- WE CONCEIVE THE FUTURE -

Your version is as valid as mine. Let’s shape ours together.

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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 for better or worse, we “program” our reality
• 4:49 noetics and paranormal talents
• 6:19 complex societies
• 7:53 weapon and peace dissidence

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID

From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld

Learner, begin

 
- WE CONCEIVE THE FUTURE -

Please read “The Future” first.

I have less and less faith in creeds – militaristic or mystical – that appeal to anything other than best informed self interest. Social systems are ridiculous that attempt to turn the masses into saints. Those that rely on force, terror and the law (the most organized form of terror) are perverse and thus self-defeating.

No matter how “sophisticated” we become in the future, turbulent mind/universe interactions will outpace our ego-driven representations of them. 

Could this turbulence drift us into more promising fisheries? For example, could art, dreams, wishes, blessings and curses influence the world as much as worldly routines? 

Primal humans “made up” their story and image of the world by naming the ancestors they could recall or dream up, along with significant events from their lives. They recited these epic feats of memory to each other around the evening campfire as a timeline and a scrolling map. That was the infotainment of the day. See Genesis:

“In the beginning, there was the word.” John 1:1, the Bible.

In The Anatomy of Restlessness, Richard Chatwin discussed a fascinating endowment. Some Bushmen could translate snippets of each other’s “naming songs,” even though their dialects were mutual babble. The protagonists lived at opposite ends of the Australian continent; they spoke two dialects (out of 500) separated by a thousand miles. Yet one listener could picture a familiar landscape of the other’s tale just by the cadence and rhythm of his narration. The same providential occurrence befell me. An African TV evangelist recited the Lord’s Prayer in his language that I couldn’t identify much less understand, but the cadence of his speech was unmistakable. Spoken in any language: Allah Akbar!

For better or worse, we “program” our reality by repeating to ourselves: “I deserve that joy; I hope it happens” or “I’ll never succeed at this; it’s bound to fail” and suchlike incantations affirmative or negative. Subconsciously, we project our reality through speech and thought. We imitate our parents and mentors who taught us what notions were acceptable and how to recite them. Thus are transmitted the sins of the fathers unto the seventy-seventh generation. 

Traditional and thus more rigid faiths invoke this “New Age” programming with equal fervor. Even though they reject New Age doctrine, they misuse it as prayer in church, which Jesus specifically forbade (see Matthew 6-5 in the Bible). 

His teachings seem more “New Age” than all of them put together; more venerable, cross-cultural and universal than the exclusionary ceremonies of newer, more restrictive and jealous mass monotheisms. In a way, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other thousand-year cults appear to be mere sprouts oozing the green sap of envy, cursing earlier wisdom instead of worshiping the best of what they share. 

“New Age” has become a weapon-distorted insult; like the idiot catch-phrase “politically correct,” one of the last arrogant self-dispensations that suppressed bigots can get away with these days. Learners will replace the former with a neutral and benign expression like “primal” or something else, and treat the latter as worthless: the latest sociopath summons to mayhem.

I would rather recite the Lord’s Prayer at home by myself, in accordance with Jesus’ specific instruction in Matthew 6. This type of prayer has led me to believe that I may achieve personal salvation by reincarnating into Christ's lifetime the next time I die. I console myself with Christ’s pledge of ultimate flight from this vale of tears soon to become once again charnel house, famine site and Bedlam of plague. 

Writing Learner serves me as a focal point of meditation. 

Jesus’ commandment to “Love your enemy” may have been His best effort to cleanse our universe. If, instead, we shout insults and swing elbows at each other until aggression becomes the norm, then criminality (worse yet, lawful sociopathy) must rebound along with injustice, pollution and warfare. 

I believe that if someone guns me down, I must return as the shooter. He'll come back too, to be shot down by me. Or, who knows? One of us may find a way to interrupt the cycle of destruction. And if I shoot or torture someone else, I must come back as the victim. There is no escape from this fate except, perhaps, in Jesus’ love. 

Speaking as the hopeless egotist I am, how can I not love myself, even if only cloaked in another’s incarnation? 

Could we wish for a world of human harmony and prepare ourselves to establish it? In that new world so alien to our way of thinking, everyone’s primary needs and comforts would be met as a sacrament, with wealth left over to pile up “unused” in the form of climax biohabitat and aquifers topped off with clean fossil water. 

In your estimation, what would seem more sustainable and “realistic?” Since we should not pray for things and circumstances, but only recite exactly the Lord’s Prayer, what should we wish for in between those prayers?

Paranormal talents, neglected these days, may have been commonplace in the past. Learner Networks and other breakthrough info technologies may allow us to re-examine those hidden talents and put them to better use. Some researchers have begun to apply scientific methods to paranormal studies. Rupert Sheldrake is the patron saint of this new science, called Noetics.

Others have explored mystical applications to post-industrial agriculture, reforestation, massive soil amendment and environmental purification. Some of them are described in Secrets of the Soil, Peter Tomkins and Christopher Bird, Harper and Row, New York, NY, 1989.

Assuming we cast aside our clever omnicide toys, this new path of inquiry may boost our energy manipulations to greater orders of magnitude and enrich us sustainably. As they say in aircraft engineering: “With enough extra energy, you can make a brick fly.” Or snap WeaponWorld into PeaceWorld.

Heaven help us if we persist at current practice: reinforcing weapon technology with or without added paranormal talents. Absent resurgent peace mentality, this surge of mightily awakened skills will invite extinction. We would hold each other hostage for a while, then wreck everything during the next pointless military showdown, or let artificial intelligence kill us off that much more efficiently. IBM punch cards charted the victims’ ebb and flow of Nazi concentration camps; now, we have the real-world military development of fictional Skynet. Now contemplate the opposite track: PeaceWorld.

Like ambitious employees in a rigid bureaucracy, complex societies promote themselves to one or more rungs above their utmost level of competence. They may operate optimally at or below that level for a while, but then some new benefit promotes their grow beyond the counsel of prudence. 

Joseph A. Tainter, (The Collapse of Complex Societies), proposes that societies grow more complex once they make a key discovery that responds to an old problem with new solutions and more auspicious resources. Once this paradigm-shift offers unforeseen new benefits (as did Islam, reciprocating engines and constitutional democracy, for example), satiated majorities favor recent gains over additional risk-taking needed to surpass current limits. These beneficiaries-turned-conservatives fossilize cultural orthodoxy and suppress further improvement in favor of reassuring simplicity.

There is no populace more reactionary than one once downtrodden that has finally found a dependable source of new benefits that can be lost once again. See Weimar Germany, Brexit England, and Trumped America. Tyrants are brought to power to maintain current levels of satisfaction at all costs. They take credit for them (even though not of their doing), and weave an astonishing fabric of lies. Eventually, subtler dollar democrats replace them. They amplify trivial matters to world-shaking importance (the World Series or the Super Bowl, for example) and trivialize significant matters into invisibility. The status quo is thus preserved beyond its useful shelf life. The longer this period stretches out, the worse the series of disasters that will bring it to a close, and the more fascistic the leaders in the meantime.

Our weapon societies have produced progressives and idealists in numbers surpassing by far their muted voice in the historic record. Only the pig-squeal of a minority of inflexible reactionaries remains to be heard, amplified by present-day psychopaths in control of world media. Weapon communities only tolerate progressive commentary insofar it obscures the ragged edges of social injustice so as not to upset special interests that profit from them. 

Regressive societies dispose of several means to neutralize the dissidents they tolerate:

·       They attract potential revolutionaries into bogus opposition organizations that betray them to police surveillance. 

·       They uncover radical ideologies and quash them by means of mental inertia, verbose indifference, insipid argument and orthodox distortions of historical analysis. Negative peer pressure is exerted in this order of complexity, depending on the intransigence of the rebel. 

·       By means of endless hot-air debates – like a roomful of monkeys would eventually type out a Shakespeare Sonnet – they reveal new, low-risk ways for weapon managers to tighten their stranglehold on the info proletariat.

As communal creativity tails off over time, social rewards shrink. Public expenses skyrocket as recent benefits wear thin. Conservatives demand more and more effort for less return. Eventually, citizens starve, sicken to death, revolt, get massacred or simply walk away. Cultures go into decline because their leaders adhere more and more strictly to some preferred norm despite the real-world’s demand for sustainable productivity through transformation. Such societies collapse when unforeseen environmental disturbances and military disasters force shell-shocked survivors to adapt to change, even though they grew up forbidden to do so in any hurry.

Otherwise, the inescapable warrior elite (along with its paramilitary and paracivilian support networks) claims greater and greater riches, even though its interventions are less and less productive. After all, its foreign adversaries have become just as well organized and lethal. It stages of increasingly destructive temper tantrums, aimed more and more often inwards as military revolt and civil war. In the long run its own civilians appear to be easier, more profitable targets. It ceases to earn its keep protecting anything, but takes its pay as a protection racket, lest it destroy the whole in armed pursuit of a quick buck, which it winds up doing in any case, multiple times. Then invasions from abroad and eco-social devastation from within finish the job. 

All that blocks this historical tendency is the rock bed conservatism and sense of honor typical of career military personnel. Yet the speedway to military chaos is paved with the military’s loathing of messy civilian culture. Their sense of honor alone prevents them from wrecking the whole. This consideration peace mentality must emphasize above all others when dealing with the military.

It is noteworthy that the American military have fiercely championed laissez-faire capitalist philosophy, even though their own lives and those of their dependents are strictly centralized, pre-planned and communistic; also that the first seeds of capitalism take root in the army headquarters of nations that have been historically deprived of it.

Learner offers its readers – assuming we become numerous enough – the opportunity to effect this peaceful transition willingly. We can do it this way now, or wait for robotic weapon routines to overtake us, rip this last opportunity from our grasp, and eat us alive.

Although cultural creativity and chaotic aggression seem antithetical, they share a resemblance with the discharge of a battery. Its polarized ions interact with their opposites (friend and foe, rich and poor, progressive and conservative, legitimate and criminal, ignorant and aware, chaosist and pacifist) to release energy either as useful current (peace, justice and progress) or as a lethal discharge (war, riot and revolt). These pairs interact in proportion to the efficiency and usefulness of the social circuit board into which they’ve been plugged. This cultural battery runs down once its depolarizing human ions become too similar; it fails when they share equal parts of abundance or misery, unless some new energetic potential re-infuses the whole system.

Learners will differentiate some communities of interest that share the same topic of passion, from many more that don’t or hardly ever. These segregations will recharge the cultural battery without having to resort to customary and shameful “us versus them” prejudices: age, class, race, nation, belief, relative wealth and political power. PeaceWorld will draw power from the polarization between ignorance and expertise across so many dimensions that everyone will consider themselves an expert at one or more topics and in most others hopelessly ignorant (compared to others more focused on that topic of passion). The power and pernicious influence of older polarizations will shrink. 

Poverty is a great incubator of genius, even if others born to it come to crave crime, repression and militant bigotry. On the other hand, those born with a silver spoon in hand often grow up in favor of chauvinistic mediocrity. Look at the United States, where a more or less well-to-do population suffers from recurrent bouts of smug severity, ungrateful exclusion and senile reaction. Most rich elites are satisfied with passive-aggressive conservatism, but they can revert to vigorous aggression if they feel threatened by change. They feel compelled to short-circuit their own imagination and that of their cultural inferiors, especially when the need for change is obvious. Socio-educational advantages and disadvantages tend to muddy these waters, but such distinctions remain significant in any case. 

As members of the ultimate weapon societies, we are coerced from our first, slapped breath until our pried-into death rattle. Irrelevant and stultifying information engulfs us without letup. We are vulnerable at any moment to arbitrary confrontation by the police community or the criminal one or both in succession. Our governors are more intent on their immutable institutions, regulations, profits and technologies than the noxious effect they may have on us. We are taught to tolerate ignorance, expect injustice and respect oppression. Personal sainthood is required of us by every creed, yet our circumstances place it beyond our reach. Hence the foreseeable fate of violence and lies winds up being our reasonable expectation. 

Even though such myths are the favorite talk of fundamentalists, Learners will reject them in their entirety. This time around, civilization will choose to rule itself more wisely. We will have to abandon cherished misgivings about radical transformation and elite fantasies that we must serve as orthodoxy’s early warning system. We will act instead (as good conscience dictates) as the creative, sacrificial and in time affluent Learners described above. 

In the meantime, the meek will inherit the Earth by accident through their suffering; and the mighty, die by the sword because of their insufferable conceit. 

Rich and poor alike, why not opt for goodwill and abundance instead?

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COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net