- YOU CHOOSE 1

Pick your constellation of political metaphors to conform with history or dream up a new tomorrow.

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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 jettison three layers of mental ballast
• 1:58 New World Order Wimps
• 4:40 abstract the Other into a perfect enemy.
• 7:22 turning an abstraction like bigotry into a conviction.
• 10:01 the constitutional right to withdraw from misery
• 11:46 the difference was between men and women
• 13:04 Everyone loses at war; there are no winners except weapon elites
• 14:56 multi-cellular organisms underwent a dramatic transformation
• 16:40 they will look back on their most grandiose projects to date as slumlord flops
• 19:33 Our current constellation of political metaphors is a mashup of dusty buzzwords and obsolete clichés
• 21:42 We are all born Learners; none may abstain

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

- YOU CHOOSE (I) -

“We are being taught by all the foregoing to assume as closely as possible the viewpoint, the patience and the competence of God.” Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, St. Martin’s Press, p. 251.

 During the Second (sic) World War, every European had to face the same choice: accept the Nazi fait accompli or defy it. Today, it’s up to you. No time is left to duck key issues (a favorite human pastime), nowhere’s left to hide. From New Zealand to Novaya Zemlya, your choice will be between accepting the status quo or defying it by turning into a Learner worthy of the name: between moral bankruptcy and self-sacrifice. Weigh your options carefully here, before push comes to shove.

First off, you will have to jettison three layers of mental ballast. Without thinking much about it, you may have chosen to be:

• nescient: “I can only trust those ideas I have heard at least a hundred times before, those least likely to get me into trouble. Nothing else matters.”
• credophobic: “I don’t believe any of this BS they’ve pelted into my brain, but I can’t accept anything else.”
• fanaticophobic: “I only trust those who repeat well-worn ideas to me. Anyone who testifies otherwise must be a fanatic, a crankcase or a snake-oil peddler. No-one can con me; I’m way too cool for that.”

 These days, almost everyone has become a fanaticophobe. Not  you? 

You can set those notions aside and put up with the social ostracism that will come with your denial. Strike out on your own, for a change; make up your own mind and take creative risks. Only you can unplug your ears to new ideas (“Only you can prevent forest fires…”). That will take guts, brains and heart the current mind-set would rather you passed up. 

Have you got what it takes? You just might, since you’ve stuck to Learner thus far.
 

The prevailing orthodoxy bids us to submit a “New World Order” based on global national-corporatism. “Us, the rulers, versus Them, the People.” At best, fond adults caring for children; at worst, con men mugging suckers. 

I call these people World IMPerialistS or Wimps. Current events confirm their dominance if not, regrettably, their competence. Our existential despair, the environmental holocaust we witness against our will and the rise of militant chaosism – from microcriminal to macromilitary – reveal the corporate econologic that drives them. Televised thought-control beams quantities of Hollywood trivia and Madison Avenue materialism into our brains, thus amplifying the Wimp lunacy we share and concealing its toxic outcome. 

When you think of corporations and their outrageous control freaks, think of capricious, enduring, licentious and dangerously shortsighted monarchies. Their worst fear is that the slightest social progress will diminish them — which prediction they fulfill by opposing progress more and more brutally until a Newtonian blowback explodes in their face. Learners will deal with multinational corporations the same way European republicans of the Enlightenment dealt with their corporate monarchist opponents. Old school, violent overthrow just multiplied the misery of mirror-image counter-revolutions, but intelligent and gradual succession brought forth some new improvements.

Old school troglodytes assert that a “chosen few” must “return” to some dreamland of uncertain provenance, while the rest of us must surrender to Wimp servitude at their hands. Hypnotically, these Prisms imprison themselves and everyone else in their favorite “ism.” Be it individualism, libertarianism, “strict” constitutionalism; generic nationalism, Nazi/Fascist/Bushido national socialism, Soviet/Maoist national communism, corporate national capitalism, religious national fundamentalism either idolatrous (cult of personality), atheistic, mono- or polytheistic; radicalism, anarchism, racism or tribalism. Take your pick of those simple cure-alls; all of them the ingathering of like-minded peers make-believe superior and the sacrifice of imaginary inferiors who are in reality quite akin in their shared diversity. By their Prism shall you know them.

The title Prism applies equally to military autocrats, politburo absolutists, religious fanatics, government-paid and extra-governmental terrorists, ethnic genocides, crime barons and their secret brothers in the secret police, military-industrial extortionists, reactionary politicians and their know-nothing supporters — as well as you and I in a bad frame of mind. In search of sedative simplicity, such activists dehumanize their enemies by turning them into philosophical abstractions, the better to kill one or more of them, terrorize and subdue the rest. 

In The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York, 1959, J. Glenn Davis lists several types of warriors and the way they abstract the Other into a perfect enemy. 

Professional soldiers would rather fight competent and courageous enemies; they hold a lesser adversary in contempt. Paradoxically, their enemies should be despised and destroyed with professional efficiency as long as they resist, but treated honorably once they surrender — even though sociopaths hand-picked for the job may abuse those prisoners to death later on in distant prison camps. When unarmed civilians are tortured, robbed and killed, as they must be in war, (and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise), this must happen with ceremonious reluctance on the part of professional warriors. 

With the exception of psychopathic warriors who get away with the opposite: they dodge powerful enemies and torture the helpless ones. 

Racist warriors turn their enemies into sub-humans. There is no room for mercy, human decency or redeeming values in their attitude — which adds a robotic drudgery to war’s other insults. The enemies of a religious or ideological crusader are not only subhuman but Incarnations of Evil in insufferable revolt against God, the Leader or some other lofty principle. Killing them is not only a crusader’s duty; it is his divine calling. Expect even less compassion from such mass murderers.

In addition, compared to the glory of the abstraction they uphold, everyone’s well-being and survival are insignificant, whether among opponents, innocent bystanders, fellow combatants, even themselves — even if the adopted ideal forbids this type of aggression. For example, Shia and Sunni fight each other without mercy, even though both are practicing Muslims forbidden by the Koran to attack fellow Muslims. Mohammed would not have approved. 

May Learner never be so debased! You lethal cowards who advocate mass murder will find no excuse this time around. Your criminal routines will be forbidden, no matter what the excuse. 

On the other hand, conscience-driven people consider their opponents fellow human beings and victims of forces beyond their control — especially during wartime. Contradictions between that healthy attitude and the brutal requirements of combat make it (and sanity) hard to hold onto very long on a battlefield where hesitation often leads to casualties and defeat. Jesus Christ or survival? 

Professional soldiers are very critical of this attitude. From their standpoint, scorning the enemy simplifies the perilous task of killing him and subduing his survivors. Thus, they prefer reflexive contempt (despite its mercilessness) to any undermining sense of fraternity. Since it’s hard to stay sharp while brooding over two opposite thoughts, they feel similar contempt for anyone outside their military clan.

In This Thing of Darkness: a Sociology of the Enemy, University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 1994, pp. 36 et seq., James A. Aho lists five steps required to reify ethnic hatred. Reification means turning an abstraction like bigotry into a conviction.

1.    Naming: a false characterization of one individual as the role model for an abstract evil category. 

2.    Legitimization: validating this lie by reversing official findings.

3.    Myth-making: creating a legendary history to confirm this lie.

4.    Sedimentation: embedding these legends into the memory of the next generation as part of a group bonding dynamic.

5.    Ritual: the traumatic, spectacular extinction of victims, often en masse, often accompanied by the entrapment and ritual torture of their family. 

6.    We might add a sixth element, Martyrdom: the sacrifice of some minor bigot to horrified authorities after the above-described Ritual and his canonization by senior bigots who got clean away. God, how sorry they feel for themselves! Especially after they’ve gotten away with some unbelievable atrocity. Strapping a remote control suicide bomb to a little girl and sending her out to die in the resulting massacre? Unnamable monsters!

These habits are no doubt twisted equivalents of peaceful, “mixing bowl” rituals (getting little girls to present roses). As with many weapon rituals, with a few rewrites of the theatrics involved, we could convert them into practices of peace.

Warring tribes replaced their heavy casualties by adopting prisoners of war after inflicting physical and psychological tortures on them so as to test their spirit and tame it. Thus, lethal bigots became experts at the art of turning bitter enemies into blood brothers. Life is paradox.

Fanatical elites are looking forward to a final orgy of prismatic aggression that will climax in the planetary, pan-toxin gangbang we have helped to prepare: the bio-chemo-nano-nuclear-scalar extermination of every hated Other as well as the fearsome Other within. We deny our part in this upcoming disaster that could never come about without our staunch support. 

In the near future? Peace will worsen by small degrees until total war erupts irretrievably – unless we’ve already taken vigorous steps to head it off.

Both Wimps and Prisms rely on weapon mentality. Their ethics are equally corrupt; their odds of long-term success, nil. Sooner or later, their power trips degenerate into a blood bath. It is merely a question of time and weapon sophistication. 

Fortunately, most people’s belief (or lack thereof) can be harnessed to peace struggle and Satyagraha, of which more in later chapters. 

This text announces a different ideology upheld by an army of one (me). It claims no sponsorship from the Skull & Bones, the Mujihadeen, the International Monetary Fund or any other club of for-profit cutthroats, stealthy or otherwise. I hope this disclaimer attracts you to the cause. 

Learners will require the complete infrastructure humanity has assembled today. It must remain intact, flourishing and constantly renewed. What’s more, fewer and fewer people may be deprived of home, homeland, security, livelihood and life. 

In short, everyone on Earth will have the constitutional right to withdraw from their misery.

Learners will address the needs of the rich with as much care as those of the info proletariat. In other words, a thousand times more skillfully than what weapon managers got away with. Unlike weapon dissidents and their reflex hatred of the rich, Learners will require the cooperation, expertise and capital management of info elites (at least the conscience-driven cadre among them). Without their support, none of this transformation will be possible. 

Humanity has barely got enough capital and good will to undertake this transformation. Any societal breakdown (of the kind weapon dissidents keep calling for) would drive us to lower Levels of weapon barbarism and eventual annihilation. We can’t afford any more mass destruction, pilferage and terror of the kind we’d agreed – while heaving great big sighs! – were regrettably unavoidable. 

As for those who seek to destroy civilization while they hone their survival skills, I stand in awe of their hysteria. Whether they adhere to the Unabomber’s screed, to some fundamentalist’s rant or to murderous voices in their head, their brutal simplification of reality bodes ill for everyone, themselves included. May Learners bring to life their petrified imagination and neutralize their craving for deadly simplification! 

I recall the story of a young mountain tribesman arrested for enforcing a blood feud. When the police asked him why he had murdered an innocent stranger, he said it was because his mother urged him on. Women are just as lethal as men in this context, perhaps more so. Most will serve PeaceWorld even more enthusiastically.

So-called “primitive” shamans told a foreign observer what the difference was between men and women. Men hunt, fight and cut down trees; women tend the children, the men and the garden. Thus, men and women are entitled to their natural differences in talent, vigor and aptitude. However, most importantly, women must advise men when to stop. 

We have forgotten this reliable veto.

An incident in Mormon history comes to mind. At a certain point, their leader concluded that migrants passing through had to be massacred. If his wives (polygamists) had blocked his decision (and I suspect they tried to with all their might), this massacre would never have sullied the Mormons’ reputation. I also suspect that many deadly patriarchal combats throughout history could have come to a better conclusion by means of this veto, just as much then as now and in the future. 

By social convention, an elite of women should be able to cut short serious killing (or even serious talk about it) by a majority of men. Period.

Nothing on Earth is as permanent as it seems, not even annihilation. During the next Paroxysm of mass stupidity and soiled underpants panic, we may destroy the entire biosphere, the human species or merely its civilization. It’s just a question of the megatons offloaded, laced with additional deadly disease, warped weather and weapon-grade nano-tech. 

Those dismal outcomes would be meaningless to a believer in reincarnation. We’ll just have to re-enact the entire vicious farce of weapon history to reach current levels of peace potential. Once the radioactive rubble stops bouncing, our survivors can take the next few thousand years to re-enact the history of weapon civilization, or millions more to match that since the Dawn of Man, or billions since life took hold on the Earth. 

Take your pick, you pompous bombardiers! You’ll have to wait a little while longer before you can score bombs fat enough to drive us further back in time. That’s all your malevolent panic can do: just delay things for a while longer, given life’s near infinite time span. 

How much more precious time will we squander on historical re-enactments? How many devourings , burnings alive, rapes, suicides, crucifixions, pogroms and redundant massacres will we have to attend? 

You can find out all you want about war in your news feeds and history pages; what you will never read is the following. After every war, things pretty much return to the way they were before the war began. Survivors resume their routines, love and hate one another, care for youngsters and go about their business. No war, no matter how “glorious and significant,” has changed much of anything. The same thing (more likely a better one) would have resulted from an equivalent stretch of peace. The only real change is in the decades of toil and skill it will take to replace the wealth and mutual trust war squandered, along with irreplaceable casualties. 

Everyone loses at war; there are no winners except weapons elites.

Early on in life on Earth, multi-cellular organisms underwent a dramatic transformation among others. Primitive colonies let their central cells starve out and suffocate. Surrounded by layers of “selfish” cells on the outer layer, the ones inside couldn’t get enough nourishment, clean water and oxygen to survive. More complex, three-dimensional life forms couldn’t evolve until “privileged” outer cells collected surplus nutrients and oxygen and passed them into the “poorer” center. Then this capacity had to be transmitted unto latter generations. 

Anyone who spouts "survival of the fittest" Social Darwinism dogma of the kind sociopath’s worship (à la Ayn Rand), had better contemplate "survival of the most generous.” Nature supports the most complex community of sharers that can coexist in that environment. See Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution.

“Over millions of years, nature’s ecosystems engineers have been especially effective in the promotion of overyielding [my italics]. They have coevolved with other species that exploit the niches they build. The result is a harmony within ecosystems. The constituent species, by spreading out into multiple niches, seize and cycle more materials and energy than is possible in similar ecosystems. Homo sapiens is an ecosystems engineer too, but a bad one. Not having coevolved [my note: in intimate familiarity — a peace technology we could cultivate] with the majority of life forms we encounter around the world, we eliminate far more niches than we create. We drive species and ecosystems into extinction at a far higher rate than existed before, and everywhere diminish productivity and stability.” Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2002, p. 112.

Once the Learner creed takes hold, info elites with surplus wealth will discover the titanic profits they can enjoy in a pragmatic yet fully moral way, once everyone is sustained with greater equity. Compared to this abundance, they will look back on their most grandiose projects to date as slumlord flops. 

While everyone merits modest comforts, those who excel may outstrip that minimum by no more than five to one between the highest and lowest fifths of the population, and fifteen to one between the highest and lowest income percentiles. Thus, the higher the comfort ladder the poorest can climb, the more luxuries the rich may indulge in with a clear conscience.

Here I go again, making pronouncements when Learners’ aim is to trigger global transformation, then step aside and let experts and specialists optimize their topics of passion. I should let a more qualified Learner do this work for me. 

“Socioeconomic Democracy is a model socioeconomic subsystem in which there is some form of Universal Guaranteed Personal Income [UGI] as well as some form of Maximum Allowable Personal Wealth [MAW], with both the lower bound on personal material poverty and the upper bound on personal material wealth set and adjusted democratically by all society.” Robley E. George, Socioeconomic Democracy: An Advanced Socioeconomic System, Praeger Studies on the 21st Century, Praeger Publishers, Westport, Connecticut, London, 2002, p. 91.

Learners will seek neither absolute economic equality nor unlimited economic opportunity. For that matter, their first reflex will be to shun almost every absolute. Everything in moderation (except wisdom, beauty and elegance), in well-balanced proportion and facilitating peace.

Stalin and Pol Pot revealed to us that enforced equality leads to absolute poverty and millions of murdered entrepreneurs of every kind. Whether civilian or military, bureaucratic or professional, farm or factory managers; almost everyone who tried to get ahead was killed, as well as many people innocent of any such ambition. The United States and Victorian England demonstrated how unhealthy polarization become between the rich and the rest when personal and corporate wealth is prioritized without exception. In the absence of economic moderation, the psychopaths take over both political wings, left and right, high and low, with no good outcome for innocents caught in their crossfire.

A golden mean must be pursued such that everyone lives in comfort while entrepreneurship is allowed its creativity and rightful gain, and a much healthier moral conscience prevails in most individuals and in society as a whole. This while providing the several Earths-worth of resources it will take to supply the same level of comfort to thronging billions. We need to acquire much more wisdom: the ultimate intention of Learner. 

As much for the rich as for the poor, a healthy conscience is the ultimate luxury. Compared to that, all the treasures accumulated and honorifics awarded thus far have been mere baby baubles and babble; every sacrifice and affliction endured, a sorry waste of time and energy. 

I’m not talking about the satisfaction obtained by clawing to the top of the human meat pile, or experienced by the handful of the privileged that struggles for the wellbeing of the poor. I’m talking about authentic self-worth, a clear conscience and real wellbeing well-earned because universal. Sacrificed up ‘til now on the weapons altar, those are a thousand times more valuable than the diktats and conspicuous consumption of the elite, and much more so than the proletariat’s submission to its suffering or rebellion against it.

Recent political labels assert dogma and linear thinking. They pin us like butterflies to a politico-linguistic corkboard, the better to “control” us. 

No term has ever been coined for a political entity as well-represented as a Learner. We’ve gone nameless therefore powerless because we’ve turned our back on better doctrine. We’ve expected to muddle through despite our refusal to clarify our politics.  

Our current constellation of political metaphors is a mashup of dusty buzzwords and obsolete clichés that may have held some promise in the distant past but none any longer. These vague euphemisms (left versus right, democracy, capitalism, collectivist, Republican, Democrat, phtui!) served no better purpose than to aggravate our errors and compound their ill effects. As Simone Weil attests in her pamphlet “On the Abolition of All Political Parties”, political parties serve no interest except their own institutional and personal ones; they defraud the public instead. Politics-as-usual prevents us from fine-tuning the boilerplate of civilization. This text notes that obstacle to progress and sidesteps it. 

“These principles, therefore … are to be submitted to the dispassionate and patient investigation … of those individuals of every rank and class and denomination … who have become in some degree conscious of the errors in which they exist; who have felt the thick mental darkness by which they are surrounded; who are ardently desirous of discovering and following truth wherever it may lead; and who can perceive the inseparable [connection] which exists between individual and general, between private and public good!” Robert Owen, Catechism, Cole, 205-7. Taken from The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen, by A.L. Morton, Monthly Review Press, 1963, p. 128. 

One cannot cheat at Learning, lie about it or dodge it — except to learn how to lie, cheat and duck. Bullies learn evil; victims, endurance; and progressives, if they’re lucky, patience and compassion. Everyone learns to do it better next time. Learning is hard-wired into each of us; it is our favorite game. From conception to death (and perhaps beyond), our consciousness burns to learn. 

The verb “to learn” is missing its active voice to supplement the passive one we’ve grown used to. We need to renew its meaning, from “passively absorbing information” to “exchanging information freely.” “I learned to read … My school-marm learned me to read.” In addition, the term Learning, as understood here, includes the packet of information required to get on with civilized life. I claim my share of Learning and hope to barter part of mine for part of yours. 

The terms “teaching” and “education” imply compulsion and regimentation that has little to do with the “Learning” we’re talking about here. 

While the index to Theories of Learning – A Comparative Approach has many entries under punishment, conditioning and suchlike compulsions, there are no entries under “play” and “games.” Interestingly, the only reference to play occurs in the Preface where the editors explain how much they indulged in play while they “worked on the problem” of learning. 

Even though my book may address a clueless crowd of Learners (“Who, me?”) it is especially addressed to those who identify as Learners the moment they scan these lines. 

You Learners! Rally here!

We are all born Learners; none may abstain. The body of Learners embraces toddlers and the elderly; rich persons and poor; victims and tormentors; know-nothings, academes and the self-taught alike. Age, race, sex, ability and other identity issues are one and the same on the playground of Learning. 

Once Learners recognize each other and rally to their topics of passion in keeping with their talents and interests, the stars will smile on us for the asking. 

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COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net

- YOU CHOOSE (2) -