The illuminatus! trilogy (116 page)

We must remember that
thought is abstraction
. In Einstein’s metaphor, the relationship between a physical fact and our mental reception of that fact is not like the relationship between beef and beef-broth, a simple matter of extraction and condensation; rather, as Einstein goes on, it is like the relationship between our overcoat and the ticket given us when we check our overcoat. In other words, human perception involves
coding
even more than crude
sensing
. The mesh of language, or of mathematics, or of a
school of art, or of any system of human abstracting, gives to our mental constructs the structure, not of the original fact, but of the symbol system into which it is coded, just as a map-maker colors a nation purple not because it
is
purple but because his code demands it. But every code excludes certain things, blurs other things, and overemphasizes still other things. Nijinski’s celebrated leap through the window at the climax of
Le Spectre d’une Rose
is best coded in the ballet notation system used by choreographers; verbal language falters badly in attempting to convey it; painting or sculpture could capture totally the magic of one instant, but one instant only, of it; the physicist’s equation, Force = Mass X Acceleration, highlights one aspect of it missed by all these other codes, but loses everything else about it. Every perception-is influenced, formed, and structured by the habitual coding habits—mental game habits—of the perceiver.

All authority is a function of coding, of game rules. Men have arisen again and again armed with pitchforks to fight armies with cannon; men have also submitted docilely to the weakest and most tottery oppressors. It all depends on the extent to which coding distorts perception and conditions the physical (and mental) reflexes.

It seems at first glance that authority could not exist at all if all men were cowards or if no men were cowards, but flourishes as it does only because most men are cowards and some men are thieves. Actually, the inner dynamics of cowardice and submission on the one hand and of heroism and rebellion on the other are seldom consciously realized either by the ruling class or the servile class. Submission is identified not with cowardice but with virtue, rebellion not with heroism but with evil. To the Roman slave-owners, Spartacus was not a hero and the obedient slaves were not cowards; Spartacus was a villain and the obedient slaves were virtuous. The obedient slaves believed this also. The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly.

If authority implies submission, liberation implies equality; authority exists when one man obeys another, and liberty exists when men do not obey other men. Thus, to say that authority exists is to say that class and caste exist, that submission and inequality exist. To say that liberty exists is
to say that classlessness exists, to say that brotherhood and equality exist.

Authority, by dividing men into classes, creates dichotomy, disruption, hostility, fear, disunion. Liberty, by placing men on an equal footing, creates assocation, amalgamation, union, security. When the relationships between men are based on authority and coercion, they are driven apart; when based on liberty and nonaggression, they are drawn together.

There facts are self-evident and axiomatic. If authoritarianism did not possess the in-built, preprogrammed double-bind structure of a Game Without End, men would long ago have rejected it and embraced libertarianism.

The usual pacifist complaint about war, that young men are led to death by old men who sit at home manning bureaucrat’s desks and taking no risks themselves, misses the point entirely. Demands that the old should be drafted to fight their own wars, or that the leaders of the warring nations should be sent to the front lines on the first day of battle, etc., are aimed at an assumed “sense of justice” that simply does not exist. To the typical submissive citizen of authoritarian society, it is normal, obvious, and “natural” that he should obey older and more dominant males, even at the risk of his life, even against his own kindred, and even in causes that are unjust or absurd.

“The Charge of the Light Brigade”—the story of a group of young males led to their death in a palpably idiotic situation and only because they obeyed a senseless order without stopping to think—has been, and remains, a popular poem, because unthinking obedience by young males to older males is the most highly prized of all conditioned reflexes within human, and hominid, societies.

The mechanism by which authority and submission are implanted in the human mind is coding of perception. That which fits into the code is accepted; all else is Damned. It is Damned to being ignored, brushed aside, unnoticed, and— if these fail—it is Damned to being forgotten.

A worse form of Damnation is reserved for those things which cannot be ignored. These are daubed with the brain’s projected prejudices until, encrusted beyond recognition, they are capable of being fitted into the system, classified, card-indexed, buried. This is what happens to every
Damned Thing which is too prickly and sticky to be excommunicated entirely. As Josiah Warren remarked, “It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly.” Almost always, we have not understood them. We have murdered them and mummified their corpses.

A
monopoly on the means of communication
may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of “monopoly on the means of production.” Since man extends his nervous system through channels of communication like the written word, the telephone, radio, etc., he who controls these media controls part of the nervous system of every member of society. The contents of these media become part of the contents of every individual’s brain.

Thus, in pre-literate societies taboos on the spoken word are more numerous and more Draconic than at any more complex level of social organization. With the invention of written speech—hieroglyphic, ideographic, or alphabetical —the taboos are shifted to this medium; there is less concern with what people say and more concern with what they write. (Some of the first societies to achieve literacy, such as Egypt and the Mayan culture of ancient Mexico, evidently kept a knowledge of their hieroglyphs a religious secret which only the higher orders of the priestly and royal families were allowed to share.) The same process repeats endlessly: Each step forward in the technology of communication is more heavily tabooed than the earlier steps. Thus, in America today (post-Lenny Bruce), one seldom hears of convictions for spoken blasphemy or obscenity; prosecution of books still continues, but higher courts increasingly interpret the laws in a liberal fashion, and most writers feel fairly confident that they can publish virtually anything; movies are growing almost as desacralized as books, although the fight is still heated in this area; television, the newest medium, remains encased in neolithic taboo. (When the TV pundits committed
lèse majesté
after an address by the then Dominant Male, a certain Richard Nixon, one of his lieutenants quickly informed them they had overstepped, and the whole tribe—except for the dissident minority—cheered for the reaasertion of tradition.) When a more efficient medium arrives, the taboos on television will decrease.

1. What was Mama Sutra’s “reading,” where Danny Price-fixer questioned her, actually all about?

Answer:
It had nothing to do with the John F. Kennedy assassination, the
Confrontation
bombing, the Illuminati, or any of the subjects it seemed to suggest,
except indirectly
. She had aimed in the dark, and picked up bits and pieces of the old movie
Manhattan Melodrama
, thusly:

•
District Attorney Wade
does not refer to the Dallas official who first proclaimed Lee Harvey Oswald’s guilt over TV; it refers to the character played by William Powell in the movie.

•
Clark
does not refer to any of the Captain Clarks we have encountered; it refers to Clark Gable, Mr. Powell’s co-star.
The Ship is sinking
does not refer to the Illuminati spider-ships, or the ship piloted by Captain Clark; it refers to the
General Slocum
, as Mama guessed—the sinking of this ship on June 15, 1904, is the first scene in the movie.
2422
does not refer to the dates of Oswald’s and Kennedy’s assassinations, or to the old Wobbly address; it refers to a scene in the film where Gable, at a racetrack, walks from box 24 to box 22 (box 23 is never shown, his body being between it and the camera).

•
If I can’t live as I please, let me die when I choose
is the last line spoken by Clark Gable in the screenplay.

The fact that these phrases overlap certain themes in this novel (and in Joyce’s
Ulysses)
is either coincidence or synchronicity—take your choice.
Manhattan Melodrama
, you might be interested to know, was playing at the Biograph Theatre on the night of July 22, 1934, and was the last film seen by the man who was shot outside and identified as John Herbert Dillinger.

2. What was the Masonic signal of distress used by the grocer B. F. Morgan when Dillinger tried to rob him in 1924?
Answer:
It consists in holding your arms outward, bent
upward 90 degrees at the elbow, and shouting, “Will nobody help the widow’s son?”

3. Is there really a secret passage beneath the Meditation Room in the UN building?
Answer:
If so, we haven’t been able to find it. Other spooky secrets about that room, however, are revealed in
The Cult of the All-Seeing Eye
, by Robert Keith Spencer (Christian Book Club of America, 1964).

4. What was the
Erotion
of Adam Weishaupt mentioned by Hagbard in the First Trip?
Answer:
The word translates, loosely, as “love-in,” and the idea is basically the same. (See the books of Nesta Webster and John Robison cited in the text.)
Now
do you believe in a conspiracy?

5. Did Al Capone really help the FBI set up the man who was shot at the Biograph Theatre on July 22, 1934?
Answer:
That’s one of the more plausible arguments in
Dillinger: Dead or Alive
, by Jay Nash and Ron Offen.

6. If no animals were reported missing from local zoos, how is that Robert Simpson of Kansas City was found dead with his throat torn as if by “the talons of some enormous beast?”
Answer:
See the sequel,
The Homing Pigeons
.

7. If Simon Moon majored in mathematics and was so obsessed with numerology, why didn’t he ever notice the most significant 23 in mathematical history—the 23 definitions that open Euclid’s
Geometry?
Answer:
Perhaps for the same reason that the road from Dayton, Ohio, to New Lebanon, Ohio, was due
east
when Joe Malik drove it on June 25, 1969, but has always been due
west
on every day before and since then. Or maybe by the same processes that allowed Joe to see a Salem commercial on his TV set in the mid-1970s, although cigarette advertising was banned from television in 1971.

8. Did Smiling Jim Trepomena achieve the fame he had sought?
Answer:
No Dr. Vulcan Troll’s definitive history of the
Great Quake,
When a State Dies
, mentions on page 123 that “no American Eagle has since been reported, and we can only assume that this species was another victim of nature’s mindless rampage on that tragic May 1.” On page 369, Dr. Troll mentions, among prominent casualties, “The famous Cincinnati lawyer and proponent of censorship James J. Trepomena.” Neither he nor anyone else ever connected the two occurrences.

9. Where are the missing eight appendices?
Answer:
Censored.

THE PURPLE SAGE
. An imaginary Chaoist philospher invented by Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst (another imaginary Chaoist philosopher).

LORD OMAR KHAYAM RAVENHURST
. An imaginary Chaoist philosopher invented by Mr. Kerry Thornley of Atlanta, Georgia. Mr. Thornley was a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald’s, was accused of complicity in the John Kennedy assassination by District Attorney Jim Garrison, and is the author of
Illuminati Lady
, an endless epic poem which you really ought to read.

GEORGE DORN
. His maternal grandfather, old Charlie Bishop, was once a patient of the famous Doctor William Carlos Williams. The Bishops came to New Jersey in 1723, having left Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 under something of a cloud. Folks in the Nutley-Clifton-Passaic-Paterson area always have a good word for the Bishops, though. But the Dorns were all troublemakers, and George’s paternal grandfather, Big Bill Dorn, was so indiscreet as to get killed by cops during the Paterson silk-mill strike of 1922.

HERACLEITUS
. He was apt to say odd things. Once he even wrote that “Religious ceremonies are unholy.” A strange duck.

THE SQUIRREL
. A set of receptor organs transmitting information through a central nervous system to a small
brain programmed for only a few rudimentary decisions—but, in this, he was not far inferior to most of our characters.

REBECCA GOODMAN
. Her maiden name was Murphy, and she was named after Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. You thought she was Jewish, didn’t you?