As some of you may know, I fell into possession of an astounding new model of violence in our culture produced by Stanford University's Rene Girard. It's actually quite an easy model to understand, once all the verbiage is stripped away and one gets down to the mechanism of the model. That's what took me so long. I had to laboriously read some books. I hate that. Anyway, Nan Williams did some of the heavy lifting, getting most of the words out of the way until we got it down to the bare bones where I could finally see it for myself. Then we wrote a 1-pager applying the model to the dynamic of violence in the schools. Knocked my sox off. The damn model works. It actually demonstrates what is happening and why. Talk about an eye opener. No wonder I never could make sense of the culture. When I learned to think, it never occured to me to think ass-backwards from the way I learned. OK, so we put out the first application of the model in the paper some of you may have seen, "Thinking About Violence in Our Schools," which is up on the web at http://www.musenet.org/orenda/violence.html. No sooner do we put it out then some clown writes a damn parody of it. "Thinking About Stupidity in Our Scholars." And he sends it to me and every one else. Nan Williams damn near dies of a broken heart when she sees that. I won't lie to you. It took me a coupla hours to get up the courage to actually read the parody. Boy was it vicious. But, you know, it didn't hurt that much. My emotions had been so numbed already that I read it as if I were grading just one more lame piece of student writing. And then I became enlightened. The parodist was a fucking genius! He showed me that the model was completely general. You could plug in any feature of the culture that propagates by mimetic diffusion and the model will show what happens. So the first thing I did was to retaliate against this joker by posting a link to his parody and mentioning in our original essay his mirroring of us. This model is so easy to understand and use, it diffuses through the culture just like another feature of the culture itself! So we wrote a second essay, following the same Mimetic Model as the School Violence essay, only this time it was "Musing About Merriment in Our Mirth," at http://www.musenet.org/orenda/mirth.html Mirror that! Ha! You get back more mirth! All of a sudden people are laughing their assess off. They get it. They get how Mimesis works. The Mimetic pump that's been pumping up violence and greed and injustice pumps up everything the same way. Well, it pumps it up if the retaliation is at par or better. If the retaliation is less than an eye for an eye, the feedback loop stops whistling and you get lovely chaotic humor that's really creative and funny and not vicious. I was about to sit down and rest on my laurels to enjoy the Mirth Culture when something else showed up on my radar screen. You know those endless thrashes that occur on sites like Utne, especially in the Meta areas? Turns out they're mimetic, too. Only this time you can see each back and forth of a volley under the microscope. What made some thrashes go on and on, while others died out quickly? Ha! It turned out to depend on whether it was a war of words or a negotiation. Unilateral vs. Bilateral. A closer examination revealed that the bilateral exchanges were civil and mannerly: "I propose dealing harshly with those bastards." "I have some qualms about that." "What concerns you?" "I fear it will cause escalation." "How do you figure?" "It's a straightforward feedback loop." "And..." "And if we are harsh, that sets the loop gain blah blah blah..." "Oh. I see. Do you have any examples of any better ideas? "Yes." "What?" "This conversation." "Well yeah!" So the model illustrates diplomatic negotiation and why if you instead call the other guy a snake-eyed monster it turns into a thrash. But wait, there's more. What *does* happen if both sides call each other snake-eyed monsters? Well, it's pretty easy to see that rude remarks, offensive remarks generate thrash, while diplomatic or mannerly ones maintain civility. So why can't we learn tact? Who are we gonna learn it from via Mimesis? If no one is modeling what works, the mirror ain't gonna reflect what isn't there. So it turns out that the Civility Code has a perfectly diplomatic reply that stops the thrash in its tracks, only we are all sitting here with mutual ignorance and no one to learn from! What are we not learning? How to express our own feelings. Kindergarten stuff! We are failing to express our own feelings because nobody ever gave us the damn words to name them! I had to go digging in a thesaurus to find the quantum unit of anger. It's a Qualm. The Qualm Before the Storm. I have qualms about going to war. It's amazing. You mention the tiniest feeling by name and it stops the escalation dead in its tracks. Why? Cuz that's the piece of cultural knowledge the other guy was waiting to learn! Only no one knew it. So what does this mean? It means we have a bunch of gaps in our Civility Maps. And we tango around the gaps like idiots because we are too idiotic to realize we are idiots. Now, here's the really funny part. Each of those attacks and counterattacks is generating those quantum level emotions. And where do they go? They're dumped into a file in the Amygdala, generating negative emotional pressure that drives the need to learn! All that negative emotion is the brain telling us to go learn what we don't know, and we'll feel better just like that! But silly us! We are poking each other looking for knowledge none of us has. And that is how we get to war! Every gap in the civility map generates an opportunity for one of those tangos. The whole damn culture is stupid! Provably rigorously with mathematical precision! Now Girard wasn't the first to figure this out. A lot of people down through the ages figured it out. And a few of them even noted the optimal strategy for driving the system to peace. Version 1. Not more than an eye for an eye. (Moses) Version 2. Zero retaliation. The whole thing is silly. Just laugh guys. (Buddha) Version 3. The other guy dunno what he's doing. Just give him a hug already. (Jesus) But nooooo! How does our culture play the game of what do you do when everyone's an idiot? We do it this way: Version 0. Kick 'em in the tochus. Hard. (Macchiavelli) Sechel! What a brilliant strategy. Kids. We're in kindergarten. We've got feelings. Honest to God. Mention them already. They are the shield that stops the war and start the learning. Your negative emotions *mean* there is something here to be learned. There is a missing piece of knowledge and it's causing the missing peace. I just have one question. What is the name of this feeling? Got Peace? Barry