the Fraternal Order of Hate Groups—given to allegedly libertarian groups only if they have engaged in conspicuously authoritarian behavior and have developed a philosophical line proving that said behavior is actually libertarian. (That group which has found the best libertarian justification for opposing liberty receives the Annual William Buckley Memorial Award and joint membership in the St. Famine Society for War Against Evil.);
the First Evangelical and Reformed Rand, Branden, and Holy Gait Church—for those who are simultaneously rationalists and dogmatists;
the Part-of-the-Solution Vanguard Party—for any Supreme Servant of the People who has shown inordinate zeal in banishing most of the people as Parts-of-the-Problem.
Other aspects of Operation Mindfuck include:
Project Eagle. Day-glo posters have been printed which look like the old Eagle proclamation saying TO THE POLLS YE SONS OF FREEDOM. The new, improved Discordian posters, however, have one slight word change, and say cheerfully BURN THE POLLS YE SONS OF FREEDOM. Like the old ones, they are posted in prominent places on election day. Project Pan-Pontification. Since the Rev. Kirby Hensley founded the Universal Life Church and started ordaining everybody as a minister of the gospel, the Paratheo-Anametamystikhood of Eris Esoteric has decided to raise the stakes. They are now distributing cards stating:
THE BEARER OF THIS CARD
IS A GENUINE AND AUTHORIZED
POPE
So Please Treat Him Right
GOOD FOREVER
Genuine and authorized by the HOUSE OF APOSTLES OF ERIS. Every man, woman and child on Earth is a genuine and authorized Pope.
Similar cards, with “Him” replaced by “Her” and “Pope” by “Mome,” are being prepared for Woman’s Liberationists.
Project Graffito (and Project Bumpersticker). Anybody can participate by inventing a particularly Erisian slogan and seeing that it is given wide distribution. Examples: Your Local Police Are Armed and Dangerous; Legalize Free-Enterprise Murder: Why Should Governments Have All The Fun?; Smash the Government Postal Monopoly; If Voting Could Change the System, It Would Be Against the Law; etc.
Citizens Against Drug Abuse. This organization possesses elegant letterheads and is engaged in a campaign of encouraging Congressmen to outlaw catnip, a drug which some young people are smoking whenever marijuana is in short supply. The thought behind this project is that, the government having lost so much credibility due to its war against pot (a recent ELF survey showed that in some big cities a large portion of the under-25 population did not believe in any of the moon shots and assumed they were all faked somewhere in the American Desert), a campaign against this similar but more comical herb will destroy the last tattered shreds of faith in the men in Washington.
* The double-bind, first defined by anthropologist Gregory Bateson, is a situation in which you must choose between two alternatives both of which are unpleasant. A beautiful example, suggested by Mr. William S. Burroughs: Condition a draftee so that he will immediately obey either the order ‘Stand up” or the order. “Sit down,” if given by a superior officer, then have two officers simultaneously order him to stand up and sit down. Obeying the first order means disobeying the second, and obeying the second means disobeying the first. Presumably, the subject would wig out.
* All these are real groups, currently active in the U.S.A. (Do you believe that?)
* Annual meetings are held on the Feast of St. Famine at the Casa de Inquisitador in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
* Members receive a handsome banner proclaiming IN YOUR HEART YOU KNOW IT’S FLAT.
APPENDIX KAPH
THE ROSY DOUBLE-CROSS
Saul, Barney, Markoff Chaney, and Dillinger were all puzzled that a man like Carmei would bring a suitcase full of roses with him when fleeing to Lehman Cavern. Those who knew Carmei in Las Vegas were even more perplexed when this fact was made public. The first readers of this romance were not only puzzled and perplexed but petulant, since they knew Carmei had loaded his briefcase with Maldonado’s money, not with roses.
The explanation, as is usually the case when seeming magick has occurred, was simple: Carmei was the victim of the oldest swindle in the world, the okkana borra (gypsy switch). It was his custom to transport his earnings to the bank in the same suitcase which he used when looting Maldonado’s safe. His figure, and the suitcase, were well known to the shadier elements in Las Vegas, and among these were three gentlemen who decided early in April to intercept him during one of his journeys and remove the suitcase from his possession, using, as young people say, “any means necessary;” they even considered striking him upon the temple with a blunt instrument. One of the gentlemen involved in this project, John Wayne Malatesta, however, had a sense of humor (of sorts) and began to devise a plan involving a nonviolent gypsy switch. Mr. Malatesta thought it would be amusing if this could be carried off smoothly and Carmel, arriving at the bank, opened a case full of horse manure, human excrement, or something else in equally dubious taste. The other two gentlemen were persuaded that this might indeed be worth a laugh. A substitute suitcase was purchased, and a plan was devised.
Two changes were made at virtually the last minute. Mr. Malatesta learned from Bonnie Quint (a lady whose company he often enjoyed, at $100 a throw) that Carmel suffered acutely from rose fever. A more hilarious image occurred to him: Carmel opening the case in the bank and starting to sneeze spasmodically while trying to figure out where the switch had been made. The roses were purchased, and the caper was set for the next day.
When Carmel, Dr. Naismith, and Markoff Chaney collided, Malatesta and his associates abandoned the switch idea: Two collisions in a few minutes would be more than a man like Carmel would accept without profound suspicion. They therefore decided to follow him to his house and revert to the more old-fashioned but time-proven technique of the sudden rap on the skull.
When Bonnie Quint left after her violent interview with Carmel, the bandits prepared to enter. To their amazement, Carmel came running out, threw his suitcase into his jeep, and then ran back in. (He had forgotten his candies.)
“It’s God’s will,” Malatesta said piously.
The switch was made, and they took off for points south in a great hurry.
Several weeks after the crisis had passed, a state trooper found a car with three dead men in it off the road in a ditch. His own symptoms were self-diagnosed while he waited for the coroner’s crew to arrive, and he received the antidote in time.
The empty suitcase in the car caused only minor speculation: A Gila monster had obviously eaten most of one side of it to shreds. “Whatever they had in there,” the trooper said later, “must have been pretty light. The wind blew it all over the freaking desert.”
APPENDIX TETH
HAGBARD’S BOOKLET
After prolonged pleading and vehement prayers of entreaty, the authors finally prevailed upon Hagbard Celine to allow us to quote some further illuminating passages from his booklet Never Whistle While You’re Pissing.* (Before we made these frantic efforts, he wanted us to publish the whole thing.)
Here, then, are some of the keys to the strange head of Hagbard Celine:
I once overheard two botanists arguing over a Damned Thing that had blasphemously sprouted in a college yard. One claimed that the Damned Thing was a tree and the other claimed that it was a shrub. They each had good scholarly arguments, and they were still debating when I left them.
The world is forever spawning Damned Things—things that are neither tree nor shrub, fish nor fowl, black nor white—and the categorical thinker can only regard the spiky and buzzing world of sensory fact as a profound insult to his card-index system of classifications. Worst of all are the facts which violate “common sense,” that dreary bog of sullen prejudice and muddy inertia. The whole history of science is the odyssey of a pixilated card-indexer perpetually sailing between such Damned Things and desperately juggling his classifications to fit them in, just as the history of politics is the futile epic of
a long series of attempts to line up the Damned Things and cajole them to march in regiment.
Every ideology is a mental murder, a reduction of dynamic living processes to static classifications, and every classification is a Damnation, just as every inclusion is an exclusion. In a busy, buzzing universe where no two snow-flakes are identical, and no two trees are identical, and no two people are identical—and, indeed, the smallest subatomic particle, we are assured, is not even identical with itself from one microsecond to the next—every card-index system is a self-delusion. “Or, to put it more charitably,” as Nietzsche says, “we are all better artists than we realize.”
It is easy to see that the label “Jew” was a Damnation in Nazi Germany, but actually the label “Jew” is a Damnation anywhere, even where anti-Semitism does not exist. “He is a Jew,” “He is a doctor,” and “He is a poet” mean, to the card-indexing center of the cortex, that my experience with him will be like my experience with other Jews, other doctors, and other poets. Thus, individuality is ignored when identity is asserted.
At a party or any place where strangers meet, watch this mechanism in action. Behind the friendly overtures there is wariness as each person fishes for the label that will identify and Damn the other. Finally, it is revealed: “Oh, he’s an advertising copywriter,” “Oh, he’s an engine-lathe operator.” Both parties relax, for now they know how to behave, what roles to play in the game. Ninety-nine percent of each has been Damned; the other is reacting to the 1 percent that has been labeled by the card-index machine.
Certain Damnations are socially and intellectually necessary, of course. A custard pie thrown in a comedian’s face is Damned by the physicist who analyzes it according to the Newtonian laws of motion. These equations tell us all we want to know about the impact of the pie on the face, but nothing about the human meaning of the pie-throwing. A cultural anthropologist, analyzing the social function of the comedian as shaman, court jester, and king’s surrogate, explains the pie-throwing as a survival of the Feast of Fools and the killing of the king’s double. This Damns the subject in another way. A psychoanalyst, finding an Oedipal castration ritual here, has performed a third Damnation, and the Marxist, seeing an outlet for the worker’s repressed rage against the bosses, performs a fourth. Each Damnation has its values and its uses, but it is nonetheless a Damnation unless its partial and arbitrary nature is recognized,
The poet, who compares the pie in the comedian’s face with the Decline of the West or his own lost love, commits a fifth Damnation, but in this case the game element and whimsicality of the symbolism are safely obvious. At least, one would hope so; reading the New Critics occasionally raises doubts on this point.
Human society can be structured either according to the principle of authority or according to the principle of liberty. Authority is a static social configuration in which people act as superiors and inferiors: a sadomasochistic relationship. Liberty is a dynamic social configuration in which people act as equals: an erotic relationship. In every interaction between people, either Authority or Liberty is the dominant factor. Families, churches, lodges, clubs, and corporations are either more authoritarian than libertarian or more libertarian than authoritarian.
It becomes obvious as we proceed that the most pugnacious and intolerant form of authority is the State, which even today dares to assume an absolutism which the Church itself has long ago surrendered and to enforce obedience with the techniques of the Church’s old and shameful Inquisition. Every form of authoritarianism is, however, a small “State,” even if it has a membership of only two. Freud’s remark to the effect that the delusion of one man is neurosis and the delusion of many men is religion can be generalized: The authoritarianism of one man is crime and the authoritarianism of many men is the State. Benjamin Tucker wrote quite accurately:
Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government are interchangeable terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it be made by one man upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.
Tucker’s use of the word “invasion” is remarkably precise, considering that he wrote more than fifty years before the basic discoveries of ethology. Every act of authority is, in fact, an invasion of the psychic and physical territory of another.
Every fact of science was once Damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and “progress,” everything on earth that is manmade and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man’s refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, “Disobedience was man’s Original Virtue.”
The human brain, which loves to read descriptions of itself as the universe’s most marvelous organ of perception, is an even more marvelous organ of rejection. The naked facts of our economic game, are easily discoverable and undeniable once stated, but conservatives—who are usually individuals who profit every day of their lives from these facts—manage to remain oblivious to them, or to see them through a very rosy-tinted and distorting lens. (Similarly, the revolutionary ignores the total testimony of history about the natural course of revolution, through violence, to chaos, back to the starting point.)
We must remember that thought is abstraction. In Einstein’s metaphor, the relationship between a physical fact and our mental reception of that fact is not like the relationship between beef and beef-broth, a simple matter of extraction and condensation; rather, as Einstein goes on, it is like the relationship between our overcoat and the ticket given us when we check our overcoat. In other words, human perception involves coding even more than crude sensing. The mesh of language, or of mathematics, or of a school of art, or of any system of human abstracting, gives to our mental constructs the structure, not of the original fact, but of the symbol system into which it is coded, just as a map-maker colors a nation purple not because it is purple but because his code demands it. But every code excludes certain things, blurs other things, and overemphasizes still other things. Nijinski’s celebrated leap through the window at the climax of Le Spectre d’une Rose is best coded in the ballet notation system used by choreographers; verbal language falters badly in attempting to convey it; painting or sculpture could capture totally the magic of one instant, but one instant only, of it; the physicist’s equation, Force = Mass X Acceleration, highlights one aspect of it missed by all these other codes, but loses everything else about it. Every perception-is influenced, formed, and structured by the habitual coding habits—mental game habits—of the perceiver.
All authority is a function of coding, of game rules. Men have arisen again and again armed with pitchforks to fight armies with cannon; men have also submitted docilely to the weakest and most tottery oppressors. It all depends on the extent to which coding distorts perception and conditions the physical (and mental) reflexes.
It seems at first glance that authority could not exist at all if all men were cowards or if no men were cowards, but flourishes as it does only because most men are cowards and some men are thieves. Actually, the inner dynamics of cowardice and submission on the one hand and of heroism and rebellion on the other are seldom consciously realized either by the ruling class or the servile class. Submission is identified not with cowardice but with virtue, rebellion not with heroism but with evil. To the Roman slave-owners, Spartacus was not a hero and the obedient slaves were not cowards; Spartacus was a villain and the obedient slaves were virtuous. The obedient slaves believed this also. The obedient always think of
themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly.
If authority implies submission, liberation implies equality; authority exists when one man obeys another, and liberty exists when men do not obey other men. Thus, to say that authority exists is to say that class and caste exist, that submission and inequality exist. To say that liberty exists is to say that classlessness exists, to say that brotherhood and equality exist.
Authority, by dividing men into classes, creates dichotomy, disruption, hostility, fear, disunion. Liberty, by placing men on an equal footing, creates assocation, amalgamation, union, security. When the relationships between men are based on authority and coercion, they are driven apart; when based on liberty and nonaggression, they are drawn together.
There facts are self-evident and axiomatic. If authoritarianism did not possess the in-built, preprogrammed double-bind structure of a Game Without End, men would long ago have rejected it and embraced libertarianism.
The usual pacifist complaint about war, that young men are led to death by old men who sit at home manning bureaucrat’s desks and taking no risks themselves, misses the point entirely. Demands that the old should be drafted to fight their own wars, or that the leaders of the warring nations should be sent to the front lines on the first day of battle, etc., are aimed at an assumed “sense of justice” that simply does not exist. To the typical submissive citizen of authoritarian society, it is normal, obvious, and “natural” that he should obey older and more dominant males, even at the risk of his life, even against his own kindred, and even in causes that are unjust or absurd.
“The Charge of the Light Brigade”—the story of a group of young males led to their death in a palpably idiotic situation and only because they obeyed a senseless order without stopping to think—has been, and remains, a popular poem, because unthinking obedience by young males to older males is the most highly prized of all conditioned reflexes within human, and hominid, societies.
The illuminatus! trilogy Page 87
