be more Satyagraha masters on PeaceWorld than there are karate masters on WeaponWorld (and more of those, too). Satyagraha will be the key practice of courtesy and social grace. Most people will acknowledge and assist it with enthusiasm; those who reject it will be considered insane. Only then will we contemplate Satyagraha in the cool shade of our innermost thoughts and find genuine contentment there. Until then, we fail at our ideals and suffer for our convictions.
O bodhisattva! Keep trying. This is hard, but you are stubborn. Keep trying.
Some conflicts end by force and guile, others by accommodation and compromise, still more through arbitration and law. None of those outcomes satisfied Gandhi. Win-lose and lose-lose outcomes merely prolong resentment, deceit and violence. There cannot be true victory until both sides agree that they won simultaneously.
Satyagraha requires that both sides recognize, exchange and embrace each other’s foremost principles. Neither side’s truth is utterly wrong nor wholly correct until it reflects and confirms the other side’s truth. Once both parties expose their differing versions of the truth, alternate outcomes will confirm (and be confirmed by) their most dependable principles. Thus, we should welcome conflict as an opportunity to analyze and embrace both faces of the truth: neither an excuse for coercion nor an evil to be shunned.
1. List each side’s foremost values. Each side claims its own truths: some vital and some less so.
2. Let each side examine the importance of its claims and pick out the most important ones.
3. Merge, in your heart and mind, both sides’ most vital elements. Create a new side and adopt it with your opponent.
4. Revise your position as the fight goes on.
In this context, we should consider Steven Brams’ and Alan Taylor’s book, Fair Division: From Cake Cutting to Dispute Resolution.
According to their formulation, for any number n of people sharing a cake, equal portions will result if 2(n-2) + 1 pieces are cut and chosen in a certain order. Handing out equal portions of dessert may seem like a trivial exercise, but more important applications suggest themselves. For you number crunchers out there, note that the complexity of conflict resolution increases exponentially as more and more parties assert their interest.
Nowadays, dispute resolution and other peace practices stumble along by trial and (mostly) error. Our rough and tumble decision-making is based on the rule of terror. Learners will demand much more subtle precision from the sciences of peace. We must master elegant new ways to negotiate our differences.
I am pretty sure that the French language is better adapted to this task than “zero-sum, winner-take-all” English. Those who learn to write in French are taught to take their time, crosscheck the links between every element of the sentence as written, and thus tell their story more clearly. If they fall short, they will neither attract nor influence anyone with their claims, not even themselves.
On the other hand, by training, English speakers achieve intellectual dominance as abruptly as possible, regardless of their tone and content. We are taught to argue both sides of a debate equally well, regardless of personal convictions. Only afterwards may the masters of English rhetoric defend their convictions in the public forum — once they’ve certified their amphibious nature.
“At the age of twenty in Rome, Richelieu argued a sermon before the Pope to prove a certain point. The next day, he was once again before the Pope to argue the same sermon proving the opposite point.” John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Vintage Press, A Division of Random House, 1991, p. 53.
French children are probably taught the same arid logic of ancient Greek war tribes; all the children on WeaponWorld are. But I did not pick that up during my fractional French schooling, except incidentally from my adoptive grandfather, Maître Auguste Reynaud.
I found a truer voice of conviction in French. I may have begun this text in English, but its full truth couldn’t emerge until I had translated it in French and rewritten both versions several times, reweaving new ideas into the old arbor or tearing it down and rescaffolding it with the tougher grammar and syntax of French. Errors and omissions of thought reveal themselves more clearly in French; necessary clarifications become more obvious. Then the English version serves to resimplify. That may just be my upbringing… Gershwin wrote An American in Paris for proud hybrids like me.
Besides, French speakers are not as scared of polysyllabic terms and complex ideas, the way English readers are, hopelessly attracted instead to dead-end thought and Trump/Brexit EZ-listening.
Is that why the French language wound up being that of the diplomatic world? Why the bitterest foes of French domination send their children nowadays to learn it in school? Power grabs and winner-take-all are easier to justify in English; more thoughtful, win-win thought is clearer in French. I’m not sure, but Mandarin Chinese might be even more suitable? See Language.
It may be that my habits of translation force me to triangulate ideas, the same way stereoscopic vision reveals distance and size with greater precision? In that case, everyone should learn to think in at least two languages. The fact that I am dyslexic and yet learned two of them more or less fluently, confirms that almost anyone could learn the trick.
This enhanced social competence will terminate the bloody chaos we have come to expect from weapon mentality. May we banish its applied cowardice forever!
What follows is my summary of the teachings of the Qran, Koran. I hope Mohammed would not have disapproved, even though he condemns those who dare to supplement his text. These are difficult times; they seem to require clarification to staunch the flow of blood that Allah must abominate as much among His Faithful as those others who should be.
In The Dust of Empire: The Race for Mastery in the Asian Heartland, Public Affairs, The Century Foundation, New York, 2003, pp. 103-4, Karl E. Meyer talks about Mukilika Banerjee’s investigation (The Pathan Unarmed) of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, also known as the “Frontier Gandhi.” He and his Punjabi Red Shirts or Khudai Khidmatgar (Servants of God) fought alongside Gandhi and his Congress Party in the 1920’s for a single, free and secular India.
His followers, clothed in cheap, brick dust dyed cloth, had to pledge: “I shall never use violence. I shall not retaliate or take revenge, and shall forgive anyone who indulges in oppression and excess against me.” Announcing this nonviolent form of Jihad, he recruited 100,000 followers. They submitted to arrest and torture by the Raj, then won elections in Punjab to form a series of provincial governments under Chief Minister Dr. Khan Sahib, the British-educated brother of Abdul Ghaffar.
Both the Muslim League and the British found Ghaffar Khan’s political success alarming, based on his non-violent demand for Pashtun independence. The former because his open-minded Muslim movement denied routine, hysterical claims that Islam is in danger; the latter because it threatened to deprive them of a prime military recruiting ground, Punjab, for their jewel of Empire.
In some sense, the Taliban are the murderously bankrupt ideological descendants of a popular nonviolent movement for political independence among the Pashtu people. Since that peace ideology has been systematically suppressed and infected with weapon brutality, every other one since has proven sterile, divisive and futile. Despite all the blood spilled opposing it, Islam’s non-violent holy war can claim a long and glorious past and a bright outlook in the near future.
Once the Umma (the community of Islam) takes up non-violent Jihad for the greater glory of Allah, all the dead-end terrorism that Mohammed forbids will fall by the wayside, the handiwork of godless human animals on both sides. Terror neither converted non-believers nor helped the Faithful. Islamic non-violence will empower them, powerless otherwise, and convert billions more.
Irhaab haram: terrorism is forbidden.
Allah just expects to be obeyed. Almighty is His patience and mercy!
First of all, Islam is a religion of personal salvation and social revolution. There are no priests, only gifted interpreters of Allah’s words as recited by the angel Gabriel or Gibril to Mohammed who memorized and recited them to the faithful for later compilation in the Qran.
Nowadays, too many fanatics earn a living by preaching massacre in the name of God or some other revealed Truth. Militant clerics and ideologues of that sort have emerged from almost every belief system in history. From the little of it I understand, classical Islam would rather one had a real paying job rather than preachifying murder and terror for pay.
Everyone is expected to read the Koran and memorize its splendid verses. I am told it contains the finest Arabic poetry, no contest. This is a miracle, since Mohammed could barely read and write.
I wonder if you realize how revolutionary those notions were, back during the 7th century CE? Every peasant boy could become a Koranic scholar (a Learner). Christians would not reach the same level of Learning until the 19th century. Thank God, we include little girls nowadays.
Nobody can save you. You can save yourself by following five simple rules as long as you are able (Allah is infinitely merciful):
· Shahada: Once during your lifetime, say with full understanding and absolute conviction: “There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his Prophet.”
· Salat: Pray five times a day (at first it was twice; later, dozens of times; finally, five times): at dawn, at noon, in the afternoon, at dusk and once it is dark outside. Clean yourself first. Muslim societies have organized themselves to facilitate the duty.
· Zakat: Give alms generously — and then more than generously. Again, Muslim societies have converted these alms into official taxes, for better or for worse.
· Sawm: Sustain a daylight fast during the month of Ramadan (whose date shifts yearly according to the lunar calendar), eat and drink only after dark.
· Hajj: Make a pilgrimage to Mecca once during your lifetime – if you are able; God is infinitely merciful. During your Hajj, you may witness the family of humanity under Allah’s tutelage.
That’s it. The rest is up to the infinite mercy of Allah, blessed be His Name. Like I said, Islam is a revolutionary religion of personal salvation. Either you choose to submit to God or you don’t. The Koran forbids Muslims from coercing your belief. It must be pure, free of fear and spontaneous.
It is not surprising that Islam is a religion of rugged individualists, since the Mecca/Medina region in Mohammed’s day would have made the American Wild West seem like a lady’s sewing circle — so savage were local customs. I wonder if that is why Muslim and American fanatics hate each other so fervently: because they are the same in spirit?
The propaganda of Salafi Muslims, ultra Jews and American Christian fundamentalists could have been written by the same psychopath; just switch the name of the protagonists and antagonists.
Desert nomads are among the Earth’s hardiest individualists. I know; I’ve met some and admired them. No one can get them to do what they don’t want to do, and there is no nobler host for a friend or an innocent passer-by. After all, some random visitor might be an angel sent by God to test their honor.
Most of the ground-down, bowed-back peasants (Pagan, Christian, Zoroastrian, Hindu, Buddhist, you name it) Muslim conquerors absorbed, grasped the advantages of Islam soon enough. Islam makes every Muslim man the equal of every other in the eyes of God. Nobility, wealth, the means and motive to hurt people really bad; what are those worth in the eyes of God? Less than nothing.
Can Euro-Americans claim they taught the same thing to the American Indians they conquered? Can any Christian or non-believing conqueror?
Besides, everyone got five breaks a day from their backbreaking toil, shared with their masters on their knees before Allah, at least in the mosque on Friday afternoons; plus universal literacy and generous alms for the poor. What more benefits could you ask from a religion, in an Age of royal shadists?
Just as Christ’s Sermon of the Mount calls on Christians to accept the equality of each human being; Allah, through Mohammed’s recitation, calls on all Muslims to submit to their equality before God. Direct democracy is obligatory in both cases, since it alone can satisfy the political equality that flows from the existential one of the human condition. There can be no dispute between religionists as to their justification of direct democracy, except from sly psychopaths.
As to any call for organized brutality in the Koran, I regretfully direct your attention to http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/, an article both bleak and hopeless. I turn my back in disgust on this topic and its psychopathic advocates.
As for the lines of the Qran I invoke, here are those I found for your personal review:
| SURA-LINE(S) | CONCLUSION
| 025-063, 028-055, 008-061-064, 043-089, 051-025 | Say “Peace” to those who try to delude you.
| 004-114, 005-016, 006-052, 010-025, 013-026 | Non-Muslims could be beloved by Allah.
| 004-90, 94 008-061 041-034 | Be kind to harmless unbelievers, for the greater glory of Islam.
| 002-224, 256, 010-099, 030-053, 050-045 | Muslim submission must not be coerced.
Sorry if I left out key Surats on these topics, that any bright child raised lovingly in Islam would know. If you catch me missing some, please contact me and I will make humble amends.
The Sayings of Muhammad, by Allama Sir-Abdullah al-Mamun al-Suhrawardy, with forward by Mahatma Gandhi, Carol Publishing Group edition, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1999.
Of Kindness (the numbering system below is internal to this edition).
247. To gladden the heart of the weary, to remove the suffering of the afflicted, hath its own reward. In the day of trouble, the memory of the action cometh like a rush of the torrent, and taketh our burden away.
248. He who helpeth his fellow creature in the hour of need, and he who helpeth the oppressed, him will God help in the Day of Travail.
249. What actions are most excellent? To gladden the heart of a human being, to feed the hungry, to help the afflicted, to lighten the sorrow of the sorrowful, and to remove the wrongs of the injured.
250. Who is the most favored of God? He from whom the greatest good cometh to His creatures.
251. All God’s creatures are His family; and he is the most favored of God who doeth most good to God’s creatures.
252. Whoever is kind to His creatures, God is kind to him; therefor be kind to man on Earth, whether good or bad; and being kind to the bad, is to withhold him from badness, thus in Heaven you will be treated kindly.
253. He who is not kind to God’s creatures, and to his own children, God will not be kind to him.
254. Kindness is a mark of faith; and whoever hath not kindness hath not faith.
Allah Akhbar! God is Great!
- SOME BASIC RULES -
With repeated thanks to Mark Juergensmeyer who let me copy them from his book, Fighting with Gandhi.
I cling to Satyagraha, even though I understand it less than a Sudanese mother might, the vaccine for which she went to the ends of the Earth to save her child. We have this in common: we have something precious to save, we know it works, and neither of us cares whether we understand it or not ― be it vaccine or Satyagraha. Expert medics may save her child; expert verifactors may save the world. We lay-folk can only hope. Bring it on at any cost!
· Do not avoid confrontation. Evasion merely prolongs the underlying conflict. Instead, welcome peaceful contradiction and the light it may cast on your truth.
· Stay open to communication and criticism. Each side has only a partial view. The perspective of the Other is essential to sort truth from untruth.
· Find a resolution and hang onto it. Once a better alternative appears, seize it and base your strategies on it. But be willing to challenge it as well.
· Consider your opponent an ally. Do nothing to harm and alienate those who oppose you. If you do so by accident or bad habit, seek forgiveness as soon as possible and make amends. Remember, your goal is to struggle together against anti-truth. [Author’s note: avoidance, accusation and resentment are my worst weaknesses ― see the items below, at which I fail all too often].
· Make your tactics consistent with your goal. When possible, use the goal itself as a weapon. When not, use only actions consistent with it.
· Be flexible. Be willing to change tactics, alter short-term goals, and revise your notion of the opponent, as well as your conception of the truth.
· Be temperate. Escalate your actions by degrees. The idea is to prevent your opponents from feeling intimidated. Their response should be communicative rather than defensive. You want to attract them into friendship and allegiance, not alienate them, as we have been indoctrinated to do in our dealings with the fearsome Other.
· Guard your sense of proportion. Determine which issues are trivial and which are worth your time and energy. The basis for judgment is the degree life and its quality are abused. Mount a campaign whose strength is equal to that of your opponent and appropriate to the issue.
· Be agonizingly disciplined. Especially when many activists mount a collective effort, make certain that your position is coherent and your side is devoted to nonviolence. Consistency is one of your major strengths.
· Know when to quit. A deadlocked campaign, or one with negative results, may require that you revise your tactics and even change your goals. There is no victory in concession to your prejudices without an agreement in principle. In a Gandhian fight, you may not claim victory until your ex-opponents also claim it.
· Be circumspect. Mass movements should practice Satyagraha as a last resort. They should use it only after every other resistance against untruth and violence has failed. Only those qualified by suffering may do so on any occasion.
Once you have absorbed these rules, (please review them carefully a couple times), you begin to grasp the enormous moral reeducation we require.
Several times? What am I thinking! At least five times a day for a full year under the vigilant gaze of a peace master. That would be the millionth part of the weapons indoctrination to which we have submitted to since childhood, teaching us the exact opposite of everything you just read. Good luck with that!
How can we turn enemies into best friends; defuse automatic reflexes of distrust and pre-emptive assault? Our Learning requirements are staggering; they surpass by far this shallow scribe’s intellect, self-indulgent sermonizing, off-the-wall temper and craven desire to make those who disagree submit or perish. We have a long, hard road to travel.
“Man, this here’s no joke.” Francois Villon
Mark Juergensmeyer’s excellent bibliography covers Gandhi’s writings and those of his principal analysts and biographers. He questions Gandhian tactics as they apply to cold-blooded ideologues and weapons elites who dominate current events and history. He studies the fatalism and saintly patience required to practice Gandhian principles against devil worshipers like Hitler and Pol Pot. Those moral ogres seem to be immune to common appeals to reason that might sway a fellow Learner, even if he disagreed with us.
Wouldn’t it take decades (millennia) of immense suffering to verifact successfully alongside their descendants slightly less crazy? Unless total annihilation at their hands intervened meanwhile? Faith in reincarnation might re-emerge for this reason: its implicit perpetuation of the truth, whatever harm might befall in meanwhile.
He pushes Gandhian logic to its extreme. Should we make an exception for benign coercion? Could we force people to behave better in their own best interest? Wasn’t that the error of the Grand Inquisitor? Can we succeed if we believe ourselves weaker than our antagonists? Gandhi thought not, lest we risk the moral pitfalls of the Grand Inquisitor.
Gandhi has been described as a Hindu saint, political moralist, religious ethicist, rational mystic, peaceful revolutionary, etc. These labels don’t fit him at all. His heart ruled his head. Gandhi was the ultimate tragic lover: a cartoon hero rushing headlong over cliffs and crushed under her rock falls in pursuit of his beloved. Using his body as a stylus and his beloved India as a slate, he composed psalms to his Beloved, the same way Solomon wrote his Song of Songs.
During his last minute on Earth – having held Kali at arm’s length for a lifetime and in despair over this incarnation of his Beloved whose fangs ran with the blood of a million Hindu and Muslim victims – he nodded to Her latest, exalted emissary who shot him dead. You can see that on film; Gandhi greeted his assassin as if he had foreseen that fate all along.
- ODE TO TRUTH AND NON-VIOLENCE -
Inspired by Raghavan Iyer’s
The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi
Our love accepts reproach.
Our love answers to no one but us.
Our love bears equally indifference, ridicule, abuse, repression, respect and reverence.
Our love bears Truth, bares Truth.
Our love calls us into the mortal pitfalls of politics.
Our love can err but never fail.
Our love cannot be cruel.
Our love cannot be gainsaid.
Our love cannot coerce or be coerced.
Our love cannot do harm.
Our love cannot lose or lose us.
Our love corrects.
Our love craves the mothers’ milk of pure religion.
Our love demands that we know ourselves.
Our love disgraces us by our own errors.
Our love faces the consequences.
Our love has all the time in the world.
Our love improves.
Our love increases with the observance of truth.
Our love is better than us.
Our love is consistent.
Our love is infinitely brave.
Our love is neither public nor private.
Our love is our obligation.
Our love is our religion.
Our love is passionately celibate.
Our love is perfectible.
Our love is spontaneous.
Our love is stronger than hate, than our hate.
Our love is the Holy Spirit: human conscience.
Our love is the still, small voice.
Our love is the truth.
Our love is the world.
Our love knows soul force.
Our love loves our opponents.
Our love loves self-sacrifice and self-suffering.
Our love loves the climb, not the unattainable summit.
Our love makes us act, not tarry.
Our love makes us fear our mistakes, nothing else.
Our love makes us humble.
Our love makes us want to help others.
Our love makes us want to suffer.
Our love obeys every good law.
Our love sends our judge, jailer and assassin.
Our love tolerates no cowardice.
Our love tolerates no evil.
Our love turns us into heroes.
Our love waxes and wanes, never stagnates.
Our love’s burden is featherweight.
Our love’s fight or flight becomes “Stay and suffer by my side.”
Our love’s martyrdom is bliss.
Our love’s only betrayal is our weakness.
Our lovers answer only to themselves.
Our lovers are among the beaten and the scorned.
Our lovers are anyone and everyone.
Our lovers are blessed by God.
Our lovers are born disciplinarians, instinctive law-abiders.
Our lovers are calm and wise.
Our lovers are clutchers-after-truth.
Our lovers are consumed and consummated.
Our lovers are fearless.
Our lovers are gloriously ordinary.
Our lovers are God.
Our lovers are harmless, blameless.
Our lovers are in the crowd and in the cave.
Our lovers are kinsmen and strangers, young and old, man and woman, friend and foe alike.
Our lovers are moral.
Our lovers are neither moralists nor legalists.
Our lovers are never without our love.
Our lovers are noble.
Our lovers are non-violent.
Our lovers are not creatures of habit.
Our lovers are our family.
Our lovers are our opponents.
Our lovers are our strength.
Our lovers are ours.
Our lovers are owed everything.
Our lovers are passionate, total.
Our lovers are perfect as they are.
Our lovers are rebels, not rulers.
Our lovers are revolutionaries.
Our lovers are saintly politicians.
Our lovers are self-freed in the art of action.
Our lovers are self-governing.
Our lovers are selfless.
Our lovers are the few.
Our lovers are the meanest creatures.
Our lovers are the other.
Our lovers are to die for.
Our lovers are to die laughing with.
Our lovers are too perfect to be.
Our lovers attract more lovers.
Our lovers believe the individual sacrosanct.
Our lovers bring us delight and peace during utmost turmoil.
Our lovers can only be respected or pitied.
Our lovers cannot be coerced.
Our lovers cannot be harmed except by misunderstanding.
Our lovers cannot be State or Nation.
Our lovers cannot bear a grudge.
Our lovers cannot coerce.
Our lovers cannot do harm.
Our lovers cannot go wrong.
Our lovers cannot harm us.
Our lovers cannot lie.
Our lovers carefully consider the consequences.
Our lovers comfort the oppressor and the oppressed alike.
Our lovers compel their enemies’ admiration.
Our lovers cooperate with those who won’t.
Our lovers demand correction.
Our lovers demand our very lives.
Our lovers demand purification, penitence, and non-cooperation with evil.
Our lovers despise apathy.
Our lovers do no harm.
Our lovers do not come to us in fear.
Our lovers do not oppress.
Our lovers don’t care about majority rule.
Our lovers don’t worry about consequences.
Our lovers emerge from our opponents through our suffering.
Our lovers exemplify truth and non-Violence.
Our lovers expect the highest discipline.
Our lovers experiment playfully.
Our lovers express love through love.
Our lovers fight by enduring injury upon themselves.
Our lovers grant their opponents the same rights they claim.
Our lovers hate indiscipline and chaosism.
Our lovers have been every prophet.
Our lovers heal and cure.
Our lovers heed the inner voice.
Our lovers hope for better.
Our lovers in prison, we must go to prison.
Our lovers keep faith in goodness.
Our lovers keep us company in the hole.
Our lovers know guilt, not shame.
Our lovers know pure sincerity.
Our lovers know right from wrong.
Our lovers leave us no alternative but love.
Our lovers leave us sleepless at night.
Our lovers love conscience.
Our lovers love justice.
Our lovers love our vows.
Our lovers love prayer.
Our lovers love the underdog.
Our lovers love us as themselves.
Our lovers love us like God.
Our lovers make fasting a feast.
Our lovers make no exceptions.
Our lovers make other interests trivial.
Our lovers make personal gain worthless.
Our lovers make up the only law.
Our lovers make us fearless.
Our lovers make us like unto nothing.
Our lovers make us powerless without them.
Our lovers make us strong in love.
Our lovers make us weak.
Our lovers may not be harassed.
Our lovers may not be hurt.
Our lovers may not be quietly watched being hurt.
Our lovers may only be loved.
Our lovers merit total sacrifice.
Our lovers must be pursued, not shunned.
Our lovers must be seduced.
Our lovers need bring us no other advantage.
Our lovers never retaliate.
Our lovers obey every good thing.
Our lovers obey their beloved.
Our lovers obey their jailers’ slightest rule in good conscience.
Our lovers offer matchless weapons of truth.
Our lovers overcome shame with perfectibility.
Our lovers practice detachment in intense concentration.
Our lovers practice self-effort to become self-aware.
Our lovers prize absolute truth over relative truth.
Our lovers produce honor.
Our lovers purify us.
Our lovers reserve the strongest remedies as a last resort.
Our lovers seduce the loveless.
Our lovers seek peace within themselves.
Our lovers self-rule.
Our lovers shall be many.
Our lovers shield us as we harm ourselves.
Our lovers shield us from raging crowds.
Our lovers shower us with mercy.
Our lovers smash bad laws.
Our lovers take tremendous risks.
Our lovers teach us everything.
Our lovers trust those who don’t.
Our lovers turn us into lunatics.
Our lovers undergo trials and observe principles.
Our lovers voice their innermost convictions.
Our lovers we cannot harm.
Our lovers we must imitate.
Our lovers, ever courteous and thoughtful.
Our lovers, failing, lack imagination.
Our lovers, free to choose, pick selflessness.
Our lovers, loveless, are full of law.
Our lovers, loveless, are powerless.
Our lovers, loveless, feel shame.
Our lovers, loveless, must be seduced.
Our lovers’ acts are those of heroes.
Our lovers’ acts may be judged right or wrong.
Our lovers’ attitudes must be perfected.
Our lovers’ capital is character.
Our lovers’ ends are inevitable.
Our lovers’ enemies cannot be surrendered to.
Our lovers’ enlightenment is more important than our happiness.
Our lovers’ fellow feeling is godly.
Our lovers’ Good is better than any Best.
Our lovers’ happiness is more important than our lives.
Our lovers’ love is painstaking.
Our lovers’ love is purchased with our suffering.
Our lovers’ lovelessness must be changed.
Our lovers’ means are everything — ends, instinctive.
Our lovers’ separation kills us.
Our lovers’ sleeping conscience reawakens.
Our love, birdsong and heartbreak sunsets.
Our love, the sun, the moon and the stars!
Our love, Linda.
Our love, your art and mine, together.
Everything is due to our lovers and due them.
Our love song to the Universe is the Our Father recited alone.
We are real people,
Alive in God because we love,
Not just animals baying at an empty world.
Peace management rests on Satyagraha and the fine art of verifaction.
Study them as if the survival of humanity depended on it.
SECTION 3 – WHAT TO EXPECT
“Let us restore the good old days?
The good old days lie ahead.”
The Future of History: Interviews with David Barsamian, by Howard Zinn, Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, 1999, page 20.
- THE COSMIC SERPENT -
The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, Tarcher/Putnam, New York, 1998.
The author, Jeremy Narby, is a Swiss anthropologist who investigated shaman cultures in the Amazon Basin. Last I read, he was helping to shield their cultural heritage by finding royalties for their guardianship of irreplaceable biota and habitats.
He noted that Western surgeons use curare during surgery. Most doctors understand that it works, in a vague sort of way, but have no idea how it was discovered.
The drug can be rendered from about seventy different tropical plants. That jungle recipe, however, releases a fragrance as pleasant as it is lethal.
Imagine the village chief, his thoughtful shaman and their sharp young acolytes (otherwise, the whole village) found mysteriously lifeless around a fire-blackened pot. No sign of injury or struggle. Scary! By rights, this process and all its primary ingredients should have been declared taboo since forever.
Another ethno-botanist was sent back to the shamans to find out how they had learned to cook up curare. He refused to believe them when they said they had picked up the trick from their hallucinations.
They had to drop monkeys from tall trees for meat; otherwise they were starving. They had hunted out all the other game, yet many monkeys perched out of reach in the trees. The hunters got high and made their request to the Cosmic Serpent. According to them, it taught them how to cook up curare and blow-dart monkeys out of the trees.
“Set a special fire, small but persistent, a day’s walk from any habitation. Mix the following magical jungle greens to cook for 24 hours. Walk away right away and don’t come back until the next day. Now, here’s what to do to make a blow gun.” Sweet instruction!
Shamans induce revelatory hallucinations by taking drugs from nature, fasting, singing, drumming, and dancing to exhaustion, then meditate. Across the world, an international brotherhood of independent shamans has reported similar visions.
It consists of two wavy parallel lines, rather like the two-headed chromosome chain of a diploid cell, like the messenger god Hermes’ winged Caduceus whose intertwined snakes form a medical symbol, and like the Rod of Asclepius, similar to the stick healers of the ancient world used to spool a two-foot-long guinea worm during its nocturnal eruption from a human host. At other times, the hallucinatory vision is that of a dragon, a ladder to heaven or what resembles DNA helices to our science-honed prejudices.
The game of Snakes and Ladders comes to mind, as does the Plumed Serpent, the herald of science for pre-Columbian civilizations, called Coatzacoalcos or Quetzalcoatl by the Aztecs, Q'uq'umatz by the K'iche' Maya, Kukulkan by the Maya and Viracocha by the Inca.
In addition, there’s Yggdrasil, the World Tree of Scandinavian mythology ― in other words, Arctic shaman sagas clouded by murderous Viking mead hall clichés. There are other mythical World Trees whose aerial branches and subterranean roots grow and shine in cosmic symmetry.
Ancient spiral petroglyphs are on every continent, as are representations of snakes as drawings on rock walls and architectural elements of monuments.
“The foundation of Funan [southern Cambodia] is ascribed to an Indian Brahman, Kaundinya, who in the first century A.D., following instruction in a dream, picked a magic bow from a temple, embarked on a merchant vessel, and reached Funan. There, he defeated the local queen, Soma, daughter of the king of the Nagas (cobras), married her, and began a royal line. This legend of the mystical union between the Brahman and the serpent, giving the dynasty a dual legitimacy of an Indian origin as well as roots in the popular indigenous mythology in which belief in earth, water and snakes was important, was adopted by several Southeast Asian kingdoms, including Champa, Angkor, and Kedah, to name only a few. The cobra was regarded the lord of the earth and therefore commanded reverence from agricultural people.” D.R. SarDesai, Southeast Asia: Past and Present, Westview Press, A Division of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., Boulder, Colorado, 1997, pp. 23-24.
A similar rainbow serpent is fundamental to the belief of the Bushmen in Australia. A voodoo myth says the rainbow serpent (Aida Wedo, Ayida Wedo) and the cosmic serpent (Danh-Gbwe, Dambala Wedo) embraced to create the universe and the world. Amazonian incarnations include a Black Python and a Rainbow Boa intertwined.
Zeus defeated Typhon and trapped it under Mt. Aetna. The deadliest monster of Greek mythology, Typhon was the last son of Gaia by Tartarus. The lower half of its body consisted of giant viper coils covered with feathered wings.
For primates once upon a time arboreal like our pre-human ancestors, a chimera, half snake, half bird of prey, would have been an elemental nightmare monster.
Having just swallowed all the cosmic waters, the serpent Vritra coiled around a mountain. The god Indra struck it with a lethal thunderbolt and thus released the yearly monsoon upon the land parched by its drinking.
In ancient Egypt, the uraeus (from the Greek term for a cobra or an emblem thereof) was the headdress of gods and kings to represent supreme power. The uroboros, a snake swallowing its tail, is a Jungian symbol adopted by many cultures to represent infinity or the Milky Way. African equivalents include Oshunmare and Aidophedo; South American jungle natives have some more. Hindu folk myths include the serpent Adisesha, which called itself into being.
Mythological and sacred fish symbols can be included here, along with Leviathan and the Christian bounty symbol of a fish (a far healthier symbol than the bloody cross). See http://www.reptilianagenda.com/research/r073101d.html for a longer list of serpent myths.
About 412 million miles of DNA are minutely knotted in each human body. Those strands emit coherent light at very low wattage, like a weak laser. Shaman visions are incandescent, they are accompanied by a complex song that ranges beyond human hearing. This DNA body rush can resemble cosmic laughter to our tinhorn ears, like the music of the spheres, or the still, small voice revealing muted truths — or just the flow of blood in our ears stuffed with DNA, amplified by the Universe presumed to be beyond the self. The hallucinatory setting is one of stellar proportion, overwhelming sound and kaleidoscopic luminescence. It holds infinite promise yet dire consequences, compared to which our personal life and death might seem like no big deal.
During auspicious hallucinations, a serpent, an animal familiar or some other wise spirit reveals itself, answers challenging questions and offers sound advice — as long as the inquirer shares this information for the common good. Otherwise, if evildoers abuse this gift, that creature never revisits their visions that turn into nightmares without its aid. This often leads to the death by accident or suicide of those who stray.
According to the author’s dazzling conclusions, DNA:
• engages in endless conversation with all its living incarnations;
• interacts playfully with the “inanimate” world;
• orchestrates all the energy in the universe;
• plays a laser concerto inside each body, especially during Dreamtime and nightly dreams; and
• delivers a long sermon to its thoughtful carriers.
In other words, the Cosmic Serpent sings to all the DNA, inanimate matter and residual energy in the Universe. “I’m so pretty, oh so pretty…”
The next time you go outdoors, picture every tree, bush, grass, every beast, insect and microbe – out to the horizon and beyond – in conversation (some say in love) with each other and with you. What a rush I got when this idea rocked my worldview.
“In truth, I doubt if there is a more decisive minute for a thoughtful human being than when, the scales fallen from his eyes, he finds he is not an element lost in cosmic solitude, but there is a universal will to live that draws together and is humanized in him.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon, (adapted from the translation of) Bernard Wall, trans., Wm. Collins Sons & Co Ltd., London and Harper and Row, Publishers, New York, 1959, p. 30.
Using shaman visions, DNA describes itself more fully. These revelations allow it (and us, its favorite pupils for the time being) to become more self-aware, confident and discerning.
Our childish weapon religions share common myths in which a jealous man-god-hero-child confronts, banishes or kills the Serpent. Such myths include the Biblical Serpent cast out from the Garden of Eden ; Hercules’ throttling of a pair of pythons who’d invaded his crib, also the massacre of Ladon, the dragon guardian of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides — which leads to the field of dragons I only mention in passing.
In the Hindu pantheon, Krishna, the avatar or son of Vishnu, killed Naraka, King of the Serpents. The Scandinavian thunder god Thor is in eternal conflict with a sea serpent called Jormugand. The two are prophesied to kill each another at the end of the world, Ragnarok.
“In Cadmus’ tale, as in the Old Testament, the serpent plays the villain’s role. Remember that until the appearance of the written work, a writhing snake had been a graphic symbol of female sexual energy and power. Shortly after writing’s acceptance across the ancient world, male heroes dispatched serpents in order to acquire knowledge or to gain power. Marduk became omnipotent by defeating Tiamat, whose form was a sea snake. In Egypt, Ptah defeated the loathsome serpent, Apophasis. In Canaan, El defeated the dreaded sea monster, Yam. Later, Baal slew Lotan, another sea serpent. Apollo, the god whose sacred gift was the alphabet, gained control of the important function of foresight by slaying the terrible she-snake Python, guardian of the Delphic Oracle. Perseus killed Medusa, a sorceress with a head of snakes instead of hair. Medusa’s most powerful weapon was her image: any man who gazed on her turned to stone. But at the dawn of literacy, Medusa met the fate reserved for all she-serpents.
“Biblical scholars have identified Psalms 74 and 89 as the two oldest passages in the Old Testament. Each psalm tells a Creation story that predates Genesis, in which Yahweh gains dominion over the universe by killing Leviathan (or Rahab), both sea serpents. The universe, therefore, must have been created by some other entity, perhaps Leviathan.” Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image, 1998, Penguin Group, New York, p. 122.
In Rune XXVI of the Finish epic, Kalevala, the hero Ahti commands the serpent of a thousand tongues to get out of the way (which it does, quietly), as the hero quests to crash the wedding feast of Pohyala, the rainbow virgin.
During the third of seven labors, the Persian hero Rostam awakens to slay a dragon serpent that harried his warhorse, Rakhsh, while Rostam slept. Great armored knights, the Persians.
The Kusanagi no Tsurugi, or Grass-Cutting Sword, is part of the Imperial Regalia of Japan. It represents the virtue of Valor (the other two, Wisdom and Benevolence). The storm god Susanoo is said to have cut it out of an eight-headed serpent. http://wealthydebates.com/10-of-the-worlds-greatest-lost-treasures/
We have rejected this cosmic energy source. Dr. Shlain restricts it to a female entity seated in the right brain of both males and females, which theory he validates in the rest of his fascinating book.
Learner concludes that DNA pure and simple, (from our stunted point of view, an all-powerful agent) is the material and biological originator of our ephemeral alphanumeric culture.
Public miscreants routinely condemn their opponents for crimes the miscreants and their friends have already committed. Duped by identical weapon clergymen, we have abandoned the primal faith in favor of their fantasy of an anthropomorphic and egotistic God (in their image). This incessant denial has forbidden us to soothe our psyches; it has made us strangely reluctant to care for the natural world: an obvious duty.
The Bible’s Gospel According to St. John, Ch. 1:
1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2. The same was in the beginning with God.
3. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
4. In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
5. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
6. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.
7. The same, came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe.
8. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.
9. That was the true Light, which lighteth every man which cometh into the world.
10. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.
11. He came unto his own, and his own received him not.
12. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.
13. Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
14. And the word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.
The Qran contains a Sura on this topic (The Light, An-Nur), whose similarity/dissimilarity with the initial Hebrew text is characteristic. I leave it to your interpretation. The Q’ran, 24:35, which I first noted in Albert Hourani’s A History of the Arab Peoples, (Warner Books edition, Hachette Book Group USA, New York, 1991, p. 173. Please excuse my patchwork of English and French translations.
God is the light of the heavens and the earth:
The Parable of His light
Is like a niche with a lamp
The lamp is in a crystal
And the crystal, like a glittering star
Kindled from a Blessed Tree
Its olive, neither from the East nor the West
Whose oil shines almost by itself,
Though no fire touch it;
Light upon Light --
God guides to His Light whom He will
God gives parables to human beings,
God knows everything.
I propose that prehistoric gardeners obtained Vedic guidance from shaman hallucinations. Armed with unlimited time, curiosity and patience, they exercised elementary skills like comparative anatomy and botanical chemistry, making use of technologies as simple as ceramics and pottery wheel centrifuges. In so doing, they would have delved deeper into genetic architecture than our genetic engineers could imagine. The key necessity: some botanical potion to strip cell walls away and expose the DNA within — then lots of time, patience and good counsel.
Those who seek to use powerful psychoactive drugs should not have taken alcohol recently. They had better join a brotherhood that bans the consumption of alcohol. Their best option would be the least alcohol with the strongest psychoactivity.
Otherwise, the combination of strong drink and powerful hallucinogens seems to trigger a violent form of social psychosis, as demonstrated by pre-Columbian blood cults, Scythian human sacrifice and the Jivaro Indians between Peru and Ecuador, famous for their shrunken heads and extermination raids; not to mention hundreds of abandoned cities in Central and South America. Ritual human sacrifice, mass cannibalism and/or total annihilation appear to result. Good luck with that!
In the USA, the refusal of a large part of the electorate to acknowledge and fix obvious threats and favor of vain fantasies of force and power, can be attributed to its massive dosages of alcohol and strong psychoactive drugs
Such abuse, by shamans and leaders especially, serves the Cosmic Serpent as an alarm signal for cumulative extermination to re-establish the ecological balance between humanity and nature imperiled for the most part by stupid failure at family planning. Almost every mass murderer used both strong drink and drugs, himself and his henchmen, as will the decision-makers of future genocides. Mass extermination, cannibalism and even collective suicide seem to be the consequence of strong spirits mixed with powerful drugs.
No thanks, pass.
To restore PeaceWorld, we must solve many looming technical problems that plague us today: pollution, infrastructure collapse, bionanotech error, weapon mishandling and many other complex interactions. To find those answers, we should explore this shaman universe methodically, without fear or prejudice.
The deadliest feature of current technologies is the weedy growth of unintended consequences. We must find “miraculous” methods to anticipate and neutralize them. They should be natural, commonplace and practical. Honoring scientific principles, any honest researcher should duplicate prior results using similar methods. New technologies must prove reliable and safe — or at least safer than equivalent “scientific” operations carried out heedless of consequences today. They would be subject to rigorous scientific standards and tool kits, plus much more open-mindedness than the current muddle.
Compared to newborn human culture, DNA is agelessly wise. Unlike fragile human civilization, DNA took the hardest hits this universe could dish out and thrived from or grew around them. Conversations with the fundamental spirit of DNA would benefit both parties. Thus, with reasonable care, both sides could avoid at least some of the unintended consequences charging at us. We should do so to avoid such fantastic perils in the future.
- ALIENS & CAVEMEN –
In order to inform yourself fully on this topic, you should review YouTube presentations by Dr. Steven M. Greer of Sirius Disclosure and his Unacknowledged movie. Warning: these are very long presentations (many hours) and info-packed. Get ready for that. They ring true to me and conform to the information I have gathered on this topic, information too confusing and voluminous to be ignored.
U R L references
At this juncture, Learner’s speculations branch out in many directions.
Interstellar space offers something like a savanna ecology, just scaled-up, and enormous abundance for those diligent and mobile enough to earn their place in it. Once we evolve beyond our vegetative, static, planetary phase; outer space promises unlimited stellar energy and hydrogen, more than enough for a plant-like, sun-powered civilization like ours, that feeds at great waste off a tiny fraction of the solar energy available.
Our present technology pegs us as microbial “decomposers”: global leaf mold, if you will. Indeed, we juggle sunlight, plants, animals and miscellaneous dirts to produce cities, armies, waste heat and light, carbon dioxide, methane, rust and hard membranes of concrete and asphalt. In so doing, we stir up a witch’s brew of toxic refuse, solid and liquid waste and megatons of human flesh.
“The pattern of human population growth in the twentieth century was more bacterial than primate. When Homo sapiens passed the six billion mark we had already exceeded by as much as a hundred times the biomass of any large animal species that ever existed on the land. We and the rest of life cannot afford another hundred years like that.” Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2002, page 29.
Humanity may break free from its Earth-bound primitivism. In that case, we may stray into the living space of other herbivorous civilizations. Let’s hope each side has graduated from its “heroic hysteria” phase of weapons atavism.
Then again, there may be predatory civilizations out there, fast, stealthy and lethal by design. “They may treat us,” Paul Lackman suggests, “the way European colonists treated the rest of the world.” I had in mind a much more lethal interaction: like that between a big fish and a smaller one, or the way a worm eats its way through the soil. Their hunger might tempt them to engulf all life that showed the least sign of weakness, down to planetary bedrock.
These days, a bubble of electromagnetic signals pulses ever louder from the Earth. As we speak, its radius spans over one hundred light years: thirty times the distance to the nearest star. This bubble is spreading at the speed of light: the radio signature of a second sun that’s not there. It includes 2,056 electromagnetic pulses from idiot-savant nuke tests, U R L reference, as well as the snap, crackle, and pop of particle accelerators.
If any ravenous entity could sort out this signal from the sizzle of the sun, they could. Our ultra-primitive radio signals might attract them, the way the bleats of a calf tucked out of sight by its mother would betray them both to hungry hyenas.
Their ingestion of the biosphere might become lethargic if we put up a proper fight to begin with. Defense against this type of predation may be the only justification for our inbred ferocity. For the same reason, rams bash each other’s skulls during ritual courtship duels — so that their offspring will better fend off mountain predators.
Robert O’Connell’s study of weapon management, Of Arms and Men, concludes that most battles are ritual duels fought between equivalent armies. They resemble courtship competition among ungulates and other beasts. Like rutting males, each army risks the injury of a tolerable number of its soldiers (cells), only to withdraw and perish unfulfilled if the affair goes south.
He dubbed this phenomenon “intra-species warfare” interspersed with “extra-species” fights during which a more heavily armed aggressor dehumanizes and exterminates its victims until weapon parity, attrition and or genocide bring on martial exhaustion.
We could face both challenges in the future, whether fighting among ourselves or among aliens.
In his compilation, A History of Warfare, John Keegan presents two kinds of warfare: true war and real war.
True war is the Clausewitzian ideal, chock-full of weapon justifications: the Chinese School of Law, Realpolitik and Machtpolitik (the politics of “realism” and power). It shows off elaborate battle preparations; the self-sacrifice, professionalism, noble bonding and peacock panoply that professional soldiers love to boast about; the elitism that lets them set themselves above non-combat ants, etc.
Real war is the art form of the bully and the tyrant. It sets loose routine massacre, vandalism, rape, terror and the degradation of conscience. It is the disgraceful way we express our reptilian neural wiring and paleomammalian reflexes that govern human fear, authoriphilia (love of authority) and aggression.
Weapon mentors take great pains to disguise real war as true war.
John Keegan characterizes as typical of Western combat, the face-to-face, fight-to-the-finish, spear point scrums “invented” by urbanized Greek farmers. He distinguishes them from cavalry missile duels fought on the steppes of ancient Asia and during industrial combat. To him, the latter are examples of “sissy” war. He favors the symmetry of steel-thorned hedges of foot soldiers harvesting each other's flesh, and of Enlightenment regiments playing “firing squad” against each other in tightly packed checkerboard squares.
This preference may be a matter of taste or perhaps atavism. Were the first “battles” waged (aside from the assassination of intimates and Freud’s murder of the father?) between small bands of hunter-gatherer-scavengers during the harvest season over precious patches of crops, clean water and fishing holes? Did they wield the first generation of weapons adapted from hunting, gleaning and fishing gear?
It may be that the primitive tactics of warfare ; a kin to fire-starting and other displays of sentience ; were first tried out as child’s play (inspired by a shaman’s crazy mimes?). The most promising games were taken up more systematically by mothers and elder sisters, then adopted by young males and made commonplace when they took over from grizzled elders who never accepted newfangled tricks in the first place. This according to The Hundredth Monkey by Ken Keyes, at URL reference.
This well-worn path of primate adaptation has been the common freeway of Learner revolution. I expect that World Peace will evolve along the same lines, once pass away those who don’t want to have anything to do with it. Hopefully, they’ll do so quietly, without burning up what’s left of the planet before they leave.
Note Hitler’s last wish: pull the whole thing down around his ears once his master plan failed: a common aspiration among failed psychopaths. It’s likely they would rather cauterize the planet if they can’t possess it entirely (read rape it, and us). Thus, climate “skeptics.”
Nations always want their warriors to attack in hand-to-hand combat; this despite their recruits’ sensible aversion to that option. Throughout ages, weapon mentality propounded the “spirit of the bayonet” regardless of the casualties on both sides. The most likely outcome of two sets of men clashing with long pointy sticks or similar weaponry is a carpet of agonizing bodies never unconscious soon enough, with both sides’ blood-crazed leaders calling for fresh troops to exploit the back and forth of mutual carnage.
Shaka Zulu punished his warriors who lost their spear in battle. He did not allow his soldiers to throw them (the customary fighting method, even among the legions); instead, they were to thrust and slash with them in close combat. It was said Shaka’s recruits could not take a wife until they had killed an enemy in battle: another sublimation of the sex drive into military violence.
The Zulus endured runaway population growth and resource depletion: the same problems we face today. So did all the South African tribes prior to the Mafai kanai (“Crushing”). Whole valleys were carpeted with human bones during this Zulu-initiated genocide of neighboring Bantu tribes, aggravated by them in turn as they fled from the Zulus. This devastation took place just after the first wave of European tribal immigrants flowed into Africa to compound its military problems.
If forced to choose between these fighting styles, one could favor the swift-mounted herder of helpless foot soldiers into petrified or routed herds ripe for slaughter. During countless mobile battles of annihilation – Carrhae, Adrianople, Angora, Liegnitz 1, Mohacs, Little Big Horn, Kursk and the Southern Golan – this aspect of the threat formula was perfected. Unlike Keegan’s pedestrian ideal, modern combat puts more emphasis on mobility, long-range missile attack and distancing from the target both physical and psychological. From this perspective, the infantry is just there to occupy terrain, deny it to the enemy, abuse local civilians and get ripped to pieces by devastating mobile firepower. Lethal drones vs. roving IED bombers serve as the latest, most relevant examples.
In the final analysis, these quibbles are secondary to the Learner intention of peace. From playground to parade ground and from kindergarten to kin der mord (baby murder), our institutions subtly lure us into the meat grinder.
Even though we may have heard a lot about the warrior king Shaka Zulu, another African leader demands our attention. Weapon mentors have ignored him while they’ve flooded the collective memory with books, movies and television programs about the warrior psychopath.
Moh-shayshway was born a prince of the Basotho in 1786. He became an angry and impatient young man. So his father sent him to study under Mohlomi, a famous chieftain who taught him dignity, self-restraint, patience and leadership. Moh-shayshway learned the value of hard work; that powerless people deserve justice, and the poor, compassion. These lessons served him well under the most trying circumstances an able ruler would face.
After a great drought brought on the mafé-kann or leefa-kann, (crushing dispersal, like ours soon to come thanks to global warming), Moh-shayshway withdrew with his people to the natural mountain fortress of Buta-Boothay. When Tlokoa tribesmen invaded his territory in overwhelming numbers, he withdrew with a few survivors to Tabah, Bosiu or Bosigo (the Mountain of the Night) from which he would never be dislodged.
His warriors captured two Tlokoa cannibals who had killed and eaten his grandfather when he fell behind during the retreat. Moh-shayshway forgave them and granted them farmland so they could give up cannibalism. He said he had to revere the resting place of his grandfather.
Thanks to a series of brilliant military campaigns and diplomatic coups, he defeated a succession of aggressors against his people. He threw back triumphant forces of the Tlokoa, the Nguni, the Ndebele Zulu (after whose defeated troops he sent cattle and rations, wishing them peace. Never again would they attack him. Voortrekkers and British Regulars. Any army too powerful for him to defeat, he would negotiate its deflection against another group. He was a better general than his enemies and a better negotiator than his neighbors. All his wars were defensive. What he held onto; he would never let go without a hard fight. He always sought peace.
He welcomed refugees from the four corners of southern Africa and multiplied his few thousand survivors twenty-fold. He forged the Basotho nation and held it together through every adversity, despite its traumatized and scattered constituents. His was perhaps the only place in South Africa where a homeless refugee and his family could find welcome, security and justice. In return they offered him their desperate loyalty and valor. No other native district thereabouts stood up so well against the tests of time and man.
In 1838, wandering priests arrived from the Evangelical Missionary Society of Paris. He welcomed them, encouraged them to create an alphabet for his language and set up schools for his people’s children; then he had them negotiate with Queen Victoria on his behalf. Though he could quote Bible verse, he never became a practicing Christian.
When the Voortrekkers finally defeated him in 1868, he put his nation under British protection. As was their habit, they stole his best land. Eventually, the truncated remainder became the modern state of Lesotho. Moshoeshoe died in 1870.
There are admirable warriors and there are the others. Learner does not suggest we despise them, rather that we change the heart of those who delude themselves that anything less than permanent peace is victory. Victory means permanent peace: anything less is of no more value than a train wreck. It insults the sacred memory of those whose life was sacrificed. Without permanent peace, there can be no victory; without victory, no honor. Without honor, there should never have been any fighting to begin with, except for the most extreme case of self-defense.
Moshoeshoe understood this fully — as the rest of us must. And, whenever possible, he accepted the Other, the unknown stranger, and bid them welcome.
It’s up to us to imitate him.
In a distant past, alien garrisons may have been posted on various orbital platforms, on a hypothetical planet orbiting beyond Mars (or around it?) that could have blown to fragments, and on others.
Astronomers assert that billions of years of gradual meteoric activity caused the random planetary craters we survey by telescope today. On the other hand, extra-solar flotillas might have herded swarms of asteroids and comets both as a shield and as a missile weapon with which to pummel planets. If this bombardment lasted months, sandwiched between million-year-long intervals of cosmic serenity, cumulative impact forces could have shattered or displaced planets, topped off or bailed out marine basins, stripped away or thickened atmospheres, shifted continents and drilled the planetary pockmarks we observe today.
Only recently, geologists concluded that the geological layers on Earth they had thought represented millennia of volcanic activity, were laid down during a few brief cataclysms and their erosive aftermath.
Venus is devoid of tectonic features and cratered with absolute randomness. It appears to have undergone a crustal failure so complete that its entire surface liquefied and turned inside out. Mars bears an enormous crater in its Southern Hemisphere, as if a moon-sized chunk had struck it there, and a reciprocal deformation of the planetary surface on the opposite side, lifted along the strike path above the average elevation of such a sphere and sucked lower around its margins. According to a consensus of astrophysicists, the Pacific Basin may have been carved out and the Moon formed by the ejection of a super-lunar mass during a similar collision between the Earth and a Mars-sized planet. Unforeseen new findings might come to light on the timing of trans-species die-offs and planetary morphology (see De Grazia, 1981).
A hail of cosmic fragments may have snuffed out the late Bronze Age civilizations of Akkad, the Old Kingdom of Egypt, Greece, Israel, India, Afghanistan and Hongshan China, all at once. A subsequent flurry, the Early Iron Age civilizations of the Mycenaeans, the Hittites, the Egyptian New Kingdom, as well as the Late Bronze Age Israel and the Shang Dynasty in China. This second kill-off took place a thousand years after the first one. Once again, it smashed all of its victims almost simultaneously. Otherwise, could we be talking about a super El Niño? The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, at U R L reference, is a good source of material on this topic.
It is interesting to picture the interactive effects of a relatively modest asteroid or comet (thus more frequent if natural and less problematic if wielded as a weapon) diving into one of the Earth’s seismic fault lines or volcanic hot spots. Enormous lahar-beds in India and Siberia may have formed in this manner, as well as Java's explosive separation from Sumatra.
Other cosmic collisions scored civilization-wrecking Tilts on the terrestrial pinball. Psychiatrist Immanuel Velikovski (Worlds in Collision) speculated that a massive celestial pass-by took place some 3,500 years ago. The planetary turmoil it overshadowed could have included the Exodus. The scientific community dismissed his findings. In like manner, positivist reactionaries (“I am positive you’re wrong.”) dismissed the first reasonable speculations about plate tectonics, as well as many more scientific hypotheses that turned out to be correct despite their denials.
One of these days, I may draft a chapter on the official sabotage of scientific truths in favor of a well-funded status quo already confirmed to be wrong. At least those instances I could recover. Chapter? Archives rather! Check out those decrepit minds described above, who won’t learn anything new and will forbid anyone else from doing so, as long as they can get away with it. Intellectual psychopaths who ruin the knowledge of their victims rather than their life and happiness.
Of late, speculation has revolved around the idea that the volcanic explosion of Thera or Santorini, and the Bible's Exodus may have been simultaneous events (in 1628, 1400 or 1200 BCE, depending on the source ; the preferred date seems to vary with skirt hemlines). The ten Plagues of Egypt, as well as the parting of the “Red Sea,” may have been after-effects of this titanic explosion. Leon Pomerance seems to have spearheaded this idea.
I wonder why records of those Plagues don’t include a Cinemascope portrayal of a tidal wave sweeping in from the Mediterranean into the valley of the Nile, drowning Egyptian civilians by the million and perhaps the Hebrews as well before anyone could get away.
Simcha Jacobovici directed a fascinating documentary film, The Exodus Decoded, in which he merges the Hyksos and the Jews into one historic people, and explains the Ten Plagues of Egypt and the drowning of the Egyptian Army during the Exodus as outcomes of the eruption of Santorini. See U R L reference.
The Minoans in exchange for the Jews?
That would bring into new perspective Arthur C. Clarke's haunting short story, "The Star." It describes a space research expedition that came home from Star of Bethlehem. Its science crew discovered that when the star went nova, it fried the civilization that orbited around it, whose civilization perished so that people on Earth could observe the star of Bethlehem’s flare-up around the day Jesus was born.
My brother-in-law, Billy Graham (a fine musician and video producer, not the departed preacher of the same name), believes it was the comet that appeared twice to the Magi – once before and once after its orbit around the sun – and directed them toward Jesus' manger in Bethlehem. He commemorated the event with a silver medallion. U R L reference. This interpretation of Matthew 2 is feasible. The star appears to have guided the Magi twice in different directions, before and after their summons to Herod’s court.
There followed the Plague of Justinian in 542. Massive mortality spoilt the Byzantine Empire’s last opportunity to renew itself. A volcanic eruption (or a meteor strike on a tectonic soft spot?) tore the island of Java from Sumatra. Terse local records mention horrific casualties. This titanic explosion caused a nuclear winter whose chill seeped into the tropical headwaters of the Nile. It set off one of the first non-biblical pandemics on the Western record.
The Plague of Athens comes to mind, prior, as do a few more plagues mentioned in the Bible. Many more local and perhaps regional epidemics must have taken hold, as many more as there were human towns and trade networks: so many used Petrie dishes and tongue depressors scattered across the planet.
Around Lake Victoria, fleas became vectors of plague because abnormal frosts activated the bacteria they carried in their guts, otherwise harmless in the muggy tropics. Luxury ivory imports passed this plague on to Constantinople and from there by commercial and military transport to the remainder of the Roman empire. This plague spared peripheral barbarians and struck urban victims instead ; it allowed Arab Muslims to overcome Byzantine Orthodox Christians and their Persian Zoroastrian adversaries who had cross-infected each other during prior wars. David Keys presents this fascinating thesis in Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World, Ballantine Publishing Group, 2000.
Another conundrum. If Jurassic Earth was uniformly tropical (its oceans ten degrees warmer than ours today), what prevented monstrous hurricanes from wearing down the coastline to bedrock? Could these storms explain the remnants of Paleolithic ecosystems discovered flash-buried under what appear to be tons of storm-tossed sediment?
We may have to cope with comparable Grand Chaos cyclones, now that we’ve poked the global warming beast awake. It is quite likely that human fertility – with its infinite complexities and subtleties – will crash in response to the environmental variables of Grand Chaos. I would rather we had chosen to reduce our numbers peacefully and in good order as well-informed Learners. Then again, my hope is constantly disappointed that institutional stupidity will loosen its death grip on humankind.
For example, I note the pointy head of collective stupidity raising up once again to propose – well financed and thus always louder – so-called geo-engineering projects that would mask the world heat-death that our industrial exploitation brought about, without moderating it in any way. On the contrary. “Let’s just transform the Earth’s atmosphere into that of Venus and see what happens!” I wonder if the same stupidity, nursed so tenderly on Earth, achieved a similar outcome on Venus: all the mighty works of its civilization’s reduced to slag for quick profit?
Outer space may also hold omnivorous civilizations poised to study, hunt, domesticate and enslave us. In short, they might inflict on us the same indignities we reserve for less well-organized prey. The biblical allegory of the shepherd and his flock troubles me. Sooner or later, the former fleeces and butchers the latter.
Then again, these alien omnivores may resemble Federation emissaries like those portrayed in the Star Trek television show: stuffy interstellar bureaucrats intent on some contrarian ideal of meddlesome non-interference. In that case, immediate contact with aliens would be with roving bandits, while more ethical beings hid themselves more or less effectively from view.
We may be under cosmic quarantine: a fitting penalty for our rabid behavior. Sun-hopping civilizations might adhere to pure peace mentality. Contact with yammering humanity would seem like pouring boiling water on one’s skin, a painful gesture carefully avoided, at least until the liquid had cooled to tolerable levels. “For the time being, sink or swim alone; we’ll take this up with you once again after you have matured a little.”
Another alternative? Our governments were notified that if a majority of humans convince themselves that aliens really exist, those aliens will simply sterilize this planet, in the same offhand manner we would fumigate a home infested with insects. Problem solved, if not very peacefully from our point of view. It might be a question of politics: Democratic aliens in favor of treating humanity like an interesting ecology, versus Republicans who’d rather exterminate us like wolves threatening their livestock. This might explain why world leaders distort the truth on this topic so shamelessly.
In any case, the worst way to greet aliens, friendly or otherwise, is divided among ourselves. Over and over, history teaches that internal discord is the quickest route to disaster when alien cultures collide. First, massive injustice and civil war wear down the victim from within, then exploitative outsiders take over with relative ease after they let enraged locals do most of the killing for them.
Let’s expand on this subject for clarification’s sake. Imperialist invaders find it easier to knock off a centralized power rather than a conglomeration of smaller, independent power hubs that must be subdued one by one. So an alien invader would rather its planetary target were ruled by one totalitarian and therefore vulnerable government rather than many independent ones. Knock out the corrupt central power and take over its control system to finance your own: that’s the most successful formula for takeover.
Learner Laocracy would foil such a plot indefinitely. While a one-world empire would be vulnerable to foreign subversion and military conquest (in proportion to its corruption and injustice), the Learner World Militia would remain under local control and independent of centralized command, thus even more intractable than two hundred competing nation-states. Regional control hubs will claim their own ethnic and cultural loyalties, above and beyond a merely national one; they will be just as devoted to honesty and justice as the central Learner core would be.
Few other systems of planetary governance would provide a better defense against planetary piracy, whether by hypothetical aliens or the next, inevitably human conspiracies of greed. Not to mention our problems of planetary ecology and poverty that the leaders of our nation-states refuse to address.
In our dealings with aliens, three intellectual pitfalls await us.
1. We might treat them like ourselves and ignore their unique aspirations, desires and fears.
2. We may demonize them. In refusing to recognize their valid motives, we may try to cause them harm. That would force them to isolate us or make war on us in self-defense. This may be the current reality, driven on our side by government paranoia and reflexive suppression of relevant facts; and on theirs by unknown technologies that hide them from our view.
3. The third interaction, deification. It has rarely been practiced with respect to fellow humans (always fatally), but could be carried out indiscriminately with respect to interstellar contacts. Endowed with acute technologies and inscrutable motives, they might seem godlike to us. We might view enslavement at their hands as fair punishment for our sins instead of plain bad luck in the cosmic lottery. We could accept everything they told us as divine inspiration. In short, their shit might not stink in our nostrils; it might even be addictive to us. In addition, they might prove conclusively that they or their predecessors were responsible for historical interventions we had always assumed were “divine.” Awkward! Millennial cults predispose their adherents to such self-delusion, as when the Spaniards exterminated the gullible Aztecs. If your goal is to take over a newly discovered civilization, you would do everything in your power to impersonate its most revered deities.
The USA’s weapon dominance tempts us to control the world of the poor. The Aztecs fell into a similar trap. Supremely confident on their own turf, they oppressed their neighbors with the delicate brutality of their Flower Wars. This kind of warfare entailed wounding and capturing adversaries for cannibal butchery later on. It optimized the use of hard wood and razor-sharp obsidian weapons, as opposed to our weapons and tactics of fire and steel, good for nothing but immediate mass murder.
Aztec weapons elites wound up feeding their core population thousands of human sacrifices per week. In the same way, transglobal managers humiliate and victimize entire nations to exploit their mineral, forest and fisheries reserves and cash crops, while suffering minimal casualties among their mercenaries and none at all among themselves.
The outcome of this institutional shadism? A few hundred European free booters, armed to the teeth, led a horde of disgruntled Indian allies against the Aztecs. Together, they invaded the Aztec capital, seized and executed its ruler. A ferocious counterattack sent them reeling. Then they returned to exploit this New World civilization melting away from Old World epidemics.
A few extraterrestrial free booters might deal with us with equal savagery: recruit our bitter enemies abroad and disenfranchised minorities at home, and return us the favor of our prior abuse. American Conspirators of Greed would find such a twist of fate hard to accept, given their arrogant past. They might collaborate with the invaders, regardless of the cost to their subordinates. For the same reason, some Silk Road monarchs collaborated with the Mongols, some Europeans with the Nazis, and some African chieftains with slavers. Ah, the glorious legacy of profit-motive psychopaths!
Another weapon myth is the notion that human spear teams crossed the Bering Straits dry-shod about ten thousand years ago, exterminating dominant fauna across the Americas. They wielded stone-tipped spears: chipped obsidian Clovis and later, stemmed spearheads cunningly grooved into wooden shafts to detach upon impact and remain stuck in the body. Their prey was said to have included twenty-foot imperial mammoth, sixteen-foot ground sloth, one-ton beaver, saber tooth tigers smaller than a lion but twice as heavy, packs of dire wolves weighing hundreds of pounds each, and short-faced bears six feet tall at the shoulder on four legs, that could gut a bison with ease. Our tank-like grizzly bears would have been middleweight predators in this pumped-up ecology.
Even further back in time, our ancestor, Australopithecus afarensis, had to face the same problem in spades. These child-sized human precursors occupied African savannas swarming with gorilla-sized baboons, double-sized rhinos, hippo-sized wild pigs and equally monstrous predators. I’ve asked myself how huge and nasty snakes must have grown in those days. Twenty-foot mambas? Foot-wide rock vipers?
Barbara Ehrenreich raises the same point in her book, Blood Rites (Metropolitan Books, New York, 1997). She concludes that our devotion – whether to bloodthirsty gods, insane ideologies or warfare in general – is based on psychic traumas endured during hundreds of thousands of years. Back then, humans were easy prey for saber tooth tigers: sluggish, tasty cat food on the hoof; soft and chewy on the outside, pleasantly crunchy and juicy within.
This ceaseless torment of predation fear awoke a spirit of self-sacrifice in our ancestors, that served them well at first. It drove suicide commandos of berserker human teenagers into banzai charges against an unstoppable predator dismembering the human tribe at leisure.
We honor those martial talents. For example, adrenaline-induced strength enhancement and time dilation; intense physical training by means of hazing, humiliation and terror; cold-blooded, microscopic battle planning; group success through individual sacrifice; mystical defiance of danger, fear, pain and suffering, not to mention cancelling the will to live: these attributes promoted human survival despite ferocious conditions.
But these large cats eventually disappeared. By what mysterious means? Such fearsome predators would have thrived against the banzai charges of their kibble-beasts.
The tribal domestication of saber tooth kittens (other first tier predator cubs) may have solved this problem.
The latest theory proposes that a big rock fell out of space onto an Earth glacier (thus no trace of the impact remains) about ten thousand years ago and sterilized the Western Hemisphere of Clovis man (named for his signature spear points) as well as all those big beasts all at once. It was recolonized by the first American-Indians and the wildlife found in contemporary zoos. All the first-tier predators and herbivores died on two continents North and South; it preserved some of the second-tier, and left a second wave of humans after wiping out the first. That was very micro-surgical selectivity for such a planetary hammer blow! Just like other recorded extinction events and the miraculous selection of their survivors. Smells fishy!
Humanity got trapped in a sacred species mutation from prey to first rank predator. Lacking locus for its mortal anxieties, we found no better nemesis to worship and stalk than ourselves.
Dr. Ehrenreich describes the bond that battle elites (my term) share with their victims hosts. Depending on social complexity, they are either predators and prey (Learner’s Level Two) or parasites and hosts (Levels Three and Four). Learner concludes that the ultimate relationship would be as co-equal symbionts peacefully integrated (Level Five).
Once upon a time, I saw a striking television documentary. During this gloomy show, a pride of lions stalked a herd of Cape buffalo. Enraged, the bulls counter-attacked the big cats, chased them up some thorn trees and besieged them there until dark. The humbled pride fled from its tormentors and beat a nighttime retreat across a flat desert plain. In the early morning gloom – as we watched by starlight scope – more buffalo crossed their path and routed them once again. The angry cattle trampled two lion cubs despite their mom’s desperate attempts at diversion. Under similar circumstances, a human spear team – slow moving, more vulnerable and requiring much more time to mature – would have been summarily blotted out.
It is one thing to sit in a soft armchair (as I am doing now) and talk about chasing a mammoth over a cliff edge and into a convenient crevasse over and over again. It would be another to face these oversized specimens 24 7 across clear terrain without big rifles and high-power ammo, jeeps and plenty of clean water.
Exactly how were we supposed to dispatch these creatures, with bare hands and brittle stone flakes glued to a stick? We are talking about fifteen-foot cave bears and packs of super-wolves as massive as lions and ferocious as the monsters that haunt our nightmares.
Intimately familiar with their territory and the habits of none-too-bright buffalo, well-established Amerindian tribes got away with something like that at much better odds; even though they never really succeeded until they got hold of horses and guns from the Western world ; and then all too briefly afterwards.
Stampeding a herd of shy herbivores over a cliff edge, that might work for a few territorial hunters intimately familiar with their prey. But it would be implausible for footloose nomads crossing unknown territory and facing unfamiliar species. The problem remains: how to stampede herds over cliff-edges and not over your vulnerable campsite and squishy, slow moving troops.
Africans, the intimate neighbors of elephants, have an expression for them: “They don’t think like animals, but like enemies.” Besides, elephants have always been a massive meat on the hoof resource for protein-starved natives.
Humans weren’t the only pack predators who employed such ambush tactics. They probably learned them from feral dogs that hunt in relays. Besides, primitive man could cover long distances for days on end, tracking down his prey faster than it could flee. Animals are good at short bursts of speed but slower than men during daylong plods.
With good reason, migratory animals instinctively shunned such geological traps. Their primeval grazing corridors would have led them away from these precipices. That type of optimal hunting zone, constantly revisited by stupid herds, would not have been frequent and dependable enough to serve as way stations for human migrants.
African Pygmies thrust spears into the underbelly of elephants, according to Paul Lackman, exploiting the thick concealment and neurotoxins that jungle vegetation provided. Nonetheless, even once they had equipped themselves with steel assegais, Masai tribesmen took heroic casualties to protect beloved cattle from smaller, modern hunting cats.
But newcomers, armed with nothing more than sticks and precious stones, confronting endless hordes of monsters across featureless terrain, much of it flat and barren? No way, not without prohibitive casualties. Go ahead, invoke any atlacatl (spear thrower) technology you fancy. In the long run, casualties would outpace your human pack’s ability to replace them with much slower-growing, more vulnerable and far more precious children.
Renaissance soldiers traded deadly crossbows and compound reflex bows for expensive firearms that were unreliable and unsafe to use. They turned out to be slower to reload and harder to shoot. In skilled hands, a military bow was more accurate, had a faster rate of fire and a longer effective range. A big unit of archers could mow down its equivalent of harquebusiers long before the latter could fire on them.
I’ve learned, since, from le Cajun on YouTube, that massed French artillery mowed down English archers and armored knights during the endgame of the Hundred Years War; newly mobile French cavalry ran down the former from behind, and regular armored infantry, raised from companies of village-pillaging “skinners” (écorcheurs), massacred what remained of the latter by pole-axe.
New soldiers relied on the fearsome flash, bang and smoke that guns produced and the horrific wounds fat bullets caused. Bows are noiseless, as are at la cattle spear throwers. Were expert bowyers replaced by gunsmiths who found that trade more profitable? Each weapon system requires a different set of fabrication skills. Did archers disappear in a few generations, K I A or too old, replaced by young sons who favored the new weapon?
Some historians assert that gun play is easier than the bow and arrow. Keeping a primitive gun clean and in good working condition, keeping the powder dry and using it effectively under fire without harm to yourself and your fellows, juggling a slow-burning match and an open flask of loose gunpowder, all the while standing out in the open under preferential enemy fire and cold steel assault (Kill the gunmen first!): those skills would have called for just as much hard-earned experience.
Archeologists have retrieved a few stone blades from dug-up mammoth carcasses. However, those tiny blades could not have brought down onrushing monsters before they flattened their puny human tormentors. Those shards may have served as appetizer knives lost during a frenzied butchery, used to tease the flesh from carcasses deceased from other causes. What other causes? Now there’s an interesting question.
Imagine you were the leader of a fifty-forager Neolithic band. Actually, that would be too large a group to feed dependably. During one bad season, it would starve out, cannibalize itself into extinction or fly apart. Let’s keep it that big in any case and say that several independent groups merged during the seasonal hunt for big game.
How would you react if each new hunt cost you additional human casualties? Make a diligent count of your human assets and their replacement rate.
The reek of human kills and shit would attract scavenger packs and large rogue predators. As circling buzzards drew them irresistibly, a steep price would have to be paid to kill them off or merely hold them at bay. Guarding its kills, your exhausted spear team would have to confront every predator from miles downwind, day-in and day-out, for as long as you could hold out. These New World predators would have no fear of man; humans would have to teach it to them the hard way, at the cost of precious human lives.
Carnivores and big grazers would threaten elders left behind in camp and children sent out to forage. These people would need additional guards taken from the hunting party. Let’s see: guards for the workers of the hearth, mothers and babes; more guards for scattered berry pickers and mouse hunters. You’d be down to half of your people for a long-range hunt. Factor out the sick and the lame and you’d be down to a half-dozen or so of your strongest people for long and arduous hunts. No sense bringing dead weight along.
Now, let’s see you stampede a herd of mammoths (or a rogue charger) with a half-dozen people brandishing pointy sticks. Fire might offer temporary refuge around a fixed point, but none during big moves or long hunts.
Figure it out for yourself, or go ask a real hunter, as I have. They just shrug their shoulders. Only a desk-bound academic could contemplate such a thing.
One thoughtful anthropologist, Professor Bruce Huckle, conducted a test. Problem: butcher a circus elephant dead from old age. Method: gather a few grad students, stone tools and some leather cord. The carcass turned out to be so heavy, Bruce’s team couldn’t roll it over to get at the bottom half. It began to rot within hours. In olden times, swarming with vermin and inaccessible to human butchers, it would have attracted every carnivore from miles downwind. Kill the closest one and the next closest would come sniffing around, and so on.
It is too easy to talk about immobilizing prey in bogs; that would just worsen the problem. Could there be a less sanitary butcher shop than a shallow bog used time and again as an ambush site, slaughter pen and offal sump? Accessible water holes already attract big predators. Now, let’s fill it with large rotting carcasses and see whose curiosity gets aroused.
Not to mention fatal pandemics these human super hunters would have unleashed upon themselves during such ecocidal treks. The annihilation of established species would have discharged their toughest microbes into humans: Neolithic Ebola! Catastrophes of this kind would have befallen expanding waves of migrants in touch with camps established earlier: a gradualist response to the above objection, unsupported by archaeological evidence.
Disease would have thrived just as readily among scattered hunter-gatherers as among dense-packed townies. Birds, insects and rodents would have spread infections just as quickly.
My far-out conclusion? Some human vs. monster nightmares may have been real-life predicaments our ancestors survived, registered into genetic memory and passed on to us. Each of us may harbor in our genes and dreams the inherited history of our ancestors human and otherwise. The collective superconscience could retain a global readout of life since its inception.
The adrenalin rush we experience watching movies like Alien, Predator, Jaws, etc. – as well as childhood panic attacks from monster nightmares – may be dream reenactments of scary scenarios our ancestors survived, recorded into DNA and transmitted to their progeny.
J G Ballard is in part responsible for this speculation. Apparently, L. Ron Hubbard entertained similar notions.
If we could tap into this marvel, we might recall the history of terrestrial life in its entirety, supplement the flimsy fantasies of recorded history and empty dreams of past-life with the total recall of the past genetically recorded; replace the pipe dream of a clockwork time machine with the full potential of human DNA, the ultimate recording medium both in volume of data assimilated and fidelity of duplication over long stretches of time. In-depth hypnosis could help us explore this hypothesis.
Another conclusion, stranger still. If human beings did cross the Bering Strait dry-shod from Siberia; big predators, super droughts and decade-long blizzards would have killed most of them. Feel free to bring up kayak-born hunters hugging the coastline, driven there by unexpected storms or intentional expeditions; but what about the women and kids? Flotillas of young couples?
Wary aliens may have nurtured the toughest of these explorers, massacred local fauna and left its carcasses for survivors to consume. Could a team of aliens have vaccinated our ancestors against epidemics, given them biodegradable shelters and safe transport to milder climes further south? From then on, did it intervene for good or ill when it judged that humanity strayed too far from its developmental ideal?
Could what we call God have been an alien matriarchy that nursed humanity through its pathetic infancy? For the time being, does it tolerate our James Dean juvenile delinquency and chaperone us through our James Bond militarism under a threadbare cloak of self-advertised anonymity?
Who knows? Could it be that the community we call “God” is just an alien hunt club: a gaggle of jock trophy hunters of the type we mass-produce here on Earth? As it stands, human hunters swarm the trifling wildlife habitat we had not got around to ruin. Nowadays, sport hunting is as acceptable as target practice on the statues in an art museum, à la Daesh. In the extremity of our weapons addiction, a primetime newscast of this type of vandalism would come to us as no surprise.
Did some remote agency regulate these big-game hunters in our favor? Was humanity declared a protected species — due to our potential? Did a policy of licensed hunting leave providential spoils behind on which our ancestors could gorge, plus unoccupied continents for them to explore?
Does all that sound farfetched? What other alternative have you got? Could human flesh have been toxic for big predators? Have we forgotten some magical survival skill that mankind once mastered: teleportation or telekinesis?
Picture us as cavemen. Let’s say you could magically project yourself onto the shoulders of a mastodon, hoisting a big rock with both hands and bringing it crashing down on his head. Now, there’s my kind of Neolithic hunting! But there’d still be unsustainable casualties.
A major reevaluation of human prehistory is overdue to set straight the myth of stone-tipped spear huntsmen exterminating entire species of multi-ton animals, overcoming Arctic blizzards on the move and avoiding epidemics by miracle ; all that without intelligent assistance.
Recall that the mildest spots on the Antarctic are sterile except for lichens, microorganisms and sea creatures; deadly cold and barren for all but the most experienced and well-equipped modern explorers. There are no natives on Antarctica. Back then, the Bering Passage would have resembled it closely.
Recognizable civilization and sentience may have been so rare in cosmic space-time that none remains nearby. That does not seem very likely. The acorn falls close to the tree. Might this desert masquerade have been the deliberate intent of unseen sentiency?
Among others, four fates may have befallen advanced extraterrestrial civilizations and veiled them from our view.
· They optimized their energy manipulation so as to emit little or no electromagnetic noise and waste energy (making use of it instead) — in a way we consider impossible according to our energy conservation laws and black box models. What’s that? Could our prized scientific dogmas prove to be horribly wrong? Probably so, given the fate of precursor dogmas considered just as perfect.
· Or more likely: reaching the terminus of the same weapon railway we’re speeding down now, without switching to another track leading away from inevitable military extinction.
· Or some cosmic hiccup snuffed them.
· Or the lack of alien life in a universe that should be full of it confirms our suspicion that the universe is a virtual reality programmed by a prior civilization to contain us like lightning bugs in a jar, or, more accurately, fighting scorpions. “Earthlings! Amuse us with your endless, meaningless wars!” This alien intelligence would only confront us as an existential threat once we had united in peace and stopped being the subject of wagers on every scale from criminal duels to the downfall of civilizations.
Given these possibilities, guarding alien radio frequencies might be about as sensible as lounging along a Manhattan gutter and expecting a message in a bottle cast-off from a beach in Hawaii.
Some other communication technology, superior to the radio, must be commonplace among them, and the radio we play with so intently, a dead-end or a child's toy. The electronic equivalent of twigs monkeys use to tease tasty tidbits from a termite mound. Miraculous and brilliant ; for a monkey.
Rasmus Bjork, a researcher at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, hypothesized that an alien intelligence could disperse self-replicating robot probes to discover life in its galaxy, spend the entire duration of that galaxy in so doing and not discover all the havens of life and sentiency within it. Sentient beings must be few and far between, at least until humanity launches out into a nearly empty universe and colonizes it, the way our ancestors crossed whole continents uninhabited otherwise.
Then again, could we exploit this space-time displacement to our advantage, find alien artifacts out there, that would reveal our distant past and remote future?
This fate may befall us, or nothing of the sort. We Learners who care, are itching to get out there and find out. Fellow Learners, PeaceWorld offers us the best means to do that.
One fine morning, a few thoughtful Europeans awoke lightning-struck to the realization that the world was round instead of flat and that its known surface had expanded enormously.
Every once in a while, I ask myself if physical reality materializes in parallel with our understanding of it; if prior universes are complete manifestations only slightly more complex than our current understanding of them. In other words, as humanity came to terms with Copernican, Newtonian, Einstein’s, Quantum and other descriptions of reality, the Universe evolved from simpler forms (nested crystal spheres, for example, overseen by manlike godlings from storm clouds and secluded mountaintops) to accommodate our latest visualization of it. A universe flexible enough to reflect our collective imagination, a funhouse mirror maze of the human intellect. Ah, idealism pursued to dizzying heights!
We may soon come to realize that one of several (many? Seven?) dimensions beyond space and time may be intent. In other words, Life intends to grow and die and thus travels down the dimension of intent to grow and die, carrying along with it the three dimensions of space and the one perpendicular to them we recognize as time. We intend to annihilate ourselves militarily and thus jaywalk in that direction. This book suggests that we choose World Peace instead: finding our way down divergent dimensions from the ones that unfold from WeaponWorld.
This fifth dimension would more likely be the synthesis of intent and result; the way our current dimensions synthesize high low, near far, left right and former latter.
Of course, scientists dismiss intent for the simple reason they see a four-dimensional snapshot of reality, the way we use a two-dimensional map to visualize the Rocky Mountains in three. How convenient for them! “Speaking scientifically, we have determined, at least enough to convince you, that mountains don’t have any altitude since they’re flat on every map we’ve studied meticulously.”
Such Learner reflections might liberate us from our least convincing primitivisms; the exploration of outer space, reveal to us that the universe unfolds under our gaze like a cosmic lotus: a laboratory maze whose many pathways we may not walk with confidence until we’ve civilized (and ecologized?) ourselves.
- DOCTORS WITHIN BORDERS -
First draft, over twenty years ago. To every reference to AIDS, please add "and COVID".
“Should medicine ever fulfill its great ends, it must enter into the larger political and social life of our time, it must indicate the barriers which obstruct the normal completion of the life cycle and remove them. Should this ever come to pass, medicine, whatever it may then be, will become the common good of all.” Rudolph Vir chow quote in The World Encyclopedia of Peace, Volume III, page 362.
There should be ten times more medics where there are plenty of them already and a thousand times more where they are few and far between.
The most important but the least appreciated benefit of this medical reinforcement will become apparent for the duration of the next global pandemic. Instead of collapsing once a third or more of healthcare providers fall sick, this service will rapidly ramp up the number of available hospital beds by recruiting newly trained healthcare providers to replace losses among everyday hospital staff. Otherwise, we will face this 21st century challenge with 19th century means of care and corresponding losses.
Learners of healing should address a broad spectrum of human conditions, most of which are neglected today. These treatments will range from internal factors (psychic and physical) to external ones (social and environmental). Learners will pay equal heed to each of them.
Robust public health promotes human genius; failure to improve it lowers a civilization’s IQ and multiplies its other troubles. Those will decrease to a fraction of their current bulk in proportion to that improvement.
To fulfill that mandate, Learners will legislate a universal healthcare system constitutionally guaranteed of high quality. Privileged corporations, (insurance, pharmaceutical, teaching, nursing care, etc.) will be stripped of healthcare profits and converted into public utilities. Psychic and other forms of alternate healing will be studied in depth, especially the preventive benefits of good sleep and hydration, thoughtful micronutrition and body micro-ecology.
These days, only a third of American doctors have signed up with the American Medical Association. Its innate conservatism spells its doom and it is gradually fading away as we speak.
In truth, its membership may rise once again, based on the recent waves of recruitment of American doctors trained for perpetual war. I am probably being too optimistic about this decline.
By hook or by crook, right-wingers have swept what’s best off the American buffet table. Reactionary chic is all the rage these days, complete with pointless wars overseas and disasters at home, leaders handpicked for ineptitude, ambidextrous handouts to the rich, and fraud at every level of government. Is there any crime or misdemeanor these people have not perfected? They keep insisting that government must be incompetent. Man, how thoroughly they’ve confirmed their own claim to ineptitude! No other group could serve as a better example of dogmatic incompetence.
The AMA recruited its first adherents from bloody-aproned military surgeons who received their weapons catechism in the 1860s during the American Civil War. In unholy alliance with startup drug companies, the AMA suppressed its sister discipline, homeopathy. Early in the 1800s, Samuel Hannemann had brought back to life the idea that certain drugs, administered in infinitesimal doses, could induce specific sets of signs and symptoms and cure ailments with similar ones.
Despite homeopathy’s early success, the AMA championed allopathic therapy that prescribed drugs in massive doses strictly to suppress symptoms (at or just below toxic levels, don’t mention toxic interactions!) . Even though homeopathic hospitals and colleges flourished up until then, the AMA and allied drug companies hounded most of them out of existence by World War II (sic).
As in the case of weapon religions, AMA conservatism exhausted whatever usefulness it could once claim. These days, the main goal of AMA conservatives is to boost their profits by denying the automatic delivery of high-quality healthcare to everyone except the rich and the military.
Weapon medicine attacks disease and trauma deliberately inflicted. Soldiers in the field suffer like mistreated farm animals. Out in the weather and layered in filth, they devour whatever garbage they can loot, dig from the ground or drag up from the rear. In combat, the daily routine involves agonizing casualties, pandemic infection, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, exposure, malnutrition, grief, frustration, fear, rage, separation anxiety and psychiatric emergencies. In addition, seniority and combat survival determine who gets promoted among military leaders. Therefore, military surgeons do their best with the tools they have at their disposal: crude drugs and sharps, to suppress their patients’ signs and symptoms of illness, trauma and old age, as well as emotional reactions.
From weapon medicine’s point of view, reducing stress to promote health is absurd. Instead, warrior societies practice social triage, isolation of patients and post-insult, high-stress invasive treatments. No such medical system can maintain the health of a population undergoing greater and greater stress. As overall health deteriorates, medical expenses skyrocket. After all, there is no “rear area” toward which to evacuate casualties for better treatment, and no stream of replacements in good health to suffer their abuse in turn. Hospitals turn into incubators of every infection strange and ordinary, and wind up killing nearly as many patients as they save.
Western medicine evolved just off the battlefield. Alexander the Gross brought surgeons along with his much lauded, pincushion Macedonian phalanx. Occidental medics didn’t seriously investigate oriental acupuncture until after French military surgeons followed their Army into Indochina. The American Army didn’t establish a semi-adequate “Golden Hour” of helicopter emergency response until the Korean and Vietnam Wars. As a gesture of mercy, Napoleon’s senior surgeons equipped horse-drawn ambulances with sprung axles. Prior to that, such accommodations only cushioned the delicate behind of healthy nobles.
Space-age ambulances bounce screaming or shock- and dope-zombified casualties down our bullet-swept, crash-strewn streets. More people die on our highways than in our wars, and far more in those overseas. Every war on this planet, every insurrection, every redundant massacre of innocents, every suicide explosion and car wreck is one more “too many” and largely avoidable despite everything we've been told.
Even today, the medical community hasn't decided whether to keep shock victims warm under blankets or pump their chest with a freezing cocktail of lifesaving fluids. Flash-cooled victims of trauma and drowning seem to retain a longer survival rate, delayed bleed-out, greater resistance to infection (look out for gangrene after frostbite!) and extended immunity from brain death while they await delayed but crucial care from doctors out of reach. British combat surgeons documented this capacity among wounded patients during the Falklands War; as did army doctors during the invasion of Murmansk, Russia, by Allied forces in 1918, among others.
Victorian era tropical medicine and insect eradication programs protected white colonial garrisons, only aboriginal peoples as an afterthought (and many of those not even today.) Yellow fever and other tropical infections were finally conquered for that reason alone. This racist neglect continues today. It engenders, among other abuses, the mass genocide of AIDS that is engulfing Africa and the poorest corners of Asia. AIDS has spread, predictably enough, into every poor neighborhood on Earth: just like terrorism has. Once all those Third World babies, child parents and twenty-something grandparents succumb to AIDS, mass terror or mere malnutrition, they won’t require so much pesky international aid, now will they?
Sooner or later, this bias will summon similar plagues down on our First World heads. The best global public health results from that achieved at great distance from the richest nations. If you can ensure that someone living at the antipodes of your world benefits from public healthcare comparable to your own at the time, your own will improve correspondingly.
Today, much more research money goes to cure the trivial complaints of rich societies (baldness, geriatric impotence, foot fungus and pet neuroses) than lethal tropical diseases.
The underlying causes of most of these diseases – chronic malnutrition and bad water – have been ignored or even fostered.
Almost every war in Africa since the Cold War has shared this feature in common. It involved corporate monopoly of a poor country’s profitable export: diamonds, timber, oil or some other monoculture or rare mineral resource. The revenue from these kinds of enterprises ebbs and flows unpredictably and cannot be used to buy out these problems once and for all. Their exploiters refuse their obligation to overcome these problems and cease to profit (poorly) from them.
Simple autarky in those countries (self-sufficiency, which means good food and water produced locally) will blunt most of those wars. I can hear officials of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund scream bloody murder rather than allow this to happen. Learners will suggest that they change their mind: swiftly and with gusto. They will discover, a little late but beyond dispute, that this new policy pays much better. Practical charity pays much better than their WeaponWorld today. Who knew?
Weapon medicine took off during the Great Paroxysm (World War I, sic) when most doctors did a medical rotation through years of combat internship. If not World War I (sic), then WWII (sick); and if not those, other wars since. As a result, general practitioners vanished, most physicians became specialists, home visits were cut short, health services became hospital routines and preventive healthcare was dismissed as irrelevant.
This recession to the militarist mean is not hard to understand. On a battlefield, honest caregivers would instruct their patients to drop their weapons and go home. Weapon elites are not amused by these instructions unless their foes adopt them unilaterally.
I’m counting on everyone to adopt them. Once that happens, we will see how much global health improves! I’ve heard that high quality healthcare could be delivered to everyone on Earth for something like the price of a year of the war in Iraq under Bush the Lesser: easily affordable if every country on Earth contributes.
Instead, we submit to the paradoxical, hypocritical, ruinous and disease-aggravating medical mismanagement of WeaponWorld.
A peace-oriented medical community will train many more deliverers of basic first aid and cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR). There will be a tremendous increase of home health care providers, including personal aides, masseurs, acupuncturists, physical therapists, emergency medical technicians, hospice care-givers, pharmacists, nurses, physician assistants, chiropractors, naturopaths, homeopaths, shamans, healers, herbalists and other specialists.
Could we foresee a healthier society with so many more caregivers? A lot of them are in preparation today, yet their training is incoherent and chaotic. This confusion betrays reductive and fragmentary attempts by decrepit WeaponWorld to apply holistic, PeaceWorld solutions to its problems, even as they worsen. Those fixes are doomed to fail because their application is too localized and fragmentary. Except for its weapons projects, WeaponWorld forbids the pragmatic holism that PeaceWorld demands.
Learners of healing will practice their skills on-site, up to but not exceeding their level of expertise. Their qualifications will establish which of an incremental pharmacopoeia of remedies and treatments these successors of “barefoot doctors” may administer, and who among them will deliver in-depth diagnoses involving many more consultations and referrals. Particular attention will be paid to powerful placebo effects reinforced by new, shamanistic healing rituals of forceful psychological impact.
The need to seek a second opinion will become unnecessary since this medical system will provide several professional opinions for every important diagnosis. Since a comfortable income will become commonplace in any case (in multiples of the minimum necessary to escape from poverty), expert cooperation and free referrals will replace competition for patients. This will eliminate the insular, “figure it out for yourself” attitude of present-day medicine, which promotes a growing incidence of errors. Apply deliberate redundancy to lessen diagnostic errors! WeaponWorld insists on personal medical mastery that was never that important: what is important is a drop-off in error rates. It would be better if each patient were seen by a partnership of doctors or a more extensive medical team to confirm their diagnoses and treatments. In recent studies, their diagnoses have proven less error prone and more accurate than those of lone practitioners.
Malpractice would draw immediate demotion to less healthcare responsibility and more remedial coursework. Word would go out: “If your medical competence is suspect, we will seek treatment among better qualified replacements while you retrain and recertify to a more appropriate level of care.”
Learners of Healing will saturate neighborhoods with basic education in nutrition and hygiene. They will teach preventive and elementary public health measures in every household, office and school. Every instance of junk food and drug poisoning for corporate profit will be neutralized.
Doctors with advanced training will be freed for visits at home or in much more numerous and widespread clinics. Primary healthcare providers will practice preventive medicine and long-term nursing care in the home. Rarely visited hospitals will only house the most demanding tasks of emergency and surgical care, teaching, research and disaster response.
Along with reorganizing the medical community, Learners will introduce conception-to-expiration, single-source and holistic healthcare on a global basis.
This may involve more ablutions of prayer, washing of strangers’ feet (especially those of enemies), more restful sleep, proper micro-nutrition and adequate hydration. I am convinced that many chronic ailments stem at least in part from these deficiencies. Not to mention the longstanding blockage of rational social policy by six generations of leaders who have suffered from the concussions of warfare explosives and contact sports.
The stupidity of war abounds in the peace that follows it.
In obedience to Mohammed’s dictum, everyone will wash their hands at least five times a day or else will feel ritually unclean. This simple habit will block the easiest transmission route of most infectious diseases. It seems that bacteria cannot mutate around the simple physics of soap and diligent scrubbing flushed with warm water, unlike complicated antibiotics that they evolved to neutralize in the long run. The water temperature irrelevant except for comfort; water hot enough to sterilize the skin would blister it. Also, new masks will block airborne pandemics, using powerful glues or static electricity? How do nose hairs block germs?
Public health overwatch, pollution control, good nutrition, more exercise, health education (and no private cars) will improve general health much more dramatically than research grants funding the serial torture of laboratory animals. Timely, accurate, cheap and preemptive diagnoses – both medical and psychological – will replace the medical guesswork of today.
I discovered that my digestive disorders were the result of eating tomatoes and other nightshade vegetables, as well as acidic foods and drinks. No more Coca Cola, soda, coffee or vinaigrette salad dressing for me!
I found this out by trial and error, without a doctor’s input beyond a physical therapist’s conclusion that there was no mechanical reason for my chronic lower back pain. My illness had been officially diagnosed as inflammatory colitis and treated in vain with big handfuls of pills as bitter as they were ineffective.
I discovered that a teaspoon, more or less, of simple baking soda mixed in a small glass of warm water could stop back pains I’d suffered intermittently for years. My wife found the same solution for her digestive problems, if only by avoiding onions and taking a shot of cider vinegar in the morning. I just partook of a tasty slice of lasagna for the first time in years, chased with a small glass of baking soda mix, and it didn’t cost me a week’s follow-up pain as it would have in the past.
It’s funny. When I eat acid foods (very carefully), then swallow a small glass of bicarbonate of soda and water, the liquid goes down the digestive tract quicker than the food, catching up soon with pockets of its acid. When they pass through each other, the chemicals flash into carbon dioxide and salt water. So I burp. At each burp, I’ve neutralized a globus of acid food that would otherwise have eaten into my guts.
Check out those treatments for yourself!
How many millions of people suffer from similar complaints, undiagnosed or treated at best symptomatically, rather than receiving a definitive diagnosis of their ailment and a permanent cure for it?
The self-care wisdom we pick up by trial and error after a lifetime of disease and suffering, Learners will be taught trouble-free as children.
That which follows cannot be stressed enough. The survival of human civilization may depend on psychological testing and monitoring both universal and lifelong.
Weapon technology encourages ephemerization. In plain English, that means it has become easier to induce mass casualties and destruction with the latest biological and nanotech weapons. By “easier,” I mean cheaper, less technically complicated, more accessible and easier to hide by individuals and groups not at all powerful otherwise. Read “lone gunmen” and marginal terrorist cells along with their psychopathic patrons and sociopathic supporters.
Thanks to ex-President and dementia sufferer Ronald Reagan (glorified by his equally crazy supporters), the richest nation on Earth institutionalized homelessness: a national disgrace. These days, we let people run loose unsupervised who hear voices in their head; or imprison them, worse yet. Thus we risk the occasional axe murder and NRA-induced massacre of innocent victims in a restaurant or a school. In the future, these marginal crimes could become attacks that depopulate entire cities and continents.
Those homicidal maniacs, (especially the borderline, the latent, late bloomers and the most brilliant among them), will have to be watched very closely over the course of their lives. We may as well survey everyone as a matter of course and iron out many neuroses while their bearers are young and their ills easier to treat; or even before birth, using prenatal genetic surgery.
No longer will doctor’s visits be restricted to crisis situations once something has gone seriously wrong. Medical visits will become easier to schedule and more reliable than the purchase these days of self-administered, over-the-counter palliatives. Four doctor’s visits per year will become the norm, if only to chat for a while about routine matters of health both mental and physical. Local Learners of Healing will dispense cheaper remedies (for the most part, placebos). They will deliver preliminary diagnoses of anything amiss, targeting serious problems for extensive referrals and consultations from a broader, better trained and much more accessible medical community than ours today.
The therapeutic laying on of hands will be studied and practiced intensively. Anyone with a talent for that kind of thing will be recruited into the medical community as a child and dedicated to the highest levels of healing as long as their talent lasts..
Many cost-effective therapies have been withdrawn from us to satisfy weapon requirements of medical rationing, profit and privilege. The media applaud spectacular feats of life-support, surgical virtuosity and extraordinary intensive care; but rarely the hyper-inflated expenses and shortcomings of this type of care. The latest example? Surgical transplantation and replacement of a complete pair of lungs ruined by COVID.
That’s shocking! In John Dos Passos’ trilogy, USA, hard-working families lost everything they had worked so hard to achieve, to illness and its medical bills, lost employment and income. He wrote his novel a century ago. Here we are, a century later, and the worst nightmare most families face is that bills for chronic illness and the vulnerability of old age will ruin them (the cause of 60% of American bankruptcies).
This perfectly reasonable fear justifies economic disparities that would be inexcusable otherwise, so that a few schemers can shield themselves and their family. Almost everyone conspires with this travesty, hoping to attain some Shangri-La of medical security by means of self-seeking, zero-sum competition for quality health care. Slightly wiser heads (much better informed) will provide free lifelong health care and put an end to this mass anxiety and the inequity it causes.
Drug companies base their research and development budgets on “what the market will bear” rather than “what the population needs today.” This kind of waste will soon price itself beyond the reach of everyone except millionaires.
Instead, self-serving medical care corporations will be replaced by more civic-minded public utilities. Patients who require absurd levels of care should be allowed to die with dignity, free of pain and fully aware of their option to reincarnate and be saved.
I suspect that a merciful God ministers even unto our death. The epiphany that many near-death survivors report has confirmed that conclusion for me. If this is merely the result of imbalanced brain chemistry during the agony of death, so be it. Drug companies should synthesize its components, and medics, administer them during the death throw of their patients. Less pain and less fear, more mercy and no harm in that, per Hippocrates.
Our medical spending priorities should be revised on a global scale to reduce overpopulation, infant mortality, epidemics, the ill effects of mental illness, obesity, undiagnosed criminality, family neglect and abuse. We should stop working so hard to retain signs of life in those near death.
Rich survivors of old age, awaiting replacement organs from concentration camps of random victims (if not those arrested on purpose): this is what WeaponWorld offers us, at least in China nowadays if not elsewhere. This disastrous project, extending the lifespan of certain privileged individuals beyond the statistical norm, must be shelved. More pressing priorities should be addressed first. They will purify and re-enforce this project in an acceptable manner.
Once every newborn and mother enjoys a cherished and healthy relationship – and only then – extending the decrepitude of the rich may cease to be obscene vampirism. The miracle of very old age in good health will be surprisingly easy to achieve for rich and poor alike, without so many betrayals of everyday morality.
Abortion is a source of grief for everyone. But this ghastly procedure cannot be brought down until the above measures have been fulfilled. If you insist on banning abortion, you should insist on these other items, first. It is not realistic to criminalize the actions of desperate parents; it would be better to relieve their despair and let them decide what to do with their child, every one of which deserves a secure, tender and dearly beloved upbringing.
This grim decision must be delegated to each mother and only to her, once advised by her chosen physicians and without government intervention. God help her make such a devastating choice.
- DOCTORS WITHIN BORDERS –
First draft, over twenty years ago. To every reference to AIDS, please add "and COVID".
“Should medicine ever fulfill its great ends, it must enter into the larger political and social life of our time, it must indicate the barriers which obstruct the normal completion of the life cycle and remove them. Should this ever come to pass, medicine, whatever it may then be, will become the common good of all.” Rudolph Vir chow quote in The World Encyclopedia of Peace, Volume III, page 362.
There should be ten times more medics where there are plenty of them already and a thousand times more where they are few and far between.
The most important but the least appreciated benefit of this medical reinforcement will become apparent for the duration of the next global pandemic. Instead of collapsing once a third or more of healthcare providers fall sick, this service will rapidly ramp up the number of available hospital beds by recruiting newly trained healthcare providers to replace losses among everyday hospital staff. Otherwise, we will face this 21st century challenge with 19th century means of care and corresponding losses.
Learners of healing should address a broad spectrum of human conditions, most of which are neglected today. These treatments will range from internal factors (psychic and physical) to external ones (social and environmental). Learners will pay equal heed to each of them.
Robust public health promotes human genius; failure to improve it lowers a civilization’s IQ and multiplies its other troubles. Those will decrease to a fraction of their current bulk in proportion to that improvement.
To fulfill that mandate, Learners will legislate a universal healthcare system constitutionally guaranteed of high quality. Privileged corporations, (insurance, pharmaceutical, teaching, nursing care, etc.) will be stripped of healthcare profits and converted into public utilities. Psychic and other forms of alternate healing will be studied in depth, especially the preventive benefits of good sleep and hydration, thoughtful micronutrition and body micro-ecology.
These days, only a third of American doctors have signed up with the American Medical Association. Its innate conservatism spells its doom and it is gradually fading away as we speak.
In truth, its membership may rise once again, based on the recent waves of recruitment of American doctors trained for perpetual war. I am probably being too optimistic about this decline.
By hook or by crook, right-wingers have swept what’s best off the American buffet table. Reactionary chic is all the rage these days, complete with pointless wars overseas and disasters at home, leaders handpicked for ineptitude, ambidextrous handouts to the rich, and fraud at every level of government. Is there any crime or misdemeanor these people have not perfected? They keep insisting that government must be incompetent. Man, how thoroughly they’ve confirmed their own claim to ineptitude! No other group could serve as a better example of dogmatic incompetence.
The AMA recruited its first adherents from bloody-aproned military surgeons who received their weapons catechism in the 1860s during the American Civil War. In unholy alliance with startup drug companies, the AMA suppressed its sister discipline, homeopathy. Early in the 1800s, Samuel Hannemann had brought back to life the idea that certain drugs, administered in infinitesimal doses, could induce specific sets of signs and symptoms and cure ailments with similar ones.
Despite homeopathy’s early success, the AMA championed allopathic therapy that prescribed drugs in massive doses strictly to suppress symptoms (at or just below toxic levels, don’t mention toxic interactions!) . Even though homeopathic hospitals and colleges flourished up until then, the AMA and allied drug companies hounded most of them out of existence by World War II (sic).
As in the case of weapon religions, AMA conservatism exhausted whatever usefulness it could once claim. These days, the main goal of AMA conservatives is to boost their profits by denying the automatic delivery of high-quality healthcare to everyone except the rich and the military.
Weapon medicine attacks disease and trauma deliberately inflicted. Soldiers in the field suffer like mistreated farm animals. Out in the weather and layered in filth, they devour whatever garbage they can loot, dig from the ground or drag up from the rear. In combat, the daily routine involves agonizing casualties, pandemic infection, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, exposure, malnutrition, grief, frustration, fear, rage, separation anxiety and psychiatric emergencies. In addition, seniority and combat survival determine who gets promoted among military leaders. Therefore, military surgeons do their best with the tools they have at their disposal: crude drugs and sharps, to suppress their patients’ signs and symptoms of illness, trauma and old age, as well as emotional reactions.
From weapon medicine’s point of view, reducing stress to promote health is absurd. Instead, warrior societies practice social triage, isolation of patients and post-insult, high-stress invasive treatments. No such medical system can maintain the health of a population undergoing greater and greater stress. As overall health deteriorates, medical expenses skyrocket. After all, there is no “rear area” toward which to evacuate casualties for better treatment, and no stream of replacements in good health to suffer their abuse in turn. Hospitals turn into incubators of every infection strange and ordinary, and wind up killing nearly as many patients as they save.
Western medicine evolved just off the battlefield. Alexander the Gross brought surgeons along with his much lauded, pincushion Macedonian phalanx. Occidental medics didn’t seriously investigate oriental acupuncture until after French military surgeons followed their Army into Indochina. The American Army didn’t establish a semi-adequate “Golden Hour” of helicopter emergency response until the Korean and Vietnam Wars. As a gesture of mercy, Napoleon’s senior surgeons equipped horse-drawn ambulances with sprung axles. Prior to that, such accommodations only cushioned the delicate behind of healthy nobles.
Space-age ambulances bounce screaming or shock- and dope-zombified casualties down our bullet-swept, crash-strewn streets. More people die on our highways than in our wars, and far more in those overseas. Every war on this planet, every insurrection, every redundant massacre of innocents, every suicide explosion and car wreck is one more “too many” and largely avoidable despite everything we've been told.
Even today, the medical community hasn't decided whether to keep shock victims warm under blankets or pump their chest with a freezing cocktail of lifesaving fluids. Flash-cooled victims of trauma and drowning seem to retain a longer survival rate, delayed bleed-out, greater resistance to infection (look out for gangrene after frostbite!) and extended immunity from brain death while they await delayed but crucial care from doctors out of reach. British combat surgeons documented this capacity among wounded patients during the Falklands War; as did army doctors during the invasion of Murmansk, Russia, by Allied forces in 1918, among others.
Victorian era tropical medicine and insect eradication programs protected white colonial garrisons, only aboriginal peoples as an afterthought (and many of those not even today.) Yellow fever and other tropical infections were finally conquered for that reason alone. This racist neglect continues today. It engenders, among other abuses, the mass genocide of AIDS that is engulfing Africa and the poorest corners of Asia. AIDS has spread, predictably enough, into every poor neighborhood on Earth: just like terrorism has. Once all those Third World babies, child parents and twenty-something grandparents succumb to AIDS, mass terror or mere malnutrition, they won’t require so much pesky international aid, now will they?
Sooner or later, this bias will summon similar plagues down on our First World heads. The best global public health results from that achieved at great distance from the richest nations. If you can ensure that someone living at the antipodes of your world benefits from public healthcare comparable to your own at the time, your own will improve correspondingly.
Today, much more research money goes to cure the trivial complaints of rich societies (baldness, geriatric impotence, foot fungus and pet neuroses) than lethal tropical diseases.
The underlying causes of most of these diseases – chronic malnutrition and bad water – have been ignored or even fostered.
Almost every war in Africa since the Cold War has shared this feature in common. It involved corporate monopoly of a poor country’s profitable export: diamonds, timber, oil or some other monoculture or rare mineral resource. The revenue from these kinds of enterprises ebbs and flows unpredictably and cannot be used to buy out these problems once and for all. Their exploiters refuse their obligation to overcome these problems and cease to profit (poorly) from them.
Simple autarky in those countries (self-sufficiency, which means good food and water produced locally) will blunt most of those wars. I can hear officials of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund scream bloody murder rather than allow this to happen. Learners will suggest that they change their mind: swiftly and with gusto. They will discover, a little late but beyond dispute, that this new policy pays much better. Practical charity pays much better than their WeaponWorld today. Who knew?
Weapon medicine took off during the Great Paroxysm (World War I, sic) when most doctors did a medical rotation through years of combat internship. If not World War I (sic), then WWII (sick); and if not those, other wars since. As a result, general practitioners vanished, most physicians became specialists, home visits were cut short, health services became hospital routines and preventive healthcare was dismissed as irrelevant.
This recession to the militarist mean is not hard to understand. On a battlefield, honest caregivers would instruct their patients to drop their weapons and go home. Weapon elites are not amused by these instructions unless their foes adopt them unilaterally.
I’m counting on everyone to adopt them. Once that happens, we will see how much global health improves! I’ve heard that high quality healthcare could be delivered to everyone on Earth for something like the price of a year of the war in Iraq under Bush the Lesser: easily affordable if every country on Earth contributes.
Instead, we submit to the paradoxical, hypocritical, ruinous and disease-aggravating medical mismanagement of WeaponWorld.
A peace-oriented medical community will train many more deliverers of basic first aid and cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR). There will be a tremendous increase of home health care providers, including personal aides, masseurs, acupuncturists, physical therapists, emergency medical technicians, hospice care-givers, pharmacists, nurses, physician assistants, chiropractors, naturopaths, homeopaths, shamans, healers, herbalists and other specialists.
Could we foresee a healthier society with so many more caregivers? A lot of them are in preparation today, yet their training is incoherent and chaotic. This confusion betrays reductive and fragmentary attempts by decrepit WeaponWorld to apply holistic, PeaceWorld solutions to its problems, even as they worsen. Those fixes are doomed to fail because their application is too localized and fragmentary. Except for its weapons projects, WeaponWorld forbids the pragmatic holism that PeaceWorld demands.
Learners of healing will practice their skills on-site, up to but not exceeding their level of expertise. Their qualifications will establish which of an incremental pharmacopoeia of remedies and treatments these successors of “barefoot doctors” may administer, and who among them will deliver in-depth diagnoses involving many more consultations and referrals. Particular attention will be paid to powerful placebo effects reinforced by new, shamanistic healing rituals of forceful psychological impact.
The need to seek a second opinion will become unnecessary since this medical system will provide several professional opinions for every important diagnosis. Since a comfortable income will become commonplace in any case (in multiples of the minimum necessary to escape from poverty), expert cooperation and free referrals will replace competition for patients. This will eliminate the insular, “figure it out for yourself” attitude of present-day medicine, which promotes a growing incidence of errors. Apply deliberate redundancy to lessen diagnostic errors! WeaponWorld insists on personal medical mastery that was never that important: what is important is a drop-off in error rates. It would be better if each patient were seen by a partnership of doctors or a more extensive medical team to confirm their diagnoses and treatments. In recent studies, their diagnoses have proven less error prone and more accurate than those of lone practitioners.
Malpractice would draw immediate demotion to less healthcare responsibility and more remedial coursework. Word would go out: “If your medical competence is suspect, we will seek treatment among better qualified replacements while you retrain and recertify to a more appropriate level of care.”
Learners of Healing will saturate neighborhoods with basic education in nutrition and hygiene. They will teach preventive and elementary public health measures in every household, office and school. Every instance of junk food and drug poisoning for corporate profit will be neutralized.
Doctors with advanced training will be freed for visits at home or in much more numerous and widespread clinics. Primary healthcare providers will practice preventive medicine and long-term nursing care in the home. Rarely visited hospitals will only house the most demanding tasks of emergency and surgical care, teaching, research and disaster response.
Along with reorganizing the medical community, Learners will introduce conception-to-expiration, single-source and holistic healthcare on a global basis.
This may involve more ablutions of prayer, washing of strangers’ feet (especially those of enemies), more restful sleep, proper micro-nutrition and adequate hydration. I am convinced that many chronic ailments stem at least in part from these deficiencies. Not to mention the longstanding blockage of rational social policy by six generations of leaders who have suffered from the concussions of warfare explosives and contact sports.
The stupidity of war abounds in the peace that follows it.
In obedience to Mohammed’s dictum, everyone will wash their hands at least five times a day or else will feel ritually unclean. This simple habit will block the easiest transmission route of most infectious diseases. It seems that bacteria cannot mutate around the simple physics of soap and diligent scrubbing flushed with warm water, unlike complicated antibiotics that they evolved to neutralize in the long run. The water temperature irrelevant except for comfort; water hot enough to sterilize the skin would blister it. Also, new masks will block airborne pandemics, using powerful glues or static electricity? How do nose hairs block germs?
Public health overwatch, pollution control, good nutrition, more exercise, health education (and no private cars) will improve general health much more dramatically than research grants funding the serial torture of laboratory animals. Timely, accurate, cheap and preemptive diagnoses – both medical and psychological – will replace the medical guesswork of today.
I discovered that my digestive disorders were the result of eating tomatoes and other nightshade vegetables, as well as acidic foods and drinks. No more Coca Cola, soda, coffee or vinaigrette salad dressing for me!
I found this out by trial and error, without a doctor’s input beyond a physical therapist’s conclusion that there was no mechanical reason for my chronic lower back pain. My illness had been officially diagnosed as inflammatory colitis and treated in vain with big handfuls of pills as bitter as they were ineffective.
I discovered that a teaspoon, more or less, of simple baking soda mixed in a small glass of warm water could stop back pains I’d suffered intermittently for years. My wife found the same solution for her digestive problems, if only by avoiding onions and taking a shot of cider vinegar in the morning. I just partook of a tasty slice of lasagna for the first time in years, chased with a small glass of baking soda mix, and it didn’t cost me a week’s follow-up pain as it would have in the past.
It’s funny. When I eat acid foods (very carefully), then swallow a small glass of bicarbonate of soda and water, the liquid goes down the digestive tract quicker than the food, catching up soon with pockets of its acid. When they pass through each other, the chemicals flash into carbon dioxide and salt water. So I burp. At each burp, I’ve neutralized a globus of acid food that would otherwise have eaten into my guts.
Check out those treatments for yourself!
How many millions of people suffer from similar complaints, undiagnosed or treated at best symptomatically, rather than receiving a definitive diagnosis of their ailment and a permanent cure for it?
The self-care wisdom we pick up by trial and error after a lifetime of disease and suffering, Learners will be taught trouble-free as children.
That which follows cannot be stressed enough. The survival of human civilization may depend on psychological testing and monitoring both universal and lifelong.
Weapon technology encourages ephemerization. In plain English, that means it has become easier to induce mass casualties and destruction with the latest biological and nanotech weapons. By “easier,” I mean cheaper, less technically complicated, more accessible and easier to hide by individuals and groups not at all powerful otherwise. Read “lone gunmen” and marginal terrorist cells along with their psychopathic patrons and sociopathic supporters.
Thanks to ex-President and dementia sufferer Ronald Reagan (glorified by his equally crazy supporters), the richest nation on Earth institutionalized homelessness: a national disgrace. These days, we let people run loose unsupervised who hear voices in their head; or imprison them, worse yet. Thus we risk the occasional axe murder and NRA-induced massacre of innocent victims in a restaurant or a school. In the future, these marginal crimes could become attacks that depopulate entire cities and continents.
Those homicidal maniacs, (especially the borderline, the latent, late bloomers and the most brilliant among them), will have to be watched very closely over the course of their lives. We may as well survey everyone as a matter of course and iron out many neuroses while their bearers are young and their ills easier to treat; or even before birth, using prenatal genetic surgery.
No longer will doctor’s visits be restricted to crisis situations once something has gone seriously wrong. Medical visits will become easier to schedule and more reliable than the purchase these days of self-administered, over-the-counter palliatives. Four doctor’s visits per year will become the norm, if only to chat for a while about routine matters of health both mental and physical. Local Learners of Healing will dispense cheaper remedies (for the most part, placebos). They will deliver preliminary diagnoses of anything amiss, targeting serious problems for extensive referrals and consultations from a broader, better trained and much more accessible medical community than ours today.
The therapeutic laying on of hands will be studied and practiced intensively. Anyone with a talent for that kind of thing will be recruited into the medical community as a child and dedicated to the highest levels of healing as long as their talent lasts..
Many cost-effective therapies have been withdrawn from us to satisfy weapon requirements of medical rationing, profit and privilege. The media applaud spectacular feats of life-support, surgical virtuosity and extraordinary intensive care; but rarely the hyper-inflated expenses and shortcomings of this type of care. The latest example? Surgical transplantation and replacement of a complete pair of lungs ruined by COVID.
That’s shocking! In John Dos Passos’ trilogy, USA, hard-working families lost everything they had worked so hard to achieve, to illness and its medical bills, lost employment and income. He wrote his novel a century ago. Here we are, a century later, and the worst nightmare most families face is that bills for chronic illness and the vulnerability of old age will ruin them (the cause of 60% of American bankruptcies).
This perfectly reasonable fear justifies economic disparities that would be inexcusable otherwise, so that a few schemers can shield themselves and their family. Almost everyone conspires with this travesty, hoping to attain some Shangri-La of medical security by means of self-seeking, zero-sum competition for quality health care. Slightly wiser heads (much better informed) will provide free lifelong health care and put an end to this mass anxiety and the inequity it causes.
Drug companies base their research and development budgets on “what the market will bear” rather than “what the population needs today.” This kind of waste will soon price itself beyond the reach of everyone except millionaires.
Instead, self-serving medical care corporations will be replaced by more civic-minded public utilities. Patients who require absurd levels of care should be allowed to die with dignity, free of pain and fully aware of their option to reincarnate and be saved.
I suspect that a merciful God ministers even unto our death. The epiphany that many near-death survivors report has confirmed that conclusion for me. If this is merely the result of imbalanced brain chemistry during the agony of death, so be it. Drug companies should synthesize its components, and medics, administer them during the death throw of their patients. Less pain and less fear, more mercy and no harm in that, per Hippocrates.
Our medical spending priorities should be revised on a global scale to reduce overpopulation, infant mortality, epidemics, the ill effects of mental illness, obesity, undiagnosed criminality, family neglect and abuse. We should stop working so hard to retain signs of life in those near death.
Rich survivors of old age, awaiting replacement organs from concentration camps of random victims (if not those arrested on purpose): this is what WeaponWorld offers us, at least in China nowadays if not elsewhere. This disastrous project, extending the lifespan of certain privileged individuals beyond the statistical norm, must be shelved. More pressing priorities should be addressed first. They will purify and re-enforce this project in an acceptable manner.
Once every newborn and mother enjoys a cherished and healthy relationship – and only then – extending the decrepitude of the rich may cease to be obscene vampirism. The miracle of very old age in good health will be surprisingly easy to achieve for rich and poor alike, without so many betrayals of everyday morality.
Abortion is a source of grief for everyone. But this ghastly procedure cannot be brought down until the above measures have been fulfilled. If you insist on banning abortion, you should insist on these other items, first. It is not realistic to criminalize the actions of desperate parents; it would be better to relieve their despair and let them decide what to do with their child, every one of which deserves a secure, tender and dearly beloved upbringing.
This grim decision must be delegated to each mother and only to her, once advised by her chosen physicians and without government intervention. God help her make such a devastating choice.
- PLUS LTA, MINUS NUKES -
“The test, code-named ‘Trinity,’ took place on July 16 [1945]. It exploded with a force equivalent of 18,000 tons of TNT. Recalling the scene, Oppenheimer said: "A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. There floated through my mind a line from the Bhagavad-Gita in which Krishna is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty [author’s note: and cheerfully kill his relatives in battle]: 'Now I am become death: the destroyer of worlds.'" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/peopleevents/pandeAMEX65.html
LTA, Lighter-than-air transport, offers fascinating possibilities. Dirigibles can provide heavy cargo lift with low fuel consumption. Passengers could fly cross-country in surprising comfort and watch the landscape unfold at a leisurely pace (say 80 MPH) and an interesting altitude. LTA ships could offload anywhere a modest tower affords minimal clearance. Many airports – with their problems of noise, air pollution and waste of costly real estate – could be consolidated and shifted to distant wastelands.
During the Great Paroxysm, a German Zeppelin overflew thousands of miles of enemy territory. Its crewmen intended to deliver ten tons of war supplies to countrymen marooned in German Central Africa. They never made delivery. Flying across the North African coast, they intercepted a bogus radio broadcast that their troops had surrendered. Fully loaded, they flew back to Central Europe non-stop.
LTA is a glass-jawed technology : it presents a large, slow and unarmored target to ground fire, fighter interception, sabotage and bad weather. Its only practical weapons application was escorting American coastal convoys against Nazi submarines. No dirigible-escorted convoy lost a ship during the war, despite the massacre of unescorted coastal ships the year prior.
The US Navy developed strategic dirigibles equipped with self-docking fighter aircraft. They were abandoned during their prototype stage in the 1930s, just prior to the Greater Paroxysm. American battleship admirals ordered the world’s finest airships, their advocate commanders and crack crews to fly into hurricanes. Storms of this kind wrecked first-class warships from both navies before and during the Pacific War. Those admirals would have dared penetrate such thunderheads with their precious airplanes.
Officials of the British Air Ministry (with visions of Spitfires gleaming in their eyes) got away with something even worse. They dispatched the dirigible R101 to India even though it was so poorly designed it could barely lift its own weight. After its inevitable crash in a thunderstorm, they publicized the disaster so loudly that the popular outcry let them ground the prototype R100 (a much sounder design) and quietly scrap the entire British dirigible program with no opposition. Rarely have so few done so much to harm to so many.
Peace technicians will find better uses for LTA. The military liabilities that allowed bureaucrats to trash them will be largely irrelevant on PeaceWorld. Modern fabrication and weather forecasting techniques promise to improve LTA safety; gasbags, inflated with fireproof helium, eliminate hazards posed by explosive hydrogen; stronger materials and new construction techniques will produce lighter and stronger vessels. The outer covering of the Hindenburg airship, for example, was doped with a silvery, high-explosive paint.
Let’s hope these techno-monstrosities will be junked : civilianized strategic bombers, supersonic ozone depleters and high-altitude transports of main battle tanks. Hundred-ton aircraft will rake the skies less often with their contrails of sewage, waste fuel and combustion by-products. The stratosphere – once cloudless and now foggy and seared with ultra-violet – may heal once again. Majestic, helium-filled sky sculptures can make a spectacular comeback as the sky resumes its serenity.
Another promising technology is WIG or Wing-in-Ground flying boats. In great secrecy under the direction of Rostislav Y. Alexeiev, the Soviets built one-hundred-plus-ton Ekranoplans that skimmed the surface of the sea. Relying on the lift produced by the surface effect, they carried heavy payloads across vast distances. Their cruising speed ran as high as 500 KPH (300 MPH) at very low altitude (under 20 meters or sixty+ feet), in other words below most radars. Their fuel consumption was exceptionally low. Once these craft speed up to the point at which the surface-effect takes effect, the drag that slows conventional aircraft is reduced. This technology promotes big machines since they benefit the most from the surface effect.
As usual, these craft were first deployed as weapon systems. Prototypes delivered a large number of troops with their light tanks overseas; later on, heavy anti-ship missiles. Fully amphibious, they could fly across flat terrain (beaches, deserts and snow/ice fields) as readily as across calm seas with ten-foot or lower waves. Settled on bodies of water, they turned into extremely shallow-draft vessels.
Nowadays, such transports could carry massive freight payloads or many tourists. The idealist Alexeiev intended his Ekranoplans to fly peacefully up and down Russian rivers in the first place.
Going back to lighter-than-air craft, they could also serve as first stage boosters for space payloads. Large dirigibles could lift heavy space vehicles into the stratosphere and release them to fire up their rockets at thirty thousand feet. Basically, we would replace the giant, first-stage rocket packs we're used to, with a little more payload in a much lighter launch vehicle. Cruise missiles and fighter ejection seats have already perfected post-launch direction finding. Rockets launched in this way from dirigible lifters would be cheaper, safer and more ecologically sound than payloads hurled from the Earth’s surface with brute chemical explosives. If you did it right, you could reuse the lifter with new payloads.
I am grateful to Doug Dean for this idea — among many we shared before his regretted demise.
This technology was never adopted. The basic goal of WeaponWorld space programs is to loft nuclear missiles from concrete silos at an instant’s notice, and incinerate vast cities or smack pinpoint targets like enemy missile silos at intercontinental distances. Giant balloons just won’t fill the bill. So much the better…
Dr. Daniel P. Raymer, President of the Conceptual Research Corporation, is the lead designer of the Dynalifter concept, a hybrid winged dynamic lifter and helium airship “successfully combining the loitering capabilities of airships with the ground handling of fixed-wing aircraft.” The Ohio Airships Company owns the conceptual design and patent rights for its unique internal layout. You can find them at http://www.ohio-airships.com/OhioAirships/.
There is as well a French company, Voliris, URL REFERENCE Also the California-based Worldwide Aeros Corp. whose airships can carry 66 tons of cargo 4,380 miles non-stop at up to 140 miles per hour, with much lower gas consumption compared to equivalent cargo planes.
While lofting stratospheric space payloads would be within the Dynalifter’s capabilities (along with other priceless civilian applications — think of long-endurance search-and-rescue and scientific research craft), this project was first proposed as a loitering platform for weapons delivery, strategic transport and surveillance. Why am I not surprised?
Just as LTA offers nothing but peace potential in the long run, nuclear and “hot” fusion power plants offer no legitimate function in the here and now. Nuclear power may serve a moon-based industrial plant, but none here on Earth. The problem with nuclear energy is its appeal as a self-reinforcing weapon system and zero potential as a peace technology.
Face it. Whether by abrupt accident or long-term contamination, nuclear reactors vomit torrents of radioactivity across the ocean (Fukushima) or a continent (Chernobyl). Building a “safe” nuclear reactor is like designing a theft-proof bank or an unsinkable ship ― good luck with that!
Our bodies adapted to millions of years of constant background radiation. During the last fifty, that background count has tripled (sextupled now, with Chernobyl and Fukushima?) due to accidents, runaway pollution and criminal military experiments. In addition, the thinning ozone layer has intensified an electromagnetic blizzard that our bodies ‒ raised under the vast, pure skies of the Serengeti ‒ could never handle. The human body is a raw-nerve recording machine: a thermometer, gyroscope, chronometer, oscilloscope, barometer, scintillation counter, gravity meter and multi-band antenna of unmatched delicacy. Who knows what effects this multi-generation bombardment will impose on generations to come? Do our epidemics of auto-immune disease (cancer, obesity, diabetes, arthritis, depression, autism, dementia, etc.) arise from it unacknowledged?
During the Joint Atomic Bomb Commission of 1945, both Dr. Averill A. Liebow, the chairman of that official body and it’s most vocal dissident, Dr. Alice Stewart asserted that long-term, low-level radiation could do as much harm to human beings as short bursts of intense radioactivity. Dead silence on this topic since.
The ideal resting place for this kind of isotope is buried in stable ore seams from which they were first dug up. That would sure beat lacing the air and water with them and lodging them in human baby fat at the tip-top of the food chain. We can only hope that idea sinks in and pitchblende mining is curtailed. Current nuclear diktats are suicide by slow poisoning.
When it comes to nuclear technology, Thorium nuclear power plants offer better alternatives than Uranium238 equivalents. Much greater quantities of Thorium is available than Uranium reserves that will run out soon. A great source of Thorium? Coal tailing piles.
Secondly, Thorium232 reactors do not go critical (unlike so-called pebble bed reactors: a compromise technology part-Thorium and mostly Uranium). They use molten Thorium both as a heat source and a cooling fluid; it is a very hot and corrosive fluid, but operates at sea level atmospheric pressure. This differs from water-cooled Uranium power, whose materials must be kept separate. If the piping of a Thorium reactor bursts, its circulating liquid falls into a capture vat and that stops the reaction cold. Uranium reactors require costly and unrealistic safeguards against critical reaction. When those go haywire, high-pressure, super-heated steam explodes, followed by subsequent binary explosions of free oxygen and hydrogen (rocket fuel) that throw off uncontainable clouds and shrapnel, both highly radioactive.
We could build modular Thorium reactors on the cheap.
Finally, the leftovers of Thorium reactions have a radioactive half-life of hundreds of years instead of millions, and are thus easier to store, even though they may be hotter in the meantime, until they are safe to bury conventionally.
Thorium reactors produce Uranium233 that can be used to make atomic weapons after elaborate industrial processing. That passport to disaster will have to be watched very carefully.
Thorium reactors reached the experimental stage in the 1960s, but was sidelined in favor of Uranium ones. In the same stupid way, solar, water and wind power were sidelined in favor of nuclear, coal and petroleum equivalents. We should abandon those insane weapon technologies in favor of more rational peace alternatives. India, Indonesia, Czechoslovakia and China have gone ahead in developing this new technology, compared to techno retardation for profit in America and the rest of Europe.
The main problem with a “hot” fusion power source is, of course, the county-sized crater it could gouge out once it went critical. Bets, anyone? Besides, this technology has been declared “possible within the next fifteen years” for the past 75 years and still today with no end in sight.
In the meantime, we should upgrade global energy efficiencies, conservation and “soft” sources. Windmills should carpet high-wind corridors and low-impact hydropower plants should dot every receptive waterway. Advanced smart energy management systems should have been installed decades ago and are still non-existent. Cheap capitalist frauds!
For generations, overcapitalized nuke and fossil fuel interests (weapon technicians on the march!) have quashed these obvious alternatives. Instead, they’ve carefully subsidized their own nightmare technologies. What a big surprise!
During the Greater Paroxysm, multinational fascists hatched a plot to kill off entire peoples whose birth certificate they deemed poorly filled out. Their scheme went ahead with little interference from the Allies who never bombed the death camps and their train depots, even though the rest of Europe was bombed flat. It would be interesting to list the few strategic factories spared this fate in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, as well as their international owners.
Meanwhile, millions of human prey were entrained to death camps. There, concrete bunkers were filled with victims and poison gas. With Teutonic efficiency, the end products were shoveled into crematoria and the victims’ belongings, recycled to finance the Nazi war effort. The dawn of industrial recycling!
These all-too-human fascists discovered, however, that they could never make their death camps efficient enough. More victims always emerged than the technical means to dispose of them. There were never enough sociopaths to guard them while the extermination went on. So discouraging!
Nowadays, the ideological descendants of these brutes have arranged things so that they will occupy underground cities crammed with luxury tidbits and survival necessities. Instead of poison gas, they will breathe the purest, freshest air modern agro-technology can filter. Once everything has been perfected to their taste, they plan to flood the planet-turned-crematorium with a century’s output of the most expensive omnicide toxins they could persuade their panicked victims/constituents to bankroll. We despised Others can die en masse on a planet turned into Belsen — much more efficiently this time.
We’ve heard a lot of empty talk about new world orders and repeated flourishes of treaty ceremonial … more empty diplomacy flushed down the drain. Quite a few mass protest movements have sprung up overnight against nuclear weapons and evaporated just as quickly. Yet nothing serious has been done to avert this truly Final Solution. (“This time, we really mean it!”).
Other Learner objectives: cripple these satanic ministries and drive their minions into well-deserved if involuntary retirement.
The threat of military omnicide grows worse every time another power group comes online with nuclear, chemical, biological and meteorological weaponry. Every time another nuclear test explodes, a somnolent Devil blinks.
Such lunatics could never turn this planet into Belsen or threaten to do so without our brainless consent. We must have been sleepwalking to entrust our fate to such ghouls. I would rather no such Damocles' sword hung over our heads from a hopeless tangle of military metaphors ― no man-made, man-worshipped, man-promised apocalypse and no multi-trillion-dollar serpentine of genocidal hardware perfectly coiled above our head to strike.
A less watertight confirmation of my thesis would have sufficed: that we are weapon zombies hypnotized by weapon mentality, sleepwalking hand-in-hand into Armageddon. The death grip weapon mentality holds over our collective conscience is confirmed by our blind submission to this nuclear nightmare.
It’s up to us to free ourselves. Which means it is up to you.
That’s right, fellow Learner, nobody but you!
- CONSTITUTIONAL ECOLOGY? –
“Only after the last tree has been cut down. Only after the last river has been poisoned. Only after the last fish has been caught. Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.” Cree Indian Prophecy taken from Mutant Message, Marlo Morgan “Two Hearts,” MM CO., 1991.
It is sickening to watch stuffed-suit sociopaths cannibalize what is left of our only oxygen works. Here we are, packed aboard the only submarine we know about (the micro-bubble human habitat), cruising the black depths of outer space without a chance to “surface.” Like idiots, they are shooting vital components of that unique system out torpedo tubes into the depths. They reward each other for their brilliant achievement with shiny bits of metal and crisp green waste paper printed with lots of zeros. How unwise! They are riding a ruthless race to perdition.
And to think, more than two thousand years have elapsed since the Christ child was born. What tremendous progress we’ve made!
We cannot rely on the American Constitution’s protections as enforced at the dawn of this Third Millennium AD. Its Bill of Rights doesn’t even mention clean air and water. How can we cleave to “original intent” interpretations of this Constitution? Its authors worded things to proclaim all men equal and preserve slavery!
Face it. The U.S. Constitution is obsolete as currently enforced. It was an outstanding document two centuries ago, in the age of horse and sail, of correspondence by goose quill and sealing wax, of unlimited free land as against the land monopoly of nobility. Like other revolutionary instruments, it required active defense by disinterested authorities supposed to bring it up to date on a regular basis, in accordance with its own provisions. But we cannot regulate it properly if under the dictation of special interests that disdain the common good.
The coffin of American freedom was sealed shut by two recent laws:
• “Citizens United,” approved by a reactionary Supreme Court that could not have left its citizens more disunited, that grants legal personhood to mere corporations and legalizes unlimited and anonymous political bribes; and
• The Defense Authorization Bill of 2012, legislated by an equally vile Congress and signed by a Weimar Republic President, authorizing the indefinite detention or execution of American citizens by military authorities without due process.
America just waits for its burial by some near-future favorite son Hitler mimic and his pack of last-ditch Republicans. There lies Trump, crawling back under his rock: the latest prototype.
Sinclair Lewis said: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
In Great Britain, Common Law got muddled during the Enclosure Movement during which communal rights to Britain’s pasturage, forest resources and shared fields were sacrificed to consolidate large plantations for the rich. In mimicry of this distortion of traditional Anglo-Saxon values, sovereign property rights were crammed into the American Constitution.
Native American Indians were dumbfounded by this legal definition of ownership. Such claims were based on little more than elite-certified paperwork and enough firepower to back those more often groundless claims. The outcome was genocide for former communal owners more accustomed to collective conventions of usufruct they’d accepted for ages. Less arbitrary, personal and debatable, it was more dependably akin to their intuitive way of thinking, thus easier to enforce peacefully by common consent.
In transition to PeaceWorld, this topic will be very important. Learners will abandon brutal regulations that promote the interests of minority elites, and replace them with regulations enforced by peaceful means of mutual trust and near-universal consent.
In truth, the peasants of what became Great Britain were just as astounded as New World Native Americans, by the haughty felony of their betters — backed by overwhelming firepower and eagerness to abuse it.
“Usufruct: The right to … enjoy the profits and advantages of something belonging to another, [in this case, God], so long as the property is not damaged or altered in any way.” Webster’s II, New Riverside University Dictionary.
Our contractual titleholders must over-exploit their private property to defray outlandish weapon taxes. They accrue profits and advantages from this degrading exploitation despite negative outcomes and perhaps because of them. Most of those weapon taxes should wind up in the social security cash drawer of PeaceWorld or be left in the hands of private owners to reward their good stewardship.
Econologicians refuse to honor sustainability, even though it is the first requisite of good stewardship and the foundation of legitimate use. It is the best way to accelerate our flight from misery, much more practical than elite fantasies “in the pursuit of happiness.” Neither the challenges nor the rewards of ownership will diminish under usufruct law, but sustainability will surely benefit.
Like concentric waves radiating from a pebble tossed in a pond, we radiate expanding rings of delegated authority. From birth on, we delegate preset affiliations of family, religion, culture, education, business and government. An outside agency cannot “grant” us these liberties, privileges, responsibilities and obligations: at best, we can only delegate them in a manner that seems convenient and attractive to us – at worst, on WeaponWorld, less terrifying.
Several ideas, neglected in the past, should govern the way we delegate this authority:
• Personal Prerogative: a healthy mature individual is personally responsible for their authority and right to privacy. It is never some institution’s to grant back as a “privilege” or withdraw as a source of profit. At worst, the individual must consent to it for the record on a case-by-case basis, especially if an invasion of privacy is involved. The release or use of private information to harm an individual without their consent would be a chargeable offense. The sole exceptions: certifiable psychopaths and convicted sociopaths who will wind up on permanent probation.
• Institutional Limitation: instruments should limit themselves to issues they have proven they can handle well and delegate other problems to task specialists.
• Directed Service: past priorities will be reversed: instruments will honestly serve a popular function, not rich special interests through stealth hypocrisy..
Learners will amend the Constitution to grant equal rights to those who pledge allegiance to it, not just geographical Americans. This will include those who wish it well but refuse to swear and those would rather honor another text – the Koran or the Bible, for example – provided they cooperate in peace. That will merit near-unanimous approval by the consensus of good conscience.
Soon, political dogfights will swirl around proposed Amendments to the Constitution ; one set drafted by reactionaries to perpetuate weapon management; the other, more progressive, endorsed by Learners. As usual, the former will accuse those latter of its own abuse of power and the latter will accept that blame in silence..
Learners will leave “the pursuit of happiness” to individual talents and personal conscience where it belongs in the first place. Valid legislation will accelerate everyone’s flight from misery: something our weapon governments block with grim determination. They’d rather abuse select prey in pursuit of happiness for unrestrained elites.
Government cannot know what happiness is. It is too subjective a topic to handle honestly. On the other hand, misery is something a government can easily count, analyze and reduce through routine procedures any rational adult could recite with their eyes closed: the provision of clean air and water, good nutrition, clothing, housing, education, freedom of speech and assembly, justice (shelter from corruption), etc. Like other institutions and individuals, government should do what it is good at, nothing more and nothing less.
Learners will recognize personal rights to life, freedom of choice, justice and withdrawal from misery. In addition, they will honor the following self-evident rights, namely: the right to cheap, high-quality survival necessities; the right to wholesome soil, air and water; the right to superior health care from conception to expiration; and the right to pursue Learning to one’s utmost ability. Current rights, mercilessly narrowed under weapons rule, will expand under peace rule.
In How to Think about War and Peace, Mortimer J. Adler writes:
“The simplest test of a true conception of human happiness is that it should be attainable by each individual without in any way impeding or preventing an attainment of the same goods by others. Anyone who regards the pursuit of happiness as a competitive enterprise …” [suffers from a fatal delusion].
I recommend this book.
A rationalized world government will assemble thousands of the planet’s top biologists (the majority in that venue) with chemists, physicists, technologists and industrialists ‒ along with their brightest acolytes who will get philosophical free reign should they stray from their stick-in-the-mud superiors ; for a Manhattan Project III (Project II: photosynthesis in human skin).
Each will receive a study copy of The Knowledge (Lewis Dartnell, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch, The Penguin Press, New York, NY, 2014).
Then they will get these tough marching orders:
“Let drop everything you just red. That technology cannot be sustained on this planet at our level of population – neither by luxuriant Twentieth Century standards nor by those much more austere of the post Apocalypse. Come up with more durable ones by slavishly biomiming natural systems. Start with the basics and work your way up. Nothing is sacred but the survival of human civilization, even if it must transform itself beyond recognition. Scrap and replace every technology that stands in your way.
“Notice: fire is a very special tool to be used very sparingly and usually deep underground or in industrial isolation in outer space, otherwise long ago and far away from the affected object. Likewise, the competition and destruction of living things should more often be secondary to cooperation and growth.
“Don’t come back until you are satisfied with your preliminary findings. “Hurry!”
- PLANET OVERWATCH –
Per Al Gore, we face several emergent phenomena:
• Global Mind: a computer-based network of planetary awareness;
• Earth, Inc.: national-capitalism taken to its extreme of pathocracy (rule by psychopaths). This is my definition, not his.
• We might add Peak Ecology: the exhaustion of key Earth resources like healthy soil, breathable air, good water, salt and fresh, climatic stability, biota, hydrocarbons and ores.
• Finally (and well beyond the scope of Gore’s vision), we must organize Learners to sort out this Raft of the Medusa and rework it better.
Instead, environmental desecration takes root in the politics of disinformation. Paradoxically, it becomes a mania of “conservative” doctrine. Reactionaries cause as much harm to foreigners, to children and to the natural world as they can get away with; the same way bull sea lions trample any cub that gets in their way, silverback gorillas trash the undergrowth when pissed off, and other primates cast their dung at passers-by.
This nonstop environmental desecration brings on unprecedented meteorological disasters — and perhaps additional tectonic upheaval. Massive reforestation would soak continental surfaces with a little more water and slow the global melt and aqueous redistribution of millions of tons of it, which could buffer some of these cataclysms.
Past civilizations sealed their fate by denuding bottomlands and forestlands nearby. Worsening weather and famine followed close behind.
The Chinese have an expression for abusers of this kind, whose shortcomings (lack of compassion and failure to perform propitious rituals) bring on environmental disaster, and its opposite for others wise enough to avoid them. The latter retained the “Mandate of Heaven” while the former lost it. Like Rousseau’s “general will” for governments in the West, this mandate became the only valid endorsement of an Oriental government. Those without it automatically lost their legitimacy. Revolution was not only inevitable in this case, but mandatory to end governmental abuse and its environmental fallouts.
Multiple on-site monitoring groups and volunteer public inspection teams will augment governmental and administrative overwatch agencies for high-risk projects on PeaceWorld.
We should draw an important distinction here. People invoke environmental regulations like the Superfund to clean up hazardous waste sites. Yet these efforts are incredibly crude. Most remediation projects use high-pressure water, superheated steam, dredges, bulldozers and toxic chemicals to scrape everything away — the good, the bad and the ugly. They accomplish little more than this, for eventual disposal in leaky dumps, out to sea or in poor countries.
There is no proven way to dismantle a worn-out nuclear reactor — much less the 500-odd commercial ones and who knows how many more scientific, military or covert for other reasons?
Much of the billion-dollar Exxon Valdez cleanup was either value-neutral or injurious. It was ordered anyhow, for its propaganda value, per Jeff Wheelwright’s Degrees of Disaster – Prince William Sound: How Nature Reels and Rebounds, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1994. Here we are, a generation later, and ExxonMobil has yet to make good its fines while the environment continues to bear its stigmata. “How best to remedy environmental disaster? Hire more lawyers… and judges!”
Not to mention the Gulf of Mexico, or Fukushima, or planetary disasters to follow evermore nightmarish.
Eight complementary remediation paths suggest themselves, (the last one perhaps the most important).
1. Eliminate lifestyles, technologies and corporations that produce the worst pollution. Among the worst, military technologies (see http://www.uwec.edu/grossmzc/schrinrj.html) as well as the manufacture of private automobiles, motorboats and their fossil fuels, plus agroindustries based on trial-and-error genetic engineering as currently malpracticed;
2. Shut down the worst point-source (factory-type) polluters preemptively. Subsidize less funky technologies.
3. Regulate potential polluters to minimize their negative impact. Mandate dependably closed systems that recycle industrial toxins and lock them in impermeable membranes.
4. Stock sufficient emergency containment and clean-up equipment on-site at all times. This would include double-hulled and bunker-hulled oil tankers, inspected tugs with certified crews at every tanker landfall, and containment buoy systems in every port.
5. Research alternate energy sources and substitute as appropriate. Learners who share this topic of passion should focus on every scale from top-to-bottom of energy management: botanical, biological, ecological and social, as well as deader sciences that run on nothing but algebra.
6. Stop disrupting natural recovery. Beyond isolating and collecting clearly specified layers of pollution, accelerate post-disaster recovery only when it’s feasible and safe.
7. Determine if biochar, agrichar and terra preta can be engineered on industrial scales to produce high-carbon soil supplements by the millions of tons while drawing a lot of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100810122030.htm
8. Unforeseen new technologies?
The supertanker Exxon Valdez lacked functional radar and a wary bridge crew. Its corporate bosses lied about their state of preparedness long before and after the disaster. The ExxonMobil Corporation (with others such as Mitsubishi, giant agro-combines, precious metal and timber extraction companies) have spearheaded the most destructive environmental policies their Masters of Business Administration could dream up. May they and their ravenous investors recognize the insane trade-offs they’ve made between short-term profit and the hardship of their children in the long run. May they experience a massive change of heart and make amends.
In the future, bridge-mounted video cameras will scan the instruments, crews and surroundings of supertankers and other vulnerable machine assemblies. Distant hobbyists will oversee them, the equivalents of today’s ham radio operators. Professional on-site crews and home-based amateurs will share the chore of monitoring control centers across many signal frequencies, telltale panels and control panels currently developed as “glass cockpit” aircraft controls. These Virtual Monitors will have access to complete on-line Operations & Maintenance Manuals, pre-filed contingency plans and e-published Emergency Guides. Randomly scheduled inspections of on-site monitoring equipment will ensure against malicious tampering. The primary goal will not be to guarantee procedural minutia, but to track down institutional negligence in the long run, and, in the short, head off multiple simultaneous system failures that had not been foreseen early on. Then broadcast Red Alerts: “Bridge crew of Exxon Valdez: Red Alert!”
Once an alarm went off or was disabled, word would go out on the Overwatch Network: “Something interesting is happening at XYZ address.” Scrutiny would then intensify as more monitors checked in. Like good journalists, these international hobbyists would make it a point of honor that every incident within their purview got reported before it turned into a disaster. Alerted locals would gather to witness on-site incident response in person.
Michael Yanitch is Dutchsinse at URL REFERENCE. Several times a week, he reviews the latest geophysical activity on Earth: earthquakes, hotspots and volcanos. Based on his review of seismic databases on Google Earth, he makes earthquake predictions for the upcoming week or ten days, surprisingly successful ones. In the future, others will apply his techniques to their own discipline.
Spy satellites will serve as periscopes for these future hobbyists. Some observers will specialize in a certain type of structure or industry, (for example, nuclear power); others will become regional specialists. Through obsessive observation, they will memorize every detail of their chosen specialty and take note of anything out of the ordinary with microscopic precision.
Learners will survey PeaceWorld much more minutely, with the intent to sustain it, than the CIA and its international equivalents surveyed WeaponWorld with the intent to deceive effectively and not be deceived in turn. Nowadays, we still don’t know the general nature of this planet (more familiar with the surface of Mars than with the deep ocean floor, and even more so than with the microbial ecology in each human being). In the future, we will know better.
This said, merely because modern means can pry into everyone’s personal privacy, that does not mean we must submit being stripped of it. On the contrary, new, very detailed laws will let consumer protection groups and individuals detect and report those who intrude into their personal privacy without a signed authorization, and sue them easily and painfully for their misdeeds. Legal precedents have already been established for unauthorized photo portraits and leaked medical records. The rest of the private sphere remains to be barricaded in the same way, as was brilliantly legislated by the EU in 2018. Merely be a question of fastidious attention to detail, as with every future topic of passion on PeaceWorld.
Virtual monitors will register their topics of passion in a public register listing in detail their points of focus and the time they’ve spend on each of them, with the intention of revealing those who might misuse this information. These records would lead investigators to whoever plotted to do harm. A majority of honest monitors will make it a point of honor to identify and isolate those who might betray their topic of passion.
Lastly, many Learner investigators will specialize in the preventative study of “worst case scenarios,” those that financial interests ignore to avoid costly preventive measures (as with Fukushima, the Titanic, Deep Water Horizon and its Taylor Industry ghost, etc., etc.). If a majority of study peers confirm such Learner warnings, their remediation will take priority over deficient plans already set in place. Otherwise, the project will be dropped until adequate guarantees can be financed. Fukushima reverse-engineered to prevent it.
Across the planet, elite battalions are on standby to be dispatched with their high-tech weaponry almost anywhere on Earth within a day or two. Why are so few professionals assigned to respond to ecological disaster? Are good government, pure air and clean water so bound together that no written guarantee is called for? Fat chance. No one can afford to waive rock-bottom guarantees of personal protection. The future world constitution will list them in black and white. Dedicated, independent overwatch officials – mandated to exert the full force of the law without favor or prejudice – will back up these guarantees. Anyone who gives up such protections should expect to be crapped on as often as they are lied to and beaten without redress.
Throughout history, those who controlled the water supply ran everything else. China, Egypt, Babylon and other hydraulic civilizations flourished by regulating the course of waters. Entire civilizations collapsed when ecologically unsound policies, that might have seemed profitable in the short term, induced unintended consequences in the long run. Multi-year famines resulted, then plagues, wars and all too often annihilation soon thereafter.
Such errors will dwindle under Laocracy that calls for absolute private equity, personal emancipation, elaborate safeguards against exploitation internal and external to the nation, and a lot more free time to philosophize. It will require that we raise rare and beloved children into healthy adults and that an enlightened public heeds ethical warnings in order to ward off unintended consequences. Finally, massive majorities will have to cherish Learning above all.
Laocracy may have evolved among subsistence hunter-gatherers; it flourished thereafter in the irrigated fields of prehistory, despite the Plant Trap’s sentence of hard labor. Egalitarian societies arose spontaneously among subsistence hunter-gatherers. Insofar labor-intensive agriculture permitted, they remained in force among farmer-warriors.
No matter how backbreaking the daily toil, everyone sought their fair share of freedom and justice. As among earlier wolf packs, tyranny unchecked invited collapse. Large-scale, gravity-fed irrigation systems were surprisingly delicate structures that required lots of hard work from all hands. In a single night of furious payback, a few disgruntled farmers could wash out the most elaborate irrigation layout. No one could be denied an equal part in the allocation of water and other privileges without jeopardizing the whole.
All too often, pointless torture and execution of whole families may have been invoked and carried out. This abuse never silenced the perpetual demand for justice, at least not for very long.
In ancient Indochina, the best leaders were taught the following tenets. The king had to maintain the lightest control over his districts; the district chief, over his villages; the village headman, over his households; and the senior householder, over the members of his family. The saying went: “The Emperor’s law stops at the village gate.” It could not cross that gate without burning it down sooner or later, thus confirming its own incompetence and losing its benefits. This was plain common sense: an iron rule of social cohesion.
There is a tight correlation between freedom and clean water. When clean water becomes so scarce it must be boiled, metered or sterilized before it can be drunk safely, freedom is in danger. China revealed this tendency thousands of years ago.
For the first time in history, we face the same problem with clean air. Weapon managers look forward to turning all the air that’s fit to breathe into a marketable commodity. That would just splice another cable to those that bind us already.
Face it: oxygen is a 100% lethal addictive drug. Going cold turkey from oxygen (or water, or protein, fats and carbs) makes withdrawal from heroin seem like a serious allergy. What’s more, our bodies turn oxygen molecules into free radicals that rust out human cells and wear down their telomeres in a cumulative demolition derby we call “aging.”
Of course, once enough Learners reach this conclusion, that will put an end to the Prohibition of recreational drugs and reveal the serial stupidity and self-interest of its fat-cat hire-arcs. Profits derived from that criminalization fuels a multi-decade sprint to fascism that has come to maturity across the planet.
This Second Prohibition reminds me of the Roman persecution of Christians.
Both lacked a valid precedent, good motive and just purpose. Both promoted grand and petty crime, elite hypocrisy and contempt for government. Both contradicted fundamental liberties and jeopardized global peace. Both became playgrounds for sadists, brutes and tyrants. Both were wasteful of innocent lives, their productive effort and good reputation; at odds with vital institutions; and eventually unenforceable when confronted by spontaneous mass resistance. Both were invented, organized and perpetuated by psychopaths with the passive consent of their conscience-driven, info proletarian victims.
Corporate hirelings have not turned free air into a controlled narcotic yet, because they haven’t monopolized its supply and thus inflated the expense and legal risk of breathing it. Give them another generation of private automobiles, fossil fuels and suicidal over-industrialization to make natural air unbreathable to let them turn the trick. The hyper-disastrous finale of Fukushima might achieve the same result under a global rain of radioactivity. I can hear them bellow: “We must protect the children from this insidious danger” by locking them up by the million and throwing away the key. Wait, they’re already doing that…
So-called “recreational” drug use has been routine among humanity for at least the last 10,000 years. The Dutch policy of gedoogbeleid (lit. "policy of tolerance") will be seriously considered everywhere, wherein that drug use is illegal but tolerated under strict guidelines, provided no other crime results. That would include all “recreational” drugs.
These days, we face an ever-worsening resource base. Almost any drink is better than that which flows from the tap at growing expense. Go and take a sip. Chances are, it is at least slightly toxic and tastes awful. Middle-aged prostates give up in despair and fertility indices collapse. Children’s test scores document this decline as youngsters’ brains suffer cumulative damage from over-chlorinated wastewater and dissolved lead, as well as airborne contaminants that only massive forests could purify.
Big forests do just that: they attract and soak up torrential downpours that wash out the ash, dust and smoke from the air. They metabolize useful components and let the rest flow quietly out to the sea.
Industrialists gloat over the average person’s preference for their expensive soda pop, powder mix beverages and bottled water, over tap water. One TV ad crowed that its over-sweetened brown pap is to America what water had been to ancient civilization. That attitude is sickening, literally and figuratively.
No stream, lake, aquifer or catchment basin is safe. Rain falls as a vile corrosive more and more radioactive. Snow bears its own toxic burden, even on remote mountainsides where sparkling streams harbor the fecal contamination of wildlife suffering from recent pandemics of their own.
Washington State’s Puget Sound was once a sylvan nursery for gray whales and matchless marine life. It has become their graveyard. Gray whales swim into the Puget Sound and succumb to liver rot. Yet this region has one of the most stringent quality standards for a body of water of its size. Even Lake Baikal, the sacred Eye of God that once held the purest water on Earth, has been deep-pumped with toxic effluents for decades, thanks to Soviet industrialists staring down Stalin’s firing squads.
Despite cleanup efforts, or perhaps because of them, our urban waterways are open sewers. Across the globe, marine mammals crowd the shore to commit suicide, driven crazy by inflamed sinuses. Ask any congested diver or airline passenger how bad that hurts. Their immune systems (and ours) are compromised by tons of dioxins, PCBs and other toxic chemicals that lace our air and water. Plus three times more background radiation (five times now, maybe more?) than the Earth has experienced for millions of years.
Once-fertile farmlands undergo two destructive processes. Real estate developers acquire the best bottomland, pull up its native growth and pave it over with buildings, parking lots and roadways. What agricultural land remains is soaked with industrial herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers. As a result, the soil’s organic balance is shattered. Once-fertile soils turn into sterile clay to which plant nutrients must be added synthetically. Lacking organic binding, loose soil erodes at irreplaceable rates. It slimes our waterways with oxygen-depleting muck saturated with artificial fertilizer. This in turn chokes the life out of rivers and seas through microbial overgrowth and its lethal die-off.
We have been conditioned to prefer greasy, over-processed foods over “healthier” raw vegetables. This bias is neither thoughtless nor accidental. Our digestive disorders worsen when we consume dangerously contaminated raw foods. Modern pesticides, antibiotics and radioactive toxins (and worst of all, genetic tampering) resist ordinary food decontamination techniques like washing and cooking. The human digestive system took millions of years to adapt our bodies to natural foods. What’s more, the millions of years plants took to develop toxic defenses against herbivorous attack have been refined by thousands of years of artisanal agriculture, centuries of industrial ag, and dozens more of recent genetic engineering. It would take another million years for us to adapt to those contaminants in our over-processed foods.
Agro-corporations encourage this bias. They carefully sterilize over-processed foods and allow greater and greater toxin loads in raw foodstuffs. Their ultimate goal? Turn pre-processed, high-priced and irradiated foods into life necessities for everyone three times a day.
Public health officials ignore this trend, even though food irradiation and genetic engineering schemes menace us with insidious medical disasters.
Fresh food bestows life; food long dead imparts obesity, diabetes and gastritis. Irradiated and long shelf-life foods should be minor consumer items reserved for emergencies. Otherwise, most foods should be bought fresh, lightly cooked and chewed slowly and hungrily (hunger being the best sauce) on the same day. This nutritional habit is a peace requirement practicable at current scales of consumption only under pure peace parameters.
For example, the baker’s insane ambition of turning good bread into bread that won’t go stale in day. Good bread only lasts one day and then goes stale, at which point it can be turned into “French toast.” The attempt to square the circle of bread with a long shelf life merely creates the American epidemic of gastritis currently dubbed “gluten intolerance.” Might as well call it “idiocy tolerance.” Not to mention the addition of sulfites and God knows what other pollutants to wine — on orders from fat beer lobbyists, no doubt. Overpaid idiots…
Not satisfied with strip-mining the Earth of its mineral wealth, corporations strip-mine our health, talent and dreams; our bodies of their healthy appetite; the air and water of its purity; the soil of its fertility; and culture of its good sense and empathy. Very little has been left to embezzle, short of our life, liberty and happiness.
We rely on “factory farming” for cheap meat. Livestock is trapped in cages so small they can’t move, or in mass pens intended for far fewer beasts. Their brief existence is spent buried alive – their sickly bodies fattened on powdered animal flesh, antibiotics, hormones and other noxious additives in criminal quantities – before mass slaughter cuts short their nightmare.
Road rage and spillover criminality may result from eating meat seasoned with such unsavory compounds. Surely a God of Irony would reincarnate consumers of such grisly foods into a “factory farmed” animal existence for the next few life cycles, if only as a lesson in good manners. And any corporate CEO who drives his indentured farmers out of business unless they farm in this manner, merits an even worse fate as part of his Karmic lesson plan.
The worst outcome you can arrange for someone you despise: his misery, the fading of his children and his grim death: those are outcomes you are destined to reincarnate into. A simple rule of Karma.
Perched as we are at the summit of the food chain, our immune systems are overwhelmed by a cumulative load of toxins. We suffer from an internist’s nightmare of allergies, nausea, diarrhea and constipation, vertigo, gray-outs, panic attacks, headaches, chronic fatigue, lupus, respiratory ailments, diabetes, infertility, cancer, fetal and neonate mortality. Public health officials blame all this sickliness on smoking, overeating anything but cauliflower, failing to exercise and hating ourselves. Thus they deftly subtract themselves from the cause/effect equation and forsake significant improvements to hygiene, real nutrition and preventive public health.
We are left with numbed minds, irritated nerves, wills eroded and bodies exhausted. In the absence of superb public health, mental decay, violence, denial and neglect must worsen; apathy, inertia and fantasy come to dominate our thinking. Constitutional protections lapse as the commonwealth decays.
As you read these lines, the ozone layer unravels and the sun itself bears a lethal frown. Once-healthy outdoor lifestyles offer nothing more than skin cancer and early onset blindness.
Please get your kids to wear good sunglasses, long sleeves and a shaded hat when they go outdoors! Slather their skin with sunscreen at every opportunity. They will thank you later, for your annoying interventions, when their colleagues come down with lethal skin tumors by middle age or go prematurely blind.
We are facing many serious problems: institutional inertia, laughable education, criminal rampage and pandemic disease ... If clean air, rich soil, vigorous forests and pure water were freely available, and if we benefited from them without regard to weapon requirements, a surprising number of these problems would dwindle to mere irritants.
At Mt. St. Helens and elsewhere, nature has demonstrated her remarkable resiliency. After major pollution sources are shut down, faltering ecosystems recover spontaneously. Many more delicate and/or seriously damaged environments cannot restore themselves without our assistance. Don’t count on natural regeneration, however, until we shut down most of our toxic outputs or until nature takes a break from our spoiled-child tantrums by wiping the slate clean and starting over from scratch: bacteria and such. Do we really want to reincarnate into bacteria another few trillion trillion trillion times?
Clean air, soil and water will become Learner priorities. Dedicated environmental agencies will arise under a supranational World Court and alongside enthusiastic local Administrations. They will:
• census air, soil, water and bodily contaminations impartially;
• shut down persistent offenders; and
• enforce new environmental regulations.
Deliberate polluters will be bankrupted by withdrawn subsidies, public boycott and punitive taxation, the proceeds of which will finance effective controls for less sloppy industries. A convicted polluter will occupy his toxic site until it is certified safe. Whatever the cost, we must shut down runaway pollution; tear out and rebuild obsolete transport, garbage and water systems; flush out and repurify aquifers, rivers and lakes.
Halfway, feel-good measures are no better than doing nothing at all. False economies here are as worthless as starving to death to save on the grocery bill.
Massive reforestation is essential in every territory that once hosted large forests. Vast stretches of Yellowstone, America’s premier National Park, burned down a few years ago like a slum-corner convenience store. What more warning do we need? We were told this disaster was only natural; the fifty years or so it will take to grow back are “acceptable.” Assuming, of course, the rest of the Park doesn’t burn down in the meantime, leaving us a cinder desert where our greatest park once stood.
Actually, Yellowstone is a giant volcanic caldera that threatens to blow clouds of volcanic glass across the entire country. We are talking about a thousand Mt. St. Helens exploding at once, with yard-thick ash falls a thousand miles downwind, plus nuclear winter whatever the season. Could this be the natural end of every overgrown species? My hunch: a thickening veneer of climax forest across the globe might be the only living thing that could hold this type of catastrophe in check.
Every river and coastal region should be edenized. Climate shifts for the worst have coincided with biohabitat simplification along coastlines, river lines and edge zones of climate, latitude and altitude.
The annihilation of Viking colonists at the feet of North Atlantic coastal glaciers may have resulted from growing herds of sheep and goats that overgrazed the ecologically fragile shores of Iceland, Greenland, Canada and Scandinavia. Subsequent puffs of volcanism and the subsequent Little Ice Age?
World edenization may moderate the worst effects of our pollution and its climate extremes. Our grand project to become ecologized should reinforce heroic efforts to become civilized.
The cleanup of urban areas will include the following tasks, but not necessarily those alone.
• Break up built-up surfaces pointillistically in urban zones. In other words, perforate hard surfaces with topsoil plugs and replace entire avenues and city squares with parks and greenbelts. Economies of scale would dictate that vast areas be devoted to this project, not just median strips and a few holes in the sidewalk. Isolated urban plantings – like trees lining a road – have a harder time surviving than mixed stands of vegetation assembled in a park. This does not mean we should stop planting roadside trees. On the contrary, a single row of one variety should be interspersed with other species.
• As transportation costs go up and urban air quality improves, urban agriculture and rooftop gardening will become attractive business propositions. Urban roofscapes will go under glass in northern latitudes and turn green with plant cover everywhere. Hot cities will whitewash their rooftops and streets to transform themselves into bright daytime stars when viewed from above. Shady greenbelts and greenswards will slash across urban areas. Highways and railways (vacuum mag-levs tubes?) will skirt urban areas entirely or be driven underground where automotive exhausts can be sucked up and filtered. Indeed, following Seattle’s lead from the century before last, cities may pave over their entire ground level downtown, thus insulating pedestrian traffic and amenities from automotive congestion, accidents and pollution.
• An interim solution might involve stretching lightweight elevated walkways downtown, threading them above or below urban arteries and letting them span busy intersections. Heavier, stronger overhead byways might accommodate bicycles, rickshaws and other lightweight conveyances.
• In addition, seedbeds might be planted where concrete foundations exist today. From these beds, re-architected bamboo structures might grow, equivalent in tensile strength to the steel currently used on-site. By bamboo, I mean vegetation best adapted to local engineering needs.
Ground cover will be replanted along eroding mountain slopes, hillsides and watersheds. Plant varieties will be systematically propagated in every biohabitat. Diversified softwood plantations will be planted along devastated fringes between hardwood and softwood habitats. Climax ecologies will be restored and protected wherever possible.
Where melted ice once covered millions of square miles, white trees, bushes and flowers will be planted and propagated.
Specially tailored oleophagous (oil-eating) bacteria will attack oil slicks from driveway sheens to industrial and maritime spills. Special trees, shrubs and micro-organic communities will soak up runoff water and persistent toxins for subsequent collection and recycling. Almost every watershed, wetland and beach on Earth will be restored to the best version Learners can make of their natural state.
Mr. Harrison Ford and his rich, perceptive friends have set aside development-free belts between major wildlife habitats and the nearer pole. These set-asides will permit forests and their animal populations to migrate towards more temperate latitudes as global warming cooks forest-edges nearer to the equator. Once these forests have grown back, they will require fewer and fewer protections and artificial supplements. But until then, those should be multiplied.
Climax ecosystems are enormous natural pumps that collect water and inject it into the atmosphere as purified rain. Learners will make sure that these organic sprinkler systems work the way nature intended them to. We mustn’t allow them to dry out and heat up much more, or allow the seas to cool off too much as a result of glacier melt … and perhaps spin us into Weather Chaos if we fail to do so.
Solar power is another peace technology weapon managers loathe because it is decentralized, anarchic and anti-combat. On a battlefield, you cannot expect to draw energy directly from the sun. Any energy-collecting machine caught out in the open would get bombed to bits, not to mention drawing the enemy’s attention to its nearby consumers.
Besides, solar power is a one-shot deal. You buy the panels and set them up (or paint them on your windows) and wind up in the energy business for yourself. It doesn’t require massive, stinking and/or radioactive power plants, proprietary mineral rights and obsolete refineries whose owners impose spiraling service fees on the rest of us.
Note how petroleum production is at an all-time high by international agreement, gasoline consumption at an all-time low due to the 2021 conditions of COVID, yet gasoline prices are at an all-time high in direct contradiction to free market supply and demand. This would not happen if individual and local soft power utilities came online.
Terra preta technologies may reduce industrial amounts of carbon dioxide and slow down global warming before its atmospheric accumulation cooks us off this planet. In addition and perhaps more significantly, some of the captured carbon can renew exhausted soils. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100810122030.htm
Trees capture carbon as they grow. Large tree plantations absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide and hold back greenhouse warming. As old growth biomass collects more water and carbon on land, the oceans might recede, warm up and salinate. Massive reforestation projects may counter the effects of industrial greenhouse gasses that seem to generate glacial melt, marine cooling and desalination. This cooling may interrupt vast deep-sea currents that shuffle planetary temperature variations and moderate the global climate.
A lot of the CO2 of human origin gets sucked into the sea. Unless we reverse that process ASAP, that will turn them into mild seltzer water too acidic to sustain marine life. Long-term effects demand more study, but deeper studies must not delay obvious and immediate intervention.
In the meantime, the good news is that the nickel in sea urchins shells is a cheap and long-lasting catalyst that turns carbon dioxide into chemically inert calcium carbonate chalk just as readily at sea as in the chimneys of our power plants. Salps are another potential CO2 collector on a massive scale. Plankton and sea life of this kind will have to be factory farmed by the megaton and sown across the sea.
We may need to reforest Texas-, Europe-, Australia-sized landmasses. This project may show little impact until we have buried mature trees in checkerboard acres and immediately replanted that ground with tree seedlings. That might not be the wisest policy; it might cause regional imbalances: too much effort here and not enough there.
A better plan might look something like this. Children go out into the countryside with their parents on birthdays and other holidays to plant trees and shrubs as part of a religious festival. Similar projects will proliferate. Wise Learners, get planting!
As I write this text, my own hypocrisy grieves me. We cut down two wild cherry trees on our small plot of land. A year earlier, we had planted new fruit trees pruned much smaller. We even uprooted a beautiful stand of bamboo because it encroached on a neighbor’s yard. Afterwards, to ensure against trees falling on our buildings, we cut down or trimmed all of them. I regret those losses.
The Emerald City Seattle has less and less tree cover every year. Biomass, clean air and shade suffer all in proportion. Urban arborists replace big, old trees with dwarf ones that won’t impinge on overhead power and telephone lines. This bureaucratic compromise contradicts their fondest inclination. Why don’t you plant big trees and bury the damned power lines instead? We urbanites have lost our soul to concrete and asphalt … when all our cities could become gardens!
There is irony here, if you think about it. The easiest and cheapest way to cool down a home in summertime, or a city for that matter, is to plant shade trees along its sunny flanks. Deciduous shade trees are quite suitable: they drop their leaves during winter and allow the sunlight to shine through when it’s cold out.
Even though we may not know exactly what to do next, we could set our pace step-by-step back onto the right path. Gaia should see to the rest — and perhaps to our long-term survival.
In any case, if humanity must engineer its own demise, we should leave behind compelling proof of heroic attempts to correct our worst errors, just as the vanished Minoans left us the moving testimony of their magnificent artwork, just as I leave you this draft of Learner.
If I could get it engraved on the interior walls of massive desert pyramids, I would. Instead, it is recorded in evaporative pixels.
Whether or not we kludge along in mediocrity is matter of indifference to the universe. It would be more important that we unite in peace, act heroically and leave behind a sterling record of fine achievements, no matter how fleeting or everlasting.
If ancient peoples thought about such things, I suppose they believed they belonged to the Land, (Vietnamese Xa), as Xa belongs to nature. Later on, various phantasms entangled us (pretend or truly sacred? Who can honestly tell?): God(s), chains of ancestors, sovereign states, ideologies, bureaucracies, Freudian or holy trinities, deconstructionist simplicities, simplifying nihilism, the next tomfoolery.
Of late, we don’t belong to anything. On the contrary, everything and everyone belongs to the most tormented among us, for whom anything goes without regard to consequences. The more harebrained and vicious their schemes, the worst the disasters that unfold from their clumsiness without follow-up correction, the stronger that makes them because it made them richer. They bring to mind ten-year-olds who got hold of the car keys: gasping, screaming and laughing their hysterical way through a horrifying series of near collisions since the car hadn’t stalled yet.
It is time we recovered our sense of belonging, the way a lost child is brought back to parental arms. Time we regained calm competence and wisdom instead of playing Russian roulette with the world, blinking blindly from panic greed and failed inspiration.
Global reforestation could restore our sullied habitat to a semblance of its primal purity, soothe disastrous weather patterns and promote edenic diversity. Who knows? Edenization might moderate tectonic disasters and help heal the atmosphere and the oceans. This may be our last chance to make amends for environmental abuse. At the same time, we could bind each other’s social, physical and psychic wounds in our common withdrawal from misery.
Uruk, Babylon, Love Canal, Chernobyl, your hometown: the list of dead-end ecocides could stretch out real long, real fast.
- YOUR RIGHTS OR THEIR PRIVILEGE –
“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 calls for a completely new life ethic on our part. Habits found tolerable in the past, as well as those found intolerable, need to be reassessed for their weapon content. We must address fundamental contradictions between our ideals and the weapon “realism” we have had to endure because of illusory limitations. We must resolve these contradictions and develop a new social awareness in absolute peace.
Assisted death should be discretionary for adults. Powerful reasons support this principle, involving personal freedom. Weapon societies forbid self-termination : another attempt to annul personal autonomy. This restriction all by itself, validates assisted death in case of need.
Obviously, killers should never get to abuse these assisted endings. Waiting periods, offers of therapy, counsel and social assistance, as well as published declarations of intent could secure the safety of potential victims. The rituals of self-directed death should be as solemn and carefully thought-out as those of marriage or abortion.
“To merit your painless death, we officials must certify that you are in unmanageable agony or incurable catatonia. At that stage, of course, you will be unfit to request it.” Such Catch-22 legalisms are mere refinements of weapon enslavement.
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.
As usual in a weapon society, pain relief and life termination are overseen by healthy people free of pain; and the provision of abortion, by men who cannot ever get pregnant. PeaceWorld would see to it that those most deeply affected by a problem were in majority responsible for it.
Authoritarians revolt at the idea of letting prisoners “cheat the hangman.” Everyone understands that life imprisonment and capital punishment are nastier fates than a quick clean suicide. Punishment bureaucracies consider prisoner suicide a provocation, even though they often invoke it to disguise custodial neglect, rape and brutality at the hands of their subordinates. They’d rather someone at their mercy were stripped of human rights and forced to suffer indefinitely, denied the right to choose their own time and means of dying.
As for contraception and family planning, weapon managers aim to increase the number of abused offspring who make the best cannon fodder and the greatest body count of victims. They condemn promiscuity a priori because the resulting sexual frustration multiplies the criminal aggression they desire. How convenient for them. Sexual rebels are punished with unwanted pregnancy, moralistic condemnation, incompetent butchery, social ostracism and genital diseases otherwise controllable by straightforward public health measures.
The stupidity that’s been institutionalized on this topic for all these years is inexcusable.
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: a self-evident outcome for very poor and therefore hyper-violent societies. Over long stretches of time, they spin off fewer male survivors and more females. This unbalanced sex ratio induces polygamy, more children and social approval for unavoidably large families. Poor people might as well congratulate themselves for what they can’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 neglected children. The outcome is a mass of despised womenfolk, potential killers among their children because poorly raised, denser populations and an upsurge of personal violence and public warfare.
Secondly, warfare kills off those more creative, strong, brave, bright, healthy, dutiful and enlightened, faster than it kills off the rest of us. The silage of warfare is a superfluity of stubborn mediocrities who waste precious time imposing their rough sketch bureaucracy on the rest of us. War and its offshoots are their ultimate revenge.
If warfare were forbidden, future generations would grow up stronger, wiser and more honest. It would take generations of this kind to mend the harmful effects of a single generation massacred. After consecutive generations of massacre, it might take a century’s worth of peace. Until then, evil and indifference to its ramifications prevail over the good and its preventive care, in direct proportion to those casualties.
Thus Rome’s transition from Republic to Empire can be attributed to the deterioration of its management due to massive elite casualties during the Punic Wars, those in Gaul and civil wars after. The stagnation of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations, as well as the eventual collapse of their leadership after the Cold War, to massacres before, during and after.
It is grimly comical to note that subsequent historians blame this Roman transition on the effects of Roman peace (almost as many quarrels as quarrelers), but not on those of war. In turn, the Soviets’ collapse is attributed to the clownish and ruinous policies of that reactionary con man, President Ronald Reagan, but not to the festering sore of previous casualties apparent to anyone who would bother to count them. During World War II (sic), America suffered about two percent of the casualties Russia suffered (600,000 dead versus 30,000,000), and none of its massive infrastructure demolition. Guess who won the Cold War? All that, thanks to Ronald Reagan and his smirking con schemes. Right!
There are better ways to stabilize the population: sound nutrition, quality universal health care, comparable education, dependable social security for the elderly and the disabled and, more importantly, strict enforcement of equal rights for everyone, women and children included, without compromise or exception.
Everywhere those things have improved, populations have shrunk to the horror of the reactionaries. The only real thing to fear is that poorer, less well-run but well-armed nations drag the rest of us down in revenge. Every nation should be equally well off and depopulate just as quickly. No problem then!
With fanatical obstinacy, weapon management blocks these benefits each in turn. After all, its technicians prioritize mass destruction and suffering. Life-enhancement is irrelevant or else subtracts from those goals; it is at best a sideshow compared to harsher priorities of theirs.
The prohibition of birth control harnesses explosive human energies: intense sexual frustration and the rage of bastard ostracism, multiplied by human overcrowding reflexes of aggression and shadism. Weapon management strengthens itself by abusing 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, and by sublimating all those into criminality.
An organization declares itself a weapons institution if it disempowers women by discouraging family planning,: another reason to tag mass religions as shameless weapons institutions.
Sexual promiscuity is unavoidable among people denied adequate education and healthcare; it is equally prevalent among those well-educated and cared for. Ordering people to refrain from something as pleasant as sex is a royal waste of time for everyone concerned except weapons elites shrouding their real agendas.
The duller and less skilled the female and the more fragile her support network, the more often weapon managers will urge her to have children. Routinely and without redress, she will be raped into motherhood if she lacks high-privilege male protectors. Such sad ravages occur as often today as they did in the past (thus no social improvement can be noted.)
The best infantry recruits survive the least secure childhood. In short, they are bastards, orphans or both. Ghettos and slums make the best nurseries for a large number of good troops. That is the only reason they exist. Otherwise, they are the most expensive neighborhoods to administer and the least profitable ones downstream in time.
Even though social regression to medieval iniquity has always been their hypocritical goal, reactionaries blame the average liberal for social decline. Accusing an opponent for their misdeed, that is their usual attempt to bury their shame. In the name of compromise, modern politicians (“One million dollars equal one vote!”) persist at monkey-wrenching progressive legislation. Now that the evils they’ve bargained for have borne their bitter fruit, they declare these outcomes the fault of progressives. Only weapon management running a weapon state could spew such provocative lies and get away with them, thanks to our collective apathy.
Everyone knows that a shortened human lifespan – ended at the embryonic stage if necessary – is better than a lifelong torture endured in some ghetto nightmare, famine desert or prison hell. Many people would never condemn their own children to such a demonic existence, yet 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 many religious fundamentalists. They would rather 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 support warfare abroad, prison empires and the death penalty at home ; targeting for misery and destruction the excess children they insist on bringing to term.
What would Jesus have said?
On the other hand, those who counter abortion with legitimate alternatives of adoption and quality child-care, command unlimited respect. I suspect “those” would mostly be women. In so doing, they deny weapon technicians their primary source of recruitment.
No one prefers the lesser evil of abortion. Safe and speedy adoption should be the norm for every unwanted child and every couple wanting to raise one. I never understood why there are so many waiting lists of unloved children and anxious, 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 by right-to-lifers have been just as bitter.
Ignoring the real challenge provoked by their precious contradictions, weapon managers make up bogus challenges to their tyranny. By dee-normalizing harmless sexuality and criminalizing drug use among consenting adults, reactionaries produce complete new sets of “deviants” they may persecute at will.
Unfortunately, we have granted too many responsibilities to certifiable neurotics and let them impose their obsessions on the rest of us. Then we’ve let them select the next even sicklier generation of neurotics to take their place. This is a typical tailspin of institutional degeneracy over time, until ruthless inquisitors reign supreme everywhere.
Bring out the sweeps!
The covert profits reactionaries gleaned from decades of illegal drug trade have financed their sprint to global fascism, cheer-led by the media. Where do you suppose all those billions of criminal dollars wound up, except in their filthy, manicured hands? The media went along with this conspiracy, even though it wound up collapsing their own profession along with everything else.
Learners will redraft legal codes with one overriding consideration: ease of enforcement by 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 caught 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, industrial jailers and ideological fanatics to entangle honest folk in frivolous legalisms, it becomes unenforceable. Insofar significant minorities define the police as hostile intruders, the law as a whole becomes less and less enforceable.
Some social commentators have concluded that the Law should be an inexorable Juggernaut. According to them, it should grow without restraint; menacing and absolute. Anarchy might emerge from its failure to grow or from attempts to correct its worst errors. This attitude leads to Auschwitz. The law should be a gossamer web best defined by its absence, to which most people submit when they go astray.
Any failure or error on its part calls for strict and swift self-correction. A cop has no more right to shoot an unarmed man, no matter what the provocation, than a civilian would have. A prosecutor who lies to obtain a conviction should serve the prisoner’s time in his place.
Learners will enforce a minimum of laws. Destructive activities that cannot be realistically forbidden should be regulated to serve public health.
“A State so governed needs very few laws, and insofar it becomes necessary to promulgate new ones, the need is obvious to everyone. The first to propose them merely states what everyone else has already felt. It would not be a question of intrigue or eloquence to pass into law that which everybody has agreed to once they were sure everyone would do likewise.” John-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social, (The Social Contract) Bordas, Paris, Bruxelles, Montréal, 1972. Book IV, Chapter 1.
Prostitutes should be thoroughly inspected by doctors and regularly certified; drug distributors, licensed like alcohol and tobacco dealers. Gambling receipts should be taxed to defray gambling abuses. Any abuse of minors should become unthinkable and difficult to hide, just as much by law as by custom and universal mores.
With fewer bad examples to draw upon and more good ones to imitate, people will do the right thing more and more often until most people regulate their own behavior (and especially that of local trouble makers) with the help of firm outside protection but less supervision from above.
Once our laws have been purged of weapon-dross, specific offenses will emerge uncovered by precedent. In that case, 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 look upon the authorities as benevolent by and large. Mean-spirited punishment incites defiance, no matter how hopeless that defiance may be. Excessive punishment glorifies the criminal in the eyes of his community and defeats a worthwhile outcome, however much it may entertain the psychopaths in control.
Remember, every criminal conviction is a new confession of community failure: money and talent sucked down a black hole of imprisonment with nothing gained. The welcome sacrifice of bad guys during a ritual of public vengeance: that would be the worst alternative, except execution, from a peaceable point of view.
Of course, some crime victims believe their tormentors deserve punishment, that their assailant’s suffering will somehow offset their own. I might come to the same conclusion under similar circumstances. God guide us through this obscurity.
The death penalty befouls man and God, Heaven and Earth. We conspire to execute the least fortunate and 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 liv in obedience to the basic tenets of every creed and culture.
Murders of passion, ignorance and insanity are a pity to behold. Wisdom dictates they be preempted by stratagems more subtle than neglect-before-the-fact and brutal hysteria after. Lethal self-defense might be half justified in worst-case scenarios. Juries could take to heart the cries for vengeance of a victim’s family. Also, violent convicts should be housed and guarded in prison separately from petty criminals.
In a society free of weapon mentality, murderous violence will have no more appeal than eating a plate of shit. No-one but the obviously insane would think of doing it, and they’d be relatively easy targets for preemptive detection.
However, when legal 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 executions, each new one less justifiable than the last. In pursuit of an improved “score,” they wind up executing the deranged, the mentally deficient, mere children and innocents mistried and misjudged.
Tyranny’s worst and final argument is the death penalty. In that direction lie the wanton slaughter of innocents to settle mere property disputes, and civil war to argue paltry principles.
In legal confrontations, the criminal, his victims and official representatives of society (judges and lawyers nowadays; juries and trained mediators soon), will merge their valid needs into a holism. From this agreement pragmatic solutions will emerge. The widest voluntary gathering of judge, jury, victims, the accused and intermediaries should seek to resolve these problems in a manner acceptable to the majority of them.
The media should portray acts of violence as despicable, cowardly and tragic; no longer heroic. Rather than eliminate fictional violence entirely, or “pretty it up” and tone down its ill effects (as happens in fiction these days), movies and television should fan the flames of 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 in portrayals of violent confrontation.
Hollywood upholds an implicit formula already: 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, anonymous onlookers should be seen to 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 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 the violence shared. No more heroes except those of peace, or, if forced to be violent in self-defense, equally self-sacrificial, as in morality tales like Have Gun, Will Travel. Military honor above all!
People often blame the worsening of fictional violence in the media for inspiring worse actions on the street. I am convinced that the modern day count of violent acts per capita has remained unchanged or decreased compared to those of yore. However, they have become more perilous overall, thanks to too many fire harms in hands unqualified for that responsibility — including those of bad cops. I am also convinced that the dramatization of cultural heroes suffering from more and more insane levels of violence and inflicting it in turn has incited “lone gunmen” and gangs to surpass the latest level of self-promotional massacre.
It would be better if we cooled down the fiction media and thus the developing minds of potentially homicidal psychopaths; more and more problematic to throw ourselves in the opposite direction like we are doing these days.
Under the coercion of weapon management, our country turns into a vast prison courtyard. In unacceptable numbers, the law-abiding fortify their homes and neighborhoods. More and more victimless convicts and homeless indigents are subject to systematic abuse. Regardless of our guilt or innocence, deficits or assets, it’ll be our turn soon enough.
A social commentator once split civil society into two worlds: neighborhoods that remain open, and banana republics where the rich shield themselves behind bodyguards and perimeter walls beyond which mass poverty festers unattended.
The richest, most powerful and freest nations are turning into banana republics. Just like prior to World War II (sic), the United Nations and other world organizations are less and less able to address the proliferation of wars, refugees and tyranny. We enslave and disgrace ourselves by failing to honor our foremost values at every tier of governance. In our case, political indifference breeds global chaos and the sense of personal and collective powerlessness that psychopaths find quite useful. It is paradoxical that our society’s incredible wealth decrees its declining liberty, equality and fraternity.
Everyone became upset when the news story came out that all the neighbors of a city block ignored the cries for help of a female victim attacked just below their window. Not only did no-one come to her aid; no-one called the police at that time. What more can we expect from ordinary folks when emblematic world organizations refuse to do any better?
More and more often, perimeter walls and security alarms are set around homes. Mine has both: another disgrace of mine. Far too many Americans are in jail or on probation. An American citizen who is also a minority male has a much better chance of being crushed in judiciary clockwork than of winning at roulette, when the reverse would be true in a healthy peace society.
Once peace mentality regains the fore, so will our self-discipline, virtue and refusal to accept the unacceptable. Global Learner organizations will weed out warlike violence. Those global efforts will inspire atavistic warriors to defend PeaceWorld. Problems will work themselves out in proportion to shared efficiencies on every scale, from local families, marketplaces and administrations to the World Agora and World Court.
- STOP VOMITING IN THE SALAD BAR –
“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.
To begin with, the following should be obvious to everyone. But it has not yet begun to be:
“Be fruitful and multiply” does not mean “multiply like rabbits without a predator until you burn up the planet.” Just like the “All you can eat” sign does not mean “feel free to throw up in the salad bar.”
Rigorous family planning should have been set up everywhere on Earth decades ago: the poorer the region, the more thorough its family planning. Instead, a pack of Dark Age yahoos took charge of its global suppression with well-financed if criminal stupidity.
We should take hold of this forgotten truth: children are the most promising recipients of mass devotion. It may surprise you, but raising a healthy child may be the ultimate worldly sacrament, or at least not hindering the child’s development. Every infant should be a gift from heaven, not:
• a wish fulfillment;
• compensation for loneliness and neglect;
• a desperate shot at immortality;
• submission to family, church and state pressure;
• an outlet for one’s own childhood torments;
• mass produced cannon fodder;
• the inarticulate expression of motherhood or fatherhood;
• mucilage for a shaky marriage;
• a blend of medical virtuosity and misplaced longing. (Grandmothers bearing their grandchildren to term ― does this planet not produce enough children fit for adoption?);
• a biological old-age pension plan, (“God’s own Social Security” as one fundamentalist put it ― dead serious, he was);
• the only permissible outcome of sex; or
• the legislated outcome of unwanted pregnancy.
Throughout history, irresponsible people were favored to breed. In Medieval Europe as much as elsewhere, such arrangements were commonplace. Those with more brains (both men and women) were set aside for religious celibacy, while titled bullies and peasant brutes (mostly illiterate) were abandoned to militant fertility.
Nowadays in Germany and elsewhere, studious, hard-working young women don’t have the time and support to have children while they pursue their professional ambition. Maternity is more likely among women who have their first child before they finish High School. Learners will provide day-care and financial support for professional women who need to take time off to raise children, and intensive education for teenage moms and their offspring.
Earlier on, creative minds got sucked into the first cities. Downtown overcrowding and grimy turmoil ensured higher mortality and lower birth rates, on average, than the countryside where rural folk and their fertile progeny took their chances with sporadic famine, endemic banditry and terminal boredom.
Generally speaking, the brighter the creature, the less likely to breed under adverse conditions. Captive animals refuse to raise a cub if excessive noise, malnutrition and overcrowding prevent them from doing so. Heightened stress induces physiochemical imbalances in the reproductive cycle of neurologically gifted species; it increases the likelihood of sterility, stillbirth, infant mortality and perhaps mutants, sociopaths and infertile offspring; it lowers immunity and increases vulnerability. The dismal 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?
Has humanity canceled out eons of true-bred endurance during the last few millennia of liquor-sodden weapon management? Fragmentary ancient literature offers few clues as to which Age displays superior temperament, ours today or one prior. Our suppression of sacred wonder is a dependable sign of modern senescence, as are the growing evils of weapon mentality.
If we don’t restrict the human genotype to a few idealized clones – the way we’ve done with crops and livestock – genetic diversity should sire a dependable bell-curve of intellect fit for higher pursuit.
Disparities between human “races” are 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, enslavement, etc. Repeated attempts to document these claims have failed despite elaborate approaches bankrolled by bigoted elites.
Any group that deviated markedly from the human norm would have been reabsorbed into it or ejected from it. It would either have displaced lesser humans through superior adaptability or disappeared through incompetence, monstrosity and genocide.
Human sexuality has blended the genetic milkshake much more briskly than we care to admit. Whether by commerce and marriage, by affection and elopement or by warfare and rape, human lineages have intermixed avidly. These days, a racial pureblood is a statistical freak and a geographic anomaly; “racial purity” is more a function of self-delusion than of DNA.
Any good farmer will tell you that crossbreeds are more robust on the whole than purebreds. The “purer” the noble blood and the smaller the genetic pool it could draw from, the weaker and dumber its offspring, vulnerable under all but the best circumstances. In spite of adverse conditions, weeds thrive due to their genetic freedom.
Learners will find little interest in “purifying” human eugenics. Natural diversity and freedom of choice will be promoted within a flowering of good conscience and Vedic architecture. Any lesser goal is just slow motion suicide.
Quite often in the past, fanatical bigots dove into the depths of psychosexual pathology and annihilated entire peoples just for having the “wrong blood” and certain peculiar habits. Fortunately, those who have attempted this stunt have allied the whole world, horrified, against them. Their execution of the Other has earned them nothing but their own. “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.
Hitler and his crazy cronies seized upon this Prism pathology.
“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 (take them from me, please!). Replace the designation “Aryan” with their preferred race (their own), replace the flowery palaver quoted above with the incoherence of rage and ignorance, and you will have heard something similar from people just like them on your home ground. It wouldn’t matter where those bigots came from, what language they spoke or what they looked like. Their worship of racial purity and bloodline nobility is just another manifestation of the reptilian limbic system that all of us inherit but they alone are enslaved to.
It’s interesting to reverse the quotation above and note its pertinence. “The flame of (matrilineal) civilization was there to begin with and rekindles today despite the patrilineal abuse of slaver Aryans.”
Another interesting idea is that the self-glorification of bigots would merely be the displaced worship of extraterrestrials who may have reprogrammed our culture and DNA to turn us from mere upgraded apes into farmers, city dwellers, creative thinkers and potential sun treaders. Reread the above text with that in mind and see how well things fit.
No one dogma or genotype can resolve every problem under every circumstance and from every point of view. The pursuit of happiness is everyone’s private business. It cannot be controlled from above. At best, government may accelerate the withdrawal from misery. Eugenic “improvement” will hold no interest for Learners. The CO2 farts of the world’s human overburden confirm our torrid adaptation to it.
Average birthrates have fallen somewhat in developed nations. Unfortunately, each First World child burns up more resources and generates more garbage than dozens of children from impoverished nations. Thus, when rich couples conceive another child, they spawn many more consumer-equivalents. "Lower, more praiseworthy" birth rates in the First World still amplify overconsumption and waste. Compared to it, the higher birth rates of the Third World are an equal or lesser burden, though their eventual development will require several Earth’s worth of resources unless PeaceWorld radically transforms consumer priorities.
There is no valid reason to worsen this traffic jam ― whether among First or Third World peoples. Chinese couples have submitted to a one-child birth limitation: a limit Learners will go well beyond.
More and more liberties may become routine in the future, that we would consider anarchic and unmanageable today. Only one sphere of human endeavor will require strict regulation, the one exempted from it all this time: having and raising babies. Of course, any suggestion of this kind will draw howls of heresy, blasphemy and outrage.
Once this regulation is adopted, thriving criminal syndics will see to it that unimaginable crimes fester in black markets of illegal human childbirth, cloning and enslavement ― each driven by the darkest of human compulsion. Compared to it, the American Prohibition of alcohol and then recreational drugs will seem like annoying family squabbles at a county fair.
Show me a valid alternative and I will drop mine like a hot brick from my bare hands. Government regulation will be necessary – whatever nightmare that implies – because those wise enough to comply will be worthy of having children, while many rebels, not so much.
It would have been much better if we had turned this argument into a matter of morality and guilt feeling during decades of complicated philosophical debate. Too bad we don’t have that much time. A general dialogue on these issues, however brief, could promote a consensus broad enough to support such laws and better manage their worst consequences.
I drafted what follows categorically. It remains to be seen whether it will be adopted without compromise, given enough time. In the meantime, these principles should be applied much less dogmatically and only insofar possible provided peace prevails, in incremental steps and after much debate. The generations we should have taken to reason them through to everyone’s satisfaction, they’ve shrunk to a few short years and months.
It is dreadful to witness how well we’ve confirmed our collective madness. Learner genius beyond question must prevail over it to assure our long-term survival.
So here goes! Everyone will undergo a reversible sterilization at puberty as a rite of passage into adulthood with all its privileges and obligations. This might involve supervised drug dosages or reversible minor surgery.
Countless licenses are issued to drive, to practice law, to go fishing and for a thousand other pursuits. Alas, there is neither the supply nor the demand for advanced training in raising a healthy child. No-one bothers to note that child raising is a far graver responsibility and obligation than all those carefully licensed tasks. Please consult Adrian Raine, The Anatomy of Violence.
Those who insist on having children should undergo advanced training in childcare, internships serving the elderly and the disabled, and in-depth psychological testing. They should vow to care for children as a lifelong priority. Each graduate’s fertility would then be restored for a full-term pregnancy. Newborn children will be matched with an extended family of natural and surrogate parents both fertile and sterile.
No adult should endure the toil of childcare single-handed, and no “difficult” child should be left in the hands of impatient, hostile and indifferent biological parents: the recipe for adult criminals and warriors in large numbers. Children should be taught socialization skills by the best role models we can find and by age-peers just as well treated. Learners will not tolerate child abuse of any kind: accidental, institutional or criminal. There will be far fewer “regrettable” exceptions that current societies mass-produce.
Indeed, the amazing success of education in Finland may show us the way. They shut down all their teaching colleges with mediocre standards “if you can’t do, teach” and replaced them with elite degree programs as honorable as the astronaut program, in eight universities as hard to get into as MIT. Child test scores improved by two or three standard deviations; a result declared impossible elsewhere.
This new childbearing priesthood will recruit talented amateurs on a full- or part-time basis either temporary or permanent. Such communities will require the same financial support we lavish on the military today, including generous allotments of life necessities, special services and full-time salaries. If necessary, couples bearing more than one child would hand over additional offspring to these extended family groups: safe havens for orphans, runaways and other young victims of abuse.
Parents certified to be reliable after their delivery will be spared this fate and allowed to raise their children naturally. The love between parent and child is one of the strongest forces in nature. Learners must not stand between them without good reason, neither should they refuse to take a stand between them if good reason to do so exists.
This text advocates these extraordinary measures for five 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 fear of brutality.
3. Note: guilt, not shame. Guilt is inner-directed; it promotes empathy for victims and leads to repentance and reparations. Shame is impersonal and objectifying. Those who suffer from it consider themselves victims and blame everyone else, which triggers additional 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 shameful humiliation. Interestingly, so did many great Learners, guilt-driven to do good despite the abuse they were inflicted.
4. The human population needs to shrink to a fraction of its current, useless bulk ― calmly, quickly, and voluntarily. The fastest way to do so would be to halve birth rates immediately worldwide and halve them again several times within the next few decades, inducing a net decline across every human population without the need for more war and killing.
5. Are you still awake?
It might seem that such stern measures could do no more than lighten, at enormous social cost, the enormous burden humanity imposes on the world today. There are seven billion of us, soon to be ten billion or more: a deep footprint indeed for planet Earth. When a certain species leaves such a heavy footprint, it invites global disaster. A lighter one would allow us more leeway.
But this is not the only reason. It is not so much the mass of humanity that burdens the Earth today, as the shoddy quality of our thought and culture with its ensuing waste per capita.
Nature could easily trim us down to acceptable numbers. Corporate greed and subsequent mass-casualty disasters could produce this toll of misery almost effortlessly. The above-listed measures would still be worthwhile, even if humanity got hammered down to a few fertile couples. World-dominant species have perished this way in the past ― once their footprint grew too heavy for the world ecology to maintain, but rarely before. We should transmit the fertility instructions listed above, if only to ensure that our rare replacements don’t repeat our overpopulation mistakes during fertile generations to come.
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 relatives carried their infants everywhere they went between the first five birthdays of the infant’s life.
On the island of Bali, for example, it is bad luck for an infant’s feet to touch ground while relatives remained awake. All other things being equal, prolonged handling and a mobile perspective from adult height enhances the neurological development of infants. Healthy communities of healthy adults raising healthy children would promote our cherished freedoms best.
It was only with the Plant Trap – and its unavoidable hyper-fertility, wife abuse and child neglect – that our social problems began to fester in earnest.
If our children were as rare as plump diamonds, we would treat them royally, as should be their due. Because we consider them as common as dirt, we abuse and neglect far too many of them (except our own). It is not surprising that many survivors of this neglect and abuse 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.
Criminal negligence has kept humanity off balance for so long, we face the choice of a desperate surgeon. Eighty years ago, humanity needed to get its teeth cleaned. Nothing doing; “too busy.” Fifty-some years ago, advised that a painful restorative procedure was necessary, we bemoaned expense and pain. Twenty years ago, several teeth had to be filled. Once again, no consent. Ten years later, nothing despite more and more pain. Last year, some rotten teeth had to be pulled. Still nothing.
Nowadays, the equivalent of open skull surgery offers a last chance to dodge cerebral sepsis. There’s no time left to whine and dine in pathetic indecision: what humanity seems to do best.
- WORLD MILITIA –
Military honor is the only thing that prevents weapon technicians from wrecking everything — which fact peace mythology must emphasize. Learners should appeal first and foremost to warrior honor: the honor of my father, of every good warrior, that scrubs him of his filth. Those whose passion is military honor will recognize it at once in PeaceWorld and defend it against anyone crazy enough to deny it, lethal as he may be. They will champion PeaceWorld and guard it fiercely thereafter. Duty, honor and Learning must fuse into one.
It may surprise you to stumble on a blueprint of a World Militia in Learner, a PeaceWorld manifesto. Actually, it shouldn’t surprise you. The Second Amendment of the American Constitution bars government from infringing on the right of its citizens to bear arms, a well-regulated militia “being necessary to the security of a free State.”
The weapon justification was to arm local militias against slave revolts in the South and attacks by Native Americans wherever they had not yet been exterminated or confined to concentration camps. The peace justification will be to arm everyone against any armed threat from any direction, from global tyranny down to an active shooter in the neighborhood.
No solution can be found in current “norms” of private handguns in too many households, (fire harms + children = tragic loss guaranteed); bodyguards for the rich and weapon shakedowns for the poor; a ruinous, mercenary army anathema to the spirit and letter of the Constitution; suicide bomb massacres; fire fights that mow down innocent victims on the street, in restaurants, even in the hallowed hallways of school.
Learners, what a disgrace! The whole world may have come to terms with this infamy, but we should have done better than that.
Some people confound a world without war with one without violence. In the end, they may be right. Then again, they may have mistaken a method like non-violence – a very powerful one, therefore very challenging – for the goal at hand: PeaceWorld.
Can you tell the difference between simple pacifism and much more complex Satyagraha, between a world without any violence whatsoever and PeaceWorld?
The practice of deliberate non-violence (Satyagraha) has just been rediscovered by humanity after thousands of years of brutal suppression at every attempt.
The most recent attempts have been in Palestine. They have been painful failures for the time being because this exercise cannot succeed until the following lessons are Learned.
Palestinian Satyagrahi overlooked two key elements:
1. The presence of a dangerous military alternative, the evil twin of the Satyagrahi but under their control as long as the peace party succeeds: “Negotiate with us in good faith or take on those other guys as best you can.”
2. Realtime, world-spanning media coverage of any suppression of the Satyagrahi.
Palestinian Satyagrahi may have been able to call on the former necessity. I doubt it: their armed forces were never strong enough or under their complete control. But they were fatally denied the latter. The systematic brutality of reactionaries won out once again, this time under the Israeli boot while the world media looked the other way.
In 2018, unarmed Palestinians were shot down in droves along the Gaza fence line, carefully filmed by the world media. The Israeli government is not troubled by its criminal behavior because its American patron has become equally fascistic and bloody-minded, while both their civilian populations are so downtrodden that no-one has the spine to protest. Weapon mentality has reached its vicious climax of Yang, just before its nova explosion into a justice-prone Yin ‒ just as race apartheid hardened so much it collapsed into its economic equivalent in South Africa.
It may take centuries to perfect nonviolence in our institutions and even longer to convince every free-willed individual. On the other hand, humankind has debated pacifism for thousands of years (“No matter what happens, I don’t much care for war”).
Learners can criminalize warfare and establish PeaceWorld. We have merely to work it out assertively and all together. It could take mere months or years to institutionalize that across the planet.
The criminalization of war does not mean its total elimination; it means making it illegal, much more difficult and expensive ; thus less rewarding, savage, frequent and lingering. Theft has been criminalized everywhere. That does not mean there is no theft, merely not as much, in proportion to the effectiveness of institutions that criminalize it and, even more importantly, the public’s enhanced wellbeing and wisdom that make it redundant and obviously self-destructive.
As peace institutions improve, war will drop off perhaps to extinction, as with cannibalism, human sacrifice and slavery, even though their debris continue to disgrace us today. Once war has been dealt with, those others may finally vanish.
What would the world look like if we had done nothing about theft until absolutely everyone always obeyed the commandment not to steal?
This text is quite wary about ending the violence that seems rooted in human nature. Will it prove useful in the long run, more or less tractable, more or less subject to institutional remedy? After all, any project to eradicate it could provoke its ultimate adherents to do their worst.
If the criminalization of warfare must wait until brutality has been purged from every human psyche, then we are due for a long, long wait. And if PeaceWorld must wait until everyone is solely motivated by non-violence in any given conflict situation, then multiply that wait-time by hundreds. Since war has achieved hair-trigger devastation of staggering proportions, this delay will allow warfare to swallow us whole in the meantime.
What should we do now? Hold off until everyone has achieved personal perfection? Or transform our institutions into peaceful ones today and then revisit the project of universal perfection? You choose. Let’s be realistic about our priorities.
Learner concludes that warfare must be criminalized now, while we retain the means, motive and opportunity to do so. Thereafter, unconditional human non-violence can begin to grow for as long as that takes.
Those two are separate projects. The former might take the next few decades to perfect; the latter, the rest of human existence.
Just keep this in mind: the perfect is the enemy of the good, and the good, the enemy of the worst. Would you cling to the worst until perfection had been achieved, or would you try to make the worst a little less bad, pending perfection in the long run?
Let me be perfectly clear. These two projects have never been mutually exclusive. On the contrary, each one would reinforce the other. We should work hard for the good now and for perfection in the future.
This said, in the here and now, we can reduce the worst effects of weapon mentality, multiply the benefits of peace and replace penal punishment with shrewder, more focused methods of improved conduct. What’s more, we can criminalize warfare, which provides the greatest scope for those inclined to do harm.
Learner forecasts no end to human violence … it wouldn’t begin to tackle that evil. I doubt if it could be strained from human awareness without harming that awareness. However, a global majority of sane Learners (the psychosane and the sociosane) will defy weapon mythology’s intent, demote weapons elites to cultural insignificance and relegate weapon technology – their masterpiece – to vestigial status. Once enough of us agree to share this task, we may carry it out almost overnight.
Learners will disband the world’s Harm Forces, decommission most of its weapons of mass destruction and rebuild their remnants into four nested organizations:
· World Militia,
· World Court Foreign Legion,
· Continental Constabulary, and
· Local Police.
This chapter contains the least effective of Learner’s prescriptions. Those outlined in this chapter are merely cosmetic tweakage until Learner majorities adopt some semblance of the following features first:
· Laocracy (direct, proportional democracy through a World Agora),
· Learning Networks, and
· The entire constellation of political metaphors these features imply.
Indeed, without these crucial supports, militia paramilitaries morph into nightmare murder clubs. Examples abound: Colombian death squads, the Afghan Taliban – “Taliban”: an ironic twist on the term “Learner” in Arabic – and an assortment of gangster organizations across the world. Eliminate them where they breed or expect them and theirs to take over your hometown. In this case, a penny of local development spent now is a better bargain than expensive tons of stray rounds fired into the same area later on.
A well-regulated militia will rely on a universal draft and incorporate the best features of the armies of Switzerland and Israel.
Mandatory high school training will emphasize the tough know-how and fieldcraft of elite light infantry. Militia units will not claim organic vehicles, artillery, armor or aircraft; but they will be well equipped with dug-in, crew-served, automatic, anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons. Prepared positions will dot the approaches of every community. In times of crisis, entire communities will mobilize quickly. Indeed, this Militia scheme will require Civil Defense facilities comparable to those in Switzerland. Local Militia garrisons will offer a few high value targets to a mechanized aggressor; on the other hand, a multitude of equally dangerous, low value, low signature targets; relative logistical immunity and tremendous defensive depth against assault, bombardment and military occupation.
During Operation Desert Storm, air power dominated ground combat because of the relative prominence and vulnerability of mechanized forces in desert terrain, as well as their fragile command, control and logistics networks. None of these liabilities would trouble an omnipresent, static, pre-positioned and virtually self-sufficient World Militia whose units would defend fanatically their homes and families and thus deter aggression.
Despite the pros and cons of Yugoslavia’s dysfunctional politics, Tito organized his Harm Forces to stalemate road-bound invasion from any direction. For decades, his setup stymied foreign aggressors regardless of their strength and provenance. This arrangement backfired in Yugoslavia. The Serbian ethnic minority got hold of most of the weapons and disarmed the others.
No minority of this kind among Learners will remain disarmed. The World Court will see that every minority can defend itself and that no unarmed group “of innocent civilians” gets handed over to heavily armed chaosists … as happens all the time these days. We can forbid this around the world, prevent flare-ups and buy our way out of them relatively cheaply, compared to current weapon outlays.
Ideally, this defensive posture will deter local Aggressor forces until their preparations attract World Court investigators to arrest local ringleaders before they can initiate organized combat.
Every so often, the World Court might fail to pre-empt criminal aggression during its conspiracy stage. In that case, World Militia doctrine will permit the pass-through of gangster main forces and temporary occupation by them if unavoidable, in order to reduce local casualties. Thereafter, guerrilla raids will fall on their logistics, command/control and combat support elements. Military occupation will become too costly for some future petty Hitler with his homespun armed gang.
In Vietnam, thousands of mechanized infantrymen parked their armored vehicles around the village Chu Chi and rooted out underground fortifications in a frenzy of mayhem and destruction. Then they left, only to have to repeat the raid soon thereafter. The battles of Grozny I, II, III, etc., taught the same painful lesson to the Russians; and once again for the Americans at Faluja in Iraq.
Military leaders require years of repetition of the same painful lesson before it sinks in and calls for revised doctrine. In the meantime, the old ways trigger corresponding casualties, defeat and dishonor.
Short of total extermination, labor-intensive fortifications, extensive woodlands, deserts, mountains and dense urban hardscapes ‒ if manned and reinforced by determined combatants ‒ can frustrate almost any amount of costly firepower. Big cities are like enormous armored vehicle parking lots that shield the combatants within, even if the buildings are immobile. Shell them to rubble and triple their defensive value.
As a mechanized aggressor, there's not much one can do. One can surround the city with one’s own troops that outnumber the rebels at least three to one, or occupy it against an organized guerilla force (urban or, worse yet, rural) at odds of ten to one or higher. One can extinguish them by hunger, thirst, exposure and lack of reinforcements; or crush the city under a hurricane of firepower, block by city block. One can kill an unforgivable number of innocent civilians, recruit their outraged survivors into the next wave of enemies, get many of one’s own people killed, and then lose the case in the court of world opinion (as the American drone program does today).
M.L. Cavanaugh posted Military Victory is Dead at http://www.mwi.usma.edu/defeat-military-victory/ on September 11, 2016. He concluded that the standard definition of military victory: disarming an opponent to such an extent that he can’t resist militarily, cannot be considered a practical objective any longer. Weapons have become so cheap, widespread and lethal that any group can offer significant military resistance so long as one of its members remains alive. He calls into the question the purpose and goal of national military might.
Those lessons pay as much attribute to the heroism of the Vietnamese, the Chechen, the Iraqi and countless other peoples as to their tactics. The Serbs used similar ones to baffle NATO air power during the 1999 Kosovo Campaign. They ejected local inhabitants from their home and replaced them with their own heavy weapons. Short of blowing up every empty house, the allies could find nothing to shoot at. Saddam Hussein’s shadistic partisans and opponents adopted similar tactics in Iraq, from 2003 on, and baffled American occupation forces for years.
It doesn’t matter how “decadent” we become in the future. Military heroism will remain constant among human beings in large numbers, regardless of their provenance, riches, religion and ideology. Warrior valor is innate to humans. For every coward who runs away, a half dozen heroes step forward, each leading twenty average guys into danger. Defeats in Afghanistan and Chechnya taught this lesson to Russian chauvinists; those in Vietnam and Somalia, to their American peers. Genghis Khan’s Mongols and Alexander’s hoplites, otherwise undefeated, were taught the same lesson, often by the same opponents.
There is a critical contradiction between conventional, set-piece warfare and partisan, guerilla or so-called low intensity warfare.
In the first category, generals on both sides collect mounds of materiel and droves of human resources. Only weapon mentors could coin such a loathsome expression without blame. Since when have the lives of sacred, gorgeous human beings become a resource like so much guano? Only in the mind of weapon psychopaths who dictate our ethics.
They assemble those elements at one place and time in order to dispute their claim to victory (success by murder). It is a laborious and time-consuming task to gather so much military logistics and train so many people to operate effectively under one chain of command. A lot of time must pass while both sides gather their strength in relative isolation from one another, interrupted by shorter stretches of time during which they exercise their military marionettes in close combat.
According to Clausewitz, this duration of conflict must be of maximum intensity in order to conclude quickly and decisively. Modern war has contradicted this rule for years. In military parlance, this is called “making and maintaining contact with the enemy”: sort of like placing your hand on the coals of a fire to put it out. During combat, unit A of your military and its successors are going to be worn down while they wear down Ae of the enemy and its successors. Military units are mobile machines for giving, taking and replacing casualties.
In the second category, factionalists gather under local leadership – usually the traditional one; if not, selected democratically – in violent opposition against their neighbors backed by distant authority (whether some tyranny headquartered in the regional capital, a foreign invader or quite often both). Military contact and its destructive friction rarely let up between these groups.
The sum of casualties and devastation during guerilla warfare may be lower than that during pitched battles as described above. However, since guerilla attrition is ongoing and cumulative, final casualty counts and damage assessments in partisan war may be higher than those of climax battles. Entire districts are sterilized by guerilla warfare, which could recover more quickly from a momentary tsunami of regular warfare. The proportion of civilian losses is usually higher during guerilla warfare than during organized battles. Many civilians flee set-piece battles that rage locally and then shift elsewhere, or linger and spare many other places. Whereas guerilla warfare is so widespread and continuous that most locals cannot escape from it. Furthermore, in a typical situation of regular combat, neither side wishes to burden the discipline, limited supplies and morale of its troops with civilians and their panic, muddle and clutter. It is easier to expel them from the field temporarily.
Both sides of a guerilla war come to view the locals as cheap hostages and candidates for extortion (mistakenly, as it turns out; see below). The intensity of guerilla warfare can only be considered “low” during brief snapshots of time. It may be much more intense in the long run. The “low intensity” aspect of warfare is thus another falsehood made up by weapon propaganda to make it more palatable.
Contact is maintained between conventional adversaries by cavalry, light infantry, aerial reconnaissance and irregular forces, as well as civilian spies favoring one side or the other. Nonstop skirmishing between those elite actors is rarely described in standard military histories more interested in the better-documented maneuvers of large armed units. Notwithstanding other factors such as raw numbers or relative superiority in equipment and training, the success or failure of this skirmishing usually leads to corresponding success or failure by regular armies.
After all, it is only by maintaining contact that vital information is garnered: awareness of the enemy’s strength and weakness, of his layout, plans and intentions. The likelihood is, if you lose this low-level war of information, you will sooner or later lose the conventional one.
World War I (sic), a few wars before and most since differed from those prior in that regular forces on both sides were responsible for both conventional battle and lower-intensity warfare. For example, in major offensives during World War I (sic), tens of thousands of casualties and kilotons of munitions were expended in a few days. Meanwhile, “low intensity” warfare persisted as each small unit (a battalion of about 500 men) lost a handful of men or more almost every week on the frontline.
During most civil wars, entire regular armies are built-up on both sides. Each acquires its own central government, tax base, geographical focus and regular army units (intended for combat instead of garrison: the difference is significant in terms of leadership and material) so as to come to blows in conventional warfare. So-called low-level warfare is just the initial development stage of the final test of conventional strength.
Low-intensity war is not necessarily an existential challenge for the occupying power. In other words, whether it wins or not, its survival is not in the balance — at least in the short term. Usually it will fight with one hand tied behind its back, by definition. This weakness may be crucial. The home team has nowhere to run and must fight for its life, all out.
The rebel organization has another home advantage against a distant authority, its regular army and local adherents. Many inhabitants identify with the rebels and provide them with logistical support, reinforcements and information about the enemy. A foreign power or regional government is at an obvious disadvantage with its long history of abusing the locals. However, once those advantages and disadvantages are assigned to both sides, their combatants face the paradox described below. They will succeed or fail depending on how well they handle it.
Given this imbalance, “low intensity” warfare has one major distinction from the conventional sort. Those who ignore that distinction lose the “low intensity” fight and quite often the conventional one this skirmish heralds.
In conventional warfare, achieving a higher body count of the enemy and occupying his terrain dictate military success regardless of local wishes, (for example, the military occupation of his capital, his resource extraction and industrial centers). Losses among civilians can be ignored or worsened. According to Clausewitz’s doctrine, they will fall in line in any case, once their army has been crushed while trying to block the path of invasion.
During “low intensity” warfare, the side will lose that antagonizes the local population. This, regardless of body count and terrain successfully occupied. The higher the local body count, the greater the advantage to the side that minimizes it.
In guerilla warfare, a conventional general needs to be harder, in a way, on his own troops than on the enemy. He must discipline them so severely that they allow their own casualties to increase in order to minimize civilian ones. As much as possible, economic transactions between his warriors and the civilian population must be voluntary and fully compensated. His combatants must be punished for crime committed against local civilians, and more of his resources must be devoted to civil affairs and reconstruction through civilian agencies than to devastation by military means. The sooner during the fight he enforces these requirements, the less likely he will fail at this task, almost guaranteed to fail otherwise.
The U.S. Army ignored this requirement during its wars in Iraq. Setting aside the efforts of General Petraeus, it tried much harder to defeat the Iraqi Army and its paramilitary supports than to rebuild its society and infrastructure. In Afghanistan, the proliferation of civilian casualties from long-range drone bombardment may prove to be our undoing, as well as our habit of hiring local warlords who “maintain the peace” by denouncing their everyday competitors as our common enemy. We are paying off a conveyor belt of additional conflict as a result of those mistakes.
Law and order must be restored, even though almost everyone can thwart them. Property rights must be protected even though local civilians are helpless. It is easier for hungry soldiers to rip off local civilians than to fight dangerous, resource-poor guerillas. Otherwise do both and still lose.
This rule applies just as much to hungry troopers “liberating” the chicken of a peasant family, as to a field commander scanning his battle map for fewer and fewer good targets of his overwhelming firepower, indeed, more so to the latter.
To hell with the false promise of lethal drones! This program should be called “Dragon’s Teeth” since it creates many more enemies than it gets rid of. Like any other poison with therapeutic applications, it should be used very sparingly and cautiously.
The military discipline required for a guerilla war is much more ferocious and difficult to enforce than that required for a conventional one. The massive ideological education and propaganda campaigns that guerilla armies such as Mao’s Red Army had to teach themselves, were not needed to fight the enemy. Red Army soldiers were willing to fight without them. This schooling was needed to prevent the Red Army men from destroying their civilian support base at gunpoint.
An army of occupation confronts an even greater challenge in preventing its troops and local supporters from augmenting their security and sustenance at the expense of native civilians. This problem may be insurmountable in the long run. A foreign power can only guarantee its short-term military success by certifying that it will withdraw as soon as possible and allow honest people to reestablish local autonomy. That would be an admission of defeat during a conventional war. But it can be the key to victory during a guerilla one.
Conventional generals have only recently grasped this idea and its ramifications. http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24.pdf. They would rather satisfy conventional war’s demand that our casualties be minimized and those of the enemy maximized, whatever the cost. This standard formula guarantees failure and defeat in guerilla war. Its semi-reversal – though paradoxical and extremely difficult – forecasts success. Whichever side, guerilla or conventional, kills, rapes, rips off and terrorizes more of the civilian population, that side will be more likely to lose in the long run. The other side will win by default, no matter how weak and ineffective it may have been at first.
There is also a double jeopardy based on the home-ground advantage. Even though native rebels may murder more civilians; if they can shift the responsibility for those murders onto the foreign occupier and his inability or unwillingness to control their crimes, he will lose the fight.
Policing those murders must become the occupying power’s first priority, whatever the cost. It must honestly integrate all the peaceful forces in-country into its administration and grant them sovereignty and full support; otherwise, accept eventual defeat.
A successful occupation administration should fine-tune itself as much to the needs of local inhabitants as to those of the occupying power – somewhat like Lawrence of Arabia – and be fully responsible for local administration. The sooner this is done and the less interference from doctrinaire intruders ignorant of local traditions and language, the less difficult it would be. No tactical compromise, ideological intervention or strategic delay would be allowed.
“… He [Napoleon] made Marshall Marmont the governor of these Illyrian provinces, and it was an excellent appointment. Though Marmont was a self-satisfied prig, he was an extremely competent and honourable (sic) man, and he loved Dalmatia. His passion for it was so great that in his memoirs, his style, which was by nature dropsically pompous, romps along like a boy when he writes of his Illyria. He fell in love with the Slavs, he defended them against their Western critics. They were not lazy, he said indignantly, they were hungry. He fed them, and set them to build magnificent roads along the Adriatic, and crowed like a cock over the accomplishment. They were not savages either, he claimed: they had had no schools and he built them plenty. When he saw they were fervent in piety, he fostered their religious institutions, though he himself considered faith buckram to stiffen the Army regulations.” Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yougoslavia, Penguin Books, New York, London, 1994, p. 120.
Finally, a local guerilla force’s survival and eventual victory are much more likely with the military support of an adjacent country immune to follow-up invasion for whatever reason. If your country plans to wage a counter-insurgency campaign in some nation, it should plan to invade and occupy its friendly neighbors and their friendly neighbors and so on.
Conventional generals and their civilian leaders must teach themselves these Learner concepts from scratch.
In the future, Militia training will be universal. Small harms (arms) will be locked up at home in healthy communities and guarded in neighboring armories if recent hostilities have flared.
Able-bodied teenagers will receive some military training, if only field medicine and man-pack logistics for conscientious objectors. These apprentice warriors can be called Ephebes (ehfehbs, from the Greek for youngsters approaching maturity). Equivalent local terms will be acceptable, such as “learner warrior” or some local equivalent. This training will take two or three months during yearly high school summer camps, a week or so every few months for the following two or three years, and as long and often thereafter as local elections and voluntary membership permit.
The right to vote should not be tied to a military obligation, contrary to the Swiss model where there is no vote without military service. Learners should discuss this idea. Voluntary social work like Vista or the Peace Corps should remain disconnected from any military obligation. PeaceWorld will demand much more volunteer civil service.
It is not so much a question of separating Church and State, or School and State for that matter. We must not delude ourselves: religion is and has always been a vital part of government and the educational system. Weapon functions and institutions should become vestigial while peace functions resume the fore. We should separate killing from life-support functions and the functions of Government from those of Administration. Under this separation of powers, local Administrations will control every peace preservation function including the local Militia.
This Militia will require small cadres of full-time military instructors, combat specialists and tactical leaders: Militia Condottieri (mercenaries).
Unlike the Swiss Militia whose officer corps militarized the Swiss upper class, and unlike Israeli officer candidates a majority of whom come from certain schools and kibbutzim (nowadays, from cults of Zionist extremists), this professional soldiery should have no clustered source of recruitment, no significant political affiliation and no other job ties.
The very idea of private military contractors (hired killers and body guards) will be criminalized on PeaceWorld and eventually considered obscene. Individuals under threat because of their popular politics will be protected by the World Court and by local administrations, or if due to their malice and preference for special interests, by no-one.
Condottieri force levels should remain dangerously low. Retention will be merit-based on a competitive basis. Condottieri will fulfill their duties under intense political scrutiny. They will be reassigned worldwide at random intervals and for no apparent reason. Military honor will bind their loyalty to judicial decisions of the World Court, any deviation from which they will deem high treason and punish accordingly.
What remains of coastal, customs and border guard units will be recruited from local Militias. Defense and law enforcement will only devolve to World Court troops if local Militias and Police become too corrupt or biased to enforce global regulations of peace. For example, crooked law enforcement, factional infighting and over-quota commercial harvesting.
If local Militias become too polarized to do their duty, World Court military police units will relieve them, backed by as many World Court commando and mechanized units as necessary. Once peace is re-established, the native Militia will be retrained to enforce peace and justice until they gradually replace the World Court’s forces. Where possible, local militants will be recruited into the World Militia.
This will work as long as two rules remain in force:
• Local Militia and its recruits must never polarize along ethnic, religious and other Prism lines without immediate intervention; and
• The 1-800-MY-RIGHTS telephone number to the World Court mustn’t ring ceaselessly from that region without immediate intervention.
World Court units will only intervene in local affairs with great circumspection. Those interventions will cost local Administrations heavy tax levies after the fact, proceeds of which will finance future World Court interventions. These levies will be deferred if they threaten to induce “Weimar Germany” outcomes; if they intensify popular resentment and don’t reduce it. Instead, a Marshall Plan will be drawn up to satisfy local needs — the way environmental protection plans work these days.
Rigidly warlike regions will be isolated and “frozen out” of global exchanges until local leadership changes its mind. New approaches will deal with loose cannon elites without doing harm to the masses they hold hostage. Neighboring Militias will see to on-the-ground defense; World Court strike forces, to strategic deterrence along the periphery.
Prism organizations should shrink over time. The United States prospers because its State borders are kept permeable, because its career military are compartmentalized away from politics and government regulations are kept to a minimum under strong courts. At least that’s the theory.
During the first decades of Learner apprenticeship, elite mobile killer forces will be required for strategic deployment worldwide. These World Court troops will make up a peace-making Foreign Legion. It will incorporate a mixed air assault/mechanized corps with organic air support per continent; a naval task force for each of the seven seas plus command, transportation and logistics assets as required.
These tough Regulars will train full-time to apply selective violence and endure brutal casualties required to separate both sides of a civil war. Since they are made up of a random mix of international expatriates, little political influence will exist to remove them from trouble or withdraw them once their losses escalate, unlike national troops whose families and supporters would vote for them to leave due to excessive troop casualties. No aggressor could rely on Legionary casualties to assure their withdrawal by world opinion. On the contrary, the more casualties, the more tenacious the Legion’s grip and the stronger its reinforcement ‒ by tradition ‒ a little like Gypsies and the Masai. No-one would dare harm a few of them because, if so, hundreds more would come to retrieve their dead, investigate the particulars and dial in hurricanes of firepower on the murderers.
Shielded by this Legion from bullying neighbors, local minorities will set their own political agenda and establish their own Militia units to enforce political moderation. Militia recruitment will reach across every prismatic barrier. Whenever possible, local leaders will join the Militia, both to uphold Learner ideals and to defend egalitarian politics.
After a cease-fire brings local combat to an end, its fiercest combatants will be granted provisional amnesty. This, providing they join the Foreign Legion for long postings to the other side of the planet. They may not come home until they’ve turned into grizzled retirees. Once they make their way back home, they may live off their pension and tell war stories so horrific as to stand local ephebes’ hair on end. This system will become as self-perpetuating across the globe, as it became in the Gurkha villages of Nepal.
• Velites : local militia
• Hastati : Legion
• Triari : on pension or condottieri
Brief home leaves will be allowed earlier on to see the family – no longer than a few days and carefully watched – then extended in length and liberty for longer-service legionaries. Perhaps as the reward for valor and merit at new postings? Perhaps. We shall see.
World Government will limit other interventions to disaster relief through dedicated, non-governmental agencies. The management of disaster relief and reconstruction will be independent of the military chain of command, better funded than it and superior to it. The military will serve as bodyguards and security advisors, no longer as governors. Otherwise, local Administrations and its citizens will handle local matters. Any World Court military intervention will entail huge tax levies once the affected region has recovered, to defray similar interventions elsewhere.
The World Court Foreign Legion will rely on voluntary international recruitment. Under normal circumstances, Legionaries will not serve as occupation troops. When not deployed or on maneuvers, they will occupy isolated, company barracks. Foreign Legion garrisons will only augment local militias. Without reinforcement, they will be too weak to contradict the Law upheld by them.
Government and Administrative objectives will be negotiated in depth before each new military operation. From time to time, local light infantry Militias and mechanized Foreign Legion “stiffeners” may coordinate combined-arms maneuvers as none-too-subtle warnings of impending intervention in earnest.
No Foreign Legion unit will include too many recruits from the same region. Paul Lackman mentioned that Russia mixes its troops of diverse origins so that no unit can cohere along ethnic lines, with the exception of Russian Slavs who remain dominant. The U.S. Regular Army does the same thing. It jumbles troops together without regard to their hometown. On the other hand, the American National Guard and foreign armies recruit entire units from geographic hubs. Local recruitment promotes unit integrity and morale since recruits must answer to their home community for their behavior in combat.
Only Foreign Legion troops will suffer from such restrictions. Militia units will recruit, train and deploy locally. Without World Court support, they will lack enough supplies and equipment to deploy far afield and enough heavy weapons to prevail against light infantry of equal quality.
Civilians would be amazed by how many elite commandos can be killed or pinned down by a few well-placed machine guns, even those manned by relative amateurs, in the absence of pinpoint artillery fire in support of the attack. Such unsupported assaults rarely work out as well as they’re shown in Hollywood action movies. At best, artillery and air bombardment level everything, and follow-up infantry with armor support takes heavy casualties to overrun a few dazed survivors, their automatic and antitank weapons.
Heavy militia losses will be hard to hide since they will be reported without censure to grieving home communities. Families will soon find out how many of their sons and husbands had fallen in combat. Too bad. Learners will never hide the horror of military casualties.
No nation-state will maintain strategic armed units beyond a few squads of mobile and municipal SWAT police, local human rights investigators, the control agency of transport networks and a ceremonial guard unit: the Continental Constabulary.
Beyond the adolescent swagger of young warriors, there will be no more international or inter-service rivalry between members of this Foreign Legion. The World Court will administer the Legion as its uniformed enforcement branch; its World Court Inspectorate will administer the World Militia globally. Recruitment into the Foreign Legion will be based on basic training by Militia units and selection from among them. Militia Condottieri will be drawn from the pick of Foreign Legionnaires.
The World Court will regulate weapons manufacture and distribution. No one continent will retain a balanced weapons industry or a complete inventory. Weapon components will be manufactured separately and then assembled on delivery to units. Weapon factories will be established in the poorest regions of the Earth.
All remaining nuclear weapons, Air and Naval Fleets, and surplus battle equipment will be mothballed and scrapped under World Court supervision. They would serve no useful purpose under a reasonable planetary regime — just as radioactive arsenals have served nothing but mythical purposes.
We must stop contaminating the anthrosphere with warfare toxins, as the so-called Security Council and its demonic patrons do today, stop turning poor regions into killing grounds for profit and stop lobotomizing scientific research by restricting it to military and paramilitary applications. Instead, we will take advantage of humanity’s enhanced creativity, once those poisons and limitations are weakened if not eliminated completely. It’s merely a question of getting smarter, sidelining psychopaths and making better use of the time we have left.
Prismatic aggressors will call down the following outcomes on themselves.
· Selective and simultaneous destruction by long-range bombardment of local ordnance depots, armed concentrations, armaments factories and military headquarters.
· Grim enforcement of economic blockade. These have proven to be surprisingly effective against such diverse societies as apartheid Rhodesia and South Africa, Vietnam, the breakaway Soviet Republics, Nicaragua, Serbia, Cuba and Iran.
· The flip side to this blockade would be a Marshall Plan executed to satisfy local peace requirements and carefully advertised during its negotiation and implementation. This alternative will be more rewarding than a comparable blockade and less costly in the long run. A psychopathic tyrant could starve his host proletariat under global blockade and seem to draw political strength from so doing (as did Saddam Hussein in Iraq). Learners will flood target countries with survival necessities and economic support but denying them military supplies. It is a question of becoming sharp enough to discriminate between the requirements of peace and those of weapons: Learner is all about that razor-sharpness.
· Active resistance by World Court-armed, supplied and trained local militias ‒ serving as guerrillas, if necessary ‒ supported by the World Court’s Special Forces, heavy weapon and aerial ground attack units. The World Court will take the place of the friendly adjacent countries mentioned earlier. In the long run, local bandits will find this combination overwhelming. For example, the Kosovo Liberation Army could have been outfitted with simple radio/infrared target designators to guide NATO aircraft on their bomb runs and selectively destroy Serbian gun positions and armored vehicles hiding in local housing. This equipment could be turned off the moment NATO stopped its attack sorties or replaced its transmitters and their control frequencies. If this equipment were captured or compromised, it would serve as magnets for bombs aimed at their abusers. American Special Forces used the same principle when they attacked the Taliban. A few of their elite soldiers operated as coordinators of attack aircraft in conjunction with regional anti-Taliban troops behind a curtain of aerial bombs.
· A consistent policy of political moderation, peacemaking (faire paix? fair play?) and renewed negotiations for peace.
· I must repeat this mandatory topic of passion for all those eventually responsible. ALWAYS AND AT ALL COSTS, PEACE!
· Relentless pursuit of prismatic leaders with criminal bounties and merciless prosecution for their crimes against humanity.
· Finally, negative world opinion focused on the practice of human rights activism by unarmed peace martyrs and fearless media reportage of their fate.
Conventional politicians find these alternatives unprofitable. Under the realpolitik restrictions of weapon mentality, they belittle peace measures already proved to work. They’ve done nothing to block massacres in Rwanda, Bosnia and Syria ; instead, they have adopted anti-foreigner propaganda, police riots and theatrical military adventures only profitable for weapon corporations, to divert their constituents’ attention from policy failures both at home and abroad.
In The Utility of War: the Art of War in the Modern World, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2007, General Rupert Smith compares wars of the past, which he calls industrial war, with those in the present, he calls “war among the people.”
During industrial war, well defined nation-states “game” each other like high-stakes poker players, anteing up manpower and industrial capacity for a climax confrontation that ends conveniently in total defeat for one side and total victory for the other. According to him, this type of historical warfare ended with the advent of weapons of mass destruction. However, the developed nations (actually, every nation-state on WeaponWorld, whether “developed,” “developing” or “failed”) continue to train, organize and equip themselves for industrial war. That is what governments do; everything else is at best a secondary consideration.
The Utility asserts that modern nations must learn to fight a new kind of war: one where minorities live among the people while holding on to politics that differ from those of developed nations, and in which both sides fight “to capture the will of the people.”
The common currency of this new kind of war is the aimed bullet for as long as it takes to re-establish order under the law; followed by gathered evidentiary information that leads to prosecution and sentencing in order to re-establish justice once and for all.
Unlike industrial war, the people are not the enemy, even though the enemy live among the people; the presumed goal is to re-establish justice instead of defeating an entire people and its army; and the common currency is information instead of firepower.
The outcomes achieved by war among the people may include amelioration, containment, deterrence-or-coercion, and destruction, in ascending order of applied force and descending likelihood of success. The timeframe is indefinite and perhaps endless instead of ASAP. Finally, the military alternative is only one among many means to achieve the desired strategic goal, and not the primary one compared to political, diplomatic, legal and economic actions (one’s own, one’s allies’ and those of the people). There are too many good ideas in this book to review all of them here. Recommended reading.
In 1984, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s Doctrine outlined six conditions the U.S. would have to fulfill in order to avoid another quagmire like the Vietnam War.
1. It should be of vital national interest to the United States and its allies.
2. Intervention must occur wholeheartedly, with the clear intention of winning.
3. There must be clearly defined political and military objectives.
4. The relationship between the objectives and the forces must be continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary.
5. There must be a reasonable assurance that the American people and Congress will support the intervention.
6. Commitment of U.S. forces should be the last resort.
General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Gulf War (1991), added one last set of conditions.
7. Should the U.S. intervene, the operation should be short, occasion few casualties to U.S. forces, and the force used must be decisive and overwhelming.
General Smith demonstrates that these pre-conditions cannot be dealt with during War of the People, as opposed to Industrial War, the major reason being that most of them cannot be answered reliably before such an operation is undertaken. Later on in his book (page 392), he lists a number of questions that rational leaders of a developed nation need to answer before they can engage in a new military adventure.
“Whom are we opposed to? What is the outcome they desire? What future do they threaten? How is this different from our desired outcome?
“Are we seeking order or justice? On a scale between them, where is our outcome? If we are seeking justice, whom is it for?
“Who are we going to deal with, their present leaders or do we want others in power? If so, who are they? Are we changing the present leadership entirely? If not, who stays?
“Whose law are we using; theirs or ours? If ours; do we want their law to change?
“Who is administering the state; them or us?
“Do we know the outcome we want in sufficient detail that we can set objectives to be achieved? If not, the most we can achieve is a situation likely to be conductive to an outcome we will approve of. Can we define this “condition” so that we can set objectives to be achieved? If not; the most we can do is to ameliorate and contain, whilst we find the information to answer the foregoing questions.
“At what level (Strategic, Theater or Tactical) can we in theory achieve objectives directly by force of arms? Should we do this? Can we do this? Will we do this? When do we do this?
“If not, what are we prepared to threaten and promise in order to achieve the objectives we have defined? What does the opponent most value that we can threaten? What does he want most? (Remembering always that threats are expensive when they fail and bribes are expensive when they succeed.) When do we do this?
Learner doggedly challenges the parenthetical conclusion above. When it comes to profits for the rich and the costs for the poor, pacifying bribes are almost always cheaper than the robotic expenses of war, like those against Vietnam.
How would Ho Chi Minh have reacted if we had offered him a hundredth of the fortune we spent to massacre his people, as an outright gift with no strings attached? As opposed to President Johnson’s opening peace proposal of World Bank type infrastructure loans to dam the Mekong, that would have left Vietnam with a staggering, national debt enslaving it to the West? “Or we will kill millions of you and dump Agent Orange all over your great rice basket of Asia. “
Barbarians unfit to rule…
“How do we show the threat is credible, that we will carry it out, that we will succeed even if we have to escalate to do so? Are all other courses of action open to us perceived as being less attractive to us than carrying out our threat?
“How do we show the opponent’s threats are insufficient and that we will reject their alternative outcome?
“How do we ensure our promises are credible in the eyes of the opponent and the people?
“How do we ensure the opponent and the people can be trusted?”
Above and beyond those questions posed by General Smith, honest ones that a global leadership must ask include:
“Is the military chaos of WeaponWorld – as practiced by paramilitary nation-states, corporations and insurgencies in the developed and underdeveloped world alike – justifiable on moral, tactical or strategic grounds? Wouldn’t PeaceWorld offer a better setting in which to defend the high ideals implied in the questions above? In the meantime, aren’t we the moral equivalents of those terrorists, merely hoodlums better financed and organized, unable to defeat them in the long run since we reject the genuine morality, avowable propaganda and honest organization offered by PeaceWorld? Are we willing to achieve victory for keeps instead of maintaining our customary state of perpetual war by discovering, manufacturing and engaging ever more enemies?”
These days, many people conspire to get weapon martyrs to die eagerly, provided they seriously hurt Others marked for contempt. What we really need is an army of peace martyrs carefully trained and prepared to die as Witnesses for Peace — so that no one else need do so to no purpose and against their will.
Everyone should be taught to handle fire harms (arms) safely. The trick would be to arm everyone equally and shield them with equally good justice. Universal fire harm training will reduce gun accidents and deadly crime, assuming Israel and Switzerland are good examples.
Unfortunately, Israel can no longer consider itself a valid participant in these activities. It arms its majority against a select, prey minority. Israel, despite its genius (and that of its crushed Palestinian minority, just as evident), has failed so far to manage this feat. Jerusalem would be a good place to try out this PeaceWorld project.
Lethal crime will become much less tempting and frequent. After all, any victim or witness could rally an armed platoon from the nearest city block. Armed crime would be suicide. Even suicidal terrorists would have a much harder time, once their community devoted itself to peace instead of tolerating their mayhem.
After witnessing what military munitions do to flesh, most people lose their appetite, much less interest in the glories of ideological and inter-ethnic conflict. Young Learners will pay scheduled visits to city emergency rooms, military hospitals, morgues and centers of detention. Entertainment media will glorify peacemakers and Satyagraha. Without exception, they will portray the violence-prone as losers guaranteed, sooner or later, to turn themselves into rotting corpses or walking-dead convicts.
As a rule, local police won’t carry deadly weapons. If they need to do so, that will be a public confession of failure, admission that they had lost control of the local situation. The World Court would check this out immediately and intervene right away to restore peace there.
In societies where involuntary poverty is unacceptable, where personal security is taken for granted and the police and the public are customary allies, criminality will become the isolated act of sick and desperate individuals who can’t conceal their worst activities profitably for very long. Less criminal profit, less crime.
If an outrageous crime requires massed guns to stop, nearby militias can be deputized.
Sometime in the future, most crime interventions will depend on social ostracism and a carefully fostered sense of guilt. Prison terms and other primitive forms of physical punishment will become extraordinary measures of compulsion, confessions of public failure on the part of local administrations and their host population. Potential offenders will be identified and treated long before they commit serious infractions. If necessary, the worst offenders will suffer house arrest under chemically induced agoraphobic compulsion, or else get signed up for the Foreign Legion.
Goaded on by weapon mentality, we’ve turned our back on the fact that criminality is as much the fault of the surrounding community as of the offender. This idea should be emphasized to prevent crime beforehand, not to shield recidivists following their most recent crime.
Police intelligence units will be tolerated under strict World Court supervision, but just barely. Anti-constitutional police meddling will trigger World Court intervention.
The World Court’s intelligence system will consist of local populations, their telephones and a 1-800-MY-RIGHTS telephone number straight to the phone bank of World Court investigators.
According to dominant opinion-spinners, expensive new bureaucracies will have to be created to forecast and preempt war. These ridiculous preparations are doomed to fail. Instead, human rights complaints will receive swift and thorough investigation, provided they exceed a statistical norm of crank calls. Secret police will not be called for, beyond a nominal complement of plain-clothed Continental and World Court investigators dispatched in proportion to the volume of incoming complaints or in the absence of a statistically predictable number of them.
Local militias will protect them, if possible; World Court troops, if not. They will confirm local warnings, protect whistle blowers and arrest weapon criminals. If necessary, they will serve as sacrificial canaries in a coalmine. Communities where harm befalls them will pay for it dearly!
Alvin and Heidi Toffler predicted a frightening future in War and Anti-War, the military appendix of their multi-volume treatise called Future Shock. According to them, societies evolve toward a Third Wave of political control based on economies of knowledge, once they’ve graduated from the First Wave: sustenance agriculture, and the Second: industrial development. Talk about economizing knowledge! What a fitting portrayal of today’s force-feeding of trivia and contempt for wisdom!
The Tofflers’ fondness for the Chinese School of Law betrays the weapon content of their message. They foresee a grim future during which decaying national and ethnic elites (Learner’s Prisms) will adhere fanatically to their favorite Wave of control to restore ancient patterns of dominance by force. The more reactionary and absolute their expectations, the more sophisticated their strokes of terror.
Unfamiliar with the weapon/peace antinomy (like everyone else), the Tofflers discount the self-discipline and decentralized restraint Learner will expect from almost everyone. Terrorists cannot thrive once their host population shuns them.
The Tofflers are correct in predicting military disaster if the status quo of weapons mentality continues to dominate our spirit. Indeed, they are over-optimistic in their hope it can be controlled. However, their prediction is wrong if peace mentality assumes its rightful place. Well-treated and expecting such treatment by long tradition, locals will check their hotheads and limit their activities to spectacular theatrics only nominally lethal.
There have been significant prior and sub-Waves in addition to the Tofflers’ three; for example, peaceful, prehistoric, matrilineal societies. Each new wave only succeeds insofar it incorporates and complements the best aspects of prior ones. For example, Monarchy, weapon culture's tyrannical, corporate predecessor, is almost identical to our corporate national-capitalism. Long live King Cola!
Each new wave replaced its predecessors (except the peaceful ones destroyed militarily) once they began to grow uncontrollably and annihilate the better aspects of prior ones. The most recent wave (corporate weapon technology) is failing completely by annihilating productive aspects of former ones. A new one, so far unforeseen, is going to take its place.
One of the best suggestions in War and Anti-War is a million-dollar reward for whistle blowers who denounce hoarders of weapons of mass destruction. Learner intelligence Networks will work up that idea. The Tofflers consider essential and inevitable new knowledge infrastructures that resemble info politics suggested in Learner.
A good place to start would be organizing underprivileged youth as local police auxiliaries and making them jointly responsible to uphold neighborhood peace. Require of them that they disarm and submit to police discipline. Pay them a wage and cadre their units with police instructors. Provide job training and character references for yearly graduates who seek honest work elsewhere, and guaranteed trouble for youths who reject better alternatives. Young psychopaths will be picked out for lifelong supervision and medical treatment.
By definition, community policing is a labor-intensive job ; many Constables will walk a beat in their own, small neighborhood. Citizens and police must recognize each other as cooperative mutualists. Local adolescents could carry out neighborhood surveillance and leave serious law enforcement to clued-in adult police. We’re not talking about children betraying their honest parents to some tyrannical government: conscientious police instruction will reject that kind of political obscenity.
Small teams of U.S. Army Green Berets trained thousands of foreign soldiers in a few months. We could apply their teaching methods to this new form of community policing.
Reestablish age-set societies within civilian communities. Youths could graduate through tiers of initiation ceremonies into socially responsible, age-peer hierarchies of augmented privilege and obligation. Most youths should find more value in these groups and their social approval (passion) than in any contemplated criminality. Their appeal should become so irresistible that even the toughest criminals retained some emotional attachment to them.
Come to think of it, this sounds a lot like our scout and youth sports organizations, but cooperative and focused on peace in general instead of competitive in preparation for war.
Of course, this new cultural arrangement will require that recreational drugs be legalized for adults in private settings. The only practical consequences of this prohibition – each detrimental to public peace – have been to alienate the police from the community it was intended to serve and increase the count and qualifications of potential combatants. Those weapon priorities must be annulled.
A kid got shot dead off his bicycle a block from my home. Another got his skull bashed in, in all innocence, merely for riding his sister’s pink bicycle. Many more suffered anonymously on my beat. Yet another threatened me with a pistol during an evening walk home. Despite my fine words, he is in prison for his pains or has gone free since; I didn’t pay enough attention. I could not make myself attend his trial. I could not get him a peace trial. The grim blend of post-traumatic depression and current jurisprudence forbad it.
Good American soldiers have died for nothing for decades in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as countless local innocents. Thousands were massacred in the Twin Towers and millions more across the planet. All those losses have left me numb — miserable coward that I am. It seemed to me that each of them was my responsibility and I should have figured out how to save them. I failed, all of us failed to save them. Every one of us is 100% responsible.
Stop claiming otherwise.
The saddest aspect of the current situation is that it will get worse as basic resources run low. As long as we maintain old routines, our predicament will worsen along with prevailing levels of institutionalized violence, until someone wearing a cheap badge crashes through our front door and ships us off to a death camp.
There is no easy way to wake up from this WeaponWorld nightmare: only depraved collaboration, armed resistance or helpless victimization — each of which can only worsen the outcome. The hard way would be to establish PeaceWorld.
Where is the enthusiasm for PeaceWorld that should inspire every good soul? How much longer, God of Armies (as God is called in the Old Testament; “Lord of Hosts” is King James la-dee-da), until Learner inspires an attentive handful at first and then the landslide of their followers?
What are we waiting for? It would take the orthodox media three months of active dissemination for Learner doctrines to become household terms across the planet. Why wait? How many more tragedies do we need to witness, in addition to all those already come to pass, to confirm we lack any better option?
Rather than submit to WeaponWorld like cattle to the slaughter, I call on everyone to join PeaceWorld.
- PEACE ON EARTH, AND GOODWILL –
A. “Spiritual
• There must be a great and noble object.
• Its achievement must be vital.
• The method of achievement must be active, aggressive.
B. “Intellectual
• They must be convinced that the object can be attained, that it is not out of reach.
• They must see, too, that the organization to which they belong, and which is striving to attain the object, is an efficient one.
• They must have confidence in their leaders... [confidence in their leaders, I must emphasize].
C. “Material
• They must feel that they will get a fair deal...
• They must, as far as humanly possible, be given the best equipment for the task.
• Their living and working conditions must be made as good as possible.”
“It was one thing thus neatly to marshal my principles, but quite another to develop them, apply them, and get them recognized...” Field Marshall Sir William Slim, Defeat into Victory, Four Square Books, page 180.
This man was meditating how to turn a routed army into a triumphant one. His meditations apply just as well to Learner transformation.
Peace enforcement and disaster relief will provide many opportunities to rework the hardscape of battered cities as well as the software of their governance.
The Shock Doctrine of disaster capitalism prescribes that these disasters should serve to neutralize progressive initiatives and replace them with Victorian Era, “laissez-faire” financial piracy. Look where that has got us. This text suggests that they be used to encourage progress when they occur naturally. Disasters should never be set up deliberately, the way shock doctrinaires plan them.
A planetary reconstruction program will relocate slum populations to idyllic settings for hundreds of thousands, or to arco lo gee mega-structures housing millions in comfort, security and affluence. Beauty and order, jealously guarded by popular support, will replace the squalor, insecurity and criminality that prevail today. These new townships will reduce their urban footprint by abandoning the use of private motor vehicles.
Nowadays we shrug our shoulders, convinced we can barely afford more slums and prisons, much less the urban paradises I foretell. The same goes for other peace technologies; our systems of transport, education, justice and healthcare unacceptably degraded. How often have we been told that there’s not enough money to pay for adequate public services? Yet in wartime, there’s always enough cash. Hang the expense!
Warfare economies demand lavish amounts of personnel and equipment totally unproductive. A reduced tax base must support staggering public expenses for indefinite periods. This wartime spending is so prodigious, a few months of the same thing during peacetime would incite the average economist to solemnly declare national bankruptcy. Yet wars of this kind stretch out for years, reducing entire countries to Stone Age primitivism. That is, until military defeat flattens the loser’s last money press and bank vault: the very first things, obviously, the invaders will refurbish.
Actually, we cannot afford to degrade the quality of life much more. Cost-cutting of peace requirements merely causes more frustration, mayhem and secondary expense. In the past, these merciless “savings” financed weapon technology. Such anti-profit “austerity programs” are suicidal in the long run: precious savings handed over to ruined and ruinous banks. This idea is confirmed by the ongoing financial collapse of 2008, sporadic equivalents before and serial disasters soon to come (financial, social and environmental).
A few cosmetic changes could produce dramatic improvements to our cities.
· Fountains and Parks. Along with restoring aquifers and purifying waterways, a new art form of urban park and courtyard garden design will emerge.
· Additional free pedestrian amenities: benches, trashcans, fountains and walk-in toilets will be installed everywhere in town, unlike current practice reducing them.
· Litter disposal. Any needy person could supplement their minimum wage by “selling” urban trash to nearby collection points. Littering should be a misdemeanor subject to heavy fines and public disgrace. Learners might train urban rodents and birds for such tasks. It is ironic to think that trained rats might become more useful to urban communities than litterers (self-confessed sociopaths of a mediocre sort).
· The magnificent artwork of skilled architects and craftspeople will replace the cheap steel and concrete boxes and urban glass piles we have grown accustomed to. At first, these will imitate the works of Louis Henry Sullivan, Antoni Gaudi and Luigi Colanni; then evolve into beautiful designs of their own.
· Cities, large and small, will come to resemble Paolo Soleri’s Arcology. Rural villages will be built on the model of Nader Khalili's Domes of Rumi.
· We should follow Frank Lloyd Wright’s advice to a bad architect: wrap concrete structures in extensive plantings of trees and vines. Concrete and steel are splendid fortification materials but not so good as habitat, given current cladding technologies. It turns out that plantings are excellent heat and noise regulators: the things we need most, yet seem unable to adapt to our needs.
· The twenty-foot rule: according to the best practice of Canadian urban design, the first twenty feet at the base of every downtown building should be turned into optimal settings for pedestrians. Attractive little shops, courtyards, arcades and other amenities should line sidewalks on a comfortably human scale. Above those twenty feet, architects and developers may do as they please to meet urban zoning and cost-cutting requirements.
Baron Haussmann demolished thousands of tenements to build the Grand Boulevards of Paris. Besides unclogging Parisian streets and thus the cerebral arteries of the French body politic, his work leveled many squalid, labyrinthine and rebellious slums. Haussmann fulfilled his weapons obligation by widening boulevards enough for cavalry to charge the mob and straightening them out so government artillery could pulverize insurgent barricades.
In 1871, thousands of French progressives were executed for trying to defend Paris against victorious Prussian militarists and their re-armed French prisoners of war, led by vengeance-crazed French reactionaries.
Battles and natural disasters have always wrought massive urban destruction; no doubt they will continue to do so. Following on their heels however, Learners will discard wasteful zoning practices and rebuild urban hardscapes for optimal efficiency.
For example, the foolishness of segregating residential, light industrial and commercial neighborhoods will cease. Most Americans will live, shop and work in the same neighborhood. This zoning revision will rule out ridiculous automotive commutes, reduce rental and utility overheads, bring somnolent neighborhoods back to life and make pollution, slum housing and other urban pathologies more conspicuous and less profitable.
Many more pedestrian amenities will spring up. Public gardens, fountains, arcades and billions of new urban trees will replace the triple monstrosities of urban vehicular traffic, commercial signage and “public” art as currently conceived.
New regulations will mandate that an urban tree be planted for every advertising sign and every few parking spaces. Anyone felling a tree in a built-up area will pay a fine for the deed, the proceeds going to replant more trees nearby. One way or another, fifty percent of urban surfaces should go to trees; future Learners will consider this allocation laughably inadequate.
During Europe’s Darker Age, the Dahr-ahl-Islam reached the zenith of its glory, largely because able Muslims promoted the ablest non-Muslims. This was Islam’s first Golden Age, as well as that of the Sephardic Jew. Together, wise Arabs, Persians and other Muslims, Jews, Christians and others preserved what little remained of civilization. Working together, they gathered glorious new increments of wisdom and beauty. Around 820 CE, the House of Wisdom was established in Baghdad to collect, translate and learn from ancient texts. Learners should improve on that Convivencia and teach each other how to live in harmony.
Despite their concerted efforts, the need to pay growing armies crippled this broad-minded approach. A resurgence of militant fundamentalism laid waste what little good will had been retained from recent Mongol devastation. Neighboring provinces retained armies just as large and costly. Those troops turned against their own people and administration to sustain themselves in the short term. Upheaval led to devastation and provoked such a crisis in the Islamic world that foreign imperialists overcame Muslim self-rule for centuries. The same thing happened in China.
Just as China is emerging into its second Golden Age, Islam will do so soon, by rejecting terrorism in favor of mass Jihad for Peace. An equivalent transformation can be expected from every world religion. Major creeds will endorse a flowering of peaceful civilization once they’ve recovered their sensibility like hats gone with the wind. Pope Francis is leading the way.
This was also the Golden Age of the Muslim garden complete with canals, tanks, fountains, pools and lakes; inner-facing courtyards and outward-looking parks; flowers, shrubs and trees for shade, scent and fruit; habitats for birds and beasts wild and tame. Muslims reserved these sites of tranquility for private meditation. In their crowded circumstances, privacy and contemplation were beyond their reach in most other places.
The word “paradise” derives from the Persian term for a garden. The Koran describes heaven as a tree-shaded park under which cool river water flows. The Bible’s ideal human habitat is the Garden of Eden.
Every wise civilization has treasured its parks and gardens; every Golden Age has presented them to us to show off its elegance and grace. We, who poison the world and refuse to acknowledge that tendency, should take a page from the Arabs who fled the desert into their garden. They, at least had no choice in the matter. Since we’ve opted to mass-produce desert by dismantling the natural world, we should turn our public and private spaces into scale models of Eden.
What’s more, we should stop harassing indigents and install luxury pedestrian amenities. Without exception, legitimate churches will respond to the needs of the poor as their first priority. God favors dignified assistance to the poor. In the Qran, this was the only lawful reason to tax the faithful. Once again, it looks like Pope Francis is ahead of the pack.
Pedestrian areas should be made more inviting and enjoyable, not less so. American elites disgrace themselves by tolerating litter everywhere; by neglecting public fountains, toilets, park benches and other pedestrian amenities for the passerby.
Their incompetence is least understandable when it comes to public signage. American cities are strewn with misplaced and torn-down street signs, puzzling directional signage and buildings lacking street numbers. Highway signage is so poorly designed and sited that it only serves as a memory enhancer for drivers who’ve already found their way by trial and error. Answering the call for more complicated traffic laws that increase traffic tickets and fines and thus city revenue, urban street signs are plastered with essays instead of a few clear ideograms, making it harder to understand and obey them before traffic cameras play gotcha with disoriented drivers. This despite the fact that signage design has become a graduate degree program in American colleges. Like most modern administrative practices, they have “innovated, standardized and optimized” themselves beyond practical usefulness for anyone but special interests.
Anything we allow to be less than magnificent, just accustoms us to spirit-death of inner cities and inner lives. Such deterioration promotes a prison-block siege mentality ripe for weapons exploitation. Urban wellbeing cannot be degraded in order to chase the poor off our streets without worsening the lot of each passerby. More and more often these days, downtown housing is only fit for a handful of millionaires and many homeless people, while a rising tide of salaried commuters comes in and withdraws just as suddenly every day.
In the future, city centers will house millions of in-home teleworkers. Corporate offices will become virtual and disappear, with the exception of one floor of common-use office space for several floors of rebuilt housing in every urban tower.
Motor roads will gird acres of motor-free urban parkland. American college campuses operate quite well this way. The best college campuses imitate the ergonomics of a Renaissance city. Equipped with comprehensive mass transit, modern plumbing, optical cable and power, these new campuses will provide ideal layouts for future Learner achievement.
Only pedestrians, animals, bicycles and rare service vehicles will be allowed within these zones off-limits to autos. Greenbelts will extend the length and breadth of future cities, providing excellent rights-of-way for bicycles and pedestrians. They’ll serve as runways for public transit vehicles whether underground, on the surface and above, or LTA.
Bicycles are very efficient forms of transportation; they will be adopted wherever autos are forbidden. Those two modes of transport should not be mixed. Otherwise, as often happens today, common steel crushes the finest bone, as mediocre car drivers run down laudable bicyclists. Instead, cantilevered bicycle/pedestrian arterials will bridge auto-road networks in built-up areas. At other intersections, pedestrians and bicycles will gain right of way over cars, the same way sailboats claim priority over motor vessels on the high seas.
Modern combat-ants are expected to drive and maintain military vehicles. All-consuming industrial cartels spawn the huge vehicle fleets that mechanized armies require. The average civilian has to maintain a private vehicle both to keep in practice and to subsidize giant automotive piecework, assembly and maintenance complexes. Once warfare erupts, it would take too long to train novice mechanics, build new factories from scratch and grow the sickly corporate hierarchies needed to run them.
The replacement of private vehicles by ever-present public transport offers obvious peace benefits. By public transit, I don’t mean a fleet of ugly, stinking, roaring, poisonous, decrepit, crowded, clumsy, untimely, uncomfortable and crime-ridden busses that force commuters to share each other’s civility and hygiene failures. Bus fleets pick them up and drop them off in mini-garbage dumps; deafen them both inside and outside the vehicle; paint them every hour of the day with carcinogenic, immune-suppressing and spirit-crushing diesel stink. No new automobile could be sold if it deafened its occupants the way busses do, if it stank half as bad as a bus does and was half as uncomfortable.
Picture instead a continuous capillary flow of private but subsidized jitneys and microbuses powered by quiet, non-polluting engines. This stream will feed arteries of mixed transit including articulated busses, monorails, light rail, walk-on ferries and lighter-than-air commuter transports. This door-to-door service can be spiced with stimulating walkabouts through pleasantly car-free neighborhoods at a fraction of current costs.
A dollar spent on mass transit generates more jobs than the same dollar spent on private automobiles, more so than one spent on military highways and many more than on weapons … So what are we waiting for?
In due course, cars will be confined to interurban highways, to suburban park-and-ride facilities, to highrise and underground garages, then to the recycling plant. Horses and mules will stage comebacks in the countryside, as will camels in arid climes and dromedaries, llama and alpaca in mountain regions. A new industry of wheeled carriages and agricultural machinery will emerge. Good use will be made of new draught animals (with machines in their train collecting and burning dung as fuel for example); solar electric power; high-strength, low weight polymers; and virtually frictionless, space-manufactured moving parts.
Learner consumers will witness another cultural evolution. They will prefer to repair high-quality equipment rather than replace the cheap kind. Elegant design, simplicity and sturdiness will be major design goals, as will longevity, dependability and ease of repair. Those not handcrafted locally will be dropped to the surface from orbital factories with gravity-cheapened delivery charges. Lengthy technical apprenticeships will reappear along with master craftsmanship.
Incompetent administrators will disappear as political terms are reduced and wary amateurs assume those responsibilities. Unrelenting political overwatch will become a spectator sport; behind-the-scenes politics will come under intense public scrutiny. Political secrets and scandals will attract aggressive investigators, the same way today’s paparazzi pursue reclusive media stars.
Small family stores, shops and co-ops will flourish once again, under the aegis of corporations repurposed to satisfy these new priorities. Pollution problems will shrink as automobiles are relegated to bulk transport and emergency services, and as new conservation technologies reduce energy demands. General health will improve with more exercise. Automotive pollution will disappear and environmental health will recover.
Nowadays, we shop for labor saving household appliances and expensive exercise machines. This combination is profitable for a few but a great waste of time and money for common folk. Instead, people will get back on their feet and walk. Perhaps they – and especially their tireless children – will visit exercise stations where their aerobic efforts will generate a little electricity, improve their health and earn them a little pocket change, the way today’s indigents earn a few bucks for their blood.
In, Secrets of the Soil: New Age Solutions for Restoring our Planet, Harper Collins & Row, 1989, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, (who co-authored The Secret Life of Plants), provide interesting examples of future cottage industries specialized in organic soil restoration by means of microbial, insect, fungus and plant symbiotic mixtures. Those will replace synthetic fertilizers and toxic “pest control” agents that jeopardize the biosphere. Net increases in soil depth by such microbiological ministrations will outstrip global soil depletion that industrial agriculture brings about with its chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
The practice of industrial terra preta (biochar, agrichar) may bring about two vital outcomes:
· millions of tons per year of bio-charcoal to serve as high-carbon fertilizer for depleted soils; and
· the systematic reduction of C O 2 and its global warming.. URL reference.
Factories will set up at the mouth of great rivers to harvest chemical fertilizers and other toxic elements before they flow out to sea. Future farmers will exploit sea-floor soil mining, composting, crop rotation, reforestation and accelerated aging of artificial ponds and lakes. Devic guidance will regulate genetic architecture. Learners will dismantle outrageous industrial cartels that:
• factory-farm neomutant, pseudo-food beasts stuffed with antibiotics;
• raise industrial crops loaded with gene-engineered toxins;
• peddle mountains of pesticides that sterilize the soil, along with surplus chemical and animal manures that eutrophy waterways; and
• commit agricultural strip-mining in general.
Organic pest controls and fertility enhancers will replace that multi-head monster hydra. Food animals will be raised for strength and health, not weakened enough to need corporate pharmaceuticals. Their digestive tracts will be tailored to digest re-architected versions of prolific native weeds. In this way, their oft-contaminated feed supplements will be eliminated.
Learners will ban engineered cannibalism altogether. Reprocessed flesh is often fed to penned livestock, poultry and fish stocks, relying on the differing physiology of species to prevent cross-infection between the eaten and the eater. Yet that still opens the likeliest route of vicious infections and prion pandemics. Attempts to raise factory beasts in static lots will be curtailed along with other factory farming abuses.
Or else humanity will adopt vegetarian-ism and or insectivore-ism and suffer from existential nausea at the idea of devouring mammals that bleed and suffer the same way we do. Our descendants may think of us, primitive omnivores by choice, as monsters of extravagant cruelty, deliberately filling the world with needless fear and suffering.
Learners will develop high-protein, high vitamin foods based on microorganisms like Chlorella, Wolffia and Spirulina. The advanced cultivation of microorganisms, insects and aquaculture fish will replace domesticated livestock and marine fisheries: archaic industries whose luxury products will be consigned to rare ritual consumption. Instead of spoiling half the world harvest every year, cultivated pests will supply half our protein requirements and reduce farmed acreage.
Cities will have at least one large structure (several, to ensure redundancy during urban emergencies), in which enough insects, bacteria and algae will be cultivated to provide the town’s inhabitants with basic daily nutritional requirements. These harvests may proliferate in urban settings and elsewhere if they get clean water and sunlight in sufficient quantities. Urban factories will reduce the farm acreage required to support city populations, perhaps by several times; they may also serve as heat pumps and water purification plants.
Today’s cardboard-flavored soy burgers; half-raw “hand-cut” fries, and practically raw hash browns will evolve into nutritious gourmet items with the great crunch and the delicate savor of “golden brown and delicious” French fries and top-grade hamburgers cooked medium rare, exceeding their nutritional content and eliminating toxic ingredients. Of course, other flavors and mouth feels will be perfected.
Splendid foodstuffs are grown in the desert: cholla buds, chia seeds, tepary beans, pads of prickly pear cactus and flour made from mesquite pods. These items are among the healthiest foods on Earth. The Tohona O’dham tribe of Tucson, Arizona specializes in these kinds of crops.
The Mongongo nut tree (Ricinodendron Rautanenii or Euphorbiaceae Schinzio phyton) is a drought-resistant plant that provides abundant nutrition to hunter-gatherers in Africa. A given weight of its nuts offers twice as much protein as steak and five times the calorie count of rice.
The Moringa (Moringa Oleifera) is a tree with many medicinal and nutrient attributes. Its seeds bear 30% cooking oil while the remaining seedcake serves as a flocculent to purify water. Its seedpods are called drumsticks and prepared like pea pods; its seeds and flowers are edible. Its leaves are said to contain more Vitamin A than carrots, more calcium than milk, more iron than spinach, more Vitamin C than oranges, and more potassium than bananas. It is drought resistant, grows on almost every continent and restores fertility to poor soils. But it can’t tolerate freezing or frost. In that case, grow it in industrial lots under greenhouse glass.
Other desert desserts may replace the over-processed flour, toxin-laced fat, diabetes-inducing sugar and even more toxic sugar substitutes with which we dose ourselves these days.
In 2008, Carl Hodges grew a crop of Salicornia (sea asparagus) and other halophytes (salt-loving plants) by irrigating desert crops with salt water from the Sea of Cortez. Salicornia can be eaten steamed or fresh, squeezed for cooking oil and ground into high-protein flour. Let’s hope it tastes good.
An Israeli researcher discovered that regular crops can be drip-irrigated with salt water, provided that their root beds are never allowed to dry out. Tremendous stretches of desert could be covered with salt-tolerant ground cover, edible or otherwise.
As for hemp, here are 101 uses for it as a food item, medication, toiletry article and industrial component: URL reference. Its criminalization, merely because it is one of the finest psychotropic drugs in human history, is a crime against humanity.
Genetic architecture and economies of scale promise to accelerate algal food technologies. By genetic architecture, I do not mean trial and error manipulations of genetic material to satisfy corporate specifications for absurd offspring: flat-bottomed, tasteless, always red tomatoes; herbicide-resistant weeds; etc. Rather, as part of a mystical transformation of human awareness, the Devas (spirit architects of biological organisms) will teach useful details of biomimicry to teams of genetic architects, biologists, ethnobotanists and shamans. They’ll work together to bring about the best for Gaia and Learners.
Buffalo, wildebeest, deer and antelope will graze vast regions returned to wildlife ecology along with their local equivalents and natural predators. This mix of beasts is most likely to knead the soil back to maximum productivity.
Spirit-reverent nomad hunter-gatherers may reclaim ancestral homelands. In the past, pastoral nomads menaced the sedentary farmer. The former had to prove ‒ under any circumstance ‒ that they could defend their herds and their honor; the latter, that they could cooperate most often with their neighbors. With few exceptions, that transformed them into aggressors and victims respectively.
All three face annihilation at the hands of industrial weapon technicians. On the other hand, peace technicians will welcome those cultural offshoots as self-sufficient recreational communities. After all, hunter-gathering, nomadic herding and freehold farming have been natural human lifestyles for quite some time. Habitats along these lines will become “tourist attractions” for urbanites so inclined.
Have you become an obese sluggish city rat like me? Take up the hard life of a deep-forest hunter-gatherer for six months. Come back in a lot better shape, your spirit revived and your skewed priorities refocused, or don’t come back at all. Survival will be tough out there.
As a new form of worship and sinkhole for surplus wealth, coastlines, riverfronts, latitude and altitude growth boundaries will be re-edenized. Learners will cultivate climax ecology biohabitats for their aesthetic, ecological, weather and spiritual benefits, much more so than for mere profit, even though they may prove much more profitable in the long run.
Commercial fishing enthusiasts promised unlimited tons of seafood into the distant future, even though the sea is becoming a problematic source of sustenance, more so every day. Such diverse authorities as J E Lovelock, the author of The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth, Bantam Books, New York, 1990; Elizabet Sahtouris, the author of Gaia, Pocket Books, New York, 1989; and Lynn Margulis warned us about unlimited commercial fishing, arguing that land-bound ecocide might destroy humanity but not all life. Earth’s life force won’t go into serious death spasms until algae-moderated oceanic heat, salinity and carbon dioxide regimes undergo a serious imbalance.
Human encroachment is menacing to do just that. Marine ecologies undergo sewage-and-fertilizer-induced oxygen depletion (eutrophication), toxin dumping, frenetic over-fishing, greenhouse ice-melt cooling and oil spills: especially countless minor spills and ship ballast releases. Compared to them, dramatic supertanker disasters are surprisingly less significant. Red and black tides are further signs of accelerating decay, whose impact corporate media fall over themselves to belittle. Catastrophic oil spills and methane releases become more and more common and widespread.
Factory-ships rake the ocean floor with four-meter (thirteen-foot wide) beam trawls. These armored dredge nets annihilate the biota and their habitats indiscriminately. They leave a mud-clouded desert in their wake, heedless of ocean depth and ecological stability. Such cold, dark and fragile ecologies will take decades or longer to recover, assuming they ever do so.
Here is how to trigger a new age of piracy on the Somali coast and elsewhere. Let corporate factory trawlers burn government-subsidized fuel so they can empty the nets of local fishermen and turn their desperation into piracy.
Other industrial fishermen cast so many mile-long forty-foot deep drift nets, that they could encircle the Earth a couple times every year. These imperishable nylon nets are often lost at sea and turn into “ghost nets.” The death-throes of their initial victims attract many more and kill them uselessly for years on end.
That lovely fish filet on your dinner plate represents an uncounted mess of sea life ripped from the sea and gone to waste.
It is scary to contemplate capitalism rolling up its sleeves, spitting into its hands and wading out into the deep ocean to reap raw profit. We should withdraw from the oceans for a while, if only to let them recover. Failing that, reduce our impact on the sea in other significant ways. This exclusion would not be too difficult, since long-distance fishing requires massive government subsidies to pay its fuel bills.
Learners will establish thousands of Maritime Parks (starting with the Great Barrier Reef currently moribund), including the most fertile and damaged stretches of the sea. Often, unfortunately, they are the same. Protective legislation will accelerate natural recovery by means of draconian fisheries management, toxic cleanup, runoff regulation and biological reinforcement. Surplus submarines will monitor commercial fishing and pollution dumping. Vessels abusing such activities should be monitored and overtaken by obsolete nuclear submarines, then confiscated, stripped down and sunk with great fanfare to form artificial reefs.
We may achieve better understanding of oceanic currents, and mine the sea bottom not just for magnesium nodules and suchlike trash, but for sea bottom nutrients. Future technologies as-yet-unknown may allow us to raise cold, abyssal waters full of nutrients to the ocean’s surface. This could create artificial reef effects as bountiful as natural cold-water currents.
I foresee underwater power plants whose waste heat would raise cold currents to coastal surfaces, uplift untold amounts of submarine nutrients and thus explode fish populations while accelerating and fine-tuning the climate-stabilizing properties of underwater currents. We will have to find new sites for these projects that hinder neither the natural fisheries described below nor major oceanic currents.
Such currents rise to 0.1 percent of the ocean surface just off the coasts of Peru; California and Africa (Mauritania, Namibia and Somalia). Another great fishery is the Kildinbaken fishing ground in the Barents Sea. These tiny fishing grounds produce half the world’s fish harvest, per Brian Fagan’s Floods, Famines and Emperors: El Niñio and the Fate of Civilizations, Basic Books, New York, 1999, page 31. All of them should become Marine Sanctuaries. Eventually, they will be restocked with fully mature species, enormous and plentiful.
Even more significantly, we should engage in the equivalent of a new planetary Manhattan Project to develop photosynthetic capabilities in human skin and free us from the need to kill to feed. The details of this technology exhaust my imagination, as do its long-term consequences. Nancy Kress’s elitist science fiction novel, Beggars and Choosers has scooped me on this topic. Others have exposed the social nightmare that such a technology could generate if managed by the usual run of psychopaths who would rather fill the world with miserable humans slowly starving to death.
Some clever real estate magnates have discovered that sound ecological investment earns them enormous profits. In Alexandria, Virginia, my father spent the last few years of his life protecting the suburban landscape from cost-cutting developers. In such lucky communities, real-estate revenues skyrocket through loving attention to environmental detail. In general, I despise most developers: serial eradicators of forest cover for profit, thus just as damaging to urban ecologies as invasive tree-eating insects.
A few industrialists slightly less stupid have spun off superior production and quality control methods by going green, as well as superb advertising opportunities. But most of them pay mere lip service to their stewardship responsibilities. Like the econologicians they studied in school, they abandon sustainability in practice, to their utmost disgrace.
The rage the business community displays towards each new environmental and labor challenge resembles temper tantrums of a spoiled child. The merchant community can’t afford this spoiled-brat attitude any longer. Scrupulous attention to ecology and human rights is going to become just another business expense, less negotiable than outlays on plant, payroll and marketing. In the long run, such expenditures will show far more profit than warfare taxes ever did.
New regulations will prevent potential polluters and their patrons from doing business unless they move with their families to the site of their potential disaster. Local administrations will share power with their constituencies. Slumlords, bank and insurance executives, supervisors of police, judiciary and municipal services; all of them will need to revise their routines to retain their jobs. These officials will relocate with their families into the least well-run neighborhood in their care. The children of the rich may not attend the school of their choice until per capita funding has been equalized for every schoolchild in that bio-region.
In The Earth in the Balance, Vice President Al Gore suggested that the world’s bookkeepers enter environmental impacts and resource exhaustion in their Depreciation column. First World banks could credit Third World countries for forest parklands they set aside and high-pollution technologies they renounce. They will shelve power plants that burned sulfurous coal, for example, and massive slash-and-burn land grabs. Said credits will finance state-of-the-art, low-pollution technologies of native design.
I got some free advice quite some time ago. If just one penny a day had been invested in my name since the day I was born, this account would have let me live my adult life in comfort, off the interest. Well, since its infancy, humanity has bled off at least a third of its income – every day of every year – into weapons activity and its peripheral wastage. No wonder we can’t afford any peaceful improvements!
In truth, we can afford everything we need for PeaceWorld. We cannot afford any lesser endeavor, since poverty is by far the most expensive social policy.
Get used to that at least.
- WHAT CAN I DO? –
“I have not conceived my mission to be that of a knight-errant wandering everywhere to deliver people from difficult situations. My humble occupation has been to show people how to solve their own difficulties... my work will be finished if I succeed in carrying the conviction to the human family that every man or woman, however weak in body, is the guardian of his or her self-respect and liberty.” Gandhi quote from Raghavan Iyer’s, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford University Press, New York, 1973, p. 373.
My sister Karen did me the favor of leafing through an early version of Learner while I strove to disentangle its spiel. She took what I wrote seriously and got upset. “None of this is my fault,” she said, or something to that effect. “What do you expect me to do? How do I protect my children? Tell me what to do!”
Don’t expect some lone ranger to rear his white charger and stop this nightmare single-handed. Quite often in the past, like-minded enthusiasts have jumped hand in hand into the deep end of the acid pool, wrecking vast stretches of landscape and bringing many innocents to harm. The psychopaths’ dream made real.
Either an international consensus of Learners will solve these problems or no one will.
Besides, Gandhi taught us another truth. Each of us merits respect or pity in line with the quality of our actions. Only the actions of the Other merit condemnation or approval. The Other, him- or herself, is a divine manifestation equal to our own. As such, each is exempt from our hatred. We come to grief when we turn away from this sound principle.
Listed below are some personal priorities I playfully call Policies. Let’s hope they don’t induce more control-freak errors. Pick your favorites from them or follow your own.
Policies Before and After: Celebrate More, Sacrifice Less.
We are not talking about a spotless paradise here, but the reduction of sacrifice except of oneself and a corresponding increase in celebration. Pick one celebration, pick several and celebrate them! Avoid sacrificing anyone but yourself. Celebrate your ties with others!
Policy the First & the Unfirst: Do what You Do Best and Avoid the Rest.
This policy cannot be overemphasized. It applies as much to individuals as to groups at work, art and worship; to our institutions and social instruments. It applies to power, leadership and defiance: to every activity.
The short answer? Concentrate on what you do best.
Everyone does their best at least one thing. In everything we do, we occupy a point of excellence along a bell curve of interest and performance. Each of us may slam along some of them like no one else could. On others, we’d crash before we worked up to respectable speed. Focus your passion where it best fits your talents.
Weapon managers would rather produce armies of interchangeable generalists to shuffle like playing cards and deal out wherever we show marginal utility but rarely personal excellence. When our warrior companions die off, we must assume their place by rote and seniority. The world of “human resources” (that despicable term) is just a vast replacement depot for war.
As a result, most human activity becomes a mediocre botch. We muddle along somehow – at monstrous cost and ineptitude – doing marginal work that bores and disgusts us. Jobs boil down to elementary, repetitive tasks. To earn our daily bread, we repeat a few infantile routines each day for years on end until we gag over their futility. Many personal dreams and initiatives are pulped in the process, sidetracked into frustration and despair. For many, homelessness and unemployment appear to be the only alternatives to vocational mediocrity, self-loathing, existential longing-for-the-end and not much else.
So take the advice a good doctor gives a depressed patient. Go find a hobby. If you can make a decent living at it, so much the better. Some people play mean piano, others bring us closer to God or make a killer risotto, others still can get children to smile.
Find out what really turns you on and go do it. No special talent can go to waste. If you don’t know what you’re good at (a failure most of us share in this shabby civilization), it’s simple: do what’s best for others and most rewarding for you.
Consider the opposite. If you have no gift for a task, don’t mess it up; give it up instead and let some enthusiast take your place. If you are not a worshipper of children, don’t make, raise or teach them. If you’re uncomfortable with foreign languages, don’t bother with them. Don’t peddle what you don’t believe in. Don’t compromise an endeavor with your incompetence or indifference. Don’t protect selfish employers who wouldn’t cross the street to protect you. More important still, don’t force others to do what they’d do poorly.
The one exception to this rule involves the activities socio/psychopaths. No doubt they will point to the paragraphs above to justify the worst evils their talents permit. One way or another, they must be turned away from the evil they do best and made to do something better or nothing. May a cure be found for them and their satanic disability, which they consider a rare talent and legitimate source of profit. Pay most of them much better, instead, to hold themselves in check.
Similarly, most of our institutions act like blockheads. Regardless of their range of competence, they declare they can solve any problem they encounter or offer an acceptable compromise.
Now, every institution and system does a few things quite well; it does most others remarkably poorly.
Take capitalism (take it from me, please!). There may be no better way to create and concentrate wealth. Under many circumstances (especially weapon-dictated ones), these are essential activities. Naked capitalism should reign in those cases and do what it does best. On the other hand, capitalism fails (dismally) at reducing misery. If the situation calls for reducing poverty, balancing an ecosystem or revealing true faith, for example, avowed capitalists should bow out.
The same logic applies to militarism, communism, religious faith and other processes of thought, conviction and ideology. If they can deal effectively with some topic, they should be tried with broad-minded liberality; if defective for whatever reason, they should be fenced off. No method should be forbidden outright. It should just be consigned to situations that benefit the most from its interaction — and only those.
That means we cannot reject the World Trade Organization (WTO) as a whole, no matter what evils it may have committed in the past. We will need a World Court and a WTO to regulate the World Bazaar. Expertise of this kind will be essential. Learners just have to persuade its associates to foster PeaceWorld and suppress weapon mentality and its technologies.
For example, we will require that the WTO police the trade of weapons around the world. At this point, there are 600 million light harms on this planet: one for every ten people on Earth. Worse yet, many of them are traded, issued and maintained by merciless thugs, tyrants and gangsters. Meanwhile, decent folk walk around defenseless. We are left to wonder, “Why are so many innocents persecuted and gunned down so readily and so often?” WTO leaders must halt this proliferation of loose weaponry. They cannot excuse themselves from this supervisory task simply because it might interfere with national sovereignty.
National sovereignty is another heady issue we must take on. Every nation should enjoy self-determination over the activities of its willing adherents, so long as only a few protesters dial up a 1-800-MYRIGHTS telephone number and complain to the World Court. In no case should a nation benefit from external sovereignty: license to attack other nations — in the same manner no citizen has the sovereign right to attack another.
What’s more, we cannot turn our back on the rich, as revolutionaries have decreed in the past. The privileged should feel free to accumulate any wealth they need, provided everyone else subsists in comfort.
In essence, we cannot reject or embrace any social practice as a whole. First, we must see who does what well and encourage that. Then, we should determine who does what poorly and shift their attention to something they do better. Our primary criterion should be: is peace enhanced? Then encourage it. Is weapon mentality enhanced? Then watch it carefully and be prompt to downgrade it.
According to Learner, nothing need be accepted or rejected entirely. Truth demands that every point of view be heard and valid principals honored. We haven’t managed that yet because our info systems have not evolved to that crest of excellence. Cooperation over competition; celebration over sacrifice … except where those secondary practices would work better.
From the point of view of peace mentality, our worst institutions are those that demand absolute control, uncompromising obedience and rejection of outside influences. Of course, those weapons institutions are the deadliest, most persistent and powerful: the ones we venerate most despite their worst venom.
These recommendations all alone would take lifetimes to fulfill. We are expected to do things we neither want to nor are any good at. Each of us must abide by this collective insanity. Society takes great pains to quash our basic talents and aspirations. Until it supports our innermost priorities, our masterworks cannot take shape without titanic struggle.
We have reached the point where we welcome this struggle. This stupid, stupid waste of time and effort has become the prerequisite of artistic creation. We must first suffer terribly to wind up doing what we would rather do best. Instead, we should accomplish it from the beginning and improve along the way while benefiting from culture’s nonstop support.
Policy the 2nd: Gather Together.
Go find like-minded people for group activities, (reading, art, hobbies, charity, Learner, whatever). Act in concert over issues of mutual concern or celebration. Find new recruits and form different groups for different purposes. Plug into computer networks and databases. Attend the house of worship of your choice and let it reflect your spirit. Contact Learner peers across the planet. Shake off the alienation that allows weapon mentality to thrive.
Policy the 3rd: Become Political.
Not for me, the first part of this Policy, only for passionate enthusiasts. I must exhaust my initial task (writing Learners) before I can move on to the next one (preaching it). The politician’s work does not interest me.
You, attend political functions. Make your opinions known. Climb to the peak of political responsibility, as high up the ladder of leadership as you can bear the heat. Get in touch with media workers. Write, call and visit your representatives. Give them an earful! Get in touch with famous individuals and corporations about the things they do well and those they don’t.
Vote, even when your alternatives seem like loser, trivial options. Assert your political convictions and challenge those of your fellows. When you can’t find an acceptable ballot choice, insist on your right to register a disgusted abstention. Political anonymity is the routine sanctuary for victim and tormentor alike, but that form of political escapism has become too costly for us and profitable for them. We would be better off confronting our responsibilities instead of letting them drop.
Every time you refuse to vote,
You approve those policies and leaders
You hate the most.
Those who proclaim, “I’m not political” actually are. They have just concluded (falsely) that their needs are best served by the status quo. As for those who don’t vote out of sheer disgust, they only sour their existential nausea.
Policy the 4th: Charity.
The more funds you hand over to a good cause, the less money weapon managers acquire. Make a point of supporting needy individuals and worthy instruments with your time and money. Tithe, but be picky about it. Don’t just shovel money over to monolithic charities or church corporations. It’s quite likely their directors warp legitimate mandates with crooked agendas personal or institutional.
Find new ways to help others. Reach out beyond your circle of friends and clients. Be good and make your goodwill count.
Charity unlocks Miracle.
Policy the 5th: Actualize what You Visualize.
Note the bumper sticker that reads: “Visualize World Peace.”
Constructive visualization should be taught to every young Learner: another survival skill we only pick up by osmosis, trial and error or not at all. What a miserable education we have to endure!
For example, make a wish list and tape it to your bathroom mirror. Note and cross out your desires as they materialize. Refresh your list from time to time. Simple visualization.
Or else “daydream” shamelessly. Your dreams – if they’re adorned with the love of humanity – will be more rewarding than the Byzantine exertions of those who gross the most.
Essential skills like Judo and other martial arts should be learned, that coach one how to fall without breaking one’s bones. Babies should be taught something like that while they are learning to walk. The same goes for learning how to swim.
Overcoming this unawareness is just half the battle. Once you visualize your ideals, actualize them.
Policy the 6th: Take Responsibility.
Let’s say something noteworthy happens to you, for good or ill. Ask yourself, “Why did I attract this into my life?” My thanks to Context, Inc. for verbalizing this subliminal conviction. Too bad Andy Revell, its founder, left us in 2004.
Do not make this a reason to feel guilty for living in troubled times, for being sick or for getting in trouble. Make it a method to attract better circumstances for you and yours.
Let’s change what we can for the better, and die trying to change what we think we can’t. To hell with “patience with the things we can’t change!” Don’t accept anything less than excellence in your life and splendor in your society. Take big risks, be bold and love fearlessly. Recall the words of Reverend Jesse Jackson and “Keep hope alive!”
Everyone should thirst for, be quenched by and drunk with the Peace of God.
Policy the 6th Point Five: Laugh more.
Masters of laughter should open every formal and spontaneous gathering; start with them during public ceremonies and private parties. Ah, ha, ha, ha! Gandhi was so grim, notwithstanding his constant good humor; you should overflow with laughter. Laugher is appropriate in many more settings than we admit. It is another passkey to miracle . http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/08/video-laughter-yoga.html
Policy 6.75: Cry Honest Tears when the Laughter Stops.
Repent and transform everything from the root of your soul to the outer limits of the universe.
Policy the 7th & 7.5th: Seize the Lead if You Will; Get Out of the Way if You Won’t.
Learner is largely written for leaders to come. Whoever honors their topic of passion shall lead in that field.
So far, people of vast depth of soul, great heart and exemplary wisdom have withdrawn in disgust from running this world, even though that has always been their natural responsibility. They should take up the struggle once again and lead us back onto the straight and narrow from which we’ve strayed. We need those people everywhere, as good as they come and improving all the time. The dictatorship of compassion will demand unlimited cooperation. The best leaders must get immediate access to their topics of passion.
The time for pious meditation and scholarly non-interference has come and gone. It is time to climb down the mountain, astride the ox of wisdom (as per the Tao).
Those less talented (elsewhere oriented) gang way! There’s no time left to waste squabbling over leadership roles. Otherwise, under the rule of weapon mentality, malevolent busybodies seize most of them by violence, since there’s no better alternative. Only morally bankrupt creeps can justify the cheesy contradictions of weapon mentality; only they can find satisfaction enforcing social mediocrity for such shabby rewards.
Only the shining example of outstanding leaders at every level will improve average leadership. With so many bad role models presently in control, it’s no wonder our leaders line up around the block to file for moral bankruptcy.
This planet is a patchwork of slums mismanaged by warlords; Learners will turn it into an Eden ruled by the most upright tribal leaders we can find. The military salute goes to the badge of rank, not to the person who wears it; political recognition should go to outstanding individuals and not to their station, wealth or status.
A solitary leader is like the prow of a ship without its keel and hull. However, the whole is stronger than any of its parts. Learner calls on those who won’t lead as much as those who will.
The info proletariat grows its elite on demand, a bit like the way a honeybee colony cultivates a new queen. While info proletarians support their current elite, they should also nurture an assortment of proto-elites. Find the best leaders and bear them in triumph to City Hall!
Blaming current leadership is only a half-measure. Anyone satisfied with doing so little, hands the control of his life to others and their flawed understanding of his misfortune. If you don’t want to lead, fine; find those who do, find out what makes them tick and if they can love and be loved fearlessly. Uphold them, inspire them to do their duty, then challenge their righteousness. Watch over them, correct them when they stray and insist that they do better. Or replace them with someone better.
Policies the 8th and the 8th and a half: Study Learner, become a Learner.
Read this text, get to know it, challenge it and figure out where it’s gone wrong. Discover better alternatives and send them to me for inclusion. Get your best ideas published on your own. Discuss the ideas in this book with others and find out what they think. Identify Crimestop and confront it wherever you find it. Defy weapon mentality in your own thoughts and on your daily rounds of conversation and Learning.
Policy the 9th: Satyagraha.
Seize shared victory. Find out what other people need, find out what you need and make both happen. Practice the Golden Rule with everyone, yourself included. If you can’t recall the Golden rule, look it up and memorize it. Like most concepts of peace mentality, it is part of the heritage of every language and culture. I cannot help but repeat it to you here:
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
With this additional proviso: always bear in mind that the needs of others may differ from your own.
Policy not the 10th: Have No Children unless You Must.
It’s simple. Couples that have one child or none add to Learners. Those who have two, reproduce themselves. Those who have three or more mass-produce warriors and warrior-breeders. Men who inseminate and run, and women who get pregnant and plop down, spawn a progeny that will have to be nourished with all of PeaceWorld’s strength. Unlike on WeaponWorld, no infant will be abused without immediate reparation on PeaceWorld; that kind of abuse will become an unheard-of disgrace.
Traumatized by weapon mentality, intoxicated by its violence and untruth, we’ve found these terrors perversely rewarding. We may free ourselves from this collective nightmare by halving human birth rates several times within the next few decades.
Policy the 11th: Learn!
We are all Learners, have always been and will always be, for as long as we stray here on Earth.
Airports handle airplanes and travelers; everything revolves around their fluid transition. Humans are built the same way, to Learn. Every human need, desire, aspiration and fear centers on Learning. Luxury does not increase it and dearth does not diminished it. Matter and Spirit absorb it equally. Doing good and suffering evil are analogous Learning scenarios. Birth and death are among its most instructive lessons. Live to learn and learn to live.
Once we recognize that learning DNA’s Song is a good reason we spend time on this sorry, beautiful planet (as revealed in The Cosmic Serpent, John 1-5, and Genesis 28-12 of the Bible, among other dribs and drabs), everything else will assume its rightful place in the scheme of things. No matter what fate may befall us, we retain the alternative of dying well and reincarnating into Christ’s life. Once you lash your faith to that pier, no one can set it adrift again.
Policies the 12th, 12.3rd And 12.666…th: Dig Ponds, Grow soil, Plant Trees and Hedges.
Shallow ponds are natural magnets for windborne topsoil, pollen and sediment. As water plants age and decay, they produce perfect fertilizer. Organic household and garden wastes are more useful once fermented into topsoil and natural gas – provided households are kept clean and healthy and those wastes are turned over periodically for proper aerobic breakdown – and not anaerobic decay into incinerator ash and landfill ichor.
The ways and means of soil regeneration are about to undergo a New Age renaissance and compensate for thousands of years of official neglect and abuse.
Per Kristin Ohlson’s The Soil Will Save Us: How scientists, farmers, and foodies are healing the soil to save the planet, Rodale, Inc., NY, NY, 2014, so-called organic farming can raise the same amount of crops as the industrial kind, do so more sustainably at lesser cost, with fewer chemical and mechanized inputs. Theoretically, the extra CO2 humanity produces every year could be bound up in super fertile, high-carbon soil. Its restoration would involve a few basic steps plus many new insights and innovations and of course a lot of hard labor.
Stop adding chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides wholesale to the land except on a temporary and local basis, with microscopic precision and with a specific goal in mind.
No-till farming: don’t plow or break up the land. Use brains and natural processes instead of petroleum-fueled brute force and inert chemicals.
The more complex the ecological community on a farm, the higher the resulting carbon content of the soil. Establish a mix of local ground cover both perennial and annual. Sustain the soil’s microbiological community with as much care as that applied to aboveground herds and crops. Plant trees and hedges on marginal lands. Foster the widest genetic diversity in seeds specifically adapted to local conditions by cottage agronomy. Impose natural suppression techniques on harmful insects, weeds and disease. Industrial monoculture and livestock mass-penned in static lots on otherwise ruined farmland, those are signs of suicidal stupidity.
Drive animal herds across fallow fields; either by shifting farm animals quickly through small, moveable enclosures or by allowing predators to pick off, speed along and concentrate wild herds across vast stretches of land. You want lots of hoof prints, urine and dung in the soil, but only a quarter of the ground cover grazed before the herd moves on. Plant diverse food crops on the ground the herd has tromped.
It turns out that primitive slash-and-burn farming can be swapped for more thoughtful terra preta techniques whose slash piles are left to smolder under blankets of dirt or straw. This low-oxygen, partial burn traps a lot of carbon and trace elements. When mixed with bio-char, light and poor soils turn into rich, dark ones almost by miracle. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100810122030.htm. Get to work!
Mushrooms can augment soil volume and improve its quality by means of myceliation (networks of its threads growing through the subsoil), fruiting, decay and propagation. The first stage provides soil structure, mineral concentration, and selective micro-organic control. The fruition stage provides food for passing animals both large and small, along with their deposit of scat, pollen and seeds. The stage of decay nourishes plant and micro-organic growth. Each step can be accelerated by intelligent human cultivation. Plus, at best, they turn into good eats when sautéed in garlic and butter. http://www.fungi.com/
Every celebration should include the planting of new trees, borders or shrubs hardy in your clime and widespread in your locale. Join with friends to create new groves, parks, orchards and forests. Plant trees along the biological demarcation lines listed in this book. Plant trees, more trees! Get politicians to promise to plant more trees: a promise even today’s bought and paid for politicians could keep.
To repeat: micro-organic soil communities will receive as much attention and care from farmers and gardeners in the future as aboveground crops do today.
Policy the 13th & Lucky: Cultivate our Garden.
Let me quote the last line from Voltaire’s Candide, the masterwork of my childhood mentor and science fiction pioneer.
« Cela est bien dit, répondit Candide ; mais il faut cultiver notre jardin. »
“That’s well said,” replied Candide, “but our garden needs be tended.”
Every day, thoughtless discards litter the streets of our global slum. Our front yard is a filthy dump of broken glass and trash that’ll take quite some time to clean up. In between those layers simmer additional ones of psychic hatred, fear and pain.
Once we’ve cleared all this shit away, we’ll be left with a bare dirt lot and daily refills of trash. What to do? Give up? Abide in filth? Whine about lower profit margins? Indulge in half-comforting half-measures?
Not on your life. Every day, for as long as our heart holds out, we’ll haul the filth away. How much it costs to do so will not matter. We’ll replant the garden: seed and water it with tender, loving care. We’ll plant trees and shrubs and tend them as well. With luck, our best neighbors will imitate us, drawn by our example. As local eyesores turn into lovely gardens, our disastrous neighborhood will turn into a parkland worthy of our affection.
Scaled up somewhat, this is what we must do across the planet. Weapon mentality – dragged out into the light of day – will be tossed aside like a rotten rag. Its prevarications of false economy will no longer be tolerated.
Policy XIV: Fast when it’s fitting.
As long as a worthy Learner of Healing would concur, feel free to abstain from solid food for a day or so a week, a couple days a month or just on special occasions. Drink healthy liquids and break your fast whenever you wish, without remorse.
Learners should become intimately acquainted with hunger. They should know it so well that they would no more permit strangers to go hungry against their will than they would let their own family starve.
This policy does not apply to children and young people still growing up. They need regular daily meals to grow strong and smart. Fasting is only good for full-grown adults.
Policy XV: Reverse the Emotional Polarities of Weapons and Peace
According to Roland N. Stromberg’s, Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914, The Regents Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, 1982, p. 90, Europeans were swept up by similar sensations when warfare broke out, no matter which side they were on.
Exaltation, spiritual awakening, transformation, deliverance from narrow pettiness; above all, a surge of reunification by people of all kinds … plain folk with intellectuals, leftists with rightists, etc. The mysticism of a sacred union, the ecstatic revival of community, a union of hearts, the rally cry of Empire. A quickened pulse, a new strength and courage, a sense of brotherhood, a spirit of discipline and sacrifice. Revolutionary ecstasy aims to purify a corrupt world with a great, cleansing fire. Revolt against a rationalized, mechanized society, escape from unhappy personal circumstances, unification with something monumental and historically important, and the sexual emancipation of warriors. The temporary silencing of those opposed to war and permanently shutting them down. A fever, the salvation of Christianity (or your favorite religion). Physical force charged with moral energy becomes like love. War brings out religious feelings even in the anti-religious; it is an apocalypse. The abandonment of scientific internationalism and objectivity; the triumph of emotion over reason. A search for heroism, nobility, unselfishness as well as adventure, danger and even death. The urge toward group solidarity and kinship, a newly felt connection between the individual and the entire nation, the comradeship of the trenches. War hammers the world into new shapes. It is existentially real: the enemy and the perils of war are very real, while peace is so abstract as to strip the individual of his identity. Unity based on something simple, the common enemy. An ingathering of patriotic minorities into the mainstream, social harmony, solidarity, distributive justice and salvation through suffering. The old rationales for war were necessity, duty and justice; in 1914, the “new” ones became renewal, adventure and apocalypse.
At least until mass killing got serious, a few weeks later, and ceaseless for years to come.
American citizens felt the same thing after 9/11. Stromberg states that frontline soldiers retain similar sentiments longer than rear-area civilians who revert to standard, peacetime alienation much more quickly. This may explain why veterans have such a hard time reintegrating into the civilian world they’ve lost touch with while exposed to the crucible of war.
It will be up to Learners to turn the transformation from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld into the kind of moral crusade human beings seem to be hard-wired for. They will pump up PeaceWorld using the same passions listed above, (“It was him or me; them or us. The ends justify the means. I am in command here; go die.”); they will exalt Peace with utmost sincerity and leave nothing unsaid about war.
This peace exercise will be very challenging. Learners will have to seize the righteousness of their cause, confirm their conviction through study, and convince everyone through the purity of their actions. The least trace of hypocrisy, weakness and hesitation in the reversal of these sentiments will jeopardize World Peace.
Policy XVI and Especially for the Young: Protect their Eyes and Skin!
As you read these words, the ozone layer is unraveling and even the sun bears a lethal frown. Outdoor occupations once found healthy offer nothing more than skin cancer and premature blindness.
Please get your kids to wear high-quality sunglasses and shaded hats when they go outdoors, along with long pants and long-sleeve shirts. They will thank you for that annoying interference later, when their contemporaries go blind or suffer early onset skin cancer.
Policy XVII and then Some: The Nose Is for Breathing; the Mouth, To Eat and Talk.
Oxygen is a 100% lethal addictive drug: another waste product (like alcohol) of plants and cyanobacteria. The human body was designed to consume an absolute minimum of it by breathing sparingly through the nose. Unless you’re out on a run or some other vigorous activity, you take in too much of the stuff when you breathe through the mouth, which induces a cumulative lowering of vitality and thought.
The nasal passages of many Caucasian faces are narrow, which compels occasional mouth breathing. This racial weakness should be resisted. If you catch yourself breathing through the mouth, make a conscious effort to breathe through the nose. If every Learner followed this simple rule, a lot of foolishness would cease along with premature aging of body parts, especially those in direct contact with the air: the lungs and digestive system, also the eyes and brain that reflexively take in more oxygen than they need whenever possible. After all, if you are breathing by mouth (which would only occur in nature during an emergency), more concentration and better vision must be required, accelerating their burnout. In the long run, too much oxygen can be almost as bad as not enough.
Policy XVIII: When You Die, Look Up Jesus for me.
I invite you to reincarnate into the life of Jesus. Find therein what you need to Learn to be saved. Break free, during His agony, from the Wheel of desire and death, and go to Paradise that very evening in His company.
Thus armored in life and with nothing left to fear, we should build PeaceWorld.
(Return to Policy 11).
Well, sister mine, that sums up my point of view for the time being. You've made so many wonderful things happen in your life, with so much spontaneous grace and elegance, without anyone’s say-so. Your achievements surpass most others’ I’ve beheld. You have taken the best care you could of your children and they’ve grown up as best they can. Let’s hope our descendants – spiritual and hereditary – will flourish in ways we cannot imagine.
- IT IS NEVER TOO LATE FOR GLORY –
“All life strategies have their advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of the exploitative-experimental approach is obvious. … We directly manipulate the environment in ways that ensure our populousness and ubiquity, notably in farming. The disadvantage of the exploitative-experimental approach is also obvious. Exploitation is … likely to produce unforeseeable consequences. On the other hand, nothing ventured, nothing gained.” …
“But the party really is over. This really is a special time in history — a critical time. The first full-time farmers of 10,000 years ago were perfectly capable of overfarming (we can see evidence of ancient soil erosion); but even so, they could effectively regard the world as a whole as a limitless resource. There were entire continents still to be discovered, … [Now] the fertile spots have been dug up, ... Agriculturalists can argue about details – can we feed … ten … twenty or thirty million if we really put our minds to it? – But no sensible person can seriously doubt that the finishing post is now in sight. …
“In short, the attitude that has been so appropriate this last 10,000 years, and has allowed the most exploitative-experimental people to raise inexorably if fitfully to the top, has simply ceased to be appropriate. Yet our economics are geared to the exploitative-experimental approach, and so are our political systems.”
[Note: Here is where the author and I part company. Our social systems have stuck conservatively to the habits and limitations of the past. Experimentation has been forbidden for millennia with respect to anything but marginal improvements to the delusional exploitation of “striking it rich soon by exhausting something precious but considered free because poorly defended by nature.” Unheeding exploitation has trumped acceptance at every level. His exploitative-experimental versus conservative-accepting model turns into mine of conservative exploitation dominating experimental acceptance, at least until now].
“… Surely it cannot be the case that the only “realistic” course is to head pell-mell for disaster? Is that what the levelheaded, sober-suited people are arguing? …” Colin Tudge, The Time Before History: Five Million Years of Human Impact, Scribner, New York, 1996, p. 342.
Has humanity procrastinated too long to save itself? Will the transformations we require – no matter how well thought-out – turn out to be nothing more than a Band-Aid stuck on a green-stick fracture squirting arterial blood? Will Gaya mock our efforts and shrug us off, the way a grizzly drowns its fleas while seizing its next salmon? Are we simple mammalian dinosaurs equipped with but slightly renovated brains: less worthy than them of million-year survival?
The short answers? 1) Probably so, 2) maybe not and 3) so what?
First off: probably so.
Whether or not this civilization pulls through its next set of challenges, its members will transform themselves beyond recall. This transformation may be purposeful and clear-eyed, promoting the greater good for everyone; or it may be chaotic, anarchic and bent on personal survival at the expense of everyone else. We may thrive as individuals and nations, our hypocrisy cast aside to reveal the true beings we are without them; or turn into wounded, cornered animals harmful to one and all. In either case, this adjustment will be more intense than our wildest dreams and terrors.
We will evolve beyond recognition along with our societies. Our successors will look back on us as mythic beings: either figures of wicked extravagance, or envied role models of matchless prosperity and trouble-free stability.
“Just imagine! They took hot showers more than once a day if they felt like it! Their electronics were designed to waste electricity when shut off! They never walked anywhere, but took a one-ton jalopy wherever they went. Their homes were crammed with idle equipment and tools no one else could use.”
They might see us as spoiled brats set loose to wreck the toy store, compared to the austere stewardship of the world to which they resign themselves, proud of their sacrifice. Then again, our worst massacres and plagues may seem to them like the novice spite of a schoolyard bully compared to the super-tech omnicide that few of them survive. Our primitive peace technologies may seem alien to them compared to their nano-tools and biomime systems, or else to older, mud-bound alternatives of last resort, or to both.
After surviving eons of lethal ordeal, human beings are born and bred conservative (the few of you out there who assert your progressive activism, you are fooling yourselves): “I will only do what my father and his father did — just a little better if I can get away with it.”
Unlike young and even middle-aged adults, for old folks like me almost every life-change is for the worse. As someone once said, life offers everything to youth and takes it all back from the old. They become reflexive conservatives almost always.
When I began this chapter, I watched a 2007 televised debate between ten Republican wannabe replacements for President Bush the Lesser. During my rewrites in 2011 and 2015, more racist clowns sought to replace President Obama because they felt superior to him; thus nothing significant had changed. Their lack of spirit was staggering. None of them paid the least attention to the transformations about to overwhelm them and us. They were intent instead on restoring America to some pre-Crash reprise of the 1920s if not the robber barony of the 1870s — as if those destinies could ever take hold again. Even though a tidal wave of history and science crested over their heads, casting a grim shadow over their cliché-ridden notes, none of them took heed. They counted on millions of special interest dollars and childish votes cast in their favor, simply because they refused to pay attention and afforded their supporters that fatal luxury. They and those they take in will be swamped by this transformation, like children swept out to sea because they were lured by the tsunami’s initial, extra low tide.
If only we had undertaken these transformations earlier, when so many more resources were available!
A handful of Zionist idealists emerged from World War I (sic) sharing their dream of rebuilding ancient Palestine into a modern, high-tech nation-state and regional breadbasket. If only that handful of Jews had been the mass of Learners of every ethnicity, nation and religion, intent on turning the whole world into one federated technological powerhouse and Garden of Eden! Most of them got carried out feet first during intervening wars. If only President Roosevelt had held on for another decade after World War II (sic), his dream of a one-world government might have taken root and we could have become one prosperous tribe on PeaceWorld.
Picture the untold energy, intellect, dedication, discipline and selflessness it took to murder over half a hundred million war dead, wound three times as many, turn a dozen times more into refugees, destroy the home of a hundred times more! Imagine that frenzied effort devoted to peace and mutual benefit instead. Think of stadiums-full of fuel wasted to thrust aircraft carriers, battleships, submarines and transports across the seven seas; to fill the sky with deadly aircraft tasked with burning countless cities to the ground; to roll cities-full of soldiers, their weapons and supplies back and forth across Europe, Asia and North Africa; to truck innocent victims by the million to ovens, gulags, and killing grounds. Think of that incredible wealth wasted on futile mayhem!
As far as most people are concerned, progressives are best left unheard. Transformation is by definition dangerous; keeping things the way they are seems to be safer on the whole. The only dramatic transformations we tolerate are those at the behest of war. Any peaceful transformation proposed on the same scale must be unacceptable.
Think again!
On occasion, shifting conditions twist the status quo beyond the ability of its fans to cope. Once things get that bad, they may resort to dramatic change. But. Oh. So. Reluctantly! Soon thereafter, they will put up with virtually anything to resume the olden ways of golden days.
The tendency of every revolution in human history has been to fall back on ancient routines the moment new ones reveal their drawbacks by spawning worse disasters. We fall back on the older ways (for example, letting ancient royal monarchy relapse into modern corporate monarchy: the mirror image of its iniquity), no matter how worthless that retreat turns out to be. Our innate conservatism may well spell our doom once change comes knocking at our door.
Second: maybe not.
These problems we face might appear so massively unfamiliar as to exceed our competence. But instead of hysterical paralysis, our efforts to head them off may lend us untapped dexterity. Turning away from the trivial obsessions of modern culture, we could concentrate on real problems instead. They might shrink to sensible proportions once they were honestly addressed, much easier to solve than we expect. As our initial problems drop off one by one, our rate of success may accelerate to liftoff. More of us may take the bull by the horns and vault exultantly over its mighty shoulders; fewer will pirouette away from onrushing progress like matadors setting up their death stroke.
In addition, we might not be alone in our efforts. Alien forces may be out there just beyond perception, invisible allies and unacknowledged friends. They might be human agents eclipsed up ‘til now, or beings beyond our ken. Something in the Universe seems to favor life and, by extension, us. Call it God, call it UFO, call it what you will: a benign rewording of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds: “intellects vast, cool and [sympathetic].” A course in miracles may linger just beyond our doorstep, waiting for us to turn our back on faithless, ourselves-alone scientific determinism and its serial failures.
What would attract this miracle to us, what transformations should we undertake? I have sketched a few of them in Learner.
Our first renovations may be spiritual rather than high tech. The threats we face may poison our scientific technologies in the absence of psychic supports we cannot yet fathom. Religious convictions deeply held in the past may be obsolete; orthodox approaches to spirit and transcendence, rigid and heartless. Our religious leaders may turn out to be grim fools crouching whitened sepulchers, or institutional monsters (Serial child molesters? Protectors of Nazis in flight? Enslavers of women?). Selfless saints, ignored up ‘til now, may step forward to replace them. We will have to launch an ethical revolution as groundbreaking as the industrial one, a spiritual revolution that outshines the scientific. Learner empathy and cooperation could replace the official cruelty of competitive individualism; global humanism and PeaceWorld, national-capitalism and its inevitable wars.
Finally, so what?
Humanity may have doomed itself before it starts this transformation in earnest. As during painful rewrites of Learner, we may have delayed too long.
What if every transformation we undertake not only fails to postpone our doom but helps to bring it about?
Those who block transformation to prioritize their short-term gain may cut us down for our trouble – as they’ve done so often in the past – and destroy everything in an orgasm of omnicide their victims set up so tirelessly. Human civilization may grind to a halt like a wind-up toy wound backwards too hard.
So what!
What we need most these days: idealism, heroism and hope; new ideas, untold elegance and unobstructed innovation. Conservative mediocrity dishonors us with the memory of those drowned in its wake. If we do not undertake this transformation for practical reasons, for reasons of mere survival, we should do so for its glory.
Crouching in the mediocrity of special interests and stumbling over the bodies of those wiped out by incompetence and indifference: that is brain-simple, brawn-easy and bereft of glory, the fond dream of Republican politicians everywhere. It involves no self-sacrifice, no appeal to genius, no stretch of the imagination; merely persistent self-pity, unearned entitlement and empty claims of exceptionalism.
Reaching out for something better, even though it is declared impossible, perhaps so magnificent as to perch just beyond our reach: now, that would be worthy of our talent and honor.
Every delay will make this transformation more difficult, riskier and less likely to succeed; every month spent weighing our options will make those options more perilous. The longer we do nothing, the more desperate our task will become. The most hazardous alternative at this point would be to do nothing and wait, sitting on our hands, the consequences of having done nothing.
What about you! Is it too late for you already?
- CONCLUSION –
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
An Upton Sinclair quote taken from the column of Mike Mailway (pseudonym for L.M. Boyd of regretted memory) syndicated by the Seattle Post Intelligencer of regretted memory. All that’s left in town is the Seattle Times that scams progressive politics by hyping unelectable Republicans and their sellout politics. Yay!
Please read “The Future” first.
One way or another, a grim era is winding down. Weapon managers cannot draw any more profit from warfare … not even false profit. That time has passed. The energy wasted on weapon myths can no longer be considered surplus. No excuse remains for knee jerk ignorance, deliberate poverty, preventable disaster, sanctioned injustice and dogmatic overpopulation: by far the most expensive social policies. Their revision will induce less pain and more profit; better yet, shrink the ill will that plagues us.
We Earthlings use up around 40,000 gallons every second, or 126 tons, or four and some tanker trucks of petroleum. That doesn’t sound so bad, now does it? Multiply by 86,400 to reckon our daily fix.
A dozen or so years ago, we were rushed over a cliff edge of growing oil demand and reduced supply: a leap none of our officials warned us about.
The inertial momentum of WeaponWorld is too massive to be stopped. It turns us into cartoon characters suspended just beyond the precipice, windmilling arms and feet to stay level. There may still be enough time to choose what to take with us over that precipice.
We can take the jump with the latest flame-thrower apparatus dreamt up by WeaponWorld: death at one’s finger tips, that’ll fry anyone who would dare pry it from our hands. Costing a fortune. Why not several? Why not heavily armored and self-propelled on tracks? Why not regiments of them? That assembly will make a satisfying flash and bang when it crashes into the canyon floor below. A spectacular fireworks display: smoldering body parts and red-hot bits of junk cartwheeling in all directions!
Otherwise, we could don a parachute carefully woven, tested true, well packed and deftly secured to us. Train long and hard to land catlike, the way veteran smoke jumpers would.
I suspect that we will take this jump equipped with something halfway between those extremes: with a moth-eaten emergency parachute to uphold the tin can flame-thrower tankette the we will ride down to impact against the advice of experts.
If only we had looked to fix this problem back during the 1950s when enough oil reserves remained to cushion our fall. If only a convincing precursor of Learner had been published in millions of copies a generation or three ago!
But back then, WeaponWorld authorities were too shortsighted to do the right thing, and their modern-day counterparts show no greater vision, quite the contrary. Windmilling their feet like synchronized swimmers, they display just enough political correctitude to appease us idiots.
Tending toward flame-throwers: the sacrifice of the Other. Tending toward the parachute: the celebration of Learners.
It is not mere profit we should seek, but Learner commonalities we can share: the Humanity of World Peace and the Duty of Learning (to paraphrase Mencius).
Our future is threatened by society’s worst tendencies: elite presumption, proletarian ignorance and mutual submission to those errors. Prejudice, panic and greed have degraded everyday wisdom; ignorance, mental sloth and self-isolation have shorted out our common sense.
Learner calls for the dictatorship of compassion, the tyranny of conscience; it demands serious contemplation and STAT application of those new alternatives.
Powerful private interests may resist this transformation (are resisting it); they may jam (are jamming) infant Learner Networks, especially the Internet, with meaningless babble and fake news. Info elites peddle their worthless priorities across tiers of corporate monologue mass media. Conspiracies of Greed crouch behind private property rights and other weapon myths in order to violate the Commons with impunity.
Once Learning prevails, weapon technicians (globally inferior peace technicians) will not be satisfied with their newfound vestigial status. They will suffer clinical withdrawal from so much money, authority and prestige, this last, the ultimate military perk. Battle elites may balk at honoring the newfound priorities of their proletarian hosts. They may refuse to cooperate with erstwhile enemies except to wreck more havoc.
Religious fundamentalists are resurrected carnivores in sullen retreat. They will find no sustenance for their self-worship in Learner. Preaching the twin contradictions of religious bigotry and blessed mayhem, they accurse themselves and their followers. Yet the same people could celebrate more often and sacrifice less frequently, help more people and injure fewer, and thus render due devotion to God.
So too, those who exult in catastrophe, whether they draw inspiration from the Bible's Book of Revelations, from some rabid misinterpretation of the Koran (Qran) or some other holy text they’ve rendered toxic. They act like a homicidal bus driver who dreams of the fiery crash that will consume the passengers entrusted to his care. The trick would be to never again hire such people as our guides.
It is with awe-inspiring miracle that we should play like infants chuckling among their toys, not unstoppable catastrophes to bemoan.
You, revolted activist! Snap out of your hypnotic fascination with empty clichés; shake off the dead-end lethargy you inherited, its fussy futility and vehement emptiness. Shoulder instead the golden yoke of Learning and behold its radiance blossom in your trace and those of the rest of the world.
We who have been routed by the forces of reaction; we should sound the rally call so that our scattered companions may link up with us from the ends of the Earth. We who share no vision beyond our worst fears, must form square around Learner and stand our ground until the reactionary assault shatters against the wall of our bodies and bogs down in its worst possible outcomes as usual. Then we may counter their assault irresistibly, once and for all.
This book proposes a few answers to our worst problems. Expect better ones to emerge once new Cooperatives of Plenty revive Learner creativity and grant us a say in every problem our curiosity illuminates. Every baby step, every antinomy clarified will win another round for Learners.
We must winnow the weapon content from our constellation of political metaphors; only then can we liberate ourselves from the Thousand Year Reich of weapon mentality.
This text calls for the reform-idealism of youth. Call it revolutionary fervor for lack of a better term. Everyone moderately sane shares a kalotropism: an innate attraction to the good. Our conscience will guide us quite reliably once we stop repressing it.
These days, this fervor lies dormant with no permissible outlet. Weapon mentality converts healthy fellow-feeling into Prism exclusivity, rabid nationalism, parochial prejudice, general loathing, and ultimately, willingness to soldier. Under the sway of this deception, the milk of human kindness curdles into fatal exasperation. Hypnotized since birth by expert weapon mentors, we reject new ideals and resist real progress. Then we wonder why our piece of the puzzle refuses to fit!
Most of us defy this perversion of values, at least in the privacy of our thoughts. Our defiance however, relies on obsolete vocabulary, outmoded politics and feeble appeals for circumstantial justice. Our liberal, atomistic and meliorist mindset has stalled since it’s been monkey-wrenched by sociopaths. To shake them off and jumpstart it, a far and wide majority of Learners will have to develop cooperatives of abundance.
Peace loving Learners will turn this reform-idealism into a dynamo of social transformation. Once we give it full play, we will head for glory. Given a knowledge-value loom stout enough to shuttle the thousand-count sheet of reform and stiffen it with ribs of revolutionary fervor, we may mend our tattered social fabric and reweave it into a broadcloth of many colors in a single generation.
Many old souls swaddle their bruised conscience in empty mysticism, bombastic positivism, pseudo philosophy and para-faith; they numb it down with drug abuse, pathosex and the obsessive void of Prismatic and Wimpish thought.
We reed stacks of books and magazines, and endure years of television programming, that merely underscore our powerlessness and social futility. In desperation, we cling to a succession of addictive denial mechanisms. We pander to “scientific” closed-mindedness, inertial paralysis, post-modern nihilism, groundless fundamentalism and religious faith in the impracticality of progress. We withdraw into personal cool, evasive jokes and refusal to take anything seriously except our carefully fattened ego.
We pay attention to nothing any longer but that which confirms our prejudices and swaddles us in our comfort zone. For fear of turning into “fanatics,” we reject new hopes and inspirations unless they are trivial. We are hopeless credophobes: too hung-up and “cool” to believe anything new.
Weapon mentality wastes talent and intellect; it craves your clammy cool. The mentality of peace would prize you and your topic of passion for its bright flame of brilliance.
Don’t count on any grace-benefit, homegrown, store-bought or book-learnt, until we establish PeaceWorld. Five thousand years of unilateral self-perfection, of bloody nation building, futile dissidence and fanatical cult revival, that is all we have to show for our history: staggering amounts of time and effort wasted.
Those outdated notions were given a more than fair chance to succeed and more latitude than sane prudence would dictate, given their disastrous outcomes. They failed as miserably as they were cunningly advertised and fanatically adhered to. It is time they were swept from the scene like rotten rags; either that or dragged up to the rooftop, scrubbed with Marseille soap suds and sunned in the heat of day, that their colors might resume their shine.
We must mend the global stage. Other remedies so difficult in the past will turn out to be self-starting and self-sustaining, once Learners sort out these other things.
Learning will raise the living standard of ordinary folk and extraordinary ones alike. Developed wisely, real abundance will replace the hardship and terror we had settled for, until we share the essentials of PeaceWorld: our birthright already paid for in full. Any remaining threat or dearth will become a problem subject to swift, decisive resolution, not just another unintended consequence swept under the rug by senile institutions.
The poor of today take for granted some things an ancient Emperor would have traded a kingdom for: telephones and vaccines, for example. On PeaceWorld, the poor will claim security and comforts surpassing the pathetic luxuries our besieged billionaires boast of today.
This text delivers to smug elites and ambitious proto-elites the only challenge worthy of their braggadocio (braggart arrogance). Their cooperation is vital for this endeavor to succeed. Their current accomplishments are trivial in comparison, and doomed to fail unless followed up with a Learner renaissance. Once the info elite has seen to that, it will ensure that its descendants enjoy a better life than ever dreamt possible, even (especially!) after legitimate needs have been met.
And so, let’s get to work! Forgo the paramilitary consumerism we have mistaken for success up to now, reject suicidal wealth-to-poverty ratios surpassing fifteen-to-one and five-to-one. Instead, give everyone the freedom to choose between moderate serenity and risky adventures Learners find some use for.
We Learner proto-elites are just reawakening to our responsibility. In coping with the latest wave of transformation, we find ourselves in turn Wimpish, Prismatic and chaosist; info elite and info proletarian; progressive, moderate and conservative. Moreover, we are loath to jam our political identity into those claustrophobic corners. We reject old values but are baffled by current events. No valid vision of the future inspires us; no conviction warms our hearts. Infant-like, we fixate on flashy baubles. No matter how hard we try, we cannot concentrate on real progress.
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” The Bible, Corinthians 13 11.
Learners will find allies on both sides of every barricade of wealth, class, ethnicity, nation, religion and occupation. Relieved of their fears, former adversaries will emerge from their sandbagged gun pits, ready to make friends. The segregations remaining on PeaceWorld will show off cultural and artistic uniqueness — little more. They’ll resemble German Oktoberfest or Native American Powwows: sources of cultural pride and comfort, not bigot hostility and distrust. Most of our alleged opponents will turn out to be natural allies. The resistance offered by the sullen remainder won't even pose a speed bump before Learner progress.
These pages are not engraved in stone; on the contrary, I typed them in ephemeral pixels. Treat them as a discussion agenda and a stage in the round from which to plan a brilliant future. Dedicated professionals and gifted amateurs should reconsider the assumptions found herein. Their debate could bring about a brilliant Learner Commonwealth. Our first and last question should be “What if the sky were the limit?”
Either Learners will drag humanity kicking and screaming into PeaceWorld, or weapon managers will sleepwalk us hand-in-hand, smiling vacantly, into military disaster.
You. Yes, you! Quit stoking the WeaponWorld Jive Drive. Defy weapon mentality when you find it. Be anarchic in your own unique way or join some new collective to accomplish a chosen project. Devote your lifetime to quiet saintliness, as your ancestors may have done, or quietly trip up the next bully who chases his victim past your front door.
In any case, reach out! The miracle we’ve sought since the beginning of time may be just within reach!
“Our conception of truth and justice is without a doubt bound to be outdone in the ages to come. This much we know. And, far from bringing low our courage, this hope and conviction are the foremost stimulants of our current drive. It is therefore each generation’s stern duty to reach out for the truth as far as it can, to the very edge of what it can perceive, and cling there desperately as if it had reached the absolute truth. The progress of humanity is at that price.
“The life of one generation is nothing more than an endeavor that follows from and leads to the rest. Well, friends, our generation did its part.
“Peace be upon us.”
Roger Martin du Gard, John Barois, Edition Gallimard, Paris, Le livre de poche, 1921, pp. 327-328.
- TRASH SOCCER –
No hands.
Kick trash off the sidewalk and onto the street.
Cigarette butts, filters and empty packs, glass, pebbles, cardboard, clothing, anything white, metallic, plastic, paper, and inorganic: ONE POINT EACH.
Organics: leaves, animals (dead or alive), grass, soil, spittle, droppings, oil spots, wet spots, water puddles, snow and ice: ZERO POINTS.
Bright orange peels or smelly ones of melons and each of its seeds: ONE POINT.
Kick trash onto the brick border along the curb just short of the street: ONE POINT EACH.
Foot strikes on the same target while airborne: ONE POINT EACH.
Same kick, multiple targets towards street: ONE POINT EACH.
SK, MT onto street: ONE POINT EACH.
Onto curbstone: ONE POINT EACH.
Into the street during high winds: ONE POINT.
Kick target into a trash receptacle: ONE POINT.
Your score is cumulative.
Competition by yards of sidewalk swept per unit time.
Or alternating kick passes by different competitors from an agreed starting point to the street. One item per competitor, unless it’s worth TWO POINTS or more; then the same competitor starts kicking the next item.
MINUS ONE POINT for kicking an object into a crack in the sidewalk.
MINUS ONE POINT for unsportsmanlike behavior or using hands (game over).
ONE POINT, once per game, for making spectators laugh and/or applaud.
Or
ONE POINT, once per target if you're a real clown.
PERMITTED CHEAT: A twig may be used to tease one or more targets from cracks in the sidewalk that cannot be reached by shoe toes. Do not count footsteps to do this task. ZERO POINTS.
If some piece of litter perturbs you beyond enduring, pick it up by hand and take it to a trash barrel. Wash your hands after. ZERO POINTS.
Elegant simplifications of these rules are welcome. Children should sum up the score in their head (the more complicated the calculation they tolerate, the better) and kick litter to the curb.
Sociopaths rejoice in fouling or killing everything they touch, if allowed. The conscientious cleanse and heal, and, even more rewardingly, restore to a natural state; whether or not they are allowed by prevailing psychopaths. We must turn this cosmic dance into an everyday game, at least for children.