WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin
- 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 oflike-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 choose.
IN FRENCH
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COMMENT? markmulligan@comcast.net
