The Secret Knowledge (24 page)

The habit, inculcated at school and at home, of thinking myself a failure persisted through my school career, and, of course, it is to this ingrained assumption that I, in moments of despair, confusion, or indeed, boredom, default.

For, Common Wisdom (and what are the schools if not forcing houses for such?) can never be phenomenological; it must always be operational. The schools and the media must exist, that is, to disseminate and to inculcate and endorse only that “knowledge” already approved by the mass. This is neither a risible nor an unimportant function, as society must, to function, share attitudes and information likely to induce cohesion, but these studies bored me to death.

As a kid I loved comic books. My favorites were, unsurprisingly, the adolescent male fantasies: Superman, Batman, and so on.
⁷⁶
I never was a fan of the Archie comics, which were a lighthearted (that is, to me, worthless) look at essentially harmless juvenile hijinks. But one aspect of the Archie comics intrigued me. He was bracketed by two young women: blonde-haired Betty, who loved him, and black-haired Veronica, whom he loved but who scorned his advances. A close examination, however, revealed that, aside from the color of their hair, they were the same girl.

I have tried to apply this insight to many situations in life, and have found that it often answered. We subdue feelings of powerlessness with the illusion of choice; addicted to cigarettes, we are convinced that we are Camel rather than Lucky people; Coke rather than Pepsi people, Democrats rather than Republicans,
⁷⁷
and so on. These staunch loyalties, in addition to gratifying our feelings of perceptiveness, are the placeholders for those doctrinal differences, which once plagued the Christian West.

I knew, though I could not articulate, that while the schools existed to inculcate
habit,
they had and could have no interest in the dissemination of
knowledge.
This is not to say that schools did and do not spread information, of course they do, both good and bad, but this information, reducible in its benign form to the three Rs, can be learned as easily or more easily outside of school, where it is less apt to be tainted by the spurious though amusing doctrines which of late have come to characterize our Education System.

School bored me. And I was so sunk in the shame of my failure there that it took many years' distance to see that school bored most everybody. As an autodidact, know-nothing, or “enthusiast,” and as one self-deprived of the benefit of “common knowledge,” I was inspired to create that unified theory of existence which, in its wholesale appearance is called philosophy and in its retail, drama.

Darwin tells us there must be variation in order to create balance. Balance cannot exist without variation.

Socialism suggests a state of balance, which, once having been established, will never alter.

This is the dream of the return to the Garden of Eden, of a rejection of the current, unfortunate struggle which, in total, is called: civilization.

Darwin writes, in
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
: “We shall best understand the probable course of natural selection by taking the case of a country undergoing some physical change, for instance, of climate.”

The elections of 2008 were characterized by vicious, indeed vitriolic, feelings and expressions of rage on either side, each side thinking the other on the brink of destroying the world.

The fervor, verging on panic, of each side might be attributable directly to the question of climate change; each side, that is, sensing a diminution of resources, expounding its own strategy for species survival; and each side accusing the other of concern not for the survival of the
species,
but only of its own moiety. The Left claims that it must save the world as the climate is changing, the Right that it must save the world from the Left's irrational and foolish fears, e.g., of climate change.

Both the Left and the Right are, whatever they appear to be addressing, and however they cloak it as a concern for values, or civil rights, or tradition, are each essentially concerned, finally, with a scarcity of resources. The Left sees the earth polluted, wild lands disappearing (indeed, having already disappeared), species extinction, vanishment of fossil fuels, and it counsels that the sky is falling, and that any who cannot see it are, each day, and in all their endeavors and acts, worsening the problem.

The Right shares this concern about resources and productivity, but counsels increased exploration and exploitation, free capital to fund innovation, and a stronger defense against those outsiders who would appropriate those resources which are ours. (Those resources the Left asserts belong not to us, but to “the world, and future generations.”)

Now, no adherent of either view is going to live his life in congruity with all, or even most of the precepts he believes himself to endorse. For while he espouses them, his life, day to day, whether on the Left or Right, is lived pretty much the same as that of his ideological opponent—utilizing or conserving more or less the same amount of goods, and “ruining the world” or “living out his life,” using the same amount of water, air, and oil. The hatred occasioned by the late election then
must
conceal a deeper sense of impending change.

This ideological division, after the election, has deepened. The Left, seeing its pet fear of climate change debunked
⁷⁸
, has moved on to health care—maintaining its ineluctable eschatology and, as usual, merely relabeling it.
⁷⁹
The fear of the Right, based upon the preelection behavior and pronouncements of then Senator Obama, was of devolution of America into a Socialist State. This fear, unfortunately, has not been dispelled, but ratified by his behavior as President. The hotheads on the Right want those on the Left sequestered as fools and madmen, and those on the Left want their counterparts on the Right killed.

Abortion, same-sex marriage, and birth control, whatever else they are, are a displacement of anxiety on the Left about the state of our civilization, as are offshore drilling and the right to own firearms (for example) to the Right; the Left frames its arguments around the essential goodness (barring the Right, Israel, and the Jews) of all humankind; the Right—around the race's observable pursuit, as individuals and states, of its own ends, irrespective of its pronouncements (the Tragic View).

The ascription to leaders of supernormal powers is a recurring aberration (called the Election Cycle) which entertains us, and licenses those thoughts, words, feeling, and actions usually kept in check, and it is perhaps no accident that the election cycle (formerly called “elections”) is growing and will continue to grow to be continuous, just as, to the preverbal mind, “The Woods are Burning.” The Left thinks the Right (America) is ruining the world. The Right thinks the Left is ruining the country. I endorse the latter view.

The effective organ for the transmission of cultural information is the family. For, the children, though we know they are never listening, are always watching.

Not only attitudes but mechanisms for social interaction are learned from earliest infancy: this is how a group operates, this is the role of the breadwinner(s), this is the role of the dependents, this is how a
covenantal
group conquers stress and oppression, this is how that group deals with questions of religion, race, national service, charity, injustice.

If the family as a cohesive covenantal unit does not exist, attitudes toward these universal situations must be learned by the individual later in life, when he is both conscious of and burdened by his pressing personal needs—that is to say, when he is not supported by a family.

He must, then, imbibe or acquire these attitudes mechanically
,
his consciousness affected by the lack of the surety of the home—where one learns, as a child, by observation not by consideration. He is, then, prey to his intellect. What does this mean? He must now trust his intelligence to choose between various courses of thought and allegiance: so he is likely to choose that course which flatters his intellect. But the intellect is an inadequate organ for working out the myriad interactions of a society.

“Good ideas” go bad, and the intellect, rather than be affronted by its failure, will ascribe the reason elsewhere (e.g., the inevitable French “
Nous sommes trahis
” and the Liberal “The program
itself
was good—it had insufficient funding”).

But the interactions of the family were not based upon reason, and so, not liable to casuistry. They were based upon the generationally bequeathed experience of previous families; experience so deep and ingrained that it could neither be absorbed nor parsed by reason. (“This is how one treats one's wife, one's husband; this is the correct way to express disapproval, the correct way to ask for help, for indulgence, forgiveness, solitude,” et cetera “
in our community
.” For the family exists to inculcate those laws which will aid the child in the wider world—the world as experienced by its parents and
their
parents. Do we truly want to give this function to the State?)

Written rules and laws are only and can only be codifications of the unwritten rules which precede them. These unwritten codes of behavior have been worked out over millennia. The child learns them through constant observation, not through indoctrination. The child who has not been exposed or subject to these rules (treat your elders with respect, take care of your possessions, always defend your family members, do not bring bad companions into the house, never speak ill of or to your family, etc.) may come to think them arbitrary (cf. my generation of the sixties), and endeavor to create rules of his own, based upon his reason, which is and can only be (to a child) a conveniently self-excusatory name for his desires: copulate freely, do not marry, do not respect, but mistrust all authority, demand governmental support, base political choices upon feelings rather than experience, do not bother to learn a trade, et cetera.

Curiously, the brightest (or, perhaps, the highest achievers) of our educational system go to the elite universities where intelligent young people are misled into the essential fallacy of Liberalism: that all society and human interaction is susceptible to human reason, and that tradition, patriotism, marriage, and similar institutions are arbitrary, and stand between the individual's spontaneity and his ability to create a perfect world: that the individual's reason is supreme, that he is, thus, God.
⁸⁰

The child imbibes the lessons of civic virtue, religious devotion, marital behavior, restraint, self-esteem, and self-sufficiency in the home. If the home is destroyed, or its influence negated or derided (as it was both by Welfare, and as it is in today's Liberal Arts “education”), he is hard-pressed to come, through the force of his own reason, to a practicable ethical view of the world. His need for order, then, can easily be warped into the view that there is something wrong with “the world,” and that this dysfunctional world requires his participation in a grand new scheme to put things right. This scheme may be called Marxism, Socialism, Fascism, Cultural Revolution, or “change.” It is attractive not to the supposed “victims” of the old order, the poor, the “colonialized,” the “oppressed,” but to the deracinated affluent.