Let's Prehend
A Manual of Human Ecology and Culture Design

WARRIOR ETHIC, WE, A Myth of Origins

In any political economy, there are warrior roles and producer roles, W-P. Of course, real people sift a mixture of the two. The producer components make the goods and provide the services that support life and culture. The warrior components usurp and consume the product. Those taking roles on the warrior side are called WEs. Needless to say, the warriors usually control the workers. What WEs say goes.

The warrior-producer scale describes psychological and ideological aspects as well. Because of FF and TT,(p.10) w-p may look like a dichotomy, but it's not. Its a parameter of process in which we all slide back and forth. The general set of rules of behavior that express these two roles in the real world is called `ethics'. Let's DIPL p.5, and put personal feelings aside for this objective analysis and strive to describe the underlying operating ethics.

All institutions and activities have both components, the warrior and the producer, each woven into the complex fabric of eco-politics. Such complexity invites analysis by using the D Chart of Roles. Sketch a D CHART OF WARRIOR-PRODUCERS, with warriors on the left dissociated side and producers on the right accord side. Let the vertical i measure the amount of money involved, or some other measure of intensity.

Human nature is versatile. People are predisposed by nature or nurture to be both warriors and producers, but they readily shift these roles as needed. Modifying such human behavior is an ancient skill, even more easily accomplished with modern methods.

Consider the mix of these two roles. A production system such as farming includes the warrior sub-process of killing pests. Pest control itself can also be analyzed on the W-P scale from DDT on the D side to integrated pest management the A side. Growers choose less `abstract' methods when they switch from simple pesticides to more complex organic pest control methods. They may even sacrifice some profits for long-term gains.

Of course, the two roles are symbiotic, or more accurately, parasitic. In a warrior context such as an army or law office, someone must produce the lunch, the bullets, and the paper. Countless others in the productive sector must create the wealth for the warriors to pursue. The producer sustains the warrior, the warrior depends upon the producer.

Take a historical perspective of HUGS and OOPS, imagine that warriors have conquered a community. What then? First is the rut of rape, vengeance, pillage, and destruction. But after that comes the lengthy process of control. To continue the conquest, the victors assess reparations from the vanquished, thereby punishing them for their resistance. The soldiers begin as agents of the conquering group, centrally intelligent agents, but gradually become the mercenary army of occupation.

To govern, the victors engage indigenous friendlies, raising their status from vanquished to quasi-victors. Gradually they develop whatever labor and resources they have won to enhance their profits. Essentially, the victors enslave the vanquished and plunder of their resources.

With time and tide the conquerors simmer down. They transform into carpet-baggers, managers, spies, organizers, etc. as the structure of the occupation stabilizes and integrates with the culture. These service-people form what might be called a Mercenary Army of Occupation, MAO. Eventually, this adversarial, entrepreneurial system picks its spokesmen and its folk myths. The warrior ideology softens and the original exploitative nature of the process is obscured. The Warrior Ideology, WI (pronounced "why"), is gradually replaced by the Conservative Ideology, CI (pronounced "see?"), a form of Denial Ideology, DI (pronounced "die"). CI softens WI and gradually displaces it. The system is seen as working not by warrior control, but by the "invisible hand of the market place", the HAND OF GOD, HOG, p.281) The warrior becomes invisible and is replaced by the owner and her clerks, CGMs, p.248.

Notice the timeless contraction-expansion dynamic, CED p.35: the warrior tends to sicken the situation (iD), but the organic system tends to heal the scars of poverty, enslavement, and terror (Ai). For example, the scars of the failed US revolution 1865, in spite of its intensity at that time, is healed today, almost. After more than a century, many have given up their demand for independence and joined the conquering Republicans.

The warrior, skilled at the art of conquest and indulging her triumph of the will, TW, may deliberately creates chaos and confusion. Such a ploy intensifies herself and also stresses the situation for her advantage. In chaos, the high intensity warrior has advantage over the producer, who is often distracted by her work. Promotion Of Chaos, POC, is common strategy - in global politics and family politics.

The pervasive tone of capitalism, free enterprise, and competitive individualism is clearly a warrior mode. The level `playing field' might well be called `battlefield'. The field is never level because a competitive system is not an equilibrium system, as George *Soros has pointed out, yet again. The advantage goes to the side with wealth and power. "The rich get richer....." The system may raise production but at the expense of those people who over-work and under-consume and those resources that are despoiled. Adam *Smith's "invisible hand" is essentially permission to abandon broader responsibility and adopt the Denial Ideology, DI, to ignore `external costs', `human values'.

Psychologically, the warring and the producing modes cultivate very different personal experiences. These two types are not idealist categories but ends of the D scale from the warrior to producer, W-P. Each person, like each institution, oscillates back and forth as various functions and roles develop. People change their behavior for very small incentives, and different behaviors result in different attitudes. Ecotax, p.275, makes good use of this versatility.

Systems dominated by the Producer Context, PC, are contrasted in GOLDEN MEAN, p.194. The producer's attention is on production or service. Producer values are more intrinsic. They include such satisfactions as a crafts well done, or a meal well served. To illustrate, let's analyze the production of a cake on the D scale. Starting on the right Accord side is the inherent pleasure and triumph of creating a cake. Moving a bit left is the satisfaction of presenting it to loved ones, for a slight extrinsic reward. Further left is the alienating work on the assembly line of a cake factory. Next left is the abstract task of marketing the cakes as Twinkies. Finally, the most alienating activities include the enhancement profits and, finally, contriving a leveraged buy-out. Notice that this evolution complexity enables, but does not compel, the compulsion to the abstract life toward modern abstract culture, CAL > MAC.

The worker loves her work. The implicit rewards of organic relationship between the baker and the cake, the producer and the product, the server and the served, exemplifies `objective love'(p.57). It can be subjectively experienced or not, as a matter of choice, but objectively, work is a process of loving reality.

In contrast to producer process, the warrior's attention goes to extrinsic `outer' values. Warriors value victory and spoils, or its modern form, status and profit. The warrior mode gradually progresses from the triumph of the will at victory with its sweet taste of vengeance, to the status and wealth that comes with power.

The warrior's rewards are different from the producer's: the exercise of power over others and dominion over nature. Another reward is an egotistical self-concept, an alienation of the ego from the greater self, the opposite of losing oneself in one's work. Warriors' rewards also include the alienation of self from other and of his in-group from the alien outgroup, all essential elements of the warrior mentality, up-left on the D chart. The more genteel rewards include the identification with the superior status or upper class and higher culture (by registering Republican). The warrior's original arrogance is mellowed to mere self-esteem, a deeper confidence in one's place in society. Mellower yet is a glimmer of empathy expressed as pity expressed with a hint of generosity. With luck, noblesse oblige evolves, and the warrior becomes the progressive leader, like Franklin D. Roosevelt, who saved the warrior system and conquered the world.

The warrior's high i values, by the nature of their structure as minor systems, imply not only alienation but also freedom. Freedom to deny the connectedness of all things, the freedom to evade the infinite responsibility and meaning in life. With heroic effort, the self is separated from the other, from the family, from the ecosystem, from the human condition, toward isolating individualism, toward abstract life in the CULTURE OF GHOSTS, p.326.

The ethics of the producer include harmony with reality and nature, the integration of the ego with its supporting processes and the cultivation of the awareness of this harmony through ceremony and celebration. All work is seen in its total meaning, therefore work has a transcendental importance, intimate and holistic participation in the physical world. Likewise, service enriches life as participation in the great social process. To the producer, symbols of power and wealth become little more than a distraction. The producer looses herself in whatever task is needed and is thereby enriched. In the context of such integration, the inherent healing processes of organic systems permeate every aspect of life.

The system itself manifests the warrior - producer functions. High Dissociation systems encourage man's inhumanity to man, exacerbate the life's agonies, and promote the breakdown of ecological and cultural support systems. High Accord systems alleviate the inherent conflict of ego and being, assuage the dilemmas of the human condition, and reduce the destructive effects human activity on the ecosystem.

The warrior ethic, WE, includes rules for the efficient operation of an economic battleground. A mild example is John Locke's `social contract'. Without the supporting foundation of production and service, the warrior system would quickly run out of resources. The cornucopia of earth's *GAIA can support a high level of warfare, but even warriors would not flourish after a nuclear war. War and occupation gradually mature to become the management of an adversarial culture. The battle percolates down to every nook and cranny of culture. Fortunately the opposite trend is also happening, more or less. The war recedes, the culture tries to heal by its own organic imperative, humanity and complexity try to proliferate.

The warrior ethic becomes the ethic of the occupation: producer jobs are disparaged and everyone is taught to seek `higher' positions and middle class status. This `middle class' is the mercenary army of occupation, MAO. Its job is to keep the producers producing.

In an adversarial warrior culture, producers are especially disadvantaged. They are distracted from the adversarial games because their minds are on their work. Producers often avoid the distraction of extrinsic rewards, sacrificing money for security. They are often haunted by the insecurity of their position at the hands of the warriors, especially if unemployment is kept high. Such problems leave them even more vulnerable to exploitation, certainly more timid about organizing. Furthermore, most producers lack the capital, power, culture or inclination to raise their status, even though the education system assists and recruits.

For the producer in a warrior culture, Anxiety Motivations, AMs, replace expansive motivations. "You gotta eat!" The system relies on and promotes insecurity. Most people rationalize that unemployment is caused by `the economy' or `cycles'. Denial becomes a principle preoccupation. Denial Ideology displaces the objective description of things as they are. Hence, economics becomes a dismal science, as we shall see in Chapter 6.

The tighter the warriors' egos, the more paranoid they become, appropriately. The tighter the system becomes, the more difficult is the task of denial, yet the more skilled its practitioners. Such is the fragility of contraction, FOC, and the resulting development of escalating contraction, DEC.

Let's summarize some issues of war and work, W-P:

 D  WARRIOR ETHIC  <---------->  PRODUCER ETHIC  A
     Extrinsic motivation   Intrinsic motivation 
      Goals: money, status    Goals: satisfaction, participation
     Triumph of the Will     Passion of creativity
     Attention to self       Lost in task and service
     Individualism           Teamwork
     Isolating efforts       Group support
     Discipline              Coordination
     Competition             Cooperation
     Anxiety motivation      Team spirit
     Punishment              Rehabilitation
     Adversarial             Reconciling
     Aggravation             Remediation 
     `capitalism'            `socialism'
     `Authoritarianism'      `Democracy'

SUMMARY OF THE WARRIOR ETHIC, WE,
     in US Political Culture.

WARRIOR ETHIC, Abstract Ethical Imperatives:

  1. Make things complicated in the sense of demanding, devious, and distracting: tax filing, building, recycling, consumer credit...
  2. Make trouble for people: pms = parking meter syndrome P. ?, stings, audits, tax traps, data banks...
  3. Hassle people: drug war, tax law, McCarthyism, parking, commuting, building and zoning codes, most litigations...
  4. Set up For Suffering, SUFF p. ?: competitiveness, free enterprise, school testing...
  5. Punish people, POP p. 140: make `bad guys', prisons, schools, parking, hospitals, abortion....
  6. Economic squeeze: inflation, unemployment, marketing orders, geriatric care, antiabortion, the repairman, the lawyers, the therapists, building codes and inspectors...

PRODUCER ETHIC, PE, Organic Ethical Imperatives:

A recent study in a classroom setting of how students respond to rewards establishes the basic premise: extrinsic motivations degrade the work with superficial values, a net loss of integrity, creativity and production. In the absence of extrinsic rewards, internal integrations expand and deepen the value system, increase the complexity and quantity of production, and enhance the individual's experience and culture. Therefore, the highest value and greatest health results from attention to the work itself and its social coordination and broader meaning, and is degraded by extrinsic rewards such as money, praise, status, and especially competition.

Therefore in the good and healthy society, people need to organize into task-oriented productive activities, with enjoyment of the deeper values of their work. Money should be paid for existence, not for labor or submission. As Adam Smith wrote: "Work according to your ability, take according to your need."[ Just kidding! It's from Karl Marx's COMMUNIST MANIFESTO.] Update that to: "Let each person enjoy creative, productive, and meaningful participation with minimum regard to the distribution of goods, services, or status."

Organic Ethical Imperatives:

  1. Make things simple in the sense of direct and coherent.
  2. Facilitate other people's lives and work.
  3. Avoid operations which hassle people.
  4. Promote cooperative and facilitative supports and attitudes.
  5. Forgive people's negative behavior. Give serious attention to remedial systems.
  6. Avoid waste of material, personal, ecological, or cultural resources.

The principles of culture design are at the ready to alleviate this agony and direct healthy change. In every culture, whether on the producer or the warrior side, there are forces in both directions ready to be used and guided. To take an image from *Gleick's book CHAOS, there are butterflies all over the place.[ In *Gleick's "butterfly effect" small events can result in huge changes: The motion of the butterfly in Australia makes hurricanes in America. Rosa *Parks was "sick and tired" of standing in the bus and boosted the civil rights movement....] In general, organic culture tends to heal itself, while pathologies of abstract culture make things worse. Thus, programs that decrease anxiety and enhance organic life allow the dissociations to heal. Programs that intensify the adversarial system promote pathologies. For practice, make a list of such programs. Thus, objectivist political economy becomes the basis for culture design: what's wrong and how to fix it. [See also NEW ECONOMIC POLICY, NEP, p. 308]

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