Our Earth
27-05-2004, 10:30
... I typed up from books by the best author of the last 50 years (in my opinion, of course).
Robert P. Drake's Tarot Reading c. 1928
"You have the talent," Drake said coldly, "but you are still basically a fraud, like everyone in this business. Your worst victim, madam, is yourself. You deceive yourself with the lies that you have so often told others. It's the occupational disease of mystics. The truth is that it doesn't matter whether I destroy myself alone or destroy this planet -- or turn around and try to find my way to the right-hand path in some dreary monastery. The universe will roll blindly along, not caring, not even knowing. There's no Granddaddy in the clouds to pass a last judgement -- there's only a few airplanes up there, learning more and more about how to carry bombs. They court-martialed General Mitchell for saying it, but it's the truth. The next time around they'll really bomb the hell out of civilian populations. And the universe won't know or care about that either. Don't tell me that my flight from Death leads back to Death; I'm not a child, and I know that all paths lead back to Death eventually. The only question is: Do you cower before him all your life, or do you spit in his eye?"
"You can transcend abject fear and rebellious hatred both. You can see that he is only a part of the Great Wheel and, like all other parts, necessary to the whole. Then you can accept him."
"Next you'll be telling me to love him."
"That too."
"Yes, and I can learn to see the great and glorious Whole Picture. I can see all the men defecating and urinating in their trousers before they died at Château-Thierry, watching their own guts fall out into their laps and screaming out of a hole that isn't even a mouth anymore, as manifestations of that sublime harmony and balance which is ineffable and holy and beyond all speech and reason. Sure, I can see that, if I knock half my brain out of commission and hypnotize myself into thinking that the view from that weird perspective is deeper and wider and more truly true than the view from an unclouded mind. Go to the quadruple-amputee ward and try to tell them that. You speak of death as a personified being. Very well: Then I must regard him as any other entity that gets in my way. Love is a myth invented by poets and other people who couldn't face the world and crept off into corners to create fantasies to console themselves. The fact is that when you meet another entity, either it makes way for you or you make way for it. Either it dominates and you submit, or you dominate and it submits.
Take me into any club in Boston and I'll tell you which millionaire has the most millions, by the way the others treat him. Take me into any workingman's bar and I'll tell you who has the best punch in a fistfight, by the way the others treat him. Take me into any house and I'll tell you in a minute whether the husband or the wife is dominant. Love? Equality? Reconciliation? Acceptance? Those are the excuses of the losers, to persuade themselves that they chose their condition and weren't beaten down into it. Find a dutiful wife, one who truly loves her husband. I'll have her in my bed in three days, maximum. Because I'm so damned attractive? No, because I understand men and women. I'll make her understand, without saying it aloud and shocking her, that the adultery will, one way or another, hurt her husband, whether he knows about it or not. Show me the most servile colored waiter in the best restaurant in town, and after he's through explaining Christianity and humility and all the rest of it, count how many times he steps into the kitchen to spit in his handkerchief. The other employees will tell you he has a 'chest condition.' The condition he has is chronic rage. The mother and the child? An endless power struggle. Listen to the infant's cry change in pitch when Mother doesn't come at once. Is that fear you hear? It's rage. Insane fury at not having total dominance. As for the mother herself, I'd wager that ninety percent of the married women in the psychiatrists' care are there because they can't admit to themselves, can't escape the lie of love long enough to admit to themselves, how often they want to strangle that monster in the nursery.
Love of country? Another lie; the truth is fear of cops and prisons. Love of art? Another lie; the truth is fear of the naked truth without ornaments and false faces on it. Love of truth itself? The biggest lie of all: fear of the unknown. People learn acceptance of all this and achieve wisdom? The surrender to superior force and call their cowardice maturity. It still comes down to one question: Are you kneeling at the altar, or are you on the altar watching the others kneel to you?"
"The wheel of the Tarot is the wheel of Dharma," Mama Sutra said softly when he had concluded. "It is also the wheel of the galaxy, which you see as a blind machine. It rolls on, as you say, no matter what we think or do. Knowing that, I can accept Death as another part of the wheel, and I can accept your nonacceptance as another part. I can control neither. I can only repeat my warning, which is not a lie but a fact about the structure of the Wheel: By denying death, you guarantee that you will meet him finally in his most hideous form.
I once overheard two botanists arguing over a Damned Thing that had blasphemously sprouted in a college yard. One claimed that the Damned Thing was a tree and the other claimed that it was a shrub. They each had good scholarly arguments, and they were still debating when I left them.
The world is forever spawning Damned Things—Things that are neither tree nor shrub, fish nor fowl, black nor white—and the categorical thinker can only regard the spiky buzzing world of sensory fact as a profound insult to his card-indexing system of classifications. Worst of all are the facts which violate “common sense,” that dreary bog of sullen prejudice and muddy inertia. The whole history of science is the odyssey of a pixilated card-indexer perpetually sailing between such Damned Things and desperately juggling his classifications to fit them in, just as the history of politics is the futile epic of a long series of attempts to line up the Damned Things and cajole them to march in regiment.
Every ideology is a mental murder, a reduction of dynamic living processes to static classifications, and every classification is a Damnation, just as every inclusion is an exclusion. In a busy, buzzing universe where no two snowflakes are identical, and no two trees are identical, and no two people are identical—and, indeed, the smallest subatomic particle, we are assured, is not even identical with itself from one microsecond to the next—every card-index system is a self-delusion. “Or, to put it more charitably,” as Nietzsche says, “we are all better artists than we realize.”
It is easy to see that the label “Jew” was a Damnation in Nazi Germany, but actually the label “Jew” is a Damnation anywhere, even where anti-Semitism does not exist. “He is a Jew”, “He is a doctor,” and “He is a poet” mean, to the card-indexing center of the cortex, that my experiences with him will be like my experiences with other Jews, other doctors, and other poets. Thus, individuality is ignored when identity is asserted.
At a party or any other place where strangers meet, watch this mechanism in action. Behind the friendly overtures there is wariness as each person fishes for the label that will identify and Damn the other. Finally, it is revealed: “Oh, he’s an advertising copywriter,” “Oh, he’s an engine-lathe operator.” Both parties relax, for now they know how to behave, what roles to play in the game. Ninety-nine percent of each has been Damned; the other is reacting to the one percent that has been labeled by the card-index machine.
Certain Damnations are socially and intellectually necessary, of course. A custard pie thrown in a comedian’s face is Damned by the physicist who analyzes it according to the Newtonian laws of motion. These equations tell us all we want to know about the impact of the pie on the face, but nothing about the human meaning of the pie-throwing. A cultural anthropologist, analyzing the social function of the comedian as shaman, court jester, and king’s surrogate, explains that pie throwing as a survival of the Feast of Fools and the killing of the king’s double. This Damns the subject in another way. A psychoanalyst, finding an Oedipal castration ritual here, has performed a third Damnation, and the Marxist, seeing an outlet for the worker’s repressed rage against the bosses, performs a fourth. Each Damnation has its value and its uses, but it is nonetheless a Damnation unless its partial and arbitrary nature is recognized.
The poet, who compares the pie in the comedian’s face with the Decline of the West or his own lost love, commits a fifth Damnation, but in this case the game element and whimsicality of the symbolism are safely obvious. A least one would hope so; reading the New Critics occasionally raises doubts on this point.
Human society can be structured either according to the principle of authority or according to the principle of liberty. Authority is a static social configuration in which people act as superiors and inferiors: a sado-masochistic relationship. Liberty is a dynamic social configuration in which people act as equals: an erotic relationship. In every interaction between people, either Authority or Liberty is the dominant factor. Families, churches, lodges, clubs, and corporations are either more authoritarian than libertarian or more libertarian than authoritarian.
There was a hawk-face wop at Drake's table, very elegant in a spanking new tuxedo, but the cop it me made him as illegit. Sometimes you can make a subject precisely, as bunco-con, safe-blower, armed robber, or whatnot, but I could only place him vaguley somewhere on that side of the game; in fact, I associated him with images of piracy on the high seas or that kind of gambits the Borgias played. Somehow the conversation got around to a new book by somebody named Mortimer Adler who ha already written a funder or so great books if I understood the drift. One banker type was terribly keen on this Adler and especially on his latest great book. "He says that we and the Communists share the same Great Tradition"(I could hear the caps by the way he pronounced the term) "an we must join together against the one force that really does threaten civilisation--anarchism!"
There were several objections, in which Drake didn't take part (he just sat back, puffing his cigar and looking agreeable to everyone, but I could see boredom under the surface) and the banker tried to explain the Great Tradition, which was a bit over my head, and judging by the expressions around the table, a bit over everybody else's head, too, when the hawk-faced dago spoke up suddenly.
"I can pu the Great Tradition in one word," he said calmly. "Privilege."
Old Drake suddenly stopped looking agreeable-but-bored--he seemed both interested and amused. "One seldom encounters such a refreshing freedom from euphemism," he said, leaning forward. "But perhaps I am reading too much into your remark, sir?"
Hawkl-face sipped at his champagne and patted his mouth with a napkin before answering. "I think not," he said at last. "Privilege is defined in most dictionaries as a right or immunity giving special favors or benifits to those who hold it. Another meaning in Webster is 'not subject to the usual rules or penalties.' The invaluable thesaurus give such synonyms as power, authority, birthright, franchise, patent, grant, favor and, I'm sad to say, pretension. Surely, we all know what privilege is in this club, don't we, gentlemen? Do I have to remind you of the Latin roots, privi, private, and lege, law, and point in detail how we have created our Private Law over here, just as the Politburo have created their own private law in their own sphere of influence?"
"But that's not the Great Tradition," the banker type said (later, I learned that he was actually a college professor; Drake was the only banker at that table). "What Mr. Adler means by the Great Tradition--"
"What Mortimer means by the Great Tradition," hawk-face interrupted rudely, "is a set of myths and fables invented to legitimize or sugar-coat the institutions of privilege. Correct me if I'm wrong," he added more politely but with a sardonic grin.
"He means," the true believer said, "the undeniable axioms, the time-tested truths, the shared wisdom of the ages, the..."
"The myths and fables," hawk-face contributed gently.
"The sacred, time-tested wisdom of the ages," the other went on, becoming reduntant. "The basic bedrock of civil society, of civilization. And we do share than with the Communists. And it is just that common humanistic tradition that the young anarchists, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, are blaspheming, denying, and trying to destroy. It has nothing to do with privilege at all."
"Pardon me," the dark man said. "Are you a college professor?"
"Certainly. I'm head of the Political Science Department at Harvard!"
"Oh," the dark man shrugged. "I'm sorry for talking so bluntly before you. I thought I was entirely surrounded by men of business and finance."
The professor was just starting to look as if he spotted the implied insult in that formal apology when Drake interrupted.
"Quite so. No need to shock our paid idealists and turn them into vulgar realists overnight. At the same time, is it absolutely necessary to state what we all know in such a manner as to imply a rather hostile and outside viewpoint? Who are you and what is your trade, sir?"
"Hagbard Celine. Import-export. Gold and Appel Transfers here in New York. A few other small establishments in other ports." As he spoke my image of piracy and Borgia stealth came back strongly. "And we're not children here," he added, "So why should we avoid frank language?"
The professor, taken aback a foot or so by this turn in the conversation, sat perplexed as Drake replied:
"So. Civilization is pribilege--or Private Law, as you say so literally. And we all know where Private Law comes from, except the poor professor here--out of the barrel of a gun, in the words of a gentleman whose bluntness you would appreciate. Is it your conclusion, then, that Adler is, for all his naivete, correct, and we have more in common with the Communists rulers than we have setting us at odds?"
"Let me illumate you further," Celine said--and the way he pronounced the verb made me jump. Drake's blue eyes flashed a bit, too, but that didn't suprise me: anybody as rich as IRS thouhgt he was would [/i]have[/i] to be On the Inside.
"Privilege implies exclusion from privilege, just as advantage implies disadvantage," Celine went on. "In the same mathematically reciprocal way, profit implies loss. If you and I exchange equal good, that is trade: neither of us profits and neither of us loses. But if we exchange unequal goods, one of us profits and the other loses. Mathematically. Certainly. Now, such mathematically unequal exchanges will always occur because some traders will be shrewder than others. But in total freedom--in anarchy--such unequal exchange will be sporadic and irregular. A phenomenon of unpredictable periodicity, mathematically speaking. Now look about you, professor--raise your nose from your great books and survey the actual world as it is--and you will not observe such unpredictable functions. You will observe, instead, a mathematically smooth function, a steady profit accruing to one group and an equally steady loss accumulating for all others. Why is this, professor? Because the system is not free or random, any mathematician would tell you a priori. Well, then, where is the determining function, the factor that controls the other variables? You have named it yourself, or Mr. Adler has: the Great Tradition. Privilege, I prefer to call it. When A meets B in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses. There is no more Free Market here than there is on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The privileges, or Private Laws--the rules of the game, as promulgated by the Politburo and the General Congress of the Comunist Party on that side and by the U.S. goverment and the Federal Reserve Board on this side--are slightly different; that's all. And it is this that is threatened by anarhists, and by the repressed anarchist in each of us," he concluded, strongly emphasizing the last clause, staring at Drake, not the professor.
The professor had a lot more to say in a hurry then, about the laws of society being the laws of nature and the laws of nature being the laws of God, but I decided it was time to circulate a bit more so I didn't hear the rest of the conversation.
Robert P. Drake's Tarot Reading c. 1928
"You have the talent," Drake said coldly, "but you are still basically a fraud, like everyone in this business. Your worst victim, madam, is yourself. You deceive yourself with the lies that you have so often told others. It's the occupational disease of mystics. The truth is that it doesn't matter whether I destroy myself alone or destroy this planet -- or turn around and try to find my way to the right-hand path in some dreary monastery. The universe will roll blindly along, not caring, not even knowing. There's no Granddaddy in the clouds to pass a last judgement -- there's only a few airplanes up there, learning more and more about how to carry bombs. They court-martialed General Mitchell for saying it, but it's the truth. The next time around they'll really bomb the hell out of civilian populations. And the universe won't know or care about that either. Don't tell me that my flight from Death leads back to Death; I'm not a child, and I know that all paths lead back to Death eventually. The only question is: Do you cower before him all your life, or do you spit in his eye?"
"You can transcend abject fear and rebellious hatred both. You can see that he is only a part of the Great Wheel and, like all other parts, necessary to the whole. Then you can accept him."
"Next you'll be telling me to love him."
"That too."
"Yes, and I can learn to see the great and glorious Whole Picture. I can see all the men defecating and urinating in their trousers before they died at Château-Thierry, watching their own guts fall out into their laps and screaming out of a hole that isn't even a mouth anymore, as manifestations of that sublime harmony and balance which is ineffable and holy and beyond all speech and reason. Sure, I can see that, if I knock half my brain out of commission and hypnotize myself into thinking that the view from that weird perspective is deeper and wider and more truly true than the view from an unclouded mind. Go to the quadruple-amputee ward and try to tell them that. You speak of death as a personified being. Very well: Then I must regard him as any other entity that gets in my way. Love is a myth invented by poets and other people who couldn't face the world and crept off into corners to create fantasies to console themselves. The fact is that when you meet another entity, either it makes way for you or you make way for it. Either it dominates and you submit, or you dominate and it submits.
Take me into any club in Boston and I'll tell you which millionaire has the most millions, by the way the others treat him. Take me into any workingman's bar and I'll tell you who has the best punch in a fistfight, by the way the others treat him. Take me into any house and I'll tell you in a minute whether the husband or the wife is dominant. Love? Equality? Reconciliation? Acceptance? Those are the excuses of the losers, to persuade themselves that they chose their condition and weren't beaten down into it. Find a dutiful wife, one who truly loves her husband. I'll have her in my bed in three days, maximum. Because I'm so damned attractive? No, because I understand men and women. I'll make her understand, without saying it aloud and shocking her, that the adultery will, one way or another, hurt her husband, whether he knows about it or not. Show me the most servile colored waiter in the best restaurant in town, and after he's through explaining Christianity and humility and all the rest of it, count how many times he steps into the kitchen to spit in his handkerchief. The other employees will tell you he has a 'chest condition.' The condition he has is chronic rage. The mother and the child? An endless power struggle. Listen to the infant's cry change in pitch when Mother doesn't come at once. Is that fear you hear? It's rage. Insane fury at not having total dominance. As for the mother herself, I'd wager that ninety percent of the married women in the psychiatrists' care are there because they can't admit to themselves, can't escape the lie of love long enough to admit to themselves, how often they want to strangle that monster in the nursery.
Love of country? Another lie; the truth is fear of cops and prisons. Love of art? Another lie; the truth is fear of the naked truth without ornaments and false faces on it. Love of truth itself? The biggest lie of all: fear of the unknown. People learn acceptance of all this and achieve wisdom? The surrender to superior force and call their cowardice maturity. It still comes down to one question: Are you kneeling at the altar, or are you on the altar watching the others kneel to you?"
"The wheel of the Tarot is the wheel of Dharma," Mama Sutra said softly when he had concluded. "It is also the wheel of the galaxy, which you see as a blind machine. It rolls on, as you say, no matter what we think or do. Knowing that, I can accept Death as another part of the wheel, and I can accept your nonacceptance as another part. I can control neither. I can only repeat my warning, which is not a lie but a fact about the structure of the Wheel: By denying death, you guarantee that you will meet him finally in his most hideous form.
I once overheard two botanists arguing over a Damned Thing that had blasphemously sprouted in a college yard. One claimed that the Damned Thing was a tree and the other claimed that it was a shrub. They each had good scholarly arguments, and they were still debating when I left them.
The world is forever spawning Damned Things—Things that are neither tree nor shrub, fish nor fowl, black nor white—and the categorical thinker can only regard the spiky buzzing world of sensory fact as a profound insult to his card-indexing system of classifications. Worst of all are the facts which violate “common sense,” that dreary bog of sullen prejudice and muddy inertia. The whole history of science is the odyssey of a pixilated card-indexer perpetually sailing between such Damned Things and desperately juggling his classifications to fit them in, just as the history of politics is the futile epic of a long series of attempts to line up the Damned Things and cajole them to march in regiment.
Every ideology is a mental murder, a reduction of dynamic living processes to static classifications, and every classification is a Damnation, just as every inclusion is an exclusion. In a busy, buzzing universe where no two snowflakes are identical, and no two trees are identical, and no two people are identical—and, indeed, the smallest subatomic particle, we are assured, is not even identical with itself from one microsecond to the next—every card-index system is a self-delusion. “Or, to put it more charitably,” as Nietzsche says, “we are all better artists than we realize.”
It is easy to see that the label “Jew” was a Damnation in Nazi Germany, but actually the label “Jew” is a Damnation anywhere, even where anti-Semitism does not exist. “He is a Jew”, “He is a doctor,” and “He is a poet” mean, to the card-indexing center of the cortex, that my experiences with him will be like my experiences with other Jews, other doctors, and other poets. Thus, individuality is ignored when identity is asserted.
At a party or any other place where strangers meet, watch this mechanism in action. Behind the friendly overtures there is wariness as each person fishes for the label that will identify and Damn the other. Finally, it is revealed: “Oh, he’s an advertising copywriter,” “Oh, he’s an engine-lathe operator.” Both parties relax, for now they know how to behave, what roles to play in the game. Ninety-nine percent of each has been Damned; the other is reacting to the one percent that has been labeled by the card-index machine.
Certain Damnations are socially and intellectually necessary, of course. A custard pie thrown in a comedian’s face is Damned by the physicist who analyzes it according to the Newtonian laws of motion. These equations tell us all we want to know about the impact of the pie on the face, but nothing about the human meaning of the pie-throwing. A cultural anthropologist, analyzing the social function of the comedian as shaman, court jester, and king’s surrogate, explains that pie throwing as a survival of the Feast of Fools and the killing of the king’s double. This Damns the subject in another way. A psychoanalyst, finding an Oedipal castration ritual here, has performed a third Damnation, and the Marxist, seeing an outlet for the worker’s repressed rage against the bosses, performs a fourth. Each Damnation has its value and its uses, but it is nonetheless a Damnation unless its partial and arbitrary nature is recognized.
The poet, who compares the pie in the comedian’s face with the Decline of the West or his own lost love, commits a fifth Damnation, but in this case the game element and whimsicality of the symbolism are safely obvious. A least one would hope so; reading the New Critics occasionally raises doubts on this point.
Human society can be structured either according to the principle of authority or according to the principle of liberty. Authority is a static social configuration in which people act as superiors and inferiors: a sado-masochistic relationship. Liberty is a dynamic social configuration in which people act as equals: an erotic relationship. In every interaction between people, either Authority or Liberty is the dominant factor. Families, churches, lodges, clubs, and corporations are either more authoritarian than libertarian or more libertarian than authoritarian.
There was a hawk-face wop at Drake's table, very elegant in a spanking new tuxedo, but the cop it me made him as illegit. Sometimes you can make a subject precisely, as bunco-con, safe-blower, armed robber, or whatnot, but I could only place him vaguley somewhere on that side of the game; in fact, I associated him with images of piracy on the high seas or that kind of gambits the Borgias played. Somehow the conversation got around to a new book by somebody named Mortimer Adler who ha already written a funder or so great books if I understood the drift. One banker type was terribly keen on this Adler and especially on his latest great book. "He says that we and the Communists share the same Great Tradition"(I could hear the caps by the way he pronounced the term) "an we must join together against the one force that really does threaten civilisation--anarchism!"
There were several objections, in which Drake didn't take part (he just sat back, puffing his cigar and looking agreeable to everyone, but I could see boredom under the surface) and the banker tried to explain the Great Tradition, which was a bit over my head, and judging by the expressions around the table, a bit over everybody else's head, too, when the hawk-faced dago spoke up suddenly.
"I can pu the Great Tradition in one word," he said calmly. "Privilege."
Old Drake suddenly stopped looking agreeable-but-bored--he seemed both interested and amused. "One seldom encounters such a refreshing freedom from euphemism," he said, leaning forward. "But perhaps I am reading too much into your remark, sir?"
Hawkl-face sipped at his champagne and patted his mouth with a napkin before answering. "I think not," he said at last. "Privilege is defined in most dictionaries as a right or immunity giving special favors or benifits to those who hold it. Another meaning in Webster is 'not subject to the usual rules or penalties.' The invaluable thesaurus give such synonyms as power, authority, birthright, franchise, patent, grant, favor and, I'm sad to say, pretension. Surely, we all know what privilege is in this club, don't we, gentlemen? Do I have to remind you of the Latin roots, privi, private, and lege, law, and point in detail how we have created our Private Law over here, just as the Politburo have created their own private law in their own sphere of influence?"
"But that's not the Great Tradition," the banker type said (later, I learned that he was actually a college professor; Drake was the only banker at that table). "What Mr. Adler means by the Great Tradition--"
"What Mortimer means by the Great Tradition," hawk-face interrupted rudely, "is a set of myths and fables invented to legitimize or sugar-coat the institutions of privilege. Correct me if I'm wrong," he added more politely but with a sardonic grin.
"He means," the true believer said, "the undeniable axioms, the time-tested truths, the shared wisdom of the ages, the..."
"The myths and fables," hawk-face contributed gently.
"The sacred, time-tested wisdom of the ages," the other went on, becoming reduntant. "The basic bedrock of civil society, of civilization. And we do share than with the Communists. And it is just that common humanistic tradition that the young anarchists, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, are blaspheming, denying, and trying to destroy. It has nothing to do with privilege at all."
"Pardon me," the dark man said. "Are you a college professor?"
"Certainly. I'm head of the Political Science Department at Harvard!"
"Oh," the dark man shrugged. "I'm sorry for talking so bluntly before you. I thought I was entirely surrounded by men of business and finance."
The professor was just starting to look as if he spotted the implied insult in that formal apology when Drake interrupted.
"Quite so. No need to shock our paid idealists and turn them into vulgar realists overnight. At the same time, is it absolutely necessary to state what we all know in such a manner as to imply a rather hostile and outside viewpoint? Who are you and what is your trade, sir?"
"Hagbard Celine. Import-export. Gold and Appel Transfers here in New York. A few other small establishments in other ports." As he spoke my image of piracy and Borgia stealth came back strongly. "And we're not children here," he added, "So why should we avoid frank language?"
The professor, taken aback a foot or so by this turn in the conversation, sat perplexed as Drake replied:
"So. Civilization is pribilege--or Private Law, as you say so literally. And we all know where Private Law comes from, except the poor professor here--out of the barrel of a gun, in the words of a gentleman whose bluntness you would appreciate. Is it your conclusion, then, that Adler is, for all his naivete, correct, and we have more in common with the Communists rulers than we have setting us at odds?"
"Let me illumate you further," Celine said--and the way he pronounced the verb made me jump. Drake's blue eyes flashed a bit, too, but that didn't suprise me: anybody as rich as IRS thouhgt he was would [/i]have[/i] to be On the Inside.
"Privilege implies exclusion from privilege, just as advantage implies disadvantage," Celine went on. "In the same mathematically reciprocal way, profit implies loss. If you and I exchange equal good, that is trade: neither of us profits and neither of us loses. But if we exchange unequal goods, one of us profits and the other loses. Mathematically. Certainly. Now, such mathematically unequal exchanges will always occur because some traders will be shrewder than others. But in total freedom--in anarchy--such unequal exchange will be sporadic and irregular. A phenomenon of unpredictable periodicity, mathematically speaking. Now look about you, professor--raise your nose from your great books and survey the actual world as it is--and you will not observe such unpredictable functions. You will observe, instead, a mathematically smooth function, a steady profit accruing to one group and an equally steady loss accumulating for all others. Why is this, professor? Because the system is not free or random, any mathematician would tell you a priori. Well, then, where is the determining function, the factor that controls the other variables? You have named it yourself, or Mr. Adler has: the Great Tradition. Privilege, I prefer to call it. When A meets B in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses. There is no more Free Market here than there is on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The privileges, or Private Laws--the rules of the game, as promulgated by the Politburo and the General Congress of the Comunist Party on that side and by the U.S. goverment and the Federal Reserve Board on this side--are slightly different; that's all. And it is this that is threatened by anarhists, and by the repressed anarchist in each of us," he concluded, strongly emphasizing the last clause, staring at Drake, not the professor.
The professor had a lot more to say in a hurry then, about the laws of society being the laws of nature and the laws of nature being the laws of God, but I decided it was time to circulate a bit more so I didn't hear the rest of the conversation.