World War COVID Guerre mondiale: From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld; Learner, begin... De la terre en armes au monde paisible ; Apprenti, débute

- RITUAL STUPIDITY 2

February 09, 2024 • Artwork by my brilliant wife, Linda Hulce • Season 11 • Episode 1452

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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



WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin 

- RITUAL STUPIDITY 2 

Alcohol, drugs, prostitution, gambling, and other human addictions multiply social costs, especially when rendered scarce and expensive by official prohibition (thus more profitable for the controlling elite and their judges). In that case, those matters should be legalized, subsidized and heavily regulated to reduce their social impact, obeying the flexible Dutch principle of gedogen: “illegal but tolerated if nothing bad ensues.”
On PeaceWorld, the primary exceptions from this enforcement principle will be the ban against weapon practices for which there will be no tolerance. Addicts will get their kicks for free. Indeed, they should get special subsidies for their addiction. In the long run, these outlays will be much less onerous than forcing innocent victims to support their drug habit in person by getting robbed: a bilaterally abusive tax.
New religious ceremonies will show young Learners the pathos of immorality. Learner rituals may re-enact ancient morality plays of excess and the Pandora’s Box they open. Mystery cults served the same function in the past; likewise, ancient Dionysian holidays of public intoxication. Once society provides secure havens of drug initiation, intoxication and recovery, we may curb public drunkenness and harmful addictions. They will become unthinkable public faux pas (foh-pah, “missteps,” numb-nut strategies) among the partners of a peaceful society. 

Likewise, Learner society will encourage personal research into revelatory hallucinogens. Friends will gather in legal Kivas where they may share cheap, legal, high-quality drugs and meditate together on Dreamtime. They will find safe Kivas for these activities. But personal responsibility would never diminish for the public abuse of drugs and alcohol. On the contrary, drug-aggravated crimes will draw stiff penalties from Learner juries. After all, those jurors will have been there and done that, themselves, without such harmful consequences. 
It has been at least ten thousand years since healthy humans began taking psychoactive substances. Arbitrary prohibition is folly in slow motion. Street drugs should be regulated to ensure their quality and reduce their toxicity. The designation “Sativa,” in Cannabis Sativa, is an ancient Sanskrit honorific reserved for rice and other beneficial plants (fennel, grapes). Properly cultivated and administered, its medicinal and Dreamtime qualities outweigh its risks. High quality marijuana reduces nervous tension and stress — as opposed to the mind-numbing trash the police and criminals have conspired to refine. It promotes socialization and philosophical discourse without jeopardizing our pursuit of the Muse. PeaceWorld will welcome this source of inspiration.
In 2019, there are two main reasons why recreational drugs remain illegal. First, what to do with all the spear-carriers of the War against the Druggies: those narcs, vice cops and petty criminals, once they got fired? The “War on Drugs” has created an army of undercover agents, snitches, street dealers and kingpins for whom social abuse has become routine. Finding other work for them would unleash a backlash of complex criminality the like of which has afflicted Russia since its secret police lost its license to terrorize the populace in the name of the Revolution. 
The second reason for this war? The huge profits reactionaries obtain by flooding world-class banks with drug cash. During the last few decades, reactionaries have financed their media-driven political ascendancy with this criminal cash flow. Their fascistic spin control would dry up if drug use were decriminalized. Every new prison, drug law and illegal purchase increases their profit margin and power base. Think about that, the next time you score your favorite illegal high.
These days, some irresponsible people commit sick crimes and lay the blame for their horrific outcomes on drugs. Info elites coach these self-serving penitents so that their horror-show confessions can demonize victimless drug criminals. The same goes for grieving survivors of suicide victims who took drugs. But this careful selection of horror-show spokespeople and scapegoats cannot invalidate recreational drug use. Those who panic over adult “drug abuse” must understand its essential neutrality. When drug abuse releases destructive urges, it only does so by magnifying deep-seated psychological conflicts, notably our subconscious defiance of the weapon/peace antinomy. We will never resolve these problems by slamming shut psychic gateways. Instead, we should wrap the sufferers in safety nets much softer, stronger and more flexible. 

My psyche was blistered by several bad drug trips; so I have little use for powerful mind-altering substances. Once such drugs are legalized, however, I would grow the most benign of them in my garden or share them with friends from theirs. All such drugs will be legalized. This will reduce secondary crimes and invasive police intervention: far worse social ills in the long run. Like the treatment for someone who gobbles up enough chocolate to make them sick, the prevention of drug-related mishaps will become a primary responsibility of local barefoot doctors dedicated to the Hippocratic Oath: “Above all, do no harm” — not to armed, invasive and trouble-stirring police.

Minors should deny themselves such drugs by choice. They should insist on better alternatives. They might “save themselves” for graduated ceremonies of age-set initiation: powerful shapers of their destiny. Imitating ancient tribal ceremonies, Learner rituals will promote kinship among age-set peers. These clans will endow novices with social responsibilities as a function of maturity and by well-timed, well-deserved merit. Local crime watch could become one of their responsibilities. Children would assume adult privileges once they were ready for adult responsibilities but not before. A few police intelligence-gathering responsibilities may default to young children in a mature peace society where unregulated brutality had not been heard of for years.

Pain – humanity’s faithful companion – has long reinforced historical stoicism. Despite the braggart medical community, rich and poor alike suffer from poorly mended fractures, toothaches, chronic irritations and allergies, digestive disorders, psychiatric emergencies and wounds induced by accident, crime, battle, self-infliction, medical neglect and malpractice.
Our bodies are sullied by toxic, misunderstood and poorly taught nutrition. Disinformation is the bread and butter of food processing mega-corporations. In truth, their primary goal seems to be the mass production of combat rations: the least nutritious but most profitable foodstuffs ever produced. 

In the past, elder warriors suffered more pain than most people. Their perks let them outlive lesser folk, despite battlefield traumas and the aches and pains of old age. Indeed, the archaic “superiority” of nobles over peasants may be traced to their long-standing monopoly of hunting privileges. They enjoyed more animal protein, while peasant children grew up on gruels of vegetables, pulses and cereal. Their maturing brains never got enough protein to grow up and compete successfully. The same goes for slaves and masters; ditto for info elites and proletarians (“organic” versus “junk” food). 

The cultural stagnation of certain modern nations and minorities can be traced to inadequate nutrition, especially lack of iodine in their salt, as well as other micronutrients (like iron) the precise details of which we are poorly informed. Learners could reverse these errors at little cost and boost local intelligence almost overnight. Yet another confirmation of our weapon degeneracy: that we never fixed these elementary problems on a global scale.  

On the whole, people who have not been properly cared for or educated as children are more expensive to keep out of prison and hospitals as adults. Those who have been, tend to return dependable profits in good time, on their own initiative. 

Poverty is the most expensive social policy on Earth — but it produces legions of good infantry. 

Aside from cannabis, willow bark, mandrake, hypnosis, acupuncture and poppy sap used by many cultures, effective painkillers were rare in the past, soon harvested to extinction and forgotten. Leaders, especially hereditary leaders, had to make important decisions while beset by atrocious pain. Not to mention their underlings not so well cared for. 
If you are lucky enough to have been spared this kind of pain, trust my experience. Otherwise good people become perfect brutes under a lengthy dazzle of pain; their reason abdicates in favor of cruelty and rage. 
Alcohol was the painkiller of choice long before and after effective analgesics appeared. The combination of pain and alcohol annuls social graces. Alcohol and herbal infusions in boiled water always served as healthy substitutes and supplements for raw drinking water often polluted in primitive, poorly engineered cities.

Alcohol may also have helped with digestion. Like the carbon dioxide bubbles in soft drinks, it kills food-borne microbes harmful to the digestion and the blood. In this way, it allows populations with no better means – there are better ones, up to Learners to discover – to purify their guts from time to time; also, to cleanse wounds and soothe a troubled mind. Back then, rotten food accompanied every routine diet. 

A social philosopher, whose name escapes me now, hypothesized that societies used alcohol as a way to sort out their people. After all, alcohol is a mere concentrate of grain or fruit: complementary to basic sustenance if produced from their surplus, or detrimental if produced despite their dearth. It would provide a significant surplus to the survival requirements of a family operating on the margins and deciding whether or not to consume it: a real bonus above and beyond the basic necessities for poor families both ancient and modern. Those who abstained from alcohol could use the extra income as collateral for profitable enterprise during good times and as a survival edge during times of famine; whereas those who wasted it on excessive drink would pin themselves into the lower classes in good times and croak faster in times of famine, they and their family. Ancient societies that forbade alcohol became more rigid and fixed by forsaking that surplus and their families’ option to use or abuse it, whereas societies that permitted it promoted the upward mobility of families by merit, if only indirectly.

Also, in billions of man-to-man confrontations, a sober swordsman cleaved the sluggish drunkard who drank his fill before battle to compensate for his fear (the way a few sober Russian hooligans thrashed masses of drunken Britishers during a soccer riot in 2016). Could that have been the Q’ran-dictated margin of victory for Muslim Arab warriors over Byzantine, Persian, Hindu and Chinese armies, each of which outnumbered them, sometimes by ten times or more? That, plus the Koran’s hygienic dictates while disease carried off many more of the filthy, lifelong stinking foreigners? 

Another social philosopher, whose name I can’t recall either, concluded that dynamic societies force women who don’t want to have children (and men too, though he didn’t mention them), to raise babies. Permissive societies produce fewer children, become less defensible and suffer accordingly, since they allow neurologically gifted people to drift into celibacy (and homosexual intimacy, again unmentioned) and since so-called “sensual” women would be the only ones likely to bear children in these societies. By “degenerate” society, I mean this simple formula: fewer abused children and children in general, fewer good soldiers, military defeat by those better supplied with them, genocide, enslavement, and disappearance from recorded history. 
According to this model, chemical birth control produces the worst form of social decay: another prized prejudice of reactionaries. Even though he, a Victorian Britisher, spoke only of religious sexual segregation. The same brutal pressure to produce more children would have also been brought to bear against them during their upbringing, (also against women, social inferiors and whomever else came to hand) to make them more ferocious. Otherwise, social indulgence mollycoddled more babies, turned them into decadent peaceniks who couldn’t defend themselves militarily against the inheritors of those merciless constraints.
In many warlike societies (such as the Roman) it was illegal and even sacrilegious for a highborn citizen to avoid having children. Adoption was compulsory in extreme cases. Indeed, this inadmissible choice (since it went against bloodline purity) must have been very widespread in ancient high societies after deadly wars and epidemics — one of the only sources of genetic renewal besides even more ferociously forbidden sexual adventures. 

I would not have written this text nor outreached to others to read it, without the divine lubricant of wine. Without this psychic emancipation, I would have been too bound up by my weapon indoctrination to defy it. My spirit, dead sober and unmodulated by psychoactive drugs, would have tolerated the murderous platitudes of weapon mentality. I suspect a lot of cultural creativity springs from the same source. 
I am an introvert, thanks in part to the thorny welcome my philosophical speculations have earned me up ‘til now when I spoke up. The prospect of sharing these topics with my fellow killer primates deters me, unless wine has loosened my lips first. Plus it’s easier to take on the umpteenth rewrite of this text, once I’ve washed it down with a glass or two of the fruited red. Besides, it’s a fine balm for body and soul. 

The history of Russian elites and that of alcohol abusers share many similarities. These include intense suspicion, periodic withdrawal, violent outbursts, destructive self-criticism, poor self-imaging, temporary repentance, improved behavior, worsening lapses, alternatively doting and abusive treatment of co-dependents, frenzied outbursts interspersed with bottomless apathy, meticulous planning followed by indifference to outcomes, brilliant beginnings and clumsy follow-up. 
We could include the willingness of both parties to betray their true friends who offer them good advice. Unfailing friendliness (metta in the Pali language Buddha spoke) is considered the supreme Buddhist virtue. It is also the first personal habit weapon managers suppress in the name of loyalty to their institutions. “This is not a popularity contest. I have given you a serious job. Now go out there and hurt someone bad, then report back to me. Dismissed!” WeaponWorld talk. 
These traits characterize every weapon state, even though centuries of Anglo-Saxon propaganda have fixed them as Soviet stereotypes. Such typical human behavior occurs chaotically, in parallel on different scales, from abusive siblings and mismatched mates, spiteful clerks and tyrannical desk sergeants, up to the highest ranks of power. 

A case can be made, that Industrial Era leaders not only drank to excess, but did so from lovely, lead glass decanters — poisoning themselves synergistically with alcohol and lead, and their world with pointless violence. High-flying propaganda and institutional inertia justified this foolishness to every poisoned drunkard’s satisfaction — and to ours, today. Ancient Greek and Roman info elites, as well as more recent ones, suffered similar poisoning. They served themselves acidic wine from lead and lead-soldered vessels. High-class homes collected rainwater from lead-covered roofs; lesser folks’ apartments were roofed with cheaper ceramic tiles. Thus, the richer their houses and drinks became, the dumber they got. Romans used lead as a sweetener, the same way we use Aspartane today (God protect us from it).
Poor people ate and drank from wooden and fired-clay vessels. They did not suffer from this problem except indirectly, through the bad decisions of their superiors. Even though, now that I think of it, their famous viaducts were lead-sealed. This chronic poisoning would have been enough to collapse a civilization. Each new problem got dumber solutions spiced with reflexive terrorism. 

Does that sound familiar? What’s our excuse? Many times more background radiation? Maybe. A million times more dioxin, antibiotics and metabolic hormones double-parked in our food, air, drink and body fat? Perhaps. Or could it be the hypnotic repetition of weapon myths? Could their peace equivalents be found among Learners? 

The recreational consumption of psychoactive drugs (minus alcohol) sets off a different set of social indicators, involving decadence. When otherwise energetic people take recreational drugs, they tend to drop out of productive materialism into mysticism, art, passive denial and antisocial indifference. The extent of their withdrawal depends on the types of the drugs they take and their dosage. Adults often use these drugs as low-stress boredom relievers — trying to compensate for their failure to entertain their topics of passion and communicate with fellow Learners equally obsessed. Roller coasters and dating, for example, are high-stress boredom relievers. Combat is the ultimate boredom reliever for society as a whole, as are other risk-taking activities. 
Legalized, the social effects of recreational drugs are value-neutral and perhaps beneficial. Drug use, however, dangerously weakens a weapon state. This is especially true if the craved drug is grown, processed, and/or distributed by foreigners and thus eventual enemies. See the history of China and its cultural collapse due to opium imported to them at gunpoint by Westerners.
Ideally, these drugs should be cheap, legal, grown locally and administered hygienically. If so, their side-effects would be less harmful than those induced by the compensatory abuse of tobacco laced with toxic additives, alcohol, caffeine, bleached flour, processed sugar and sugar substitutes; not to mention police Prohibition along with organized crime commensal to it (that feeds at the same table) and every violation of human rights these august bodies bring with them.  

Mohammed’s injunctions against gambling and drink helped shift his Islamic brethren toward enhanced social justice.
·      Is social justice proportionate to public health plus ultra. To simple public health?
·      Would the consumption of alcohol offer an antibiotic effect equivalent to that of washing one’s hands five times a day?
·      Would that be equivalent to washing the feet of a stranger, of an enemy?
·      In courts of justice perhaps?
·      Washing a tired stranger’s feet as a social routine: what would that lead to? 

Early Islam wrested huge info proletariats from the control of weapon elites that could not be defeated otherwise. The Koran offered more wisdom than the dogmatic injustice of prior weapon religions and their potentates. Long before Learner, God used Mohammed’s voice to divide the world into a House of Peace (lodging those who would concur with Islam) and a House of War (their opponents). One need not be a practicing Muslim to belong to the House of Peace, just let Muslims practice their faith in peace. It is certain that Allah prefers the House of Peace and abominates the other. No wise Muslim would contradict this conclusion, certainly not Mohammed.
I am not sufficiently qualified to comment further. Muslim Learners should do so in my place, loudly! 

Urban-based agriculture and urban tyranny are thought to have evolved hand-in-hand. Crop surpluses were impossible to trade beyond the local weather boundary. Cities were set along waterways that cut through their territory. In other words, everyone shared local weather – thus surpluses or dearth – simultaneously. Only an extremely complex, hyper-technological transportation network (like those that brought grain to Troy, Athens, Carthage then Rome) could shift farm surpluses any distance from their district of origin. 
In the absence of cheap bulk transport, something had to be done to preserve unmarketable surpluses. It was neither safe nor wise to gorge in years of plenty and starve during bad times. Some way had to be found to level this nutritional roller coaster. Surplus perishables could be preserved for years of famine by extending their shelf life. 
Fermentation helped “solve” this problem. 

Up to that point, human hunting packs would have operated much like wolf packs. They shared merit-based leadership, self-enforced honesty, equitable food and labor distribution, automatic reproductive restraints, controls against internal violence and the best possible care for a few youngsters raised by the whole community. Over the course of eons, marginal conditions destroyed any pack that deviated from this norm of moral excellence. We have been bred for peace mentality a thousand times longer than for the current weapon version, totally aberrant.
Let’s ignore for a moment the philosophical quibbles, knee-jerk nihilism and existential doubts that snare us today. Real morality increases the long-term likelihood of species survival by reducing the frequency and harmfulness of unintended consequences. On the other hand, bad behavior induces worse outcomes more often than good behavior does, when run through the probabilistic, black box calculator of unforeseen consequences. In short, obey your conscience, do good and expect unforeseen miracles; disobey it, commit additional evil and expect further unforeseen catastrophes. Obedience to conscience and its gift of miracle as a scientifically demonstrable phenomenon. Period, paragraph. 
Routine alcohol abuse, however, shattered long-standing social controls through bouts of unthinkable violence and incivility, sickly hangovers, degenerative disease and adverse effects on the newborn. Generations of people recovering from benders, or just sickened by daily tippling, would have evolved insane traditions and institutions to rationalize their drunken misbehavior. Would that be us? 

… 

COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net

- RITUAL STUPIDITY 3 -