WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin
- 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 Learners are 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 past weapon cults paralyzed private thought, our weapons ideologies freeze us in place 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.
...
COMMENT? markmulligan@comcast.net
