We know that minds have a tendency to cling to the basic formation established in early life and to defend opinions subsequently reached. It is worrying to me that people will read books of a radical kind and agree with them but without allowing their established thought construction to change more than a little, partly because there are so many books all with some degree of credibility. If your aim is to change the world for the better it is necessary to recognise that automated individuals and their outlooks are thus separately fixed. Our disagreements are largely emotional, brought about by reality but without true reason. Look at the different kinds and conditions of people presently existing, often divided by mutual distrust, dislike, even hate, not only for reasons of race or colour but also class, age, and even dress or mannerisms. Consider the financial differences from rich to poor, the cultural differences from primitive to sophisticated, the educational differences from iliterate to erudite, the political differences from Fascist to Communist.
However advanced in intelligence, you may easily be influenced by such differences. You might yourself gravitate to some group, cult or religion, or otherwise unthinkingly revert to the overall norm as the easiest way of interpreting things.
This part of the book represents the act of pulling oneself up, deliberately, and challenging with doubts and questions the conclusions one has already reached. The following four chapters largely go over ground already traversed but by other routes, taking new angles of approach and shedding new light. Such is the process of intellation - making sure that our every step of reason is true but not being willing to rest on our conclusions until every possible step has been taken.
This is my mind working to the limits of its understanding. If you have not yet stretched your mind to its limits, then in order to share this understanding you may require to redirect your will, reconstruct your thoughts (or rather allow that your postconscious supervises their reconstruction) by changing signal strengths or growing new dendrites, axons and synapses in the brain. If you simply choose to examine these findings with interest, but without disturbing conclusions you have already reached by a construction of reason well below your full capacity, then you will betray your own potential understanding of humantruth, having predetermined your future in the past . On the other hand, if your mind has reached a higher level then I must reform my mind in order to learn from you.
It is not easy to see how a campaign to change the world by having the minds of humans change can succeed because so many individuals presently seem to differ and disagree immovably. It shall certainly not succeed if the most aware minds do not absolutely ensure that they themselves are humantrue before trying to render that change in others.
Change is necessary because the present is a growth whose roots are in the past, and we have had a bad past. To make our future good, which surely is our great desire, we must make good the present in which the future continually takes root.
Variations of temperament in animals are necessary to maintain the pecking order and are thus essential to survival in the balance of nature. Undesirable human temperament can be overcome, rendered harmless or made benign by intellect which can provide its own colourful variations of interest and fulfilment. But temperament with intellect consciously applied to it in the service of the Machine becomes enlarged, from saintly to monstrous. Thus our history has produced both Michaelangelo and Mussolini, both mercy and massacre. We have such a reality as has contrived to allow Christianity and monetarism, Communism and Fascism to co-exist.
To illustrate that we are in a no-man's-land between instinct and intellect, let us consider mating. In the relationship of woman and man many complex and varied factors are involved, over and above instinct's seasonal programme of temporary lustfulness followed by careful rearing of offspring strictly in the interests of regeneration. Over-indulgence of instinctive lust and lack of caring effort would be harmful to instinct's reproduction programme and is detrimental to human relationships in marriage. Yet although intellect can teach us to be kind and considerate in marriage and make us aware of a responsibility, independently of instinct, to mate in order to reproduce, we could not easily conceive offspring in the normal way but for the sexual urge that is for us a more or less reckless impulsion, but which instinct devised as a responsibly motivated directive.
But just as the sexual urge is modified by instinct to suit its responsible purpose, so would we modify it, ideally, to suit our intellectual purpose. As it is, however, in our present no-man's-land, whilst we do responsibly practice birth control on the one hand, we have an increasing number of marriages ending in divorce on the other. There is also an increase in homosexuality, through genetic irregularity or conscious preference (and the former may well be influenced by the latter) that allows people to experience from pure love to unbridled lust independently of the matter of reproduction. There is also a growing practice of selective artificial insemination that provides a means of accomplishing and partially controlling reproduction independently of normal mating. Homosexuality divorces life from its most fundamental function and genetic manipulation robs reproduction of some of its essential randomness. Life is our medium, truth our responsibility; to keep our responsibility we should truly fulfil life, not try to escape from it or alter it for the wrong reasons.
When we look back at our history we see a long and intricate process, comprising good and bad intention but full of error and horror, ending in the present. To make our society good requires a wise unity, and if and when we become wise and united we shall surely opt for a practical way of life that is truly simple.
Why is there such wide disagreement on almost every new proposal in this society? Largely because the setting is a complex and basically false framework and different people are exclusively aware of or concerned with different parts of it, whilst we all turn our backs on our true humanity. This is the past bearing on the present which pre-determines the future. Technological evolution, led by science, has us willingly by the nose, leading us, unwilling or powerless to protest, to where we think we wish to be but really neither want nor ought to go. As individual humans we are about to be replaced by artefacts of automatic reality the Machine's ultra-intelligent robots and engineered genes that we ourselves are rapidly developing. In this way the Machine may eliminate the inconvenience of having humans politically disagree with some of its proposals by replacing us, unless we achieve true awareness first and so ensure that the present learns from the past.
Whether we judge it good or bad, our current behaviour is geared to the Machine and is thus a strong influence on the continuation of our inhuman past into the future. Public good manners and diplomacy are devices for obscuring the real motives of automatic interest, status and power that underly our affairs. Know-how is a discipline demanded by the Machine, a pattern of this reality that keeps communities and individuals in their places, and to which they must especially conform if they are to rise in the hierarchy of authority that then reinforces the discipline. Present worldly wisdom is a pattern of limited understanding and its communication comprising automatic inter-relationships and controls and principles - facts, historical objects and objectives of the Machine that have no humantrue meaning.
Current bad behaviour includes growing rowdiness, vandalism, hooliganism and general disturbance by young people that is partly due to steadily decreasing respect, on the part of the uncommitted, for society's controlling institutions. The Machine responds by strengthening these institutions, so feeding the flames of unrest. Official bad behaviour includes habitual dishonesty - a disregard for truth made possible by consciousness overruling the postconscious mind, and made necessary by automatic interests overruling true human interests. This is one of the worst features of the Machine, which works against humantrue reform - the practice of deceipt, of lying or obscuring truth, in politics and on the part of authority and any institution or person with something to gain or defend by it.
Another example of official bad behaviour is that up to early 1988 Russian soldiers, commanded by leaders who were themselves impelled by automatic world reality, were fighting in support of a Communist government in Afghanistan, against rebels who were in turn trained and supplied by the American CIA, who also supported rebels fighting government soldiers in South America in the anti-Communist cause. To interpret this violent behaviour by adopting the viewpoint of one side or the other - that it is necessary to defend one's interests and ideology against the opposition - is entirely to miss the point. The point is that here we have a world society of essentially similar human beings that is being rent apart by truly unnecessary violent quarrels between authorities.
Such unhappy and distressing occurrences do not indicate that human society is, has always been, and forever shall be torn by strife because our race is naturally competitive and aggressive, but simply that human society is not yet constituted and guided as it should be - by its true humanity.
Another factor influencing perpetuation of the past into the future, of building our future in the past, is education. The education system, hand-in-hand with direct and indirect experience of automatic reality and in respect of its failures and successes, provided a very mixed moral introduction to and partisan instruction in the ways of that largely amoral and immoral reality. Reasonable people are horrified by cases of child abuse, but acknowledge that these cases result from the intolerable frustrations of deprivation, compounded by under-stimulation of mind‹that the perpetrators are sick. It should be, but is not yet, more horrifying that this society conditions its potentially intellectual young perpetually to accept this false reality, so that they shall not see the real reasons why society in general continues sick, generation after generation. It must be a relief to educators, facing the continual contradiction between preparing the young to fit automatic reality and being aware that existing reality is not fit for the young, to have formal examinations of scholastic achievement, regardless of true enlightenment, because these represent a definite measurement amidst confusion and doubt. . The measurement is not humantruly meaningful but is welcomed by realists because it is relevant to the concepts and facts of existing reality and supportive of the Machine.
Consider the people of Haiti, who are not primitive but deprived by decades of exploitation and suppression by a cruel dictatorship from which they were hopefully released some time ago. But what will be elected eventually to replace it? These people believe in dependent submission to a powerful, hopefully benign, leader, and are likely to be exploited as before. The reason is that they are generally ignorant of the much more liberal, if imperfect, systems of other countries, let alone of humantrue ideals, and are not likely to end up with a good social order because they do not know how it should be. And they are not likely to learn how it should be, and to demand that their expectations be put into practice, because they have no working example of a good social system to guide them, and it is not in the automatic interests of the existing privileged hierarchy that they should be so guided. The only present way to arouse the people seems to be through their emotions, but they shall truly answer their questions and solve their problems only by way of their intellects.
We might think that our outlook here in the 'advanced' part of the world is a far cry from that of the Haitians, but the two are quite close. Consider one of the many British television programmes where a panel of experts or public figures and an invited audience discuss current affairs let's say the problems of the elderly. All those present appear to come down on the good moral side of the fence, which may be their permanent position but is the only approach to this sensitive subject that can be put forward acceptably on such a publicly staged occasion. Nowadays the best of such discussions go further towards true compassion than ever they used to. They no longer resort to platitudes as a matter of course, but neither do they follow the paths of intellation and reveal the truth. One reason why they do not attempt to go that far is that the programme would become too 'heavy' to be entertaining; too controversial and heatedly confused. Another reason is that it would so upset the status quo as to be objectionable not only to the broadcasting establishment but also to the participants who, though taking an overtly moral stance on this question, covertly endorse the norm as being realistically inevitable.
For example, it is unanimously agreed that lack of money is a chief burden of old age and someone suggests that the state pension should be doubled. This is an instance of fence-sitting, whereby we indulge in such wishful thinking on one side but on the other, worldly side know perfectly well that such an increase shall never be paid. Whether or not we care to admit it, large numbers of deprived old people exist because medical moral conscience can not allow their preventable death, despite high financial cost. Yet ordinary moral conscience is ineffective against the Machine's demand that most old folk must live on in poverty to suit the money economy's competitive equation. To upset that equation by insisting on doubling the pension would mean the beginning of the end of the money economy for it would involve a voluntary decision on the part of younger, more privileged people to put morals before money and accept a large decrease in their income to compensate.
The future should not be entrusted to a present whose affairs are controlled by money, conducted by politics and regulated by law, because the money economy is unintelligent and inhuman, politics is a resort of unliberated minds, and law an arbitrator between the conflicts of competitive drives and interests and the disagreements between contrived beliefs and ill-considered opinions.
If we simply allow autoprogression to continue we shall be at its beck and call and it will preoccupy us so that our well-being will not be in our own hands. Whilst we, most of us here in the North (in the global economic sense), might then find an exclusive place for ourselves in the Machine, we shall not be making a good place for everyone in a humane future world, with time and opportunity for true fulfilment.
The idea, in some circles, that the human future lies in a super-galactic organism is a retreat from visions of perfection and, in a sense, a return to primitive instinct. It is a retreat from the forward idea that the individual mind alone can find truth, and truth would bring the world to true simplicity which I regard as perfect order. A super galactic organism would be a thing of meaning and purpose only to its own limited intelligence. It would put its own devised fabrications in place of truth and further reduce individuals to conforming cogs in a vast Machine which, as I see it, is disorder or, if you prefer, ordered chaos. We already recognise the blueprint of such an organism the chaotic autoprogression we now follow is the hotbed from which that super-galactic organism would take its character and grow.
The human race, in the majority, is already being automatically by-passed. Whatever we pretend, we do not sustain a worldwide, agreed, mutually supportive relationship but serve the divisive Machine. There is no present prospect of such a relationship because in the future as postulated, humans, as partnerships of mind and body, will no longer exist. We shall be conditioned minds linked to electro-mechanical devices so that the universally significant part of us, our intellectual potential, will be depleted. The body-part that completes our human character, including our emotions, will be of declining use to the Machine and eventually superfluous, as indeed our minds could also become. We are capable of performing our true function as we now stand, without further despoiling our world or ourselves.
To understand why we submit to the present norms is to understand why we tolerate a reality that is ridiculous. Once a person decides to identify with the Machine they have to stick with it and believe in it. It is easier to conform than to question. Normally, automated minds do not respond to their own initiative but simply predictably react to automatic events, or automatically initiate such events. Like, for example, taking pride in the sheer size of Heathrow airport, excitedly buying company shares on the stock exchange, taking the view that young people who will not be ordered to conform should forfeit the right to subsistence, or delighting in earning money for the sake of spending it. These are victories for the Machine, defeats for humanity.
Take two examples of humanity jeopardising its future by capitulating to the Machine. First, the exploitation of nuclear fission for electricity generation, already mentioned. This is a practice that began for the wrong reason‹to provide plutonium for atom bombs. It spread because competitive nations wanted their own source of bomb material and a new source of electrical energy. It continued to spread, despite protests, because once some nations have the bomb, all want it; because the industry gathered automatic momentum, supported by those it pays or rewards and those who now depend on its power. The contrary moral argument is that the nuclear industry arms horrific weapons, presents danger to life from accidents, and long-term danger to health from accumulation of radioactive wastes. That the magnitude of the danger is in dispute is not an argument for but against persevering with nuclear fission, especially when adequate and harmless sources of energy can be made available. As it happens, nuclear power has since gone out of fashion for financial rather than moral reasons, experience having shown that its cost of producing electricity, including that of making plants safe when their useful life ends, is too high. (I return to this subject in Chapter 48, Peacable Action).
The second example is of a good, or potentially good, humane ideal giving way to change for the wrong reasons - of intellectual intention succumbing to pressure from the automaton. The Chinese government, faced with what they wrongly interpret as a human reluctance to work willingly purely for an ideal (humans shall, provided the ideal is valid and truly understood), have reintroduced the competitive money economy's principle of financial incentive to make their economy more 'efficient' by having it prosper in the same way that Western economies achieve prosperity. This is a great mistake, for the principle of Communism, however short of the ideal it has so far fallen in practice, is the nearest collective approach to humantruth that humanity has yet made, and it is the nature of our fulfilled intellect to adopt the humantrue ideal.
If we do now begin to change our world, each humantrue step will establish a precedent for the future that will become ever easier to sustain because it is true and therefore must appeal to ultimate reason.
Once it was taboo to speak openly about sex, or death, or against the established religion. Most of the developed societies are now much more open on such subjects. Increasing emphasis is put on advancing education, yet it is still taboo to lay the mind bare. Particularly in public on 'important' occasions but even in private we dare not admit into consciousness that which our postconscious minds understand. If we survive to achieve and enjoy a humantrue future we shall look back on the present and marvel that we were once so retarded.
When we look back on this present world, assuming that we do survive it, and see all the false complexities of the Machine, we shall realise how it is possible to know a great deal but understand little. We shall see that ours was a society about which there was so much essentially to be known that few automated minds could so encompass it with reason as to unmask it (and at the same time release themselves from harness.) We shall know that in order to dismiss the Machine we had to dismiss the automatic concepts. We had to be well aware that society must accord with true intellectual understanding; must have as its most important task the optimum fulfilment of every individual mind, and so simplify itself as to be entirely within the compass of all human minds.
Next Chapters
35 Further Catastrophes
36 The Mind Above All
37 Humantrue Findings
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