Is There Intelligent Life on Earth? (part 13)

by Revilo P. Oliver

The Anatomy of Revolution

NEW WORLDS have always been the shining bait dangled before simpletons by revolutionaries, who can never deliver what they promise. The famous Jesus is reported in the various gospels to have made all sorts of glowing promises, but Christianity nevertheless was a successful revolution against the Roman Empire and triumphed over the blackened ruins of civilization. The gospel of Marx is a revolution against the civilization that our race precariously erected on the ruins of the old, and it has already been so successful that only rare individuals today can see how revolutionary it was, for the populace has been made to take its most deadly myths for granted as “social truth.” So does Mr. Catran, who is preaching his own translation of Marx. He eschews such dated terms as ‘intelligentsia’ and ‘dictatorship of the proletariat. ’

Mr. Catran’s revolution is to be carried out by “the scientists,” but he does not explain how those gifted beings are going to pull it off. He could have imagined a secession of the modern Vidyādharas to a realm of their own in the Himalayas or elsewhere, as was done by H. G. Wells, Ayn Rand, and others, but he does not. Perhaps he was restrained by some recollection of the scientists whom he had just castigated for their credulity, venality, and irresponsibility. But the “scientists” are going to do it just the same, because it is inevitable. It is inevitable because Mr. Catran foresees, as does everyone who thinks about it for three minutes, the collapse of what he calls the “money system.” He does not see that there is almost no real money in it, only stacks of the intrinsically worthless paper that is being printed in ever increasing quantities by the great counterfeiting ring in Washington, D.C., but he does see that there is an inevitable end to the technique of avoiding hangovers by drinking some more alcohol.

I need scarcely remark that the core of Mr. Catran’s magic is the old Christian hokum about making everybody equal.⁵⁶ He is going to do it, however, because human beings are merely “complex machines” — so we are back with La Mettrie in 1748, polished up a little by Skinner’s now fading doctrine of Behaviorism. The glorious world of tomorrow will begin when all infants are kidnapped from their mothers and raised in collective pens by “behavioral scientists,” who will apply the Pavlovian “principles of behavior modification,” producing, of course, although Mr. Catran doesn’t see it or doesn’t quite dare to say so, animals that will respond automatically and mindlessly to whatever stimulus their masters give them.

One wonders whether the “social animals and energy-consuming machines” that the aforesaid “behavioral scientists” are going to manufacture will really appreciate a paradise in which “every person will receive the same income in goods and services” and “all people will possess unlimited credit.” In fact, only a passing and almost furtive mention of an unexplained “population control” differentiates Mr. Catran’s ideal from the glorious future that is envisioned as inevitable by Seidenberg, a paradise in which billions and billions of biped cockroaches will crawl mindlessly over a manure heap eight thousand miles in diameter.⁵⁷

It is quite true that the techniques of “behavior modification” do work. They are obviously very effective in “sensitivity training” and all the other work of scientific Draculas that is described in the book by Mr. Dieckmann to which I referred above. And some of its principles are applied much more surreptitiously in the public schools and in the other psychological weapons that are being used in an all-out offensive against our already stultified race.

There is one question, which I am sure Jack Catran would deride as a vestige of an outmoded past. Let us assume that the “behavioral scientists” do succeed in converting the abducted infants into perfectly conditioned and adjusted “energy-consuming machines,” but let us consider for a moment the infants whom the mad scientists carry off to their behavioral pens. It is true that when the children grow up, they will never know they could have become something else. But what if they could have known? Are we not back to the old ethical problem that Glanville formulated in his Lux Orientalis (1682)? Of certain beings supposedly created by his god, he justly observed that “Certainly, could they have been put to their choice whether they would have come into being on such terms, they would rather have been nothing for ever.” Might not — would not that also be true of the scientists’ creations?

Is it likely that the “energy-consuming” machines of our future will revel in the awareness that they all have the same income? They will have work (i.e., a purposeful occupation) only three or four hours a week — and even those hours may be dull, because computers will do all their thinking for them. After they are thirty-five, they won’t have even those three or four hours a week to give them a respite from ennui. And, except for the bit of work when they are young, the hapless wretches of our future will have to amuse themselves the rest of the time. How will they — how can they do it? They will have all sorts of gadgets, including — believe it or not — an “extrapolatory computer” which will tell them precisely what is going to happen in the future. But what will they have to live for? They will presumably copulate ad libitum, but — unless Science does something about it — the hours that can be spent in that exhilarating exercise are sadly limited. Mr. Catran assures us that the “energy-consuming machines” will rejoice in “a world more poetic [sic], more beautiful [!], than there are words in our present language to describe.” But he is understandably vague. Thanks to electronic marvels, each can converse with any other of the billions of “energy-consuming machines” on the planet, but we are not told what they will have to talk about.⁵⁸ They will have forests in which they can walk and “enjoy nature,” and they can read literature, including poetry, and listen to great music. But will they have left any capacity to enjoy such things?⁵⁹

Mr. Catran tells us several times that you can make an automobile into a machine that will fly, but it will no longer be an automobile. Well, you can make an infant into an “energy-consuming machine,” but it will no longer be a human being.

Have we not already gone quite far in the dehumanization of our race? Are we not already within a measurable distance of the Behaviorists’ paradise? I could not but wonder when I read the book by Mr. Dieckmann I cited above, and came to the account of what was done to the victims of a cosmetic-peddling swindle invented by the late William Penn Patrick. The future “executives,” whom Patrick was to make millionaires when they peddled his rouge and lipstick, were assembled for a “leadership training” course, which they must have undergone voluntarily, since it was held in the Hyatt House in Palo Alto, a fairly luxurious motor inn, which cannot have been as secure as the dungeons of the Inquisition. “Leadership training” turned out to be just an intensive form of “sensitivity training,” administered by the Leadership Dynamics Institute, there represented by its president, a “behavioral scientist” appropriately named Ben Gay. Now I shall not give the details of the “sensitivity training” the embryo “leaders” received: an account of it would be both harrowing and disgusting, and, besides, I don’t want to give anyone an excuse for saying that The Liberty Bell is an obscene and pornographic publication. I could not help but note, however, that of the forty-four victims, more than half were classified as male. I do not question the anatomical classification, but I am quite sure that if there had been men in the group, Mr. Ben Gay would early have been removed in a basket.

That is not all. During the training, William Penn Patrick appeared in person and watched it with evident satisfaction. I shall not repeat my observation about the basket, but I was especially interested because years ago I had a slight acquaintance with that wonder-boy of finance, the far-seeing conservative statesman, and “future president of the United States.” I was supposed to be flattered, but I judged Mr. Patrick (who was well-mannered and Aryan, so far as I could tell) to be a ruthlessly ambitious, thoroughly unscrupulous, and utterly untrustworthy man — but still a man. But now I see that I was mistaken. According to Mr. Dieckmann’s book, Patrick watched with pleasure the “leadership training” of the males and females whom he had swindled. He wasn’t even human.

There is something terrifying about the inhuman submissiveness of Patrick’s victims. Mr. Dieckmann suggests one explanation: they had paid a thousand dollars for the course and Patrick had taken most or all of the rest of their money for the boxes and boxes of cosmetics stacked up in their basements, which they were going to sell for immense profits when they learned how to be “leaders.” And Americans in general are so greedy that a prospect of quick and easy profits acts on them as a keg of fire-water acts on an Indian.⁶⁰ But that will not do. Thousands and thousands of Americans not in a financial bind have undergone and are undergoing some form of “group dynamics” and no casualties among the “behavioral scientists” have been reported.⁶¹ I think we must turn to Mr. Dieckmann’s second explanation, the “life adjustment” or “social adjustment” that has been the chief work of the public schools since they were taken over by the gang of revolutionists headed by John Dewey, who produced volumes of turgid and ungrammatical double-talk to cover a scheme to destroy self-respect and rationality in children who are imprisoned by their parents and state laws in our enormously expensive boob-hatcheries. And, incidentally, the young victims will be prepared to huzza for Jack Catran, for they have already been shown the chief glories of his paradise on earth.

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Source: Liberty Bell publications; transcribed by Racial Idealism