- WEAPON MENTALITY 2

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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 christian fundamentalists and war
• 2:41 every child is systematically brainwashed against peace
• 5:09 the execution of power in ignorance of the facts, that corrupts
• 7:41 combat leadership
• 10:58 moral codes

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
 From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld 
Learner, begin

- WEAPON MENTALITY (II) -

St. Augustine watched as the Roman Empire dissolved before his eyes. The Goths had invaded it from East to West, annihilated every legion dispatched against them, sacked Rome and spread devastation everywhere they went. Eventually, they overran olden Spain. From there, the aptly named Vandals crossed the Med into North Africa, 80,000 strong, and took St. Augustine’s hometown, Hippo, the year after he died. 

He felt helpless to prevent the loss of everything he held dear. Can you imagine his psychic torment? Suffering from pathetic helplessness, this ultimate hand wringer etched the worst weapon myths on the bedrock of our political metaphors. He certified the inevitability of innate human evil, submission to armed authority, the divine right of kings, slavery, the surrender of personal accountability and, most perniciously, the superiority of good intentions over good results. We’ve accepted his weapon myths and their deplorable outcome ever since. One of Trump’s flunkies quote him in 2018 to justify their recent iniquity.

Don’t ask me whether Christ would have endorsed this BS, or that of the Apostle Paul or prior Popes or other Christian fundamentalists for that matter. I believe Christ summed up his trust in Christian institutions and their weapon mentors when He concluded that Peter would betray him three times before the cock crowed, and “Upon this rock will I found my Church.” His delicate sense of irony was lost on unsmiling churchmen.

The Vandals might have done us a big favor by sacking Hippo twenty years earlier and silencing St. Augustine forever. That would have shown that life goes on, for better or for worse, no matter our apprehensions of the future. 

Wasn’t Christian faith supposed to defuse these panic attacks? Wasn’t the New Testament intended to make us fearless in God and therefore heroic lovers of our fellows? Christian officials turned out to be among the most fear-crazed weapon mentors and thus our most dangerous political philosophers. Fascism and communism were just putrid outgrowths of Christianity. Christian states compare favorably with the others for the growth of their mass brutality and not much more.

Thanks to this weapon mentor’s Confessions and other publications of the same reactionary tendency, most people cannot bring themselves to challenge weapon management. They consider any invitation to do so a personal affront — not to mention a very scary proposition.

As for Christian fundamentalists who find their doctrine perfect, how do they account for the misery and exclusion it caused – two thousand years of torture and damnation – when Christ’s message of love is so perfect and universal? We need to craft critical changes for the better just to clean up our act a little, much less become worthy of our Savior. 

Every child is systematically brainwashed against peace. Proposing PeaceWorld to someone as an alternative to their WeaponWorld, that’s like challenging their potty training. Most people treat conversational gambits on the topic of world peace as if someone had farted in public. They ignore the originator if they’re polite, smile and slip away as fast as they can. If they’re really crude, they ridicule or attack him outright.

I spent a half an hour chatting with a couple about my project. Almost by reflex, they began reciting a half-dozen common weapon myths we knew by heart and they accepted as undeniable truths. I addressed those myths as best I could, pointing out how they warped reality and how the exact opposite was closer to the truth and more advantageous to peace — to which they could only agree once they had thought about it. 

They were Unitarian church congregants in Seattle, Washington: enlightened individuals who should have been at ease with the idea of world peace. Yet they were imbued with the same weapons myths I found among those least comfortable with the idea. Aversion training against peace is universal. Just examine your own childhood experience. 

They must have wondered what lunatic they’d come across.

Even “sophisticated” nations practice immoral, destructive and suicidal weapon management. We may recall comparable past-practice humanisms: cannibalism, human sacrifice and slavery. Once upon a time, those institutions were hallowed truths in the prevailing constellation of political metaphors. Anyone who challenged them was considered crazy. 

Incredibly, there is no record of a well-known classical philosopher who opposed slavery categorically, apart from Aesop : the hideous ex-slave and murdered genius fabulist. All by himself in the entire classical world? Really?

Eventually, these ancient notions were condemned more or less publicly by the still, small voice of private conscience, then let drop. Those who backed them thereafter were silenced. Might some deviants have held out for slavery or cannibalism? Sure, plenty. But, more often than not, disgusted majorities constrained them by providing other outlets for their destructive tendencies. War, for instance. It may have wound up the only acceptable outlet: a routine but ungainly way to regulate and redirect those tendencies.

Like those prior humanisms, weapon management only appears to be inevitable. We could uproot it in a short generation and forget about it, for the most part. Just a question of becoming smart enough to do so, rather than blindly reflecting its blinding glare.

We assume that government is evil because government officials are corrupt. “Power corrupts — absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Lord J.E.E. Acton. He, at least, should have known better. 

It is not so much power that corrupts as the execution of power in ignorance of the facts. More evil emanates from neglect, ignorance and unforeseen consequences than from any deliberate intent to do harm. Even the takeover of leadership by psychopaths is the outcome of collective ignorance and clumsiness. If we knew better, we’d act better, get rid of bad actors and get better results.

The gleaming-eyed psycho of popular narration is usually an incompetent weapon bureaucrat who would do better if given half a chance. It would be easy to organize things so that bungler could become more nimble. Let me explain how.

Imagine you’re blindfolded and crossing a blacked-out room. You’d be likely to trip over the furniture and come to harm. Assuming your body cells could reason among themselves, they might conclude that you enjoyed doing them harm, even though that would be the last thing you wanted. Wouldn’t matter; they’d accuse you of sinister intent anyway. Whether you wanted it to accrue or not, inadequate sensory input would make the damage inevitable. As long as you stumbled around in the dark, your hurt would increase. Eventually, you’d shrug off that pain and dismiss it as just another cost of doing business, even if it reduced you to a crawl or to cowering in a corner and giving up. 

Our info elites operate under just such constraints. Their muted awareness forces them to commit evil and forego the good, ruled by ignorance and the accidents it induces. Psychopaths are well-suited for this task. We could just as easily identify and dismiss them from the ranks of those responsible, in favor of conscientious people fully informed.

In defiance of the 1984 Syndrome, Learners will develop a clear-sighted, vigilant and responsive government with networks of locally elected Administrators affluent, attentive, and pragmatic — empowering each individual to do what they do best. They would be overseen by a hyper-vigilant central government whose forceful interventions against all but massive and exemplary incidents would be cut short by constitutional law and insufficient tax receipts. 

Once we remove the blindfolds and turn the lights back on, we’ll be amazed how many “inevitable” catastrophes, personal outrages, wasted opportunities and unforeseen consequences we can avoid. We’ll find we can take extraordinary risks in pursuit of Learning, and get away with most of them most of the time. The neutralization of most of these difficulties will translate into a lot more wealth and a lot less ill will.

Info elites sustain class privilege and economic imbalance. Everyone understands the eye-popping hypocrisy involved, the blatant contradictions nurtured, the splendid opportunities cast aside and the tremendous stakes at risk when such policies fail. We know that they must fail, sooner or later, by their very nature. Fleeting perks and personal privileges, however, silence the voice of good conscience in all but a sacrificial few. 

In the same way, concentration camp guards and death squad toughs require elite status, fancy uniforms, stricter discipline, more time off, better rations, more cigarettes and alcohol — or they’ll burn out on the job, poor dears. Guards foolish enough to raise objections were fed to the crematoria in turn or got dispatched to a slower but just-as-certain death in penal battalions on the Eastern Front. Who knows how many bad-Germans-turned-good perished in that way, forsaken by all? 

Expert small-unit leaders and terrorist chiefs require the same set of talents and skills. Both must embrace a Cause, (whatever Cause that may be), enough to sacrifice themselves and their charges for It. Both must care for their subordinates, but not about them. You know, the way prized livestock might be cared for before being butchered? Both must categorize others as expendable underlings, better-dead targets or unquestioned superiors. Both must manipulate with ease and skill the behavior and attitude of their subordinates, enforce their orders with violence, fatal violence if necessary. They must be respected (read “feared”) by their subordinates, rather than liked. 

Paul Lackman recalled behavioral studies that associated a talent for lying with leadership skills among groups of children and college students. 

If they do their jobs right, both leaders can expect the devotion of their charges. Call it esprit de corps (espree duh core, team spirit) where individuals sacrifice everything for their military unit ; or call it sadomasochistic Stockholm Syndrome where hostages identify with their captors so much they will defend them. Take your pick. The same doglike devotion arises from soldiers and kidnap victims alike, as if we had been hardwired for it.

“… Combat leadership, particularly at junior levels, involves a mixture of forceful character and a certain indifference to consequences. Lieutenants and captains are never expected to have long life spans once the shooting starts. No army can contemplate with equanimity the thought of stable, settled, emotionally middle-aged men leading platoons into enemy fire [author’s note: even though venerable garrison states often produce this kind of flabby leadership]. The German army had to walk a consistently fine line between the Scylla of emasculating its junior leaders by converting them into bureaucratized good citizens and the Charybdis of allowing panache and enthusiasm to degenerate into publicity-generating hooliganism.” Dennis E. Showalter, Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, Archon Books, Hamden, Connecticut, 1991, p. 109. By permission of Shoe String Press. 

Likewise, the ultimate basic training occurs in concentration camps. Death camps are just boot camps worked out to their logical extreme, that don’t need to produce soldiers in large numbers. Many death camp survivors became Israeli war heroes during the fighting in 1948. They threw themselves willingly into suicidal attacks that would have pinned or routed the Israeli militia never noted for its cowardice. 

In Dark Nature, Lyall Watson reviews two moral codes. The first, “genetic morality,” evolved three basic rules of animal behavior during millions of years of adaptive survival:

• do good to relatives; 
• do ill to everyone else; and 
• cheat whenever you can. 

Struggling against this genetic morality and the unspeakable horror it unleashes with tiresome regularity, is the basic morality of higher civilization, called “Tit-for-Tat, Plus”:

•  do good first; thereafter
• do whatever the other guy just did to you (for good or ill); and 
• when in doubt, revert to doing good. Despite the risks involved, the more often you obey this third precept, the likelier you will be to hook up with fellow tit-for-tat-plussers. In so doing, you will outlive gene-moralists who tend to burn out faster, both themselves and their neighbors. 

These two moral principles don’t seem to be very spiritual, compared to Jesus’ much more demanding injunction: “But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to evil.” – St. Luke 6-35, the Bible. 

 And finally, the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Keeping in mind that their preference may differ from your own under the same circumstances. Which may also lead to the cosmic conclusion that each and every one of us may relive, share and submit to every fate in existence.

 Your choice.


This tit-for-tat strategy has another pitfall, according to Roy F. Baumeister’s Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, W.H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1997. 

A perpetrator’s assessment of the evil he commits is milder than his victim’s of the same evil endured. This lopsided perception induces an escalating spiral of retaliation. 

Let’s say that I inflict (what I perceive to be) one unit of pain on you, and you perceive it as two. You inflict three units on me, to get me to stop. I feel six units and inflict a payback of seven on you, which you feel as fourteen … 

Thus murderous clan feuds can ignite over mere trifles, endure for generations and spiral out of control until some outside authority puts a stop to them. Many tyrannies grew up this way: inciting, juggling and selectively suppressing the feuds of their squabbling subordinates.

In addition, if we have suffered this kind of abuse for long stretches of time (or imagine that we have), we feel entitled to inflict harm in return, even on innocent victims, and resent any attempt to thwart us. Laboratory rats become lethargic and fatalistic after too many random punishments. Many humans replace this fatalism with a furious impulse of serial aggression.

This is the reason our legal system removes vengeance from the hands of crime victims and their surviving family members, and entrusts it instead to rich, well-insulated judges. The victims' demand for punishment usually exceeds what an impartial third party would consider fair ― assuming such a fair level of retaliation exists. By “fair,” read: “reciprocally interruptible without further escalation of violence.”

It is not surprising that humans adhere to military behaviors like well-trained dogs. Throughout history, those who defied weapon mentality suffered greater and greater refinements of ostracism, captivity, torture and murder. 

One social group was selected for elite aggression and brutality; the other, much larger, for dumb proletarian submission and its mindless escapism. One way or another, the moderate, stubbornly inquiring minds caught in between were neutralized: silenced, more often than not, and killed whenever necessary.

…

COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net

- WEAPON MENTALITY (3) -