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.
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.
WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin
- 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 and www.searchengineguide.com and wt and 2011 and 0118_wt1.html. 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?
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COMMENT? markmulligan@comcast.net