(Originally published in the July 3, 1977 issue of New Libertarian Weekly, p.4)
Fairness? Decency? How can you
expect fairness or decency on a planet of sleeping people?
--- Gurdjieff, 1918
Last year in Oui magazine, Dr. Timothy Leary
and I published an article ghoulishly titled, "Brainwashing: How to Fold,
Spindle, and Mutilate the Human Mind." I would like to summarize our basic
points here, preparatory to a more general discussion of neurological
relativism.
Human beings, Leary and I propose, are basically giant robots created by DNA to
make more DNA. (So are all the other mutli-cellular
organisms on this backward planet.)
Of course, there is nothing new about the robot theory of biology. The Sufis
and yogis knew about it centuries before Pavlov, or even before Mark Twain
wrote his stunningly prescient essay "Man, A Machine." Nonetheless,
it is so patently offensive to human narcissism that almost everybody recoils
from it "as the devil would from holy water."
(Incidentally, you can get a quick estimate of a person's intelligence by
asking them how much of themselves is robotic. Those
who say "not at all" or "less than 50%" are hopeless
imbeciles, always. The few who say "about 99%" are worth talking to;
they are quite intelligent. Dr. Leary, who is the freest human being I have
ever known, estimates that he is 99.9999% robot.)
The circuitry of the human robot, like that of other primates, is wired to take
imprints at crucial moments of what ethologists call
"imprint vulnerability." These occur on a pre-programmed schedule;
the bio-suvival imprint is taken as soon as the
mother's breast is offered; the territorial imprint as soon as the infant is
able to walk about, yell and generally meddle in family politics; the laryngeal
imprint as soon as the DNA-RNA signals trigger the talking stage; the sexual
imprint at the first orgasm or mating experience, etc.
For literary convenience, we can think of the bio-survival imprint as Will and
personify it as Scotty, brooding over the life-support and weapons technology.
The territorial or emotional imprint, then, is Ego, or Dr. McCoy, the mammalian
moralist. The laryngeal (symbolic) imprint is Mind, or Mr. Spock, the linear
computer. And the sexual imprint is Adult Personality, or Captain Kirk, the
father-protector.
Each of these imprints exists in the nervous system as a separate circuit or
network. Any one of them can be kinky or odd, since the biocomputer
imprints literally anything at the moments of imprint vulnerability.
A kinky bio-survival imprint may take such forms as anxiety, phobias or
outright autism. A weird territorial-emotional imprint can be overly
submissive, in which case the subject suffers, or overy
dominant, in which case those unfortunate enough to associate with the subject
do the suffering. A bizarre symbolic is, at this stage of evolution, the norm:
almost every society educates the young for stupidity, dogmatism, intolerance
and inability to learn anything new. As for the sexual
imprints: everybody can see how compulsive abd weird
everybody else's sexual imprint is; but alas, few can see that about
themselves.
Brainwashing consists of creating artificial imprint vulnerability. You
can do this either with drugs, or with prolonged isolation ("sensory
deprivation"), or with terror (new imprints are always taken at the point
of near-death, which is what most shamanic initiations rely on), or with a
combination of drugs, isolation and terror.
The priests, pedagogues and shamans of all tribes and nations know enough, on
the empirical level, about imprint vulnerability. All the crucial transition
stages of life are surrounded by ritual, repetition and redundance
- and frequenty with terror and isolation, and
sometimes (in many societies) with drugs - to ensure that the local belief
systems ans "morals" are heavily imprinted.
In short, the process of acculturalization is itself
a brainwashing process.
Thus, the Samoan lives inside an imprinted Samoan reality; the German inside a
German reality; an American inside an American reality. That's why a crowd of
Americans are immediately recognizable in a street full of Turks or Hindus or
even in a street of Englishmen or Irish. The naive chauvinism of the traveler
who says "all foreigners are crazy" is actually quite valid; indeed,
foreigners are crazy; the chauvinist merely lacks the insight to realize that
his imprint group is crazy, too.
(As mentioned in previous columns, there are four other imprints, intended for
future evolution off this planet and therefore only appearing rarely thus far
in our history. These are the neurosomatic imprint,
which we call Hedonic Engineering or the art of staying high; the neuroelectric imprint, or Magick;
the neurogenetic imprint or DNA-conciousness;
and the metaphysiological imprint, or "cosmic consiousness.")
Leary's idea of Intelligence-squared thus does not mean merely an increase in
linear I.Q. on the third circuit. (Super-Spockism.)
It means learning how to "brainwash" yourself; that is, to
selectively tune, focus and serially reimprint all 8
circuits, beginning with as many of them as you can handle. (It is unwise, for
instance, to attempt any 6th circuit psionic
operations until great skill has been attained in self-metaprogramming
the bio-survival, emotional, mental, sexual and Hedonic circuits.)
The plain fact is that most bio-survival anxieties are phobic and irrational,
most emotional games silly and infantile (they are imprinted in infancy, after
all), most mental sets rigid and nearly blind, most sex-roles as robotic as the
mating dance of the penguin. At the same time, the ultimate sophistication is
to avoid laying your own bio-survival needs, emotional cons, belief systems and
sex games on others, which elementary courtesy is really what libertarianism is
all about.
Unfortunately, libertarianism as a third-circuit idea (laryngeal signal) has no
more effect in this backward planet than any other third-circuit reality-map.
The other circuits continue their robotic trips, anchored in the neurochemistry
of the imprinting process. Intelligence-squared, or self-metaprogramming,
allows libertarianism to become more than an idea. This is what the
Neurological Revolution means; this is what the Great Work of the alchemists
aimed for. When the robot awakens and becomes a self-programmer, it can easily
have all the goals promised by the alchemists: The Stone of the Wise, the
Medicine of Metals, True Wiseom and perfect
Happiness. All of those traditional terms are metaphors for the awakening of
Intelligence-squared.
Usually, people are libertarians or fascists or snake-worshippers or
Republicans or nudists or whatever, because of conditioned networks that fit
smoothly into their imprints. People achieve Intelligence-squared, and become
effective libertarians, only if they work for it.