- RITUAL STUPIDITY 3

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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

• 0:08 cities
• 1:02 PTSD
• 2:07 concussions
• 2:29 control time lag
• 4:06 weapon management
• 5:17 weapon proto elites
• 6:14 popular moderation
• 7:28 Anatomy of Revolution
• 8:15 the French Revolution
• 9:21 peace revolution gets derailed
• 9:43 internal peace gets derailed
• 10:34 Non violent mass resistance

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin 

- RITUAL STUPIDITY 3 

The first cities served (have always served) as logistics centers, disaster refuges and fortresses. Primitive citadels housed only priestly elites and their bodyguards: a perfect selection of weapon mentors and battle elites. Later on, the inhabitants of walled cities faced three choices: dispatch a field army against an oncoming horde, suffer annihilation at its hands or submit to it — often the three in succession. Field armies are just voracious migratory cities, lawnmowers of local surplus and sterilizers of their path. 
Sedentary agriculture, urbanism and centralized capital militarism evolved along parallel but independent tracks. Surplus riches demanded military defenses, property laws and police protection. Dense urban populations and their fixed assets made fortifications mandatory and affordable. It mattered little whether they were manned by armed slaves, mercenaries, regulars or “free” militia. 

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) also affects ritual stupidity. PTSD survivors are afflicted with permanent hyper-vigilance, attacks of unfocussed panic, paranoia, temper tantrums, a yearning for mayhem and a general inability to readapt to civilian life. Post-traumatized veterans of the First (sic) World War formed the nuclei of totalitarian regimes across Europe and Asia in the 1920s-30s. Hundreds of thousands of American veterans of the war in Vietnam came home to die alone and homeless for decades afterwards (and now, those from Iraq and Afghanistan); many more throwaway dead than the 59,000 and some names engraved on the Black Wall in Washington — the same losses we suffer each year on our highways, with traumatized survivors in proportional multitudes. 
Ancient leaders upheld their claim to nobility by charging into the thickest combat. Nevertheless, they were supposed to display inhuman sagacity in the course of peacetime decision-making. This, despite the fact that they may have been temporarily crazed by PTSD or permanently crazed members of the battle elite. 

Besides, to a great extent, the modern world has been ruled over by six generations of victims of concussion suffered at first as amateur athletes in school or as professionals thereafter (rugby, football and boxing), and by war veterans who survived nearby detonations and became civilian leaders afterwards. Their bruised brains justified stupid policies for the rest of their life, as in Congress.  

Another factor favors ritual stupidity. It takes time, lots of it, to collect intelligence and transmit orders via slow communications channels. Running a country in the days of horse and sail was like piloting a defective radio-controlled airplane with a daylong command/control delay. In other words, the command you input at moment X would not take effect until X plus 24 hours (or weeks or months). This built-in time delay would induce a long series of crashes-on-takeoff, no matter how expert the royal hand – or the republican ones – on the joystick. 
Nowadays, much has been written about “risk management.” Management theorists bemoan the fact that professional risk managers fly by the seat of their pants, especially in foreign policy circles. Lacking anything better, they base their decisions on “subjective criteria” (read bullshit). 
Weapon technicians are at the forefront of broadband communications, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and knowledge systems. Meanwhile, the stingy “free market” foists obsolete information systems on civilians — assuming anyone bothers with civilian applications a lot less richly subsidized though much more profitable in the long run. 
Few civilian organizations gather every bit of data in real-time and study it in detail. Such systems have just begun to be adopted as military communications, command, control, computer and intelligence (C5i) systems. Modern C5i hardware and expertise accelerate the process of analysis, execution, surveillance, repeat ... tremendously. Unfortunately, most civilian institutions retain the promptitude of the era of ponies and sailboats. Weapon mentors practice routine protocols of stateliness, deliberation, and (whenever possible) retrenchment, censorship and reaction in matters of peace and social welfare. In matters of war, they practice free-spending creativity, vigor, speed, unpredictability and open-minded problem solving. 

It takes decades to reverse major blunders (like the Vietnam War and the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan). After all, awful programs must be carried out to their awful conclusion once top officials have “staked their reputation” on them. They would rather appear infallible – until catastrophe pulls down their pants – than admit mistakes, make mid-course corrections and achieve a better outcome. 
The vulnerability of entrenched elites peaks when the least incompetent managers realize their pernicious habits have brought them more trouble than gain. Then, half-heartedly, they tailor new policies to a broader, more peaceable cloth. Reactionaries block this transformation at every step. Having acquired the most privilege and profit in times of worsening repression, they are outraged by any change in policy. Their weapon hypnosis decrees that self-serving exploitation remain paramount; it is more important to them than a clear conscience.
As social justice declines, (im)pertinent proto-elites froth up from the host info proletariat, eager to challenge ambivalent elites. Reactionaries and radicals often reinforce each other’s brutality. Battle elites serve one political extreme or the other or both; their brutality sponsored by weapon managers at home and abroad. Often, partisans of opposite political extremes act in concert and in succession to disrupt the peace. Independent and hostile, yet paradoxically complicit, they raise as much hell as they can get away with. Take satanic twins like the pre-war Russian Soviets and German Nazis, modern Arab and Israeli fascists, and the global fascist psychopaths of national-corporate or national-fundamentalist persuasion. 
It takes more self-control to grit one’s teeth and quietly bury one’s dead, than to dispatch the next helicopter raid or suicide bomb squad; firmer authority to forbid the next act of retaliation rather than look the other way while local hotheads take matters into their own hands. Until such time, popular moderates will be targeted: the brave ones for assassination, the prudent terrorized and the covetous corrupted. The World Court and the World Militia will promote PeaceWorld by defending brave moderates, protecting the prudent and subsidizing the covetous everywhere.
 The info proletariat is moderate in its politics until threats, violent propaganda, selective assassination and orchestrated aggression distort its outlook. Political violence favors extremists and blocks moderates. The question is not how often extremists indulged in knee-jerk terrorism, but how rarely majorities held to their peaceful ideals and made extremists suffer the consequence of their aggression instead of rewarding their brutality by multiplying it. 
The only time I’ve seen a terrorist group suffer from its actions and stop, at least for a while – as opposed to turning themselves into martyrs and inspiring the next bunch of murderous whackos – was during the Munich Olympics of 1972. Palestinian gunmen took Israeli athletes hostage, got them gunned down in the crossfire and congealed world opinion against their cause. What was the difference between that massacre and every one since on either side? This I cannot fathom. Perhaps the Palestinians horrified themselves for a while, back when the conscience-driven among them retained some shred of a say in politics?  

An excellent analysis of weapon revolutions is The Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton. Ignoring the peace/weapons antinomy, he reviews other factors with great care. To summarize Anatomy in Learner terms, the info elite loses its privileged status when its disgruntled cadres defect to proto-elites in growing numbers. Reinforced by these defectors, the proto-elite most likely to rebuild a more lethal army emerges and absorbs many more battle elites. It kills off its most effective opponents, terrorizes the remainder and takes over. Suffering from paranoid siege mentality, its bosses cast aside any thought of peace. That way, they manage to sharpen their nation’s threat deterrent. 

The only outcome of every weapon revolution, war and techno-political phase of “progress” has been the establishment of weapon states of greater lethality. 

“The [French] Revolution cleared the way for a much larger, more centralized state apparatus, able to exploit its revolutionary-patriotic ideology and new means of coercion to mobilize large armies and the economic resources for major wars. The Revolution inevitably upset the balance of the European states system, in which France was centrally situated; and it created plenty of reasons on both sides for the series of wars which quickly unfolded. War, in turn, drastically affected the course of the Revolution, delivering the “coup de grace” to the liberal phase of 1789-91, and creating both the bureaucracy of La France Fonctionnaire and the elements of a professional officer corps and a modern national army. Not for the last time, therefore, a social revolution was instrumental in bringing about a major development of the state machine. (Marx, incidentally, recognized this in the French case, where he erred was in believing that proletarian revolution would have a different result). Martin Shaw, Dialectics of War: An Essay on the Social Theory of Total War and Peace, Pluto Publishing Ltd, London, 1988, pp. 47-49. 

Traditional info elites attack each new revolution just hard enough to set the revolutionaries back on the track of weapon development. Peaceful revolutionaries are unseated through open warfare, subsidized terrorism and economic blockade. Where outright invasion is inappropriate because a popular Militia has been formed to block it, internal chaosists (Contras) can be unleashed instead.
Freer societies, more evolved in peace, can be goaded back onto the path of weapon tyranny by means of pinprick acts of terrorism whether from external sources or internal ones. Every world power accelerates this regression to the militarist mean; weaker states follow close behind. Weapon managers pick off peaceable idealists and replace them with pet weapon mentors; they neutralize political moderates and replace them with battle elite creeps. 
We are programmed to admire this Darwinian selection for sociopathocracy and its growing brutality. No exceptions are permitted. Thus, the deadly status quo of contending warfare states grows more tyrannical every year, despite weapon revolutionaries’ mistaken attempts to resist and transform it by redoubled acts of violence. This tyranny grows stronger despite and because of them. Every form of violent resistance renews, strengthens and perpetuates it.

Non-violent resistance on a global scale by a coalition of enthusiastic, conscience-driven Learners who have just found themselves – transparent, homogeneous in their diversity and assuredly steadfast – will dissolve the strictly minoritarian Pathocracy of WeaponWorld once and for all.

Make it so. 

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COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net