I'm reading a monster of a book, all 805 pages, very slowly

it was first published in 1975 and i don't think it ever hit any bestseller list... it's billed as a "sci-fi cult novel" and also as "the ultimate conspiracy book..." i've been working on it since the end of november because reading it is like watching a fellini movie on acid... after a couple of pages, i put it aside until the next day... however, i've been struck big-time by a few passages, so much so that i've dog-eared them, threatening to excerpt a few for this blog... so, this morning, a quiet sunny sunday in skopje, macedonia, while i'm lolling in the doldrums waiting to go to the airport to catch a late afternoon flight and begin the long haul back to buenos aires, i thought i'd take a crack... see what ya think...

"I am also puzzled," Sam Three Arrows said finally. "I worked, long ago, in New York City, in construction, like many young men of the Mohawk Nation. I found that whites were often like us, and I could not hate them one at a time. But they do not know the earth or love it. They do not speak from the heart, usually. They do not act from the heart. They are more like the actors on the movie screen. They play roles. And their leaders are not like our leaders. They are not chosen for virtue, but for their skill at playing roles. Whites have told me this, in plain words. They do not trust their leaders, and yet they follow them. When we do not trust a leader, he is finished. Then, also, the leaders of the whites have too much power. It is bad for a man to be obeyed too often. But the worst thing is what I have said about the heart. Their leaders have lost it and they have lost mercy. They speak from somewhere else. But from where? [...] It is, I think, a kind of insanity."

hmmmm... strike a chord...? try THIS one...

"But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud eventually acquire access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Constitution."

"What sort of tools?"

"More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinanalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. [...] Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason - or are manipulated into reasoning - that the entire populace must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can't be trusted.

[...]

And the beauty of it is, the majority of the Americans will have been so frightened by . . . terrorist incidents that they will beg to be controlled as a masochist begs for the whip."

ya with me so far...? it gets better...

Of course, the essence of control is fear. The [brainwashing technique] produced a whole population walking around in chronic low-grade emergency, tormented by ulcers, dizzy spells, nightmares, heart palpitations and all the other symptoms of too much adrenalin. All my left-wing arrogance and contempt for my countrymen melted, and I felt genuine pity. No wonder the poor bastards believe anything they're told, walk through pollution and overcrowding without complaining, watch their sons hauled off to endless wars and butchered, never protest, never fight back, never show much happiness or eroticism or curiosity or normal human emotion, live with perpetual tunnel vision, walk past a slum without seeing either the human misery it contains or the potential threat it poses to their security. . . . . Then I got a hunch, and turned quickly to the advertisements. It was as I expected: no [fear reaction]. That was part of the gimmick, too: only in consumption, endless consumption, could they escape the amorphous threat of the invisible [brainwashing technique].

you can probably see why i was moved to not only come back to these passages but also to pass them along...

(from The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, Leviathan by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson)

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