GENERATION OF VIPERS

The future will point, like mathematics, to the one terrible flaw of our lives today: the discrepancy between what we are able to accomplish by objective honesty in the material world and what we fail to do in the world of behavior and attitude because we will not treat them with any sort of honesty or objectivity whatever.

– Page 33

The man from Mars, looking first upon us, would doubtless decide that we were trying to do away altogether with reproduction. A second look might even convince him that our estate was so horrible as to make the move extremely sensible.

– Page 58

Our Protestant churches, and, even more especially, the Catholic Church, devote an incredible portion of their political energy—perhaps most of it—to interference with the sex mores of the great non-Protestant and non-Catholic minority. Such religious enterprises are therefore essentially fascistic and in no way democratic. But it is a fact that no law which runs counter to the exact letter of medieval Catholic dogma can be passed in any of our states, and if a sensible law infringes on the archaic attitudes of Protestantism, it cannot be offered in a state legislature.

The church has stood, a rock colossus of bigotry, in the path of ten thousand proposed reforms. Sane efforts to legalize birth control information, the manufacture of proper birth control appliances, appliances for the inhibition of the spread of venereal disease, public instruction in sex hygiene, free clinics for the treatment of venereal disease, the inspection and treatment of prostitutes, controlled prostitution itself, the publication of psychological and physical sex information, aid for unwed mothers—myriad attempts by sane men acting sanely on real problems—have been fought down by church-frightened legislatures and church-dominated courts.

– Page 74

The school is an organism which teaches reading, writing, and arithmetic. It does that so the pupil can communicate. These accomplishments should also be taught so the pupil can think, but few schools have stumbled upon that notion of education. A thinking child would not think much of school—which would upset the system.

– Page 82

The teaching of history, for instance, which begins in the sixth or seventh grade, is a shoddy performance and all educators now alive should, in fairness, be given the noose and faggot for it. I don't mean, merely, such rubbish as George-Washington-couldn't-tell-a-lie, but the whole subject. Ancient history, dehumanized and fumigated, is proffered as a rote exercise in place and ruin identification, simplified battle plan, and old law. One long look at the murals of Pompeii would teach more ancient history than fifty years in such a classroom.

American history of the school brand is a disgrace to the human cerebrum. It is taught as if America, an infallible nation, rose through heroism from dire persecution, with a shining and untarnished escutcheon. This is not the stuff to give drips, because it compounds drippery. In the first place, its inhuman excess of virtue makes it unreal and thus very dull. In the second, it in no way educates. To the mind of a future voter, the contents of a school history book are about as valuable as a knowledge of all the formulas for all the emetics in Christendom.

– Pages 85-86

We are a "literate" nation. But there are not a million adults in America today who could comprehend even this casual treatise. There are hardly a million who voluntarily read nonfiction books.

– Page 91

The way to teach English would be to divide pupils by aptitude rather than by age, to insist on grammatical precision from the start, and to see to it that errors in grammar and in usage, as well as vocabulary failures, brought punitive deprivations. Rewards would not be made. To reward a child for the performance of a duty is to corrupt it with Cindarellaism. Life holds no such rewards. The first gold star a child gets in school for the performance of a needful task is its first lesson in graft. Discipline is essential. A man clumsy in syntax cannot express himself. A man ignorant of terms cannot learn anything.

– Page 92

Since there flows in our veins largely the blood of generations of people who have managed to survive by the low cunning and treachery necessitated by the unnatural aspect of all past society, some kids will be unamenable even to the physical system of compulsory education. Taking away their desserts or knocking them on the head will not enliven them to any effectual effort at serious learning, even of their own language. These people should not be permitted to continue their schooling along general lines. An effort might be made to reclaim some of them after they reach maturity. But most should be prepared at once for the sedentary handicrafts—work in the trades, in the factories, in the iron seats of farm machines, and at the pump handles of filling stations. They have no aptitude for learning, make no use of what they do manage to be taught, and are a waste of tax money. A group of that group, the least stable and reasonable, should be politically disenfranchised. No one in the entire multitude should ever be permitted to hold public office. And a certain small percentage of this dreadful offal, much of which regularly accumulates in the bleachers of our ball parks, should be quietly put to sleep.

– Pages 92-93

"GOD MUST HAVE LOVED THE COMMON PEOPLE BECAUSE HE MADE SO MANY OF THEM."

"God," the saying might also read, "must hate the common people because he made them so common."

Both constructs of the aphorism hold true. But, because it is an American convention to adore common people without restriction, I elect here to criticize them, as a lesson. A society which cannot criticize its masses is hamstrung—as ours is. For it is our American common people, and not the highly educated ones, who have chucked overboard the critical method and thereby cut loose the ship of state from its sounding machinery, its rudder, its glass, and its keel, leaving the whole business to drift where the blather of common men blows it.

Love of liberty is laudable and logically the chief political end of man, so long as it is hitched to responsibleness. Eighteenth century man, politically educated and understanding the major implications of what was going on in his environment, made a fairly responsible voter. Today, common man insists on his right to vote and insists, equally, on the right not to have to know what he is voting about. This folly is pitching all common men rapidly toward the rocks. The current war is a mere reef we are now grating over. What lies beyond may be the greater disaster.

There is no liberty for a man under any discipline except that which is self-imposed. The imposition of disciplines by the state is called fascism, or tyranny, by common man; and he hates it. By the same token, any nation which subscribes to liberty and then attempts to maintain a majority who have no discipline of themselves, is destined soon to be without freedom. Anarchy exists nowhere in nature. An asceticism, which is to say, a discipline, is imposed upon every living object by its environment and its instincts.

American liberty has been tentatively saved for the last few decades not by the self-discipline of its citizens but by their instincts, which have not yet been blunted quite enough to prevent the people from realizing imminent dangers at the eleventh hour. Twice, now, we have turned at the last moment and armed ourselves to prevent the discipline of ruthlessness—the next most powerful discipline to responsible liberty—from overthrowing us. This second time, we came within months, and perhaps even weeks, as a body of common men, of a position from which not even our instincts could have extricated us. It is not yet utterly certain that we have escaped, but the presumption is that we shall.

What about the third time?

– Pages 100 & 102-3

Few men, indeed, are so mad that they do not know when they are doing wrong. But so avid is their pursuit of goods that wrongdoing has become an element of all they do. To protest that fact is idle. Our politics, our business—little and big, our professions, our labor, are smitten in every facet with a corruption occasioned by reckless determination to make not just a reasonable profit but all the profit that can be wrung from every enterprise. Our commonest man, emulating his superiors, forges ahead with a brick on the safety valve of his conscience. Think over your morning paper in that light.

– Pages 104-5

A man's awareness derives from fragile wave and molecular disturbance, remote from his idea of himself and subject to easy misinterpretation. He lives, really, an utterly solitary life. The stars are no more distant from his body than his dearest friend is from his awareness. But, instead of developing the attributes of the isolated organism which he finds himself to be, he throws as much of his personality as he possibly can in with the herd—and, of course, becomes liable to all the misfortunes of it. I refer here to psychological rather than physical misfortunes. In this degraded and degrading condition, man serves a term in his body and dies, never having looked into himself, never having grown or learned, and without any knowledge of the meaning he might have given to his subjective existence, which, so far as his real chance for knowing went, was all he had anyhow.

– Pages 92-93

Common man has at long last got himself so far out of gear with nature and his environment that he is beginning to see the shape of extinction, whether he recognizes it as such or not.

– Page 116

The American businessman, the tweed, corpulent, horn-rimmed dollar-chaser (whom Europe would have understood even less if it had learned that he chased dollars to appease women), was a melting-pot job, and the metal of him was that of pot metal—which is white metal—the nearest thing in imitation iron to slag.

– Page 219

Starting with the thesis that competition is the essence of democracy, of which, indeed, it is an essence, the businessman undertook two main lines of bastardization of that truth. First, as recorded above, was the elimination of competition whenever possible and by all means imaginable. Second, was the establishment of the notion that business competed only with itself and never with any other requirement of mankind. By means of the latter absurdity, business was able to kick around and decimate the people and their needs with virtually no punishment, whatever the result. Under this code, the courts might transfer from you to somebody else a hundred thousand dollars because you had called the somebody a larruping Judas in public and hurt his business, but the courts could not get back one nickel for trainloads of widows and orphans rendered financially hors de combat to what was called honest corporate competition.

Any procedure that was technically legal, or could be made so to seem, became the businessman's definition of ethics and, thus, the public definition of morality. Rich robbers were admired and envied by the people from which they had stolen what they had. Standards of personal honesty in trade fell so low that, by 1941, according to actual field test, you could barely trust a grocer or a garage mechanic more than you could a footpad. Nearly two-thirds of them were proven crooks in their own trades. Swindle had apparently become the unnamed but accepted route to security. That is like saying suicide is the best life insurance, but it is the current American way of business, for the majority.

– Page 223

Man drove. He drove to the corner for cigarettes. He drove to his club and to his office. He drove around for the hell of it. Whenever his inner self knocked on the thick walls of his ego for admission, he piled into his car and drove, as he rightly said, "to get away from himself." He gave up walking, even for his soul. When a hard and long tramp in the rain was indicated, he ripped off a hundred miles in his sedan. Not only that, but in this primary mover of the escapist he emplaced man's second great device for the maintenance of everlasting unawareness of himself, or living death: the radio. This further distracted him from his true problems—and often, of course, from his driving.

The car made it possible for man to do more things by enabling him to go in a shorter time to more places where something was cooking. It also made it virtually impossible for man to think any longer. It mechanized the last chink of his time. Its operation—or even its motion—demanded too much attention for introspection. With the radio going, it became a sort of cheapskate traveling circus: two rings and a continual performance. Sitting in his car, man decerebrated his species.

– Pages 224-6

Nowadays, a woman who still screams at a mouse can drive right up to, or through, or past, intertwined masses of glass and steel among which are the red fractions of what had been, a moment ago, a half dozen of her fellow creatures. She can do it without a tremor, because a mouse is a creepy little creature but sudden evisceration on Maple Street is only a car smash.

The attitude is abnormal and man has had to pay in equivalent coin for the power which makes him able to stomach the horror aspects of automobility. The law of action and reaction works immutably in the psyche. This extravagant new callousness was won by man to protect his selfish purpose of having his ease in his own car—at least till it crippled him; therefore the payment had to be made by some other exposure of that same self—as, in bitter truth, it has been.

Man's normal recoil at the sight of a mutilated fellow tribesman comes from a projection of himself into the situation of the other person. The mechanism was designed to reveal the undesirability of said mutilation and to cause the beholder either to avenge the spectacle or to avoid whatever caused it. In the matter of automobiles, the American gadfly has no intention either of revenge or, most certainly, of future avoidance. So, when he hardened his wits up to the point that this bone-shattering business was tolerable to him, he lost his sensitivity to bone shattering in general. He immunized himself to the whole threatening subject. No flesh-ripping was, any longer, an audible warning to him. Bruno Mussolini could make flowers out of Ethiopians with bombs, and the American could not perceive a danger to all men in the act. Nanking could be burned alive, and the American would not care—because burning alive is also one of the accepted amenities of happy motoring. The Nazi concentration camps were far less appalling than they would once have been, because you could see babies with their jaws torn off on Fourteenth and Purdue almost any old time. In cooling down his reflex toward the crimson consequences of universal motoring, he froze the entire ganglion, pretty much, and thus was able with no alarm, to view crimson consequences of every sort.

– Pages 230-1

What profiteth a society of men if they are kept consuming an inferior article in order only that the maker may keep his bank accounts piling up? What good is it to let firms and corporations hide patents, obscure improvements, purchase progress and destroy it? The stock excuse of technological unemployment and the disturbance of capital structure is heady nonsense. There is genuine enough need in humanity to keep all the mills making mills for centuries, and all the workers working for as many hours a day as they have the stomach for without rebellion, if only the true requirements of men are considered, and not just his vanities and fripperies.

– Page 241

We are, as a people, the wonder and the hate of the world, its envy and its despair. We are in the midst of a time when we had better stick to a few extremely simple premises, such as that we will try to guarantee more freedom for more people after the war than we did before and that, having found every world balance of power a screwy device, we will now maintain enough power of our own to knock flat any nation or bunch of nations that sticks its head up against us, picking no fights, but taking no chances. Such a program is not diplomatic. It would throw the sissies of our State Department into a nervous sweat. The godly would not like it and the mothers of America would scream against it. It is not "idealistic" in the sense in which we have had an international idealism—which is, after all, the sense of sending missionaries over the earth, together with tourists and traders—to tell the rest of man it did not know its razzmatazz from a hole in the ground, while our diplomats, on the other hand, have been going around apologizing for not being Portuguese nobles, and bowing obsequiously to Japanese kumquats.

– Page 250

It is a waste of words here to berate Congress. The people are doing the job. In doing it, the people are indicting themselves, of course, for the men in our Senate and the men in our House of Representatives are, indeed, the representatives of the people. Each ribald hoot at the selfishness, the arrogance, the stupidity of our elected statesmen does not ricochet into nowhere, but bounces straight back, burning and sharp with inescapable consequence, into the bodies of the hooters: the citizens themselves, the voting public. The withered emasculation of our democratic statesmanship is the withered emasculation of America. The witch-hunting savagery of pompous male sluts in our national halls is that quality of all the people. The petty greed and relentless solicitation of these quasi males is our own. The sacrifice of power, of dignity, of responsibility, of national security and interest to a little patronage or the achievement of a trivial local profit is the measure of our universal loss of aim, purpose, moral worth, view, vision, integrity, and common cause.

The appalling stupidity of these men, highlighted by the ferocious peril of these hours, is the exact measure of the stupidity of the people in our states, cities, towns and villages. When we condemn them, which we rightly do with nearly every dispatch concerning their multifarious and nonsensical agenda, we condemn ourselves. When we say these men have abandoned their strength to the administration, because of pressure, we state how great has been our own eagerness to lay down the chore of civic duty and let an administration—or nobody—pick up and exploit our united strength. When we perceive that they are talking without knowing what they are talking about and doing without being able to guess the results of their acts, ignorantly busy giving unearned pensions and collecting unjust taxes, digging canals and having to fill them in, we are saying how little we, also, know or care about these matters. When we describe their pompous vanity and take exquisite pleasure in putting calipers on the immense littleness of their avarice, we are making record of our own littleness and avariciousness. When we see them knuckle to lobbies, abandon sense to the demand of minority blocks, weasel, quibble, and fail, we are watching the progress of a disease in ourselves, a democratic sickness, metastatic, and so far advanced that democracy may yet die of it—not because democracy was a mistaken plan for living together, but because the people have eschewed it out of their own greed and attached themselves to a bloc, to labor, to farms, to capital, to legionnaires, to pensioners, to states, to congressional districts, to any of a thousand gangs within our democracy—but only rarely to democracy.

By putting this small mob fealty ahead of allegiance to all of ourselves, we have steadily moved closer toward the place where mobs will fight openly to rule us, and one of them, or a group of them, may win the foray. Then they will take to fighting among each other until it becomes necessary to appoint a dictator. If that is done, the wheel will have come a full turn and democratic man will again have lost his liberty, having spat upon it, abused it, laughed at it, neglected it, and so given it up because each individual man of him was not yet good enough for liberty.

– Pages 263-4

For masses of people, "Thou shalt not kill," considered on a subjective level, becomes so incomprehensible a command that it is not even studied by the theologians. The ingrained vanity of one class, grinding against another, murders millions just as the cruelty of a wicked wife erodes the guts of her husband until he dies. Intolerance of race and creed and nation, of rich for poor and the organized poor for the embattled rich—all these and a myriad other social processes collectively engaged in—make murder on the plane of subjective crowd behavior an everyday affair, and we are all parties to these murders. In such ways we, who keep a million badly tended lunatics in a living death out of our "tender nature" and "sentiment" when euthanasia would be the mercy of God, destroy each other in shoals and packs and multitudes by our heedless devotion to the pursuit of money at any cost, the pursuit of power, the pursuit of fame, the insistence upon state and national superiority, and the universal acceptance as our "right" of prerogatives taken at a price to other men that drives them to poverty and despair. The black and white people perishing in Miami every day, which I have told about, are victims of those mass subjective vanities, and their skeletons hang, unseen, in the closets of their betters.

– Pages 297-8

The spiritual enfranchisement of the individual which would subject him only to the law of integrity would, indeed, make him free, within himself precisely where these days most men are mordant serfs of every institution, tradition, organization, prejudice and vanity. Temporal law would be a law apart, as it was with Christ, and man would not only obey it better because he understood it better, but he would continually exert his private effort, and so a mass effort, to make temporal law more congruent with man's whole nature and less a body of reflex to fear, superstition, and nonsense. This is the truth that sets man free, the only truth there is in the subjective half of consciousness, the truth which, even in portions, has served thousands of psychiatrists as a tool to integrate the neurotic and cast out every sort of devil, and this is the one truth that the church cannot afford to tell. Instead, it has developed the desperate notion that truth is a road of many branches (dogmas) and undertaken to solicit man for his journey toward the kingdom of heaven by all the denominational side roads and theological blind alleys the greedy and egregious churchmen could invent.

– Page 300

There are in America from fifteen to twenty million religious fundamentalists who are dedicated to doctrines incompatible with democracy in that they insist on their prerogatives as first principles. An even larger group feebly follows the trail of fire breathed by those fundamentalists. They are the most dangerous minority we have because they categorically eschew the reasoned judgments of the majority. Democracy properly allows them the right to worship as they choose. It should never have conceded them the right to establish schools. Education is not a function of any church—or even of a city—or a state; it is a function of all mankind.

– Page 324-5

Never was chaos so great.

Never was paradise so near to the reach of common folks—like you, and clowns—like me.

– Pages 328-330