- WHITE NOISE -

Some problems with large-scale governance.

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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

• 0:06 Any expectation of wisdom and fairness became “unrealistic.”
• 1:33 The most candid expression of Chinese weapon management, called the School of Law
• 3:48 Mencius
• 7:35 For China and other complex empires, the only alternatives seemed to be
• 8:46 Free global Learning may be the only way we can remedy our tendency to reduce fractal reality into rigid, simplistic formulae
• 9:37 developing nations will build giant, city-swallowing mega-structures

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

 - WHITE NOISE -

“Man has constantly to sum up experiences and go on discovering, inventing, creating and advancing. Ideas of stagnation, pessimism, inertia and complacency are all wrong.” Mao Tse Tong. 

Until now, governing the seething mass of humanity properly was a practical impossibility. Even the best-run States tarnished their virtue with lies, and their justice with brutality. Given the white noise blare of weapon mentality, abuse and terror became routine protocols of social control. There were so many competing demands, distractions and contradictions to deal with! Any expectation of wisdom and fairness became “unrealistic.” 

“One reason the Kennedy and Johnson administrations failed to take an orderly, rational approach to the basic questions underlying Vietnam was the staggering variety and complexity of other issues we faced. Simply put, we faced a blizzard of problems, there were only twenty-four hours in a day, and we often did not have time to think straight. 

“This predicament is not unique to the administrations in which I served, or to the United States. It has existed at all times and in most countries. I have never seen a thoughtful examination of the problem. It existed then, it exists today, and it ought to be recognized and planned for when organizing a government.” Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, Times Books, 1995, page xvii, (reprinted by permission; italics mine).

The Chinese government has often held the dubious distinction of governing ten times more people than the next largest State on Earth. No choice in the matter. No matter how badly degraded and at war with itself, its empire endured longer than any other in written history. It had also been hammered like good steel by waves of weapon barbarians.

The most candid expression of Chinese weapon management, called the School of Law, emerged during the Warring States period of weapon chaos circa 450-300 BCE. At that time, tens of millions of Chinese died in all-out warfare at each other’s hands, in ensuing famine and pestilence. Shang Yang, Prime Minister of the Chin Empire, listed just two government components: warfare and agriculture. He broke governance down into two key functions: regimenting as many killers as possible and feeding them. His so-called Legalist philosophy is akin to modern “political realism” in the West. Military robots will optimize this formula, to our total perdition.

Not bad for a nation whose warring factions buried an army of 200,000 surrendered rebels alive on two different occasions, and let famine carry off thirty million countrymen in just five short years, twice? Matchless incentives for slightly better management next time. Imagine the ghost-haunted nightmares of the leadership of the time.

Weapon mentors of the Chinese Warring States would have found congenial company comparing notes with today’s reactionaries, assuming such racist paranoids could converse freely with strangers. 

Dollar democrats can call themselves (Banana) Republican, (Corporate) Democrat, Neo-Liberal (thus corporate elitists), Conservative, Labour, Radical Populist, Institutional Revolutionary, People’s Party cadres, feudal monarchists, fascist militarists or imperial totalitarians. In their primary calculations lurks a morbid fear of war-to-the-death between the haves and the have-nots. The difference between left- and right-wingers is their projection of who will “win” this war; even though no-one, neither the rich nor the poor, ever won anything from such a stupid and destructive conflict.

This said, most Chinese political thought is devoted to peace, social harmony and a sane and sober personal outlook. The bamboo-like flexibility of Mohist and Taoist doctrines rival the best offered elsewhere. 

Weapon civilization has published stacks of works written by weapon philosophers (and not much else). Mencius stands head and shoulders above them all. His work is one of China’s greatest glories. A culture less magnificent might have discarded it as mere peace mentality. As they say in the Anglo-Saxon world: “That is not a commercial project.”

“Emperor Hui of Liang said: ‘I’ve devoted myself entirely to the care of my nation. If there’s famine north of the river, I move people east of the river and grain north of the river. And if there’s famine east of the river, I do the opposite. I’ve never seen such devotion in the governments of neighboring countries, but their populations are growing by leaps and bounds while mine hardly grows at all. How can this be?’

‘You’re fond of war,’ began Mencius, ‘so perhaps I could borrow an analogy from war. War drums rumble, armies meet, and just as swords clash, soldiers throw down their armor and flee, dragging their weapons behind them. Some run a hundred feet and stop. Some run fifty feet and stop. Are those who run fifty feet justified in laughing at those who run a hundred feet?’

‘No, of course not,’ replied the emperor. ‘It’s true they didn’t run the full hundred feet, but they still ran.’

‘If you understood this, you wouldn’t long to have more people than neighboring countries. Look – when growing seasons aren’t ignored, people have more grain than they can eat. When ponds aren’t plundered with fine-weave nets, people have more fish and turtles than they can eat. When mountain forests are cut according to their seasons, people have more timber than they can use. When there’s more grain and fish than they can eat, and more timber than they can use, people nurture life and mourn death in contentment. People nurturing life and mourning death in contentment – that’s where the Way of Emperor begins.’

‘When every five-acre farm has mulberry trees around the farmhouse, people wear silk at fifty. And when the proper seasons of chickens and pigs and [livestock] are not neglected, people eat meat at seventy. When hundred-acre farms never violate their proper seasons, even large families don’t go hungry. Pay close attention to the teaching in village schools, and extend it to the child’s family responsibilities – then, when their silver hair glistens, people won’t be out on roads and paths hauling heavy loads. Our black-haired people free of hunger and cold, wearing silk and eating meat at seventy – there have never been such times without a true emperor.’

‘But you don’t think about tomorrow, when people are feeding surplus grain to pigs and dogs. So when people are starving to death in the streets, you don’t think about emptying storehouses to feed them. People die, and you say It’s not my fault, it’s the harvest. How is this any different from stabbing someone to death and saying It’s not me, it’s the sword? Stop blaming harvests, and people everywhere under Heaven will come flocking to you.’” Mencius, p 6.

Confucianism, however, stresses political power in private and public settings. Until the advent of Communism, Chinese politics skipped administrative requirements. It relied on Mandarin ideals to impose a homogenous, centralized bureaucracy on society from top to bottom. This cookie cutter approach favored individual perfection, strong government and a rigid social cohesion through inflexible father figures and submissive subordinates at every level. 

The Chinese Communist Party is losing its mandate of heaven by abusing its poor with elite corruption, its racial and faithful minorities by fiat, and adjacent peoples (Xinjiang  Uyghurs, N. Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Tibet – all of them abused). Recent climatic disasters in China could result from this loss. Each zero-sum abuse of its national neighbors sets it a step further back from its global responsibilities. China must compulsively replicate the enlightened compassion of the best emperors in its history.

For China and other complex empires, the only alternatives seemed to be:

·       Centralize decision-making. Drive control out of the hands of those at the grass roots with the best grasp of the situation. Operate by fiat and suffer from inevitable command-control delays. 

·       Decentralize control. In the absence of efficient communications, set up competing interests against each other, pile up dearth and surplus in different regions and let parochial conflicts escalate to chaotic levels of turbulence.

·       Give up. Throughout the ages, horse, chariot and junk-borne nomads waited in the wings, eager to upend any Chinese dynasty whose devotion to militarism faltered. Recently, the first industrialized nations of the Western world stopped playing that role. 

·       When civil war did not induce the requisite weakness, some combination of famine, flood and plague would do the trick http://www.physorg.com/news198301240.html.

Even though China is famous for the diligence, genius and self-discipline of its people (quite like the French), this passive-aggressive dilemma triggered frequent bouts of warlord anarchy. The absence of valid alternatives brought on a seesaw fight between blindness at the center and decentralized rapaciousness: as was always the case with equally complex societies.

No absolutist doctrine responds well to every dilemma of the human condition. As it attempts to micro-manage the infinite complexities of human experience, it stacks up patriarchal commands “thou shalt always” and “thou shalt never” just win up derailing each other. 

Authoritarian doctrine is just a contemptible attempt to simplify very complex issues into simplistic norms of inflexible dogma. Might as well go swimming wearing cement overshoes; or, as the Chinese say: “Bind your feet to prevent your progress.”

Free global Learning may be the only way we can remedy our tendency to reduce fractal reality into rigid, simplistic formulae. Rather than jam every personality into some narrow mold of acceptable behavior; strong, flexible and coherent social frameworks will buttress the unique talents of all and sundry, clarify their aspirations, seek out and reward their passionate contribution. 

By the forecast of Learner, developing nations will build giant, city-swallowing mega-structures  of the kind Robert Silverberg described in The World Inside. A mini working model may be Paolo Soleri’s arcology, Arcosanti. 

We may witness the orderly and fair ingathering of massive populations within enormous structures set on stiletto heels, as opposed to the flatfoot sprawl of today’s cities and suburbs. In that case, outlying real estate could be restored to agriculture and climax ecology with much lower population densities. 

Personal and collective security within these giant conurbations will depend on the luxury accommodations, both physical and political, the transferees will find in their new domain. Their enthusiastic cooperation will sustain the good life. Halfway measures and cost-cutting compromises, overwritten with habitual doses of compulsion and regimentation, will bring on disasters more lethal than those wrought by the Khmer Rouge.

Likewise, the USA, China, Europe and the Tigers of Asia will help bootstrap the inhabitants of Africa, Latin America and what used to be Communist Eurasia out of the misery of their fate up ‘til now. These new Marshall Plans (the New Silk Road, among other projects) will resemble in cost and outcome the economic development plans that boosted Western Europe, Japan and the Little Tigers back onto their feet after World War II (sic). Self-interest will dictate that healthy new economies sprout from these pauperized regions. They promise enormous new markets for newly developed goods and services in both directions. 

We must develop new energy industries before the current ones choke us to death. Third World Learners will sustain this tropical front of renewal. In Columbia, the Gaviotas community offers a remarkable scale-model of native-generated transformation. See Alan Weisman, Gaviotas: A Village to Rebuild the World, Chelsea Green Publishing Co., Vermont, 1998; as well as Paolo Lugari’s blessed Gaviotas and Nader Khalili’s Dome of Rumi in Arizona. 

Learners will reproduce and refine these brilliant first efforts in millions of emergent communities. Their masterworks will enrich us beyond imagining and make us that much wiser. 

WHITE NOISE 2023 notes from top to bottom

 Straight lines, right angles and towers of boxes define us and confine us to human unfriendly hardscapes and homes, wastefully mechanized and ecocidal in the long run. However, a vast, underfunded network of architects and planners dreams of leading us out of unnatural boxes and back into living, breathing structures built for human safety, comfort and health both mental and physical.

Among those, Moshe Safdie and his Habitat 67 shine brightly. His family-friendly hillsides of boxes (found all over Israel, built in the 1970’s) should become partially domed structures using CAD and construction grade 3-D printers, either pre-fab, modular units or cast in place as practicable. Back to the Domes of Rumi, but stacked to the heights.

Office layouts and glass curtains could be stripped  off city tower frames. Instead, family housing habitat modules could be inserted  around and between utilities shafts. Leave an office floor intact every ten or twenty stories, plus retail and smalltown services (computers, town hall, rescue services, clinics) downstairs, plus pools, exercise rooms, schools, whatever is called for by that neighborhood. 

Dr. Eugene Tssui’s True Zero Building is  a model for larger, ecologically sound building projects using Revolutionary Architecture. His architectural ideas differ in content and results from ours today. His are better overall, with fewer inconsistencies, added expenses and weaknesses than ours. Retooling may be difficult, but re-Learning the entire construction industry much more so.

David Sheen promotes Uncompromising Ecological Architecture. His extremely complicated and difficult requirements are elementary to a thoughtful person. “Why aren’t we doing things his way,” you will ask yourself. Anyone living in his structures would adopt them gratefully. Such hillside and tower habitats will require much more study for simple, cheap sturdiness and life enhancement.

Modern models based on Iroquois longhouses would make excellent emergency shelters for refugees and the homeless. Arranged with proper governance, sanitation, food and water, they would help re-build shattered communities, foster small business, protect from crime and the elements. Framing and coverings should be modular and standardized for ease of installation, repair and removal. 

Large populations in famine-stricken regions should be evacuated to the nearest coast, dependable river or rainfall source, to be better housed and supplied from there. Storm resistant housing afloat should be thought through: perhaps perched on rafts of floating biomass, perhaps linked together and to shore by shared roots.

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COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net