Gian Piero de Bellis

The learning process

Human beings are born with a desire to learn provided they are living in a stimulating environment. Children want to touch everything they come across and to explore the space around them. Lack of curiosity would be the sign that something pathological is affecting him/her.
As the child grows and becomes an adolescent and then an adult, he/she learns from his mistakes or bad experiences in order not to repeat them. It would be very strange and morbid if a person, putting his hand close to fire and experiencing unbearable heat, would repeat many times the same act.
In a more evolved phase, the adult person learns not only from his mistakes (to avoid them) but also from other's people mistakes (not to copy them).

The civilizing process

In history, the learning process is called the civilizing process as each generation implements and enjoys the discoveries and improvements of past generations and avoids falling in the same traps and repeat the same errors. This dynamic is summed up in the sentence by Cicero “Historia magistra vitae.” (De oratore, 55 BC)
As far as the scientific and technological progress is concerned, relying fruitfully on past experiences and experiments is very clearly pointed out by Newton when he affirmed: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”. (Isaac Newton, "Letter from Sir Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke", 1675). A belief previously expressed by Bernard of Chartres in the XII century.
It is only by remembering (preserving) past successes and remembering (avoiding) past failures that successive human generations can improve their lot.

The human forgetfulness

The memory of the past, however, is not always so active and so precise. For this reason, we need to rely on material supports and personal alertness, i.e.:

• Accurate registration: the faithful recording of past events
• Free examination: the free access to those registrations
• Proper recollection: the precise recounting of those memories.

In some cases, an authoritarian manipulative power succeeds in either rewriting or erasing historical facts to promote its own agenda. For instance, this is what the employees at the Ministry of Truth were supposed to do on a regular basis (George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1948).
Sometimes, the people themselves seem not interested in exploring and learning from the past, fully absorbed and carried away by current events and present material consumption.
In both those cases, the result is what has been very well expressed by George Santayana when he wrote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905). And repeating continuously the past, means also to repeat more than once the same mistakes and experience the same failures. In other words, no learning, no progress. However, “only fools repeat the same things, over and over, expecting to obtain different results.” (attributed to George Bernard Shaw)

The human decay

The absence of learning and so of progress has, as the other side of the coin, the repetition of past mistakes. This is likely to engender decay and continuous decadence.
Concerning history that repeat itself, Karl Marx had this to say: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce". (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852).
Since the beginning of the 20th century, it seems that we are intent on repeating what happened in the early part of the 19th century. The tragic features of nationalism, militarism, territorialism, supremacism, appear once again on the agenda of the current state powers.
But there is an important difference that makes the tragic horrors of the past that were often hidden to the view of many individuals, a tragic horrific farce insofar as, nowadays, those horrors are a spectacle we are witnessing every day on our screens, interpreted by actors (bureaucrats, politicians, soldiers, etc.) that behave as demented clowns.

The tragic current horrors

First, let us see how the tragic features of the past are reappearing nowadays.

• Nationalism. The brief season of cosmopolitanism that was heralded by the introduction and spread of Internet and the World Wide Web (instant world communication and exchanges) has been reversed by the nation states inventing fake enemies (the foreigners, the migrants) and propagating once again a chauvinistic national identity, similarly to what had happened at the beginning of the previous century: a nationalistic frenzy, leading to the First World War, followed by the birth and ascent to power of two ultra-nationalist movements: Fascism and National Socialism.
• Militarism. The destruction of the Twin Towers (New York, 9/11/2001) has inaugurated the global War on Terror and has represented the pretext for introducing invasive measures for controlling the citizens and starting a cycle of new wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Gaza), with the invention of new enemies. Being war the health of the state (Randolph Bourne, The State, 1918), militarism and the expenditures for armaments are the essential components for the revival of the states, after a brief illusion of peace dividend following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Needless to say, the arms race had characterized the years preceding the outbreak of the First World War.
• Territorialism. The aim of state militarism is territorialism, that is, the states controlling their own territories and, if possible, adding new ones. The best examples are represented by the United States, the remaining super-power at the beginning of this century (military bases all over the world), and Israel (annexation of new territories). With respect to Israel, territorialism was, from the start even if not always explicitly, part of the Zionist ideology preaching the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine. In the past Western Imperialism (e.g. the scramble for Africa) and nazi Lebensraum (living space) were the most evident expression of territorialism. The wars in Ukraine and Palestine are, currently, the clearest examples of the same phenomenon.
• Supremacism. The red thread that links state nationalism, militarism, territorialism, is the conviction that certain individuals, groups, communities, are superior to all the others. European rulers and propagandists, for instance, have many times proclaimed the superiority of the Western civilization. The national socialists have upheld the superiority of the Aryan race. Today, but not since today, the Zionists are convinced that they are the people chosen by God to dominate others.

In other words, nothing new under the sun.

The horrific current farce

These four ideological and material horrors, that repeat the ideological and material horrors of the past, have become now a daily spectacle on our screens and a daily report on our papers. This fact represents the novelty with respect to the past and makes all the current events a tragical horrific farce.
The perpetrators of these horrors are demented individuals, devoid of any moral sense. They are so pathologically narcissistically depraved that enjoying filming themselves committing atrocities and even broadcast and diffuse them for the world to see.
We have then American soldiers taking photos in the Abu Ghraib prison (Iraq) while psychologically torturing and physically abusing prisoners. According to humanitarian organizations these are not isolated incidents but part of a wider pattern of torture and brutal treatment at American overseas detention centres.
We have the soldiers of the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) taking tons of pictures and filming themselves while laughing during the destruction of houses, schools, hospitals etc. Or while they loot apartments and steal any valuable object. Snipers are particularly proud in showing how the kill isolated individuals trying to escape from the rubbles all around them.
And the tragi-farcical aspect is that they do all that while proclaiming their superiority as the most civilised people and the most moral army in the world. Their insanity is so blatant that they do not realise that they are involved in a process of self-destruction not only of their reputation but of their very humanity. They are, as already pointed out, like demented clown intent on all sort of foolish self-harming behaviour to make other people laugh. But no one is laughing except the clowns themselves.

The "bête époque"

The years preceding the outbreak of the First World War were called the "belle époque". I suggest qualifying the current years, preceding a possible future world catastrophe, the "bête époque".
The protagonists and the extras of this tragi-farcical époque are big and small beasts.
They can be represented as:

• Leeches. The leaches are the parasitic strata that are the main component of the ruling states. The principal expression is constituted, since immemorial time, by the omnipresent bureaucracy through which "the state enmeshes, controls, regulates, superintends, and tutors civil society, from its most comprehensive manifestations of life down to its most insignificant stirrings, from its most general modes of being to the private existence of individuals." (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852).
• Jackals. The jackals are the violent (openly or secretly) individuals that are the dominant component of the army, the police, the judiciary. They will do everything in their power to protect and guarantee the existence of the state, from promoting senseless wars to imprisoning whoever questions or endanger the reputation and permanence of their power (e.g. whistleblowers).
• Foxes. The foxes are all those who profit from the existence of a dominant power, drawing from it privileges, resources, honours and whatever else can be obtained as favours and rewards. Many of them are small fish, that navigate the system trying to survive. In this case they represent a sort of material and cultural underclass, ready to sell themselves and submit under any master.
• Parrots. The parrots are situated on two levels. The first level is made by those (intellectuals, journalists, artists, teachers, propagandists etc.) who either receive direct instructions from the power how to manipulate individuals and make them obedient servants or are themselves in love with Big Brother and so no directives are needed. The second level is composed by those who absorb and recycle the ideas and data received by the first level parrots and act, willingly or unwillingly, for the perpetuation of their servitude. Second level parrots are also known as sheep.      
• Sheep. The sheep compose the large mass of people living under a territorial (macro-feudal) state power. They are the manipulated individuals, the monads or atoms of the social magma, the mass society. They are subjects serially instructed (manipulated) by state school and state controlled and financed media to be subservient to the power and are always ready to answer the call to participate, at regular intervals, in the election of their own masters.
• Pigs. The pigs are the visible result of the current generalised hyper-consumption. They are a mass of over-weighted, obese individuals, with slow body and, quite often, slow minds, the perfect specimen for keeping the current power system alive. Junk food and junk ideas, as the staple diet of most of them, indicate very clearly, through them, the existence of the present social and personal decadence.

The reference to animals should not be seen as intending to put scorn or depreciate those living creatures who are generally better than their conventional image manufactured by humans. What is simply meant here is to suggest the fact that every human being, going beyond his/her animal nature, should become a quite complex living being, in which human nature is formed and elevated by social nurture.
For this reason, going beyond the "bête époque" should be a moral, social and cultural imperative, for the survival and development of fully human individuals and societies.

Beyond the "bête époque"

To go beyond the "bête époque" means not only to remember and learn from the mistakes of the past, but also to be capable and willing to overcome the four tragic features previously listed: nationalism, militarism, territorialism, supremacism.
To do so we need the following realities:

• Autonomous polyvalent individuals, that do not want to be subject to any dominant authoritarian power, who feel at home anywhere, because, as Wolfgang Goethe, are residents in a place and, at the same time, are citizens of the world.
• The practice of the non-aggression principle. This should be a universal principle, the only one necessary and indispensable, to be adopted and implemented everywhere by all civilised human beings.
• The emergence of non-territorial voluntary communities, because autonomous polyvalent individuals are inclined to associate themselves through shared affinities much more than through casual vicinities.

One of the most famous quotations of the anthropologist Margaret Mead is the following one: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has."
This conviction should be coupled with the invitation, attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, that we should first change ourselves before thinking to change the world. And, as a matter of fact, when a consistent group of individuals change themselves for the best, they start, with their activities and example, to change the world.