- COSTS -

Please stop appraising peace technology by the econologic of weapon mentality. While the latter is anti-profit in the long run; the former would be much more sustainable if pursued with equal passion. A likely solution to the problems of swelling population and thinning resources.

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The greatest fool thinks himself wisest - learnermarkv
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Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

- COSTS -

We must address the question of costs – if only momentarily and with proper caution – given the misery we endure while we pay undue attention to imaginary dearth. For millennia, we’ve never found the wealth to invest in a secure abundance. Instead, we bemoan peace expenses and short-change ourselves by reneging on them, while at the same time we underestimate weapon costs and ruin ourselves to honor them.
We will pay dearly for this transformation. Essentially, the richest countries will be expected to ante up first and raise the high bids. As usual, conspirators of Greed will gainsay Learner transformation with myths of scarcity, even though as usual they are awash in liquid capital that lacks a gainful catchment except in war and its preparations. 
What choice do we have? Everything is at stake. We may endure the next decade of eco-disaster, shrinking petroleum reserves and ensuing global fascism of national-capitalist states fighting over the dregs. Otherwise, we can fall prey to annihilation this very afternoon, the victims of some military paroxysm unforeseen by us though carefully engineered by others. 
If we chose to make a concerted shift from weapons to peace, its promise to us could be a future of unforeseen abundance and elegance. 
For decades, econologicians have defended supply-side (pro-investor) economic models versus demand-side (pro-consumer) ones. Meanwhile, they’ve ignored the obvious conflict between weapon production and peace demand. 
Weapons economies encourage wild spending. They cannot achieve, much less maintain a balance between the mighty industrial potential of wartime production and lesser peacetime consumer demand. This imbalance leads to extravagant hyper-consumerism, guaranteed obsolescence, energy splurge and mass wastage whose unsustainable nature produces cycles of explosive growth-surge booms and abrupt bankruptcy crashes. 
Only weapons economies can produce enormous “surpluses” of disposable people, iron rations and military hardware as costly as it is unproductive; only they can keep up with mushrooming battlefield demands. They must produce mass quantities of zero-profit weapons and no-other-choice inductees on short notice. For no better reason than this, they subsidize overpopulation and military-industrial complexes: obsolete, harmful and toxic. 
A peace economy would favor the quality of life. By balancing peace supply and demand, it would sustain reasonable enterprise. It would provide long-lasting if modest prosperity with rare economic peaks and shallows; but not the enormous, last minute industrial output that armed hordes require once war breaks out. It would be much more stable during times of peace by avoiding market saturation under conditions of slow, no, or reversed growth. Without warfare’s requirements and their unavoidable binges and busts, our boom-crash-boom would start generating a soothing hum. 
Weapons economies in peacetime are like Formula One race cars throttled down to five MPH for days on end. They foul up, stall and require much upkeep — might as well walk. Fuel saving, peace sub-compacts would hum along during peacetime at optimal cruising speed, with minimal fuel consumption and wear and tear. Just don’t expect a sudden burst of speed from them when the general quarters alarm is flipped. 
Weapon managers could care less about civilian economies during peacetime, so long as they can tear them down like a stage set and replace them with weapons assembly lines. For all they care, the world’s peacetime economy can collapse (as it did under their care during the Great Depression and as it threatens to do so yearly). That just adds more abandoned factories ready for instant conversion to wartime production and deepens the despair of jobless military recruits and their grim parents. That turns them into willing wartime collaborators in exchange for a sturdy pair of shoes, a dry place to sleep and three hot meals a day. Pure genius.

The creation of PeaceWorld will no doubt demand substantial sacrifices. But what we value most cannot be taken from us. Freedom to choose, the craving to Learn, good will and a sense of humor: those we would retain, regardless. PeaceWorld can only enhance them. 
In Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, (Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1996), Tzvetan Todorov lists rare virtues like heroism and saintliness. He compares them with mundane survival skills like maintaining personal dignity, caring for those near and dear (as opposed to unfocussed charity) and cultivating the life of the mind in spite of horrific conditions.
The saintliest camp inmates may have perished first — and perhaps more mercifully. But Nazi concentration camp guards could not suppress the basic survival instincts of the survivors, no matter how soon they disposed of the best of them. No future adversity can, short of annihilating us. 
If our first attraction were to evil, if weapon mentality could sate itself unchecked, our forebears would have left no progeny and we wouldn’t be here to discuss this. That anyone survives today confirms the fact that most of us are kalotropes attracted to the good, the same way plants are phototrophs drawn to sunlight. 
During the idealism of youth, many fine minds dedicate themselves to the common good. Weapon mentality subverts their idealism every way it can. Conversely, our institutions need only network themselves for peace for those ideals to turn into dynamos of change. Sooner or later, our worst social contradictions will heal in the fresh air of peace and its sunshine of truth. 
With the consent of its proletariat, each info elite runs its own mix of peace and weapon policies. We have walked the plank over and over from peaceful decadence to weapon constraint, our choice based on a threat-distorted constellation of political metaphors. Our decision could favor ethical peace or any trash info elites use to justify their toxic and intoxicating weapon technologies.
The elite that opts for “Peace at Last” will work itself out of the job of rationing information. In so doing, it will draw near to the summit of managerial excellence. The quality of worldly leadership could not get much higher. But weapon leadership will never approach that crest of excellence, since, in armed competition with its weapon peers it a) rations good information and broadcasts mis/disinformation instead, and b) esteems “strong” realism and cold-blooded calculation over “weak” human conscience and compassion.
The usual shift from marginal peace to total war induces a switch of attitude from thrift to extravagance. Once mass killing takes priority, ideas of profit and fiscal restraint go out the window. New goals are established, priorities redefined and plans drawn up. Hang the expense! New regulations are strictly enforced. It matters less who’s VIP toes get stepped on. Overnight, flaccid institutions snap to weapon goals — or get cast aside without regret. During World War I,  British Edwardian society tore itself to pieces as did equivalents elsewhere. Millions of inductees dedicated themselves to weapon requirements, they often sacrificed everything for little or no reason. 
We must mobilize the entire war-making potential of this planet to promote lasting peace. The problems of peace merit the same doggedness of spirit and contempt for obstacles that weapon management has always claimed for itself. 
In the past, only weapon priorities benefited from such problem solving. When info elites concluded that defeat overshadowed their children, they cast aside lesser priorities and met weapon demands at all costs. Today, everybody’s child is at risk. PeaceWorld (which alone can save them) should benefit from the same kind of popular enthusiasm and its mass conscription. 
The Learner transformation of public awareness will begin very subtly. It will wind up being a grand consensus that will drive overwhelming social reforms.
Throughout history, humanity has treated its wealth “surplus” like coal to be shoveled into the perpetual blast furnace of warfare. Learners will harvest that cash crop just ahead of the next paroxysm. Like frantic farmers, we’ll bring in the sheaves at the first rumbles of the next oncoming thunderstorm. At which point, snug under the dry roof of PeaceWorld, we can celebrate a harvest festival, the same way the Jews observe the Succoth holiday of deliverance from Pharaoh. 
Almost everyone will obey their rational self-interest: the opposite of wartime self-sacrifice and propaganda-driven hatred planned from above. Once we accept the guidance of enlightened self-interest, arguments against PeaceWorld for reasons of cost become absurd. Celebration instead of sacrifice; the wealth of peace instead of weapon destitution. 
Peace technologies produce real wealth; weapon technologies, nothing more than downstream overhead and mayhem. Learner Networks will provide real wealth surpassing the returns from every prior investment, and solutions to problems that contemporary thought cannot work out properly.
 
At first, Learner Networks will be terribly vulnerable. Populations seething with weapon mentality will have to stand firm against the ultimate efforts of their old elite to stampede them into Armageddon. Quite a few people, maddened by their weapon indoctrination, will obey those ultimate summons to mayhem. 
Learner Networks will require elaborate diagnostic and defensive measures triply redundant and compartmentalized, with built-in safeguards against computer viruses, electromagnetic pulse, vandalism, mob violence, criminal tampering and sabotage. 
Learners will seek a firm but tolerant balance between liberality and security. Over-liberality set loose prematurely will engender chaos in societies soaked in weapon mentality; rigid police measures serve no better purpose. Policies that Wimps have found useful to dominate the proletariat, and Prisms, to subvert proto-elites: all of them will have to be revised or thrown out. Read Intro & Vocab (assuming you haven’t already) to grasp the meaning of these expressions. 
Learner management must be error-free from the get-go. A set of preliminary failures will not be given a second chance. Only strict adherence to the dictates of a healthy private conscience will free the majority of our efforts from error, regardless of institutional contradictions opposing them.
Throughout history, obsessed individuals invented new peace technologies with little or no official support. Info elites usually ignored these inventors and their pet projects. If they suspected that these inventions might destabilize the weapon status quo, they crushed them and their inventors without a second thought (Tesla, Reich, etc.). 
Many gifted Learners are driven amateurs sprinkled through an info proletariat reduced to indifference. Once they dispose of enough leisure time and discretionary income, they set to work on their topic of passion, often at the expense of a life others would call normal. 
They cannot be found by standardized tests, or by running children ragged through classroom obstacle courses, or by promoting rare survivors of examination hells (the Asian model). The more constraints on those people, the faster they will drop off your radar screen. They find their own interests sexier than the empty rewards of bureaucratic orthodoxy and corporate greed, much less the herd-like futility of weapon dissidence. Allergic to form-over-content pretense, they impose stratospheric demands on themselves and their creation. 
By topic of passion, I mean some specialty someone will gladly spend 10,000 hours perfecting. After that, an info elite must be crazy enough to adopt, coordinate and broadcast such discoveries. 
Most often, songs compose this way are silenced; games invented, forbidden; and exquisite toys produced, discarded in favor of rubber-stamped platitudes, homogenized mediocrity and mass-produced junk. Status quo societies promote gatekeepers whose only job is to shut Learners out and Mandarin ticket punchers who delight in suppressing them. They crush many breakthroughs, only to see them re-emerge when ideal circumstances line up once again. This grim attrition of sabotaged peace technology must stop. It’s time humanity found it voice renewed by Learner awareness and fine-tuned the dialogue between full grown energy management systems and regrown natural environments. The enormous destructive potential accumulated in the past must be repolarized to constructive Learning.


The billion children who go to bed hungry constitute the world’s ultimate pool of untapped genius. I don’t advocate their nurturing through disinterested altruism, even though that purpose is also served. I insist on it because their genes have survived centuries of lethal deprivation. As survivors of that hecatomb, they include the largest number of Learner prodigies once they’ve been properly cared for. Typical of human behavior, they are the people we need most and care for the least.
Meanwhile, sleek mediocrities play revolving doors by the million through bureaucracies either useless or openly destructive. Lacking enough love, empathy and generosity, these morality amputees are as relevant today as their predecessors were who attended the Great Universities of the European Middle Ages. 
Actually, the resemblance is remarkable between the darkest of the Middle Ages, the last century and this next one just beginning. 
On both occasions, military aristocrats and corporate clerics shuffled personnel, cash and paperwork. Both relied on monolithic elites: their fragmented clergies and nobles — our corporate bureaucrats, scientists and politicians. Both pauperized the info proletariat. Both erected phallic skyscrapers from seedbed of filthy slums to immortalize the emptiness of their dreams. Both were responsible for gross ecological, justice, education and public health blunders clearly inferior to what they could have accomplished had they honored peace mentality. Both adopted exotic languages to distance themselves from their info proletarians: their Latin and our mathematics. Both validated weapon mentality with their chosen set of pathetic weapon myths. 
The residents of both ages based their definition of reality on social fantasies: theirs, bureaucratic religion; ours, bureaucratic technology. Both eras trusted dogmas as incoherent and clueless as they were beyond dispute. They turned their back on real social and spiritual issues in favor of corporate pseudo-faith, we have corporate pseudo-entertainment: diversions equally seductive and divorced from reality. They exploited witchcraft and torched thousands of rich and eccentric old ladies as scapegoats for evils elites had obviously committed and benefited from. We have our perpetual War on the Drugged, War on the Terrorized and the most sophisticated torments our police states and penal empires can contrive. 
Both societies ground down their people with complex, expensive and filthy wars. Neither sought to avoid global war. Maximum combat was routine during both ages, whether intercontinental or village-local. Armed conflict dominated both worldviews: theirs between Muslim and Christian; ours between Communist and Capitalist. During both ages, fanatical (read psychopathic) Christians and Muslims called for Crusades and Jihads in pursuit of combatant spoils and pay. 
Eventually, this fight will sort itself out between the wealthy and their victims; otherwise between progressive city dwellers and reactionary small town, suburban and country folk (as American politics sort themselves today). More recently, global conflict has come down to that between the rich world of the North and the Southern one, poor but gifted with enormous productive potential. 
Actually, the Northern Hemisphere resembles Embassy Row in Mogadishu on a bad day. The industrial West, (including Japan, the Little Tigers of Asia, and the new Chinese elite) include the most privileged, powerful and well-armed neighborhoods of a planet in ruins. 
“After all, our street gang (career paramilitary and paracivilian bureaucrats and their supporters) appears to be the most powerful on Earth. Let’s maintain the fantasy that we have something important to lose from any better arrangement.” 
They are tempted to repeat the stale platitudes of Embassy Row of Planet Mogadishu on a bad day, and deny the fact that we could occupy Embassy Row on Planet Geneva just as easily if not more so, and be that much more magnificent in so doing. They’ve turned their back on the fortune we could share from radical transformation. See Mencius. 
Street gangs are street gangs and not much more. They will always settle for hypocrisy, criminality and tyranny. We can protest current events as much as we want, try to fine-tune our street gang and make it “nicer” until the cows come home — our results will always be the same: worse than imaginable.
The secret would be to turn Planet Mogadishu into Planet Geneva, not our street gang into a nicer one while the others remain the same. There is one transformation left for us to embark upon: we must replace weapon mentality’s sacrifice of victims with peace mentality’s celebration of Learners.
 
Under the sway of weapon management, population density and economic complexity worsen inflation and human misery. Under peace management, the same factors would multiply abundance and civilization. Note Holland and Japan where population densities boil away yet peace inspires and adorns them. 
Take Pittsburgh, for example. Not long ago, that city was famous for its bustling factories, seemingly affluent inhabitants and overwhelming social and ecological problems associated with overpopulation and industrial growth. Calling Pittsburgh a scenic town would have been a sick joke. Abruptly, its industrial base imploded and many of its laid-off workers were forced to abandon their homes. Soon thereafter, it became one of the most “attractive” cities in the United States. 
Also illustrated, how shoddy and run-down all our cities have become. We subsist in misery because we won’t let ourselves be magnificent.
 
It may be that modern humanity awaits its elimination, the same way that Dark Age peasants did. They couldn’t improve their lot until one-half of them died from the Black Plague. Survivors profited from this massive cull by offering their scarce labor for better wages. Noble birth lost some of its social significance after so many leadership slots went vacant.  These lines were written tens of years ago.
The most effective way to escape the Plague (besides a timely prescription of Cipro) is to bury oneself in a stronghold far from the madding crowd and not emerge for at least six months. Consult Boccaccio, the author of Decameron. Even though later waves of infection will snuff out additional victims. If that is your fate, bubba, there’s nowhere to run and hide. 
The personnel turnover of the Black Death – along with its shocking psychic trauma – jump-started the Renaissance. 
As did intellectual imports from China? According to Gavin Menzies, Chinese sailors, scholars and diplomats from the fleet of Eunuch-Admiral Zheng sailed as far as Cairo, the Adriatic and Venice, along with much of the seven seas. A Chinese embassy visited the Pope in 1434 and left a mass of technological, agricultural, mathematical, cartographic, and astronomical tools and information. The geniuses of the Italian Renaissance plagiarized this cultural treasure trove and improved upon it, soaking up a thousand years of intellectual heritage Europe had flunked out during the Dark Ages. 
A comet strike off New Zealand wrecked this world fleet in 1340 with 500-foot tsunamis across the Indian Ocean. Chinese eunuch officials turned their back on foreign trade and exploration, and had the remainder of the fleet scuttled just off the Chinese coast. Gavin Menzies, 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance, HarperCollins, New York, 2008.
 
Will a new pestilence to befall us? Will our descendants profit from our mass disappearance? God knows, if AIDS mutates into an aerosol infection – much the way the Plague evolved from Bubonic to Pneumonic – even a raving optimist would write off civilization within a few months. 
Mother nature seems to be rehearsing our grand finale, the way a bright kid would practice a magic trick. She’s shuffling her cards, reviewing her ways and means, making up her mind how to deal out the Death card as she has dealt it to every fleetingly dominant ecology for a billion years. Is she toying with us until we are crushed under her next discard? We should secure the best our civilization has to offer and give it its best shot to survive our sorry fate.
 
In the near future, recombinant genetic engineering will put deadly epidemics within the reach of almost anyone. Some psychopath with a little Biology training and access to a Community College lab could cook up continent-clearing pandemics — and that soon. Set your watch for the next few years! Once this cataclysm strikes, neither an Ivy League tenure nor a blue-chip stock portfolio will provide any more protection than a lifetime spent sifting through garbage. 
In that event, Learner is a blueprint for global reconstruction, presuming dazed survivors ever renormalize their lives. 
Media pundits keep echoing each other’s misgivings of impending doom. Meteor strikes, environmental disaster and high-tech warfare threaten us with multi-modal and synergistic tragedies. Could these be the by-products of our collective malevolence, astral punishment for our sins, or just the unhappy outcome of random coincidence?
Besides, the nuclear suicide of civilization shot from highly probable to a statistical certainty between the 1950 and now.  Who or what managed to avert that up until now?
 
Many UFO stories describe what seems to be some aliens' (or future post-humans’?) clumsy attempt to harvest genetic material from this planet’s biosphere before it shrivels up and blows away. Are those aliens on a reality television show, like anglers on one of those boring TV shows: “Reel ‘em in and toss ‘em back; reel ‘em in and toss ‘em back …” just to relieve their boredom and satisfy their curiosity? At any rate, almost all the fish hooked and tossed back that way die within a day or two.
Could all this hysteria have some factual basis? If our fate is mere eradication on schedule, then treat Learner as the personal entertainment I intended it to be. If not, and our destiny proves slightly less ludicrous, consider SECTION III that follows a laundry list of global chores we have neglected far too long. They demand the immediate commitment of every Learner on Earth.

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