negative thinking

by Robert Anton Wilson

The Semantics of the "Soul"
The Realist (#18) June, 1960

Our argument in Part One of this article (issue #18) was that the Judeo-Christian dichotomy of man into "body" and "soul" needs to be rejected on the grounds that it is insane in a semantic sense. Here "insanity" means, operationally, any idea, "perception" or feeling which gives low predictive value.

The body-soul dichotomy, we argued, is a map which does not fit the territory. If somebody produced a map of the world in which it was portrayed as two spheres instead of one, with a great void of space between them, this map would not have a similar structure to the territory. A navigator trying to orient himself by this map would get into trouble: the predictions he made from it would not be confirmed.

A map which pictures as dual that which is not dual has low, or non-existent, value for making predictions. All our lives we are making predictions, in the form of plans for survival, happiness, comfort, etc. - "If I do thus at point A, this will happen at point B."

Thus we believe things like, "If I plant poppy seeds, poppies will grow"; "If I smile at that girl, she'll smile back"; "If I impress a 20 volt source across a 2 ohm wire, I'll get 10 amperes of current." All such predictions are based on theories about the structure of the universe, including its dynamic structure as a process.

When these implicit structural theories do not mesh with the actual structure of the universe, our predictions are not confirmed. We are frustrated. The seeds we plant do not flower, the devices we build do not work. We become embittered, and we think of ourselves, rather than our ideas, as "failures."

A dualistic theory of man - a theory which sees him as a bastard hybrid between two kinds of "reality” – does not fit the structure of the universe. As we argued in Part One of this article, a synergistic theory - in which we include not just Buckminster Fuller's synergetic geometry, but also Korzybski's non-elementalistic general semantics, Kohler's gestalt psychology, Einstein's relativistic physics, the Ames-Dewey transactional neuro-psychology, the cybernetic biology of Rosenbleuth, Rashevski and Rapoport, etc.- fits the structure of the universe better. It yields more accurate predictions.

Such an approach is not identical with classical materialism. Indeed, I am inclined to consider the synergetic approach a completely new doctrine-function, as far from classical materialism as classical materialism was from theology.

Both Gaston Bachelard in his Philosophy de Non, and J. Samuel Bois, in his Explorations in Awareness, have tried to divide human intellectual history into five epistemological stages, and in both cases their fifth stage is rather close to what I call the Synergetic approach.

Roughly, we might say that man has passed through a demonological stage, a theological stage, a rationalistic stage, a classical materialist stage, and a synergetic stage. Each of these stages posits one basic structural unit as the foundation of the universe.

To the demonological savage, this unit is the demon or spirit; a little, invisible anthropoid-creature.

To the theologian, the unit is a more abstract God, together with His angels.

To the rationalist, the unit is the Platonic Idea or the Aristotelian Essence.

To the classical materialist, the unit is the thing: a hard, block-like entity which was first the atom and later the sub-atomic particle.

To the synergeticist, the unit is the relation, always understood as a dynamic structure-in-time.

In Part One of this article, we spoke of the body-soul dualism as the Schizogenic Fallacy, an expression we have used also in earlier columns. Many people seem to think that the adjective I am using is a misprint for “Schizophrenic”; it is not. “Schizogenic”, a word recently introduced into psychology, means: tending to produce schizophrenia or schizoid conditions. Thus there have been learned papers on “The Schizogenic Parent,” “The Schizogenic Environment,” etc.

I suggest there are also Schizogenic ideas.

An idea, after all, does not float around in the cortex, without influencing the rest of the body-process.

Ideas influence perception: when the same semi-abstract blob is shown to Mexicans and Americans, the former see a bull fighter, and the latter see a baseball player.

Ideas influence body-sets: when an adult trips, he falls differently than a baby, less limply.

Ideas influence reflexes: We feel hungry at the mention of “a tender, juicy steak,” but not at the mention of a “chunk of dead castrated bull.”

Neurotic individuals have manufactured in their bodies symptoms of blindness, paralysis, pregnancy, and dozens of other medical conditions, without any “physical” cause being present.

Thus, I state and insist that the body-soul idea has created, in an Occidental world, feelings, perceptions, sensations, and even a kind of body-tonicity which does not exist in the Orient. (The Orient, of course, has its own problems, but we are not dealing with them here.)

The Occidental, even if he has cortically rejected the Judeo-Christian heritage, still retains the kind of armoring that goes with that heritage. He feels flesh – his own, his lover’s, everybody’s – as gross, ugly, recalcitrant. He may grow blue in the face denying this, but just look at the way he stands, the way he sits, the hysterical way he tries to “relax.”

No man would consider it “sport” to go out in the woods on a beautiful autumn day and raise a gun to kill a living creature unless, deep inside, he felt contempt for flesh, contempt for living tissues, contempt for life.

Look at our literary intelligentsia – if you have a strong stomach. Nowadays every intellectual magazine is full of articles about the great Marxist hallucination of the 30’s. All sorts of clever explanations are shuffled and re-shuffled back and forth to account for why so many intelligent people defended and glorified the regime of the sadistic maniac, Stalin.

Nobody sees fit to suggest that the intellectuals of the 30’s love their big abstractions – “Equality” and “Social Welfare” and whatnot – just because they were incapable of loving flesh. Nevertheless, these abstractions were used to sing the praises of a regime that built the largest slave-labor camps in the history of the world.

Naïve and sentimental “freethinkers” and “humanists” imagine that the scientific intelligentsia is a little bit further advanced than the literary intelligentsia. Such people ought to take a look at the reports of the Humane Society of the United States.

This organization – which is not made up of anti-vivisectionist cranks – tries to prevent unnecessary cruelty to laboratory animals. The cases they turn up in a single month – cases of animals used in an experiment, for instance, then left to die slowly, without care, without euthanasia, without a flicker of mercy – read like pages from deSade.

England has long had a law for the protection of laboratory animals. It is a just and fair-minded law, and was introduced partly at the instigation of Huxley and Darwin: It has not in any way interfered with legitimate scientific research in England, as is not resented by English scientists.

There have been recent attempts to introduce a similar law in the United States, seventy years late. This is being “vigorously opposed” by some American scientists. I ask why and will go on asking why until somebody gives an answer that is more plausible than my own answer: that these scientists unconsciously hate the flesh of living creatures.

We all know about the experiments on humans carried on in Germany under Hitler, but we tell ourselves “our” scientists are not like that. I wonder if the natives of Hiroshima would agree. I wonder if the mothers of small children would agree, in New Mexico and other places where there has been high fallout followed by high increases in childhood leukemia. I wonder if people who have been cured of cancer by Krebiozin would agree, while the A.M.A is still against Krebiozin and stubbornly refuses to listen to the evidence which Dr. Carlton Fredericks and a few other heretics have dared to make public.

And what about our noble rulers in Washington who have gleefully joined with the Russian is sabotaging the U.N. in preventing any sane resolution of the nuclear stalemate? What about our judges who sentence human beings to death by strangulation and gas poisoning and electrocution?

Would any of these things be possible if mankind had not been taught that the flesh was secondary to abstract ideas about non-existent “spirit” or meaningless metaphysical jargon about “Truth” and “Justice” and Situational Sovereignty” and other resounding bromides? If people knew and felt that our life is here and now, in the flesh of the moment, could they allow it to be injured unnecessarily?

This is what I mean by the Schizogenic Fallacy. We do not sense and feel the beauty of flesh, the joy of flesh, the aliveness of flesh. We feel ourselves still as disembodied “spirits” or “minds” carting around between-one-hundred-and-two-hundred-pounds of brutal matter.

This is schizophrenia, withdrawal from reality, inadequate perception of reality. This is the result of our parents’ attempts to make us “good Christian children”, “good Jewish children,” “good Americans.”

The Realist is constantly receiving letters that begin: “I’m a liberal and a freethinker, but…” The but always turns out to be something to the effect. “I wish the editor would make Robert Anton Wilson stop writing about sex. It upsets me.”

I am always glad to see such letters. I want to upset people. What I am writing about, in most of these columns, is the survival of life on earth, directly or indirectly. I don’t want readers to take my words in an abstract way. I want them to know I am saying: you are sick. We are all sick. I want them to know that I am telling them to change themselves, and that I know it will be an agony for them, because in that change the individual is both the sculptor and the marble, and hurts with every necessary stroke of the mallet.

Look at the world around you, brother. Do you think this is a time for abstract ideas, toys of the intellect, polite essays and pretty pink ribbons? I write with all there is in me, from cortex to cojones. I write in a world that is full of human beings who have turned themselves into turtles, each suffering in his own little armored shell, each afraid to let down the shell for a moment. When I write that the flesh is alive, they do not know what I mean. To them, it is a dead thing, a weight pressing down on them like an Alp. They have built in their own image gigantic and mad super-states, each armed to the teeth, each ready to explode in a moment.

H.L. Mencken once cynically called the Hydrogen Bomb “a great Christian invention.” As usual, he was more profound than the “serious” writers who look down their long noses at his flippancy. The Hydrogen Bomb is the triumph of 2,000 years of Christian idealism. It is the one tool which will create on earth the heaven of which all Christians dream. Once and for all, it will destroy the “vile” and “sinful” flesh, and all “materialistic” and fleshy” desires. It will leave only the reality that Christians desire – pure “spirit” – pure nothingness.

Fulton Sheen says that it may well be his God’s will that this should happen. Almost certainly, it is Fulton Sheen’s unconscious hope that this should happen. But until it does happen, I will go on repeating, in as many ways as I know, what I said a few months ago apropos of the murder of Caryl Chessman:

”The flesh is supreme. It must not be sneered at, or put in second place to ‘spirit’ or ‘justice’ or any other abstract myth. It must not be harmed, ever, for any religion or for any natural state. The flesh must be loved, and cared for, and enjoyed.”