- YOU CHOOSE 3

Pick your constellation of political metaphors: historically conformist or dreaming up 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 prisms
• 8:05 On Learner PeaceWorld, administrative responsibilities will settle to the most local level to which they can be delegated
• 12:00 the Palace Hotel just before the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake
• 13:47 Humanity and Duty must always overrule mere profit

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

- YOU CHOOSE (III) -

Strutting Prisms display their weapon psychoses for all to see; they’re unmistakable. Subtle Wimps make stealthier antagonists. The epithet “Wimp” should be political poison for a tyrant and his lovers. Beware of Wimps who call themselves Learners! Fortunately for us, Wimp elites betray themselves as follows.

They consolidate political power to the highest, most centralized summit they fantasize they can dominate. Their impulses are irrational and reflexive. They can’t tolerate the probing questions of public discourse that Learners thrive on. Learning declines, even among children of the elite, despite endless micromanagement by remote education bureaucracies. 

On WeaponWorld, skinheads in suits run crumbling weapon states. Political, economic and police terror extract submission from a disarmed citizenry. Militarized police conduct security crackdowns with no checks and balances against their abuse. “Non-lethal” weaponry makes this reflexive terrorism less controversial, even as it becomes more widespread and arbitrary. Democratic institutions become shameless facades for Conspiracies of Greed. Government officials seek omniscience by spying on everyone and everything. So-called transparency hides a methodical witch-hunt for whistle blowers, and mass deportations underline the promise of smarter migration policies. Republican policies become Democratic showpieces while the Republicans wallow in neo-Nazi psychobabble and nationwide sabotage until it gives them absolute power over the tatters that remain. Living standards rise to stratospheric heights for a privileged few as poverty crushes a swelling underclass and grinds down the dwindling remainder. 

Ripped off the land and deprived of legitimate livelihood, entire peoples become stateless pariahs hunted down like animals. Their desperate leaders accept token development aid and millions more to acquire weapons. The UN Security Council, which rules on their legitimacy, is an elite club of the worst weapon merchants. 

Meanwhile, weapon dissidents nurse their sense of inferiority: a liability more taxing than any police repression. Our passive acceptance of this disgrace strengthens weapon tyranny and demeans us all in proportion.

Not too long ago, corporate elites sliced the Earth into First, Second and Third Worlds — the better to devour it. Nowadays, those Wimps plot to slice the swollen info proletariat in two. 

1) The slaves: a drab mass of human cogs that over-consume and over-produce to meet the profit quotas of info elites. Most of us shuffle along this pathetic treadmill. We wage-slaves no longer recognize the primary objective of our forced labor: that we’re on permanent standby to arm the world for the next paroxysm of total war … whether or not that priority is rational. Otherwise, we can be incinerated or plagued in a few desperate months along with our defenseless cities, vulnerable power grids and delicate food and water supplies. 

2)  The unpeople: unemployable, untouchable, invisible and stripped of rights … pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire put it ("to motivate the others," us slaves). 

For Wimps, human rights are a marginal concern at best. When civil rights and other ethical considerations clash with weapon protocols, flagrant abuses are tolerated, promoted and officially sanctioned. The administration of President Bill Clinton specialized at this kind of sellout à la Democratic Leadership Council; his replacement Biden has gotten even better at it. Good for nothing, mind you, but slow motion military catastrophe for the nation and corresponding economic decline for the masses.

As a fashionable dissident, you could have protested against the World Trade Organization (WTO). Nonetheless, the World Village is going to need a well-ordered Bazaar to manage its global transactions. 

What we should have protested was the weapon content of the WTO (which no “activist” bothered with): its refusal to regulate military affairs to ensure regional reconstruction, restore universal justice and enforce global peace. No anti-WTO activist demanded that during Seattle’s 1999 WTO police riot. It did not occur to them or to anyone else. 

I was too busy with the nth rewrite of this book and don’t much care in any case for “social activism” as malpracticed worldwide. Besides, my few efforts in that direction fell on the deaf ears of local and global “activists” as bossy as they were clueless about constructive alternatives. Those factors they got around to protest were, as usual, second-tier considerations such as friendlier labor and environmental regulations. Weapons organizations like the WTO are sure to neglect them — at least until world peace, secured first, forces them to honor such obligations. 

Meanwhile, as if by magic, titanic peace dividends disappear down bottomless pits of financial scandal, weapon deficit, wars of corporate convenience, preventable disasters and handouts to the rich. That shouldn’t bother Learners. It will just consolidate the funds needed for PeaceWorld. Fewer gatekeepers to sweet-talk.

Insurance companies garner more and more profits by ejecting indigents from their homes, the unhealed and the mentally ill from their hospital beds. A century of centralized, IMF/Supreme Soviet-style mismanagement has nursed neo-colonial contempt for the Other. The same thinking brought forth a plethora of disasters. The demolition of the World Trade Center was their handiwork, systematically provoked but officially “unforeseen.”

A series of ecological disasters has been brought together under the term “global warming” and thus handily dismissed. Some bold scientists, carefully ignored, predicted the influence of human industry on air pollution and global warming since the 1800s. All they had to do was choke on Victorian smog and calculate its simple growth curve. https://mymodernmet.com/history-climate-change/ 

Industrialists shouted them down. As signs of global warming grew more spectacular and inarguable, that roar grew louder and better paid. Their arguments resemble the deft maneuvers of a defeated army’s rear guard: falling back on a succession of barely tenable arguments that assert the influence of human industry on global warming: 

·      doesn’t exist;

·      is a statistical blip on a flat line of environmental stability;

·      is irrelevant to natural phenomena insufficiently studied and thus unaffected by man (no need for logic); 

·      cannot be prevented economically;

·      is drowned in a flood of cosmic influences; and finally

·      repeat the above idiocies until everyone has been convinced to do nothing.

Given our leaders’ long history of inducing mass misery among select prey by “thinking the unsinkable” on the cheap (think of the Titanic, built penny ante and sailed full speed into disaster), what political legitimacy can they claim? Only that of our listless submission. 

Shifting tornadoes of military violence land here, land there… They pause long enough to devastate communities, level cities and decimate peoples. Then they spin away just as abruptly, with no one the wiser. 

Learner civilization will foster peaceful talent instead of expertise at killing. Unlike prior revolutions, there will be no call any longer for more mass violence, oppression and destruction.

The media praise inept foreign relations and inflame our fear of new immigrants. They refuse to analyze world events for content and context. Gross miscalculations and institutional blunders are conveniently ignored. Without explanation, deadpan newscasters report more and more flagrant international atrocities as minor dips in the superhighway of global morality. 

TV and movie worship thugs and bullies we wouldn’t hire to sweep the sidewalk. Reporters have exposed our leaders as hypocritical buffoons so often we’ve stopped expecting better leaders but worse miscreants instead. Newscasters have promoted their corrupt sponsors to the highest rungs of power, which must have been their principal task all along. 

If the rich and powerful are exposed and punished, it’s only because they pissed off richer superiors. Those superiors hold that a scapegoat should be thrown to the mob every once in a while, to divert its attention from their much riper misdeeds. 

Just follow along behind fictitious Indiana Jones or all-too-real Bush the Lesser (and now Trump), and catalog the infrastructure and lives they’ve wrecked. Each of them belongs in the docks of Justice. 

On Learner PeaceWorld, administrative responsibilities will settle to the most local level to which it can be delegated, including police and self-defense functions. A well-regulated World Militia – of the kind ignored in the United States despite its Constitution and practiced only in part in Switzerland and Israel – will see to local defense.

The broader the mandate of a Learner agency, the more reluctant it will be to micro-manage local affairs. By constitutional decree and universal consent, World Government will limit itself in scope and, more importantly, tax receipts. It will defer decision-making to lower levels of administration that benefit from a greater share of tax receipts to deliver well-proportioned local services. Most social problems will be handled at municipal, county and bioregional levels. This last per Joel Garreau in The Nine Nations of North America. Only the broadest tasks will be delegated to continental levels of administration and only peacemaking, globe spanning and extra-planetary projects will receive attention from the World Government. 

Learners will multiply ethnic and cultural inputs; they will reinvest in peace the massive dividends we’ve wasted on some illusion of national military security; they will turn political power, security and Learning into constitutional rights. Schools will be rebuilt to honor these principles; (see “Education as Pathology”, “Laocracy”, and “Is Ecology Constitutional?”).

Info proletariats will merge with their elites to form a Learner Commonwealth. Populations will stop splintering between well-schooled elites and dunce-head majorities. At worst, tiny info proletariats will emerge, composed of know-nothing extremists, disability-illiterates, and ideological and religious fundamentalists intent on boycotting World Peace. Nothing they do, short of violence, will reduce their share of rights on PeaceWorld. Only diagnosed psycho- and sociopaths will be filtered from power. 

Learner civilization will come to resemble the culture of Bali in its prime. With more extensive leisure time and many more mentors wiser than those today, people will cultivate their topics of passion and contribute to a mighty Learner Commonwealth. Everyone will work various temporary jobs interrupted by equivalent sabbaticals. They will live parallel, creative lives much more crucial to their wellbeing and social status. Most will learn everything they can on their topic of passion. A majority of self-taught entrepreneurs (“takers-in-between”, go-betweens) will replace tiny Conspiracies of Greed with Cooperatives of Plenty. 

While science renews its expertise, popularity and findings, the sacred will resume its rightful role in commonplace reality with the blessing of the scientific community. Spirit and science seem incompatible because faith is based on personal certitude while scientific inquiry, on collective skepticism. We should agree that those attributes are complementary, not mutually exclusive. The two will become everyday norms of worship and the arts will welcome every honest contribution.

Small but vital minorities have begun to develop most of the peace technologies we require. Few essentials need be invented from scratch, even though countless additional ones will need to be. 

This Commonwealth will not coalesce until international majorities practice info politics on a daily basis and a global scale, and until they’ve shouldered enough political responsibility to claim membership in it.

For the first time in history, Learners can pull fully serviceable, planet-spanning communications right off the shelf. This is the first time that PeaceWorld has stood a chance of success. Humanity’s past failures are irrelevant, since it lacked the fundamentals of global communication, universal cosmopolitanism, economic commonwealth, and most importantly, a global mass of well-briefed Learners. Prior failures are not valid arguments for further delay; rather they confirm the promise of peace by chaos phase shift beyond our cunning. PeaceWorld may appear beyond our reach: its impracticality confirmed by every page of our long and bloody history. But it will soon become a practical reality. The only alternative is sooner or later is annihilation… and we know it. 

Today’s dollar democrats resemble the owners of the Palace Hotel just before the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Back then, that town boasted one of the finest Fire Departments on Earth, with more trained personnel than it hires today. The hotel was built stoutly enough to shrug off the actual quake. Its design incorporated every new-fangled safety feature money could buy. 

Unfortunately, other structures roundabout had not been as well thought out. The city’s brilliant Fire Chief was among the first to die in the wreckage of his headquarters. Most of his boys were crushed under collapsing firehouses ; so was most of their shiny new equipment. Water mains burst and gas mains exploded. A post-quake firestorm engulfed the city.

Seeking to block the fire, poorly trained soldiers blew up block after block of buildings (including a big alcohol depot) with state-of-the-art dynamite, only to feed the firestorm. In an attempt to hold out the blaze, the Palace staff and parched firemen pissed away its high-tech emergency rooftop water supply — to no avail. It was a total loss despite every precaution taken during its construction. 

Twenty-eight thousand buildings were destroyed; a quarter million San Franciscans lost house and home, including all the Nob Hill mansions. For fear of crashing property values, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce lied about the extent of the carnage. It reported 478 deaths when the rubble gave up almost ten times that number of bodies.

Just as the Palace Hotel was no more fireproof than the shoddiest tinderbox next door, so the rich of today are no more secure than the poorest of the homeless around them. Everyone knows this. Irrationally, we’ve papered over our apprehensions with gloating stock market projections. Yet we suspect, in our heart of hearts, that a Learner Commonwealth may be the only sanctuary we could reach in time. 

As if from nowhere, new investment opportunities break out in rare bursts between long stretches of stagnation, like the one we’re experiencing now. A few entrepreneurs make tremendous profits by turning someone’s harebrained scheme into lucrative reality. This upcoming Learner renaissance promises more abundance than any prior growth phase in history, despite and perhaps because of the catastrophic exhaustion of petroleum reserves and the perestroika-like crash of weapon institutions that depend on them. 

Unheard-of prosperity awaits us just around the corner, provided we focus on the quality of life — and a lot less on the quantitative, military parameters of national chauvinism. “How much firepower? How many battalions? Built, trained and deployed how quickly?”

And don’t forget Mencius’ advice! Humanity and Duty must always overrule mere profit, in the same way a winning football score is trivial compared to the dedication and passion required to achieve it.

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