Re: R. D. Laing
Since reason is based on experience, and experience has largely been destroyed, can reason now be trusted?
Re: Primitivism
Even if we knew the nature of all our problems, we couldn't solve them—only change them. Then we would have new problems that we didn't understand. A century passes while we come to understand them, but still we can't solve them—again, only change them.
For this is the way it has been with us. We don't solve problems—we change them to new problems. It is a vicious cycle, a Pandora's box, for the new problems are always somehow more numerous than the old ones, and more complicated. Things seem to grow gradually worse and more complex the more we solve problems. For we don't solve them, only change them.
How do we get out? How?
Primitivism
I cannot repeat enough that, concerning the actual worthwhile-ness of human life, I believe very much (every day am more sure of it) that the history of civilization is roughly the history of the decline of mankind.
It is not that I hate civilization—I don't. Today we couldn't survive without it, we must have it, bear it. But it is still basicly an evil, and the brother of evil. That we can't survive without it only points clearly the fact that the history of its rise is the history of our demise as fully alive human beings. Perhaps we can go a step deeper and pin the blame on reason—yes, reason! For man's increasing intellectual sophistication continually leads directly to increasing societal sophistication.
Acts of new vision, of bright original thought, seem to lead inevitably to new more intricate chains jailing us. Deeper locked in the civilized cage.
How to get out. I wish I knew. So far reason has only seemed to result, eventually, in more deeply entrapping us. So that to hold out that more reason is still somehow the answer is rather naive, unjustified by any evidence we have. Reason can solve all kinds of “technical” problems: how to eliminate small pox; but always its larger more indirect general effect is to further trap us and alienate us from life.
What we must realize is that it is our reason, not our lack of reason, our rationality not our irrationality, that is the real agent responsible for injustice and stupidity and pig-headedness in the world.
It is all so typical to put the blame on those unenlightened who, rather than being ruled by reason allow themselves to be ruled by their “emotions” and “physical desires”. But it's about time this is seen as hogwash. Hogwash it is.
(And we are the hogs doing the washing.)
Man is a rational creature. That is his problem. He listens to his head more than to his body. His head forces its ideas onto his body. And the ideas it forces are the ideas it's been taught. And the society that teaches these ideas is very much built upon the ideas that it teaches.
Between them, they are taking us in the wrong direction, and have been. Nonetheless, the ideas that corrupt a society at a given time are rational. Reached—at least reachable—by reason. Reason that takes into account circumstances and human experience.
We would like to be able to say, of course, that people like Hitler and Stalin and Idi Amin were irrational—but it is just self-delusion on our part. Their behavior may appear erratic, their reasoning (if we refuse to see it from anything but the point of view of our particular outlook) may appear senseless—but the truth is Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin were all quite rational men, no doubt as rational as Wilson, FDR, and Nixon. We think the present-day Russian leaders somehow less rational than us in insisting on totalitarian control over ideas and speech. It may be they are wrong and we are right, but the truth of such a matter is not as logically determinable a thing as the correct move in a given chess position. The Russians may after all be right in their belief that freedoms must be curtailed if a fully communist society is to be achieved. And who can be sure that they are wrong that such a communist society can never be, so long as the spectre of a capitalist one hangs over any portion of the world. If they are right that capitalism is a corrupting and killing disease, who can be safe till it is eradicated? Is it not the duty of everyone to fight pestilences, even remote ones?
Our problem is reason, not the lack of reason: how can it not be obvious. Reason is our cage.
But what can we do about it—disclaim it? Turn against it?
Obviously that won't do. Rather than an end to reason, we'd have a stabilization: present reason. That is, common reason would jump on us like an ox—even more than it does today. Substituting a static reason for a dynamic but chaining one does little good, no good at all in fact.
What we need is a drastic change in our basic philosophy. We need to reason, but not blindly without mind to the nature of reason itself. We need, instead, reason that is self-conscious, that doesn't ignore itself as an entity. A new rationality with a healthy distaste for rationality itself.
Reason is evil unless it is complete. But reason can never quite be complete.
For we are fallen: bodies broken in twain. Until the twain meet again—well. . . maybe reason can't ever help. Even if we all knew the problem—and the answer—what could we do? Could we do anything?
I don't know; but it would be a worthwhile position to be in. There is always hope.
From "Closed" to "Open"
In the early 1960's or late 1950's a new trend of permissive. love-based “open” classrooms had it beginning. It replaced the old classroom in which strict discipline and the pressure of competition dominated all. By 1970 or so the switchover had been complete: a new type of enjoyable, fun-oriented education had replaced the older “competitive” type, a sort of parallel to our society's new orientation away from competitiveness towards a sort of do-your-own-thing enjoyment-based ethic.
Theory: that perhaps it was the being caught in the switch-over from closed, competitive classrooms in younger grades and open freedom-oriented classrooms in older grades that produced that occurrence known as the youth rebellion of the 60's.
We know of course the importance of Vietnam and racial inequality, but much of the anti-capitalistic and consumer-oriented economy feeling perhaps is due to students undergoing in school the sudden sudden switch from one form of classroom to the other. It was just that that made them tend to be radical—for society as a whole, especially in the way it educated them—suddenly deprived them of the order they had at first been exposed. Result: then had, they realized, to look elsewhere (within themselves) for the order they felt lacking.
The present generation of school children we need not expect to be radical; or radically-tended, we can expect. For not having been exposed to a tighter order in the first place, it is unlikely they will feel something missing in that respect. They should, we can feel safe, fit well into our pleasure-oriented society and economic system.
And yet, since this system leaves such an emptiness in life, we can expect a continued religious revival. And religion, as we know, is a “safe” outlet for frustrations and failings.
Opiate of the people? —perhaps Marx is still right.
But no—the opiate is our consumer-pleasure-oriented economy. That is the opiate. Religion is a medicine to heal us from the opiate, from the widespread degradation of life. Without religion, life is not worth living.
I want to change that. I want to put God out of business, make Him unnecessary.
graffiti
Now through the long
cold arctic cloud-front comes the silvern ship
filled to hull brim with babies
(for the storks will not fly in winter
the penis being too icy for a comfortable grip
and cunt too deep
and babies as naturally messy as they are). . . . So
comes the silvern ship of bawling
little bawds and playthings
and plenty of Q-tips,
comes into port and settles down
at Disney World
for all the hungry animals.
Pause
The rain has taken us over
over the world.
Come on like a dark hood over the world,
and we are strangers
stranded
in the darkness stranded, and we cannot see.
There is nothing to see.
Down, on down, downward the rain pinging
and we cannot see.
It pings in the pine trees, on the needles unaware
drop on drop burning out.
Passing cars, their static in the street
slush unseen through the down rain,
fade into nothing music of sweet
silence, amid the pain
of the tumbling, drowning, dying of the world.
