INTRO AND VOCAB #1

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Le pire imbécile se croit le plus sage- apprentimarcv
Ne traitez personne d'imbécile – Jésus

The greatest fool thinks himself wisest - learnermarkv
Call no man a fool. Jesus

Chapters

• 0:42 Masters of weapons and peace
• 1:47 The dialectics of weapons and peace
• 2:27 Utopia, by Thomas More
• 5:09 Weapon memes and peace remnants
• 7:44 Social deformations caused by weapon mentality
• 8:50 Constellation of political metaphors
• 9:51 Info proletarian, info elite
• 13:09 Honor and glory
• 13:41 The Info elite fails

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin 

- INTRO AND VOCAB #1 -

“Your isolation is not so much the direct result of enemy action as of the fact that when you travel this road your experiences are shared by fewer and fewer people, until at last there’s no one to whom you can make yourself understood.” Sarah Patton Boyle, “Spit in the Devil’s Eye: A Southern Heretic Speaks,” from the October 20, 1956 issue of The Nation magazine © 1956. The Nation Company, LP. Reprinted with permission. Also found in The Nation 1865-1990, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Ed., p. 214. 

Secretly throughout history, weapons and peace mentors have diced for our wealth, talent, faith, bodies, posterity, sanity and Holy Spirit ― the whole caboodle. The former wanted to protect us militarily from the Other and protect themselves from us; the latter, get us to accept ourselves and each other in peace.

You will find the same conflict between weapon mentors and those of peace ― among whites and blacks; Chinese, Argentineans, New Zealanders and Greenlanders; capitalists, communists, socialists and fascists (progressive or reactionary); among atheists, agnostics, deists, Christians, Muslims, Pagans, and Buddhists (fundamentalist or ecumenical); as much among jungle dwellers knapping rare flint as among city workers managing (or managed by) a frenzy of info technology. 

Is that fully understood? If not, re-read.

This contest cuts right across every social divide we hold dear. Age, sex, ethnicity, class, religion, ideology, geography and politics ― mere distractions from our primary task: making PeaceWorld happen.  

The Weapon/Peace Dialectic regulates our political dialog across a rigid, Cartesian coordinate system. Each of us speaks with a forked tongue, as do our nation-states. Its two tines (one controlled by weapon mentors, the other by peace mentors) share three communication traits. They are: 

• dialectical: parallel along the axis of understanding; 
• antithetical: at right angles to each other's beliefs; and 
• antinomical: directly contradicting each other’s methods and outcomes.  

This three-fork tongue-tie creates the Weapon/Peace Antinomy: absolute disparity between methods used, goals sought and results achieved. 

My example will be the term “utopia.”

Along the first, dialectical axis, Utopia is a venerable text whose author, Sir Thomas More, describes a “perfect” social order. Everyone agrees that his utopia is not an accurate historical representation, is not relevant to present circumstances and not possible in the future. What a perfect model! But this is the nearest that most Western scholars dare approach the idea of PeaceWorld. There are a handful of later texts just as obscure and poorly thought out. 

Reactionaries and progressives agree that this is all the documentation they require to determine the relative merits of weapons and peace. Might as well try to cross the Rocky Mountains using a map of Pangaea.

If you’re interested, Lewis Mumford summarizes about two-dozen primary texts in English (several thousand pages worth) in the first 150 pages of his book The Story of Utopias. Don’t ask me what he intended to say in the latter half of his book.

Along the second, antithetical axis, the word utopia signifies for weapon mentors, “that (place) which can never be.” Utopia is their favorite reference text on this subject. Taught in every high school and college, it confirms their prejudice that peaceful and benevolent societies are impossible. For peace mentors, utopia means “that (place) which is not, but might be.” Utopia is a speculation upon which to build a better peace. 

Don’t ask me why progressives haven’t published a half a hundred better works, since. Craven subservience to weapon mentors, flawed imagination, subconscious approval of the status quo or mere mental inertia? The reason for their failure eludes me. 

Along the third, antinomical axis, weapon mentors use the word utopian like an adverbial clause: “When pigs fly and hell freezes over.” Any idea branded utopian can be dismissed by reflex without further consideration. Peace mentors use it to describe a social scheme that intends to improve current reality, whether it is doable or not. In other words, the peaceful version of the word utopia means "something good we should strive for," whereas the weapon version is "a horror to be avoided like the plague.” Not only useless but somehow toxic.

Thus, along the antinomical axis, the intention on each side is in total opposition. What was once a conversation is now a tug of war.

Nowadays, weapon mentality dominates our words, arguments and intentions, just as much as weapon technology dominates our material lives. We try to survive in peace despite the dominance of weapon thought. 

Our synchronization of meaning, definition and intent – and the clarity it may bring to public discourse – promise us security, abundance and fellow feeling surpassing our understanding. 

Our institutions and cultures retain a few peace remnants we should cultivate and a majority of weapon memes we should render vestigial. 

In this book, we will use the words “weapon” and “weapons” interchangeably. Rather than use them simply as nouns, we will wield them as modifiers: weapon technology and peace technology. From now on, “weapon” will go before words that begin with a consonant, and “weapons” anticipate those that begin with a vowel. 

The text below separates the weapon/peace antinomy into three word-pairs:  

• weapon mentality
• peace mentality
• weapon technology
• peace technology
• weapon mythology
• peace mythology 

Weapon mentality relies on fear, and fear rules our world.  

“… [The English historian, Thomas] Carlyle said that the great element missing from our attempted entry into the past is Fear; he set himself to re-enact it, and succeeded extraordinarily well. His syntax is designed to embody a distracted groping for certainties in a fog of rumour [sic] and of events at best only half-understood, in moods of acute anxiety, rage and sometimes dangerous exaltation.” John Burrow, A History of Histories: Epic, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2008, page 362.
 

Trying to shield its adherents from their overwhelming dread, weapon managers develop threat deterrent weapon systems they believe so ghastly that no-one will dare challenge them. Alas, WeaponWorld ordains this challenge: “The best defense is a good offense.” In the long run, no-one’s agonizing death has deterred anyone from anything; it has only given momentary satisfaction to psychopaths.

In this text, we’ll avoid terms like “war mentality” and “warfare mentality”. War mentality is to weapon mentality what road rage is to defensive driving. Neither weapon managers nor defensive drivers prefer a violent collision.

Only rarely will we use terms like militarism or fascism as substitutes for weapon mentality. The latter is much more widespread and subtle; it infects “free” democracies as much as dictatorships. Indeed, free citizens of free republics are better weapon technicians than slaves of a dictatorship. A people that calls itself peace loving can manage its killing more skillfully than another that thirsts for foreign blood. 

If you consider yourself a lover of peace, pure beyond reproach – even though you’ve never bothered to sort out your peace and weapon priorities – you’re actually a weapon fellow traveler and a pillar of the weapon status quo. 

Like alcoholics in denial, we worsen our addiction to weapon mentality insofar we deny it.

Weapon mentality inflicts social distortions on purpose. Poverty, rigid hierarchy, injustice, inequality, ecocide, underemployment, nurtured criminality, substandard education, malnutrition and class arrogance ― the list goes on and on. We mistake weapon mentality for a regrettable combination of stupidity, bigotry, insanity, greed, crime, honest error and disaster. We refuse to believe those things fester on purpose to further its goals. 

Social reformers imagine they can improve things reductively, gradually and incrementally ― problem-by-problem, identity position by identity position and topic by topic. Using the same scattergun methods and birdshot reasoning, they’ve promoted nothing but war for the last five thousand years. “Sorry about that!”

The categorical solution to this problem would be holistic, simultaneous and global peace mentality – agreed upon by almost everyone – followed by a swarm of atomistic and reductive fixes. Long-term success is impossible in the opposite order (as currently practiced), since each minor fix is paralyzed by the holistic, simultaneous and global repression of weapon mentality. 

Society measures itself against a constellation of political metaphors its members agree to share. Ours is crammed with weapon myths. Many common policies and beliefs of religion, law and morality constitute weapon mythology: the popular explanation for our irrational policies and institutions. Since the basic values of weapon mentality seem insane to any lover of peace, weapon mentors impose their own mythical vocabulary and syntax to shield themselves from peace mentors' reasonable criticism. 

For weapon managers to succeed, they must be incompetent at peace. Military technology is the only field at which they must excel (mercilessly graded on the battlefield by Darwinian selection). Other endeavors can be ventured with deliberate ineptitude and still fulfill their requirements. The worse they manage peace, the better they will succeed at war. Weapon technicians have ruled for thousands of years, for it is much less bitter to fail at peace and triumph at war, than to succeed at peace and lose at war. 

A common weapon refrain is, “You’re not paid to think about such things; we are.”  

Information proletarians are enslaved by their lack of valid information. Junk data, served piping hot to them every day, maintains their servile status. Most often, you and I fit in somewhere here. At other times, our loyalties sparkle between these meta-groups like energy quanta between the atomic shells around a world-sized atom.

As information proletarians learn, work and play, they create wealth while sustaining themselves and their beloved. Much smaller groups (called information elites) seize most of this wealth in the name of military security, and use it to defray the anti-profit costs of their weapon technologies. 

These costs go well beyond peacetime expenditures for weapons and soldiers, far beyond that. When comparing the economics of a peaceful society to the econologic of a weapon society, a more precise distinction would be between the wealth of Geneva and the poverty of Mogadishu — or the strength of an Olympic runner winning his favorite race, versus that of a soldier carrying his wounded buddy to the rear.

I’ve considered opting for the terms opinion elite and opinion proletariat to emphasize the fleeting nature of these prejudices and the information elite's paradoxical lack of merit. Opinion elites hold that their prejudices are a cut above everyone else’s; opinion proletarians are convinced that their preferences are second-rate compared to those of the opinion elite. Well-entrenched in the media and schools, opinion elites stress this inferiority complex. 

This could be the root cause why an overwhelming majority of progressives (relying on reason) never prevails over a tiny minority of weapon managers (shamelessly reliant on sociopath lies). Ah yes, I nearly forgot! That, and the knee-jerk reflex of reactionaries, to kill and torture people at random if they feel seriously challenged ― either in the cellars of the secret police during mass unemployment, or in the trenches of a war arranged for that purpose alone, or both as often in succession as they deem necessary to renew the proletariat’s reluctant submission.

Info elites and weapon managers are interchangeable among different nation-states, religious affiliations and political organizations. They include our rulers, their staff, media workers, judges, teachers, priests, politicians and other key misinformation and disinformation professionals ― whether or not they understand what they’re doing and why they are doing it. They consider themselves superior to their proletarian hosts – from whom they spring and upon whom they depend – the same way a precocious youngster might scorn his humble guardians. 

At first, in times of weapon chaos, info proletarians picked their elite from among themselves; thereafter, once things got more organized, their replacements were promoted from the info proletariat by the elites. It did not matter whether this happened through princely privilege, democratic election, religious hierarchy, Soviet nomination, robber barony or whatever. Nor did it matter if the political setting was a kraal of mud huts, a stinking feudal barony or a continent spanning, multi-ethnic, military-industrial empire. No matter whether weapon managers were enslaved or free, secular or religious, centralized or profit-oriented, plebian or noble, criminal or authorized, professional or amateur. Identical weapons elites emerged in any case, with remarkably similar mind-sets, attitudes and reflexive behaviors. Their talk might change over time and under different circumstances – cynically, opportunistically and with prejudice – but their walk does not. Except, perhaps, for honor and glory: the first at great sacrifice, the second by reckless success. 

Learners must make foremost appeal to them, to those of my father, of every noble warrior, that cleanse him of his filth and confirms valor. A real warrior will recognize them at once and defend them against any crazy denier, lethal as he may be. Glory will stem from PeaceWorld’s success; honor will uphold it fiercely thereafter. Those and Learning should become one. After all, honor is learned until glory ensues. 

Info elites assert that their weapon management best suits everyone’s needs (an obvious lie). They employ: 

• weapon mentors to broadcast this lie during pseudo-peace, and 
• weapon sectarians to do so more forcefully in times of war. 

The information elite is no wiser than the info proletariat from which it springs. Its members merely promote weapon mentality and themselves in the short term. They censor important information and drown this censorship in babble and lies. Those scrupulous enough to criticize this poor bargain are marginalized. 

This triage “in the name of obedience and loyalty” dumbs down those chosen (and self-chosen) to monopolize power, collectively and automatically. Holding to this course for a while, weapons elites run aground on reefs of their social contradictions. Quite predictably, they sink into ritual cruelty, institutional terror and routine corruption (see “Ritual Stupidity”). 

…

COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net

- INTRO AND VOCAB #2 -