- SUNKEN EDUCATION, FLOATING ARMCHAIR

Modern education is about triage and restriction. Learner education will award each child by puberty with at least one graduate degree, the way musical prodigies earn theirs today. Accelerate the flow of information instead of rationing it. Flip the ziggurat of hierarchic education and turn it into a cornucopia of Learning, anarchic but self-filtering for excellence.

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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

 - SUNKEN EDUCATION, FLOATING ARMCHAIR 

“We psychologists typically construct tasks or tests to separate the children who can from those who cannot, the former then being labeled ‘smarter’ or ‘more mature’. The ideal curriculum-maker – like Socrates instructing the slave in the Meno – arranges things in such a way that everybody will understand, all will be among the ‘cans’ rather than the ‘cannots.’” Jerome Bruner, In Search of Mind, p. 181.

Did Socrates intend to convey anything useful to the slave in Meno? Was it the Pythagorean Theorem? Such a difficult lesson to follow without the accompanying sand diagram. Plus a gross exploitation, to boot. What brilliance is there in the simple deduction that a clever slave can be taught a complex idea? Note how Socrates turned his back on someone he had just confirmed was a worthy student. Golden Age brilliance, indeed! 

Aristotle’s take on slavery in The Politics shows what intellectual brambles thoughtful people must cross to adhere to the info elite. His babble, echoed below, recalls the fatal flaws slaveholders crammed into the American Constitution. Their “strict interpretation” successors hide their psychopathy behind rumbling vocabularies and prestigious job titles. Such blatant dishonesty, repeated so often and so authoritatively without regret, is the most insidious habit of weapon mentality. Despite the abolition of slavery, the slavers were never removed from power.

“We may thus conclude that all men who differ from others as much as the body differs from the soul, or an animal from a man (and this is the case with all whose function is bodily service, and who produce their best when they supply such service) — all such are by nature slaves, and it is better for them, on the very same principle as in the other cases just mentioned, to be ruled by a master. A man is thus by nature a slave if he is capable of becoming (and this is the reason why he also actually becomes) the property of another, and if he participates in reason to the extent of apprehending it in another, though destitute of it himself. Herein he differs from animals, which do not apprehend reason, but simply obey their instincts. But the use which is made of the slave diverges but little from the use made of tame animals; both he and they supply their owner with bodily help in meeting his daily requirements. 

“But it is nature’s intention also to erect a physical difference between the body of the freeman and that of the slave, giving the latter the strength for the menial duties of life, but making the former upright in carriage and (though useless for physical labor) useful for the various purposes of civil life – a life which tends, as it develops, to be divided into military service and the occupations of peace. The contrary of nature’s intention, however, often happens: there are some slaves who have the bodies of freemen – as there are others who have a freeman’s soul. But if nature’s intention were realized – if men differed from one another in bodily form as much as the statues of the gods – it is obvious that we should all agree that the inferior class ought to be the slaves of the superior. And if this principle is true when the difference is one of the body, it may be affirmed with still greater justice when the difference is one of soul; though it is not as easy to see the beauty of the soul, as it is to see that of the body. 

“It is thus clear that, just as some are by nature free, so others are by nature slaves, and for these latter the condition of slavery is both beneficial and just.” 

Taken from Mitchell Cohen and Nicole Fermon, eds., Princeton Readings of Political Thought: Essential Texts since Plato, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, pp. 112-113. 

Much like two thousand years of false science, Aristotle and his fans imposed two thousand years of misleading politics. One of these days, someone will tell me why a hundred generations of Learners had to ingest and regurgitate this hogwash. Why, in all the writings of ancient Greece and Rome, none survive that call for universal freedom (except the fables of Aesop). Why no trace remains of classical writings that declared slavery a scandal and called for the brotherhood of humankind — the literary equivalent of  servile revolt like that of Spartacus?

Who dares suggest that human brotherhood might have been an offshoot of Christianity or some more recent religious monotheism or ideological unitruth? That ancient people did not understand that everyone belongs to the same family since human comprehension began? That wise and generous spirits wrote on this topic ever since writing began? Whether they hailed from ancient Greece or elsewhere, they concluded that slavery was unjustifiable and forbidden by natural law — denying the econologic of slave masters and their historical scribbles children have been forced to study ever since. 

Moral imperatives against slavery were just as apparent to them, then, as they are to us today. Idealistic adolescents argued with their parents about them, then, just as they do today about current social problems. Ethical philosophers were just as numerous (indeed, more so) than the brilliant hypocrites we worship in school: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, among others. 

The Golden Rule never held a patent date. God and good parents always taught their children to treat others like themselves, since human understanding awoke.

Where did the teachings of moral superiors go? Into the flaming maw of weapon mentality, that’s where. 

Weapon management rejects the findings of the gifted; it dictates that tiny elites publicize nonsense, censor valid information and lie outright. Most info proletarians never get to develop their God-given talents. Call it slavery, call it being a peasant or “choosing” to serve as a third class stoker of the Jive Drive — it has always boiled down to the same thing: info proletarian lock-down.

Info elites are no smarter than their host proletarians. On the contrary, elites pick their replacements from among the proletarians, for orthodoxy, combativeness as demonstrated in sport and battle, and loyalty through blood ties to the info elite — not exceptional brilliance or compassion. Those whose empathy is stunted enough to satisfy weapon requirements have little use for compassion, much less for the compassionate.

The academic community pigeonholes likely candidates for the info elite. Career educators eject gifted peace mentors. Idealistic young teacher burnouts personify this triage: their idealism and compassion sacrificed on the altar of weapon regimentation. For details, see Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America, by Page Smith, Viking Penguin, Harmonsworth, England, 1990. Like the work you are reading, it could find no publisher in America: way too seditious and pertinent.

Picture the Earth as the local lobe of a cosmic brain. On this lobe (the anthrosphere), billions of human neurons interact through more or less effective or defective networks that can only accommodate a few hundred million human “cells” in real comfort at current levels of peace incompetence. 

First off, proper nutrition seldom reaches each cell. Many people have a hard time merely subsisting from day to day. The rest of us compensate our misery with shameless over-indulgence, even though the quality of our ample food supplies is dubious. Starving for rare micronutrients, we stuff on bulk GMOs and “anti-health food.” 

The Earth produces enough good nutrition for everyone; it has always done so, barring catastrophe. Yet our distribution networks are so shabby, the world’s population splits into thirds. The first, with its pandemic obesity, diabetes-inducing addictions, obscene pets and pathetic meat livestock: vastly overstuffed; the next, underfed; the third, starving. In other words, those provided with enough clean water, with just enough water borderline potable, or with bad water and not enough of it.

We’re exhausting the Earth's fertility; yet half the food we produce goes to waste. And we make no effort to exploit those wasteful pests (bacteria, fungi, molds, insects and vermin) as sustainable, high-protein food sources. 

This hypothetical planetary organism suffers from perpetual stroke, its heart is in partial arrest and its frame flails between overgrowth and necrosis. Many poor adults find just enough food to get by: their vulnerable children are more or less starved and poisoned from conception. Childhood starvation and pollution undermine youthful Learning in rich and poor nations alike. 

If everyone of good will rallied behind a good plan, (the way polio was eradicated until resurgent fundamentalists and Western neo-Gestapo agents reversed this achievement) everyone on Earth could be fed, housed and cared for properly. That policy would be a thousand times more clear-cut and profitable than managing the poverty-stricken world war all of us have prepared for so meticulously. 

Think about that.

Second, our thought processes are hopelessly muddled and our learning tools, outdated. Even “educated” majorities take much too long to assimilate new ideas: a full generation or longer, assuming they bother at all. Occasionally, popular culture adopts ideas more advanced than what the status quo dogma allows (gun control, untampered elections). It has begun to challenge the absolute value of 19th Century science otherwise frozen in place. Info elites often retain ideas well beyond their useful shelf life.

Trump and his anti-truth supporters accuse the news media of not favoring pro-Trump propaganda. Nowadays, there is a lot of talk about “fake news” and how to resist it. No-one seems to care that lovers of truth set themselves up for this ambush by not calling the media to task for its rejection of the truth in the recent past. From 1990 until 1994, a weekly magazine called The Lies of our Times listed falsehoods, inaccuracies and deliberate omissions in the New York Times, the “newspaper of record for the country.

Let’s discuss the Armchair Formula. 

Within each of us, random ideas surface to our consciousness. We retain those ideas – no matter how brilliant – about as briefly as the memory of a dream. We must reinforce them right away so that they register into long-term memory. Otherwise, they are forgotten and return to the collective superconscience for retrieval at some more favorable time, perhaps by someone better prepared to receive them. 

This is the case for our most fundamental definition of reality. If solitary confinement or sensory deprivation cut us off overlong from reality, we go insane. 

It is difficult to find a specialist or document to repeat, deny or confirm some transient thought; almost as difficult for scholars as for anyone else. Pinning down a slippery new idea often turns into a confusing, dismissive chore. 

Go ahead and try it. Sit down in a good armchair and come up with some insight novel and arcane. Then get up, go find someone, some book, class or recording to repeat, elaborate, confirm or challenge your inspiration. How long did it take you? Hours? Days? In most cases, especially with truly innovative thought, it would take longer than the few moments your short-term memory retained the original idea. 

The best scholars shorten this time-delay in any way they can. They cultivate special study skills, document collections and peer information networks; they hoard reference sources and information contacts. That way, they can confirm or deny the latest ideas as soon as they get up from their armchair or faster by computer, by telephone or in person. 

I call this process the Armchair Formula. Only a few thousand tenured professors and intelligence clerks operate under optimized Armchair Formulas. Even college students lack the means, motive and opportunity to research freely. 

The World Wide Web has just started to refine this Armchair Formula. Their refinement will benefit everyone privileged enough to gain access to the WWW. That portends well for Learner transformation, whether or not we grasp its long-term benefits. Predictably, that’s been the least publicized and least capitalized benefit of the Web, the one we’ve taken the least advantage of: crowd sourcing. 

Especially nowadays, Learners must satisfy many certification criteria before they’re encouraged to learn. University obstacle courses bristle with monetary and geographic hurdles, arbitrary credentials, certifications and performance criteria. Every step of an academic career must be negotiated, up to and including the “highest” rungs of scholarship and tenure. 

Academia is not so much interested in “what” you want to learn, as “why” and “how” it gets taught. If you seek its services, your knowledge will have to serve some other purpose: status, moneymaking, job placement and propaganda manipulation. Instead of enhancing intellect, college professors erode it. They bury each student’s interests in compulsory trivia until ultimate studies are reduced to a sub-sub-subtopic research thesis. 

The academic community erects massive barriers between itself and the laity. Amateur scholars have a hard time keeping up with the professional scholars of any given topic. Decades of secondary studies (for the most part a total waste of time) must be certified in order to achieve a student-teacher relationship with relevant scholars. A Learner cannot access information she needs unless she commits years of study to one avenue of research. From then on, she must submit the fruits of her zeal to the whims of academic superiors. 

Universities are intellectual catacombs. Most research is buried there, never to see the light of day again. Admitted, most of it isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on — in conformity with the general rule: “95% of everything is crap.”

"… but in every era and every country and every category, evil swarms and the good is rare." Voltaire, Romans et contes, « Le monde comme il va », Garnier Flamarion, Paris, 1966, p. 104.

Some of it might prove to be more valuable if it were granted more careful consideration. And a lot of precious research is nipped in the bud before it can be undertaken. Catacombs haunted by frustrated ghosts …

Today’s “ziggurat” educational system is founded on a mass of illiterates and semi-literates. On their shoulders roosts a shrinking flock of undergraduate and graduate scholars on whose pointy-heads perch a handful of certified academics. Scholarly upper management is mostly devoted to the logistics of education: finance, politics, sports and business. The higher those directors climb up the ziggurat of academia, the more they distance themselves from actual Learning.

Learners will flip these pyramids. Three tiny minorities, deliberate know-nothings, religious fanatics and the disability-illiterate, will gather in the buried below ground mouthpiece of these Learner horns of plenty. Otherwise, massed Learners will share their topics of passion from their bells open to the sky. This arrangement may be the last substitute for bureaucratic/industrial jobs once automation and post-industrial efficiencies bring on near-total unemployment.

Corporate propaganda warns us about an exploding populations of retirees versus a shrinking count of workers, and the consequent need to shrivel retirement benefits. The ultimate outcome of this nonstop propaganda may be hundreds of millions of ex-workers added to the scandalous count of the poor in the richest societies mankind has ever known.

This may be the main excuse for the next wave of fascist genocide, during which all those elderly birds with big, gaping beaks will get transported to the blast furnaces of newly built death camps (free electricity!) instead of being taken care of at great expense. We self-indulgent baby-boomers are likely candidates for this sorry fate; our indifference to current abuses will have earned us this fate.

No one addresses the fact that, for every modern worker, hundreds and thousands of machines just as taxable have multiplied productivity and corresponding corporate profits by thousands of times. 

The exponential profits of those exploiters might shrink somewhat if they had to honor their obligation to prior workers. Those profiteers will choke on them unless they recognize their obligation and honor it. Their future profits will freeze up and throttle them otherwise. Such colossal, propaganda-driven stupidity at the bidding of weapon technology! The peace variant would see through such cooked books and make honest amends without a second’s hesitation.

Of course, corona virus induces and accelerates this process.

Progressive, government-subsidized education boosting it further along, also boosts downstream prosperity. Adopted on a global scale, this policy will skyrocket world prosperity. The other alternatives would just lead to some variant of Auschwitz for former workers, in the name of raw corporate greed.

Music education offers an elegant model of open Learning. Its coaching relies on voluntarism — at least in theory. Horror stories abound of children forced to practice music against their will. On PeaceWorld, this exercise will be limited to those who love it. Small classes are favored, along with one-on-one tutoring; it starts at the earliest receptive age and accelerates with the pupil’s growing talent. Maturity of performance is expected by puberty with ongoing improvement though adulthood. 

Music is one of the few fields of Learning where true mastery goes unsuppressed. We enjoy a Golden Age of tempered music because this restricted field has zero impact on weapon management, so the best teaching methods are tolerated.

Just as a golden age of Rock and Roll was based on near-universal music training in primary and secondary schools of the Western world, the yodel-bleat of country-western music and the thumping patter of hip-hop are based on generations of liberal education reduced to the bleak minimum of corporate greed. This failure of music education reduces mass appreciation of music to zero; it proliferates music formulae of lesser mastery, pending AI equivalents even more robotic. Yet impassioned musicians will always pick up professional training somewhere, and Learners everywhere will see that song birds flourish, human and otherwise.

It is ironic to note that crime may be the only other trade that complies with these primary learning directives. Indeed, the budding criminal engages in crime as soon as he discovers an interest in it. The courts send all but the best criminals to “reform” schools and penitentiaries where veteran crime instructors await them. Their educational and vocational alternatives are carefully sabotaged. Many of them emerge from prison to perform more and more sophisticated infractions. We don’t punish criminals for their crime but for demonstrating incompetence by getting caught. Weapon society practices Darwinian selection for better criminals. Big surprise! By prioritizing penal punishment above civilized rehabilitation and re-assimilation for the majority of prisoners, we just reinforce weapon outcomes at the cost of rising criminal recidivism.

Many other prejudices hinder Learning. One weapon myth presumes that knowledge is a privilege to be rationed according to arbitrary qualifications. 

Another asserts that information must be discovered and confirmed locally to be valid. Insolent claims to the contrary, rabid nationalism (each nation claiming its own: the evil twin and nemesis of every other) and national frontiers are gross barriers to Learning. Crouching behind these obstacles, patriots and fundamentalists promote blatant obscurantism: national governments pirate information, standardize educational mediocrity and foster redundant research. 

Unique breakthroughs are carefully guarded corporate secrets in defiance of scientific transparency. Science violates straightforward principles of scientific inquiry, once placed at the beck and call of corporate and military interests. They insist on secrecy and proprietary knowledge. Secret science is like soundless music: worthless to anyone but its paid practitioners. Of what worth is knowledge no-one else may know?  

This is the main reason corporate science of the 21st century has not repeated the exponential productivity of the last two. The War on Terror compounds this problem with its knee-jerk suppression and homogenization of information. So, too, the “free market” simplification of the Internet and media by an international pseudo-aristocracy (Sun Corp. instead of the Sun King).

Just as corporate weapon Christianity herded the people of Europe into a Dark Age of ignorance and social chaos; corporate weapon technology is herding us into a new Dark Age of suspicion, paranoia and fostered anti-science.

Another weapon myth insists that information solely available to a secluded elite is more valuable than that which many proletarians can acquire simultaneously. 

In plow field and smokestack societies, an item’s rarity raises its value. Zero-sum anal retentives compete for restricted advancement opportunities — social, economic and reproductive. Their feeding frenzy leads to info elites that wallow in relative opulence but unprincipled degeneracy, surrounded by an abject mass of info proletarians. 

Appalled by this injustice, the righteous abandon their claim to leadership that was always theirs by right. In the absence of fairer role models, even exceptional ones, weapon leaders are left to imitate their worst exemplars. 

Thus, the long-term, public example of superior leadership – common knowledge shared by everyone – is far more important to society than the latest high-tech secrets known only by a privileged few. Near-total transparency would be even more beneficial. The application of correct knowledge generates wealth. Common knowledge is more fruitful than secrets stockpiled in obscurity for their status-value. In the commerce of ideas, distribution creates wealth, and generosity leads to prosperity. 

This paradox promises us untold prosperity. We are like pirates who’ve misplaced their treasure map: bewailing our misery and sprawled in tears on the ground covering a deeply buried treasure trove, even though our plight is self-induced and easy to correct. “Look! There’s the map!”

Competitive education is about as sensible as for-profit sex. Both are cooperative endeavors where competition is a loser’s proposition. Short-term competition produces trivial gains or outright loss; long-term cooperation offers more promise. 

Learning Networks could stretch and reweave themselves with a lot more elegance than clumsy production/consumption machinery. We could see to this at small expense for tremendous rewards. 

In the meantime, academia crowns itself with wreaths of compulsion whose tendrils smother any usefulness it could once claim. Once most students emerge from this ordeal, they shun further study beyond the minimum required for their job. They consider Learning a sorry chore best left to journalists, government spokespeople and commercial copywriters: info mercenaries paid to satisfy hidden agendas with censorship, oversimplification and the rote repetition of official lies. They reject any idea that deviates from the mass media norm and that they cannot co-opt to enforce it. 

Learners will handle Learning as if it were the ultimate form of play (which it is). When in doubt, they will favor truth over lies, and humanism over privilege. 

Otherwise, official “education” is a monotonous grind. Schools impose a prison atmosphere of incarceration and regimentation that prepares the inmates for the punishing routines of the barracks square, the battlefield, criminal court and the munitions plant. 

Weapon managers dictate that education be a slow torture, an intellectual manual at arms and a repetitive drudgery. According to them, it should be a drain of time, interest and energy. Every hour of every school day, nit-picked and nit-picking teachers must disgorge a full day of predigested curricula. Disinterest in those topics and interest in others are punishable offenses. Everyone must drag ass through this dozen-year Calvary at the pace of the slowest. 

Young Learners are naturally inquisitive. They delight in learning the most trifling things, with or without adult approval. School suppresses this curiosity. Instead of encouraging info proletarians, it penalizes them without mercy. 

From the first day in school to the canned ceremonies of graduation, years of fostered boredom, meaningless repetition, stifled initiative and quashed curiosity must be endured. Cultural pap is force-fed and regurgitated in endless competitive examinations. Homework saturates children's private time with mind-numbing drudgery. 

Anxious parents and school officials resist efforts to enrich this gruel. Age-cohort bullies, know-nothing parents and petty adult tyrants dominate school culture. The lowest common denominator marks the high tide of cultural achievement. To put it mildly, precocious Learners are in for a hard time. 

Children in Finland got the highest standardized test scores in the Western world. They were the only ones to benefit from fifteen minutes of recess for every forty-five spent in class. Nowadays, everyone, including those Finish children, must satisfy the brutal norms of paramilitary, para-educational bureaucrats.

The ferocity of this acculturation is so widespread, it must serve some hidden purpose (weapon mentality). It is somewhat relaxed in private schools where info elites warehouse their own children. Class snobbery, crushing discipline, isolation from the family, religious mumbo jumbo and cockpit competition combine there to subvert Learning. 

I can hardly imagine a worse way to learn anything — except how to endure terror and boredom. There is no better way to repress natural curiosity and prepare for war. 

In his book Burro Genius, Victor Villaseñor wrote that he visited several classrooms of young students and asked them, “Who here is a genius?” In kindergarten, everyone’s hand shot up; by third grade, no one dared raise their hand. This is what weapons education achieves everywhere.

It will be up to Learners to identify and nurture the genius of every student. If a student has destructive tendencies, those must be exposed as early as possible and housebroken with affection and doggedness: those last would be much more efficient than punishments applied later on, too late.

These recommendations cannot lead anywhere if practiced the way they are today: as an exception by a few gifted teachers with respect to a few gifted students, despite the educational orthodoxy and its accepted majority of mediocre rejects. To achieve progress, it must be practiced universally. Instead of advancing a few high-merit scholars past a neglected mass of the mediocre students, we should cultivate every student’s foremost talents. Almost all of them are very talented in one or more topics of their choosing. We must become sharp enough to recognize their choice and encourage it. The blame for failing to do so belongs to us adults, not to innocent children.

In self-defense, common folk take complacent pride in their ignorance. What choice did they get, since their tender talents were crushed early? All they have left are sports, commercial advertising, and the media blather that frames them. Raw genius seems more threatening to them than raw greed. 

Three topics dominate popular discourse: sports, sex and money. They have nothing to do with civilization’s major advances; instead, they divert our attention from progress. Men escape into macho fetishism and empty, statistics-driven sports commentary; women, into the trivia of gossip, shopping and fashion. 

Once these prejudices have taken over, its participants turn into pawns of the Routine of Evil. Once mass propaganda has crippled our moral faculties, we can expect nothing more from our leaders than expert wrongdoing, unforeseen consequences and unavoidable catastrophe. Distracted by the empty summons to “pursue happiness,” we turn our back on our neighbors’ flight from misery and our duty to assist them. 

We “lucky” somnambulists condemn ourselves to a life of self-indulgence, over-consumption and social insignificance. Wearily, we warehouse, care-take and inventory piles of redundant stuff; stuff we never needed to begin with, unsustainable stuff in any case. This useless clutter is the industrial substitute for the world-wrecking junk pile and stew of chemical toxins total war calls for. 

The hapless poor are stupefied by a lifetime of toxic malnutrition, engineered misery and cultural anxiety; their despair deepened by their inability to fulfill basic needs, achieve basic comforts and secure the goodwill of authorities.

It’s no accident that education and military conscription became compulsory around the same time, after the French Revolution. These military requisites were brought to their logical conclusion by Jules Ferry, whose Law of 1882 mandated free, secular and mandatory education for all French children. He was a fervent French colonial imperialist. The other military/industrial nations matched his law within a few decades.

By the way, universal conscription is another weapon misnomer. The entire military age population (from the post-pubescent cohort to that of the elderly, including women) has always been liable for call-up on demand. The only limitations were the number of weapons available; the need to staff workshops and farms with women, children, old folks and war slaves when necessary; and the enormous logistical burden required to hold armies together despite their tendency to sicken, starve, run riot and fall apart.

It is only recently that bloated industrial capacities swelled populations by reducing mass mortality below reproduction rates. Until then, making weapons and keeping them out of the hands of rebels were self-limiting tasks. Some justification remained for separating trained combatants from civilians. That rule no longer applies. No difference remains between armed and unarmed combatants. We have all become legitimate targets and routine victims of warfare. There’s enough weapons around to kill everyone.

For example, military pilots, submariners and commandos undergo elaborate rituals of initiation, training and graduation similar to those of ancient knights. Their equipment and transport cost several lifetimes’ wages. For the most part, peasants took the resulting blows in the face. While the rewards of weapon technology have gone to a smaller and smaller minority, its spiraling costs are borne by the rest of us, the poor foremost.

The so-called free market sanctions personal ambition within parameters carefully constrained by weapon technology, an incredible advantage compared to older weapon dogmas that crushed personal dreams under obligations of caste. Once the last barrier to excellence (weapon technology) comes down, financially independent Learners will pursue their talents wherever they may lead. At long last, we may anticipate much greater abundance. 

In the meantime, most of us get a nominal education matching the complexity of our society’s weapon systems… and no more. Barely educated citizens are taught to curb their curiosity, serious culture and imagination. In their place, a lot of useless trivia is fed to them and they are taught to prefer that force-feeding. They should be more or less handy with tools (in direct proportion to the complexity … etc.). Tamed to blind obedience, they should be comfortable with independent decision-making, but only under rigidly predefined circumstances. Most of them will be expected to be politically naive, closed-minded, indifferent to political obligations and intolerant of progress. They should be cryptically self-destructive and violent on a hair trigger. In moderately good health during their military years, they should be indifferent to preventive care and ready to cripple or poison themselves for no apparent reason. 

The majority of info proletarians are imbued with those attributes, ones useful for modern armies. Once a military age cohort “completes” its mandatory miseducation, weapon management grants its favorite candidates nominal license to study and climb a career ladder. This economic subversion is so harsh that many youths have no choice but to join the military, the unemployed and or the world of crime. Banks, insurance companies and public service agencies redline entire neighborhoods for no better reason than socio-economic and race prejudice. Legitimate capital never reaches these ghettos, only criminal funding that coaches more war. 

Poverty is the most expensive social policy by far, but the best nursery for legions of good soldiers.

The International Monetary Fund, the Politburo and hobbled UN agencies have abused Third World nations in this manner for decades. They have promoted showboat, mega-buck projects to pay off local elites and increase their addiction to Wimp institutions. Meanwhile, the average person’s standard of living is shrinking from runaway population growth, expropriated public funds and ecological devastation, all induced by paramilitary corporations.

Why don’t we benefit from free, mandatory college education? Or, better yet, four years of subsidized non-college skills for young adults? This subsidy already exists to send soldiers to war. Why not civilians in peacetime? After all, there’s mandatory High School. Why impose that cut-off, when a college degree is required for a good job these days? 

In comparative biology, the longer the stage of infantile development, the better prepared for survival the adult animal becomes. Wouldn’t this be the case for young human beings? 

A weapon state’s educational system selects an elite officer corps to command a vast majority of enlisted and civilian slaves: armed and unarmed combatants. The demand for weapon leaders dictates the exact number of degrees awarded. In this way, universities pick a new generation of info elites from the info proletariat. Mandatory college education does not exist today because the current college system (both for-profit and non-profit) produces enough military officers and bureaucrats as it stands. Deliberately centralized weapon technology is glutted with talent while scattered peace technologies starve for funds and talent. 

Universal education is just another weapon myth: a carrot dangled in front of peace mentor mules to co-opt their goodwill effort. In the United States, 60% of the population has done some time on the university treadmill. This doesn’t mean much, since many are functionally illiterate, more choose not to vote, and only a handful gain access to the corridors of power. 

We should feel regret and make amends.

The chapter Computer Yellow Pages will discuss specific Learner approaches that could replace the top-down, mass-consumption, “tell-and-test” educational systems of today.

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COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net