27 SOCIAL SERVICES
We probably think of social services as good, especially by comparison with the bad old days. And they are good in that they represent human compassionate concern and sympathetic effort to relieve the sufferings of humanity. But the social services can also be seen as bad because they do not reach the root causes of suffering. They do not seriously try to rectify, but accept with little question, an automatic world reality which, if looked at from the viewpoint of humanity, is clearly to blame for that suffering. Instead they attempt to provide antidotes for this reality's poisons, to repair its depredations, soothe its terrors and comfort and cure its hurts.
One may think of society as broadly divided into two compartments, one devoted to driving forward for automatic achievements and the other following behind to care for human casualties. This represents two extremes that are reflected in the struggle between our outer shells and inner selves, and in the division of our waking hours into eight working for the Machine and eight spent at home each weekday. An ideal society would not have this irrational division but would be devoted to one common human activity for the well-being of all. It would be a framework for the satisfaction of instincts in keeping with intellect and for the fulfilment of intellect without stress or strain. As we have seen, our world society serves the automaton for no other reason than that this is the way it is. There is no real human reason why this should be so and every reason why it should not be so.
Existing society gives us automatic-money-economy motives rather than human aims. Let there be no doubt that it is this which produces division, conflict, poverty, over-complication, stress and lack of fulfilment. There is no reason whatever for these to be social features of a truly intelligent race. As a result of these features the human race is prey to its own disordered and aggressive behaviour. Our society experiences discontent, ignorance, mental imbalance, drug and alcohol addiction, vandalism, suicide, rape and other violent crime on the part of its victims. Our welfare and social services have arisen out of concern on the part of individuals who are neither victims nor law-officers of the Machine, who seek to help rather than punish. They react in horror but not against the real culprit, the Machine, and its victimisation of most of us. They react against human suffering and deviation from the norm, and have set up institutions of the Machine with the aim of curing and correcting these things.
In a humantrue society we would, out of our accumulated wisdom and as a matter of course, provide for our own good general health just as instinct does for animals. Automatic reality does not so provide but harms and diseases us in many ways. So we have a health service that might more accurately be described as a disease service because its function is not to promote good health so much as to deal with ill health. This health service is vitally necessary to most of us as we are, for it has many techniques for controlling the many things that go wrong with us, but we need not be as we are. Doctors are unable to prevent ill health because it is caused by the way we live, and the way we live is dictated by market forces of the Machine which also lays down the programme of medical training. Past improvements in Western health have come, more than anything, from improved hygiene and recently from rising public awareness. Many people have given up smoking and others are refusing manufactured drugs and turning to natural medicines and alternative health-care practices. There will always be a need for surgery if only because of accidents. But accidents could be greatly reduced, not only by safety measures, which we do constantly improve, but by avoiding the mounting unnecessary causes of many accidents. By avoiding, for instance, the present practice of having numerous motor vehicles of different size and capacity, travelling at different and often excessive speeds, passing close to each other in opposite directions, driven by persons of all ages and degrees of skill, sharing a varied network of roads on which every year in the UK more than five thousand people are killed and many more injured because of human error, incapacity (especially due to drunkenness and fatigue), recklessness, mechanical failure and bad weather conditions.
The health services have to deal with a great many serious and distressing illnesses such as cancer and heart disease, largely caused by unsuitable and stressful life-styles, and incorrect diet. It is logical that our physical body, if it is to work efficiently, requires certain food and drink in certain quantities taken at certain times. But our diet is not provided by the health service; it is provided by the food and drink industry whose interest is to sell for profit whatever it can persuade us to consume. During the slow course of evolutionary change we, like every other species, gradually adapted our digestive system to whatever diet was available to us. Nowadays, in the West, the food industry largely tailors its produce to the convenience and taste-buds of the consumer. The industry tampers with food and drink, refining, adulterating, packaging and advertising in order to make it attractive to the customer and therefore profitable to itself. As a result, although people may seem to eat well their diet can lack some of the necessary ingredients but contain much that is unnecessary. Our bodies are commonly undernourished in some respects whilst being overburdened in others. We tend to take in an excess of pure sugar, fat and carbohydrate which our systems have to eliminate as toxic wastes, putting an extra strain on already unhealthy bodies. We can tolerate this fairly well when young but are likely to suffer for it as we get older. As a consequence the health service is orientated more towards repairing, removing and replacing organs which have failed than to preventing their failure, and towards surgery rather than gentler, non-invasive treatments. For example, while back disorders are very common in Britain, conventional medicine is not good at dealing with it, surgery being drastic and dangerous, yet numerous people who can afford it are relieved of pain, or cured altogether, by alternative private practitioners employing massage, manipulation and other techniques.
To illustrate that the health service is both an institution of the Machine and geared to automated humankind, take the example of mental health. Mental breakdown, where the brain is not physically damaged, occurs when an individual mind construction is so at odds with the norm as to become unable to cope with or tolerate existing reality. Yet the medical reaction is to diagnose the condition as psychological instability, and to give drug-related psychiatric treatment with the object of re-adjusting this mind to the norm. There is no question of giving sympathetic support to the patient's refusal to embrace existing reality even though the reason for refusal is that reality, and not necessarily the patient, is insane. This is not only because the present norm overwhelmingly exists, is accepted as real by the great majority, and so cannot be escaped by any individual. It is also because the humantrue alternative , though obviously preferable to the least conditioned and most supraconscious minds, cannot be recognised by the medical profession for the reason that it goes contrary to the Machine of which that profession is an instituted part.
In Britain, and other countries where the money-economy prospers, there is a social security system which has largely removed the previous extremes of poverty. The state itself pays people, or supplements their money income, with the object of preventing anybody's finances falling below a certain level. This is a great humanitarian advance in that it relieves of desperate hardship and anxiety those people whom the automaton would otherwise completely neglect. But as long as the automatic reality exists social security cannot be allowed to advance far enough against the competitive principle that adequate money income is to be won other than by way of service to the Machine. Therefore social security payments are pitched above starvation level but so low by comparison with the average wage as to represent deprivation. This policy is forced on officialdom by the Machine, whose aim is to reinforce the work-ethic and its money-incentive by making everyone who is unemployed, whether because they are superfluous or too old, aware of their inferior status, and to make all those who are employed aware of their rewarding automatic advantage and determined to cling to it. Old age pensions remain low because of similar meanness that is not corrected because the old have little energy and bargaining power. Other reasons why social security payments are kept low are resentment on the part of the employed at having to pay to support the unemployed, and fear that if the payments were pitched higher too many people might prefer not to work for the Machine. To ensure that nobody gets too much for nothing, to use an automatic expression, many rules and regulations are made as a result of which many individuals slip through the safety net. They are the people of no fixed abode who are to be found tramping, searching dustbins, wandering the streets and sleeping rough under the bridges of London, or herded into enormous pitiless doss-houses in New York.
Local authorities have welfare departments to help some persons with marital, housing and other problems to survive and cope with automated life. Again, the social workers might be expected to identify and try to rectify the real problems. But, again, they are employed by the Machine which embraces the causes of these problems, in numbers and with resources sufficient only to prevent the deficiencies of the here and now outraging the moral conscience of even the most self-satisfied of the automated public.
Sometimes such consciences are outraged, by cases of baby-battering for instance. Many people are becoming much more tolerant and willing to understand all sides of such cases. But it takes an intellating mind to add up all the real evidence of this kind and make it into a compelling case against the Machine. As it is, baby-battering, like wife-abuse or terrorism, is mostly blamed on the perpetrator by a majority who have never been pushed to breaking point by unbearable circumstances, and who do not wish to expose their awareness to the unacceptable facets of life to the point of seriously upsetting the complacent concepts and secure facts of their own personal realities. Of course it has to be admitted that some individuals are more prone to cruelly violent outbursts than others. This may be due to innate defects or instabilities that can never be eradicated, so that there will always be some instances of this kind. But most of the circumstances that trigger these outbursts can be eradicated - the combinations of pressures and deficiencies caused by inequality, deprivation, lack of stimulation, exclusion, neglect, hopelessness.
We need to ask ourselves these questions - can a person who is poor, unemployed or menially employed and underpaid, who is sexually potent but unmarried, who is ugly, badly dressed, dirty and without adequate shelter, who is despised and shunned for any of a variety of reasons; can such a person be expected to conform to a norm based on the average middle-class person with adequate income, car, wife, two children, house on mortgage, of good appearance, well-dressed and confident? And how may an individual who belongs to this norm firmly maintain a position in it except by excluding from the mind any serious doubts, or deep thoughts about better alternative values?
Those of us who do have intelligent doubts about existing reality may lose that confidence which comes of being party to the universally accepted norm. It is intellectually healthy to turn against this unintelligent norm and then to support ourselves with our own true convictions. This is hard to do, and some of us look to other, unhealthy supports - alcohol and drugs - which give a kind of reason for living that reality lacks for those who cannot find themselves in supraconsciousness. This artificial support is a feature of the autoculture and a good example of the automatic paradox. The very reality that creates a need for alcohol and drugs - a need to dull the mind because reality itself is so intellectually unfulfilling, and a need to escape from its overwhelming pressures - this very reality fulfils the ruling ethos of the Machine to supply the demand it creates, by openly providing alcohol and encouraging its use, and by secretly smuggling in drugs. This is an automatic practice of the consumer money-economy, profiting from the manipulation of humans. How much drunkenness and alcoholism would there be if the only source of alcohol were home-made wine and beer from local natural ingredients? Who would trouble to bring drugs across half the world to give to addicts for no money-profit in return?
There is another support or therapy for individuals who cannot reconcile their inner conscience and automatic reality - religion. Religions are a product of human conscious intuition which, rather than reason its way to truth, made a virtue of its own mysterious limitations and contrived to set these up as moral institutions of the Machine - churches. Religion pays lip-service to morality but without recognising the independence of intellect, from which true morality arises, and without challenging the Machine, which responsible intellects must critically oppose. So the moral influence of religion is more than cancelled out by its automatic realism. It takes responsibility away from humanity and places it in the hands of some god. It rejects the concept of a human race co-operating to make its world accord with its morals. Instead it presents the world as an inescapable battle between forces of good and evil in which the individual, responsible only for the self, may choose good and be 'saved' or evil and be 'damned', either in this life or some other form of life to follow. So religion is another social service adapted to this present reality, accepted, mostly tongue-in-cheek, as their closest possible approach to morality, by persons who do not believe a world human moral reality to be attainable.
Charity is an expression of our humanity in its battle with the Machine, a human virtue that we show when and where we can but which is very much limited by our duty to the uncharitable Machine. Also there is charity of the voluntary but official kind, in the shape of institutions set up to disburse the bequests of persons who were usually ruthlessly automatically successful during their lives but felt they redeemed themselves by giving part of their wealth to relieve some of the poverty of those whose labour created that wealth.
Charities are institutions of the Machine which, like religions, must consistently fail to achieve the objective to which they are supposed to be dedicated - must depend upon a continuance of the evils they pretend to be trying to eradicate - otherwise they would lose their supportive status as automatically justified institutions. Their alternative course is to turn their backs on the Machine and truly determine on fulfilling their supposed overall good purpose, but this they feel unable to do. For example, a campaign to eradicate all unnecessary human suffering by replacing the Machine with an ideal framework of life, a humantrue society, will not be supported by charitable institutions. The reason is that their executives are restricted by law to relieving only some deprivations, of particular persons, in certain circumstances, from specific causes - all related to automatic concepts, values and facts.
Pt.IV REVELATION
THE AUTOCULTURE
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