- WARNINGS 2

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin 
- WARNINGS 2 -
Learner calls into question the choice between weapon mentality and its peace equivalent. Every moment we endure here on Earth, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we connive with this evil or defy it. Nowadays, weapon mentality dominates our thinking without serious debate. No wonder runaway weapon technologies harvest evermore victims, since everyone submits to weapon mentality without a second thought. It is also no wonder that progressive initiatives shudder to a halt in this Sargasso Sea of weapon mentality. Is there any surprise in that? This social defect is so common and predictable, we shouldn’t even feel disappointed by it. Disgusted and enraged, certainly, but not disappointed.
Once our faith shifts from weapons to peace, we may thrive along with all our progressive hopes. Until then, forget them and forget us.
Since you begin to grasp the central premise of Learner, you might reject it. 
“World Peace? PeaceWorld? Shut up! I’m through!” 
If you like to form your own opinion by triangulating all the elements of a controversy, you might ask yourself: “Why dismiss this topic without a fair hearing? While I pursued extensive studies at school, why did no-one sit me down and inform me about this just as carefully?” 
Sit still and listen and I will tell you why. Emerging from infancy into frustrated adolescence, we mature sexually (in our teens) long before we do so emotionally and socially (around age 30?). Society exploits this offset development. It offers us a predictable life cycle from adolescent rebellion to adult uncertainty, followed by the mid-life backlash of reactionary senescence. Young hostages are force-fed weapon mentality until their youthful idealism is wrecked.  
It’s funny, if you think about it. From the standpoint of physical fitness, the human body was designed to be eaten around age thirty by a saber-tooth tiger and thus avoid the painful dissolutions of old age. Under those lethal conditions, survivors endured the transports of love, sex and reproduction as adolescents. Most humans don’t fully develop their empathy and problem-solving skills until they’ve reached thirty years of age or thereabouts (some sooner, others never). The pitiless Neolithic killing ground called for near-suicidal recklessness and procreation as early teens, thus the selfish naiveté of young beasts in heat. Thoughtful elders, though revered by the brightest surviving children, were never welcome in the natural world.
If humanity tries to separate itself from nature, crush it and bend it to its will, it is merely returning nature’s favor. Nature grows things by killing them, including humankind. This antagonism will likely end badly for us, even though it is entirely understandable. See The Cosmic Serpent chapter.
 
Every cubic yard of earth, air, water and vacuum may hold all the energy in the Universe (minus 1?). Can we become clever enough to reach into this vacuum fire and warm our hands in it, yet not burn our fingertips or the world? Or will we remain parched and starving bums stumbling across a desert while untold abundance lies locked below our feet?
We are sitting down together to share a giant, super-deluxe pizza that stretches out to the horizon and beyond to infinity. It is covered with mounds of creamy cheese, aromatics and deli delicacies: all the makings of a fine pizza. This pie has got college degrees, fair housing and low infant mortality; enough abundance, justice and serenity for everyone; anything anyone could ask for and more than enough to satisfy everyone’s needs.
Too bad we only look down a one-degree slice of this pie, the sorriest of slices, unbelievably bitter. It’s been combed over at sword-point for millennia, stripped bare, scorched to charcoal and saturated with poverty, fear and suffering. All aroundit, starving children cower in stoic tears, in bunkers, hovels and refugee dumps: poster children of our failure and guilt. That’s all we can see: this WeaponWorld of ours, the blackened crust of a burnt-out world. Yearning for something better, we scramble after its crumbs with microscopic compulsion. 
The infinite leftover heaping with untouched goodies? It is out of sight as far as we’re concerned. The other 359 degrees of this cosmic pizza are walled-off from us by long-revered cultural blinkers that screened us from PeaceWorld in favor of WeaponWorld ever since we were born, more and more persistently as we grew up. So we’ve dismissed the potential abundance of PeaceWorld as mere utopian fantasy. 
Learners will depolarize those blinkers and reveal the whole pie to everyone. A bumper crop is there for us to harvest on PeaceWorld. All we have to do is focus our vision, roll up our sleeves and make it happen. That will lead almost everyone to share this incredible abundance. They’ll be too busy doing that to rip each other off for lesser gains, a military extravagance we can no longer afford.
As in Herman Hess’s Siddhartha, we may only plumb the depths of harsh asceticism, sensual pleasure, material wealth, self-revulsion and eventually, saintly complacency in our mediocrity (by default). We are forced at an early age to surrender our healthy conscience and replace it with passive-aggressive compromise and adherence at gunpoint to conspiracies of greed. We soothe our heartache with big doses of ignorance, apathy, drugs, alcohol, fanaticism, amateur obsession, professional compulsion, insanity, felony and self-destruction. Among these forms of escape, take your pick. 
Aghast, I understood King Ashoka’s torment. Standing back-to-back, we couldn’t deny our complicity in this carnage of our own making or stand idly by. We had to do something dazzling: reach out for the big brass ring dangling just beyond our wildest dreams; blow the doors off our fragile confidence, competence and self-worth; risk everything to reduce the robotic atrocity of the human condition.
 
The reform-idealism of youth is everywhere subverted. The suppression of youthful idealism is a pseudo-skill each of us is called upon to master. Shouldn’t our first priority be to nurture that creative drive? 
Do you recall when you were a bright young thing as pure as a glass of water? Do you recall the barrage of insults that blasted your childlike inquiry about peace? No matter to whom you turned – strangers or beloved, enlightened teacher or dumb brute – you ran a gauntlet of veiled insult, condescension and violence if you persisted. 
Think back. “World peace? End poverty? Feed and care for everyone with honest equity? Get real, stop dreaming, grow up! What am I supposed to do with you and your silly questions? Cut it out, now! They’ll teach you about this stuff the hard way when you get to school."
Ok. I’m summarizing years of systematic and very subtle indoctrination in a few lines of text. But you get my drift.
On this WeaponWorld of ours, a so-called “happy childhood” is the rare one during which inescapable traumas and wrongs are inflicted at a later date, at random, by strangers and by surprise.
Your timid childhood investigations were no doubt cut short by denunciation, rejection and dismissal from weapon conformists. According to them, “World peace equals crap. Act accordingly, if you know what’s good for you.”
Did this ceaseless brainwash bring you up short while you were young and impressionable? Was your conscience battered into silence? Did you suspend disbelief to avoid rejection? Did you enslave yourself to lies, regardless of their merit? Would it have mattered what race, nation or creed you sprang from? What choice did you have?
 
“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments that are inimical to [orthodoxy], and of being bored and repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.” George Orwell, 1984, the New American Library, Inc., New York, 1961, page 174.
 See The 1984 Syndrome chapter.
 
We were blocked because Everyman silenced us the moment we started asking awkward questions. Our culture subverts pacifism and military decadence as obsessively as it controls human waste and waterborne disease. Both were lethal to a primitive society and both are suppressed. We have been potty trained, as children, to invalidate peace and valid spirituality. 
One must arise from the other, don’t you think? In the absence of peace, doesn't valid spirituality suffer? In the midst of war, doesn't spirituality turn into a monstrous caricature of itself, sneering at its own hypocrisy? During what we dare call peacetime, is it not just as bad? Are we ready to yell Enough at this grotesque weapon cult? Have we ever been more ready? Will we ever be more ready?
As with our weapon religions and their relevance to God, it doesn’t matter how much mouth-jabber we dedicate to peace. We are as averse to it as to excrement. As a result, we face a host of social contradictions and zero closure, resolution or clarity. 
Sure, I understand your fear and loathing. But I can’t let that stop me. You and other Learners, rally ‘round! We’re grownups now, seemingly immune from childhood blame games. Unplug your ears – there, that’s better – and pay attention. Learner retrieves painful questions we let drop when we were kids, with or without our consent. The choice taken from us as children, Learner restores it to you.
 
It’s a sorry state we submit to as this Aquarian Age dawns. A giant, hereditary and adoptive conspiracy of arrogant bunglers invokes chainsaw logic lubricated with snake oil democracy. Fate’s idiot smile seems to favor conspirators of greed. Smirking predators gang rape Blind Justice under our disbelieving gaze; they laugh all the way to the bank, congress, pulpit and academy; then come back for sloppy seconds. Over and over, our institutions legitimize the spastic slapstick of killer primates.
Absurd clichés jam our constellation of political metaphors, despite their spectacular failure, or hadn’t you noticed? Like nitwit kibitzers around a stalled car, we keep intoning “We’re just gonna need more Love, more personal perfection, national patriotism, Christ in this world, Humanism, Science, Submission, Family Values, Free Markets; straighter politicians, fairer bullies and kinder Fat Cats.” In short, some textbook dictatorship of fathead vacuity. Even more common and worthless: “Don’t believe in nothin’, little pal, but earning and spending your next buck. Be cool, be a steady fool, like us.” 
Stupefied by all this barbarism, prophets, newscasters, technocrats and commoners bray disaster in four-part harmony. Others pray that swift Apocalypse come deliver them pretty please. Bewildered by their panic, they worsen the necrosis of this world, merely to bring on the Ending they crave.
We deny the obvious, the Miracle upon which our existence depends countless times all day long. According to this Miracle, a greater wisdom will replace typhoons of venom with windfalls of plenty. Abundance could blossom where wastelands fester now; full justice, soothe many old traumas and walk mutinous legions back to civility. 
Imagine that! Picture the best that could happen. 
Instead, weapon dissidents and reactionaries sing rounds of senile dogma. They obsess over the hated Other and plot His impossible disappearance. Others sit on their idle hands until everyone turns into an angel or until Christ comes back to deliver us (whichever comes first). 
Everything is improvised. No-one knows what they are talking about or has a workable plan except for more killing: sit still for it, prepare for it, or stir it up. The foremost privilege of promotion these days is not having to listen; just pass along without question a string of orders unmindful of reality: the recipe for guaranteed disaster. In fact, modern leadership tends to manage by disaster. It inherits criminally neglected disasters or starts new ones, then demonstrates “leadership” by waving its arms and blaming subordinates for failing to meet impossible demands. 
We are only permitted two kinds of politicians, these days: those who have quashed every good idea for generations (Democrats) and those who never met a bad idea they didn’t love (Republicans). Like a village blacksmith lusting after a first-glimpsed motorcycle, they long to tease the world apart and reassemble it to suit their fancy. But their obsolete political vocabulary won’t let them understand the world’s fundamental contradictions and opportunities. They seek to fix a 1050 Harley-Davidson with Age of Pericles terminology and horse-and-buggy tools. 
Only its absolute justice keeps our cause alive, not our necrotic habits of thought and speech. Made feverish by gangrenous ideologies that benefit no-one but special interests, we have become too credophobic to believe in anything any longer. Force-fed commercial blather, our moral gyros tumbled, we have lost our last spirit handholds and tumbled into riptides of change. 
But do not despair. Heed Jesse Jackson and “KEEP HOPE ALIVE!” As in Germany after two World Wars (sic), reactionaries will hand over a basket case for us to reanimate once it seems too late to salvage anything from the wreckage. Learner anticipates that handover, of the whole world this time. 
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- WARNINGS 3 -