- YOU CHOOSE 2

Pick your constellation of political metaphors to conform with history or to dream up a new tomorrow.

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LEARNER full text (2024) and chapters

All or nothing, PeaceWorld or death

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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

- YOU CHOOSE (II) -

This text casts off straitjacket terms like Leftist and Rightist. Believe me, I’ve met some decent, thoughtful conservatives and I’ve appealed to far too many “progressive activists” whose only devotion was to their dead-end prejudices and sheep herd associations — not to mention international right-wingers who would rather re-enact their horror film Kristalnacht. I found a good many people whose politics slid right off  the platters of this scale. 

The clashing demands of weapon mentality empower multinational and interdenominational right-wingers, no matter how much we despise them. Don’t tell me that extremists like Slobodan Milosevic, the KGB and their historical replacements were “Leftists.” They’ve imitated all the tactics of typical Right Wing reactionaries. In essence they are interchangeable weapon managers. Most of us have born the talon-marks of these buzzards, if only indirectly on our acquaintances here and overseas. 

These days, “moderate” reactionaries, “compassionate” conservatives, bellicose liberals and mercenary radicals elbow each other across our TV screens. Each group lauds the peace content of its own position and condemns the weapons outcome of its adversaries. However, nobody uses terms like “peace content” and “weapons outcome.” That taboo vocabulary would reveal the inexcusable lapses and predictable strengths all these people share.

Learners will conserve worthwhile values, extend a liberal hand toward those less fortunate, and go to the (radical) root of social problems. They might even display reactionary revulsion — at renewed attempts to validate weapon mythology, for example. A more accurate political description might replace weapon managers’ “fearful hatred” with Learners’ “fearless love beyond reproach.” 

Free enterprise is a vital activity in many settings; central planning is, in others. The so-called free market fosters central planning by corporations and centralized corporate welfare on behalf of weapon states. It is painful for conscience-driven people to observe those activities in their pure form, since they become more and more toxic after they make themselves the only game in town.

Habits and institutions that promote honest peace should be adopted; anything that blocks it, marginalized. Peace benefits should be identified and magnified; weapon threats, isolated and rendered vestigial. The same social winnowing applies to every political dualism that so-called leftists and rightists have failed to resolve as long as they could dictate the terms of the debate. 

Success at social transformation demands the shared agreement of rulers and ruled as equal partners — never again mere dominance and submission, whatever the reason. This concord could only result from the near-universal consensus of those well informed. Our orthodox constellation of political metaphors cannot convey this unheard-of accord. This book calls it a Cooperative of Plenty on the material plane, Laocracy on the political, and the World or Virtual Agora on the intellectual. 

We are enslaved by reductionist, hyperactive and hyper-rational humanism (actually, semi-rational). In deference to this tyranny, a coalition of nation-states and multinational corporations oversees the most culturally isolated and politically neutered info proletariat it can engineer. 

Every political party conspires to hurry up this runaway despotism: from Socialists and Communists, to Democrats and Republicans, to Nationalists and Fascists and then back around again. Reflexively, info elites shield their rice bowl in the weapon status quo, even as they deny that fact.

Those who confront this Gorgon emerge as militant extremists be it from the Left or the Right. Every “revolutionary” proto-elite is imbued with the same weapon mentality as their tyrannical archenemy. Each promises to confront orthodox violence with redundant threats of popular violence. Each anticipates social collapse and plots to manipulate it — with no more success than their dead-end predecessors. Revolutionaries, crusaders and jihadi are only good at one thing: perfecting the next round of weapon technology.

We live in an algedonic age. The real rules are those least understood. Crucial social rules are neither discussed nor acknowledged by popular consent. They control a vast meta-system of warfare that is not likely to crash into our lives until the lead bullet, toxiplasm or gamma ray with our name stenciled on it does so. Until then, we remain complacent, more or less reluctant conspirators with weapon management. 

On the other hand, Learners will sustain syncretism (“as the Cretans did”). They will identify failing institutions and then remove, reform or circumvent them in favor of everyone’s life-quality, sacred awareness, natural habitat and the common long term. 

We cannot sort these priorities effectively outside a Learner Commonwealth. Ranking them fairly will require everyone’s well-informed consent, which could only be obtained therein. 

Greed, power-hunger, and deprivation/abuse/neglect fears will fall away under a succession of Learner administrations. Criminals, the obsessively rich and other social parasites will grasp the true meaning of wealth and power once they’ve let go of their primary fears. New benefits will outweigh old fears and thus reduce brutality and untruth. 

Those heedless few who persist at ancient crimes will be caught up in social safety nets much more flexible, benign and secure than the makeshifts we rely on today: malign neglect before the fact and thereafter, armored doors sealing shut concrete prisons wrapped in razor wire. 

Only by adopting Learner priorities – and subordinating lesser ones – may we expect to achieve real progress. 

New Learner ceremonies could dissipate homicidal hostility — perhaps with live-fire militia exercises. Ernest Callenbach’s book, Ecotopia, portrays this form of ritual pseudo-battle. 

Think of a bounded playing field. Wall it off from curious bystanders and forbid idle spectators. An underground “Dome of Pain” might serve best. 

Set no rules, with the following exceptions:

•  Neutral ground: This dome should be located far away from contending militants’ home ground. It should be under the control of a local militia with no stake in the argument being contested.
• Equal numbers: None but equal teams of contenders (by numbers and weight) may be present during a ritual confrontation, everyone else excluded. Afterwards, only local medical teams may rescue survivors and retrieve bodies (with an armed escort of locals if necessary).
• Comparable qualifications: Politicians, priests and bureaucrats should confront their peers from the opposite side. One side’s military leaders should be opposed by the other side’s, etc. One side cannot send a team of commandos, or one or two politicians with a platoon of bodyguards, to exterminate the other side’s team composed of nothing but politicians and their admin assistants.

 No doubt, new rules will have to be thought up once clever psychopaths figure out new ways to massacre their opponents without harm to themselves. If respective parties cannot be made to agree about them, drop this controversial model.

Arm naked antagonists with spiked clubs and fill emergency rooms with the outcome of their rage. Begin with the ten top rank representatives of each aggressive assembly – political, military and religious – then ten more replacements, then more until none of that kind remain outside a hospital or cemetery. Let them express their hatred and rage fully. This alternative might be preferable to the current practice of quietly dispatching masses of innocent, patriotic children, equipped with modern military hardware and our social blessing, to confront equally innocent and deadly victims from the other side.

These days, arena-style televised violence panders to disgusting human traits without serious analysis or catharsis. Entire peoples and countries are sacrificed to re-enact our common dread of the Other, which teaches no-one anything useful.

Learner violence games will shut out voyeur (voy-uhr, Peeping Tom) thrill seekers. Such artificial confrontations may turn out to be superior to the crime scenes, prisons, and battlefields across which we let our accursed rage range freely. 

In exchange for voluntary and anonymous participation, they would provide:

• mystery and initiation;
• a real risk of sacrifice, serious injury and death;
• a mystical quest for mutual understanding and forgiveness; 
• elaborate ceremonies of shared pardon and ritual cleansing; and 
• a mystical rebirth – symbolic, hypnotic, perhaps even hallucinatory by psychoactive drug – then return to the real world where such cruel atavisms were no longer tolerated.

 For example, the Maya staged a ball game so painful, difficult and sacred that the rare winning team could claimed the onlookers’ belongings and the losing (winning?) team’s captain was sometimes sacrificed afterwards. Such brutal confrontations might stem from duel-challenge, provided the challenged party could call upon volunteer and mercenary champions. 

Outer space offers a handy death arena for those who must have their mortality served to them piping hot.

“The particular combination of physical and mental empowerment, retreat from and return to the ordinary world, and spiritual renewal that adventure offers, bears a close formal resemblance to classic warrior myths. And with care and thought, it should be possible to design adventures that could serve as initiation ceremonies for boys making the transition to manhood. Undoubtedly, activities not based on adventure, and myths not based on war can also be developed that would similarly move men forward toward maturity and transcendent experience. To assert that myths meet human needs and that we need new myths, does not imply that the Age of Enlightenment is over, just that rationalism has limits: it can take the world apart, but not put it back together. Only stories and visions do that.” James William Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America, Hill and Wang, A Division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1994, p. 308.

These realtime wargames might parallel today’s battlefield reenactments and paintball wargames. In highly structured, ritualistic environments, people might band together to act out their atavistic urge to posture, fight, flee or submit. As in martial arts sparring, outright violence might cause a few serious injuries and the exceptional fatality. The violence provoked could vary in proportion to the severity of local disputes; its numeric proportion controlled by the number of real bullets issued compared to blanks. The first death and injury from this ceremony would end it — in obedience to sorceress and shaman referees, as during similar ceremonies in pre-Roman Gaul. Deliberate risk-taking and sacrifice would form an integral part of the psychic process. All such activities would be strictly forbidden outside the arena.

These cruel dramas could turn into basic lessons in civics. Emerging from such hermetic rituals, shaken participants would shun further violence. They would undergo lengthy stretches of medical care, ritual purification, psychological healing, and repatriation into PeaceWorld. They’d never revisit these “Arenas of Suffering” unless they felt the need to revisit their craving for violence.

Male or female, hopeless addicts to these violence games would become paid agents, cult priests and priestesses and permanent inhabitants of these taboo precincts. They could also serve as volunteer and mercenary stand-ins for weaklings called upon to duel. They could serve in long postings to the Foreign Legion, or far-flung and dangerous missions in outer space. Everyone could find their rightful place on PeaceWorld, even those most ferocious.


In the meantime, the best among us try to solve a single problem in a vacuum. Those problems seem so overwhelming that no one person or group can hope to resolve any one of them with a mere lifetime’s work. 

Frustrated reformers obey the dogma of scientific reductionism. They chop up one big problem into tidbits that appear to be tiny enough to be workable, then sort out the least among them to fix. These weapon reformers seek compromise solutions by scavenging the discards of weapon technology. They are careful to leave monolithic weapon technologies intact, lest fear-haunted elites forbid further improvement. 

Independent groups of “morally superior” beings carry out this hopeless microsurgery in direct competition with other reformers for scarce funding. Their pecking order resembles infighting among hungry chickens. We’ve tried every variant of these tactics for thousands of years, despite continuous failure. 

We must first topple weapon mentality from its pedestal in front of City Hall; only then may PeaceWorld emerge.

Cannibalism terminated, universal salvation, emancipation from slavery, constitutional rights, class equity, worker solidarity, sexual liberation and apartheid concluded: it’s amazing how many initiatives the best among us have set in motion despite their human frailty! However, every time a mighty new ideal pried some isolated group loose from weapon mentality’s grasp, regrouped weapon managers ambushed, scattered and replaced the peaceful consensus. In a weapon dominion, hostile cash and reactionary politics drown in paradox and paralysis every isolated lunge at progress, no matter how well intended. 

We are on the verge of an Ethical Revolution as significant as the Industrial Revolution. We have endured weapon management for so long (long before the industrial one and perhaps even that of bronze), we no longer grasp the sovereignty of peace — it doesn’t mean anything to us. We don’t count on anything except aggression any longer. Our societies cannot handle any project except killing as many long-distance victims as possible in the shortest possible time. 

Weapon mentality has stacked itself steeper than its angle of repose. Its eminent collapse is inevitable. This nearly pure Dao of Yang is long overdue for a major infusion of Yin. 


In order to invoke peace mentality, the world must be managed under one roof and that a peaceable one. Each nation may try to protect its national sovereignty by sacrificing the cash and kids of its citizens, but this reflexive nationalism will always enslave us to weapon mentality.

This said, Norman Angell made a critical point about nationalism:

“However mischievous may prove some of the manifestations of Nationalism, the worst possible method of dealing with it is by the forcible repression of any of its claims which can be granted with regard to the general interest. To give Nationalism full play, as far as possible, is the best means of attenuating its worst features and preventing its worst developments. This, after all, is the line of conduct which we adopt [with respect] to certain religious beliefs which we may regard as dangerous superstitions. Although the belief may have dangers, the social dangers involved in forcible repression would be greater still.” Norman Angell (pseudonym for Ralph Lane) The Fruits of Victory, The Century Company, New York, 1921, p. 246.


As long as weapons elites coordinate proxy wars between nation states and other Prism sub-aggregates – as they manage to do today – weapon mentality and its contradictions will condemn us to misery in the short term and military annihilation in the long. National sovereignty and weapon management have never delivered peace for very long, no matter how painfully they were enforced. Only a sovereign, one world government could hope to secure world peace into the foreseeable future..

“Two things should be obvious at once:
“…The peace of a political community is impaired by civil strife of all sorts. Whether or not we choose to call such civil violence “war,” the fact remains that civil peace cannot be regarded as perfect until governmental machinery is able to cope with every form of dissension or dispute.
“The perfection of peace does not depend on the removal of all causes for dispute or strife; nor even on the avoidance of force in the settlement of differences. It depends on ways of keeping quarrels on the conversational level, and on a monopoly of the legitimate force needed to execute decisions.” Mortimer J. Adler, How to Think about War and Peace, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1944, p 121. 


Our weapons indoctrination coaches us to dread one world government, (see the 1984 Syndrome). This idea makes us nervous because we have been convinced (have convinced ourselves) that the only workable alternative is dangerously impossible. However, in our heart of hearts, we loathe the current reality that allows Wimps and Prisms to lock us into global mismanagement — not the ideal of one elegant, global PeaceWorld. 

We have as much to fear from one world government as from a Mayor’s Office: benign or corrupt as the case may be. In other words, we have nothing to fear that Learner vigilance could not handle in the long run. Just as human conscience inspired the best legislation and social philosophy so far, it could promote justice, freedom and plenty for everyone under a global regime that excluded from power those who disregard it. 


But I cannot leave it at that. We are here to deepen our thinking, not to simplify it.

The Bible and history reveal a basic contradiction. Let’s call it the paradox of the Tower of Babel. God intervened in the government of mankind in Genesis 11: 1-9. 

1.    And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.

2.    And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.

3.    And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.

4.    And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

5.    And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.

6.    And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be retained from them, which they have imagined to do.

7.    Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.

8.    So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.

9.    Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

It’s strange how God made us scatter across the planet…what we hated most to do. 

Likewise, history demonstrates that every time a civilization reached heroic peaks of inclusiveness, abundance and benevolence; some monstrous cataclysm destroyed it. Whether by plague, drought, volcanic eruption; a meteor-driven, all-season winter; or by annihilation by a weapon horde; some calamity befell every well-run society.

It does not seem to matter that the same fate befell every other human aggregate, civilized or not, as well as entire pre-human ecologies of every kind; not matter that primitive tribes were much less vulnerable to natural disaster until recently, than much more complex, stationary and fragile urban societies. We are looking into the fate of well-run civilizations and not those whose disappearance was never recorded. Right?

So what choice does that leave us with? We are confronted by a planetary civilization at odds with itself: vicious and arrogant because it is fragmented where it should be whole (in its peace technology) and holistic where it should be fragmented (in its mastery of weapons).

On the one hand, God forbids us to kill and Jesus, to harm the little ones. We are supposed to love our neighbor and turn the other cheek to violence. The best way to do that would be if everyone lived under one roof and that a peaceable one, well regulated — in other words, on PeaceWorld. 

On the other, the God of Genesis has trained us like attack dogs, to forget human solidarity and commit random mayhem instead. The Book of Revelation threatens the Wrath of God for anyone but Jesus who would dare promote Peace on Earth. 

Likewise, the natural world with its serial disasters that seem to focus in space and time on the greatest hubs of civilization. Note the genocide of the pacifistic, trans-European civilizations of the Goddess, halfway through the fourth millennia BCE. Note the volcanic eruption of Thera that blew Cretan civilization away; the meteor showers that destroyed the entire urban fabric of the Middle Bronze Age, first; and then a thousand years later, those of the Early Iron Age – see Burning Libraries (BC) – and so on, whether such disasters were recorded in history or not. 

It would be difficult to chronicle the destruction of your civilization if your last ten generations had to focus on not starving to death.

So it must be up to each of us. Do nothing, sit on our hands and watch killer primates fatten themselves on helpless babes and the World Forest? Or stand up on our hind legs and act civilized? The former course certainly seems safer and I am sure many moral cowards will cling to it. The latter is more tempting for those  of us who find all this barbarism intolerable — even at the risk of damnation by some red-toothed god, into whose face I’ll gladly spit when its jaws close on me.

Let me put it this way. Should planetary disaster befall us, its ignorant survivors will blame it on our having come together and tried to turn this carnage around. No doubt, those who can read and write among them will forgo scratching their fleas long enough to inscribe this solemn truth in the next set of sacred texts. 

“This is the holy post-script of nuclear winter. The peacemakers were horribly wrong. Everything was their fault and not that of our predecessors, our militant disciples or ourselves. Fervent mayhem is the only way to secure God’s blessing. It is better to be a Viking than a victim. Hallelujah!”

Isn’t that strange? A few passages in the first and last books of the Bible forbid world peace, whereas all those in between recommend it. The Holy book attributes every crime imaginable to man, but the only regulation that might reduce their impact — God forbids? Seems like an obvious revision of the text by weapon managers.

All I can say is this: screw that. If God commands me to do A, and then condemns my eternal soul for having optimized A, that’s His call. I refuse to consent to perpetual world war merely because the last, certifiably crazy chapter of a long-revered weapon text forbids world peace. Let the chips fall where they may; I will go on pushing for world peace. In the universe ruled by Loving God, it will be those who refuse to cooperate in peace who will face God’s disappointment prior to being saved in any case. 

I have no use for a deity who can’t make up His mind what His slaves are supposed to do, and who condemns them to eternal hellfire for failing to satisfy His schizoid demands. Obeying Jesus, I will do my best not to kill and not to harm the little ones, regardless of their provenance. Let God decide whom to punish for His lack of clarity. 

And you, make up your mind as well, now that these contradictions have been set before you. 

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COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net

- YOU CHOOSE 3 -