The Adding Machine (19 page)

I don’t mean to suggest that control automatically defeats itself, nor that protest is therefore unnecessary. A government is never more dangerous than when embarking on a self-defeating or downright suicidal course. It is encouraging that some behavior modification projects have been exposed and halted, and certainly such exposure and publicity could continue. In fact, I submit that we have a
right
to insist that all scientific research be subject to public scrutiny, and that there should be no such thing as ‘top-secret’ research.

Communism was conceived as a reaction against 19th century
laissez faire
capitalism, to oppose an economic and political system that no longer exists today.

Dialectical materialism is an ideological formulation and precisely because of its materialistic pretentions it cannot adjust to change. The West has come a long way from Daddy Warbucks and the better mouse trap. It has come a long way from sweat shops, child labor and starvation wages. The corporate structure of Western Capitalism has no more use for the small operator with a better car, house, gun, fabric or contraceptive pill. Nor can it afford to tolerate such abuses as accompanied old style capitalism. Since it has no ideology it can adjust to altered conditions. But it lacks a long range plan. All such plans require an ideology, and it does not matter if the ideology is faulty, illogical, outmoded or proven wrong again and again. What matters is that a substantial body of Soviet citizens believe it and put the state above the individual. And what does the Soviet State intend? Exactly what they say they intend: world conquest. We will bury you and turn your graves into fertile asparagus beds to feed our workers. We need only one million brown nosed Afghans to found the socialist state. The other eleven million must be dealt with as enemies of the people, cod-eyed buffoons dedicated to counter-revolutionary obstructionist hooliganism.

The words don’t matter. What matters is Russian planes and tanks and guns and Russian soldiers ready to deal with cod-eyed buffoons on an assembly line basis and plough them under for the collective farms that will feed our workers.

Is it reactionary to repeat what they themselves have said? Of course they intend world conquest. What else? It’s all there in Marx. Next move Mid-East oil. Check. Anybody going to get tactical?
Qui vivra verra.

I’m an elitist. I believe in government by those able to govern. There are very few people who are good at anything, very few good lawyers, doctors, carpenters, writers, painters.

Politics is the only area where stupidity and ignorance are brazenly proffered as qualification for office ... I stand here a plain blunt man talking with no Groton accents.

Limit the right to vote .. . those who obtain power are the least competent to use it. This is a
wanting
universe. They get it because they want it, whatever it is, shoving aside the worthy bidden guest. The whole majority-rule farce is a door through which the unworthy enter, knowing that a select and discriminating instance would relegate them to the menial and clerical jobs they might be able to perform... You do not enhance the survival potential of a species by handing all basic decisions over to the unfit, those who are least competent to represent that species.

Politics is the only area where stupidity and ignorance are brazenly proffered as qualifications for office ... Foote said he didn’t want to hear the facts about marijuana use, having already made up his mind... Or Wendell Willkie:’I stand here a plain blunt man with no Groton accent. . .’ Intelligence, learning are words of reproach ... ‘egg heads’!

And so, guided by the least intelligent, the least competent, the least farsighted and most ill-informed, the species invites biologic disaster.. . Other species have come and gone . . .

Consider the dinosaurs ... A beast fifty feet in length and weighing thousands of tons, with a brain the size of a walnut... He had grave problems, but he could not worry. .. Many theories have been advanced as to why these magnificent creatures disappeared... Certainly one factor was size ... The carnivorous models were so large that the problem of obtaining adequate nourishment posed a chronic problem which over the centuries and the millennia must have become acute.

One herbivorous species was equipped with thin long necks that become longer and longer to reach more and more fodder, they may have reached an impasse where even if they ate day and night they could not sustain their way of life .. . There was also the problem posed by emergent mammalian creatures eating their eggs, thus striking at the very roots of their survival... Let us imagine a congress and emergency meeting of the dinosaur leaders. The brightest and the best... or so they see themselves ...

‘Fellow reptiles, at this dark hour, I do not hesitate to tell you that we face grave problems . .. And I do not hesitate to tell you that we have the answer. . . Size is the answer... increased size ... It was good enough for me . . . (Applause) Size that will enable us to crush all opposition (Applause)... There are those who say size is not the answer. There are those who even propose that we pollute our pure reptilian strain with mammalian amalgamations and cross breeding... And I say to you that if the only way I could survive was by mating with egg-eating rats, then I would choose not to survive... (Applause). But we
will
survive ... We
will
increase both in size and in numbers and we will continue to dominate this planet as we have done for three hundred million years... (Wild applause).

And this is what we are seeing and hearing at the present time ... At the time when the greatest diversity, and biologic flexibility moving towards mutation is needed for survival, we see a demand for increased conformity and standardization both in the West and in the Communist countries.

Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination. Like the karate man who could slice the top off a beer bottle leaving the bottle standing. He was never in an actual fight — who would fight him? And the phenomenal gun artists like Joe Mac Givern were never in a gun fight. .. They were too good ...

If intelligence is one of the last games, then proficiency must be carefully, uh, rationed .. . That is why intelligence agencies are reluctant to use polygraphs, except to weed out queers and drug addicts in their own ranks .. . Here is a spy novel by Le Carré called
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
... Leamas is a false defector to the Communists, pretending to be disgruntled by the treatment meted out to him by British intelligence... Incidentally one of the oldest ploys in the intelligence game, the apparent defector... How long would he last on a polygraph?

So the Johnsons have an incalculable advantage. They aren’t playing. They want to end the whole stupid game. To us, intelligence and war are only means to an end: SPACE EXPLORATION.

I realize I am widely perceived as a misogynist. But quoting from the Oxford dictionary: ‘Misogynist — a woman hater.’ Presumably this is his full-time occupation? Korzybski, the founder of General Semantics, always said to pin a generality down; so
what
women? Where and when? My English nanny from the pages of The Turn of the Screw?’ She did teach me some useful jingles — ‘Trip and stumble, slip and fall...’ Or the old Irish crone who taught me how to call the toads and bring the blinding worm from rotten bread? How remote and nostalgic with a whiff of peat and pigsties. Or the Saint Louis matron who said I was a walking corpse? Well, it isn’t every corpse that can walk; hers can’t.

Bring on the heavies.
The femme fatale,
in all her guises ... Kali does her sideshow coochy dance... the White Goddess eats her consort.. . the Terrible Mother goes into her act... the whore of Babylon rides in on her black panther screaming, ‘You fools! I will drain you dry.’ Enough to turn a man to stone. But these are only surface manifestations, B-girls in fact: servants. After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say ‘I WANT TO SEE THE
MANAGER.’

Women may well be a biological mistake; I said so in
The Job.
But so is almost everything else I see around here. The dinosaurs turned out to be a mistake too, but what are a few hundred million years, more or less, for such a noble experiment? And now — as the deadly cycles of overpopulation, pollution, depletion of resources, radio-activity and conflict escalate towards a cataclysmic
sauve-qui-peut
— thoughtful citizens are asking themselves if the whole human race wasn’t a mistake from the starting gate. The question then arises as to
whose
mistake, since mistakes imply intention — and I am convinced that nothing happens in this universe without will or intention.

Now it would be presumptuous, not to say impious, to say the Creator has done a bad job; since a bad job from
our
point of view may be a good job from his or her or its point of view. The history of the planet is a history of idiocy highlighted by a few morons who stand out as comparative geniuses. Considering the human organism as the
artifact
of an intentional Creator, we can then see more or less where we are. To date, no super-genius has managed to achieve what might be called normal intelligence in terms of the potential functioning of the human artifact.

‘Look at this artifact’. The instructor holds up a flintlock rifle.’ What’s wrong with it? Quite a bit it still has a long way to go.’

He holds up a modem automatic rifle. ‘Now we are getting close to the limit of efficiency for small arms on the principle of a projectile propelled by an exploding charge. Now look at
this
artifact.’ He holds up a cage in which a weasel snarls. ‘What’s wrong with this artifact? Nothing. It’s limited, but in terms of its structure and goals it functions well enough . . .’

Take a look at the human artifact. What is wrong with it? Just about everything. Consider a species that can live on the seacoast, watching ships come in day after day, year after year, and still believe that the Earth is flat because the Church says so; a species that can use cannonballs for five hundred years before the idea of a cannonball that explodes on contact blossoms in this barren soil... I could go on and on. So why has the human artifact stayed back there with the flintlock? I am advancing a theory that we were not designed to remain in our present state, any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole forever.

The human organism is in a state of neoteny. This is a biological term used to describe an organism fixated at what would normally be a larval or transitional phase. Ordinarily a salamander starts its life cycle in the water with gills; later the gills atrophy, and the animal develops lungs. However, certain salamanders never lose their gills or leave the water. They are in a state of neoteny. The Xolotl salamander found in Mexico is an example. Scientists, moved by the plight of this beautiful creature, gave him an injection of hormones, whereupon he shed his gills and left the water after ages of neoteny. It is perhaps too much to hope that one simple injection could jar the human species out of its neoteny. But by whatever means the change takes place, it will be irreversible. The Xolotl, once he sheds his gills, can never reclaim them. Evolution would seem to be a one way street.

Considering evolutionary steps, one has the feeling that the creature is tricked into making them. Here is a fish that survives drought because it has developed feet or rudimentary lungs. So far as the fish is concerned, these are simply a means of getting from one water source to another. But once he leaves his gills behind, he is stuck with lungs from there on out. So the fish has made an evolutionary step forward. Looking for water, he has found air.

Perhaps a forward step for the human race will be made in the same way. The astronaut is not looking for space; he is looking for more
time
— that is, equating space with time. The space program is simply an attempt to transport our insoluble temporal impasses somewhere else. However, like the walking fish, looking for more time we may find space instead, and then find that there is no way back.

Such an evolutionary step would involve changes that are literally inconceivable from our present point of view. Is the separation of the sexes an arbitrary device to perpetuate an unworkable arrangement? Would the next step involve the sexes fusing into an organism? And what would be the nature of this organism? As Korzybski always said, ‘I don’t know. Let’s see.’ Is it too much to ask that this beached fish of a species — the human race — should consider the unthinkable, for evolution’s sake?

The colonel beams at the crowd ... pomaded, manicured, he wears the satisfied expression of one who has just sold the widow a fraudulent peach orchard. ‘Folks we’re here to sell the only thing worth selling or buying and that’s immortality. Now here is the simplest solution and well on the way. Just replace the worn parts and keep the old heap on the road indefinitely.’

As transplant techniques are perfected and refined the age-old dream of immortality is now within the grasp of mankind. But who is to decide out of a million applicants for the same heart? There simply aren’t enough parts to go around. You need the job-lot once a year save twenty percent of people applying. Big executives use a heart a month just as regular as clockwork. Warlords, paying off their soldiers in livers and kidneys and genitals, depopulate whole areas. Vast hospital cities cover the land from the air conditioned hospital palaces of the rich radiating out to field hospitals and open air operating booths. The poor are rising in huge mobs. They are attacking government warehouses where the precious parts are stored. Everyone who can afford it has dogs and guards to protect himself from roving bands of part hunters like the dreaded Wild Doctors who operate on each other after the battle, cutting the warm quivering parts from the dead and dying. Cut-and-grab men dart out of doorways and hack out a kidney with a few expert strokes of their four-inch scalpels. People have lost all shame. Here’s a man who sold his daughter’s last kidney to buy himself a new groin — appears on TV to appeal for funds to buy little Sally an artificial kidney and give her this last Christmas. On his arm is a curvaceous blonde known apparently as Bubbles. She calls him Long John, now isn’t that cute?