Prometheus Rising (31 page)

acquiring "too much power" in the opinion of its masters. And so

it, too, must be monitored, by a secret-police-of-the-third-order.

244 Prometheus Rising

In brief, once a government has
n
orders of secret police

spying on each other, all are potentially suspect, and to be safe, a

secret police of order
n plus 1
must be created. And so on,

forever.

In practice, of course, this cannot regress to mathematical

infinity, but only to the point where every citizen is spying on

every other citizen or until the funding runs out.

National Security, in practice, must always fall short of the

logically Empedoclean infinite regress it requires for perfect

"security." In that gap between the ideal of "One Nation under

surveillance with wire taps and urine tests for all," and the

strictly limited real situation of finite resources and finite funding,

there is ample encouragement for paranoias of all sorts to

flourish, both among the citizens and among the police.

THE BURDEN OF OMNISCIENCE

or: Why you can't reach the Court

or the Castle in Kafka's allegories

Thus, the USSR after 62 years of Marxist secret police games

reached the point where the alpha males were terrified
of painters

and poets.

Prometheus Rising 245

In spying-and-hiding transactions, worry leads to more worry

and suspicion leads to more suspicion. The very act of participating,

however unwillingly, in the secret police game—even as

victim, or citizen being monitored—will eventually produce all

the classic symptoms of clinical paranoia.

The agent knows who he is spying on, hut he never knows who

is spying on him.
Could it be his wife, his mistress, his secretary,

the newsboy, the Good Humor man?

If there is a secret police at all, in any nation,
every branch

and department of government,
and institutions which are not

even admitted to be parts of government,
becomes suspect in the

eves of cautious and intelligent people as a possible front for, or

tunnel to, the secret police.
That is, the more shrewd will recognize

that something bearing the label of HEW or even International

Silicon and Pencil might actually be the CIA or NSA in

disguise.

In such a deception network, conspiracy theories proliferate.

Rumor is necessary, it has been found, when people cannot find

"official" news sources that can be trusted to tell them what is

really going on. The present author, having worked in the civil

rights movement, the anti-war movement, the legalize-pot

movement and other dissident causes, has repeatedly been

approached by friend A with dire warnings that friend B is

almost certainly a secret police agent, only to be told later and

independently by friend C that friend A is a secret police agent.

It requires delicate neurological know-how to keep one's sense

of humor in the secret police matrix.

The more omnipresent the secret police, the more likely it is

that intelligent men and women will regard the government with

fear and loathing.

The government, on discovering that growing numbers of

citizens regard it with fear and loathing, will increase the size

and powers of the secret police, to protect itself.

The infinite regress again appears.

246 Prometheus Rising

SUSPICION LEADS TO MORE SUSPICION

Prometheus Rising 247

The only alternative was suggested sarcastically by playwright

Bertolt Brecht (who was hounded by U.S. secret police as

a communist and by East German secret police, later, as not

sufficiently communist). "If the government doesn't trust the

people," Brecht asked innocently, "why doesn't it dissolve them

and elect a new people?" No way has yet been invented to elect a

new people, so the government will instead spy on the existing

people with increased vigor.

Every secret police organization is engaged in both the
collection

of information
and
the production of misinformation,
euphemistically

called "disinformation." That is, you score points in

the secret police game both by hoarding signals (information

units)—hiding facts from competitors—and by foisting false

signals (fake information units) on the other players. This creates

the situation I call Optimum SNAFU, in which every player has

rational (not neurotic) reasons for suspecting that each and all

may be trying to deceive him, gull him, con him, dupe him and

generally misinform him. As Henry Kissinger is alleged to have

said, anybody in Washington who isn't paranoid must be crazy.

Maybe the UFOs really exist objectively—or maybe the

whole UFO phenomenon is a cover for a secret police disinformation

ploy. Maybe there are Black Holes where space and time

implode—or maybe Black Holes were invented to befuddle

Russian scientists and send them into "little man who wasn't

there" semantic spookery. Maybe Jimmy Carter really exists—or

maybe he is, as
National Lampoon
once claimed, an actor named

Sidney Goldfarb trained to project an attractive down-home

"image." Perhaps only three alpha males at the top of the

National Security pyramid really know the answers to these

questions—or perhaps these three are being deceived by certain

subordinates, as Lyndon Johnson was deceived about Vietnam

by the CIA.

Such is the neuro-sociological "logic" of a Disinformation

Matrix. It is, as Paul Watzlawik has demonstrated, the logic of

schizophrenia.

Less than ten years after the secret police game was established

here by the National Security Act of 1948, the books of

Dr. Wilhelm Reich were burned in a New York incinerator by

government order. This was a shocking sight to some of us, who

248 Prometheus Rising

remembered that we had recently fought a long war against Nazi

Germany for, among other things, their crime "against civilization"

of burning books. Shortly thereafter, Dr. William Ivy,

former head of a department at Chicago Medical School, was

subjected to ten years of legal harassment for espousing a radical

cancer cure. More recently, Dr. Timothy Leary was sentenced to

38 years imprisonment for espousing controversial ideas about

neurotransmitter chemicals and reimprinting the nervous system.

Now there is a war on against holistic physicians.

It does not matter whether any or all of these "heretics" were

right or wrong. Scientific truth is only determined after a generation

or more of research; it is not determined by throwing the

dissenters in prison or burning their books. The point is that the

secret police game immediately creates the social context for a

return to the mechanisms of the Holy Inquisition.

The intelligence of the whole society—the communication

networks through which information is received, decoded and

transmitted—is the first casualty.

"I feel great and I send fraternal greetings to Dr. Andrei

Sakharov in Russia," said Dr. Leary on emerging from prison,

registering the fact that the mechanisms of the police state are the

same everywhere, as are the myths that protect them. "Good

Russians" believed Dr. Sakharov was a half-crazed alcoholic,

just as "Good Americans" believed Dr. Leary was a half-crazed

dope-fiend.

I once proposed in a magazine article that the UFO is caused

by some unusual electromagnetic or gravitational field fluctuation;

and that this geophysical anomaly creates (a) real energy

disturbances—jumping furniture, electrical failures, ball-lightning

making odd lights in the sky, etc. and (b) disturbance in the

brain functioning of animals and humans in the afflicted area,

causing the well-documented animal panics and the rather obvious

human hallucinations occurring in such areas.

Statistical support for this theory will be found in Persinger

and Lafreniere who have run computer-analyses of common

patterns in 1,242 UFO cases and 4,818 other "abnormal" reports

—"poltergeists," "teleportations," "miracles" and "mysteries" of

all sorts. This data demonstrates that both UFOs and other

energy anomalies tend to cluster along earthquake faults with

Prometheus Rising 249

some peaking before earthquakes. Persinger and Lafreniere also

suggest that the geophysical forces at work create both real

oddities (jumping furniture, etc.) and hallucinations, so that it is a

job of nice and exquisite discrimination to attempt to find out

what was really going on.

It has also been proposed, by the learned Dr. Jacques Vallee,

astronomer, cyberneticist and physicist, that the UFO phenomenon

is being created by a secret police agency as an elaborate

"cover" for a complex disinformation system.

A combined Wilson-Persinger-Lafreniere-Vallee theory,

probably fitting more of the data than the separate theories,

would suggest that the UFO phenomenon is the synergetic product

of some geophysical oddity which created weird energy fluctuations

and brain-change experiences in humans on the scene,

and
is being manipulated after the fact by one or more

"intelligence" agencies, or by groups even more esoteric.

Consider this scenario:

Something weird happens. Assume that it is the geophysical

abnormality and brain-change trauma we posit, but grant also

that it might be the alien spaceship beloved by folk-myth. The

following events are equally likely, whatever the weirdity "really

was."

As soon as the witnesses start talking, All Interested Parties

converge on the area. Intelligence Agent Moe comes to
conceal

evidence that it might have been a spaceship—that is the policy

of his agency, for their own reasons. Intelligence Agent Joe also

arrives to plant evidence that it
was
a spaceship—that is the

policy of his agency, since they are doing just what Dr. Vallee

suspects. (The British Double Cross Bureau, in World War II,

engaged in equally complex and absurdist dramas, seemingly

totally unrelated to their actual work, but serving as disinformation

screens for that work.) Philip Klass and other Skeptics

arrive, too, trying to reduce
everything
to "hallucination," even if

eyes are burned, cars wrecked, etc. The Space Freaks, who may

or may not be infiltrated by associates of Intelligence Agent Joe,

are soon there, too, to get the facts to fit their Benign Space

Brothers reality-tunnel. Various occultists are there, too, to fit it

all into their own mythos of angelology, demonology, etc.

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Prometheus Rising

What we are saying is that every conspiracy regards itself as

an affinity group—men and women who share the same goals

and work together well. When you and I do it, it is just an affinity

group. When that gang over there does it, it is a damnable

conspiracy.

True conspiracy does exist when a group conceals evidence,

spreads deliberate misinformation and coerces or terrorizes witnesses.

Any affinity group approaches such behavior to the

extent that members reinforce each other's participation in the

group reality-tunnel, especially concerning such crucial epistemological

matters as what is important enough to notice
and

discuss
as against what is trivial and better ignored. How coercive

do we have to be to intimidate witnesses? Most people, as

our Snafu Principle explains, are easily led to reporting what an

Authority Figure wants to hear.

But let us consider the UFO syndrome further, as illustrating

the whole spectrum of brain-change, and brain-programming.

UFO contactees frequently show positive
neurosomatic turn

on,
the bliss-out experience; some even become faith-healers or

leaders of occultist groups. Others show negative neurosomatic

effects—light is unbearable, 'as in schizophrenia, anxiety attacks

may require hospitalization, etc.

Meta-programming
consciousness (the ability to choose

between alternative reality-tunnels) is also reported, in crude

metaphors about "parallel universes," "other realities," occultish

jargon.

Neurogenetic
(Jungian "collective unconscious") visions are

common, ranging from demons, hairy dwarfs etc. to the Space

Goddess or Lady of the Stars of ancient and Catholic iconography.

Even meta-physiological (quantum-level) experience is

reported in the UFO literature, ranging from trans-time trips and

"out-of-body experiences" to seeming, or alleged, teleportations.

It must be emphasized most strongly that both positive and

negative visions on all these circuits are common in UFOlogy. It

seems that if the Programmers mean us well, they are accidentally