The culture of a society is essentially the voluntary activity of mind and body of each individual member. Ideally it would reflect their most intelligent, noble and compassionate nature and would be embodied in their social framework. In other words the true supraconscious nature of an intellectual race would be expressed in all its thoughts and actions - in its society.
In the present human case our culture expresses our inner selves only as far as they are revealed despite the layers of conditioning, and is then expressed publicly only to the extent that the Machine permits or, more usually, can exploit. It is that in which we indulge at the end of the day's work, when we think ourselves temporarily released from automatic harness, and ranges from escape into a personal private version of reality to public exhibitions of action and thought which are chiefly instinctive and emotional. But our culture is not distinctly human, for in fact we never throw off the automatic harness. Our culture is not an expression of intellation and ultimate reason but a matter of juggling with different relative truths. Therefore it is not an instrument of our true selves, working to humanise our society, but an instrument of existing reality, keeping us automated. It is an autoculture.
This autoculture is so-called because in the main our personal, supposedly voluntary interests and activities of body and mind are strongly infiltrated so as to be largely dictated by the Machine to which we are otherwise duty-bound. All our doings are entangled with or invaded by preoccupations of the competitive here-and-now; by the overwhelmingly intrusive money economy; the hypnotic influence of the actual existence of an amoral automatic reality and our constant need to tend the injuries this inflicts on us; the power of our encouraged instinctive aggressive drives; the relative weakness of our discouraged intellectual will. Consequently, in our moral battle against the Machine, we humans are continually selling out or giving way to our opponent. In these conditions we want help and relief. Despite these circumstances we need to believe in ourselves. So we have built our autoculture to cure the symptoms of our disease, whilst leaving the causes untouched, and to create a grand illusion of worthy human attainment, particularly in science.
Existing reality unfolds as it does because we let it take its instinctive, emotional, automatic course. We react to it in all kinds of ways to which the Machine gives real form. One purpose of this book is to depict all this as unreal. I do not suggest that as realists we presently approve of every feature of the Machine. We may condemn it in parts but applaud other parts, yet accept it overall as the reality which shapes our individual and collective character. This, our concept of reality, has a parallel in our concept of some kind of god, although neither has true foundation. We might support the establishment as the keeper of law and order because we see opposition to it - anarchy - as lawless chaos. In a similar way our concept of god, because it is a long-established embodiment of morality, is treated almost as positive fact even by unbelievers, so that atheism is cast in the role of negative denial of morality, with no values of its own. There is as yet no acceptance of the all-embracing positive moral force - supraconsciousness of humantruth - which makes both conventional reality and religion into empty, negative denials of truth. To embrace humantruth means to dismiss the Machine and our false characteristics attached to it. This means we not only condemn the bad features of the Machine, but also recognise that many of its good-seeming features, represented by the autoculture, exist merely to counteract the bad and would not be appropriate to the ideal alternative.
Science plays a very large part in the grand illusion of worthy human advancement. It satisfies our yearning for intellectual achievement in a way that bypasses our true responsibility to reason critically and completely, because of its reliance on fact. At the same time it is wholly acceptable to the Machine because it is the spearhead of technology, the best possible tool of autoprogression. So science has become both the central preoccupation of human curiosity, by way of specific application of intellect, and the main vehicle of automation. In the popular view it is the essence of human vitality. Whenever and wherever science has lost impetus Machine-society stagnates, not because science is vital but because without its activity, and especially without the race to keep up with autoprogression, the emptiness of the automatic norm is exposed.
Science is a self-justifying empirical construction of its own inter-related facts, built upon an acceptance of the physical universe and the logic of its present interdependent arrangements as our sole reality. Since it reasons according to that which exists, it tends to exclude full and true intellectual reason because this takes freedom to deny fact, and is independently able to do so, in the sense that it can envisage a changed reality in which certain present facts will cease to be, or to apply, because they are irrelevant. The scientific position is indicated by its attitude to instinct as a phenomenon which dictates the state of nature, as though the characteristics of animals determine the natural balance. This is like the realistic approach to human society which views our apparent characteristics as the nature which determines the conduct of our society. In fact the instincts of animals are determined by their environment, and in the human case it should be our intellectual reason that arranges our social framework which, in turn, determines our practical habits. By following our instinctive drives, applying our intellect to them, and going wherever this leads, we are contriving, disastrously, to make an environment which fits instincts developed for a quite different reality.
For us there are two worlds, one of physical reality to which the life of instinctive nature belongs and by which it is governed, and the other of intellect which makes, or should make, its own world governed by itself. Science belongs to the first of these worlds, whose logical forces are its subject, to understand which it employs the intellect of the second world. For the scientist to become supraconscious would ruin this objective orientation; his self must be limited to and guided by, as well as situated in consciousness, exerting its will on the utilised postconscious and inhibiting the output of the independent postconscious. So our application of part-intellect to the worship of science is carrying us to the extremes of physical reality, whereas to fulfil our intellect, opening the gate onto a humantrue reality, would be to disobey the physical forces - to go contrary to science. Our bodies are struggling with a newly automated environment for which their slow evolution did not prepare them, and our rapidly evolved minds require for us another kind of reality again - a new reality that has not yet come to be because we have not yet acknowledged it. A reason for this situation is that science has passed from simple, helpful invention to the complex pursuit of physical universal possibilities, well beyond our natural limitations, that have excited but also burdened us. Generally, we are mentally equipped for a non-existant humantrue reality; for fulfilment of intellect and adjustment to a stable and unspoilt Earth. Our existing reality uses science as the agent of technological autoprogression, to accelerate instinctive drives clear of their inhibitions. We are narrowing our minds down to this rather than liberating them. We need to realise the universal truth, which is the same task for all intellects wherever they are in the universe and whatever their circumstances, but our advances towards it in some directions are nullified by our retreats from it in others. No doubt our bodies could become adjusted to existing reality if it stabilised, but it is in a state of continual flux that makes it hard for our minds to awaken. Our bodies are suffering from conflict, neglect and abuse, and our minds from stress, anxiety and incomprehension. We are simply trying to keep up with automatic reality without knowing where it is taking us, or why, and without being asked whether we want to go that way. Our inner beings occupy neither the actual physical, scientific world of the automaton, nor the possible world of true intellectual reason, but a foggy political and/or religious or mystical compromise between the two.
It may be argued that science is the unstoppable exercise of human intellectual curiosity, or thirst for knowledge. Against this I would argue that knowledge is only part of the mind's function. The mind's true goal is truth, the result of correlating knowledge by utmost reasoning. There are clearly two reasons why our foremost thinking is applied to the inferior exercise of accumulating and applying knowledge with limited reasoning, rather than to the superior task of achieving true understanding. The first has already been stated - that false reality cannot tolerate truth. Hardly any help is given by human society, either in the way of facilities provided by institutions of the Machine or by public demand or support, to serious critical questioning of present reality and the investigation of humantruth. The second reason is that science, its teaching, research facilities and technological application, is automatically pursued by the Machine, financed by the money economy, whether we like it or not. Genetic manipulation, space travel, UIM's, 'star wars', brain transplants - every possible autoprogression is pursued for its own sake, or to bring money reward, or both, or otherwise to accrue to automatic advantage.
Their automatic status gives scientists an autonomy that can protect them from intellectual responsibility, and applies such realistic pressure that they are obliged to concentrate almost exclusively on their subject. It is quite possible for them to be fully effective in their sphere whilst bypassing the great philosophical questions which are so much harder to answer than purely scientific solutions are to find. It is not an exaggeration to say that science is generally worshipped because its fresh discoveries are novel and its salient facts are easy to swallow and difficult to deny. But scientists are a specially conditioned and privileged minority who, personally well-meaning as they may be, are otherwise officially and financially wedded to the automaton that backs them. The majority of humans do not seem to have the remotest understanding of the eventual effects of scientific autoprogression, and evidently share the Machine's view that to follow the lead of its highest applied intellects shall bring the greatest glory and good to humanity. The question is what is the true definition of humanity? If we regard it as being the supraconscious potential of our inner selves then scientific autoprogression is a disaster. But the purely scientific view is different. It sees humanitarian awareness, which opposes the blinkered forward march of science and technology (opposed, for instance, to the spread of nuclear power stations), as naive denial of the here and now, such as itself courts disaster, inviting failure of our outer shells to achieve automatic targets which will result in the Machine failing to sustain our autoculture.
To the automated, the Machine and autoculture have their virtues and attractions, and both can give high satisfaction to those who ride high in them - the privileged blind who lead the blind. We need to begin opening our eyes to the guidance of intellation which persists in gaining awareness of the whole true picture and in seeking humantruth. Society presently turns its back on intellation because we are so impregnated with falsehood that we find truth as difficult to realise as the scientific facts of reality are relatively easy. Anybody who doubts the truth of this statement has only to consider this - that whilst the foremost human brains are on the verge of knowing everything in physics, they have no answer to the question 'what is the meaning and purpose of life', and no solution to the problem of how to achieve united and peaceful human contentment.
Pt.IV REVELATION
THE AUTOCULTURE
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