Gud er Død! (Lang)

[Rorschach93]

****Der fikk jeg oppmerksomheten din....****

Excerpts from ``Never Whistle While You're Pissing''
by Hagbard Celine

From the Illuminatus! Trilogy (by Robert Anton Wilson)

Seventh Trip, or Netzach (the SNAFU Principle)

"The most thoroughly and relentlessly Damned, banned, excluded,
condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignore, suppressed, repressed,
robbed, brutalized and defamed of all Damned Things is
the individual human being. The social engineers, statistician,
psychologist, sociologists, market researchers,landlords, bureaucrats,
captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and
presidents are perpetually forcing this Damned Thing into carefully
prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the Damned Thing
will not fit into the slot assigned it. The theologians call it a
sinner and try to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and
tries to punish it. the psychologist calls it a neurotic and tries to
cure it. Still, the Damned Thing will not fit into their slots.

Appendix Teth: Hagbard's Booklet " I once overheard two botanists
arguing over a Damned Thing that had blasphemously sprouted in a
college yard. One claimed that the Damned Thing was a tree and the
other claimed that it was a shrub. They each had good scholary
arguments, and they were still debating when I left them. The world is
forever spawning Damned Things- things that are neither tree nor
shrub, fish nor fowl, black nor white- and the categorical thinker can
only regard the spiky and buzzing world of sensory fact as a profound
insult to his card-index system of classifications. Worst of all are
the facts which violate "common sense", that dreary bog of sullen
prejudice and muddy inertia. The whole history of science is
the odyssey of a pixilated card-indexer perpetually sailing between
such Damned Things and desperately juggling his classifications to fit
them in, just as the history of politics is the futile epic of a long
series of attempts to line up the Damned Things and cajole them to
march in regiment.
Every ideology is a mental murder, a reduction of dynamic living
processes to static classifications, and every classification is a
Damnation, just as every inclusion is an exclusion. In a busy, buzzing
universe where no two snow flakes are identical, and no two trees are
identical, and no two people are identical- and, indeed, the smallest
sub-atomic particle, we are assured, is not even identical with
itself from one microsecond to the next -every card-index system is a
delusion. "Or, to put it more charitably," as Nietzsche says, "we are
all better artists than we realize." It is easy to see that label
"Jew" was a Damnation in Nazi Germany, but actually the label "Jew" is
a Damnation anywhere, even where anti-Semitism does not exist. "He is
a Jew," "He is a doctor," and "He is a poet" mean, to the card
indexing centre of the cortex, that my experience with him will be
like my experience with other Jews, other doctors, and other poets.
Thus, individuality is ignored when identity is asserted. At a party
or any place where strangers meet, watch this mechanism in action.
Behind the friendly overtures there is wariness as each person fishes
for the label that will identify and Damn the other. Finally, it is
revealed: "Oh, he's an advertising copywriter," "Oh, he's an
engine-lathe operator." Both parties relax, for now they know how to
behave, what roles to play in the game. Ninety-nine percent of each
has been Damned; the other is reacting to the 1 percent that has been
labeled by the card-index machine. Certain Damnations are socially and
intellectually necessary, of course. A custard pie thrown in a
comedian's face is Damned by the physicist who analyzes it
according to the Newtonian laws of motion. These equations tell us we
want to know about the impact of the pie on the face, but nothing
about the human meaning of pie-throwing. A cultural anthropologist,
analyzing the social function of the comedian as shaman, court jester,
and king's surrogate, explains the pie-throwing as a survival of the
Feast of Fools and the killing of the king's double. This Damns the
subject in another way. A psychoanalyst, finding an Oedipal castration
ritual here, has performed a third Damnation, and the Marxist,
seeing an outlet for the worker's repressed rage against the bosses,
performs a fourth. Each Damnation has its values and uses, but is
nonetheless a Damnation unless its partial and arbitrary nature is
recognized. The poet, who compares the pie in the comedian's face with
Decline of the West or his own lost love, commits a fifth Damnation,
but in this case the game element and the whimsicality of the
symbolism are safely obvious. At least, one would hope so; reading the
New Critics occasionally raises doubts on this point.
Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression,
invasion, government are interchangeable terms. The essence of
government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to
control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the
nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it be made by one man
upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal,
or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute
monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a
modern democracy.
Tucker's use of the word "invasion" is remarkably precise, considering
that he wrote more than fifty years before the basic discovery of
ethology. Every act of authority is, in fact, an invasion of the
psychic and physicalterritory of another.

Every fact of science was once Damned. Every invention was considered
impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy.
Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire
web of culture and "progress," everything on earth that is man-made
and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some
man's refusal to bow to Authority.
We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first
apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant,
and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, "Disobedience was
man's Original Virtue."
The human brain, which loves to read descriptions of itself as the
universe's most marvelous organ of perception, is an even more
marvelous organ of rejection.
The naked facts of our economic game are easily discoverable and
undeniable once stated, but conservatives- who are usually individuals
who profit every day of their lives from these facts- manage to remain
oblivious to them or to see them through a very rose-tinted lens.
(Similarly, the revolutionary ignores the total testimony of history
about the natural course of revolution, through violence, to
chaos, back to the starting point.)
We must remember that thought is abstraction. In Einstein's metaphor,
the relationship between a physical fact and our mental reception of
that fact is not like the relationship between beef and beef-broth, a
simpler extraction and condensation; rather, as Einstein goes on, it
is like the relationship between our overcoat and the ticket given us
when we check our overcoat. In other words, human perception involves
coding even more than crude sensing. The mesh of language, or of
mathematics, or of a school of art, or of any system of human
abstracting, gives to our mental constructs the structure, not of the
original fact, but of the symbol system into which it is coded, just
as a map-maker colors a nation purple not because it is purple but
because his code demands it. But every code excludes certain things,
blurs other things, and overemphasizes still other things. Nijinski's
celebrated leap through the window at the climax of 'Le Spectre
d'une Rose' is best coded in the ballet notation system used by
choreographers; verbal language falters badly in attempting to
conveying; painting or sculpture could capture totally the magic of
one instant, but one instant only, of it; the physicist's equation,
Force = Mass X Acceleration, highlights one aspect of it
missed by all these other codes, but loses everything else about it.
Every perception is influenced, formed, and structured by habitual
coding habits- mental game habits- of the perceiver.
All authority is a function of coding, of game rules. Men have arisen
again and again armed with pitchforks to fight armies with cannon; men
have also submitted docilely to the weakest and most tottery
oppressors. It all depends on the extent to which coding distorts
perception and conditions the physical (and mental) reflexes.
It seems at first glance that authority could not exist at all if all
men were cowards or if no men were cowards, but flourishes as it does
because most men are cowards and some men are thieves. Actually, the
inner dynamics of cowardice and submission on the one hand and of
heroism and rebellion on the other are seldom consciously realized
either by the ruling class or the servile class.
Submission is identified not with cowardice but with virtue, rebellion
not with heroism but with evil. To the Roman slave-owners, Spartacus
was not a hero and the obedient slaves were not cowards; Spartacus was
a villain and the obedient slaves were virtuous. The obedient slaves
believed this also. The obedient always think of themselves as
virtuous rather than cowardly. If authority implies submission,
liberation implies equality; authority exist when one man obeys
another, and liberty exists when men do not obey other men.
Thus, to say that authority exists is to say that class and caste
exis, that submission and inequality exist. To say the liberty exists
is to that classlessness exists, to say that brotherhood and equality
exist. Authority, by dividing men into classes, creates dichotomy,
disruption, hostility, fear, disunion. Liberty, by placing men on an
equal footing, creates association, amalgamation, union,
security. When the relationships between men are based on authority
and coercion, they are driven apart; when based on liberty and
non-aggression, they are drawn together. The facts are self-evident
and axiomatic. If authoritarianism did not possess the in-built,
preprogrammed double-bind structure of a Game
Without End, men would long ago have rejected it and embraced
libertarianism.
The usual pacifist complaint about war, that young men are led to
death by old men who sit at home manning beaurocrats' desks and taking
no risks themselves, misses the point entirely. Demands that the old
should be drafted to fight their own wars, or that the leaders of the
warring nations should be sent to the front lines on the first day of
battle, etc., are aimed at an assumed "sense of justice"
that simply does not exist. To the typical submissive citizen of
authoritarian society, it is normal, obvious and "natural" that he
should obey older and more dominant males, even at the risk of his
life, even against his own kindred, and even in causes that are unjust
or absurd.
"The Charge of the Light Brigade"- the story of a group of young males
led to their death in a palpably idiotic situation and only because
they obeyed a senseless order without stopping to think- has been, and
remains, a popular poem, because unthinking obedience by young males
to older males is the most highly prized of all conditioned reflexes
within human, and hominid, societies.
The mechanism by which authority and submission are implanted in the
human mind is coding of perception. That which fits into the code is
accepted; all else is Damned to being ignored, brushed aside,
unnoticed, and- if these fail- it is Damned to being forgotten. A
worse form of Damnation is reserved for those things which cannot be
ignored. These are daubed with the brain's projected prejudices until,
encrusted beyond recognition, they are capable of being fitted
into the system, classified, card-indexed, buried. This is what
happens to every Damned Thing which is too prickly and sticky to be
excommunicated entirely. As Josiah Warren remarked, "It is dangerous
to understand new things too quickly."
Almost always, we have not understood them. We have murdered them and
mummified their corpses.
A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite
more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of "monopoly in the
means of production." Since man extends his nervous system though
channels of communication like the written word, the telephone, radio,
etc., he who controls these media controls part of the nervous system
of every member of society. The contents of these media become part of
the contents of every individual's brain.
Thus in preliterate societies taboos on spoken word are more numerous
and more Draconic than at any more complex level of social
organisation. With the invention of written speech -- hieroglyphic,
ideographic, or alphabetical -- the taboos are shifted to this medium;
there is less concern with what people say and more concern with what
people write. (Some of the first societies to achieve literacy, such
as Egypt and the Mayan culture of ancient Mexico, evidentially kept
a knowledge of hieroglyphs a religious secret which only the higher
orders of the priestly and royal families were allowed to share.) The
same process repeats endlessly: Each step forward in the technology of
communication is more heavily tabooed than the earlier steps. Thus, in
America today (post-Lenny Bruce), one seldom hears of convictions for
spoken blasphemy or obscenity; prosecution of books still continues,
but higher courts increasingly interpret the laws in a liberal
fashion, and most writer feel fairly confident that they can publish
virtually anything; movies are growing almost as decentralised as
books, although the fight is still heated in this area; television,
the newest medium, remains encased in neolithic taboo. (When the TV
pundits committed lese majeste after an address by the then Dominant
Male, a certain Richard Nixon, one of his lieutenants quickly informed
them they had over stepped, and the whole tribe -- except for
the dissident minority -- cheered for the reassertion of tradition.)
When a more efficient medium arrives, the taboos on television will
decrease.
--
Rorschach93
"Smoke me a kipper; I'll be back for breakfast!"
- Lt. Ace Rimmer, QuantumDimensionalTestPilot

Replace "SNAFU" with "no" to initiate contact.