- WEAPON MYTHOLOGY: What idea is not mythology?

Our constellation of political metaphors is chock-full of weapon myths. What if equivalents of peace replaced them?

MAIN PAGE PRINCIPALE : WWW.WWCOVIDGM.ORG

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

• 0:06 A myth reconciles the contradictions of two worldviews and holds open the way between them
• 1:25 anyone can find a book called On War, but not its antinomical equivalent On Peace
• 3:04 The Causes of War
• 5:39 a pair of weapon myths
• 10:31 veteran suicides (please Google)
• 12:49 what little good comes from war, a well-run peace could do better
• 14:49 two more myths
• 20:59 internally peaceful scavengers operating in small packs

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

- WEAPON MYTHOLOGY -

“A myth is a unit of imagination that makes it possible for a human being to accommodate two worlds. It reconciles the contradictions of these two worlds in a workable fashion and holds open the way between them…

“Myth makes it possible to live with what you cannot endure.

“And if the myth has been learned well, it becomes a word ― a single word that switches on the whole system of comforting delusions…

“The function of a myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction. The myth proves that things have always been like this, that things will never change.” Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa, Times Books, Random House, New York, 1998, p. 250. 

The text in Learner is neither fiction nor non-. Its paragraphs form core samples of renewed peace mythology that will replace, on PeaceWorld, the weapon kind on WeaponWorld.

You might find alarming what follows. Society’s most cherished assertions are weapon myths opposed to peace. The weapon/peace antinomy corrodes human conscience the way sugary saliva melts tooth enamel and acid rain dissolves marble. 

As I toss these myths up and bat them out to you, track their flight and step under them fearlessly; don’t duck and cover your head. Only your reasoned intuition can replace the platitudes of weapon mentality. 

We can find a book called On War, but not its antinomical equivalent On Peace. This cultural chasm reveals a problem for everyone. 

According to Karl von Clausewitz, author of the proverbial text On War, (that ultimate exercise in weapon pedantry): “War is a continuation of diplomacy (foreign policy) by other means.” Might as well conclude that agriculture is a continuation of candy by other means. Check out the fortunes spent on preparations for combat, even in peacetime, versus the pittance accorded to professional diplomats. Warfare is the application of weapon technology in its pure form, the digestion of society’s potential energy into active mayhem excrement.

He reached the following conclusion in his chapter, “The Purposes and Means of War”:

“We may occupy a country completely, but hostilities can be renewed again in the interior, or perhaps with allied help. This of course can also happen after the peace treaty, but this only shows that not every war necessarily leads to a final decision and settlement. But even if hostilities should occur again, a peace treaty will always extinguish a mass of sparks that might have gone on quietly smoldering. Further, tensions are slackened, for lovers of peace (and they abound among every people under all circumstances) will then abandon every thought of further action. Be that as it may, we must always consider that with the conclusion of peace the purpose of the war has been achieved and its business is at an end.” On War, Oxford Classics, p. 32. 

If the incomparable Clausewitz had to conclude that every war must end with a peace treaty; then we must also conclude that perpetual World War will not end until almost everyone has counter-signed the PeaceWorld Constitution.

In The Causes of War, The Free Press, Macmillan Publishing Co., New York, first published by Macmillan in London, 1973, pp. 115-117, Geoffrey Blainey explains that negotiations between two diplomats resemble those between two merchants who trade privileges and obligations instead of merchandise and money. While supply and demand regulate merchant trades, diplomatic transactions are more like a barter whose rate of exchange is determined as the process unfolds. Diplomats must study their relationship very carefully to determine who is buying and who is selling and at what rate. However, they can misjudge these values for several reasons, to such an extent that no agreement can be reached except a faulty one whose only corrective is war. I must add there are so many bad alternatives compared to the few good ones, war grows inexorably on WeaponWorld.

“The real cause of war, on the contrary, is seen most clearly when it is studied in correlation with the decrease in profits, which, of course, may itself be due to the increase in population and to the diminishing productivity of the soil, but which may also manifest itself independently of these two phenomena as a direct effect of the diminishing productivity of labor [or current technology] … In other words, as Proudhon remarks, war is always the result of an economic strain which cannot be remedied by less costly and less complicated means, such as commerce or a commercial monopoly. Benjamin Constant also truthfully observes: “Men have recourse to war only when they feel that commerce is unable to secure for them what they seek to obtain by force.” Achile Loria, The Economic Causes of War, John Leslie Garner, Trans., Charles H. Kerr & Company, Chicago, 1918, p. 55.

So picture yourself going into a convenience store, cash in one hand and a pistol in the other. Everyone would act that way all the time. Should anyone buy so much as a piece of bubble gum, they and the cashier would have to decide whether money was going to change hands and how much, based on their assessment of who will win a pistol duel otherwise. 

Would this be a sane way to run a business – or an entire planet, for that matter – if a better way presented itself? 

Now, to simulate our reality of shrinking reserves of fresh water and good soil, and bloated inventories of weapons, imagine that both parties have children starving and freezing at home and, instead of a gun, everyone grasps the detonator of the bandolier of dynamite wrapped around each body, wired to explode their own and everyone else’s. 

Would any sane observer stick around – be it within a city block or on the same planet – to find out what would happen next? Could there be an alternative somewhat less surreal?

Let’s deal with the following pair of weapon myths ― very common, powerful and pernicious ones. 

First off: World Peace will not occur until the unanimity of saints has repented its sins. Nothing less than that unworkable caricature will define Peace to the satisfaction of those mythmakers. Did so many people have to improve themselves before cannibalism and slavery were stamped out? Everybody had to become a saint, first?

Sure thing, buddy.

On the contrary, PeaceWorld is likely to be messy, contentious, “political,” corrupt, tragic and subject to periodic failure, perhaps on a global scale, perhaps fatally for humanity or its civilization. Human happiness and misery might have the same sources on PeaceWorld as on WeaponWorld; in other words, mostly the bad influence of psychopaths operating openly among the rich and powerful. 

The only difference would be that organized murder would be illegal and that law will be grimly enforced everywhere. War will become less frequent, extensive, advantageous and mass-produced; it will no longer be peddled as something honorable, gainful or glorious. In the absence of war, every other form of human conflict will proliferate to fill the void. 

The second weapon myth? A peace advocate must first aspire to sainthood or be a certifiable saint already, (depending on how the auditor condemns him). “Are you human in your actions, weaknesses and failures? Does your sales pitch upset me and my prejudices? You may not speak of Peace. Do you claim to speak on its behalf like a saint? You are too ambitious, a wise-ass with a Messiah complex and unfit for the task. In any case, no need to heed your talk.” 

Peace advocates are human beings who stink when they don’t bathe; who breathe fresh air and exhale CO2 and at times bad breath; who experience needs, fears, hatred, greed and ambition like anyone else. No saintliness is required for this kind of work. It might help, but would not be mandatory. Anyone could try it.

Elsewhere in this book, I talk about the massed saints of PeaceWorld. Simply put, sainthood is not necessary for PeaceWorld, but rather in the opposite order.  Personal improvement will be more likely on PeaceWorld. On the other hand, sainthood is impossible on WeaponWorld even though it is demanded by every religion. Weapon mythology has transposed these requirements and results; the peace version would simply set them in the right order: PeaceWorld first, sainthood after.

These two myths are just as reasonable as they are harmless. Weapon liars have upheld them to confuse the conscientious, satisfy warmonger prejudices and set back peace as long as they could. We have blindly followed their lead.

Regardless of your preference, you will be made to swallow war and war will be made to swallow you. Yet we buy into this other nonsense: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” This quote, just another Latin contaminant of our constellation of political metaphors. 

That phrase was coined by the 5th Century CE Roman, Vegetius. A total of 150 copies of his De Re Militari, (On Military Matters) made it through the Dark Ages. This, despite a hecatomb of peace literature from the same period, (per Arther Ferrill’s article “Vegetius”, p. 487, in Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker, Eds., The Reader’s Companion to Military History, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, New York, 1996). 

Like other disasters, war serves no purpose other than its own. It just exudes dire consequences unforeseen. The only predictable outcome of warfare is the next round of weapon technologies even more lethal. 

War has never been short; it is perpetual. Some wars were shortened by stagey statecraft: Desert Storm, Panama and Grenada, for example. This homicide interruptus just decreases their decisiveness. Long wars are trivially conclusive; short wars, even less so. 

Weapon mythology ennobles wars no more noble than latrine buckets on death row. 

War is credited with breakthroughs in literacy, freedom, social harmony, equality and other social benefits that elites must cough up sooner or later ― if only with the utmost reluctance. Even though, in the long run, they benefit the most from that exchange. Somehow, wars constitute the most respectable form of male bonding: they turn boys into men. In reality, those mentally and physically torn apart by war are rendered voiceless and invisible as if by black magic.

Haven’t we heard these weapon myths a thousand times? Memorized them hypnotically and recited them to each other for a hundred generations? No longer would we offer up such sinister thoughts, texts, dramas and outcomes on the altar of weapon mentality. Instead, we would dedicate the Virtual Agora to peace mentality and saturate the collective superconscience with myths of peace. Anyone who pays attention could adopt this unfettered point of view and make use of it to improve the common lot. 

We should follow the lead of primal shamans. They consigned the survivors of combat to elaborate rituals of social withdrawal and purification. Nobody could rejoin the peaceful community until they had fulfilled these ceremonies. In the modern world, we ignore this subliminal venom. Unacknowledged, it curdles veterans’ psyches, turns them into walking dead: the last casualties of long forgotten  wars .

“Latest figures show that 264 [British] veterans of the 1982 Falklands war have committed suicide since the conflict, compared with the 255 who died in active service.” http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030521165439.qscyf5x8.html

Simon Gardner of Reuters wrote (on 8-19-2004) that over three hundred Argentinean veterans killed themselves since the war ― perhaps denoting the therapeutic benefit of Latin passion over Anglo-Saxon aloofness when it comes to post-traumatic stress; since there were a lot more Argentinean veterans and since they suffered military defeat and its psychological aftermath. 

Victorious or defeated, combat veterans are heart-broken because they survived the loss of beloved peers. If they find no permissible outlet for their grief, their adrenal-grenadier internal monologue echoes thus. “Since I had nothing better to do, I let the Armed (Harm) Forces squander my youth in contempt, regimentation, brutality and terror. Myself, beloved companions and countless innocents were forced to run a gauntlet of defilement, disfigurement and death. Just by participating, we endorsed all this suffering. We survivors bear fearsome blood guilt. Those who refuse to participate are even guiltier in our eyes.” 

As far as they are concerned, peace activist are the guiltiest of all because we reject the utility of war without experiencing it. As if we had to catch the plague in order to seek its cure? In so doing, we render intolerable each warrior’s burden of pain and shame. After all, shouldn’t we be grateful for the burden they shouldered? Is that not the least we can do, honor them and their pain? 

No way. Warriors have been honored to death for far too long, without any improvement for them or for us. It is time humanity took up ancient rituals of warrior decontamination and psychic decompression, instead of glorifying those who’ve dealt with abominations without purifying themselves. It is time we gathered together, reluctant warriors and confused peaceniks, to resume the ways of peace. 

What little good comes from war, a well-run peace could do better. Those who suggest otherwise run a con, consciously or otherwise. If they believe that war promotes creativity while peaceful societies stagnate, they live out a hellish nightmare. 

As peaceful tribes have managed to do in the past, we could neutralize the harmful effects of egotism, idleness and opulence. Their mythical elimination became an excuse to perpetuate mass killing, a sin forbidden by God, while the other three are not ― in case you had forgotten. 

I recall a warlike journalist who asserted how much more advanced, enlightened and brilliant warfare made the world. This is another pet weapon myth. Fearlessly (I must admit with some admiration), he visited Kosovo, Kigali and like kill boxes to fuel his otherwise insightful journalism. He collected important friends and powerful contacts at each stop. He could have chosen any one of them to settle down. Instead, he’s raising his kids in a quiet backwater in Western Massachusetts. Presumably, what he meant to say was that war is creative and enlightening for other peoples’ kids. 

Weapon managers distrust real creativity and serious Learning about peaceful topics. At best, such attributes are effeminate and debilitating liabilities; at worst, treasonous assaults against long-cherished traditions and idiot protocols. 

As for the stagnancy of peace, well: “95% of everything is crap,” as a wise guy once said; and 9.5 out of every ten people are mindless drones doomed by current “education” to intellectual do-nothing, multiplying children and the rote repetition of futile banality. Meanwhile, the others do and say everything of consequence, for better or worse. 

Learners alone, managing a truly peaceful setting, will reverse those ridiculous percentiles by serious applications of Learning. 

The list of weapon myths stretches out endlessly. We’ve recited them to each other without end. No real peace will emerge until we call a halt this ceaseless invocation ― until we recognize, defy and replace every weapon myth on the spot.

Two more myths allow people to stick their head in the sand to block out lethal hazards.

The first is the adjective “paranoid.” These days, pundits use it to describe anyone who discusses controversial and dangerous topics without paying due reverence to the rotten status quo. “Paranoid” is their shorthand for: “I was too distracted and indifferent to make a serious study of what he had to say. His proposal isn’t worth looking into. Trust me and my spineless prejudice that conforms with yours.” 

The second is “conspiracy theory.”  The CIA first proposed that phrase to replace the more pertinent “assassination theory” used by the Press right after Kennedy’s assassination. Soon thereafter, those terms were transposed throughout the Press . How very 1984 Orwellian! Now used every time info elites get away with another public murder. 

People keep lecturing me about how impossible it is to carry out a complex conspiracy involving more than a handful of individuals, especially if they hail from different backgrounds and hold diverse priorities.

Bullshit.

First, a single acronym: NSA (National Security Agency), that snake pit of conspiracies. There are, how many now, one or two hundred thousand government intelligence contractors in Washington, D.C.?

Second, a paragraph. The American U-2 spy plane program of secret high altitude surveillance went on for a half-decade, unreported by the Press and denied by everyone from the President on down. This program employed hundreds of industrial engineers, thousands of military personnel from line cooks to base commanders; hundreds of government bureaucrats and intelligence technicians; and foreign officials who authorized these planes emergency base rights overseas and transit rights through foreign air space. Yet those planes “didn’t exist” until the Soviets literally shot one down and staged a show trial of its pilot, Francis Gary Powers.

Such “impossible” conspiracies are routine for a weapon complex that includes the military, industrialists, Congress and their paid media. So why not others more devious and criminal? Especially those that leave a trail of dead and/or terrorized witnesses?

In America, there is only one kind of conspiracy, the failed kind. Bumbling amateurs commit their massive crime in broad daylight. They leave a paper and digital trail no rookie journalist could miss. They are too softhearted to kill and terrorize many witnesses who will give the whole story away without worrying about their family’s safety. Pop culture and its distorting media accept no other definition of a conspiracy.

Unfortunately, there is another sort: one in which cunning, powerful and merciless malefactors are skilled at perpetrating their own crimes and exposing those of their enemies. They and their patrons have practiced for centuries; they are experts. They can call on enormous institutional memory of criminal and police procedures. They hire the best professionals to do their dirty work. Their dirty laundry is branded Top Secret and protected by the full force of the law. They are so rich and influential that they control the mass media. They have no conscience: killing witnesses is a minor inconvenience. They have enough patience to clean up after themselves, and eager subordinates to take the fall if necessary.

Classical Greeks, at the height of their power, used to call this kind of habit oriental, effeminate and degenerate despotism. They spat on it and crushed it almost effortlessly. A few thousand of their free citizens could rout the largest horde these gangsters could bully into the front line ― no matter if it were ten times more numerous. They didn’t surrender to the Roman Empire until like-minded gangsters subjugated them at home. 

Note this almost automatic decay over time, regardless of chronology, politics, geography, religion or ethnicity. Gangsters rot out their own army by degrees. Their gangsterism (“Submit to our obvious misdeeds, or else!”) is all that remains of our vibrant freedom. Our tolerance of this corruption should shame us. Beware of its ultimate outcome!

Once the deed is done, no paper trail exists and no surviving witnesses except those terrified into silence. There is a glut of circumstantial evidence, obvious lies and loose ends no one can explain, and a pile of dead bodies instead of key witnesses; but nothing that would stand up in court. Anyone who uncovers that evidence after a lifetime’s investigation gets quietly eliminated. Blackmail and extortion endure for decades, even the threat of civil war if word gets out. Archives are sealed, incriminating evidence is confiscated and “lost” by the truckload. Most official investigators are controlled by these conspirators and their allies. They find nothing wrong, seemingly through vast incompetence, which earns them their next promotion.

This is not a conspiracy in the USA. A successful conspiracy is not a conspiracy; it is official policy, perfectly legitimate; either that or nothing at all. Anyone who says otherwise is branded a conspiracy theorist and dismissed without a hearing. What a reassuring and effortless way to mollycoddle powerful, well-connected and influential criminals. How convenient for them. What moral cowards everyone else turned out to be, in their pay and at their mercy! 

As for the conspirators, success begets success. They are tempted to outdo themselves the next time around and do so gleefully. Criminal conspiracy is their ace in the hole, their ultimate backup argument. It is perfectly legitimate, protected by official sanction, media repression and popular approval. Nothing stops them. 

We live in an age when nobody well connected is personally responsible for anything and every misdeed is someone else’s fault. Weak individuals are crushed, whether they are guilty or not, and powerful ones are free to misbehave in perfect anonymity, with perfect impunity. 

At least for the time being…

Government has always been a conspiracy, by definition. Conspiracy for war or for peace? That is the question.

A strong case can be made, that the basic achievement of hierarchical politicians is to cause mourning and suffering among their enemies and force their own people to endure additional misery. After all, the dead don’t vote or submit to law and order. Only poor, grieving survivors must choose between surrender, rebellion or unrelenting resistance under unimaginable stress. Armies don’t collapse until their suffering has reached intolerable levels of grief, hunger and agony. Body counts quantify the misery that armies must generate and their victims, endure. 

Fortunately for us, our DNA took millions of years prior to recorded history, to perfect its ethics among internally peaceful scavengers operating in small packs. Any deviation from the purest ethic, any cumulative mayhem, unfruitful criminality, false signaling or mis-allocation of scarce resources destroyed violence-contaminated packs. Operating on a razor-thin margin of survival, they had no leeway to drift far off from moral excellence. 

We may appear to be sealed in the crusted armor plate of thousands of years of military history. But this is just the rusted metal foil covering a much stronger, more ancient and flexible body of behavioral excellence. Up to us to rip off this paper-thin body cast and restore a much deeper, more supple yet atrophied core. 

The freedom we seek is not founded on some fantasy utopia (even though weapon mentors insist as much), but on the perfect freedoms our ancestors bore for a hundred thousand years. Paleolithic hunter-gatherer freedom is the political context we crave, regardless of the fear weapon mentors acid-etched with adrenaline onto our mind. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201105/how-hunter-gatherers-maintained-their-egalitarian-ways 

The spread of peace does not affect Learners alone in a vacuum. When we confront an aggressor nowadays – whether a lone thug or a military-industrial complex – we expect the Other to share our fears and weapon myths. They dictate that we hesitate to extend an overture of peace and that they reject our attempt to do so unless one of us has already been knocked down. Weapon mythology whispers the same prejudices in everyone’s ear. According to its prejudices, every attempt at peacemaking is “appeasement”: a token of weakness and betrayal that should provoke universal reactions of suspicion, hostility and aggression. 

If peace mentality prevailed in our constellation of political metaphors, we could dispel this kind of aggression (bilateral or unilateral) with common gestures and accepted formulas of reconciliation. Those wouldn’t be tokens of weakness but dependable signs of wisdom, trustworthiness and power. Any child could defuse a firefight in an instant ― the same way a beta pack scavenger stops an alpha-dominant’s lethal punishment by exposing its defenseless underbelly. 

Spontaneous peacemaking is hard-wired into every healthy adult. We have merely deprogrammed it from our minds for the time being and driven ourselves crazy in the process. 

I was inspired to sound this alarm by reading Jean Bacon’s breakthrough book, The Greater Glory, Prism Press, California, 1986. 

Thereafter, we will study and institutionalize many new talents and capabilities previously hidden, and thus unleash enormous psychic energies held in check up ‘til now. We have repressed these talents out of a rightful sense of self-preservation. If these energies had been set loose prematurely on WeaponWorld, they would have annihilated us. We are limited, these days, to hurling dead matter and powdered sewage at each other. Like our ape ancestors, our troops throw shit at each other. Despite this fecal constraint, we have achieved global levels of devastation, tap dancing just short of omnicide of our own making. 

It is only on PeaceWorld that we could secure orders of magnitude more energy without blowing up our world with it.

…

COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net