- WEAPON PATHOHISTORY 1

Are we too cooperative or competitive? Why?

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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 darwinian selection for war
• 1:31 literacy and military power
• 2:55 peaceful versus warlike civilization
• 4:31 rare books
• 5:49 the geometry of war
• 7:15 threaten, fight, flee or freeze
• 8:15 artificial psychopaths

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin 

- WEAPON PATHOHISTORY 1  

The painful truth? For thousands of years, Darwinian selection has optimized weapon mentality in human culture. If any ancient society matured into a prototype peace technology – or merely held back its weapons obsession for a while – nearby weapon hordes overran it.

Human history can be resumed as follows: 

1.       The gradual perfection of the social and technological tool kits required by the weapon mentality of the day. 

2.       The discharge of this optimized weapon technology in a climax holocaust limited only by the means available (like a pistol going off while being cleaned). 

3.       A Dark Age that lets humanity recover from this paroxysm.

4.       Return to Step 1.

Once properly mixed up and detonated, the binary munition of weapon Christianity and Roman weapon technology triggered a European Dark Age that lasted nearly the next thousand years. Much the same fate befell China, Persia, Southeast Asia and Islam at other intervals, a fate they’ve only overcome recently. 

These cultural implosions have bred a subconscious contempt for peace in each of us and especially in our info elites. They have restricted peace technology to the limit of the info proletariat’s endurance, with our placid consent. This rust-through of peace caused the next paroxysm. The imminent one, nurtured by all of us through this historical process, promises a planetary Dark Age even more durable and extensive if not permanent. 

Books were very perishable before tough, cheap paper and printing presses made them commonplace, along with mass literacy. Millennial cults (venerating a primary text like the Bible for a thousand years or longer) required basic schools and libraries along with a small, carefully educated priestly elite to run them. They required safekeeping from armed hordes more interested in loot than learning. Sooner or later, those hordes cut down the guards and breached the gates. After that, surviving priests had to persuade them not to suppress the unique text — that preserving it would lessen their terror and help satisfy their greed.

 In Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1989, Collins Harvill, London, 1988, pp. 94-99, Ernest Gellner postulates that a literary class can prevail over the warrior one by determining the legitimacy of warring factions. From the top leader to lowly flunkies, warriors must guess their potential for long-term success based on how many of their fellows recognize their organization and connect with it. A priesthood (literate bureaucracy) can document that legitimacy and often become the moral arbiter of warrior bands.

Our millennial texts have been the chosen reading of a long line of pirates and murderers. A hundred generations of more and more prominent weapon mentors have rewritten sacred texts and distorted holy doctrine to satisfy the conflicting demands of weapon mentality. 

If a peace society produced nothing but pacifists, it would become rich and creative, grateful to God, exuberant, argumentative, law-reliant — and extremely vulnerable to military aggression. Weapon societies are good at nothing but hostilities; they fear their warrior god(s) and claim their religion or ideology is the only acceptable one. The dumber they are at anything but punishment, the better. The splendid “Lord of Hosts” in the King James Bible is actually the “God of Armies” in Hebrew and in French.

Sorry folks. God exists everywhere and in everything, including Their multiplicities and non-existence. The God described by every religion provides an equally valid and equally inadequate description. There’s no stepping out from God for a smoke break; neither is there a specific God “superior” to the rest. What an absurd, typically human prejudice! Especially when based on a thousand years of murder and terror. 

Such warrior societies lose the capacity to feed and care for themselves without plundering less warlike neighbors for slaves, rations, laws, technology and other peace assets. Perhaps more importantly, they exile the worst of their homegrown psychopaths abroad among colonial victims. Longer-lived societies must balance peace and weapon content, yet favor weapon management to defend against any comer. 

Since long ago, almost all the useful peace texts and findings disappeared in some frenzied auto da fé (autodafay, “act of faith,” inquisitorial pyre). Selflessly and endlessly, isolated peace mentors preached their own annihilation (and that of their culture) at the hands of itchy-fingered battle elites both at home and abroad. 

Historians can only call on a scant, censored inventory of ancient records. The best documented of ancient literatures suffered a destruction rate of more than 99%: the Roman, Greek and Chinese, for example. Less than one work out of ten survives from less than one out of ten authors. Only a few odds and ends remain, scrawls of uncertain provenance, old laments of long forgotten authors and vanished masterpieces, marginal mention of great libraries wiped out along with ancient civilizations (see Burning Libraries (BC)), and apocryphal collections from city ruins large and small, on the whole reduced to dust, ash and submarine silt.

It is interesting to note that the oral history of primal societies stood a better chance of surviving defeat by a militarily dominant, literate society. It was easier to destroy a rare text collection and murder a slim, literate urban minority, than to silence the recitation of epic myths by tribal grandparents, aunts and uncles to rapt children around humble hearths scattered across the countryside. 

Then again, the Celts and their Druids were systematically massacred by the Romans, as must have happened in many other times and regions. Religious and ideological fanatics (psychopaths) sought to exterminate their more peaceful intellectual opponents throughout history. In the end, full weapon mentality became the norm.

On a blank, hypothetical world map, the geometry of prehistoric warfare registered as a shifting rash of little red spots (pointillism) representing isolated crimes, raids and tribal skirmishes wherever the density of intertribal competition forced such confrontations. 

The geometry of global massacre grew thicker and more intricate later on. From the dawn of metallurgy to the Industrial Revolution, these blemishes wove red ribbons of death: the march routes, siege works and battle lines of armies (in a linear geometry). Flowing zones of death throbbed by land and sea from the 1700s Enlightenment through the World (sic) Wars (in intermittent planes). Modern Air-Land battle eats its way across entire regions (in a spherical plane). Meanwhile, the initial irritation thickens and swells as universal crime: chicken pox mutates into smallpox.

Historically instantaneous, near-certain lethality – planetary omnicide – could result from a nuclear/scalar/biochemical disaster (in a hollow sphere). 

If we allow our weapon practice to get much worse, clouds of weaponized, robot or mutant wasps of various sizes could chase our few survivors down deep caverns and inflict wounds that make them beg for death (as in Revelation); a carefully brewed nanoplague could boil the biosphere down into its component organic molecules (a sphere biosphere-thick); or the sun rendered nova could constitute the next stage of man-made cataclysm (in a solid sphere of annihilation). 

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman examines our adrenal-fueled reflexes to intimidate, fight, flee or freeze in place. They allow us to cope with the anxieties and exertions of fatal crises. In return, they demand a few days’ rest to verbalize nightmares, vent stress and restore some semblance of mental equilibrium. 

Unlike cliché war movies during which one weakling cracks and the other martial actors carry on with grim determination, almost all veterans take on a blank, “thousand-meter” stare after a month or so of sustained combat. A certain percentage of battle elite holdouts (his 2%, my 4%; even though half of mine may have deserted) turn out to be self-immunized against combat fatigue. They are aggressive sociopaths to begin with. 

After a month or two of combat, its psychic and trauma casualties would reduce a conventional military unit into a rabble cowering around its shot-up and supersaturated medical unit, persistently raided by lunatic commandos. Recall the grinning POW conscripts of Saddam Hussein’s defeat.

Sounding the alarm, Professor Gabriel concluded that new drugs are being developed (or have already been?) that separate a soldier’s cognitive awareness from its emotional seat while they spare his sensory coordination, alertness and sleep cycles. Combatants on this type of drug would become well-coordinated and alert versions of a car driver on Valium: racing down the highway at 120 miles an hour, rationally aware of the danger but cut off from it emotionally. In short, artificially induced psychopaths. 

Historical research has revealed that many combatants on both sides of the Second (sic) World War were issued primitive stimulant drugs of this kind. Blitzkrieg was actually Methkrieg. Hitler was an addict, as was Goering; and many German combatants were burnout meth heads. For example, the Battle of Britain’s “Few” on their last legs, and German tank crews stalled outside Dunkirk and who knows what other crucial objectives on various Fronts?

This kind of drug skyrockets combat lethality, war crimes and thorny problems of veteran reintegration into the civilian world. After a predictable spillover of these weapon-grade drugs into underworld markets, our world will assume the same cold-blooded criminality as that portrayed in brutal TV dramas. Unlike real life where crime and brutality lurk in the shadows while peaceful normalcy prevails, that scary mind-set would come to dominate our existence, the same way it manages to in the media and in war. 

Unless we criminalize warfare soon, weapon technology threatens to chase us with a bloody knife (or radioactive pixie dust, or some biowar equivalent) into our living room.  

…

COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net

- WEAPON PATHOHISTORY 2 -