Page:Minority of One March 1961.pdf/4
Can even Living be Forgotten?
By Robert Anton Wilson
The authoritarian social structure of so-called "civilization" has not changed radically, at the root, in 6000 years. This authoritarian social structure remains basically an oligarchy at all times; dictators and tyrants escape this oligarchal structure no more than democracies do. The oligarchal rule of civilized man involves, fundamentally, the control of the symbols of wealth (paper money, gold, or whatever) by a small group of usurious manipulators.
Under this 6000-year-old social structure every child is born into a state of debt inherited from his parents, and often from his parents' parents. In most cases, also, the child is born without the legal "right" to live on the planet earth, i.e., on its surface. He has to purchase this "right" from somebody else, through the payment of "rent," since a small group of speculators claims to "own" the earth and only allows the rest of us to dwell on its surface so long as we pay tribute to them.
The international usurers who control paper money and other symbols of wealth similarly have appropriated unto themselves the medium of exchange; and we no longer have what Lincoln once said free men must have in order to remain free, "our own money to pay our own debts." We must use the usurer's money, and pay tribute to him for the privilege.
The social structure is almost certainly the result of conquest. That is to say, a people dwelling in the state of nature would not depart from it willingly, but must be forcibly regimented into slavery at first, and then, their spirits broken, released into the "slavery to symbols" of civilized man. In other words, the "simple" savage is too sophisticated to believe in symbols of wealth the way civilized man does: he values the concrete thing, this tree, that horse, yonder grazing pasture. Only after an interim of slavery, of being forced to act not on his own volition but on another's command, will the savage grow schizoid enough to be ready for the "civilized" state. "Civilized" man, living on a planet that he has been told is owned by others and forced to deal with things always through a paper symbol the value of which he has been told must be con- trolled by "experts" he never sees, has lost all control over his own life and does not know what a truly volitional act would be. He therefore, at all times and all places, even in the most blatant dictatorships, makes a big verbal noise about his "freedom" and "liberty," etc. -abstractions which would never occur to the savage who possesses their reality.
There is considerable evidence that the stress of this kind of anti-natural living is definitely harmful psychosomatically, as well as "psychically." The physical bearing of "civilized" man is so obviously different from that of the savage that every explorer we know of comes back with bemused comments on this subject. Grantley Dick-Read's Childbirth Without Fear first popularized the discovery that the muscular tensions of "civilized" woman prevent her, in most cases, from experiencing the type of childbirth that is natural for humans.
Recently, the arctic explorer, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, has argued, in his Cancer: Disease of Civilization, that this dread disease is either rare or non-existent in primitive communities. So is stuttering, according to Dr. Wendell Johnson's Language and Speech Hygiene. Both stuttering and cancer, and perhaps heart disease and several other ailments, seem to be connected with the tension, apprehension and bodily "anxiety" (improper breathing) of so-called "civilized" man. Many gynecologists agree with Dr. W. Reich's idea that the prevalence of cancer of the uterus in "civilized" woman results directly from her unnaturally repressed sexual energies.
The control of symbols by a small class, and corresponding dependence upon that class by everybody else-is perhaps best illustrated by the career of Jim Fisk who once, back in 1868, owned all the gold in the world for three hours, without ever touching any of it, or even seeing it. No primitive could ever understand this "ownership"; and even the average "civilized" man grows dizzy when trying to understand the manipulations of Wall Street, which is why he prefers to leave, such "arcane" and "mystical" matters to the presumed experts. Nevertheless, this metaphysical ownership affected, directly, the diet and clothing of uncounted millions for generations thereafter. Whether or not you can "buy" two good steaks or only one good steak for ten "dollars" today depends on who owns the gold of the world and what he is doing with it.
Under such a system, anxiety, worry, insecurity, etc., as chronic body attitudes, have reached epidemic proportions.
G. Rattray Taylor's Sex in History notes, without attempting to explain, the rise of anti-sexual "religious" teachings after a great social calamity. For instance, post-exile Judaism is shot through with hatred of sexuality, whereas earlier Judaism seems to have been as tolerant as the Greeks. Similarly, English Puritanism rose out of a context of bloody civil wars and religious persecutions. In numerous other cases we observe the same pattern of social trauma followed by extreme hatred of the living flesh. Luther's hatred for capitalism led him to a theology of anxiety which flowered into the Protestant Era's embrace of capitalism. Once anxiety has become a chronic body attitude, desensitization sets in and man becomes incapable of responding naturally to the cyclic processes of his own living energy. But this chronic anxiety, caused by economic insecurity, creates the psychological vacuum, which drives man to "keep busy, busy, busy" and thus perpetuates the economic system which created it.
Thus we find that the essence of "civilized" man's bifurcation from Nature is a circular-causal process, or, in simple terms, a vicious circle. The authoritarian-usurocratic system creates anxiety; and anxiety drives the system ever onward and upward (away from the fertile earth and the living flesh); and does so at an ever-accelerating rate. Everybody today knows, in his bones, that this whole system is heading straight toward universal death like an engine out of control, and everybody feels helpless to do anything about it.
2000 years ago, when this perverse system was only about 4000 years old, Saul of Tarsus understood that "the love of money is the root of all evil." Money, the symbol of things, is not a useful thing, in itself. It is a net of usury with which one class traps another into starvation and simultaneously entraps itself forever. 500 years before Saul, the Buddha proved that, in an ownership society, theft must occur, leading to police forces, leading to murder, leading to capital punishment. leading to a universal web of anxiety. Mencius, in China, asked, "Is there any difference between killing a man with a club and killing him with a sword? Is there any difference between killing a man with a club and killing him with a system of economics?"
It seems like a ridiculous over-simplification when one first thinks of it, but the thought has grown on me over the years.
No man tries to build his house on a map; he builds it on the territory. No man tries to eat a menu; he eats the meal All of our problems, including the atomic disaster we all anxiously await, derive from the fact that people do not regard money as realistically as they regard maps and menus. They have confused the symbol with the thing symbolized, as semanticists would say. "In Gold We Trust" is, indeed, the principle religion of "civilized" man.
Only an understanding of how this black magic is worked-an understanding that money need not be at the mercy of invisible manipulators "with no front name, no hind name and no address"-an understanding that the exchange of goods between Mr. A and Mr. B does not have to involve use of a medium which forces both A and B to pay tribute to a mysterious 3rd party who "owns" some of the miscellaneous minerals of the world-an understanding that Alberta, Canada, and Woergl, Austria, in our own century, and parts of China and the Ottoman Empire in the past have had socially-owned money for which NOBODY paid interest to ANYBODY-only such an understanding, breaking through semantic bewitchments of thousands of years standing, can free "civilized" man from his enslavement to this symbol, and the anxiety this enslavement costs him.