- COULD WE BE GOOD?

Innate human evil or ultimate good? Nature, nurture and other fine things.

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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 the notion of original sin thwarts our obligation to improve the world
• 3:22 we’ve come to a crossroads without realizing it
• 5:44 our greatness resides in shared Learning
• 14:31 human cruelty is less justifiable than that of a hungry predator
• 16:12 two myths typical of weapon mentality
• 20:16 we are the best people we can be
• 26:56 the ratio of good to bad human acts has not seemed to change throughout history
• 32:17 we occupy an incredibly shoddy world stage. Take a good look! It’s begging for transformation

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

 - COULD WE BE GOOD? –

If we rallied to PeaceWorld all at once, absolutely!

“Evolution is always experimental. All progress is gained through mistakes and their rectification. No good comes fully-fashioned ... but has to be carved out through repeated experiments and growth. The same law controls social and political evolution also. The right to err, which means the freedom to try experiments, is the universal condition of all progress.” A Gandhi quote from Raghavan Iyer’s, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford University Press, New York, 1973, p. 354. 

One of weapon mentality’s most corrosive myths is that we are all struck by some ill-defined but primeval sin, surrounded by evil because full of it. Therefore, no good may come from our effort to improve the world. We might as well surrender to public evil and seek marginal and fleeting self-improvement instead. Marginal, in reality, because we backslide with horrific ease; and fleeting because we die soon in any case, along with all our personal upgrades. Thank God, those who hone their evil must do so just as hurriedly, at least for the time being, pending medical miracles better financed in their favor…

The idea: “No good… ” is ridiculous, if you think about it. My foot needn’t be the World’s Most Beautiful Foot, nor need I spend time manicuring it, to kick trash off the sidewalk. 

Just as this sentence  ̶  whose tightening up was just as tough for me as making sense of it was for you  ̶  has no need to be perfect. Honest error can play a vital part in the scheme of things, if admitted and allowed. Perfection is not essential; excellence is.

The key difference between reactionaries and progressives? The former believe that people are innately evil while the latter hold them to be essentially good. Go ahead; ask anyone and how they voted. See for yourself.

My experience drew me to the latter conclusion. Almost everyone does the best they can under most circumstances — often heroically and at great cost. Sure, some people are rotten to the core, but they are rare on the ground (around one in twenty). Sure, everyone fails from time to time and acts shamefully. I bear my share of cringe-worthy memories. However – on the whole and more often than not – we are all pedaling as fast as we can.

Look; if evil prevailed to such an extent, we’d almost always get run over trying to cross the street. That is not the norm except in war. 

The essence of sinful error – and of other human weaknesses, for that matter – is that we can straighten them out through gradual stages of learning and self-correction. At such tasks, we are expert. In other words, progress entails deliberate evolution: personal, institutional, cultural, psychic and genetic: each one interdependent, synergistic and holistically vital. 

Which leaves us the duty to make better guesses about the links between people, things and events: what causes good or evil to increase or decrease  and their relative importance or lack of such ― not the media or the politicians, but we and our peers.

The notion of original sin thwarts our obligation to improve the world. It is not a matter of abandoning one concept for the other, but of clarifying both.

Much like the dinosaurs, we’ve come to a crossroads without realizing it. An “ideal” environment sustained them for ages, then minor changes began to flicker and the die-offs began. They ran out of time, weren’t flexible enough, found no way to trade their tons of bone, sinew and armor plate – painfully accumulated over eons – before extinction caught up with them. 

We hold some advantages over the dead owners of those monster bones. Our greatness resides in part in our ability to love one another, a trait we share with other pack-scavengers. Another critical talent may be the way we provide for the young, the sick and the helpless. Just as empathy and compassion are the ultimate expressions of selfhood in a mind fading away from old age, they are just as much a true measure of public grandeur.

To review: if the golden rule leads to vulnerable greatness, sociopathy leads to moral monstrosity but military advantage. 

In some troubled souls, mistrust and “realism” have replaced compassion. This degeneracy pegs us lower than dinosaurs that watched over each other and their young. 

Each of us, no matter how abused and abusive at this point, received some loving care earlier on, so as to survive to this day. Could most felons turn bad simply because they were not treated lovingly enough early enough? Some say the most accurate predictor of criminal misbehavior is the criminal’s history of childhood abuse, as well as abuse of their mother, before and after delivery?

Mischief is easy. Any fool can wreak serious havoc without breaking a sweat. Conversely, human nurturing takes a lot of hard work. Reducing care to economize on overheads is about as reasonable as starving to death to save on grocery bills. 

If we could tabulate the amount of violence on Earth into one sum of energy X, our wealth would equal the care we expend in thousands of X, minus the one wasted in untruth and violence. The sum of human care must always dwarf that of harm, lest we perish. 

These days, the world’s  kinetic energy of care is dangerously level with its weapons energy potential. Think about that. How many mothers’ hugs would it take to equal the energy of a hand grenade, a nuclear detonation or all those we’ve buried at great cost in silos and submarines? 

Could these ultimate weapons and their unthinkable applications be mass culture’s reaction to the personal abuse endured by its members? Do those effects form a positive feedback loop?

All in all, our greatness resides in shared Learning. Keep in mind that each generation must relearn the sum total of human knowledge; only then may some add their tiny increment before they disappear. Anything not relearned by someone must be forgotten and apparently sink into the collective superconscience for later retrieval. 

Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar postulates that a whole sub-universe of information is hardwired in us and comes online as we mature. This programming won’t initialize, however, until benign external stimuli activate our internal software. To become fully aware and sane, we must receive tender loving care. 

This is also true for psychopaths and even more so for sociopaths. Continuous supervision based on rewards is much more successful at reducing their criminal recidivism than that based on punishment after the fact. Their disease immunizes them from punishments and attracts them to rewards; it does so much more vigorously than in the case of the conscience-driven.

Unlike those doomed dinosaurs trapped in extravagant suits of armor plate, our flexible, reprogrammable brains give us the means, motive and opportunity to shed our liabilities and redefine ourselves practically overnight. It might be messy and might not work out all at once, but the possibility remains: we can do much better than we’ve done in the past. 

Learning dwarfs powerful but secondary preoccupations like sex, predation and genetic survival. These overblown drives have become the norms of scientific prejudice. They’ve served Conspiracies of Greed, the same way Social Darwinism and Predestination once did, as weapon myth propaganda to justify institutional evil. Unlike these lesser drives magnified beyond proportion, Learning is the rock bed of self-awareness and PeaceWorld. 

Historians have kept themselves busy collecting biographical tidbits of micro-history. Simplifying vast upheavals of climate, resources and civilization by dissecting the lives of a few key potentates, they reduced humanity’s opulent transactions to the whims of a few courted egomaniacs and the muffled sobs of their countless victims. 

Beginning with Herodotus and ending with today’s pundits, they wrote: “King (President, Caliph, Dictator, etc.) X decreed actions A, B and not C. His Dukes (Ministers, Secretaries, Viziers, Satraps, whatever), 1 through 6 with the exception of 4, revolted against his policies, thus provoking...” unending crises of gross simplification and biographical reductionism. 

Our acceptance of this simplification is about as sensible as packing the 460 million person-years of genius, hope and sweat humanity accumulates every day, into a few wisps of newsprint and vapid newscast for the most part repeating yesterday’s thing. 

I despise biography. Art transcends life by recording dreams into culture. Shoddy dreams, not for very long; magnificent and terrible dreams, tenderly and almost forever, compared to our brief lifespans. Art takes life’s little irrelevancies and transforms them into a holism greater than the sum of its parts. 

Biography reverses this procedure. It reduces cultural dreams to an obsessive narration of nit-picking primate politics; pecking-order torture; the growth, displacement and destruction of meat puppets; and the mindless slosh of their body fluid.

Setting aside this gloss for a moment, note that the info proletariat raises the leadership it requires through a process of organic hyper-democracy somewhat akin to that of a bee colony. The intimacy of our involvement in this procedure makes it seem more complex and subjective. 

These last few generations, dissatisfied historians have consolidated massive compendiums of correspondence and anecdotes into macro-histories. In so doing, they tried to chronicle the life and times of entire peoples over la longue durée (the long haul). History has been looked at from multi-disciplinary perspectives: epidemiology, meteorology, geoseismicity, biogeography, ecology, memetics, psychohistory, herstory and sociobiology among others. The more interdisciplinary these studies have become, the more enlightening their conclusions. They’ve dispelled a whole pack of absurdities put forward earlier and quickset in the biofilm of human culture since.

This breakup of old beliefs gives us a chill of uncertainty. We hesitate to believe in anything any longer. Decisions are less and less easy to make — too many uncertainties and neither the time nor the means to clarify them. Nonetheless, we could rewire the world to meet those requirements and permit those who share peace to come up with better alternatives at many more junctures of thought and action.

As our point of view broadens, personal idiosyncrasies shrink to irrelevance. Mere individuals merge into the crowd, and social behavior becomes easier to track. Near-identical patterns, stresses and energy flows emerge on different scales of space-time — as illustrated by chaos theory.

The dynamics of a shoreline beach would be hard to track if each grain of sand had to be followed (especially “exceptional” ones). Instead, common denominators of wind, surf and tide are worth more study. To deepen our understanding of world history, we would have to remove ourselves from comfortable, reductive contexts: the self-referential, biographical, nationalistic, piously sanctimonious, and human — even the life-as-we-know-it and the linear-entropic. 

Recent photos taken from space shift our perspective to one that reveals life-as-we-know-it as a mere luminescent pond scum writhing across a smallish blue porcelain marble varnished with a thin glaze of gas and water, orbiting serenely around a quietly ordinary star. This perspective shift lets us isolate significant aspects of history, provided we pay due reverence to a universe aglow with sacred intent. 

Remarkable things come to light at this scale of vision. Decisive incidents resonate with equivalents from the past, influence current events and distort future probabilities. Accidents of individuality, chronology and locality (that teachers make their students cram) lose their illusory significance except as place markers and shortcut jargon.

Carroll Quigley focused his historical vision on such continental scales. Diverse writers like Ryszard Kapuscinski, Rian Malan, Antje Krog and John Del Vecchio brought such reverence to their reportage. 

On the other hand, many butcher geniuses have abused this scale of vision. For example, either throw out Hitler’s Mein Kampf or don a biohazard suit before cracking it open. That creep was certifiable. He wanted to replace the Jews: the Chosen People of biblical God, with Good Germans. In so doing, he would have had to murder 1) every Jew on Earth, and 2) anyone who recalled the Hebrews from their readings of Biblical/Koranic/Occidental history. That couldn’t ever have worked.

The only thing new about this collective insanity is its insane scale of application. Otherwise, a hundred and fifty generations of psychopathic weapon mentors have invoked man-aping gods, hyperactive heroes, raw might, econologic, dialectics, national honor, bloodline purity, scientific positivism (“I’m positive you’re wrong”), post-modern nihilism and every other heady superstition they could dream up. Nazism was merely one of their more spectacular failures at socio-corporate engineering. Many more failed just as consistently before and since, since they ignored the key, sacred context. Proper devotion would have cancelled their sickly ambition and favorite genocides. 

Suffering from dizzying bouts of moral detachment and lack of empathy, they’ve argued more and more fervently for fatalistic determinism (as revealed in Elias Canetti’s cheerless Crowds and Power) and Nazi mercilessness. Their terror-driven visions have been pathetic attempts to simplify the scary complexity of the real world by throttling all life, beauty and reverence from it. 

Those deluded folk may have failed us in the past; but that is no reason to become credophobic and stop believing in anything: the fastest track back to fascism. Whatever the risk, we must cultivate our gift of vision. 

I doubt if anyone who’s read some history can use words like “humanitarian, humane and human” as analogues for “kindly, compassionate and just-not-stupid-most-of-the-time.” Typical mass human behavior is weapon-based. So far, clustered humans have failed to earn the title “civilized.” Their assemblies have almost never adhered to the good until they’d exhausted every evil. 

That’s not surprising. Veterans, athletes and professionals don’t turn into real experts until they have screwed up every other alternative repeatedly. At that point, they must accept at gut level the better way to do things and practice it until it becomes automatic, despite recurring errors, distractions and inconsistencies. Just the way humanity will set up its ultimate expressions of peace despite and because of weapons errors oft-repeated. 

Celebrate the PeaceWorld Agora’s deep thought, the way you’ve celebrated Olympic athletics!

Human cruelty is less justifiable than that of a hungry predator. Auschwitz is a monument to typical human behavior: its ritual murders re-enacted by every nation in recorded history — perhaps on a cut-down scale and a bit more pastoral, at least most often. No nation or creed can claim clean hands. Every human culture has been the craftwork of maniacs, tyrants, genocides and their weapon mentor apologists. The bovine herd of humanity has tolerated them, along with their bloody fantasies and lies, like horseflies that only compelled the occasional tail swipe. History has exalted civilizations with the bloodiest hands; it has erased from collective memory every society of exceptional peace. 

Our weapons institutions peddle a categorical world-view across a wide range of multi-media. In their drive to achieve flawless certitude, weapon mentors attempt to suck all truth, beauty and mystery from life. 

Despite the whine of chainsaw logic, its patent certainties are obvious absurdities any child can see through. Indeed, young ones see quite clearly through this adult hypocrisy. That’s why the adult world spends so much time and effort breaking their spirit and quashing their ideals while they are fragile and tender. 

We’ve witnessed contradictions like these every day. Many official truths are obviously inferior to their rejected counterparts. Our social creeds are so toxic, their adherents cannot seduce every party. It is easier to insult, terrorize and murder the Other — or allow leaders to do so on our behalf. 

We could sweep the house clean as soon as we challenged this thousand-year brainwash. Once Learners adopt Truth as their foremost inspiration and Non-violence as utmost aspiration, we may feed our unmet hunger for good and relieve our longing for it (kalotropism?).

We should defy two more myths typical of weapon mentality. 

According to the first of these subtle delusions, each of us must meet impossible demands of personal sainthood. We cannot hope to improve things until we’ve become proper saints first. Any hint of personal weakness must confirm our Kosmic Korruption. 

No-one may criticize the state of affairs without convincing his audience he’s a bona fide saint. If the authorities can stick some accusation against him, they can pronounce him unfit to comment on social issues. Since everyone has something to hide, no one may comment unless friendly authorities shield him from public attack. Anyone who defies them is at their mercy. How convenient for weapon mentors!

Thus the seeming impossibility of global improvement, at least until we’ve all become angels. In the meantime, let’s just sit on our hands and wait for Jesus to serve us the Kingdom of Heaven on a silver platter. That makes two thousand years, now, we’ve sat on our hands. 

Am I alone in tiring of that? It seems to be the sorry case.

In John 14, 2-3, Christ said, “In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, you may be also.” 

Amen, brother. 

In the meantime, it must be up to us. I come back to the Parable of the Talents. The Master left us a sum of money. Upon return, God will be happier with those who increased it rather than those who buried it so as not to lose any. It is not a question of saving one’s soul by doing nothing, but of taking risks to add to this symbolic fortune.

Meanwhile, no healthy outlet remains for the frustration that festers in our heart. WeaponWorld winds up ramming it out of us by Heimlich maneuver, in war. Behavioral repression increases with regulatory density as more and more meddlesome officials adjust the details of our lives and less room remains for risky self-expression. 

Walled-in by our incapacity, we prickle with self-loathing; cursing the faults of others, we plot futile revenge. We resent growing intrusions on our precious time and assets in the material world. As inspiration and satisfaction become more remote and abstract, real obligations and penalties skyrocket around us. Perpetually unfree, we double and redouble the chains of our enslavement. Mischief becomes extremely tempting, it seems to offer some relief from our endless round of obligation and compromise. The routine expectation of mischief gives officialdom more excuses to grind us down. 

Many wind up yearning that a vast maelstrom will come simplify their life once and for all, sweeping everything and everyone away (except for them and their beloved who, of course, deserve to live by miracle and/or obsessive survival prep). The collapse of civilizations could have resulted from amped up discontent on the part of a growing majority. In the past, many transformational wars flared up because too many people became dissatisfied with the existing “peace.” Beware what you wish for.

Life does not simplify; death does. Anyone who preaches a simplifying ideology (Learner seeks more complexity) will wind up spilling innocent blood to enforce it. Get used to that, too.

Countless young bulimics, addicts and attempted suicides – their nerves raw and aglow – have conveyed the same unheard lament: “I’m not good enough for this!” Good enough for what: coping with the unending demands of weapon mentality’s hypocritical moralism and its hyperactive evil?  

While we pre-stupefied adults decline into “maturity,” we suffer analysis paralysis from orthodoxy’s ad hominem (“to the man,” appealing to prejudice) brainwash. In turn, we punish idealistic juniors for skipping the only approved track: absolute weapon mentality. We convince ourselves that peace mentality can never be “realistic” enough. We’re supposed to mature and abandon it. 

Grow up and embrace world peace. I dare you. 

To tell you the truth, we are the best people we can be: the ultimate sentient masterpieces of DNA, the Universe and God. Get used to it — nobody can take your place and do a better job. There should be no need for radical self-improvement until our radically improved institutions support our efforts without contradiction or paradox. How could we succeed otherwise, even after trillions of trillions of reincarnations? Think of your distant past lives as endless generations of viruses, bacteria, etc.

The second unhappy weapon myth absolves our institutions. Unlike individuals, they are sacred, error-free, opaque to analysis and exempt from improvement — except every few centuries, during the paroxysms of bloody revolution. 

Even in rich countries, the accepted expression of disapproval for gross institutional blunders is a protest march: perfectly dumb, bovine and trivial, if not detrimental to the cause. If the topic in question is of any importance, this rally will culminate in a police and/or thug riot: more propaganda headlines in favor of blundering institutions.

Always remember: they are OUR institutions. 

For example, the 1999 Seattle demonstration against the World Trade Organization was said to have caused “millions of dollars of damage.” All of it was attributed to rioting by what turned out to be a perfectly legitimate, quite middle-class crowd of well-behaved protestors, at least before the police stampeded them. 

True, some pimply hooligans broke a few plate glass windows, set fire to a garbage bin or two and wrecked a few cars — which let them re-enact their Black Flag Anarchy video game in real-time. Their damage couldn’t have totaled more than a couple hundred thousand 1999 dollars, tops. I was there, before and after, and watched it unfold. Afterwards, I called the city newsroom and challenged them to itemize the famous “millions of dollars of damage.” No one bothered to return my call and I could find nothing in print to itemize that damage. 

Nonetheless, this police riot went down in official history as a vicious attack by the masses against property and propriety. The same thing happened in the same city during a mass demonstration against the Vietnam War in 1968, its reportage equally biased. 

So this is how our vaunted media commit current events to historic memory? I can only conclude: “Shoot, what a sophisticated system of political feedback!” See Learning to Dance for the Learner alternative.

“Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.” Of course, this bible quote could just as well say that Caesar owns nothing and is owed nothing. After all, what authority can Caesar claim as he strolls to his death at the knives of his acquaintances? What authority compared to God’s? The opposite meaning jams our senses. Weapon mentors worship Jesus’ torture rack and drown His sacred ideals in blood — symbolic or all-too-real, take your pick. 

What more can we expect from weapon Christianity — that venerable relief program for smug desperadoes? The other world religions are not far behind in stealth hypocrisy. Cults of abnegation do weapon mentality a great favor. They alienate the best souls from the practice of politics into listless isolation and pseudo-mystic contemplation. The only creeds more despicable than those that encourage the devout to give up on the real world are those that encourage them to simplify its problems by violence.

Yet the essential goodwill of those believers allowed their creed to endure despite its submission to the errors and hypocrisy of WeaponWorld. PeaceWorld would mix of good politics and good religion: each reinforcing the good in the other and calling the other out for its misdeeds.

Weapons officials would rather administer mighty oaths. The nastier the institution, the more rumbling its oath of allegiance and the more often invoked. Hitler was a fervent believer in potent oath-taking ceremonies that bound his people more closely to him — to their ultimate destruction. It is easier to get two peoples to murder each other by making them swear an oath to that effect. 

Weapon societies glorify suicidal self-sacrifice. Prism propaganda contradicts “live and let live” principles everyone knows are better. Paul Lackman points to the Japanese kamikazes and mass suicides of World War II (sic). However, all the sacrificial tendencies of weapon mentality should be included, regardless of the side that practices them, since they are essentially interchangeable. One of the first kamikaze pilots of the Pacific War was an American Marine who crashed his crippled plane on a Japanese cruiser during the battle of Midway. I might have made the same choice, if faced, as thousands of downed flyers on both sides were, with croaking slowly in a bobbing rubber dinghy, spending years in a torture camp or getting ripped apart by a shark.

Modern culture reveres noble warriors who endure suffering with stoicism, seek privation and make a defiant last stand against overwhelming odds. Cold bloodedly, they violate basic laws of humanity. They are hallowed because they’ve surpassed the morality of common sense. 

What state of mind would you have to be in, to drop a bomb on a bustling city center? Picture yourself flying over a major metropolis, as you would just before landing at a destination airport. See the town clearly through the porthole? Ok, now drop your bomb. You would have to be nuts. Either a desperate terrorist aggrieved by lifelong suffering, humiliation and the threat of none-too-picky death by drone; or a valiant military pilot serving out your military obligation to fulfill your dream of flying. 

The outcome would be the same. Where a fascinating crowd once thronged, a blazing ruin remains for us to clean up afterwards, heartbroken and at great expense. A total waste in any case. 

One way or another, our institutions induce mass suffering without opposition. Sufferers (most of them total innocents) are dehumanized and distanced from the mainstream. By definition, individuals are expendable, and institutions, irreplaceable. 

Peace management will do the exact opposite. From its point of view, every individual is a precious dynamo of good and evil. New social instruments will magnify good traits and channel evil ones into semi-harmless games and theatrics, fully documented. Social instruments, on the other hand, will be modified, rejected and replaced with better ones as necessary. 

Contrary to current practice, Learner news media will pay meticulous attention to the endearing qualities of each victim and none at all to the identity of the killers, their purpose or political/religious/ethnic bias. They will remain strictly anonymous psychopaths in public reporting. Journalists and World Court investigators will tabulate such details subsequently in fat reports intended for ensuing prosecution. 

Despite the righteousness of Moses, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed, the ratio of good to bad human acts has not seemed to change throughout history. Good Pagans were just as upright and numerous in proportion, back then, as good people are today. Vicious Pagans were just as obvious and numerous as today’s religious/ideological bigots and criminals. The human sacrifice they demand today, in jihad and holy war (religious, nationalist or ideological), are continuations of blood-soaked sacrifices their predecessors performed face-to-face. Many non-believers, devout atheists and situational ethicists look for which way the wind blows to their advantage. 

So we’ve never figured out how to change the ratio of good and bad human acts. None of our saints have done so, none of our Prophets have and no Savior. I doubt if anyone else will manage it. 

So what? 

We could, however, shift the quality of our actions toward the good (or the bad) end of the ethical spectrum. For example, we could strengthen the Bill of Rights and shift our society towards better ethics, or revert to official genocide and legal slavery and shift more people and their decisions toward evil. 

Thomas Jefferson enslaved himself to slavery’s abuse and hypocrisy. Thus burdened, he was a lesser man than a bigoted cracker would be once slavery were abolished. As we cannot yet claim since we are still  burdened by weapon mentality. Similarly, but in reverse, we can be the same people we are today, yet become better practitioners of the Good. We have merely to replace our weapons institutions with more sensible ones of peace.

Valid ones invite criticism and transformation. There is nothing absolutely good about our institutions. We have merely adopted them for the time being. They deserve no more devotion than fairy mushroom rings in a druid oak grove. Self-serving parasites and authoritarian nitwits tend to swarm in institutions that have gone unchallenged overlong and thus fail more and more spectacularly over time. 

You, me, we are all responsible for progress; everyone is. A healthy conscience makes no exception — unlike our sickly institutions that mass-produce exceptions and justify them. When an institution becomes so inflexible it fosters evil, it should be exposed to instant, serial correction. Evildoers should be banished from institutional power the moment they begin improvising on the themes: “But we weren’t responsible! We were just following orders, policies, profit guidelines, the competition, etc.” 

“Few things are more revealing about man as warrior than his tendency to slough off responsibility for the suffering and tragedy he inflicts. … Why can men do together without conscience things that would torment them unendurably if done singly? … 

“Seated in our living rooms, remote from action and passion, most of us like to believe that we shall never yield again to abstract hatreds… Historically, our record for stemming the tide has not been good … 

“Perhaps even worse, few of us ever know how far fear and violence can transform us into creatures at bay, ready with tooth and claw. If the war taught me anything at all, it convinced me that people are not what they seem or even think themselves to be. Nothing is more tempting than to yield oneself, when fear comes, to the dominance of necessity and to act irresponsibly at the behest of another. Freedom and responsibility we speak of easily, nearly always without recognition of the iron courage required to make them effective in our lives.” J. Glenn Davis, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York, 1959, pp. 168-169. 

The day after Nazi invaders ordered Danish Jews to sew a yellow star on their clothing, the King of Denmark took his morning ride wearing a yellow star. Many of his subjects followed his noble lead and restored honor to their defeated nation. 

This turned out to be a magnificent legend. Quite often, during the Nazi occupation, King Christian X took his morning ride on horseback downtown without escort, in order to stay in touch with his people. The Germans never imposed the yellow star on Danish Jews, but on Jews elsewhere. 

Very few non-Jews wore that fatal badge, anywhere.

The fact remains that almost every Danish Jew was hustled off to Sweden and relative safety, under the Nazis’ flaring muzzles. It was generally concluded by the Danes, that if Nazis had imposed the yellow star, the King would have been the first to wear one. If Learners could make sure every King and his court were so honorable, this book would promote monarchy. Indeed, PeaceWorld would encourage an international nobility (chosen by merit instead of inheritance) as long as it remained trustworthy and policed itself.

When you confront the common dilemma of following regulations or extending a helping hand to someone without harming others, do the latter with conviction. If you oversee such people, protect their obligation to do good. If these decisions were commonplace, many protective regulations would become redundant. If criminal employees of some institution won’t clean up their act, they cannot claim our support. Without our support, their pet institutions will collapse — regardless of the level of terror they inspire. 

It has never been a question of whether an institution (bureaucracy, government, religion, etc.) is evil; rather, whether it can or cannot, will or won’t discipline and marginalize the psychopaths attached to it like leeches on flesh.

We occupy an incredibly shoddy world stage. Take a good look! It’s begging for transformation. 

Sir Lawrence Olivier’s revenant ghost could recruit his favorite actors into a troupe of brilliant workaholics obsessed with theatrical perfection. These worthies could take weeks to rehearse their scenes and longer to perfect their costumes. But if they staged their King Lear in a closed garbage dumpster, their performance would suffer, no matter how intrepid the delivery. 

I was told by jokesters at my expense that such a scene would be worth watching. As a sad lesson in morality, perhaps? I would rather watch this Lear played close to perfection on a faultless stage. 

Misled by weapon mentality, we’ve wasted lifetimes fine-tuning our personal perfection in the midst of a global concentration camp. Once we upgrade learning, compassion, empathy, justice and nature’s wilderness enough to turn this WeaponWorld garbage dumpster into PeaceWorld worthy of our genius – and only then – our quest for self-perfection may bear fruit. Until then, we waste precious lifetimes pursuing feel-good palliatives and throwaway sainthood, simply to feel better about our sorry selves despite the continuous failure of our mores. 

Proof resides in the last few thousand years of history. Misreading the instruction of our prophets, we’ve zealously pursued nothing more than personal improvement. Despite this ceaseless quest, we’ve bungled our social schemes, suffered moral bankruptcy and invited military disaster into our households to spoil the weekend feast.

That’s nothing to joke about.

When our institutions encourage evil (the way the institution of slavery did), they lead us to worsen the common lot despite our best intentions. Once our institutions encourage us to do good more often, without compromise and free of paradox, we will act better without any need for extraordinary self-improvement. We will discover the beings we really are: well adapted to live together in peace and harmony despite our transient flaws. Once our institutions are perfected, we will find our personal improvement surprisingly advanced. 

This regrettable reversal of personal and institutional priorities arises from our common distortion of the historical point of view. From this twisted but familiar perspective, our institutions seem like granite outcrops polished by centuries of painstaking trial and error. On the other hand, each mortal life seems as ephemeral as the first raindrop on a hot tin roof. It has seemed reasonable to endow our institutions with attributes of permanence and perfection, and burden our perishable selves with nagging demands of ceaseless self-improvement. 

Learners will reverse these requirements. Our institutions are frail stopgaps jury-rigged just to get us through the last few centuries. Human traits have taken millions of years to adapt us to this world and to each other. We may transform our institutions in a matter of weeks, months or years; but the chore of changing (improving) human nature would be like grinding down Mt. Everest with a toothbrush.

The problem remains: how to redefine our institutions peacefully and thus with near-universal consent? We must recruit those who have given up in despair, and seek the consent of those who fantasize they have something important to lose in the transaction. 

How to avoid adjusting all this — with, by and for the sword?

There remains only one alternative to the pitfalls of the weapon/peace antinomy: PeaceWorld. We should introduce a better vocabulary and dialectic into our constellation of political metaphors. We must walk our talk for the first time in history and relegate weapon technology and weapon mentality to vestigial status. 

“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society … The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.” Edward Sapir, “The Status of Linguistics as a Science,” Language (Charlottesville, Va.: Linguistic Society of America), vol. 5 (1929), p. 209.

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