- KNOWLEDGE VALUE

Taichi Sakaiya wrote about perceived abundance and its objective value judgments, about dearth and its knowledge value judgments. Suggested peace technology applications of knowledge-value and how they could balance affluence and poverty, objective value and knowledge-value.

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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 the knowledge-value revolution advances two brilliant ideas
• 0:23 when some new abundance appears
• 1:09 when an interval of poverty begins
• 4:41 Knowledge-value societies embrace new beliefs fanatically
• 6:43 Knowledge-value seeks balance, survival and security in time of trouble
• 7:37 Learner lends itself to knowledge-value
• 8:06 more or less well organized pacifists

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

 - KNOWLEDGE-VALUE -

Taichi Sakaiya’s work, The Knowledge-Value Revolution, advances two brilliant ideas: 

• people readily consume abundant resources, and
• they treasure resources they consider rare. 

Societies undergo alternate states of awareness as they resonate between these two impulses.

When some new abundance appears, society organizes itself to consume it. Intellectual sophistication, objectivity and logical reductionism regulate this stepped-up consumption. The more copious the resource, the more commonplace become literacy, industrial efficiency and promotion by merit. These industrious habits reinforce the rule of law whose near universal acceptance justifies a more dependable distribution of labor, responsibilities and obligations. Complicated accounting techniques sustain frenzied transactions based on elaborate indices of exchange. Art becomes more widespread, skill-based and expressive. We consume more and more resources, heedless of their depletion. Over-consumption is its own reward, its future penalties and unforeseen consequences ignored. 

When an interval of poverty begins, the perception of abundance wavers. Hoarding, corruption, political reaction, disaster and warfare replace the prerequisites of enhanced distribution; the boasts and lies of bully leaders replace rational discourse and problem solving. As hectic productivity decays into induced poverty, society abandons its objective production criteria. Its members stop appraising things and deeds for their objective value and accept more and more subjective knowledge-value instead. Eventually, this new value system replaces objective appraisal entirely. 

I’m speaking of our perception of abundance rather than abundance itself. 

You might find yourself stranded in a desert and distressed by conditions so harsh they could bring you down with thirst and hunger. On the other hand, it might bloom with proper care or contain enormous wealth (of petroleum, for instance) though seemingly beyond your awareness and reach. 

Every cubic inch of dirt, ocean and vacuum hides energy vast beyond imagining. We have merely to find and use it without disturbing its natural hiding place: a task at which we’ve become expert through painful trial-and-error regarding simpler but just as lethal problems. 

We may evaluate a wristwatch by its accuracy, its durability, the raw materials and skills needed to make and distribute it. The price for a similar watch might rise and fall somewhat; but under normal circumstances, it will stabilize along some predictable pricing curve: a dynamic equilibrium. 

That type of value assessment might appear to be objective and “real.” While most of us would see it that way, Yuval Noah Hariri affirms, in his fascinating book, Sapiens, Harper Collins, New York, NY, 2015, that many of our bedrock social constructs are shared myths to a great extent. We share such concepts as faith, justice, the divine right of kings or equality, even though they may have no basis in fact. He is particularly sure of this with respect to money: a subjective construct based on mutual trust in a shared rate of exchange reinforced by so many cultural norms, officials and conventions that it seems to be absolutely grounded in fact when in reality it is not. 

Money allows the members of a complex society to carry out many transactions with more or less magical ease. It welds links of loyalty and cooperation between large groups of strangers, on an impossible scale if family or village intimacy were invoked instead. But it also corrodes those interdependencies of family, community and religion: relationships that served as primary sources of mutual trust and support for tens of thousands of years. Thanks to their recent replacement by the all-powerful dollar (or ancient Roman denari, or cowry shells on the African coast, or medieval Chinese paper money), we can get almost anything desired without having to develop the personal connections, skills and raw materials required to actually produce it. 

Otherwise, we could apply a special coat of value-paint, a supplementary knowledge-value. Call it a Cartier watch, the ten millionth watch ever made, a “lucky” watch, your grand-dad’s, Franklin Roosevelt’s, or one that stopped during some momentous occasion. Subjectively, we could assign more or less value than what strict consumption criteria would dictate. These criteria might transcend the importance of money and replace it with something even more ephemeral (think of ancient religious relics or modern fantasy “collectibles”).

This subjective “paint” can reflect any shade of meaning people agree to share among themselves. Their subjective “colors” can shift in dramatic and unanticipated ways, baffling the supply and demand reckonings of communist central planners just as readily as the “free market” consideration of dollar democrats.

Knowledge-Value eras evolve during periods of consumption decline and retrenchment, later known as Dark Ages. They are inception stages of new empires, mass religions and revolutions: periods of insecurity, arch-conservatism and perceived scarcity. 

On a planetary scale, cyclical meteor/comet impacts or volcanic/tectonic disturbances can spread disasters of geoseismic, climato-agricultural and epidemic proportion that could trigger this kind of Dark Age. Relatively minor disasters may have caused such transitions locally, provided the locals were isolated from outside help. 

Otherwise, we could simply run out of cheap petroleum. Given our laughable preparation for this unavoidable outcome, it would emerge as just such a catastrophe.

Knowledge-value societies embrace new beliefs with the fanaticism of an inquisitor. Once a weapon society has dismissed old elites with prejudice, it will raise a new nobility based on mythical heroism and fantasy bloodline purity of famous ancestors. 

Such nobles often derive “honor and respect” from terrorist brutality. A peaceful society would handle such “nobles” with ostracism, nonviolent resistance and well-deserved contempt — the same way the Balinese treated their Indonesian military elites and European colonial “masters” both before and after the post-colonial transition. The same way PeaceWorld will marginalize violent militants and militaristic extremists, reversing WeaponWorld’s determination to empower them and bench the pacifists.

Knowledge value practitioners expect prices to vary wildly for the same object in different settings. Such societies crave splendid nobility, romantic deeds and magical mementos. Their chroniclers despise accurate, bean-count tabulations in favor of epic exaggeration. As a rule, the best leaders withdraw from the hectic minutiae of day-to-day politics into monastic contemplation and deep philosophical discourse. In their absence, petty tyrants take the lead with their trivial, self-serving priorities. The less enlightened they are and the greater their hunger for power, the more turbulent their rivalry. Say goodbye to ancient freedoms and liberties under their tender care.

Knowledge-value seeks balance, survival and security in periods of economic stasis and decline; objective criteria encourage discovery, risk-taking and growth in times of plenty. Such risk-taking might impair survival during rough patches dominated by knowledge-value. The corners get knocked off and society grows quite round and hard, the better to bounce back.

A benign Learner Commonwealth will deal even-handedly with the convictions of knowledge-value and the efficiencies of objective consumption, denying neither one its place in the scheme of things, but tolerating no excess. Peace technology will balance cooperation and competition, reapportion stability and risk. It will induce a placid economy with few surpluses and penuries (as in hunter-gatherer communism).

Objective criteria pass through inertial incremens, as if by ratchet: two clicks forward and one click back; whereas knowledge-value ebbs and flows with the fluidity of flood-tide rollers. 

The ideas written up in Learner lend themselves to knowledge-value dissemination. Our present day mind-set fixates on weapon values; but peace-values could over-paint this flawed awareness in an eye-blink. Almost overnight, amazing social transformations will sweep away current barriers to progress. Knowledge-value fervor can advance the goals of peace much more readily than some ponderous Gant chart could track the clumsy demilitarization of our institutions, and the grudging conversion of way too many weapon stalwarts into honest Learners.

The Western World has boasted of more or less well-organized pacifists for at least the last three hundred years. What’s more, humanity has nurtured the idea of universal peace since the first time some dullard smacked a bright child for no good reason, (whether an irritated elder or a pack of brethren bullies). It has always been a question of how slowly and carefully we should approach universal peace, so impractical and unrealistic by current standards. 

Time does not seem to unfold in a steady manner. It acts more like the orbit of a satellite: slow while far away from its focal point and speeding up as it closes in on it. After something has been pursued without cease for quite some time, its approach from our stunted perspective may seem to fly on exponential wings and flash from non-existence into existence.

Rather than prescribe some sweeping dogma, Learner proposes a more gradual, non-linear approach. Our assessments of gradualism and spontaneity have turned null and void. The time for peace had not yet come and we were not ready for it; at present, it will be, and so will we. From the slightest trace of peace mentality, followed by incremental infusions of it redoubling constantly, info politics will overwrite the disinfo politics we've grown used to. 

The Learner course correction will require no führerprinzip (principle of weapon leadership: “unrestricted authority downwards and unrestricted responsibility upwards” – A. Hitler). No charismatic war leaders need apply — even though they might have overseen serious transformations in the past, some for the better but more for the worse. Essential leaders will awaken of themselves: peace-wise tribal leaders, not war lords.
 

My city library displays hundreds of linear feet of books on the art of warfare, its science and history, but less than a handful on peacemaking. Multiply by two or three times, taking into account satellite libraries in town and so on as the geographical inventory extends, the ratio of weapons to peace content surpasses a thousand to one. The war books are packed into two or three subject areas, whereas those few on peace are sprinkled in ones and twos throughout the library. 

In Afghanistan, the State Department could not scrape up enough skill, people and funding to install an honest civil administration and re-establish peace. It had to go hat in hand to the filthy rich military to beg for warm bodies, cool brains and cold cash. But there again, the necessary skills were not found. With respect to making war and dismissing peace, this is the idiot norm of our cultural priorities and our focus of attention.

The more people who examine Learner and any peace-promoting texts like it, and the more often they take up those topics in ordinary conversation, the faster this knowledge-value will take root. As its tenets become commonplace, a Commonwealth of Learner peers will emerge as if from nowhere. It will surface from the dead sea of apathy, stasis and inertia that surrounds us, the way a new continent might emerge: as tectonic and unstoppable as Hergé’s The Mysterious Star.

In the past, when the thesis of weapon orthodoxy crashed into its anti-thesis of weapon revolution, their collision synthesized a deadlier weapon technology, the same way a particle accelerator collision flashes into sub-atomic fragments. 

The time has come to chip and scour away the rust of weapon mentality, lay down a prime coat of soul and, by thick brush-strokes and simultaneous little dabs, repaint the whole with fat coats of peace.

…

COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net