WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin
- 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.
WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin
- 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.
WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin
- 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 that 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 parafaith; they numb it down with drug abuse, pathosex and the obsessive void of Prismatic and Wimpish thought.
We read 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, Jean Barois, Edition Gallimard, Paris, Le livre de poche, 1921, pp. 327-328.
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