- SURVIVAL OF THE DEADLIEST

The development of military states by Darwinian selection. Their extinction of more peaceable ones by means of superior lethality. Leadership in its weapon and peace configurations.

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

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WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

- 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 thatpublic 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. 

The dominance of weapon mentality is not chiefly due to a dark plot among psychopathic evildoers – even 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 the 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 would 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 reason, thanks to greater ease of use, despite much lesser success. This corrosive process takes the path of supermemes, repeat serial meme sets that recur then fade, here and there and everywhere.

Humans fall more often into the following anti-reason traps, rather 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 in compartments on a ship and the teams of its crew. Different teams throw grenades down corridors and hatches instead of cooperating to keep the boat afloat. Prioritize the exclusive requirements of one’s own identify or nation, or special interest group, as opposed to the shared good that keeps us all alive.

·      Extreme economics. Give priority to arithmetic profit and loss requirements, lower to those arising from empathy, compassion and spirit, more rewarding in the long run -- and personally, in the short -- than mere requirements.

Ms. Costa’s solutions to these problems involve strengthening personal objectivity and insight 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 which is a lot 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 around each problem.

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.  Look her up; she's worth it.

Today's weapon managers insist that international corporations are the most disinterested agents 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.

IN FRENCH

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COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net