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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 ma
"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, u
A worse form of Damnation is reserved for those things which ca
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 man the celebrated Marxian formula of "monopoly on the means of production." Since man extends his nervous system through cha
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-Le
APPENDIX MEM: CERTAIN QUESTIONS THAT MAY STILL TROUBLE SOME READERS
1. What was Mama Sutra's "reading," where Da
Answer: It had nothing to do with the John F. Ke
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 Ke
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.