- RITUAL STUPIDITY 1

Failure to heed warnings until it’s too late, in accordance with weapon mentality.

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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

• 0:07 Robert Owen quote
• 0:28 Left in the Dark
• 2:33 The March of Folly
• 2:40 cognitive dissonance 1
• 4:52 1984 Syndrome
• 5:12 cognitive dissonance 2
• 7:41 Mr. Stoic and Mr. Nerves
• 9:34 Raw greed as tie-breaker
• 10:06 discipline, morale and glory
• 11:22 feedbacks of ritual stupidity

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin 

- RITUAL STUPIDITY 1 

“Could I tranquilly see my fellow-men walking like idiots in every imaginable direction, except that alone in which the happiness they were in search of could be found?” Robert Owen, New Lanark, Cole, 108, taken from The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen, by A.L. Morton, Monthly Review Press, 1962, p. 61.

 Graham Gwynn and Tony Wright, Left in the Dark, Kaleidos Press, 2008. www.leftinthedark.org.uk. The following is a summary of their text, composed with their permission.
From its inception some seventy million years ago, humanity benefited from a diet of jungle fruit [with nut, root, insect and carcass supplements as available] easily digestible and rich in flavenoids. This ideal diet inhibited the harmful effects of steroids and MAOs in the human body, stimulated pineal gland function and induced a physiological feedback loop that inhibited steroid activity, lengthened the prepubescent growth period (the more advanced the species, the longer its period of prepubescent growth) and tripled the volume of the human brain, in a very short amount of time from an evolutionary point of view. At that time, by harmonizing the brain’s two hemispheres, the human mind neared perfection.
Unfortunately, from 200,000 to about 12,000 years ago, humanity had to adapt to a much more hostile environment. A chain of catastrophic but unknown events cut off the human gene pool to a handful of female bloodlines. Thanks to humanity’s abundant brainpower, we survived this transition from a lush diet of arboreal fruit to the savanna equivalent of tubers and seeds, then ice-age animal flesh. These forced diet changes induced a cumulative decline in the human intellect without corresponding physiological change. We remained the same species; just ate different foods less well adapted to us and thus thought things through less clearly.
This nutritional deficiency boosted the effect of testosterone on the human body (both male and female) and set off a cascade of mental retardation. The human sleep cycle was accented, the brain’s right hemisphere was suppressed in favor of the left (linear thinking and short-term memory above and beyond holistic thought and long-term processing), and human behavior was anchored in restrictive fear instead of overall comprehension.
As a result, we are brain-crippled survivors of a transition from an optimal diet of arboreal fruit, to less and less advantageous ones (ending up with the nearly valueless junk-food of today) along with a spiraling decline in values and behavior.  

In her great book, The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman examines cognitive dissonance. By her definition, cognitive dissonance is a bureaucracy’s (and society’s) tendency to abandon common sense, healthy conscience and long-term self-interest in favor of policies that violate them. Cognitive dissonance takes the lead, even though many warnings counsel against it.
Her prerequisites for cognitive dissonance include: 

·      lust for power, 
·      excessive power,
·      mental standstill and stagnation,
·      persistence in error, and
·      protective stupidity (refusal to heed warnings). 

The consequences of cognitive dissonance are: 
 ·      social suicide replaces reason, (as when everyone dragged the Trojan Horse into the city and celebrated imaginary victory without posting enough guards around it; and when Congress attends to its campaign contributions instead of global warning, gun control and many other problems);
·      social instruments abandon their appointed tasks and turn into institutions, (the Renaissance Papacy pursued wealth and power instead of religious reform, Congress pursues its campaign finances instead of the public good); and
·      leaders enslave themselves to preconceived ideas: (America’s defeat in Vietnam, the self-defeating War on Drugs, the current prison empire, the collapse of Soviet leadership, the military quagmire everyone in a position of authority told us could never happen in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.).  

The March of Folly has no chapter describing a self-critical government, even an exceptional one. Weapons administrations perpetuate and stroke themselves with praise, even once their policies show signs of impending collapse.
Ms. Tuchman mentioned the 1981 martyrdom of Mohammed Anwar el-Sadat. As President of Egypt, he made the unpopular decision to negotiate peace with Israel and was assassinated for his pains. A few decades later, for the same reason, his followup Israeli counterpart, the Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, was murdered by the same species of psychopath on the Israeli side. 
Standard weapon policies are only held in check by clumsy exploitation, muddled methods, mental inertia, obstacles of protocol and squabbles over spoils. Since misguided leaders insist on doing things wrong from the get go, institutional inefficiency lessens their ill effects. This despite the maternal dictum: “Two wrongs do not make a right.” 

This is how the 1984 Syndrome originates. Since everyone has been misled to believe that government is malicious by nature, why not keep it as dim-wit as possible to reduce its malice? Unfortunately, a stupid government is even more malicious and eager to grow, since it forgives itself in advance for its corruption, negligence and ineptitude.
What The March of Folly calls cognitive dissonance, a rare aberration, Learner calls ritual stupidity, a continuous tendency among WeaponWorld managers.

The real-world behavior of most public institutions is usually irrational. Even though their basic mandate may be reasonable, their bureaucrats make a point of contradicting it. Ms. Tuchman admitted as much. She concluded that we may only muddle “through patches of brilliance and decline.” In her opinion, the only way to overcome cognitive dissonance would be by an electorate so well-informed, it would value moral courage above material gain — a vanishing rarity these days. The basic Learner goal? Nurture this cosmopolitan world citizenry. 

“Epic poems, inscriptions on monuments, treaties of peace — nearly all historical documents bear the same character; they deal with breaches of peace, not with peace itself. P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid.  

Many of those solemn documents justified crimes against humanity. Under the lofty tenets of Stalin’s Constitution, his officials killed as many Russians as the Nazis did. Militant Chinese exponents of Mao’s Quotations condemned more Chinese than did Japanese militarists. Those who ratified France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man betrayed it, from the Terror to massacres in Indochina, Algeria and post-colonial Africa, (Rwanda in particular). Nowadays, this semi-fascist stupidity has sunk to the level of prohibiting good little girls from wearing their symbols of worship in public schools. Secularism as an excuse for religious discrimination? What next?
As for the Preamble of the American Constitution and its Bill of Rights, well! Note the prison empire built up around us, and the army of mercenaries (Regulars, militarized police and freebooters) bankrolled to defend it. How many more Constitutional distortions will the American Empire tolerate; what additional abominations will we have to witness before the truth dawns?

In fact, cognitive dissonance typifies human behavior. We practice what we preach only rarely. In this “real world,” we compartmentalize our feelings. Certain plots, characters and settings trigger trust, compassion, cooperation and goodwill (towards family, clan, political allies, co-citizens, co-religionists and language peers). Meanwhile, others (dealing with the homeless or immigrants, for example) stain our mind and spirit with fear, untruth and violence by proxy.
We could silence the hated commands of WeaponWorld and practice charming PeaceWorld hymns instead.

Picture two men: Mr. Stoic and Mr. Nerves. When Mr. Stoic gets hurt, he secretes endorphin pain suppressors that let him function at minimal efficiency. In addition, he practices the stoicism our weapon philosophers never cease to praise. Best be stoical about problems our fervently stupid institutions forbid us to resolve.
This social stoicism promotes insane public policies; it forges the bureaucracy that Barbara Tuchman describes in detail. Decisions descend from the top in isolation from reality; they dictate fickle desires that may or may not be practicable on the ground; that may contradict survival instincts, local capabilities and moral precept. Who cares? No-one directly involved gets consulted. Middle managers execute those decisions anyway, under the threat of dismissal. Reasonable objectors get pruned from the decision tree. This pruning is the favorite pastime of most bureaucrats; this automatic ritual makes them more stupid, flaccid, apathetic and “stoical.” 
Mr. Nerves swoons at the first sight of blood, not to mention serious injury. Deep-sunk in blackout, his shock endures until his subconscious stipulates that new conditions may be survivable. While Mr. Nerves lingers comatose, his psyche mulls its options at leisure.
Argumentation and consensus-building govern nervous policy-making. The longer it takes to reach consensus, the longer the delay between actions. Nervous and pluralistic administrations compromise, vacillate and delay. Nobody commits to any position until everyone has staked a claim. As more and more voices join the debate, delays stretch out forever. The more data collected, the longer each new decision takes. Taking two steps forward and three steps back, executive organizations gather information, process it for revealed truth, announce decisions, survey outcomes, rethink, establish the next course of action, etc. 
Either that, or a hidebound minority makes arbitrary decisions and ignores their downside: a much simpler, more common practice. When decision-making deadlocks, short-term greed becomes the tiebreaker, the final arbiter of overheated debate. Soon thereafter, it replaces serious debate completely. “Let the greedy have their way; it’s so much simpler that way, plus it pays pretty good!” Disaster befalls from it quite reliably. Excellence and its incredible returns demand more thought and effort, less greed and corresponding lack of concern. 

Let’s discuss three weapon management cure-alls: discipline, morale, and glory. Military disciplinarians apply just enough brutality to short-circuit the common sense and rational self-interest of recruits. “High” unit morale allows its minions to sacrifice themselves when push comes to shove. “Glory” occurs when discipline is so well enforced that all but a few military leaders (well insulated by distance and stupidity) submit to being massacred — often for no reason.
Elite combat units must endure heavy casualties yet remain aggressive. They must attack without hesitation, even once they have been checked, forced back and chased. In certain cases, they must submit to annihilation against impossible odds. After all, personal catastrophe is the only outcome for those killed or maimed in battle. It does not matter how “glorious” their sacrifice may have been. In short, all military personnel – from latrine diggers to supreme commanders – must commit cognitive dissonance on demand. 
That’s a difficult state of mind for a State to achieve. As a matter of routine, military hierarchies must operate in a fog of cognitive dissonance; yet even they have a hard time maintaining it. Therefore, weapon states pamper masters of cognitive dissonance and marginalize the insightful, the critical, and the outspoken. From the illiterate grumblings of the info-proletariat to the pinnacles of literary mythos, dense footings of ritual stupidity must uphold the cardboard façade of enlightened civilization. This groundwork is so commonplace, it has become invisible to us. 
Weapon states mask overt aggression in times of peace. Instead, racial and domestic violence become routine; sports and popular culture glorify brutal competition. The proletariat finds less and less legitimate work, which boosts crime. In pursuit of short-term profits to pay off titanic war taxes, humans pit themselves against each other and conspire against their environment. In a flash of resource depletion, eons of ingrained reverence for nature are forsaken. Mass consumption, personal littering and institutional pollution wear away the natural, social and psychic fabrics of the world. Excessive sexual restraints, religious intolerance and recreational drug criminalization serve to multiply aggression.  

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COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net

- RITUAL STUPIDITY 2