The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (9 page)

He cannot wander at leisure in the streets and parks of his own capital, or sit on a lonely beach listening to the waves and watching the gulls.

Through enslaving others he himself becomes the most miserable of slaves.

Nothing fails like success—because the self-imposed task of our society and all its members is a contradiction: to force things to happen which are acceptable only when they happen without force. This, in turn, arises from the definition of man as an independent agent—
in
the universe but not
of
it—saddled with the job of bending the world to his will. No amount of preaching and moralizing will tame the type of man so defined, for the hypnotic hallucination of himself as something separate from the world renders him incapable of seeing that life is a system of geological and biological cooperation. Certainly, the system
contains
fights: birds against worms, snails against lettuce, and spiders against flies. But these fights are contained in the sense that they do not get out of hand, that no one species is the permanent victor. Man alone is trying to
eliminate
his natural enemies in the conviction that he is, or should be, the supreme species. Just as we cultivate vegetables, cattle, and chickens for food in the realization that we depend upon these creatures for our life, we should also realize that enemy creatures which prey upon man—insects, bacteria, and various fungi—are in fact enemy/friends.

A New York hostess entertaining a statesman from Pakistan brought up the problem of the urgent need for birth-control in Asia, and what was being done about it in Pakistan. She was utterly nonplussed with the reply that all the propaganda about birth-control was merely the white's man's attempt to maintain his superiority over the colored races.

I told her that she should have answered, "No, indeed. We only want to help you to prune your beautiful fruit-trees."

For the enemy/friends of man are his pruners. They prevent him from destroying himself by excess fertility, so that a person who dies of malaria or tuberculosis should be honored at least as much as one who has died for his country in battle. He has made room for the rest of us, and the bacteria which killed him should be saluted with proper chivalry as an honorable foe. The point is not that we should forthwith abandon penicillin or DDT: it is that we should fight to check the enemy, not to eliminate him. We must learn to include ourselves in the round of cooperations and conflicts, of symbiosis and preying, which constitutes the balance of nature, for a permanently victorious species destroys, not only itself, but all other life in its environment.

The obvious objection to an argument against "wiping out" such natural enemies of man as cancer or mosquitoes is our sympathy for the individuals who get caught. It is all very well to reason, in the abstract, that the human population has to be pruned, but when disease puts its finger on me I run for the doctor. What would be the success of a call for "volunteers for pruning"? In Western civilization we do not abandon sickly babies, shoot the insane, let the hungry starve, or leave diseased people to die on the streets. (At least, not in our better moments). For the most sacred ideal of our culture is the right of every individual to justice, health, and wealth, or "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." To suggest that the personal ego is a hallucination seems to be an attack on this most sacred value, without which civilized people would fall back to the level of coolies or ants to become an organized mass where the particular person is expendable.

During World War II a friend of mine used to fly Chinese laborers over the Hump to work on the South end of the Burma Road. The long flight was, of course, ideal for gambling, but since there was not enough cash between them to make the game interesting, the stakes were that the final loser should jump off the plane. No parachute. Our natural reaction is that such people aren't fully human. Like the families and servants of ancient kings who were buried alive with their deceased lord, they seem, as Thomas Mann suggested, to be faces with no backs to their heads—mere masks, mere roles of no further use or meaning; bees without a queen. Whatever villainies the British may have committed in India, their Christian consciences balked at the practice of
sati
, which required a widow to commit suicide at her husband's funeral.

Truly civilized people are—we feel—not faces on the sky but fully enclosed heads containing souls, each one of infinite value in the sight of God.

At one extreme, then, we have the sacred individual—the unique personal ego, separate from both nature and God—defined as such by a society which, almost in the same breath, commands him to be free and commands him to conform. At the other extreme is the coolie, the cog in the industrial-collectivist machine, or the mere "hand" (as the factory worker is often called). If one believes that the personal ego is a natural endowment of all men, as distinct from a social convention, then the lot of the coolie is bleak indeed—for one sees him as a repressed and frustrated person, though his own society may never have defined him as such.

However, there is a third possibility. The individual may be understood neither as an isolated person nor as an expendable, humanoid working-machine. He may be seen, instead, as one particular focal point at which the whole universe expresses itself—as an incarnation of the Self, of the Godhead, or whatever one may choose to call IT. This view retains and, indeed, amplifies our apprehension that the individual is in some way sacred. At the same time it dissolves the paradox of the personal ego, which is to have attained the "precious state" of being a unique person at the price of perpetual anxiety for one's survival. The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery. We do not realize that our so-called love and concern for the individual is simply the other face of our own fear of death or rejection. In his exaggerated valuation of separate identity, the personal ego is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting, and then getting more and more anxious about the coming crash!

Let it be clear, furthermore, that the ego-fiction is in no way essential to the individual, to the total human organism, in fulfilling and expressing his individuality. For every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree. To manifest individuality, every branch must have a sensitive connection with the tree, just as our independently moving and differentiated fingers must have a sensitive connection with the whole body. The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation. The head and the feet are different, but not separate, and though man is not connected to the universe by exactly the same physical relation as branch to tree or feet to head, he is nonetheless connected—and by physical relations of fascinating complexity. The death of the individual is not disconnection but simply withdrawal. The corpse is like a footprint or an echo—the dissolving trace of something which the Self has ceased to do.

If, then, the differentiation of individuals is of great value, on the principle that variety is the spice of life, this value is not going to be enhanced by a self-contradictory definition of individuality. Our society—that is, we ourselves, all of us—is defining the individual with a double-bind, commanding him to be free and separate from the world, which he is not, for otherwise the command would not work. Under the circumstances, it works only in the sense of implanting an illusion of separateness, just as the commands of a hypnotist can create illusions.

Thus bamboozled, the individual—instead of fulfilling his unique function in the world—is exhausted and frustrated in efforts to accomplish, self-contradictory goals. Because he is now so largely defined as a separate person caught up in a mindless and alien universe, his principal task is to get one-up on the universe and to conquer nature.

This is palpably absurd, and since the task is never achieved, the individual is taught to live and work for some future in which the impossible will at last happen, if not for him, then at least for his children. We are thus breeding a type of human being incapable of living in the present—that is, of really living.

For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax.

There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, "Now, I've arrived!" Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.

In other words, you have been hypnotized or conditioned by an educational processing-system arranged in grades or steps, supposedly leading to some ultimate Success. First nursery school or kindergarten, then the grades or forms of elementary school, preparing you for the great moment of secondary school! But then more steps, up and up to the coveted goal of the university. Here, if you are clever, you can stay on indefinitely by getting into graduate school and becoming a permanent student. Otherwise, you are headed step by step for the great Outside World of family-raising, business, and profession. Yet graduation day is a very temporary fulfillment, for with your first sales-promotion meeting you are back in the same old system, being urged to make that quota (and if you do, they'll give you a higher quota) and so progress up the ladder to sales manager, vice-president, and, at last, president of your own show (about forty to forty-five years old). In the meantime, the insurance and investment people have been interesting you in plans for Retirement—that really ultimate goal of being able to sit back and enjoy the fruits of all your labors. But when that day comes, your anxieties and exertions will have left you with a weak heart, false teeth, prostate trouble, sexual impotence, fuzzy eyesight, and a vile digestion.

All this might have been wonderful if, at every stage, you had been able to play it as a game, finding your work as fascinating as poker, chess, or fishing. But for most of us the day is divided into work-time and play-time, the work consisting largely of tasks which others pay us to do because they are abysmally uninteresting. We therefore work, not for the work's sake, but for money—and money is supposed to get us what we really want in our hours of leisure and play. In the United States even poor people have lots of money compared with the wretched and skinny millions of India, Africa, and China, while our middle and upper classes (or should we say "income groups") are as prosperous as princes. Yet, by and large, they have but slight taste for pleasure. Money alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy.

I live close to a harbor packed with sailing-boats and luxurious cruisers which are seldom used, because seamanship is a difficult though rewarding art which their owners have no time to practice. They bought the boats either as status symbols or as toys, but on discovering that they were not toys (as advertised) they lost interest. The same is true of the entire and astounding abundance of pleasure-goods that we buy. Foodstuffs are prolific, but few know how to cook. Building materials abound in both quantity and variety, yet most homes look as if they had been made by someone who had heard of a house but never seen one. Silks, linens, wools, and cottons are available in colors and patterns galore, and yet most men dress like divinity students or undertakers, while women are slaves to the fashion game with its basic rule, "I have conformed sooner than you." The market for artists and sculptors has thrived as never before in history, but the paintings look as if they had been made with excrement or scraps from billboards, and the sculptures like mangled typewriters or charred lumber from a burned-down outhouse.(2) We have untold stacks of recorded music from every age and culture, and the most superb means of playing it. But who actually listens? Maybe a few pot-smokers.

This is perhaps a Henry Millerish exaggeration. Nevertheless, it strikes me more and more that America's reputation for materialism is unfounded—that is, if a materialist is a person who thoroughly enjoys the physical world and loves material things. In this sense, we are superb materialists when it comes to the construction of jet aircraft, but when we decorate the inside of these magnificent monsters for the comfort of passengers it is nothing but frippery. High-heeled, narrow-hipped, doll-type girls serving imitation, warmed-over meals. For our pleasures are not material pleasures but
symbols
of pleasure—

attractively packaged but inferior in content.

The explanation is simple: most of our products are being made by people who do not enjoy making them, whether as owners or workers.

Their aim in the enterprise is not the product but money, and therefore every trick is used to cut the cost of production and hoodwink the buyer, by coloring and packaging chicanery, into the belief that the product is well and truly made. The only exceptions are those products which simply
must
be excellent for reasons of safety or high cost of purchase—aircraft, computers, space-rockets, scientific instruments, and so forth.

But the whole scheme is a vicious circle, for when you have made the money what will you buy with it? Other pretentious fakes made by other money-mad manufacturers. The few real luxuries on the market are imports from "backward" countries, where peasants and craftsmen still take pride in their work. For example, the state of Oaxaca in Mexico produces some of the finest blankets in the world, and American buyers have been trying to import them in huge quantities.

But no amount of money will give the relatively few craftsmen who weave them time to fill the order. If they want the order, they must begin to cheat and produce inferior blankets. The only solution would be to train hundreds of new craftsmen. But Oaxaca is just getting television and has, for some time, had public education, so what up-and-coming young person would want to waste his days weaving blankets?