[...]School is a genetic mechanism for society, a kind of DNA process that continually recreates styles, skills, values, hangups--and so keeps the whole thing going. The dying part of society--the society that has been-- molds the emerging part more or less in its own image, and fashions the society that will be.
[...]In fact, for most of your school life, it doesn't make that much difference what subject you're taught. The real lesson is the method. The medium in school truly is the message. And the medium is, above all, coercive. You're forced to attend. The subjects are required. You have to do homework. You must observe school rules. And throughout, you're bullied into docility and submissiveness. Even modern liberal refinements don't really help. So you're called an underachiever instead of a dummy. So they send you to a counselor instead of beating you. It's still not your choice to be there. They may pad the handcuffs--but the handcuffs stay on.
Which particular subject they happen to teach is far less important than the fact that it is required. We don't learn that much subject matter in school anyway in proportion to the huge part of our lives that we spend there. But what we do learn very well, thanks to the method, is to accept choices that have been made for us. Which rule they make you follow is less important than the fact that there are rules.
[...]Schools petrify society because students, through them, learn how to adjust unquestioningly to institutions and how to exercise their critical thought only within narrow limits prescribed by the authorities. In fact, as long as a heavy preponderance of a nation's citizens are "good students" and are in some way rewarded for their performance, then dissenters and radical thinkers are no threat and can be permitted to express their opinions relatively unmolested. In the United States, free expression, to the extent that we have it, is a luxury commodity made available by the high standard of living and by the efficient functioning of such disguised forms of repression as schooling.
Schools preserve the status quo in two complementary ways: by molding the young and by screening them. Today almost all of the positions of relative power in the United States are reserved for those who have completed the full sixteen-year treatment, and perhaps a little more. Persons who are unwilling to have their minds and bodies pushed around incessantly are less likely to get through and therefore tend to be screened out of the power centers; the persons who do get through are more likely to accept things as they are and to make their own contributions in "safe" areas. Thus corporations and government agencies insist that executive trainees have a bachelor's degree, often without specifying any particular major. The degree, therefore, doesn't represent any particular body of knowledge. What does it represent? A certain mentality.
[...]Well, a "good citizen" of sorts--isn't that the way they put it on report cards? Thoroughly schooled and ready for GE or IBM or the State Department, the graduate is a skilled, neat, disciplined worker with just enough initiative to carry out fairly complicated assignments but not so much initiative that he will seriously question the assignment itself. He is affably but fiercely competitive with his peers and he is submissive to his superiors. In fact, as long as he has some respect from his peers and subordinates, he is willing to be almost naked of dignity in the eyes of his superiors; there is very little shit he will not eat if there is something to be gained by it. In asserting himself he is moderate, even timid--except when he exercises the power of a great institution, when he himself is the superior, when he puts on some kind of real or figurative uniform. At that point he is likely to assume the sacerdotal mask that his teachers wore. At that point--when he becomes official--his jaw hardens.
[...]Our schools make democracy unlikely because they rob the people, who are supposed to be sovereign, of their sense of power and of their ability to will meaningful institutional changes.
The democratic ideal--to which even the most conservative college trustees usually give lip service--means government of, by and for the people. It means power in the hands of the people. Our schools, however, remain less suited to this ideal than to an authoritarian society; they are more effective in teaching obedience than in fostering freedom Our textbooks may teach one kind of political system but the method by which our schools operate teaches another And the method wins out over the textbooks overwhelmingly. A more substantial degree of democracy will become likely only when we understand that political freedom is not merely a constitutional matter; it's also a state of mind, which can be either nurtured or blighted in school.
[...]Courses may be pointless and uninteresting. The data may go through you like mineral oil. But at least it is some kind of challenge. And while you're involved in all this, time is off your hands and rests in theirs--the authorities'. Should you not be attending school, you may feel that you're pissing away time--days and weeks; you may begin to feel very uncomfortable. On your own, you have to face the responsibility for how you spend time. But in school you don't. What they make you do may obviously be a waste but at least the responsibility isn't charged to your account. School in this respect is, once again, like the army or jail. Once you're
in, you may have all kinds of problems but freedom isn't one of them.
[...]If we want our children locked up all day until they're sixteen, let's at least be honest about it and stop trying to pass imprisonment off as education.
[...]Learning is not something that is done to you.
[...]The people who control colleges are fond of pointing out to students that higher education is a privilege. The implication is that if they don't behave, the privilege will be withdrawn. Similarly, in high school the ultimate threat is expulsion. School is supposed to be some kind of favor that society grants you. The condition for continuing to receive this favor is that you accept it on society's terms.
Sweat shop owners used to tell their workers more or less the same thing. It's astonishing that workers swallowed that line for so long. And it's equally astonishing that most students continue to see schooling as a privilege rather than as a transaction in which they happen to be getting a rotten deal.
When you go to school, you do society an enormous favor; you give it the opportunity to mold you in its image, stunting and deadening you in the process. What you get in return is access to a certain income bracket and the material comforts that go with it. But think what you've given up. Other animals have much of their nature born in them. But you were born with the freedom to learn, to change, to transcend yourself, to create your life that's your human birthright. In school you sell it very cheap.
Source: Jerry Farber - The Student as Nigger
The Nature of Government
Two Tribes
Consider two different isolated tribes somewhere in the jungles of South America. Call them Tribe 1 and Tribe 2. Each has its unique language with its own structure. The language of tribe 1 (language 1) tends to be very literal. A man who fishes, for example, is called "man-who-fishes." The same man, while sleeping, is called "manwho-sleeps"; while talking, "man-who-talks"; while running, -"manwho-runs"; while eating, man-who-eats"; while writing, "man-whowrites"; while making a chair, "man-who-makes-chair"; while giving orders, "man-who-gives-orders"; etc. In language 1, distinctions are made between different kinds of words: "Thing-words," "Do-words," "How-words," "Story-words," "Funny-words," "order-words," "Panicwords," "What-words," "Who-words," "Why-words," "When-words," "Where-words," etc. Abstractions are rare in language 1. To the people of tribe 1, any word that doesn't refer to something physically perceivable, is highly suspect. Their test for reality is physical.
The language of Tribe 2 (Language 2) is very different. A man who obtains his wherewithal mostly by fishing, is called "fisherman." (This system of nomenclature would seem absurd to the people of Tribe 1 - how can you call someone a "fisherman" when he is not fishing, but sleeping?) Language 2 contains many abstractions - like "happiness." People from Tribe 2 can talk for hours about "happiness." (To someone from Tribe 1, this would be incomprehensible - they only talk about "woman-who-is-happy" while she is happy, and "woman-who-is-sad" while she is sad. The notion that you could separate "happiness" from a real person being happy, and talk about "happiness" as if it existed by itself, would be completely unthinkable to someone from Tribe 1.)
To the people from Tribe 2, any word being used is automatically assumed to be part of existence, otherwise people wouldn't use it. (To someone from Tribe 1, the word "existence" would be a meaningless absurdity, because in their mentality only particular objects exist.) In Tribe 2, the test for reality is agreement. If other people agree with a word and the way it seems to be used, then that word is automatically accepted as valid and useful. They suffer from hypostatization.
One day a strange man arrives at the place where the people of Tribe 1 live. They ask him: "Who you?" He: "I King". They: "your name King?". He: "No; my name John." They: "Why call self King if name John?" He: "I special person, agent of God." They: "You look different but not special; who God?" He: "God creator of world." They: "Where God?; How create world?" He: "God everywhere; God all-powerful." They: "How we see God?" He: "Can't see God." They: "You speak crazy." He: "No; I special; I show you." Whereupon the stranger performs various tricks like apparently making objects appear and disappear. They: "You clever man-who tricks." He: "I special; I King." They: "You speak funny; you clever John-who-tricks." He: "I King; my word law." They: "What law? special word?" He: "Yes; my word law - you must obey." They: "Ah! You mean order-word!" He: "Yes; I King; I make law." They: "No; you speak order-word?" He: "Yes; I special". They: "What special? - Anybody speak order-word?" He: "You not understand." They: "No."
Eventually John-the-stranger gives up trying to convince the people of Tribe 1 that he has a "special status" and that his words are different from the words of anyone else - so he leaves, to search for more gullible and impressionable victims elsewhere...
For many days and nights he trudges through the jungle before discovering the people of Tribe 2. They: "Who you?" He: "I King." They: "Your name King?" He: "No, my name John." They: "Why call self King if name John?" He: "I special person, agent of God." They: "You look different; what God?" He: "God creator of world." They: Where God?; How create world?" He "God everywhere; God all-powerful." They: "Show special?" Whereupon the stranger performs various tricks like apparently making objects appear and disappear. They: "You King, agent of God." He: "Yes, my word law." They: "What law?" He: "Law special word of God through me; you must obey." Whereupon the people of Tribe 2 bow down and kiss the feet of John - they do not habitually test abstractions against reality, so they readily accept John-the-stranger as their "King" and his word as "law." Thereafter all he has to do to control and dominate them, is to open his mouth...
"Government" is a Form of Parasitism or Cannibalism
The reason why people call themselves "government" is because it provides them with advantages - if they can get away with it. In the case of tribe 1, John-the-stranger called himself "King," but the people didn't buy it, so he left. However, the gullible people from tribe 2 believed him, so they became his "subjects" - meaning he could live off their effort - like a parasite.
The "state" (so-called) has its origin in a gang of looters making an agreement with a tribe: "We'll protect you from other gangs if you give us part of the food you produce." ("Government" is a Mafia-like protection racket.)
It's much easier to live off the values produced by others than to create your own values. Being a parasite is easier than being a producer. Being a value destroyer is easier than being a value creator. Now if we take it a step further, and regard the fruit of our labor as part of ourselves, then we're talking about cannibalism. That's why the American Declaration of Independence talks about "eating out our substance." "Government" is a form of cannibalism.
"Government" is Kept in Place by Certain Fraud-Words
Politicians and bureaucrats use mostly words to impose their will upon others - even when physical violence is involved, they use words to attempt to justify their actions. Thomas Szasz wrote in The Second Sin, "Man is the animal that speaks. Understanding language is thus the key to understanding man; and the control of language, to the control of man." The language used to control and dominate others I collectively lump together as "Newspeak." The word Newspeak was invented by George Orwell and described in his book Nineteen-Eighty-Four. I use the word in essentially the same way that Orwell did, but within its domain I subsume words that I don't think Orwell would have: "state," "government," "law," "king," "constitution," "queen," "president," "prime minister," etc. Newspeak, as I use the term, has developed over many centuries. I contend that the use of Newspeak by freedom lovers as if valid (i. e., without questioning its validity, and without considering its consequences), may easily become counter-productive. I specifically use Newspeak in the sense of Orwell's "B vocabulary":
"The 'B vocabulary' consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them... the 'B' words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables... even in the early decades of the Twentieth Century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations... the intention being to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness... ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word 'Duckspeak' meaning 'to quack like a duck.'" [emphasis added]
I'm also introducing here the concept of "fraud-word." I'm saying that certain words are fraudulent in themselves. You don't even have to use them in a sentence; the word itself is a lie. For example, the word "King." We have a perfectly good word "man." When a man calls himself "King," he's lying as did John-thestranger above. The word itself is a fraud.
In his superb book Restoring the American Dream, Robert Ringer devoted an entire chapter to how "government" is kept in place by certain words - Chapter 8: "Keeping It All in Place." Here is my list of statist fraud-words: "government," "state," "country," "nation," "U. S.A.," "empire," "commonwealth," "republic," "society," "emperor," "king," "queen," "prince," "princess," "president," "prime minister," "law," "constitution," "public interest," "national interest," "fair share," "common good," "national security," "social contract," "public policy," "mandate from the people," etc.
Two of the Worst Fraud-Words: "Constitution," and "Law"
If you think about it, you will realize the role of language in practically all coercion: be it parents or teachers coercing the young; or those masquerading as (so-called) "state" or "government" coercing (so-called) "subjects." Politicians and bureaucrats have an armory of weapons they use to coerce their victims. I put it to you that fraud-words are the most formidable weapons in their armory - not guns and explosives. Do politicians and bureaucrats use guns or words? I further put it to you that next to "government," two of their most powerful fraud-words are "law" and "constitution."
Most people believe that some of the noises and scribbles emanating from the mouths and pens of the lawyers, politicians, and bureaucrats (masquerading as "government" so-called) are somehow special and constitute "the law." This is a grotesque superstition.
The criminals who masquerade as "government" use "the Constitution" as their shield - they claim that "the Constitution authorizes or empowers them" to perpetrate their destructive acts. They use the word "law" as their sword. Because you broke their so-called "law," therefore they are authorized or empowered to punish you as they see fit.
"It is illusions and words that have influenced the mind of the crowd, and especially words - words which are as powerful as they are chimeral, and whose astonishing sway we shall shortly demonstrate," wrote Gustave le Bon in his classic The Crowd, a hundred years ago. About two hundred years ago, Jeremy Bentham wrote, "Out of one foolish word may start a thousand daggers" - Bentham's Theory of Fictions by C.K. Ogden. And 160 years ago Jonathan Swift wrote in Gulliver's Travels:
"There was another point which a little perplexed him... I had said, that some of our crew left their country on account of being ruined by 'law'... but he was at a loss how it should come to pass, that the 'law' which was intended for 'every' man's preservation, should be any man's ruin. Therefore he desired to be further satisfied what I meant by 'law,' and the dispensers thereof... because he thought nature and reason were sufficient guides for a reasonable animal, as we pretended to be, in showing us what we ought to do, and what to avoid... I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, accordingly as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves."
"Government" is Kept In Place by Superstition
The first superstition that keeps "government" in place is the belief that because practically all of us use certain words without any thought as to their validity and the consequences they produce Duckspeak - therefore these words are valid and represent reality.
The second superstition is the notion that certain words constitute "the law" (so-called). This is a most grotesque absurdity.
The third superstition is that because certain naive and gullible people put pieces of paper into "ballot" boxes, this action transforms, transmutes, transubstantiates, or transmogrifies, certain people into "presidents," "congressmen," etc. This is primitive magical "thought."
The fourth superstition is that because some people call themselves "government" - or organize themselves into structures called "government" - therefore they acquire magical powers to perform miracles.
"Government" is Kept in Place by Gullibility
To think of Slick Willy as "President of the U.S.A.," is pure gullibility. The same applies to Washington, Jefferson, and all the others. They were all liars and impostors - idols. The entire "U.S." political system has been a fraud and a hoax since the outset. The same applies to all the other political systems I know of. Why are people so gullible as to believe politicians, bureaucrats, and lawyers?
The first reason is that human consciousness is in its infancy. In evolutionary terms, consciousness is a very recent development - as Nietzsche indicated. Erving Goffman started his book Frame Analysis with:
"There is a venerable tradition in philosophy that argues that what the reader assumes to be real is but a shadow, and that by attending to what the writer says about perception, thought, the brain, language, culture, a new methodology, or novel social forces, the veil can be lifted. That sort of line, of course, gives as much a role to the writer and his writings as is possible to imagine and for that reason is pathetic."
Later in the same book - implying that it's impossible for people to become more conscious? - Goffman wrote:
"I can only suggest that he who would combat false consciousness and awaken people to their true interests has much to do, because the sleep is very deep. And I do not intend here to provide a lullaby but merely to sneak in and watch the way people snore." [emphasis added]
The second reason is that many beliefs are culturally passed on from generation to generation. In general, people who question cultural beliefs tend to be ridiculed, punished, cast out, or killed. Furthermore, the politicians, bureaucrats, and lawyers have created concentration camps for brainwashing (euphemistically called "schools" by the gullible) where the youth are coercively inculcated with cultural beliefs designed to perpetuate and strengthen the political system.
The third reason why many people are so gullible is that few have developed the thinking skills to question what they are taught and what they see, hear, and read in the media.
"Government" is Kept in Place by a Lack of Thinking Skills
To see through political hoaxes requires thinking skills. The most important one is probably the ability to question everything. Robert Anton Wilson wrote as follows in his book Right Where You Are Sitting Now:
"On a night in September 1927 when he contemplated suicide at the age of 32, Buckminster Fuller decided to live the rest of his life as an experiment. He wouldn't believe anything anybody told him "golden rule," "dog-eat-dog," or any of it - and would try to find out by experience only, what could be physically demonstrated to work.
In the year following that decision, Bucky stopped talking entirely, like many mystics in the east. He insists that he had nothing "mystical" in mind. "I was simply trying to free myself of conditioned reflexes," he said. He had met pioneer semanticist Alfred Korzybski shortly before and was convinced that Korzybski was correct in his claim that language structures caused conditioned associations mechanical reactions that keep us locked into certain perceptual grids. Fuller tried to break these grids, to find out what a person "of average intelligence" could accomplish if guided only by personal observation and experiment...
The language we use influences the thoughts we think much more than the thoughts we think influence the language we use. We are encased in fossil metaphors; verbal chains guide us through our daily reality-labyrinth.
Physicists, for example, spent nearly three centuries looking for a substance, heat, to correspond to the substantive noun, "heat"; it took a revolution in chemistry and thermodynamics before we realized that heat should not be thought of as a noun (a thing) but a verb (a process) - a relationship between the motions of molecules.
Around the turn of this century - this is all old news, even though most literary "intellectuals" still haven't heard about it - several mathematicians and philosophers who were well versed in the physical sciences began to realize consciously that there is not necessarily a "thing" (a static and block-like entity) corresponding to every noun in our vocabulary."
Fuller's many inventions and discoveries stem largely from his ability to question everything. It's through the application of this and other thinking skills that we discover that the most fundamental issue concerning "government" is the underlying thought patterns, consisting of statist fraud-concepts like "government," "state," "nation," "king," "president," "law," etc. According to Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
"But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government... is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself. And if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government..." [emphasis added]
[...]
"Government" is Kept in Place by Brainwashing
My book Wake Up America! The Dynamics of Human Power (available from Terra Libra) includes a chapter titled "Are our Schools Concentration Campuses for Mind Destruction?" in which I describe "education" in some detail.
Ayn Rand's The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, contains a chapter, "The Comprachicos." Comprachico is a Spanish word meaning "child-buyer." The comprachicos were a nomadic association, notorious in the seventeenth century. They bought and sold children - special children, children turned into deformed freaks, used in freak shows to amuse the public. At an early age they placed a young child in a porcelain pot with a grotesque form. As the child's body grew, it had to assume the shape of the pot. The result was a deformed freak for people to laugh at.
Rand uses the practice of the comprachicos as an analogy to describe American "education." She refers to our "educators" as "the comprachicos of the mind." Children's minds are forced to assume the shape of a grotesque "intellectual pot." Rand describes the result:
"The students' development is arrested, their minds are set to respond to slogans, as animals respond to a trainer's whistle, their brains are embalmed in the syrup of altruism as an automatic substitute for self-esteem... They would obey anyone, they need a master, they need to be told what to do. They are ready now to be used as cannon fodder - to attack, to bomb, to burn, to murder, to fight in the streets and die in the gutters. They are a trained pack of miserably impotent freaks, ready to be unleashed against anyone." [emphasis added]
In every part of the world, the monsters who masquerade as "government," do their utmost to achieve monopoly control of the so-called "education system" - they try to make it compulsory so all children will be subjected to government brainwashing. The result is that practically every victim is degraded into an unthinking follower... or unthinking rebel.
"Government" is Kept in Place by Mass Hallucination
My Webster's definition of hallucination includes the following:
Perception of objects with no reality;
A completely unfounded or mistaken impression or notion.
We could also describe hallucination as "seeing" or "perceiving" what's not there - or "seeing" or "perceiving" more than exists in reality.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) could be described as the science of representational systems. In our brains we have "neural patterns" or "models" that attempt to represent reality. For example, in my brain I have a "picture" of a table. If someone asks me to draw a picture of a table, I access the "picture" or "model" in my head, from which I then draw a table. These "pictures," "models," or "neural patterns" are called representational systems. They include intellectual, emotional, visual, auditory, and other sensory data.
Our representational systems are more or less "useful." To the extent that we use them to predict accurately and produce desirable results, we regard them as useful. NLP people have identified three major ways in which our representational systems differ from reality:
Generalization - e.g., the representational system called "furniture" - or the "intellectual" neural pattern: "all women are the same."
Distortion - e.g., "the color of my car is blue" - the physicist tells us this is a distortion; it's more accurate to say that my car's outer surface reflects light with the wavelength we call "blue," while absorbing light with other wavelengths.
Deletion - e.g., "Tom is a wonderful, generous, happy, healthy individual" - Tom has many other attributes, some of which have been ignored or "deleted" from my representational system.
I've identified a very important fourth way in which our representational systems differ from reality: Addition - e.g., "John-the-stranger is a King, therefore he has special powers; and the words that come out of his mouth are special and therefore are the law which must be obeyed." John is really an ordinary man. By representing him as a "King" in our representational systems, we have added something to what exists in reality. Similarly, John's words are ordinary like those of the rest of us, and when we represent some of his words as "the law" in our representational systems, we have added something to what occurs in reality.
The essence of hallucination is "seeing" or "perceiving" what doesn't really exist or occur. The phenomenon of addition, as described above, is simply hallucination. To have a neural patterns or mental models that say "the government runs the country," "government makes law," "Slick Willy is President of the U.S.A.," all constitute hallucination.
It's these forms of hallucination that keep "government" in place. Because practically all humans suffer from similar political hallucinations, they tend to all agree with each other about certain fundamental political concepts and notions - such as "government," "state," "country," "nation," "constitution," "king," "president," "law," etc. If anybody questions or challenges these concepts or nations, they tend to think he's crazy. The phenomenon is mass hallucination.
Here is one of my favorite sentences: "The notion of "law" (socalled) is an hallawcinotion" - it sounds even better in French: "La notion de la "loi" (soi-disant) est une halloicinotion." How's that for self-referencing?!
"Government" is Kept in Place by Terror and by Violence
Ultimately, political power comes from the barrel of the gun - as Mao said. The last resort of the monsters who masquerade as "government" is terror and violence. That's why they need the IRS, the ATF, the FBI, the CIA, etc. They have to threaten, terrorize, punish, and kill to retain their coercive power. Make examples out of those who question, threaten, or challenge their so-called "authority."
That's why it's appropriate to call them "territorial gangsters" or "territorial criminals" or "terrocrats" - monsters who use fraud, coercion, and violence to claim "jurisdiction" over a certain area, and the people who happen to be in that area. The monsters do so in order to control and dominate, and to live like parasites or cannibals off the values created by their victims. The foregoing is another very useful definition of "government!"
Source: Frederick Mann - The Nature of Government
Consider two different isolated tribes somewhere in the jungles of South America. Call them Tribe 1 and Tribe 2. Each has its unique language with its own structure. The language of tribe 1 (language 1) tends to be very literal. A man who fishes, for example, is called "man-who-fishes." The same man, while sleeping, is called "manwho-sleeps"; while talking, "man-who-talks"; while running, -"manwho-runs"; while eating, man-who-eats"; while writing, "man-whowrites"; while making a chair, "man-who-makes-chair"; while giving orders, "man-who-gives-orders"; etc. In language 1, distinctions are made between different kinds of words: "Thing-words," "Do-words," "How-words," "Story-words," "Funny-words," "order-words," "Panicwords," "What-words," "Who-words," "Why-words," "When-words," "Where-words," etc. Abstractions are rare in language 1. To the people of tribe 1, any word that doesn't refer to something physically perceivable, is highly suspect. Their test for reality is physical.
The language of Tribe 2 (Language 2) is very different. A man who obtains his wherewithal mostly by fishing, is called "fisherman." (This system of nomenclature would seem absurd to the people of Tribe 1 - how can you call someone a "fisherman" when he is not fishing, but sleeping?) Language 2 contains many abstractions - like "happiness." People from Tribe 2 can talk for hours about "happiness." (To someone from Tribe 1, this would be incomprehensible - they only talk about "woman-who-is-happy" while she is happy, and "woman-who-is-sad" while she is sad. The notion that you could separate "happiness" from a real person being happy, and talk about "happiness" as if it existed by itself, would be completely unthinkable to someone from Tribe 1.)
To the people from Tribe 2, any word being used is automatically assumed to be part of existence, otherwise people wouldn't use it. (To someone from Tribe 1, the word "existence" would be a meaningless absurdity, because in their mentality only particular objects exist.) In Tribe 2, the test for reality is agreement. If other people agree with a word and the way it seems to be used, then that word is automatically accepted as valid and useful. They suffer from hypostatization.
One day a strange man arrives at the place where the people of Tribe 1 live. They ask him: "Who you?" He: "I King". They: "your name King?". He: "No; my name John." They: "Why call self King if name John?" He: "I special person, agent of God." They: "You look different but not special; who God?" He: "God creator of world." They: "Where God?; How create world?" He: "God everywhere; God all-powerful." They: "How we see God?" He: "Can't see God." They: "You speak crazy." He: "No; I special; I show you." Whereupon the stranger performs various tricks like apparently making objects appear and disappear. They: "You clever man-who tricks." He: "I special; I King." They: "You speak funny; you clever John-who-tricks." He: "I King; my word law." They: "What law? special word?" He: "Yes; my word law - you must obey." They: "Ah! You mean order-word!" He: "Yes; I King; I make law." They: "No; you speak order-word?" He: "Yes; I special". They: "What special? - Anybody speak order-word?" He: "You not understand." They: "No."
Eventually John-the-stranger gives up trying to convince the people of Tribe 1 that he has a "special status" and that his words are different from the words of anyone else - so he leaves, to search for more gullible and impressionable victims elsewhere...
For many days and nights he trudges through the jungle before discovering the people of Tribe 2. They: "Who you?" He: "I King." They: "Your name King?" He: "No, my name John." They: "Why call self King if name John?" He: "I special person, agent of God." They: "You look different; what God?" He: "God creator of world." They: Where God?; How create world?" He "God everywhere; God all-powerful." They: "Show special?" Whereupon the stranger performs various tricks like apparently making objects appear and disappear. They: "You King, agent of God." He: "Yes, my word law." They: "What law?" He: "Law special word of God through me; you must obey." Whereupon the people of Tribe 2 bow down and kiss the feet of John - they do not habitually test abstractions against reality, so they readily accept John-the-stranger as their "King" and his word as "law." Thereafter all he has to do to control and dominate them, is to open his mouth...
"Government" is a Form of Parasitism or Cannibalism
The reason why people call themselves "government" is because it provides them with advantages - if they can get away with it. In the case of tribe 1, John-the-stranger called himself "King," but the people didn't buy it, so he left. However, the gullible people from tribe 2 believed him, so they became his "subjects" - meaning he could live off their effort - like a parasite.
The "state" (so-called) has its origin in a gang of looters making an agreement with a tribe: "We'll protect you from other gangs if you give us part of the food you produce." ("Government" is a Mafia-like protection racket.)
It's much easier to live off the values produced by others than to create your own values. Being a parasite is easier than being a producer. Being a value destroyer is easier than being a value creator. Now if we take it a step further, and regard the fruit of our labor as part of ourselves, then we're talking about cannibalism. That's why the American Declaration of Independence talks about "eating out our substance." "Government" is a form of cannibalism.
"Government" is Kept in Place by Certain Fraud-Words
Politicians and bureaucrats use mostly words to impose their will upon others - even when physical violence is involved, they use words to attempt to justify their actions. Thomas Szasz wrote in The Second Sin, "Man is the animal that speaks. Understanding language is thus the key to understanding man; and the control of language, to the control of man." The language used to control and dominate others I collectively lump together as "Newspeak." The word Newspeak was invented by George Orwell and described in his book Nineteen-Eighty-Four. I use the word in essentially the same way that Orwell did, but within its domain I subsume words that I don't think Orwell would have: "state," "government," "law," "king," "constitution," "queen," "president," "prime minister," etc. Newspeak, as I use the term, has developed over many centuries. I contend that the use of Newspeak by freedom lovers as if valid (i. e., without questioning its validity, and without considering its consequences), may easily become counter-productive. I specifically use Newspeak in the sense of Orwell's "B vocabulary":
"The 'B vocabulary' consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them... the 'B' words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables... even in the early decades of the Twentieth Century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations... the intention being to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness... ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word 'Duckspeak' meaning 'to quack like a duck.'" [emphasis added]
I'm also introducing here the concept of "fraud-word." I'm saying that certain words are fraudulent in themselves. You don't even have to use them in a sentence; the word itself is a lie. For example, the word "King." We have a perfectly good word "man." When a man calls himself "King," he's lying as did John-thestranger above. The word itself is a fraud.
In his superb book Restoring the American Dream, Robert Ringer devoted an entire chapter to how "government" is kept in place by certain words - Chapter 8: "Keeping It All in Place." Here is my list of statist fraud-words: "government," "state," "country," "nation," "U. S.A.," "empire," "commonwealth," "republic," "society," "emperor," "king," "queen," "prince," "princess," "president," "prime minister," "law," "constitution," "public interest," "national interest," "fair share," "common good," "national security," "social contract," "public policy," "mandate from the people," etc.
Two of the Worst Fraud-Words: "Constitution," and "Law"
If you think about it, you will realize the role of language in practically all coercion: be it parents or teachers coercing the young; or those masquerading as (so-called) "state" or "government" coercing (so-called) "subjects." Politicians and bureaucrats have an armory of weapons they use to coerce their victims. I put it to you that fraud-words are the most formidable weapons in their armory - not guns and explosives. Do politicians and bureaucrats use guns or words? I further put it to you that next to "government," two of their most powerful fraud-words are "law" and "constitution."
Most people believe that some of the noises and scribbles emanating from the mouths and pens of the lawyers, politicians, and bureaucrats (masquerading as "government" so-called) are somehow special and constitute "the law." This is a grotesque superstition.
The criminals who masquerade as "government" use "the Constitution" as their shield - they claim that "the Constitution authorizes or empowers them" to perpetrate their destructive acts. They use the word "law" as their sword. Because you broke their so-called "law," therefore they are authorized or empowered to punish you as they see fit.
"It is illusions and words that have influenced the mind of the crowd, and especially words - words which are as powerful as they are chimeral, and whose astonishing sway we shall shortly demonstrate," wrote Gustave le Bon in his classic The Crowd, a hundred years ago. About two hundred years ago, Jeremy Bentham wrote, "Out of one foolish word may start a thousand daggers" - Bentham's Theory of Fictions by C.K. Ogden. And 160 years ago Jonathan Swift wrote in Gulliver's Travels:
"There was another point which a little perplexed him... I had said, that some of our crew left their country on account of being ruined by 'law'... but he was at a loss how it should come to pass, that the 'law' which was intended for 'every' man's preservation, should be any man's ruin. Therefore he desired to be further satisfied what I meant by 'law,' and the dispensers thereof... because he thought nature and reason were sufficient guides for a reasonable animal, as we pretended to be, in showing us what we ought to do, and what to avoid... I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, accordingly as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves."
"Government" is Kept In Place by Superstition
The first superstition that keeps "government" in place is the belief that because practically all of us use certain words without any thought as to their validity and the consequences they produce Duckspeak - therefore these words are valid and represent reality.
The second superstition is the notion that certain words constitute "the law" (so-called). This is a most grotesque absurdity.
The third superstition is that because certain naive and gullible people put pieces of paper into "ballot" boxes, this action transforms, transmutes, transubstantiates, or transmogrifies, certain people into "presidents," "congressmen," etc. This is primitive magical "thought."
The fourth superstition is that because some people call themselves "government" - or organize themselves into structures called "government" - therefore they acquire magical powers to perform miracles.
"Government" is Kept in Place by Gullibility
To think of Slick Willy as "President of the U.S.A.," is pure gullibility. The same applies to Washington, Jefferson, and all the others. They were all liars and impostors - idols. The entire "U.S." political system has been a fraud and a hoax since the outset. The same applies to all the other political systems I know of. Why are people so gullible as to believe politicians, bureaucrats, and lawyers?
The first reason is that human consciousness is in its infancy. In evolutionary terms, consciousness is a very recent development - as Nietzsche indicated. Erving Goffman started his book Frame Analysis with:
"There is a venerable tradition in philosophy that argues that what the reader assumes to be real is but a shadow, and that by attending to what the writer says about perception, thought, the brain, language, culture, a new methodology, or novel social forces, the veil can be lifted. That sort of line, of course, gives as much a role to the writer and his writings as is possible to imagine and for that reason is pathetic."
Later in the same book - implying that it's impossible for people to become more conscious? - Goffman wrote:
"I can only suggest that he who would combat false consciousness and awaken people to their true interests has much to do, because the sleep is very deep. And I do not intend here to provide a lullaby but merely to sneak in and watch the way people snore." [emphasis added]
The second reason is that many beliefs are culturally passed on from generation to generation. In general, people who question cultural beliefs tend to be ridiculed, punished, cast out, or killed. Furthermore, the politicians, bureaucrats, and lawyers have created concentration camps for brainwashing (euphemistically called "schools" by the gullible) where the youth are coercively inculcated with cultural beliefs designed to perpetuate and strengthen the political system.
The third reason why many people are so gullible is that few have developed the thinking skills to question what they are taught and what they see, hear, and read in the media.
"Government" is Kept in Place by a Lack of Thinking Skills
To see through political hoaxes requires thinking skills. The most important one is probably the ability to question everything. Robert Anton Wilson wrote as follows in his book Right Where You Are Sitting Now:
"On a night in September 1927 when he contemplated suicide at the age of 32, Buckminster Fuller decided to live the rest of his life as an experiment. He wouldn't believe anything anybody told him "golden rule," "dog-eat-dog," or any of it - and would try to find out by experience only, what could be physically demonstrated to work.
In the year following that decision, Bucky stopped talking entirely, like many mystics in the east. He insists that he had nothing "mystical" in mind. "I was simply trying to free myself of conditioned reflexes," he said. He had met pioneer semanticist Alfred Korzybski shortly before and was convinced that Korzybski was correct in his claim that language structures caused conditioned associations mechanical reactions that keep us locked into certain perceptual grids. Fuller tried to break these grids, to find out what a person "of average intelligence" could accomplish if guided only by personal observation and experiment...
The language we use influences the thoughts we think much more than the thoughts we think influence the language we use. We are encased in fossil metaphors; verbal chains guide us through our daily reality-labyrinth.
Physicists, for example, spent nearly three centuries looking for a substance, heat, to correspond to the substantive noun, "heat"; it took a revolution in chemistry and thermodynamics before we realized that heat should not be thought of as a noun (a thing) but a verb (a process) - a relationship between the motions of molecules.
Around the turn of this century - this is all old news, even though most literary "intellectuals" still haven't heard about it - several mathematicians and philosophers who were well versed in the physical sciences began to realize consciously that there is not necessarily a "thing" (a static and block-like entity) corresponding to every noun in our vocabulary."
Fuller's many inventions and discoveries stem largely from his ability to question everything. It's through the application of this and other thinking skills that we discover that the most fundamental issue concerning "government" is the underlying thought patterns, consisting of statist fraud-concepts like "government," "state," "nation," "king," "president," "law," etc. According to Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
"But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government... is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself. And if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government..." [emphasis added]
[...]
"Government" is Kept in Place by Brainwashing
My book Wake Up America! The Dynamics of Human Power (available from Terra Libra) includes a chapter titled "Are our Schools Concentration Campuses for Mind Destruction?" in which I describe "education" in some detail.
Ayn Rand's The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, contains a chapter, "The Comprachicos." Comprachico is a Spanish word meaning "child-buyer." The comprachicos were a nomadic association, notorious in the seventeenth century. They bought and sold children - special children, children turned into deformed freaks, used in freak shows to amuse the public. At an early age they placed a young child in a porcelain pot with a grotesque form. As the child's body grew, it had to assume the shape of the pot. The result was a deformed freak for people to laugh at.
Rand uses the practice of the comprachicos as an analogy to describe American "education." She refers to our "educators" as "the comprachicos of the mind." Children's minds are forced to assume the shape of a grotesque "intellectual pot." Rand describes the result:
"The students' development is arrested, their minds are set to respond to slogans, as animals respond to a trainer's whistle, their brains are embalmed in the syrup of altruism as an automatic substitute for self-esteem... They would obey anyone, they need a master, they need to be told what to do. They are ready now to be used as cannon fodder - to attack, to bomb, to burn, to murder, to fight in the streets and die in the gutters. They are a trained pack of miserably impotent freaks, ready to be unleashed against anyone." [emphasis added]
In every part of the world, the monsters who masquerade as "government," do their utmost to achieve monopoly control of the so-called "education system" - they try to make it compulsory so all children will be subjected to government brainwashing. The result is that practically every victim is degraded into an unthinking follower... or unthinking rebel.
"Government" is Kept in Place by Mass Hallucination
My Webster's definition of hallucination includes the following:
Perception of objects with no reality;
A completely unfounded or mistaken impression or notion.
We could also describe hallucination as "seeing" or "perceiving" what's not there - or "seeing" or "perceiving" more than exists in reality.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) could be described as the science of representational systems. In our brains we have "neural patterns" or "models" that attempt to represent reality. For example, in my brain I have a "picture" of a table. If someone asks me to draw a picture of a table, I access the "picture" or "model" in my head, from which I then draw a table. These "pictures," "models," or "neural patterns" are called representational systems. They include intellectual, emotional, visual, auditory, and other sensory data.
Our representational systems are more or less "useful." To the extent that we use them to predict accurately and produce desirable results, we regard them as useful. NLP people have identified three major ways in which our representational systems differ from reality:
Generalization - e.g., the representational system called "furniture" - or the "intellectual" neural pattern: "all women are the same."
Distortion - e.g., "the color of my car is blue" - the physicist tells us this is a distortion; it's more accurate to say that my car's outer surface reflects light with the wavelength we call "blue," while absorbing light with other wavelengths.
Deletion - e.g., "Tom is a wonderful, generous, happy, healthy individual" - Tom has many other attributes, some of which have been ignored or "deleted" from my representational system.
I've identified a very important fourth way in which our representational systems differ from reality: Addition - e.g., "John-the-stranger is a King, therefore he has special powers; and the words that come out of his mouth are special and therefore are the law which must be obeyed." John is really an ordinary man. By representing him as a "King" in our representational systems, we have added something to what exists in reality. Similarly, John's words are ordinary like those of the rest of us, and when we represent some of his words as "the law" in our representational systems, we have added something to what occurs in reality.
The essence of hallucination is "seeing" or "perceiving" what doesn't really exist or occur. The phenomenon of addition, as described above, is simply hallucination. To have a neural patterns or mental models that say "the government runs the country," "government makes law," "Slick Willy is President of the U.S.A.," all constitute hallucination.
It's these forms of hallucination that keep "government" in place. Because practically all humans suffer from similar political hallucinations, they tend to all agree with each other about certain fundamental political concepts and notions - such as "government," "state," "country," "nation," "constitution," "king," "president," "law," etc. If anybody questions or challenges these concepts or nations, they tend to think he's crazy. The phenomenon is mass hallucination.
Here is one of my favorite sentences: "The notion of "law" (socalled) is an hallawcinotion" - it sounds even better in French: "La notion de la "loi" (soi-disant) est une halloicinotion." How's that for self-referencing?!
"Government" is Kept in Place by Terror and by Violence
Ultimately, political power comes from the barrel of the gun - as Mao said. The last resort of the monsters who masquerade as "government" is terror and violence. That's why they need the IRS, the ATF, the FBI, the CIA, etc. They have to threaten, terrorize, punish, and kill to retain their coercive power. Make examples out of those who question, threaten, or challenge their so-called "authority."
That's why it's appropriate to call them "territorial gangsters" or "territorial criminals" or "terrocrats" - monsters who use fraud, coercion, and violence to claim "jurisdiction" over a certain area, and the people who happen to be in that area. The monsters do so in order to control and dominate, and to live like parasites or cannibals off the values created by their victims. The foregoing is another very useful definition of "government!"
Source: Frederick Mann - The Nature of Government
Feminism
How come we live in a society that appears to be run by men, but feels like it's run by women ? The answer is pretty simple. The men who run the modern society - the politicians, businessmen, educators and priests - are men who think like women. They are men who espouse and advance female values. Why do they do this ? Because women have more purchasing power, more voting power and more cultural power than men. Women control the marketplace, the polling place and the content of our schools, churches and media. The "secret of success" of the modern "successful" man is that he sold his soul to women and female values. Our society is run by men who think and act like women. That's why we have so many problems. The Patriarchy is, in fact, a Matriarchy. Female values rule.
[...]
"Equality" is meaningless. Is a bee equal to a sparrow? Is a whale equal to a squirrel? The term is meaningless. And anyway, feminism was never honestly about Equality. Feminism was about MORE STUFF FOR WOMEN. Women don't want to mine coal or get drafted into war. That's too much Equality for them. Just let them have some office job so they can stay comfortable and buy more stuff. Forget that they live 8 years longer than us. Ignore the fact that 19 out of 20 people who die on the job are men. Or 4 out of 5 suicides are men. Or 80% of the homeless are men. That's the other side of Equality, and they don't want to hear about it. "Programs for men? Men have everything don't they?...Me?" she titters. "Sign up for the draft? Drill oil? You must be kidding. I'm not equipped for that. That's not the kind of Equality I mean."
[...]
Men are not the oppressors of women. The simple proof of that is that Women are not oppressed. Women are not now, and never have been "oppressed". Women have the right to vote with NO concomitant obligation to be drafted in time of war to protect their right to vote. Personally, I don't see how they got the one without being forced to assume the other. They have power without responsibility. [...]They can vote but they need not fight nor pour concrete. That's a perversion of the word Equality.
[...]
Pursuit of happiness is primarily a female goal. Pursuit of the mysteries of life is primarily a male goal.
[...]
Between the 8th and 12th weeks a fetus with male chromosomes begins to produce testosterone and other androgens which "differentiate" its masculine genitals, and later, its brain. A fetus with female chromosomes, because it is exposed to much less androgen, continues to develop along female lines. A person's prenatal hormonal experience appears to be an especially strong influence on later behavior. From those controversial corridors of animal research comes conclusive evidence that a male rat will act like one only if it has gotten the right amount of androgen, starting at the right time, and for the right duration, in the course of its development. If he hasn't received the proper amounts of hormones at the proper times he will act like a female, even if he looks like a normal male. Conversely, Robert Goy says the evidence is "indisputable" that excessive prenatal exposure to male androgen can produce male genderrole behavior in females. And, Roger Gorski's UCLA team found that when testosterone is withheld by castrating rat pups their brains look like those of females. What does it all mean? It means that, all things being equal, we would all come out female. It means that a male baby's Y chromosome induces the mother's undescended testicles to manufacture testosterone and other male androgens that shape a male fetus' gonads and brain and launch him on a life course which is incomparable and literally inconceivable to the female of the species; and this process begins in the first weeks of existence as a zygote. But most importantly, it means that males are not born, they are made.
They are made by hormones which enlarge and reform the normal model brain creating a greater right-brain capacity, and vastly different perceptual skills. And they are made by the sport and war and government and literature and legends of the older men whose duty it is to initiate the younger men into the formation of those values which beget and sustain human life. Men do not just happen. Women reach puberty, their breasts enlarge, they bleed between their legs, and life tells them that they are mature females. They can hardly fail to get the point. The female initiation in many tribes is simply for the pubescent girl to sit still and meditate silently on her condition. With men, the transitions, though noticeable, are hardly that distinct. Men must be activated, by hormones and by the society of men. Men must be made, and if they're not what you get are men who act like women.
[...]
A brain hormone (GnRH) released by the hypothalamus affects ovulation, menstruation, and the onset of menopause. Also, according to Sergio Ojeda of the Oregon Primate Research Center, "It is clear now that the onset of puberty is a brain-driven event." It is initiated by the hypothalamus in the absence of gonads. Similarly, we used to think that the depletion of eggs in the ovaries caused the onset of menopause but that doesn't seem to be the case. Ovaries from old rats have been put in young rats and they became fertile again, whereas young ovaries put in old rats didn't switch on again. According to Phyllis Wise of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore "...hypothalamic function changes in mid-age and this may play an important role in the loss of fecundity and cyclicity (in women)."
[...]
The world runs like it does for the benefit of women and children. Men cleave to their agendas. No man wakes up and asks, "What do I want to do today?" He says, "What do I have to do today?" He is an emotional junkie starting each day by servicing the agenda of the praise-givers and sex-bestowers. He has no center in his own life that has not been infiltrated by his sex partner. He is a servant, a trained performer, pursuing the gratification that his mother and his wife have hooked him on. Why do you suspect mothers-in-law and wives don't get along? They're both competing for the same praise/manipulation territory in their son's/husband's brain.
[...]
One day a Man's Intuition said:
"Let's tie a note to this pigeon's leg and send a message home."
His Wife's Intuition said:
"It'll get lost."
One day a Man's Intuition said:
"I'm going to stretch this string on that bowed branch and use it to shoot a small spear."
His Wife's Intuition said:
"You'll hurt one of the kids."
One day a Man's Intuition said:
"I'm going to carve some paddles so I can row my raft offshore."
His Wife's Intuition said:
"You'll just drown."
If civilization relied on Women's Intuition we would still be living in caves munching cold seeds and listening to them complain about that!
Walt Disney, the artist who "defined" the visual age we live in, was cursed with an "intuitive" wife. When he wanted to invest all of his money into making the first color cartoon she threatened to leave him. When he wanted to make the first feature length cartoon she blustered about divorce. When he wanted to throw everything he had behind a theme park to be called "Disneyland" she enlisted the help of Walt's brother to try and stop him.
[...]
Continues Bly: Carl Jung believed that when the son is introduced to feeling primarily by the mother he will learn the female attitude toward masculinity and take a female view of his own father and of his own masculinity. He will see his father through his mother's eyes. Since the father and the mother are in competition for the affection of the son, he's not going to get a straight picture of his father out of his mother, nor will he get a straight picture of his mother out of his father. Some mothers send messages that civilization and culture and feeling and relationships are things which the mother and the daughter, or the mother and the sensitive son, share in common; whereas the father stands for and embodies what is stiff, brutal, unfeeling, obsessed, rationalistic, money-mad, uncompassionate. "Your father can't help it," she laments.
Source: Rich Zubaty - What men know that women don't
[...]
"Equality" is meaningless. Is a bee equal to a sparrow? Is a whale equal to a squirrel? The term is meaningless. And anyway, feminism was never honestly about Equality. Feminism was about MORE STUFF FOR WOMEN. Women don't want to mine coal or get drafted into war. That's too much Equality for them. Just let them have some office job so they can stay comfortable and buy more stuff. Forget that they live 8 years longer than us. Ignore the fact that 19 out of 20 people who die on the job are men. Or 4 out of 5 suicides are men. Or 80% of the homeless are men. That's the other side of Equality, and they don't want to hear about it. "Programs for men? Men have everything don't they?...Me?" she titters. "Sign up for the draft? Drill oil? You must be kidding. I'm not equipped for that. That's not the kind of Equality I mean."
[...]
Men are not the oppressors of women. The simple proof of that is that Women are not oppressed. Women are not now, and never have been "oppressed". Women have the right to vote with NO concomitant obligation to be drafted in time of war to protect their right to vote. Personally, I don't see how they got the one without being forced to assume the other. They have power without responsibility. [...]They can vote but they need not fight nor pour concrete. That's a perversion of the word Equality.
[...]
Pursuit of happiness is primarily a female goal. Pursuit of the mysteries of life is primarily a male goal.
[...]
Between the 8th and 12th weeks a fetus with male chromosomes begins to produce testosterone and other androgens which "differentiate" its masculine genitals, and later, its brain. A fetus with female chromosomes, because it is exposed to much less androgen, continues to develop along female lines. A person's prenatal hormonal experience appears to be an especially strong influence on later behavior. From those controversial corridors of animal research comes conclusive evidence that a male rat will act like one only if it has gotten the right amount of androgen, starting at the right time, and for the right duration, in the course of its development. If he hasn't received the proper amounts of hormones at the proper times he will act like a female, even if he looks like a normal male. Conversely, Robert Goy says the evidence is "indisputable" that excessive prenatal exposure to male androgen can produce male genderrole behavior in females. And, Roger Gorski's UCLA team found that when testosterone is withheld by castrating rat pups their brains look like those of females. What does it all mean? It means that, all things being equal, we would all come out female. It means that a male baby's Y chromosome induces the mother's undescended testicles to manufacture testosterone and other male androgens that shape a male fetus' gonads and brain and launch him on a life course which is incomparable and literally inconceivable to the female of the species; and this process begins in the first weeks of existence as a zygote. But most importantly, it means that males are not born, they are made.
They are made by hormones which enlarge and reform the normal model brain creating a greater right-brain capacity, and vastly different perceptual skills. And they are made by the sport and war and government and literature and legends of the older men whose duty it is to initiate the younger men into the formation of those values which beget and sustain human life. Men do not just happen. Women reach puberty, their breasts enlarge, they bleed between their legs, and life tells them that they are mature females. They can hardly fail to get the point. The female initiation in many tribes is simply for the pubescent girl to sit still and meditate silently on her condition. With men, the transitions, though noticeable, are hardly that distinct. Men must be activated, by hormones and by the society of men. Men must be made, and if they're not what you get are men who act like women.
[...]
A brain hormone (GnRH) released by the hypothalamus affects ovulation, menstruation, and the onset of menopause. Also, according to Sergio Ojeda of the Oregon Primate Research Center, "It is clear now that the onset of puberty is a brain-driven event." It is initiated by the hypothalamus in the absence of gonads. Similarly, we used to think that the depletion of eggs in the ovaries caused the onset of menopause but that doesn't seem to be the case. Ovaries from old rats have been put in young rats and they became fertile again, whereas young ovaries put in old rats didn't switch on again. According to Phyllis Wise of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore "...hypothalamic function changes in mid-age and this may play an important role in the loss of fecundity and cyclicity (in women)."
[...]
The world runs like it does for the benefit of women and children. Men cleave to their agendas. No man wakes up and asks, "What do I want to do today?" He says, "What do I have to do today?" He is an emotional junkie starting each day by servicing the agenda of the praise-givers and sex-bestowers. He has no center in his own life that has not been infiltrated by his sex partner. He is a servant, a trained performer, pursuing the gratification that his mother and his wife have hooked him on. Why do you suspect mothers-in-law and wives don't get along? They're both competing for the same praise/manipulation territory in their son's/husband's brain.
[...]
One day a Man's Intuition said:
"Let's tie a note to this pigeon's leg and send a message home."
His Wife's Intuition said:
"It'll get lost."
One day a Man's Intuition said:
"I'm going to stretch this string on that bowed branch and use it to shoot a small spear."
His Wife's Intuition said:
"You'll hurt one of the kids."
One day a Man's Intuition said:
"I'm going to carve some paddles so I can row my raft offshore."
His Wife's Intuition said:
"You'll just drown."
If civilization relied on Women's Intuition we would still be living in caves munching cold seeds and listening to them complain about that!
Walt Disney, the artist who "defined" the visual age we live in, was cursed with an "intuitive" wife. When he wanted to invest all of his money into making the first color cartoon she threatened to leave him. When he wanted to make the first feature length cartoon she blustered about divorce. When he wanted to throw everything he had behind a theme park to be called "Disneyland" she enlisted the help of Walt's brother to try and stop him.
[...]
Continues Bly: Carl Jung believed that when the son is introduced to feeling primarily by the mother he will learn the female attitude toward masculinity and take a female view of his own father and of his own masculinity. He will see his father through his mother's eyes. Since the father and the mother are in competition for the affection of the son, he's not going to get a straight picture of his father out of his mother, nor will he get a straight picture of his mother out of his father. Some mothers send messages that civilization and culture and feeling and relationships are things which the mother and the daughter, or the mother and the sensitive son, share in common; whereas the father stands for and embodies what is stiff, brutal, unfeeling, obsessed, rationalistic, money-mad, uncompassionate. "Your father can't help it," she laments.
Source: Rich Zubaty - What men know that women don't
Books vs Tee-vee
[...]The next negative factor [in impeding brain development] is television. Studies compiled by Dr. Keith Buzzell, Jerry Mander, Mary Jane Healy, and others show that the damage of television has little to do with the content but rather with the pairing of imagery in synch with sound. This provides a synthetic counterfeit of what the brain is supposed to produce in response to language, as in storytelling. The child's mind becomes habituated to such sound-images, and the higher cortical structures simply shut down. Paul MacLean's work shows how in habituation the ancient reptilian brain takes over sensory processing and the rest of the brain idles along, doing nothing, because it's not needed. The brain uses the same neural structures every time the TV comes on, and very few of the higher structures are developed. They simply lie dormant, and no capacity for creating internal imagery develops...
There's a wonderful story about a little girl who said she loved the pictures on radio so much more than the pictures on TV because the pictures on radio were so much more beautiful.
In storytelling, the stimulus of words brings about the production of inner images, an extraordinary creative play involving the entire brain. Each new story requires a whole new set of neural connections and reorganizations of visual activity within a major challenge for the brain. Television, by providing all that action synthetically, is handled by the same, limited number of neural structures regardless of programming, since the brain's work has already been done for it. This is habituation. So neural potential goes unrealized and development is impaired unless storytelling and play are provided as well as TV, or preferably, instead of TV.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
There's a wonderful story about a little girl who said she loved the pictures on radio so much more than the pictures on TV because the pictures on radio were so much more beautiful.
In storytelling, the stimulus of words brings about the production of inner images, an extraordinary creative play involving the entire brain. Each new story requires a whole new set of neural connections and reorganizations of visual activity within a major challenge for the brain. Television, by providing all that action synthetically, is handled by the same, limited number of neural structures regardless of programming, since the brain's work has already been done for it. This is habituation. So neural potential goes unrealized and development is impaired unless storytelling and play are provided as well as TV, or preferably, instead of TV.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
Ladder Theory
The ladder theory is a funny, scientific explanation of how men and womenare attracted to each other. It also covers such topics as why women sometimes just want to be friends but men always want sex. It is based upon many years of sociological field testing, and was first conceptualized in 1994 in Exeter, CA by Dallas Lynn with acknowledgements to Jared Whitson for his role in formalizing the theory.
http://www.laddertheory.com
http://www.laddertheory.com
THE BASIC LAWS OF HUMAN STUPIDITY
THE BASIC LAWS OF HUMAN STUPIDITY
by Carlo M. Cipolla
illustrations by James Donnelly
The first basic law of human stupidity asserts without ambiguity that:
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
At first, the statement sounds trivial, vague and horribly ungenerous. Closer scrutiny will however reveal its realistic veracity. No matter how high are one's estimates of human stupidity, one is repeatedly and recurrently startled by the fact that:
a) people whom one had once judged rational and intelligent turn out to be unashamedly stupid.
b) day after day, with unceasing monotony, one is harassed in one's activities by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments.
The First Basic Law prevents me from attributing a specific numerical value to the fraction of stupid people within the total population: any numerical estimate would turn out to be an underestimate. Thus in the following pages I will denote the fraction of stupid people within a population by the symbol .
THE SECOND BASIC LAW
Cultural trends now fashionable in the West favour an egalitarian approach to life. People like to think of human beings as the output of a perfectly engineered mass production machine. Geneticists and sociologists especially go out of their way to prove, with an impressive apparatus of scientific data and formulations that all men are naturally equal and if some are more equal than others, this is attributable to nurture and not to nature. I take an exception to this general view. It is my firm conviction, supported by years of observation and experimentation, that men are not equal, that some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence. Although convinced that fraction of human beings are stupid and that they are so because of genetic traits, I am not a reactionary trying to reintroduce surreptitiously class or race discrimination. I firmly believe that stupidity is an indiscriminate privilege of all human groups and is uniformly distributed according to a constant proportion. This fact is scientifically expressed by the Second Basic Law which states that
The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
In this regard, Nature seems indeed to have outdone herself. It is well known that Nature manages, rather mysteriously, to keep constant the relative frequency of certain natural phenomena. For instance, whether men proliferate at the Northern Pole or at the Equator, whether the matching couples are developed or underdeveloped, whether they are black, red, white or yellow the female to male ratio among the newly born is a constant, with a very slight prevalence of males. We do not know how Nature achieves this remarkable result but we know that in order to achieve it Nature must operate with large numbers. The most remarkable fact about the frequency of stupidity is that Nature succeeds in making this frequency equal to the probability quite independently from the size of the group.
Thus one finds the same percentage of stupid people whether one is considering very large groups or one is dealing with very small ones. No other set of observable phenomena offers such striking proof of the powers of Nature.
The evidence that education has nothing to do with the probability was provided by experiments carried on in a large number of universities all over the world. One may distinguish the composite population which constitutes a university in five major groups, namely the blue-collar workers, the white-collar employees, the students, the administrators and the professors.
Whenever I analyzed the blue-collar workers I found that the fraction of them were stupid. As 's value was higher than I expected (First Law), paying my tribute to fashion I thought at first that segregation, poverty, lack of education were to be blamed. But moving up the social ladder I found that the same ratio was prevalent among the white-collar employees and among the students. More impressive still were the results among the professors. Whether I considered a large university or a small college, a famous institution or an obscure one, I found that the same fraction of the professors are stupid. So bewildered was I by the results, that I made a special point to extend my research to a specially selected group, to a real elite, the Nobel laureates. The result confirmed Nature's supreme powers: fraction of the Nobel laureates are stupid.
This idea was hard to accept and digest but too many experimental results proved its fundamental veracity. The Second Basic Law is an iron law, and it does not admit exceptions. The Women's Liberation Movement will support the Second Basic Law as it shows that stupid individuals are proportionately as numerous among men as among women. The underdeveloped of the Third World will probably take solace at the Second Basic Law as they can find in it the proof that after the developed are not so developed. Whether the Second Basic Law is liked or not, however, its implications are frightening: the Law implies that whether you move in distinguished circles or you take refuge among the head-hunters of Polynesia, whether you lock yourself into a monastery or decide to spend the rest of your life in the company of beautiful and lascivious women, you always have to face the same percentage of stupid people - which percentage (in accordance with the First Law) will always surpass your expectations.
THE THIRD (AND GOLDEN)BASIC LAW
The Third Basic Law assumes, although it does not state it explicitly, that human beings fall into four basic categories: the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit and the stupid. It will be easily recognized by the perspicacious reader that these four categories correspond to the four areas I, H, S, B, of the basic graph (see below).
If Tom takes an action and suffers a loss while producing a gain to Dick, Tom's mark will fall in field H: Tom acted helplessly. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain while yielding a gain also to Dick, Tom's mark will fall in area I: Tom acted intelligently. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain causing Dick a loss, Tom's mark will fall in area B: Tom acted as a bandit. Stupidity is related to area S and to all positions on axis Y below point O. As the Third Basic Law explicitly clarifies:
A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
When confronted for the first time with the Third Basic Law, rational people instinctively react with feelings of skepticism and incredulity. The fact is that reasonable people have difficulty in conceiving and understanding unreasonable behaviour. But let us abandon the lofty plane of theory and let us look pragmatically at our daily life. We all recollect occasions in which a fellow took an action which resulted in his gain and our loss: we had to deal with a bandit. We also recollect cases in which a fellow took an action which resulted in his loss and our gain: we had to deal with a helpless person. We can recollect cases in which a fellow took an action by which both parties gained: he was intelligent. Such cases do indeed occur. But upon thoughtful reflection you must admit that these are not the events which punctuate most frequently our daily life. Our daily life is mostly, made of cases in which we lose money and/or time and/or energy and/or appetite, cheerfulness and good health because of the improbable action of some preposterous creature who has nothing to gain and indeed gains nothing from causing us embarrassment, difficulties or harm. Nobody knows, understands or can possibly explain why that preposterous creature does what he does. In fact there is no explanation - or better there is only one explanation: the person in question is stupid.
FREQUENCY DISTRIBUTION
Most people do not act consistently. Under certain circumstances a given person acts intelligently and under different circumstances the same person will act helplessly. The only important exception to the rule is represented by the stupid people who normally show a strong proclivity toward perfect consistency in all fields of human endeavours.
>From all that proceeds, it does not follow, that we can chart on the basic graph only stupid individuals. We can calculate for each person his weighted average position in the plane of figure 1 quite independently from his degree of inconsistency. A helpless person may occasionally behave intelligently and on occasion he may perform a bandit's action. But since the person in question is fundamentally helpless most of his action will have the characteristics of helplessness. Thus the overall weighted average position of all the actions of such a person will place him in the H quadrant of the basic graph.
The fact that it is possible to place on the graph individuals instead of their actions allows some digression about the frequency of the bandit and stupid types.
The perfect bandit is one who, with his actions, causes to other individuals losses equal to his gains. The crudest type of banditry is theft. A person who robs you of 100 pounds without causing you an extra loss or harm is a perfect bandit: you lose 100 pounds, he gains 100 pounds. In the basic graph the perfect bandits would appear on a 45-degree diagonal line that divides the area B into two perfectly symmetrical sub-areas (line OM of figure 2).
However the "perfect" bandits are relatively few. The line OM divides the area B into two sub-areas, B1, and B2, and by far the largest majority of the bandits falls somewhere in one of these two sub-areas.
The bandits who fall in area B1 are those individuals whose actions yield to them profits which are larger than the losses they cause to other people. All bandits who are entitled to a position in area B1 are bandits with overtones of intelligence and as they get closer to the right side of the X axis they share more and more the characteristics of the intelligent person.
Unfortunately the individuals entitled to a position in the B1 area are not very numerous. Most bandits actually fall in area B2. The individuals who fall in this area are those whose actions yield to them gains inferior to the losses inflicted to other people. If someone kills you in order to rob you of fifty pounds or if he murders you in order to spend a weekend with your wife at Monte Carlo, we can be sure that he is not a perfect bandit. Even by using his values to measure his gains (but still using your values to measure your losses) he falls in the B2 area very close to the border of sheer stupidity. Generals who cause vast destruction and innumerable casualties in return for a promotion or a medal fall in the same area.
The frequency distribution of the stupid people is totally different from that of the bandit. While bandits are mostly scattered over an area stupid people are heavily concentrated along one line, specifically on the Y axis below point O. The reason for this is that by far the majority of stupid people are basically and unwaveringly stupid - in other words they perseveringly insist in causing harm and losses to other people without deriving any gain, whether positive or negative.
There are however people who by their improbable actions not only cause damages to other people but in addition hurt themselves. They are a sort of super-stupid who, in our system of accounting, will appear somewhere in the area S to the left of the Y axis.
THE POWER OF STUPIDITY
It is not difficult to understand how social, political and institutional power enhances the damaging potential of a stupid person. But one still has to explain and understand what essentially it is that makes a stupid person dangerous to other people - in other words what constitutes the power of stupidity.
Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behaviour. An intelligent person may understand the logic of a bandit. The bandit's actions follow a pattern of rationality: nasty rationality, if you like, but still rationality. The bandit wants a plus on his account. Since he is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to appear on your account. All this is bad, but it is rational and if you are rational you can predict it. You can foresee a bandit's actions, his nasty manoeuvres and ugly aspirations and often can build up your defenses.
With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy. Because the stupid person's actions do not conform to the rules of rationality, it follows that:
a) one is generally caught by surprise by the attack; b) even when one becomes aware of the attack, one cannot organize a rational defense, because the attack itself lacks any rational structure.
The fact that the activity and movements of a stupid creature are absolutely erratic and irrational not only makes defense problematic but it also makes any counter-attack extremely difficult - like trying to shoot at an object which is capable of the most improbable and unimaginable movements. This is what both Dickens and Schiller had in mind when the former stated that "with stupidity and sound digestion man may front much" and the latter wrote that "against stupidity the very Gods fight in vain."
THE FOURTH BASIC LAW
That helpless people, namely those who in our accounting system fall into the H area, do not normally recognize how dangerous stupid people are, is not at all surprising. Their failure is just another expression of their helplessness. The truly amazing fact, however, is that also intelligent people and bandits often fail to recognize the power to damage inherent in stupidity. It is extremely difficult to explain why this should happen and one can only remark that when confronted with stupid individuals often intelligent men as well as bandits make the mistake of indulging in feelings of self-complacency and contemptuousness instead of immediately secreting adequate quantities of adrenaline and building up defenses.
One is tempted to believe that a stupid man will only do harm to himself but this is confusing stupidity with helplessness. On occasion one is tempted to associate oneself with a stupid individual in order to use him for one's own schemes. Such a manoeuvre cannot but have disastrous effects because a) it is based on a complete misunderstanding of the essential nature of stupidity and b) it gives the stupid person added scope for the exercise of his gifts. One may hope to outmanoeuvre the stupid and, up to a point, one may actually do so. But because of the erratic behaviour of the stupid, one cannot foresee all the stupid's actions and reactions and before long one will be pulverized by the unpredictable moves of the stupid partner.
This is clearly summarized in the Fourth Basic Law which states that:
Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
Through centuries and millennia, in public as in private life, countless individuals have failed to take account of the Fourth Basic Law and the failure has caused mankind incalculable losses.
THE FIFTH BASIC LAW
Instead of considering the welfare of the individual let us consider the welfare of the society, regarded in this context as the algebraic sum of the individual conditions. A full understanding of the Fifth Basic Law is essential to the analysis. It may be parenthetically added here that of the Five Basic Laws, the Fifth is certainly the best known and its corollary is quoted very frequently. The Fifth Basic Law states that:
A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
The corollary of the Law is that:
A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.
The result of the action of a perfect bandit (the person who falls on line OM of figure 2) is purely and simply a transfer of wealth and/or welfare. After the action of a perfect bandit, the bandit has a plus on his account which plus is exactly equivalent to the minus he has caused to another person. The society as a whole is neither better nor worse off. If all members of a society were perfect bandits the society would remain stagnant but there would be no major disaster. The whole business would amount to massive transfers of wealth and welfare in favour of those who would take action. If all members of the society would take action in regular turns, not only the society as a whole but also individuals would find themselves in a perfectly steady state of no change.
When stupid people are at work, the story is totally different. Stupid people cause losses to other people with no counterpart of gains on their own account. Thus the society as a whole is impoverished. The system of accounting which finds expression in the basic graphs shows that while all actions of individuals falling to the right of the line POM (see fig. 3) add to the welfare of a society; although in different degrees, the actions of all individuals falling to the left of the same line POM cause a deterioration.
In other words the helpless with overtones of intelligence (area H1), the bandits with overtones of intelligence (area B1) and above all the intelligent (area I) all contribute, though in different degrees, to accrue to the welfare of a society. On the other hand the bandits with overtones of stupidity (area B2) and the helpless with overtones of stupidity (area H1) manage to add losses to those caused by stupid people thus enhancing the nefarious destructive power of the latter group.
All this suggests some reflection on the performance of societies. According to the Second Basic Law, the fraction of stupid people is a constant which is not affected by time, space, race, class or any other socio- cultural or historical variable. It would be a profound mistake to believe the number of stupid people in a declining society is greater than in a developing society. Both such societies are plagued by the same percentage of stupid people. The difference between the two societies is that in the society which performs poorly:
a) the stupid members of the society are allowed by the other members to become more active and take more actions; b) there is a change in the composition of the non-stupid section with a relative decline of populations of areas I, H1 and B1 and a proportionate increase of populations H2 and B2.
This theoretical presumption is abundantly confirmed by an exhaustive analysis of historical cases. In fact the historical analysis allows us to reformulate the theoretical conclusions in a more factual way and with more realistic detail.
Whether one considers classical, or medieval, or modern or contemporary times one is impressed by the fact that any country moving uphill has its unavoidable fraction of stupid people. However the country moving uphill also has an unusually high fraction of intelligent people who manage to keep the fraction at bay and at the same time produce enough gains for themselves and the other members of the community to make progress a certainty.
In a country which is moving downhill, the fraction of stupid people is still equal to ; however in the remaining population one notices among those in power an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity (sub-area B2 of quadrant B in figure 3) and among those not in power an equally alarming growth in the number of helpless individuals (area H in basic graph, fig.1). Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the fraction and makes decline a certainty. And the country goes to Hell.
Source: http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~leeey/stupidity/basic.htm
by Carlo M. Cipolla
illustrations by James Donnelly
The first basic law of human stupidity asserts without ambiguity that:
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
At first, the statement sounds trivial, vague and horribly ungenerous. Closer scrutiny will however reveal its realistic veracity. No matter how high are one's estimates of human stupidity, one is repeatedly and recurrently startled by the fact that:
a) people whom one had once judged rational and intelligent turn out to be unashamedly stupid.
b) day after day, with unceasing monotony, one is harassed in one's activities by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments.
The First Basic Law prevents me from attributing a specific numerical value to the fraction of stupid people within the total population: any numerical estimate would turn out to be an underestimate. Thus in the following pages I will denote the fraction of stupid people within a population by the symbol .
THE SECOND BASIC LAW
Cultural trends now fashionable in the West favour an egalitarian approach to life. People like to think of human beings as the output of a perfectly engineered mass production machine. Geneticists and sociologists especially go out of their way to prove, with an impressive apparatus of scientific data and formulations that all men are naturally equal and if some are more equal than others, this is attributable to nurture and not to nature. I take an exception to this general view. It is my firm conviction, supported by years of observation and experimentation, that men are not equal, that some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence. Although convinced that fraction of human beings are stupid and that they are so because of genetic traits, I am not a reactionary trying to reintroduce surreptitiously class or race discrimination. I firmly believe that stupidity is an indiscriminate privilege of all human groups and is uniformly distributed according to a constant proportion. This fact is scientifically expressed by the Second Basic Law which states that
The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
In this regard, Nature seems indeed to have outdone herself. It is well known that Nature manages, rather mysteriously, to keep constant the relative frequency of certain natural phenomena. For instance, whether men proliferate at the Northern Pole or at the Equator, whether the matching couples are developed or underdeveloped, whether they are black, red, white or yellow the female to male ratio among the newly born is a constant, with a very slight prevalence of males. We do not know how Nature achieves this remarkable result but we know that in order to achieve it Nature must operate with large numbers. The most remarkable fact about the frequency of stupidity is that Nature succeeds in making this frequency equal to the probability quite independently from the size of the group.
Thus one finds the same percentage of stupid people whether one is considering very large groups or one is dealing with very small ones. No other set of observable phenomena offers such striking proof of the powers of Nature.
The evidence that education has nothing to do with the probability was provided by experiments carried on in a large number of universities all over the world. One may distinguish the composite population which constitutes a university in five major groups, namely the blue-collar workers, the white-collar employees, the students, the administrators and the professors.
Whenever I analyzed the blue-collar workers I found that the fraction of them were stupid. As 's value was higher than I expected (First Law), paying my tribute to fashion I thought at first that segregation, poverty, lack of education were to be blamed. But moving up the social ladder I found that the same ratio was prevalent among the white-collar employees and among the students. More impressive still were the results among the professors. Whether I considered a large university or a small college, a famous institution or an obscure one, I found that the same fraction of the professors are stupid. So bewildered was I by the results, that I made a special point to extend my research to a specially selected group, to a real elite, the Nobel laureates. The result confirmed Nature's supreme powers: fraction of the Nobel laureates are stupid.
This idea was hard to accept and digest but too many experimental results proved its fundamental veracity. The Second Basic Law is an iron law, and it does not admit exceptions. The Women's Liberation Movement will support the Second Basic Law as it shows that stupid individuals are proportionately as numerous among men as among women. The underdeveloped of the Third World will probably take solace at the Second Basic Law as they can find in it the proof that after the developed are not so developed. Whether the Second Basic Law is liked or not, however, its implications are frightening: the Law implies that whether you move in distinguished circles or you take refuge among the head-hunters of Polynesia, whether you lock yourself into a monastery or decide to spend the rest of your life in the company of beautiful and lascivious women, you always have to face the same percentage of stupid people - which percentage (in accordance with the First Law) will always surpass your expectations.
THE THIRD (AND GOLDEN)BASIC LAW
The Third Basic Law assumes, although it does not state it explicitly, that human beings fall into four basic categories: the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit and the stupid. It will be easily recognized by the perspicacious reader that these four categories correspond to the four areas I, H, S, B, of the basic graph (see below).
If Tom takes an action and suffers a loss while producing a gain to Dick, Tom's mark will fall in field H: Tom acted helplessly. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain while yielding a gain also to Dick, Tom's mark will fall in area I: Tom acted intelligently. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain causing Dick a loss, Tom's mark will fall in area B: Tom acted as a bandit. Stupidity is related to area S and to all positions on axis Y below point O. As the Third Basic Law explicitly clarifies:
A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
When confronted for the first time with the Third Basic Law, rational people instinctively react with feelings of skepticism and incredulity. The fact is that reasonable people have difficulty in conceiving and understanding unreasonable behaviour. But let us abandon the lofty plane of theory and let us look pragmatically at our daily life. We all recollect occasions in which a fellow took an action which resulted in his gain and our loss: we had to deal with a bandit. We also recollect cases in which a fellow took an action which resulted in his loss and our gain: we had to deal with a helpless person. We can recollect cases in which a fellow took an action by which both parties gained: he was intelligent. Such cases do indeed occur. But upon thoughtful reflection you must admit that these are not the events which punctuate most frequently our daily life. Our daily life is mostly, made of cases in which we lose money and/or time and/or energy and/or appetite, cheerfulness and good health because of the improbable action of some preposterous creature who has nothing to gain and indeed gains nothing from causing us embarrassment, difficulties or harm. Nobody knows, understands or can possibly explain why that preposterous creature does what he does. In fact there is no explanation - or better there is only one explanation: the person in question is stupid.
FREQUENCY DISTRIBUTION
Most people do not act consistently. Under certain circumstances a given person acts intelligently and under different circumstances the same person will act helplessly. The only important exception to the rule is represented by the stupid people who normally show a strong proclivity toward perfect consistency in all fields of human endeavours.
>From all that proceeds, it does not follow, that we can chart on the basic graph only stupid individuals. We can calculate for each person his weighted average position in the plane of figure 1 quite independently from his degree of inconsistency. A helpless person may occasionally behave intelligently and on occasion he may perform a bandit's action. But since the person in question is fundamentally helpless most of his action will have the characteristics of helplessness. Thus the overall weighted average position of all the actions of such a person will place him in the H quadrant of the basic graph.
The fact that it is possible to place on the graph individuals instead of their actions allows some digression about the frequency of the bandit and stupid types.
The perfect bandit is one who, with his actions, causes to other individuals losses equal to his gains. The crudest type of banditry is theft. A person who robs you of 100 pounds without causing you an extra loss or harm is a perfect bandit: you lose 100 pounds, he gains 100 pounds. In the basic graph the perfect bandits would appear on a 45-degree diagonal line that divides the area B into two perfectly symmetrical sub-areas (line OM of figure 2).
However the "perfect" bandits are relatively few. The line OM divides the area B into two sub-areas, B1, and B2, and by far the largest majority of the bandits falls somewhere in one of these two sub-areas.
The bandits who fall in area B1 are those individuals whose actions yield to them profits which are larger than the losses they cause to other people. All bandits who are entitled to a position in area B1 are bandits with overtones of intelligence and as they get closer to the right side of the X axis they share more and more the characteristics of the intelligent person.
Unfortunately the individuals entitled to a position in the B1 area are not very numerous. Most bandits actually fall in area B2. The individuals who fall in this area are those whose actions yield to them gains inferior to the losses inflicted to other people. If someone kills you in order to rob you of fifty pounds or if he murders you in order to spend a weekend with your wife at Monte Carlo, we can be sure that he is not a perfect bandit. Even by using his values to measure his gains (but still using your values to measure your losses) he falls in the B2 area very close to the border of sheer stupidity. Generals who cause vast destruction and innumerable casualties in return for a promotion or a medal fall in the same area.
The frequency distribution of the stupid people is totally different from that of the bandit. While bandits are mostly scattered over an area stupid people are heavily concentrated along one line, specifically on the Y axis below point O. The reason for this is that by far the majority of stupid people are basically and unwaveringly stupid - in other words they perseveringly insist in causing harm and losses to other people without deriving any gain, whether positive or negative.
There are however people who by their improbable actions not only cause damages to other people but in addition hurt themselves. They are a sort of super-stupid who, in our system of accounting, will appear somewhere in the area S to the left of the Y axis.
THE POWER OF STUPIDITY
It is not difficult to understand how social, political and institutional power enhances the damaging potential of a stupid person. But one still has to explain and understand what essentially it is that makes a stupid person dangerous to other people - in other words what constitutes the power of stupidity.
Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behaviour. An intelligent person may understand the logic of a bandit. The bandit's actions follow a pattern of rationality: nasty rationality, if you like, but still rationality. The bandit wants a plus on his account. Since he is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to appear on your account. All this is bad, but it is rational and if you are rational you can predict it. You can foresee a bandit's actions, his nasty manoeuvres and ugly aspirations and often can build up your defenses.
With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy. Because the stupid person's actions do not conform to the rules of rationality, it follows that:
a) one is generally caught by surprise by the attack; b) even when one becomes aware of the attack, one cannot organize a rational defense, because the attack itself lacks any rational structure.
The fact that the activity and movements of a stupid creature are absolutely erratic and irrational not only makes defense problematic but it also makes any counter-attack extremely difficult - like trying to shoot at an object which is capable of the most improbable and unimaginable movements. This is what both Dickens and Schiller had in mind when the former stated that "with stupidity and sound digestion man may front much" and the latter wrote that "against stupidity the very Gods fight in vain."
THE FOURTH BASIC LAW
That helpless people, namely those who in our accounting system fall into the H area, do not normally recognize how dangerous stupid people are, is not at all surprising. Their failure is just another expression of their helplessness. The truly amazing fact, however, is that also intelligent people and bandits often fail to recognize the power to damage inherent in stupidity. It is extremely difficult to explain why this should happen and one can only remark that when confronted with stupid individuals often intelligent men as well as bandits make the mistake of indulging in feelings of self-complacency and contemptuousness instead of immediately secreting adequate quantities of adrenaline and building up defenses.
One is tempted to believe that a stupid man will only do harm to himself but this is confusing stupidity with helplessness. On occasion one is tempted to associate oneself with a stupid individual in order to use him for one's own schemes. Such a manoeuvre cannot but have disastrous effects because a) it is based on a complete misunderstanding of the essential nature of stupidity and b) it gives the stupid person added scope for the exercise of his gifts. One may hope to outmanoeuvre the stupid and, up to a point, one may actually do so. But because of the erratic behaviour of the stupid, one cannot foresee all the stupid's actions and reactions and before long one will be pulverized by the unpredictable moves of the stupid partner.
This is clearly summarized in the Fourth Basic Law which states that:
Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
Through centuries and millennia, in public as in private life, countless individuals have failed to take account of the Fourth Basic Law and the failure has caused mankind incalculable losses.
THE FIFTH BASIC LAW
Instead of considering the welfare of the individual let us consider the welfare of the society, regarded in this context as the algebraic sum of the individual conditions. A full understanding of the Fifth Basic Law is essential to the analysis. It may be parenthetically added here that of the Five Basic Laws, the Fifth is certainly the best known and its corollary is quoted very frequently. The Fifth Basic Law states that:
A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
The corollary of the Law is that:
A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.
The result of the action of a perfect bandit (the person who falls on line OM of figure 2) is purely and simply a transfer of wealth and/or welfare. After the action of a perfect bandit, the bandit has a plus on his account which plus is exactly equivalent to the minus he has caused to another person. The society as a whole is neither better nor worse off. If all members of a society were perfect bandits the society would remain stagnant but there would be no major disaster. The whole business would amount to massive transfers of wealth and welfare in favour of those who would take action. If all members of the society would take action in regular turns, not only the society as a whole but also individuals would find themselves in a perfectly steady state of no change.
When stupid people are at work, the story is totally different. Stupid people cause losses to other people with no counterpart of gains on their own account. Thus the society as a whole is impoverished. The system of accounting which finds expression in the basic graphs shows that while all actions of individuals falling to the right of the line POM (see fig. 3) add to the welfare of a society; although in different degrees, the actions of all individuals falling to the left of the same line POM cause a deterioration.
In other words the helpless with overtones of intelligence (area H1), the bandits with overtones of intelligence (area B1) and above all the intelligent (area I) all contribute, though in different degrees, to accrue to the welfare of a society. On the other hand the bandits with overtones of stupidity (area B2) and the helpless with overtones of stupidity (area H1) manage to add losses to those caused by stupid people thus enhancing the nefarious destructive power of the latter group.
All this suggests some reflection on the performance of societies. According to the Second Basic Law, the fraction of stupid people is a constant which is not affected by time, space, race, class or any other socio- cultural or historical variable. It would be a profound mistake to believe the number of stupid people in a declining society is greater than in a developing society. Both such societies are plagued by the same percentage of stupid people. The difference between the two societies is that in the society which performs poorly:
a) the stupid members of the society are allowed by the other members to become more active and take more actions; b) there is a change in the composition of the non-stupid section with a relative decline of populations of areas I, H1 and B1 and a proportionate increase of populations H2 and B2.
This theoretical presumption is abundantly confirmed by an exhaustive analysis of historical cases. In fact the historical analysis allows us to reformulate the theoretical conclusions in a more factual way and with more realistic detail.
Whether one considers classical, or medieval, or modern or contemporary times one is impressed by the fact that any country moving uphill has its unavoidable fraction of stupid people. However the country moving uphill also has an unusually high fraction of intelligent people who manage to keep the fraction at bay and at the same time produce enough gains for themselves and the other members of the community to make progress a certainty.
In a country which is moving downhill, the fraction of stupid people is still equal to ; however in the remaining population one notices among those in power an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity (sub-area B2 of quadrant B in figure 3) and among those not in power an equally alarming growth in the number of helpless individuals (area H in basic graph, fig.1). Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the fraction and makes decline a certainty. And the country goes to Hell.
Source: http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~leeey/stupidity/basic.htm
Homosexuality
Significant findings at the Brigham Young University in the USA indicate that stress during pregnancy can result in homosexual offspring. Dr D. E. Fleming and Dr R. W. Rhees, in experiments, subjected pregnant rats to psychological, nutritional, and hormonal stress and then measured the behavioral characteristics of their male offspring. The results were compared to "normal" offspring of unstressed rats.
"We found demasculinization and feminization tendencies," reported Dr Fleming. "Demasculinization, in that the test rats were not as active sexually in the male role; feminization was found where the males exhibited female-type behavior when placed with other males who were sexually aggressive. We are exploring possibilities that may have relevance to humans," Dr Fleming explained.
The researchers observed that a definite correlation exists between the endocrinal systems of rats and humans.
The predisposition towards homosexuality of male rats of the stressed mothers occurs because when the mother is under stress her body produces hormones that suppress production of androgen, necessary for the development of maleness in a male, although the male physical make-up appears normal. This occurs in the critical third trimester of the development of the fetus.
The defect can be corrected by environmental influences--feminized male rats, when placed for long periods of time with females, will begin to exhibit normal male behavior.
Three groups of mother rats were each subjected to a different form of stress, and in each group 50% of the male offspring were affected.
Other scientists, at Temple University, reported that when stress was applied late in pregnancies, the female offspring, when grown, have significantly more trouble in becoming pregnant and giving birth to viable young.
---
An argument used to demonstrate that homosexuality is natural is that male animals are commonly observed to mount each other and appear to perform sexually, but whether they achieve satisfaction or not does not denote homosexuality, because homosexuality means complete aversion to sexual relations with the opposite sex and complete sexual desire for one's own sex, a situation which does not occur in Nature among dogs or any other animals. [...]
A study of 1500 San Francisco gays by the Institute for Sex Research in 1978 concluded that homosexuality in itself is not abnormal and that most homosexuals are not dissatisfied with their lives; most of them are "stable, happy, and well adjusted". Twenty per cent of the men said they had attempted suicide and about half of them each admitted to having had at least 500 sexual partners. Does this indicate happiness and adjustment? Having seen the movie Word is Out, produced by homosexuals about homosexuals, social commentator Harriett Van Horne wrote in her syndicated column: "Their stories are mostly very sad . . . By any standard, most are lost, lonely, sick, and altogether heart-breaking . . . Whatever possessed these people to call homosexuals 'gay'?"
Studies have shown the single factor shared invariably by all homosexuals, male and female, is an unhappy childhood which in most cases commenced with an incomplete mother/child relationship, and was perhaps further degraded by parental discord and feelings of insecurity. In view of this fact, the findings of a recent report are not surprising. The British research body "One plus One", in its report "Marital Breakdown", stated that the children of divorced parents were twice as likely to display delinquent behavior, four times as likely to suffer stomach ulcers or colitis before age twenty-six, were more accident prone, troubled, drifting, underachieving, and as adults far more prone to psychiatric illness and drinking problems.
Significant findings at the Brigham Young University in the USA indicate that stress during pregnancy can result in homosexual offspring. Dr D. E. Fleming and Dr R. W. Rhees, in experiments, subjected pregnant rats to psychological, nutritional and hormonal stress and then measured the behavioral characteristics of their male offspring. The results were compared to "normal" offspring of unstressed rats. "We found demasculinization and feminization tendencies," reported Dr Fleming. "Demasculinization, in that the test rats were not as active sexually in the male role; feminization was found where the males exhibited female-type behavior when placed with other males who were sexually aggressive. We are exploring possibilities that may have relevance to humans." The researchers observed that a definite correlation exists between the endocrinal systems of rats and humans. The predisposition towards homosexuality of male rats of the stressed mothers occurs because when the mother is under stress her body produces hormones that suppress production of androgen, necessary for the development of maleness in a male, although the male physical make-up appears normal. This occurs in the critical third trimester of the development of the fetus. The defect can be corrected by environmental influences--feminized male rats, when placed for long periods of time with females, will begin to exhibit normal male behavior. Three groups of mother rats were each subjected to a different form of stress, and in each group fifty per cent of the male offspring were affected. One way or another, homosexuality is not a chosen way of life, and to quote Dr Kronemeyer again:
"Homosexuality is a symptom of neurosis and of a grievous personality disorder. It is an outgrowth of deeply rooted emotional deprivations and disturbances that had their origins in infancy. It is manifested, all too often, by compulsive and self-destructive behavior that is the very antithesis of fulfilment and happiness. Buried under the 'gay' exterior of the homosexual is the hurt and rage that crippled his or her capacity for true maturation, for healthy growth and love.
If I insist that homosexuality--the exclusive or predominant preference for same-gender sex relations for orgasmic satisfaction--is symptomatic of a psychic disorientation, I hasten to point out that I do not consider it any different, except possibly in the degree of pathology, from other neurotic manifestations of many heterosexuals . . .
The earliest psychologists--Sigmund Freud, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis--were in agreement that homosexuality is a psychological malfunction that should be treated with tolerance and compassion. They might have disagreed on its cause, but they concurred that it was neither a crime nor a sin."
"We found demasculinization and feminization tendencies," reported Dr Fleming. "Demasculinization, in that the test rats were not as active sexually in the male role; feminization was found where the males exhibited female-type behavior when placed with other males who were sexually aggressive. We are exploring possibilities that may have relevance to humans," Dr Fleming explained.
The researchers observed that a definite correlation exists between the endocrinal systems of rats and humans.
The predisposition towards homosexuality of male rats of the stressed mothers occurs because when the mother is under stress her body produces hormones that suppress production of androgen, necessary for the development of maleness in a male, although the male physical make-up appears normal. This occurs in the critical third trimester of the development of the fetus.
The defect can be corrected by environmental influences--feminized male rats, when placed for long periods of time with females, will begin to exhibit normal male behavior.
Three groups of mother rats were each subjected to a different form of stress, and in each group 50% of the male offspring were affected.
Other scientists, at Temple University, reported that when stress was applied late in pregnancies, the female offspring, when grown, have significantly more trouble in becoming pregnant and giving birth to viable young.
---
An argument used to demonstrate that homosexuality is natural is that male animals are commonly observed to mount each other and appear to perform sexually, but whether they achieve satisfaction or not does not denote homosexuality, because homosexuality means complete aversion to sexual relations with the opposite sex and complete sexual desire for one's own sex, a situation which does not occur in Nature among dogs or any other animals. [...]
A study of 1500 San Francisco gays by the Institute for Sex Research in 1978 concluded that homosexuality in itself is not abnormal and that most homosexuals are not dissatisfied with their lives; most of them are "stable, happy, and well adjusted". Twenty per cent of the men said they had attempted suicide and about half of them each admitted to having had at least 500 sexual partners. Does this indicate happiness and adjustment? Having seen the movie Word is Out, produced by homosexuals about homosexuals, social commentator Harriett Van Horne wrote in her syndicated column: "Their stories are mostly very sad . . . By any standard, most are lost, lonely, sick, and altogether heart-breaking . . . Whatever possessed these people to call homosexuals 'gay'?"
Studies have shown the single factor shared invariably by all homosexuals, male and female, is an unhappy childhood which in most cases commenced with an incomplete mother/child relationship, and was perhaps further degraded by parental discord and feelings of insecurity. In view of this fact, the findings of a recent report are not surprising. The British research body "One plus One", in its report "Marital Breakdown", stated that the children of divorced parents were twice as likely to display delinquent behavior, four times as likely to suffer stomach ulcers or colitis before age twenty-six, were more accident prone, troubled, drifting, underachieving, and as adults far more prone to psychiatric illness and drinking problems.
Significant findings at the Brigham Young University in the USA indicate that stress during pregnancy can result in homosexual offspring. Dr D. E. Fleming and Dr R. W. Rhees, in experiments, subjected pregnant rats to psychological, nutritional and hormonal stress and then measured the behavioral characteristics of their male offspring. The results were compared to "normal" offspring of unstressed rats. "We found demasculinization and feminization tendencies," reported Dr Fleming. "Demasculinization, in that the test rats were not as active sexually in the male role; feminization was found where the males exhibited female-type behavior when placed with other males who were sexually aggressive. We are exploring possibilities that may have relevance to humans." The researchers observed that a definite correlation exists between the endocrinal systems of rats and humans. The predisposition towards homosexuality of male rats of the stressed mothers occurs because when the mother is under stress her body produces hormones that suppress production of androgen, necessary for the development of maleness in a male, although the male physical make-up appears normal. This occurs in the critical third trimester of the development of the fetus. The defect can be corrected by environmental influences--feminized male rats, when placed for long periods of time with females, will begin to exhibit normal male behavior. Three groups of mother rats were each subjected to a different form of stress, and in each group fifty per cent of the male offspring were affected. One way or another, homosexuality is not a chosen way of life, and to quote Dr Kronemeyer again:
"Homosexuality is a symptom of neurosis and of a grievous personality disorder. It is an outgrowth of deeply rooted emotional deprivations and disturbances that had their origins in infancy. It is manifested, all too often, by compulsive and self-destructive behavior that is the very antithesis of fulfilment and happiness. Buried under the 'gay' exterior of the homosexual is the hurt and rage that crippled his or her capacity for true maturation, for healthy growth and love.
If I insist that homosexuality--the exclusive or predominant preference for same-gender sex relations for orgasmic satisfaction--is symptomatic of a psychic disorientation, I hasten to point out that I do not consider it any different, except possibly in the degree of pathology, from other neurotic manifestations of many heterosexuals . . .
The earliest psychologists--Sigmund Freud, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis--were in agreement that homosexuality is a psychological malfunction that should be treated with tolerance and compassion. They might have disagreed on its cause, but they concurred that it was neither a crime nor a sin."
Sex and Death
Fruit-growers, knowing these things about plants, realize that if conditions are too favorable for their fruit trees the trees won't trouble to produce as much fruit, so by manipulating the watering at the right time they induce stress to the trees to encourage them to produce more fruit. The tree does this to ensure there will be more seeds, and the farmer gets a better crop. Thus the urge to reproduce is increased in life-threatening situations.
What about animals? Stress influences the chemistry of the blood, the most well known of the various effects being that of the secretion of adrenalin to arouse the senses and increase the metabolic rate in threatening situations. Denied the chance of fighting or fleeing the threat of death, a "last-resort" animal instinct is that to reproduce. Sensing the imminence of death, cattle awaiting slaughter at abattoirs will become sexually aroused, while people awaiting death in the gas chambers in Nazi extermination camps in World War II would, in a similar fashion, indulge in sex.
Another illustration of abnormal sexual activity is given in Louis Kuhne's New Science of Healing (1894):
"It is an old and well-known fact to farmers, that an unnaturally increased sexual impulse among cattle is a sure sign of a disease having broken out. And it is the same with man, as anyone can observe who will look about him. I need only mention here the abnormal sexual excitement on the part of consumptives.
Sexual impulse in healthy man is something altogether different from that unbridled lust we see so often today."
In situations in which animals are deprived of freedom and normal healthy activity, they will display sexual depravity along with brutality and other unnatural behavior they would never in their natural environment indulge in. Dr Solly Zuckerman was a distinguished professor of anatomy at Birmingham University in the 1920s and 30s, and in the study of humans and the other primates wrote a book from which it was intended humans could learn more about themselves. The book, The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes (1932), described various behavioral patterns of primates in captivity in the London Zoo but, as Robert Ardrey pointed out in his book African Genesis (1961), conclusions drawn from behavior in captivity are not representative of an animal's true instinct in nature:
"The famous anatomist cannot be blamed for presuming that the sex-obsessed activities of London baboons reflected true primate behavior, or for drawing the logical conclusion that the powerful magnet of sexual attraction must be the force that holds primate societies together. But over and over we shall encounter in this narrative the disastrous consequences of applying utter logic to a false premise. [Which goes to show that doctors are not the only people who jump to wrong conclusions by applying logic to a false premise.] And Zuckerman's premise was false. The creature whom we watch in the zoo is one denied by the conditions of his captivity the normal flow of his instinctual energies. Neither the drives of hunger nor the fear of the predator stir the idleness of his hours. Neither the commands of normal society nor the demands of territorial defence pre-empt the energies with which Nature has endowed him. If he seems a creature obsessed with sex, then it is simply because sex is the only instinct for which captivity permits him an outlet."
Desmond Morris has pointed out that to call a city an "asphalt jungle" is totally wrong because it is much more like a "human zoo", in which zoo flourishes crime, homosexuality, rape and obsession with food, drink and sex. Nor outside of cities are humans free and natural either, but they are freer and closer to Nature than their city counterparts and are blessed accordingly. It is clear that the further a community is distanced from an unnatural environment and the closer it conforms to Nature, the better is the likelihood its inhabitants will resemble true and proper human beings.
The fact that the majority of people prefer to live in cities demonstrates the natural instinct in humans to congregate, for mental stimulus and other advantages, but in man's primitive evolutionary past high density living was not possible and the appetite for carnivals and excitement had to be satisfied by the annual tribal get-togethers like the corroborees of Aboriginals or the singsings in the New Guinea highlands. Cities are man-made traps as much as are alcohol, cigarettes, junk food, medicine and pollution, and to those who are aware of the pitfalls they need present no great hazard.
The ways of Nature, mysterious and exact, are always directed at restoring homeostasis, not only within the body but within whole population groups. If for instance in a community of bees of a certain hive a greater than usual proportion of worker bees is lost due to bushfire or some other reason, or if a lot of soldier bees are killed defending the hive from predatory ants, straight away the output of eggs by the queen bee is altered to produce a higher proportion of either worker bees or soldier bees as the situation requires to restore the correct balance in the hive's population. In human populations, the death rate among males is slightly higher than among females, and this is compensated for by a similar slightly higher proportion of male children born than female. What mysterious natural force controls this ratio? Is this ratio variable should there be a change for some reason in danger factors among humans?
One factor associated with aggressiveness and oversexuality is the high consumption of meat in the diet, and when people give up eating meat to become vegetarian they report that their natures become more placid and less sexually aggressive. Statistics show that vegetarians, generally, have a far better life expectancy than meat-eaters, and therefore it is a reasonable supposition that vegetarians feel less urgency to reproduce. The self-regulating mechanism within all living things to increase the reproductive urge when survival is threatened works, it seems, not only to increase the urge in humans who eat a lot of meat, but takes into account also that the wastage rate among male meat-eaters is greater than that among females. Statistics can be used to prove anything so they say; what do you make of this one? A 1987 report from official British statistics stated that in 1980-82, for every 100 girls fathered by butchers and meat-cutters there were 121 boys, compared with the national average of 105.6 boys for every 100 girls. This fact, in light of how Nature works to preserve balance, would seem to confirm that meat-eating is a hazard, and in the further light of the fact that meat-eating tends to excite sexual arousal more than does vegetarianism, thus is provided another example of how "living dangerously" leads to sexual excesses.
For what it's worth, a recent article in Brisbane's The Courier Mail asserted that a woman could plan to influence the sex of her future child by means of diet. It said that if a woman's diet (obviously for some time before conception) included lots of lettuce, watercress, broccoli, asparagus, radishes, cucumber, cabbage and cauliflowers she would have a great chance of having a girl. And if she ate lots of ham, bacon, smoked salmon, salty mineral water, dried beans and broad beans, she would have "a sterling" chance of producing a boy. Whether butchers ever marry vegetarians the author has no idea.
What about animals? Stress influences the chemistry of the blood, the most well known of the various effects being that of the secretion of adrenalin to arouse the senses and increase the metabolic rate in threatening situations. Denied the chance of fighting or fleeing the threat of death, a "last-resort" animal instinct is that to reproduce. Sensing the imminence of death, cattle awaiting slaughter at abattoirs will become sexually aroused, while people awaiting death in the gas chambers in Nazi extermination camps in World War II would, in a similar fashion, indulge in sex.
Another illustration of abnormal sexual activity is given in Louis Kuhne's New Science of Healing (1894):
"It is an old and well-known fact to farmers, that an unnaturally increased sexual impulse among cattle is a sure sign of a disease having broken out. And it is the same with man, as anyone can observe who will look about him. I need only mention here the abnormal sexual excitement on the part of consumptives.
Sexual impulse in healthy man is something altogether different from that unbridled lust we see so often today."
In situations in which animals are deprived of freedom and normal healthy activity, they will display sexual depravity along with brutality and other unnatural behavior they would never in their natural environment indulge in. Dr Solly Zuckerman was a distinguished professor of anatomy at Birmingham University in the 1920s and 30s, and in the study of humans and the other primates wrote a book from which it was intended humans could learn more about themselves. The book, The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes (1932), described various behavioral patterns of primates in captivity in the London Zoo but, as Robert Ardrey pointed out in his book African Genesis (1961), conclusions drawn from behavior in captivity are not representative of an animal's true instinct in nature:
"The famous anatomist cannot be blamed for presuming that the sex-obsessed activities of London baboons reflected true primate behavior, or for drawing the logical conclusion that the powerful magnet of sexual attraction must be the force that holds primate societies together. But over and over we shall encounter in this narrative the disastrous consequences of applying utter logic to a false premise. [Which goes to show that doctors are not the only people who jump to wrong conclusions by applying logic to a false premise.] And Zuckerman's premise was false. The creature whom we watch in the zoo is one denied by the conditions of his captivity the normal flow of his instinctual energies. Neither the drives of hunger nor the fear of the predator stir the idleness of his hours. Neither the commands of normal society nor the demands of territorial defence pre-empt the energies with which Nature has endowed him. If he seems a creature obsessed with sex, then it is simply because sex is the only instinct for which captivity permits him an outlet."
Desmond Morris has pointed out that to call a city an "asphalt jungle" is totally wrong because it is much more like a "human zoo", in which zoo flourishes crime, homosexuality, rape and obsession with food, drink and sex. Nor outside of cities are humans free and natural either, but they are freer and closer to Nature than their city counterparts and are blessed accordingly. It is clear that the further a community is distanced from an unnatural environment and the closer it conforms to Nature, the better is the likelihood its inhabitants will resemble true and proper human beings.
The fact that the majority of people prefer to live in cities demonstrates the natural instinct in humans to congregate, for mental stimulus and other advantages, but in man's primitive evolutionary past high density living was not possible and the appetite for carnivals and excitement had to be satisfied by the annual tribal get-togethers like the corroborees of Aboriginals or the singsings in the New Guinea highlands. Cities are man-made traps as much as are alcohol, cigarettes, junk food, medicine and pollution, and to those who are aware of the pitfalls they need present no great hazard.
The ways of Nature, mysterious and exact, are always directed at restoring homeostasis, not only within the body but within whole population groups. If for instance in a community of bees of a certain hive a greater than usual proportion of worker bees is lost due to bushfire or some other reason, or if a lot of soldier bees are killed defending the hive from predatory ants, straight away the output of eggs by the queen bee is altered to produce a higher proportion of either worker bees or soldier bees as the situation requires to restore the correct balance in the hive's population. In human populations, the death rate among males is slightly higher than among females, and this is compensated for by a similar slightly higher proportion of male children born than female. What mysterious natural force controls this ratio? Is this ratio variable should there be a change for some reason in danger factors among humans?
One factor associated with aggressiveness and oversexuality is the high consumption of meat in the diet, and when people give up eating meat to become vegetarian they report that their natures become more placid and less sexually aggressive. Statistics show that vegetarians, generally, have a far better life expectancy than meat-eaters, and therefore it is a reasonable supposition that vegetarians feel less urgency to reproduce. The self-regulating mechanism within all living things to increase the reproductive urge when survival is threatened works, it seems, not only to increase the urge in humans who eat a lot of meat, but takes into account also that the wastage rate among male meat-eaters is greater than that among females. Statistics can be used to prove anything so they say; what do you make of this one? A 1987 report from official British statistics stated that in 1980-82, for every 100 girls fathered by butchers and meat-cutters there were 121 boys, compared with the national average of 105.6 boys for every 100 girls. This fact, in light of how Nature works to preserve balance, would seem to confirm that meat-eating is a hazard, and in the further light of the fact that meat-eating tends to excite sexual arousal more than does vegetarianism, thus is provided another example of how "living dangerously" leads to sexual excesses.
For what it's worth, a recent article in Brisbane's The Courier Mail asserted that a woman could plan to influence the sex of her future child by means of diet. It said that if a woman's diet (obviously for some time before conception) included lots of lettuce, watercress, broccoli, asparagus, radishes, cucumber, cabbage and cauliflowers she would have a great chance of having a girl. And if she ate lots of ham, bacon, smoked salmon, salty mineral water, dried beans and broad beans, she would have "a sterling" chance of producing a boy. Whether butchers ever marry vegetarians the author has no idea.
Our Enemy, The State
Be it or be it not true that Man is shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin, it is unquestionably true that Government is begotten of aggression, and by aggression. -- Herbert Spencer, 1850.
This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention, the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State; that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long-run sustains, nourishes and impels human destinies. -- Jose Ortega y Gasset, 1922.
It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men. -- Henry L. Mencken, 1926.
IF WE look beneath the surface of our public affairs, we can discern one fundamental fact, namely: a great redistribution of power between society and the State. This is the fact that interests the student of civilization. He has only a secondary or derived interest in matters like price-fixing, wage-fixing, inflation, political banking, "agricultural adjustment," and similar items of State policy that fill the pages of newspapers and the mouths of publicists and politicians. All these can be run up under one head. They have an immediate and temporary importance, and for this reason they monopolize public attention, but they all come to the same thing; which is, an increase of State power and a corresponding decrease of social power.
It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power. There is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.
Moreover, it follows that with any exercise of State power, not only the exercise of social power in the same direction, but the disposition to exercise it in that direction, tends to dwindle. Mayor Gaynor astonished the whole of New York when he pointed out to a correspondent who had been complaining about the inefficiency of the police, that any citizen has the right to arrest a malefactor and bring him before a magistrate. "The law of England and of this country," he wrote, "has been very careful to confer no more right in that respect upon policemen and constables than it confers on every citizen." State exercise of that right through a police force had gone on so steadily that not only were citizens indisposed to exercise it, but probably not one in ten thousand knew he had it.
[...]
The process of converting social power into State power may perhaps be seen at its simplest in cases where the State's intervention is directly competitive. The accumulation of State power in various countries has been so accelerated and diversified within the last twenty years that we now see the State functioning as telegraphist, telephonist, match-peddler, radio-operator, cannon-founder, railway-builder and owner, railway-operator, wholesale and retail tobacconist, shipbuilder and owner, chief chemist, harbour-maker and dockbuilder, housebuilder, chief educator, newspaper-proprietor, food-purveyor, dealer in insurance, and so on through a long list.[2]
It is obvious that private forms of these enterprises must tend to dwindle in proportion as the energy of the State's encroachments on them increases, for the competition of social power with State power is always disadvantaged, since the State can arrange the terms of competition to suit itself, even to the point of outlawing any exercise of social power whatever in the premises; in other words, giving itself a monopoly. Instances of this expedient are common; the one we are probably best acquainted with is the State's monopoly of letter-carrying. Social power is estopped by sheer fiat from application to this form of enterprise, notwithstanding it could carry it on far cheaper, and, in this country at least, far better. The advantages of this monopoly in promoting the State's interests are peculiar. No other, probably, could secure so large and well-distributed a volume of patronage, under the guise of a public service in constant use by so large a number of people; it plants a lieutenant of the State at every country-crossroad. It is by no means a pure coincidence that an administration's chief almoner and whip-at-large is so regularly appointed Postmaster-general.
Thus the State "turns every contingency into a resource" for accumulating power in itself, always at the expense of social power; and with this it develops a habit of acquiescence in the people. New generations appear, each temperamentally adjusted - or as I believe our American glossary now has it, "conditioned" - to new increments of State power, and they tend to take the process of continuous accumulation as quite in order. All the State's institutional voices unite in confirming this tendency; they unite in exhibiting the progressive conversion of social power into State power as something not only quite in order, but even as wholesome and necessary for the public good.
Source: Albert J. Nock - Our Enemy, The State
This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention, the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State; that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long-run sustains, nourishes and impels human destinies. -- Jose Ortega y Gasset, 1922.
It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men. -- Henry L. Mencken, 1926.
IF WE look beneath the surface of our public affairs, we can discern one fundamental fact, namely: a great redistribution of power between society and the State. This is the fact that interests the student of civilization. He has only a secondary or derived interest in matters like price-fixing, wage-fixing, inflation, political banking, "agricultural adjustment," and similar items of State policy that fill the pages of newspapers and the mouths of publicists and politicians. All these can be run up under one head. They have an immediate and temporary importance, and for this reason they monopolize public attention, but they all come to the same thing; which is, an increase of State power and a corresponding decrease of social power.
It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power. There is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.
Moreover, it follows that with any exercise of State power, not only the exercise of social power in the same direction, but the disposition to exercise it in that direction, tends to dwindle. Mayor Gaynor astonished the whole of New York when he pointed out to a correspondent who had been complaining about the inefficiency of the police, that any citizen has the right to arrest a malefactor and bring him before a magistrate. "The law of England and of this country," he wrote, "has been very careful to confer no more right in that respect upon policemen and constables than it confers on every citizen." State exercise of that right through a police force had gone on so steadily that not only were citizens indisposed to exercise it, but probably not one in ten thousand knew he had it.
[...]
The process of converting social power into State power may perhaps be seen at its simplest in cases where the State's intervention is directly competitive. The accumulation of State power in various countries has been so accelerated and diversified within the last twenty years that we now see the State functioning as telegraphist, telephonist, match-peddler, radio-operator, cannon-founder, railway-builder and owner, railway-operator, wholesale and retail tobacconist, shipbuilder and owner, chief chemist, harbour-maker and dockbuilder, housebuilder, chief educator, newspaper-proprietor, food-purveyor, dealer in insurance, and so on through a long list.[2]
It is obvious that private forms of these enterprises must tend to dwindle in proportion as the energy of the State's encroachments on them increases, for the competition of social power with State power is always disadvantaged, since the State can arrange the terms of competition to suit itself, even to the point of outlawing any exercise of social power whatever in the premises; in other words, giving itself a monopoly. Instances of this expedient are common; the one we are probably best acquainted with is the State's monopoly of letter-carrying. Social power is estopped by sheer fiat from application to this form of enterprise, notwithstanding it could carry it on far cheaper, and, in this country at least, far better. The advantages of this monopoly in promoting the State's interests are peculiar. No other, probably, could secure so large and well-distributed a volume of patronage, under the guise of a public service in constant use by so large a number of people; it plants a lieutenant of the State at every country-crossroad. It is by no means a pure coincidence that an administration's chief almoner and whip-at-large is so regularly appointed Postmaster-general.
Thus the State "turns every contingency into a resource" for accumulating power in itself, always at the expense of social power; and with this it develops a habit of acquiescence in the people. New generations appear, each temperamentally adjusted - or as I believe our American glossary now has it, "conditioned" - to new increments of State power, and they tend to take the process of continuous accumulation as quite in order. All the State's institutional voices unite in confirming this tendency; they unite in exhibiting the progressive conversion of social power into State power as something not only quite in order, but even as wholesome and necessary for the public good.
Source: Albert J. Nock - Our Enemy, The State
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