Est
Est
The Steersman Handbook
L. Clark Stevens
Bantam |
ISBN: 978-0912264127
ISBN-10: 912264128
Updated: 2024-12-20
Copyright
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Copyright Holder.
ENCODED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Part 1
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What Is Coming
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Catch-All Term
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New Language
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The Red Book
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The Black Book
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Overthrow
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The Whole Earth
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Dynamic Processes
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Transformation
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Transformative Processing
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Transformation to What?
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Adversaries
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Movement Vs. Establishment
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Time of Crisis
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Ultimate Victory
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Whos Really Got the Numbers?
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How Long?
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No Way Out
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Trends to Oblivion
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Why Does the Transformation Occur?
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What Is the Electronic Environment
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Formative Years
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Expanded Awareness
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The Simulsense
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In-Depth Examination of “Linear”
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Linear Concepts
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Non-linear Nature
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A Comparison of Sensory Modes
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“Civilized Behavior”
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Captive Children
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Tribalism
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Neo-Primltives
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The EST
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Sum, Es, Est (Lat. Pres. “To Be.” Est: “It Is.”)
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Leaders
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No Leaders and No Followers
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Success
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Parasites
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Motivation
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Clear Definitions
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Physical Basis
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Mass Phenomena
- First Moratorium
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Show of Unity
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Show of Violence
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Police and Military
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A Bloody Birth
part 2
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“The Heart of the Beast”
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Selling the Public
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An Important Event
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Guidance System
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Different Skills
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The Inhumans
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Military-Industrial Complex
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Efficient Managers
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Labor Unions
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Original Purpose
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Dont Rock My Barbecue Pit
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Organized Religion
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Why War?
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Public Support
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Lobbies
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The Idiot King
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Constitution
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Antagonist
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Emergency Measures
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Speculation
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Barbed Wire
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Black View
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Dead End
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Nowhere
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Ethnic Bill of Rights
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Unique Document
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Peaceable Assembly
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Illegal Assembly
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Pollce/Mllltary Lines
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Line of March
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Vast Gatherings
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All Power
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Why Any Form of Government?
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Life Support Systems
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Pinpoint of Crisis
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Premises
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Prelude and Transit Zero
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Transit Zero
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Charts of Survival
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Dirty Word
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Political Leaders
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Beyond Politics
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E = MCa
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The Kinetic Power of People
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Flash-Groups
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Compulsive Violence
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Inside the System or Out?
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Resonance
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Mongoose Tactics
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The Soft Establishment
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Ecotactlcs
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Granular Tactics
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The Capture of California
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What Kind of Candidate?
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Bridge Over Troubled Waters
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Hard-Line Tactics
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Intimations of the Transformation
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Transformer
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Age of Aquarius
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No Party
Part 3
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What Comes After?
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Prediction
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Transition Stage
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Livelihoods
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The Sociosphere
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Incentive
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On-going Government
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The Future of Law and Order
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Local Changes
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Peace Officers
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The Future of Television
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The Future of the Ego
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Drugs Tomorrow
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Altered States of Consciousness
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The Future of Authority
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Limits of Prediction
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Prophecy
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Prophecy of Chbffl
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Outer Limits
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The Role of the Individual
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Consultations
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Charts
Glossary In Brief
The Steersman Handbook
Charts of the Coming Decade of Conflict
NATIONAL GENERAL COMPANY
EST: THE STEERSMAN HANDBOOK
A Bantam Book / published October 1971
AU rights reserved.
Copyright © 1970 by L. Clark Stevens.
This book may not be reproduced tn whole or In part, by
mimeograph or any other means, without permission.
For Information address: Bantam Books, Inc.
Published simultaneously tn the United States and Canada
Bantam Books are published by Banterm Books, Inc., a National General company. Its trade-mark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a bantam, is registered In the United States Patent Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10019.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
¶ Part 1
1/What Is Coming Make no mistake: the upheavals of the moment are but a mild foretaste of what is to come. That which is now upon us in America reaches beyond disorder, riot or insurrection. Beyond revolution, beyond classification; what is now unfolding is no less than the transformation of all things. Revolution is included in the transformation, but in forms never before experienced. Vast patterns of change sweep across the nation like pressure systems in the weather report. / Social configurations flourish and fade with the seasons. The sole condition which is reliably constant is change.
2/Catch-All Term In a sense, revolution has become permanent but thereby loses definition. Events in America today are beyond the limiting status of revolution. This fact will not readily be accepted by those who have an investment in the name of revolution. Leaders who claim revolution, authors who write of revolution, poets inspired by revolutionall will tend to resist the sweeping away of revolution itself. Their fervor is not in question; their concern is clear. The concept is wrong. Revolution is a linear concept by which a new structure supersedes an existing structure. There is no new structure.
3/New Language The definition of revolution, “the overthrow or renunciation of one government or ruler and the substitution of another,” does not accord with the present continuum of events. The upheaval in America today provides a chaotic surf upon which would-be revolutionaries steal wild rides, but to define the upheaval as revolution is to fail to discern its essence. It is not organized. It has no plan. It has no doctrine. There is no pattern, no structure no leaders and no followers. It happens. It is.
“The world is undergoing a transformation to which no change that has yet occurred can he compared in scope or rapidity.”
DE GAULLE
4/The Red Book
“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
CHAIRMAN MAO
5/The Black Book
“Revolutions are based upon bloodshed. Revolutions are never compromising. Revolutions are never based upon any kind of tokenism whatsoever. Revolutions are never even based upon that which is begging a corrupt society or a corrupt system to accept us into it. Revolutions overturn systems.”
MALCOLM X
6/Overthrow
“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government.”
Declaration of Independence
7*/The Whole Earth* Present events manifest things in common with classic revolution: mass gatherings, marches, militancy, slogans, strikes, barricades and violent confrontations. Also, various parties engaged in the struggle often announce traditional revolutionary aims including the seizure of state power. But be these pipe dreams or the earnest endeavors of true doctrines, they are dust on the surface of the American cauldron. The voices of “revolution” have not suddenly become persuasive and the masses have not been inspired by bold strategies and tactics. No revolutionary slogan has awakened America and aroused fervor in the people. The great awakening words of today arise out of the struggle for life on this planet: Peace, Love, Freedom. These are not slogans of revolution; they are not tenets of organization. They are conditions of survival and they belong to the whole earth.
8/Dynamic Processes All prior thought has regarded social forms as fixed “things.”
Social systems were considered stable entities which only changed by vote, coup or revolution to another stable system. Old orders were considered to have been swept away by new orders. Examples of structured societal forms are: Primitive Communal Tribalism, Slave States, Feudalism, Socialism, Communism, Fascism, Democracy, etc.
“All previous revolutions had, as their goal, the attainment of some new state of equilibrium. What we are seeing in our time is a new order of revolution, whose goal is not a new equilibrium, but social disorder itself. It is the first social recognition that continuous change itself is a form of equilibrium and that it is only in disorder that we find order."1
DON FABUN
Today, social structures, once considered to be rigid entities, are better understood as dynamic processes. Electronic information can now cope with vast ranges of data in extreme detail. This flow of information “softens” apparently rigid forms into changing patterns. The overall field of observation is now the planet earth. Social processes covering the planet are no more fixed than are cloud-cover systems observed by satellites. The old notion of a rigidly compartmentalized earth is a vestige of linear cartography which printed the world as grids of latitude and longitude with fixed national boundaries.
9/Transformation The concept of revolution is a vestige of this same linear need for concrete entities, wherein the present social order will be overthrown by a new social order. Old Left concepts require Capitalism to be overthrown by Socialism. This has occurred in the U.S.S.R., and the Socialist order turns out to be rigid, linear and obsolete. The whole earth requires entirely new concepts.
Transformation differs from revolution qualitatively. Transformation does not arrive at a fixed, rigid, linear entity. Transformation transforms and continues to transform. It does not stop. It is the ongoing, transformative process of change itself, ever changing.
Transformation is what is in store for the planet earth. This pattern-view of social configurations will enable mankind to inhabit the earth. Great, basic flows-of-energy have now come to conscious awareness. Vast processes, hitherto invisible and overwhelming, are now subject to understanding. Eternal change, manifest in the orbit and rotation of the globe, is now the substance of all reality: day and night, heat and cold, water, air, weather, land, seasons, life, birth-growth-death, food-chains, motion, energy-exchange, the electromagnetic spectrum.
10/Transformative Processing
"In the concept of constant inexorable change the most valuable assets of man are his utterly abstract, weightless ‘ideas’ which permit his swift recognition and adjustment to the ever changing pattern. The most valuable ideas are those which not only comprehend the change but also the trendings of the change and anticipate the next important change eventsas does the good driver of a car, a pilot of a plane, a captain of a shipthereby enabling the safe and satisfactory dynamic, forward, transformative processing of man in evolutionary universe.”
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
11/Transformation to What? In answer to the question, “Transformation to what?” the answer is, “Transformation is the what.’ ” Transformation is constant, inexorable change. Two thousand years before Christ, the sages of ancient China discerned the underlying polarity of all things. They noted the ongoing, transformative process of all things and recorded a compendium of measured wisdom to help steer a path through inevitable change. In those simpler times, they were not beset by products and could see beyond material possessions to the fundamental ground of all being: the environment itself, the land, the planet earth. Their ancient compendium is still one of the great charts for Steersmen of the planet earth: The “I Ching,” Canon of Changes, is a remarkable nature oracle. Not instructions, not rules to be followed, not a doctrine, not an authority; it is a very old, very wise friend, always available for deep and serious consultation.
Let “revolutionaries” scoff. The land-ethic is the relevant ethic. Peace, Love and Freedom belong to the whole earth. Transformation relates to life forces, “gentle stewards of the earth’s community of being.” Transformation is eternal change, changing.
12/Adversaries Few will deny that the populations of industrial societies have shown severe division between two great masses of peoples: the “young” versus the “old.” Simplistic on the face of it, there is validity to identification of the conflict as “war between the generations.” There are exceptions on both sides, which will be accounted for below, but, by and large, the vast majority of those under 30 support the Movement while the vast majority of those over 40 support the Establishment. The division occurs between the ages of 30 and 40 (in the 1970s) for reasons to be explained in this handbook.
13/Movement Vs. Establishment The Movement is variously identified as “Under Thirty,” “Woodstock Nation,” “Youth Revolution,” “Now Generation,” etc. The Establishment is variously identified as the “Corporate Power Structure,” “Military-Industrial Complex,” “Silent Majority,” “Amerika,” etc. The population comprising the Movement is predominantly unstructured and is basically non-organized, although it coheres in spontaneous mass upon occasion. This phenomenon of massive “holding together” will be examined below. In sharp contrast, the population which comprises the Establishment is severely structured, heavily organized and is characterized by rules, regulations, plans and exact hierarchies of leaders and followers. By definition, the Establishment is the “established order.” As such, it forms the national, corporate body politic, founded upon laws and orders, and it maintains armed forces to protect and prolong its established lifeways.
14/Time of Crisis The crisis decade is now at hand, as polar extremes become inflexible. Agitation becomes chronic. Oscillation increases and violent phasing, if not controlled or modified, must result in cataclysm. How much worse it will get before it gets better depends upon the extent to which the established order resorts to its powers of forceful regulation. The Movement will not or cannot cease its irregularities. It is, by nature, irregular.
“The antidemocratic arrogance and nihilism from the political extreme left is an extremism that has spawned a polarization of our people and is increasingly forcing upon the people the narrow choice between anarchy and repression. And make no mistake about it, if that narrow choice has to be made, the American people, even with reluctance and misgiving, will choose repression.”
SENATOR MARGARET CHASE SMITH
15/Ultimate Victory The Movement generations count upon ultimate victory through sheer weight of numbers; for as the natural birthrate swells their ranks, the natural deathrate cuts down the opposition. Meanwhile, the older generations wield military and police power to correct what strikes them as uncivilized outrage.
16/Who’s Really Got the Numbers? “The majority of Americans are now under 30” has become a catchphrase which suggests to many in the Movement that the path of wisest resistance is to wait patiently until Peace, Love and Freedom “occur naturally.” The notion of dropping out and quietly relating to the Cosmos may be attractive, but the premise of waiting-it-out rests upon statistical quicksand. If the notion that the “majority of Americans are now under 30” gives anyone comfort by suggesting that the Movement is a dominant political bloc, the actual numbers reveal nothing of the kind. The eligible voting strength of the Movement (age 21 to 34) is 42.6 million.” This is 41 million less than the Establishment’s eligible-to-vote 84 million. The Movement population is indeed the majority, for out of the total U.S. population of 208.6 million, those under 34 number 124.2 million, while those over 34 number only 84.3 million.
However, let it be noted that the entire “over 34” group is eligible to vote while in the “under 34” group, 21.3 million are under 5 years old; 20.5 million are between 5 and 10 years old and 20.6 million are between 10 and 15 years old. This means that over half of the people who would seem to comprise the Movement are not old enough to drive; much less to vote. In addition, many of the 18-25-year-olds are captives of the draft and both sides are thinned out by non-voters, such as the apolitical “abstenate,” felons and the infirm. The dominance of the under 30 population is economic. They form the vast majority of basic consumers.
17/How Long? Members of the Movement who wish to remain in a holding pattern until the Establishment obligingly dies off must wait until those who are now 45 years old reach an age of at
• If the lowering of the vote to age 18 is found to be Constitutional, the Movement voting strength increases by approximately 7 million to 49.6 (35 million short of equaling the Establishment’s 84 million).
least 60 before the real elders thin out and let go. By that time sufficient reinforcements from the under-age population will have arrived in voting strength. A 15-year wait will take the Movement generations straight to Orwell’s 1984 and deservedly so, for they may well have waited themselves to death.
18/No Way Out Those who elect to drop out imagine that their refusal to participate in a corrupt society benefits the earth because they, at least, do not support and perpetuate the established order. This attitude must be examined in light of the fact that there is no way to drop out of the planet earth. The world itself is at stake and America is the center of crisis, with the power to drown it all in pollution or destruction. Those who attempt to hide “until it blows over” expect to detach themselves from the actuality which threatens the whole earth. But the use of so much as a car, a phone or a kitchen match relates them to the corporate structure. Failure to resist the forces of waste, pollution and destruction relates them negatively as they attempt to “leave the field.” They know the ecological balance is slipping fast. They know that food chains are now being destroyed. The fate of the biosphere is in the balance. We are swiftly approaching the hour of transit and there is no place to hide.
The urgency of the situation is due to massive inertial effects. Giant ecological trends which accumulate gradually are not responsive to instant control. They tend to “skid” or “swerve” as they attempt to alter course. Pollution buildup may be likened to a car gathering speed as it heads for a cliff. There is a point of no return beyond which brakes and steering wheel are useless. Too close to the brink, it matters little that the driver applies the brakes and wrests the wheel with all his might. Even with all wheels locked, the force of inertia must cause an overshoot into uncontrollable disaster.
In terms of pollution, we are becoming aware of the fatal drop ahead of us. Instinctive optimism, unable to gauge the true margin of survival, tells us that we still have plenty of time to put on the brakes and to change course. But pollution has been building up for a long time and our momentum is greater than our limited instincts can grasp. Moreover, our engine is so designed that it does not readily respond to brakes.
19/ Trends to Oblivion The decade of the 1970s contains the midpoint of the transit time which is also the point of no return. By the 1980s, pollution of the atmosphere will no longer be a reversible error. By the century’s end, failure to redesign the distribution of world food will result in rampant famine. These trends, clearly visible in 1970, if unchecked, lead with rigor to oblivion.
“The ’70s must be the decade when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters and our living environment. It is literally now or never.”
PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON State of the Union Speech, 1970
“Now or never” is acknowledged by any and all.
20/Why Does the Transformation Occur? Why the upheaval? Why the war between the generations?
Evidence exists which suggests that the Movement generations (post-World War II) are characterized by a pervasive shift in the fundamental Nature of Being. Almost as though a massive “mutation” had occurred, millions upon millions of the young suddenly ceased to conform to the established lifestyles of previous generations. Generally acknowledged, this abrupt nonconformity has bewildered the Establishment and has stimulated a host of theories to account for the phenomenon. Theories which have gained prominence are: threat of atomic war, chronic war in the Far East, Supreme Court decisions, racial conflict, Communist agitation and subversion, anarchistic provocation, LSD and the “drug culture,” failure of religion, corruption in government, the Mafia, student unrest, affluence, alienation, permissive family situations, pornography, the piB, Dr. Spock, etc.
“America is unquestionably experiencing an extreme crisis of confidence. And this crisis is unquestionably not illusory, even if it coexists with affluence, social gains and scientific miracles. It is a crisis with many sources; but none is more important, I think, than the incessant and irreversible increase in the rate of social change”
ARl’HUR SCHLESINGER JR.
Any or all such theories may be contributive to some degree, but the pervasive shift in the fundamental Nature of Being is best accounted for by the advent of the electronic environment which was identified by Marshall McLuhan, Teilhard de Chardin, Buckminster Fuller, Lewis Mumford, Norbert Wiener and others.
211 What Is the Electronic Environment? Instant electronic input via television, radio, telephone, telegraph, wire-services, wire-photo, teletype became commonplace by the end of World War II. Since 1945, the rising curve of electronics-in-daily-use has coincided precisely with the rise of the Movement generations in America. This new environment conditions formative minds in new and unexpected ways. This unique conditioning will be examined below.
“Young people who have experienced a decade of TV (to cite only the most obvious mosaic form of the electric age) have naturally imbibed an urge towards involvement in depth that makes dll the remote and visualized goals of visual culture seem not only unreal but irrelevant, and not only irrelevant but anaemic. It’s the total involvement in all-inclusive nowness that occurs in young lives via TV’s mosaic image. This change in attitude has nothing to do with programming in any way, and would be the same if the programs consisted entirely of the highest cultural content. The change in attitude resulting from relating themselves to the mosaic TV image would occur in any event.”
MARSHALL MCLUHAN
22/Formative Years In all industrialized countries, the pre-World War II generations were primarily shaped in formative years by school books. Print itself, in neat lines across the page, molded the minds of the young. Reading was the primary input which shaped the line-of-thought of Industrial Age children. Social identity was drilled from printed manuals.
“Reading and Writing and ’Rithmetic
Taught to the tune of the hickory stick.”
School Days
In sharp contrast, the sons and daughters of these print-programmed parents have been shaped quite differently in impressionable years by the new electronic information which goes far beyond books. Lines-of-type in books creates thoughthabits which emphasize visual input in linear sequence. Television input is obviously not frozen lines-of-type and is not merely visual; hence, the new thought-habits are created by multisense input in non-linear, random sequence. This new, electronic programming of young minds by a steady diet of mixed media at electric speeds instills “all-at-once” habits of thought and expression which are not the same as the “one-by-one” habits of thought and expression of print-conditioned previous generations. Certain media experts suggest that this brings about a new ratio of the senses, that emphasis on the eye has been “traded” for emphasis on the ear. This linear notion of a “new order” is erroneous in that it still compartmentalizes the senses one at a time. What has actually happened is a non-compartmentalized “no order.” Contradictory as it may sound at first, the linear mode, or “line-of-thought process” of the print conditioned generations, caused by constant reading of orderly sequences of words in neat lines, has not been abandoned by the new electronic generations but has been included as a quaint but useful “language-of-reading” along with today’s non-linear, all-senses input, the “Tanguage-of-moving-pictures” (which arrives as the daily diet from disorderly, flashing-on-and-off, noisy electronic sources). This TV-radio-wire-service input also includes the “language of sound” as constant ear-input via the sound channels. This simultaneous ear-conditioning also tends to break up orderly, linear habits of thought and expression in formative minds since the sound channel on television (and radio) is quite obviously not arrayed in neat lines on a printed page but is a chopped up, formless miasma of variable input as are the screen images. McLuhan’s notion that television is “tactile” is incorrect. What is tactile is the television viewing environment wherein eye and ear are joined by all kinds of touch-input as the entire body sprawls, lolls, eats, drinks and does not sit in the silent, still, linear rows of classroom or theater. This pervasive input of eye, ear, touch, taste and smell, any of which could be linear taken alone, all happen to be nonlinear in the electronic environment and are simultaneous. This disorderly inundation relegates linear print reading to a skill which seems relatively minor to the flashing-on-and-off, formless, variable children of the electronic environment. Moreover, in today’s electronic world, the Movement generations feel no need to “outgrow” their non-linear habits. Only in the orderly structures of the elderly Establishment does the linear printed page dictate habits of thought and expression.
“Elsewhere emerged the Hippies, gentle offspring of the Beatniks themselves heirs of Bohemiawhose art work, like their play (indeed, the two were one), was communal, thus political. This art was manifest in general by ‘new’ mixed media and in particular by rock groups. Some inaudible signal, some psychedelic flare, caused the five invisible jars that once contained our separate senses to overflow into each other with such orderly confusion that we now heard velvet, saw sound, tasted purple, sniffed C-major, not to mention caressing sorrow and listening to the hues o) terror.”
NED ROREM
Many members of the Movement attribute their simultaneous sensorium to the use of psychedelic substances, such as acid, grass, peyote, psilocybin, etc. These hallucinogens, also known as “head drugs,” do tend to modify synaptic transmission. Be that as it may, the sense-input-conditioning of the electronic environment best explains the otherwise unaccountable “wildness” and nonlinear lifestyles of those masses in the Movement who are non-users. Let it be clear that hallucinogenic drugs do tend to confirm and amplify the all-at-once sensory mix, but they are not die cause of it
23/Expanded Awareness Simultaneous sensory input is the formative mental diet of electronic conditioning. This all-at-once surround brings about a new, habitual mode of perception and conception, an overlapping fusion or sensory “mix,” which is here called the simulsense.
24/The Simulsense The simulsense is not an innovation, for it prevails in primitive peoples, in children and those who have maintained overlapping, simultaneous, sensory mix as their habitual mode. Artists, creators, geniuses and certain eccentrics of all ages and cultures have always tended toward multisensory blends which are noted as “acute sensitivity.”
“The Greeks had the notion of a consensus or a faculty of ‘common sense’ that translated each sense into each other sense, and conferred consciousness on man. Today, when we have extended all parts of our bodies and senses by technology, we are haunted by the need for an outer consensus of technology and experience that would raise our communal lives to the level of a world-wide consensus. When we have achieved a world-wide fragmentation, it is not unnatural to think about a world-wide integration. Such a universality of conscious being for mankind.was dreamt of by Dante, who believed that men would remain mere broken fragments until they should be united in an inclusive consciousness.”
MARSHALL MCLUHAN
What we now witness in the world is the integration of man. The pervasive shift in the fundamental Nature of Being is the new “universality of conscious being,” the inclusive consciousness of the whole earth.
“The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they ARE nature.”
MARSHALL MCLUHAN Counterblast
25/In-Depth Examination of “Linear” The Steersman Handbook considers linear versus nonlinear as the opposing forces: The Simulsense peoples of the Movement versus the Compartmentalized Linear peoples of the Establishment. “Straights.”
Examination is in order. People who are predominantly readers or who depend upon the print-oriented culture of the established order necessarily follow lines-of-type with sequential spelling out of words and sequential following of words in sentences. This step-by-step “line of thought” is the essence of the linear mode. Linear sequence of thought has been developing since spoken words were first strung together, but the advent of print on a page (the typographic technology of Gutenberg) locked it in. Fluent speech is far more flexible, improvisational and “round-about” than the frozen, rigid line-of-print. A linear author tends to be logically exact, as in legal briefs or technical treatises. A nonlinear author tends to be poetic and to engage in sensory mixes, i.e., “bitter scarlet,” “thick laughter,” “green thoughts,” etc. Such metaphor is unwelcome in industrial or financial contracts. A poem printed on a page appears “out of line,” ragged, next to a neat ordinance. Literal-minded (print-conditioned) people tend to be linear. A phenomenon experienced by artists is the fact that linear-minded executives, when forced by commerce to relate to “creators,” consider them to be childlike, eccentric, colorful or crazy. This is a case of the linear view attempting to account for non-linear, simulsense awareness. Thomas Mann’s comment, “There is always something disreputable about genius,” is yet another description of simulsensory nonconformity to the linear mode.
“The tendency to carry youthful characteristics into adult life, which renders man perpetually immature and unfinished, is at the root of his uniqueness in the Universe, and is particularly pronounced in the creative individual. Youth has been called a perishable talent, but perhaps talent and originality are always aspects of youth, and the creative individual is an imperishable juvenile.”
ERIC HOFFER
Those who habituate a linear-visual mode of sensory perception will insist that they hear, touch, taste and smell vividly. There is no argument about that. In the single-sense (separate-sense) mode, the actual instruments of reception are not impaired, nor is there any lack of keenness. What is suggested is that whenever the favored, habitually emphasized input is linear, all of the senses tend to be employed habitually in the linear mode (i.e., separately and, in sequences, “logically”). When the linear mode dominates the sensorium, one-sense-at-a-time is brought into “focus” instead of the flood of simultaneous, overlapping mix. The result of the linear mode is compartmentalized selection: “uncluttered concentration.” This differs qualitatively from “simulsense awareness.”
26/Linear Concepts Worth noting are linear concepts ingrained in print-conditioned society: “assembly-line,” “out of line,” “party-line”; desks in linear schools are arranged in neat lines as compared to informal clusters. Formality requires the “reception line.” Protocol demands hierarchic lines of succession, lines of authority, lines of command. In the linear view, the black-and-white of letters on the printed page are correct colors for formal occasions: “black tie,” “white gloves,” “basic black.” Traditionally, metropolitan police in major Industrial Age capitals wear black-and-white as seen in Londons “Bobbies” and the New York Police Department. This black-and-white of print is characteristic of literate, Europe-America and is not characteristic of the ancient, tribal families of the pre-literate Monarchies. In tribes, clans and “field” groups, the colorful emblazons of heraldry reflect die dazzle of nature; i.e., lions, elks, boars, thisdes, acorns, planta genista, as well as such fanciful simulsense mixes as griffins, basilisks, hippogriffs and chimeras.
At Buckingham Palace, nature is preserved in the bearskin busbees of the Coldstream Guards whose drummers wear leopard-skin halters. Heraldic plumes and horsetails decorate helmets while Victorian clerks, buders and Bobbies observe in bookish black-and-white. The linear mode of the Industrial Age is very evident in the factory-city lines of identical houses where black-suited legions wearing white collars march like sentences across a Page bookkeeping chores.
“Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.”
T. S. ELIOT
A step down from the book-minded classes are the “uneducated,” non-reading classes who wear blue collars and punch timeclocks on assembly lines where machine presses stamp out the line-of-types of cars.
27*/ Non-linear Nature* Where typographic linearity does not prevail, the police are invariably “overdressed” in the pre-Gutenberg heraldic mode or wear rustic khaki, olive-drab or sky-sea blue ensembles in varying degrees of simulsense mix. “Field uniforms” of rangers, sheriffs, highway patrols and combat forces depart from the printed page. The more removed from books, the closer to nature, the less black-and-white formality. The diplomatic corps wears pinstripes. Dress uniforms of the aircorps, marinecorps and Northwest Mounted Police are comparatively gaudy. The early piratical Navy was a riot of color but as the environment of steel ships embodied the machine age, the uniform printed page prevailed but not without an echo of oceanic blue, heraldic gold and combat “decorations.”
28/A Comparison of Sensory Modes Compare a visual, linear dinner to a simulsense, non-linear dinner: In London’s conservative, upper-class dining room, formal dress is black tie, the formal tablecloth is white. Dishware is white with no visible cracks or mismatched goblets or wooden bowls mixed in. A visible spot spilled on the snowy damask is a faux-pas. White napkins instantly cover spills and keep fingertips from touching greasy foods. All touch is carefully subdued as guests are separated in chairs and try not to clank matched silverware. Courses are served in rigid order and according to rank. All sound is subdued and voices are carefully modulated. Lines of butlers in black tie serve silently. A dropped tray is disastrous. Even the sense of taste is subdued by not too exotic spices. Cosmic sensibilities are protected. Heavy garlic is considered provincial-primitive. Loud, boisterous, spilling, swilling behavior can only occur if drunkenness sweeps away the linear printed page and allows the simulsense to play.
At dinner in an Italian fishing village or in a tent in the desert or in a hut in the jungle or on a Polynesian island, the influence of the printed page is nonexistent and the simultaneous, sensory mix is clearly evident. Everyone dresses differently in a vivid display of colors and textures. No black-and-white is required. (Save by book-minded missionaries.) The tablecloth is checkered or embroidered or nonexistent. Glassware, if any, need not match; goblets, bowls and dishware are decorated with colorful designs. Cracks and chips are no serious drawback if the vessel is serviceable. Food spills as it may and the “eye-catching” spot on the table is ignored. Fingers pick up food, reach into pilafs or dip into poi. “Getting into the dinner” with tactile gusto is good taste. Putting an arm around a shoulder, exchanging morsels, breathing spices, garlic, oregano, curry all ends in singing and dancing and expressions of love.
29/“Civilized Behavior” That which the established order calls “civilized behavior” is largely conformity to the linear mode (formalities) of typographic, printed-page conditioning. To “civilize” the savage, one begins by teaching him how to read. No moral judgment is made and right or wrong is not the issue. Evidence indicates that those people who are strongly print-conditioned tend to be linear-minded and tend to be part of the established order. As such, they tend to live out the linear mode and hold to uniformly predictable preferences, such as: dramas with story-lines which are logical with “beginning, middle and end”; music with distinct melody line; place high value on a particular point of view and hold rigid, structured opinions. They prefer “their own kind” and are quick to “type” people. They tend to conform in dress; accept hierarchies; go through channels; discourage emotional displays; consider colorful clothing “loud” or informal; keep their hair trimmed and combed; try to be neat; avoid natural body smells; disapprove of “off-color” language; compartmentalize sexuality; set goals, and, step by step, seek them methodically; accord with rules and regulations and expect enforcement; specialize in a particular work skill; focus on one thing at a time; command attention through looking; feel that chaos threatens as “things fall apart”; etc. Persons characterized by the above are primarily print-conditioned and find nothing questionable about their way of life. In their view, nonconformity is to be measured against the linear standard, judged, and either tolerated, disapproved of or condemned.
“Physical affection between the defendants and their friends and witnesses was always noted either by the judge or the prosecution for the record. The scene of Bill Kunstler hugging Ralph Abernathy was particularly offensive to the judge, who declared that he had never seen so much ‘physical affection in my courtroom.’ ”
TOM HAYDEN The Trial
30/Captive Children Children of strongly print-conditioned parents are sometimes deprived of television and other electronic input media (such as rock-and-roll radio and recordings) in the hope of preserving established tradition. Such children are usually expected to study diligently, to compete strongly and to “suceed.” To the degree that their captivity is secure against electronic
encroachment, they conform. But, by and large, the children of the electronic environment are no
longer conditioned by printways of thinking, feeling and living. The efforts of linear schools prove futile versus the electronic inundation. Although electronic children learn how to read, they are
necessarily programmed (conditioned) overwhelmingly by television, radio, recordings, films,
telephone, telegraph, wire-services, telephotothe all at once. The Movement sees no reason to limit its lifeways to the Establishment’s limited, linear mode of perception and conception. In turn, the Establishment is sore offended, indeed, frightened, by the hairy, patchwork grab-bag of the “uncivilized” young whose simulsensory awareness includes every culture on earth, encourages participation in all arts, and has proved capable of contributions to those sciences and professions which permit of hairy, patchwork people.
instant input of the entire world, every day and
31/Tribalism Although they share the simul-sense with primitives, Movement generations are done something of a disservice by identifying the entire modern-day, simulsensory lifestyle as “tribal.” In spite of appearances, such as costumes, hair-styles, beads, body-paint, exotic dances, communes, etc., authentic tribalism is as minor a part of electronic man’s totality as is book reading. Tribalism seems to suffuse the Movement because the younger generations’ non-linear, natural lifeways tend to relate to the Cosmos as do primitive tribes. However, the simulsense mix of today receives moment-to-moment data concerning the entire globe, all of its history and worlds beyond, whereas the simulsense mix of authentic primitive, pre-literate (pre-linear) tribal man received only the input of meadow, birds and the local village. Not only are electronic media opening the doors of perception but the carrier waves conveying information deliver more noise and more signal at greater range. By his apt, evocative term, “global village,” McLuhan means the unified community of the whole earth, and the term, “tribal,” as he uses it, suggests one, unified, worldwide Family of Man rather than fragmented, primitive groups.
The peoples of the Movement, children of the whole earth, are not about to close down their simulsensory awareness to conform to a narrower view. They refuse to “get into line” and for that the print-conditioned Establishment will “throw the book at them.”
32!Neo-Primitives (Also see Glossary) The natural state of man was originally simulsensory. Awareness of nature related the primitive to the Cosmos. This childlike state of awareness was nonlinear. The advent of typographic technology, at the beginning of the Renaissance, gradually structured the sensorium in the orderly, sequential, one-at-a-time, step-by-step, homogeneous, uniform precision known as “linear.” This linear mode made possible the assembly-line, feed-lines, mechanical order, production lines, mass production, lines of goods and products, row-housing, prefabrication, skyscrapers, the hardware machine-society known as the Industrial Age. These are achievements of the Establishment.
The advent of electronic technology, hastened by World War II, had little effect on the existing structure of the sensorium of adults already programmed by print lines. However, new generations / being formed by the new electronic environment were programmed completely differently: nonstructured, non-orderly, out-of-sequence, all-at-once, overlapping, mixed, non-uniform, not precise non-linear. This non-linear mode accomplishes production through computer automated technology. Electronic tapes “order” variable, multispeed, custom-craft control in many patterns at once. Design systems, controlled environments, climate control, geodesics, bionics, recycling systems, cybernetics, synergetics; all are achievements of the electronic era and cannot be attributed to the Industrial Age when hardware ruled supreme.
All people who were bom into the electronic environment, and who have thereby been conditioned to simulsense awareness, tend to relate to the Movement and tend to resist the Establishment. It is of vital importance to note that the non-linear lifestyle of the Movement includes many who have not the slightest linear capability whatsoever, due to no mastery of books. They may read single words or short phrases such as flash on TV screens but have no interest in sustained reading. They have no structured technique of any kind. They “play it by ear.” These members of the Movement are Neo-primitives, on a par with preliterates. No moralizing is intended and no judgment is made by the observation that in their benevolent aspect primitive peoples may be close to the Cosmos, but in their malevolent aspect they are close to the predator. Violent and criminal individuals with the volatile, emotional mix of savagery belong to the Movement but do not tend to serve it. At the mercy of stimulus, appetite and vagary, they are often prey to destructive gratification without measure or balance.
“Q. They say that ‘Stranger in a Strange Land? and ‘Revelations,’ Chapter 9, has affected you. Have you ever read them?
A. No, I never read books. I have heard of the book. Also, the Revelations bible has been read to me. 1 have tried to look through the words but it didn’t tell me what I didn’t know already.”
Interview with Charles manson
The Neo-primitive need not be destructive but tends to have relatively little control over raw emotion. The same applies to true primitives, although paternalistic tribal structures do demand some degree of restraint. Authentic primitive peoples are held in high esteem by the Movement. The American Indian, such as the Hopi, provides an example much respected for his husbanding of nature and his manner of relating to the Cosmos.
33/ The EST The Neo-primitive is limited to the capabilities of ancient cultures. Failure to achieve any linear capability indicates an arrest of development possibly due to broken families, ghetto deprivations, dropout situations or other dislocations which prevent linear achievement of any kind. This limitation of capability does not affect the simulsense. Neo-primitives are extremely aware and are often gifted with great insight. But they are current versions of a very old breed. The primitive mode is not a new phenomenon. The new phenomenon is those people of the Movement who are naturally at home in the simulsense but have also achieved linear capability. These people are genuinely comprehensive and include all of mankind’s capabilities. They are prime movers of the Movement; they are transformers of energy. Complete representatives of the Electronic Social Transformation, they are the people of the EST.
34!Sum, Es, Est (JLat. Pres. “To Be.” Est: “St is.”) The Est people differ from pre-literate primitives; they differ from the literate Establishment and they differ from non-literate Neo-primitives.
They are post-literate. They have “passed” literacy but include it as one of the many abilities in their comprehensive lifeways. They are not “book- minded” but they get into books. They are technically capable. They relate to the soil in all its mystery and they understand chemistry. They relate strongly to the influence of heavenly bodies and they understand astronomy, physics and the electromagnetic spectrum. The Est people know what a computer is all about. Although not specialists, the Est people are not awed by mathematics. Buckminster Fuller, a simulsense man in spite of his advanced years, is an authentic Est. His World Resource Inventory publication “World Design Science Decade 1965–1975” is one of the important charts by which to navigate the coming decade of conflict
Est people are those who are capable of handling the systems and technologies necessary to the whole earth. They are not specialists, although they have mastered specialties. They are people dedicated to construction and not destruction. They are people who are willing to give the love and care that it takes to help it happen naturally. They help create the climate in which things flourish. In The Book of Tao they are Teh.
351 Leaders The Book of Tao is another chart of passage, particularly in its comments on government and leaders.
“As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. The next best, the people honor and praise. The next, the people fear; and the next, the people hate.
“When the best leader’s work is done the people say: ‘We did it ourselves!* ’’
The Book of Tao
The Movement is unstructured. It is the biological unfolding of man in universe. When it gathers together, it does so without organized structure. The entire Movement is a natural happening which is inherently free. The Est people, bom of the Movement, are free people. They are not “leaders” in the linear sense of hierarchies. A number of Neo-primitives relish dominance and assert “leadership ” Ego, because it announces authority, often commands followers. The need for authority in the form of boss, guru, lord and master is an echo of the paternal family structure. No moral judgment is made of authority structures by identifying them as linear. T,in parity has definite value as an instrument of orderly sequence, indeed, b
uildings tend to collapse without linear measurements; families tend to collapse without fathers and mothers. As an instrument, it is valid: to accomplish effective solidarities it is vital. The Est people include linear capability as part of their mastery of man’s total vocabulajy of being. Thus, the Est is entirely capable of organization but is not wedded to organization as a way of life.The Est does not seek to organize Peace, Love and Freedom nor does it set such goals; rather, it is aware of Peace, Love and Freedom as the fundamental and natural matrix of being which must be furthered.
Birth is a natural event; the good midwife lets it occur and helps when interference obstructs the course of life. The Est people are midwives of the transformation.
36/No Leaders and No Followers The Movement, in spite of ego assertions by Neo-primitives and notwithstanding tables of organization by “revolutionaries,” cannot be led. It has no authoritarian leaders and no submissive followers. What it does have is brothers and sisters, peoples of the world who relate with love, in peace and freedom, to their household earth. The historic quality of leadership now changes into individual “aura,” “charisma” or “field of influence.” Aware people radiate a flow of energy. This open flow is unique and cannot be pretended or simulated. Intrusions of ego are immediately discernible in that they reduce or filter the open flow of energy by structuring it into obviously unnatural forms. When the doors of perception are open, the doors of creation are the same. The people of the Est are not in any way “separate” or an elite. Beyond the assertive grasp of ego, the new leadership is inherent in each individual. No different from courage, it is not something to seek out, prove or demonstrate. Hemingway displays on safaris and in bull rings are not acts of courage. They are contrived demonstrations. Courage does not seek to prove that it is courageous. Leadership, no longer the authoritarian “leader,” does not seek to prove its status. The Steersman is not compelled to be the Captain.
377 Success Responsible, linear parents wish nothing so much as to have their children “succeed.” Professing not to care exactly how their offspring succeed, they nevertheless conceive of success as the achievement of respect in the established order. This usually means the achievement of financial security. Status, in linear terms, suggests some degree of financial substance. The professions, such as law, engineering, the military, architecture, science, finance, etc., are considered worthy avenues of success, as is a position with a major corporation.
The simulsense young do not respond to this linear concept of success because to them the requirement, in terms of lifestyle, means giving up individuality to conform to prescribed behavior. In the established order, particular clothing is required. Particular, short hairstyles are prescribed. Homogeneous “blending in” seems to the young to be a betrayal of creative originality. Genuine innovation, startling achievement, arresting ideas are subtly discouraged as “out of line.” Singing, dancing, smelling, “raunchiness” would soon destroy a linear career. Also, the young do not seem to be able to choose a job and “settle down.” To them, to settle down is to cop out on life by electing to become a sterile, duplicate person.
To benevolent adults, these reluctant children resemble vague wanderers. Bodies without purpose. Lost. They seem to live in a vacuum of triviality, listening to formless music, absorbed in confusing pictures, smiling at obscure jokes, enjoying odd costumes, gyrating to sensuous dances, sniffing pungent incense, believing in the most gullible way in pseudo-sciences, astrology, the occult. And adults see their children apparently playing with fire: drugs, venereal disease, perversion, theft, arson, riot, sedition, anarchy.
Parents who love their children despair of jumbled, overlapping, wrap-around nonconformity, however creative. To the parents, the Movement does not seem to be original. Lumped together, by linear “type,” all long hair seems identical and in its own way conformist, regardless of color, length, combed or natural. Individuated clothing of youth is categorized by parents as Halloween costumes. All new music is labeled as noise and no nuance is accorded to the actual variety of Movement music: folk sounds, blues, jazz motifs, rock and classic played on everything from harpsichords to Moog Synthesizers; it all “sounds the same” to closed ears. The linear mind acts as a filter which classifies and dismisses any stimulus which does not conform to the preferred patterns of the established order. The linear mind does not enjoy garbage, junk and hodge-podge detail. In contrast, the nonlinear mind relishes all-at-once clashes of textures, sounds, shapes and smells. Garbage is framed as art: pale eggshells against burnt umber coffeegrounds becomes a Japanese print. Fused glass becomes a collector’s item. Non-linear people revel in the total World Museum, which to them is their whole earth home. The Establishment’s structured, compartmentalized daily life, confined to corporate positions, respectable professions and other linear specifications, seems to spell death to the simulsense. “Straight jobs” are endured by members of the Movement as bleak confinements.
381 Parasites Linear adults, brought up in the work ethic, resist simulsense people and tend to consider them parasites. A world of undeserved leisure seems purposeless and stagnant. Yet electronic technology has brought mankind to the threshold of Eden. Life support systems have been developed which recycle resources powered by the eternal atom. This world at peace holds no terrors for the Movement. The changing planet as “home” is the environment in which the Movement moves. That is the success which stirs the young beyond any mere purpose. The linear world has lost them because they have found the Cosmos.
39/Motivation Simulsense people do not readily relate to long-range purpose. Sustained goalseeking is not their way of life. Primitives and
Neo-primitives are vulnerable to those who exert
linear tenacity of purpose. The primitive ego may distracted by mood, appetite and whim. Responsive to ever-changing input, primitive peoples become diverted from goals and seem to lack “staying power.” They have plenty of energy but it is not structured, step by step, in linear sequence. However, the Est people are not helpless before those who exert linear tenacity, because the Est also has linear capability. Adaptable and flexible, the Est can apply linear techniques or non-linear improvisation as needed. Not governed by rigid goal-seeking, the comprehensive Est furthers the elemental changes of nature, negotiating adversity to best survive in Peace, Love and Freedom.
have self-interested duration but attention is easily
401Clear Definitions (Also see Glossary) For the sake of clarity, the terms introduced thus far are here defined. The Movement is the overall population bloc which moves with the transformation. The entire Movement population is simulsensory and fundamentally non-linear. Along with the youth generations, the Movement population includes people of any age who are simulsensory and non-linear. Neo-primitives are those people in the Movement who have simulsense awareness but do not have any linear capability whatsoever. The Est peoples are those in the Movement who have simul-sense awareness and are non-linear and have also acquired linear capability as a “tool” or “language” but not as their way of life.
Opposed to the Movement population is the Establishment population, which is not simulsensory and is fundamentally linear.
41/Physical Basis What does the simulsense do that makes people who possess it unruly? Why do Primitives and Neo-primitives exhibit a “volatile emotional mix”?
The cerebral cortex has evolved as a selector system which focuses concentration and, in effect, \ “filters out” input which is not the preferred field of attention. The cortex is the seat of extended attention. It stores, retrieves and displays data as “mental imagery.” It is the brain area of structured processing such as making judgments and comparisons: without the cortex, there is no linear capability.
In all animals except man (and certain cetaceans ), nerve impulses from the sensory receptors of the entire body arrive at the diencephalon (old brain) without extensive modification by the cortex. The diencephalon controls individual survival instincts, ancient fight-or-flight reactions, plus species’ survival instincts such as sexuality. Simulsensory awareness “floods” the cortex and the diencephalon is stimulated without so much filtering effect of the cortical system. The diencephalon relates to the “here and now” of immediate stimulus. With lessened cortical influence, reactions are deeper and, in a sense, truer. With a reduction of overbearing cortical control, i.e., with due exercise of the “technique of suspended judgment,” the simulsensory person is closer to the inner human. The simulsense peoples of the Movement are authentically “wild.” Their cortex no longer functions as the inhibitory “up-tight” filter which smothers the diencephalon. Hence the tendency toward homeostatic naturalness.
“Wildness is the state of complete awareness. That’s why we need it.”
Changes
Head drugs are important to the people of the Movement due to their intensification of awareness. In effect, hallucinogens fuse the cortex and it ceases to function as the preferred-field selector system. The diencephalon, the old, wild brain, aware of the fused, flooded cortex (the blown mind) is the ultimate seat of the “self.” Commonplace sensory awareness in infants is the diencephalon functioning before cortical structuring sets in.
“Nearest the Tao is the infant”
The Book of Tao
The diencephalon’s input receptivity is one-to-one “awareness without thought.” When the audiovisual replay-chatter of the cortex is stilled, that which knows is the diencephalon. The diencephalon, evolved over millions of years, has built-in homeostatic balance. Consistent experience of clear diencephalic function, without the aid of drugs or stress-stimulus, constitutes natural mastery. Innate homeostatic relatedness to the environment may account for the ecological morality of those no longer enslaved by rigid, cortical control.
“What is the effect of acid? People ask me that, and I’ve been thinking about it. I haven’t come up with much, though. It’s hard; the influence i is pervasive. But there is one notion that seems to dwell on the face of such facts as I rememberit’s that acid makes you receptive to the idea of an ecological morality. Acid and ecology go together, that’s my thought.”
EDWABD LOOMIS
Bank Burning
Obvious connection or obscure synchronicity, the innate balance of the aware diencephalon relates with harmonious affinity to the eternal balance of nature. The natural man and the natural world are as one.
A valuable book about the effects of change upon the human brain and the body is Man’s Presumptuous Brain by A. T. W. Simeons, M.D.
It explains the relationship between the cortex and the diencephalon and, by virtue of its systems approach, assists Steersmen in managing otherwise inexplicable fight-or-flight reactions in the coming decade of conflict. To the ancient instincts of fight-or-flight it adds the concept of “flow.”
42IMass Phenomena Accept the conflict of our times as “linear versus non-linear” or not, few will deny the profound difference ingrained in the very fiber of the Movement generations. Nor will many deny the Movement a determination which goes deeper than mere stubbornness.
The people of the Movement perceive the world quite differently and their art, appearance and appreciations can be accurately described as multimixed and omnicomprehensive. Speculative as considerations of cause may be, the Movement population is demonstrably powerful in numbers. Mass phenomena such as Woodstock revealed an unparalleled capacity to simply “come together,” however briefly, without regulatory organization. At Woodstock there was no club or membership, no leaders and no followers. An enormous, formless mass many hundreds of thousands strong gathered to share a simulsense experience, then quietly dispersed. The documentary, Woodstock, captures the mood of the phenomenon on film. Not a chart, it provides a historical record of an important landmark in the awakening of collective consciousness.
“Defense Attorney: Where do you live? Abbie: 1 live in Woodstock Nation.
Defense Attorney: WiU you teU the court and jury where it is?
Abbie: Yes, it is a nation of alienated young peoplewe carry it around with us as a state of mind, in the same way as the Sioux Indians carry the Sioux nation around with them.
It is a nation dedicated to cooperation versus competition, to the idea that people should have better means of exchange than property or money, that there should be some other basis of human interaction.”
Court Transcript, Chicago
43/First Moratorium Another mass phenomenon was the first Moratorium of October 15, 1969, at which time the Movement population came together throughout the land in even greater numbers and demonstrated for Peace, again without benefit of leaders and without the status of followers. They were joined by war-weary members of the Establishment. This Establishment group, caught up in the linear mode, is beginning to experience the awakening of awareness. Not to be condemned as “vacillating liberals,” these masses are capable of constructive response to the transformation. Cared for and encouraged, they are potential allies of the Movement. Opposed to war, they are not yet possessed by death. Sympathetic to the antiwar aspect of the Movement, they joined in opposition to the invasion of Cambodia. Scientific American, a respected publication not given to idle speculation, presented a study of public opinion polls in June, 1970 (Vol. 222, No. 6), which indicated that most Americans are against the war in Vietnam. This finding by the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan was based upon an analysis of a decade of published polls on the Vietnam war and also upon national surveys by the Research Center which extended beyond the scope of both the Gallup and Harris polls. The results indicated that the so-called “Silent Majority” is a majority for peace and not for the war.
441Show of Unity The mass unity of occasions such as the Moratorium patently goes beyond organization. No organizational genius could begin to “turn out the crowds” in every state, county, city, town and village. Four hundred college protest demonstrations could not be “coordinated” by some small, clever group of subversives the day after the Cambodia invasion. This obvious fact is beyond the comprehension of the linear-minded Establishment which needs structured, organized concepts in order to function logically.” It is essential to linear mode-of-thought to attempt to discern order in random events and to strive to organize unorganized data.
45/ Show of Violence Earlier on, the chaotic events in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic convention of 1968 began as a mass gathering of the Movement and ended in historic violence. It became necessary to the linear forces of the Establishment to identify the “gifted conspirators who got it on.” Eight were selected; seven were tried. The jury could not find the defendants guilty of the enormity charged; but Judge Julius R. Hoffman, who will be remembered as a precise embodiment of Establishment justice, did find himself surrounded by non-linear chaos with which he dealt severely.
“Our crime was that we were beginning to live a new and contagious life style without official authorization. We were tried for being out of control.”
TOM HAYDEN The Trial
46/Police and Military The unprecedented punishments of the Conspiracy Trial stirred deep apprehension within the Movement and more mass gatherings resulted in violent interface. Reported by the news media as disconnected events, the clashes appeared to be senseless riot as a mob of wild men burned down a branch of the Bank of America. The Establishment might tolerate bloodshed, but burning money was madness. The Movement, in turn, felt that the corporate Establishment had now revealed a stark pattern of increasing force brought to bear against the young. Movement people were being imprisoned for living out their simulsensory, hairy, “uncivilized” lifestyle. The burning bank illuminated the police and the National Guard massed in ranks. At this point, Peace and Love seemed as remote as the year 2000.
Then came Cambodia. Then came Kent State. Jackson State. Augusta. Isla Vista II. The Panthers. And it continues to come.
“What we are faced with is the question of whether or not a new society will be allowed to peacefully emerge. It is never the new people who settle the question of whether the emergence is peaceful. It is the hand of the past that decides whether there will be violence or peace. It is the hand that writes the verdict. It is the hand that raps the gavel. It is the hand that holds the police club. It is the hand that holds the mace. It is the hand that pilots the helicopter. It is the hand that releases the napalm and the antipersonnel bombs over Vietnam. It is the hand of the past that determines how the future will arrive.”
TOM HAYDEN
“1 pity the nation that fears its young.”
FATHER ANTHONY MULLANEY (Benedictine monk: defendant)
Milwaukee Twelve Trial, 1969
47/A Bloody Birth
“If repression is not yet as blatant or as flam-boyant as it was during the McCarthy years, it is in many respects more pervasive and more formidable. For it comes to us now with official sanction and is imposed upon us by officials sworn to uphold the law; the Attorney General, the FBI, state and local officials, the police, and even judges.”
HENRY STEELE COMMAGER
The transformation of the whole earth, inexorable, inevitable, would continue because it could not stop, but the days of birth would be bloody. Somber questions would soon be answered. How much blood would have to be shed? Would too violent a birth result in the death of the mother earth?
“If there’s going to be a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.”
GOVERNOR RONALD REAGAN
48/“The Heart of the Beast?’
“I envy you in the United States. You are in the heart of the beast.”
CHE
The heart of the Establishment is not made of flesh and blood. No person or group of persons presides at the center of power, commanding. Moreover, there is no brain issuing orders. The basic structure which embodies the Establishment is a massive, evolutionary growth on the order of Tyrannosaurus Rex. This dinosaur is an invention which permits human individuals to avoid authority and accountability. It is called a “corporation.” It is an invention designed to process funds and to take the blame in case of failure. It is a fiction, a “corpus” body, written on paper, designed to bear the brunt of bankruptcy. In France it is called an “Anonymous Society.” When it fails, it is declared defunct Its holdings are held in estate. It does not return to dust because it had no substance in the first place. It was a clever scheme, systematized and made legal by statutes describing its organization and its purpose. Its function was and is to make money.
“The Corporationthe synthetic man who, if properly designed, legally can do no wrong, assertedly has a fantastic composite brain and fool-proof enterprise ingenuity, can avoid almost any responsibilities and can be so large, long-lived, rich and powerful that ‘he’ can stay, dominate or even slay any single-handed human or little bands of humans that block the corporations way without legal charge of murder because the corporation is obviously not a ‘real’ man, ergo, cannot be a felon. The corporation needs no passport and can take up residence anywhere in the world or in many parts of the world simultaneously, effecting sum totally in coordination of its parts those tasks which might be prohibited in one or the other of its political residences. But no matter how ‘pure’ the corporation may attempt to make its synthetic, scientific integrity image seem, that image is always inherently corrupt for as the corporation’s directors will tell you, the corporation’s first and only real purpose is to make money. If money can be made gracefully, that makes the corporate servants feel graceful and romantically idealistic but it is irrelevant.”
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
49/Selling the Public Through mass advertising techniques, major corporations manipulate the public. Major corporations are specified because they alone have sufficient financial power to keep up the continuous, extensive saturation needed to influence great masses of people. Also, via “Public Relations,” the major corporation takes care to project a favorable image. Advertising corporations specialize in these representations and, in due course, have sold the public cigarettes, cyclamates, DDT, and other items hazardous to health. When controlled emphasis of information is the work of government, it is called “news management” or propaganda; in politics, crowd manipulation is known as demagoguery. Norbert Wiener in Cybernetics takes note of the manipulation of masses.
"The psychology of the fool has become a subject well worth the serious attention of the knaves. Instead of looking out for his own ultimate interest, after the fashion of von Neumann’s gamesters, the fool operates in a manner which, by and large, is as predictable as the struggles of a rat in a maze. This policy of lies or rather, of statements irrelevant to the truth will make him buy a particular brand of cigarettes; that policy will, or so the party hopes, induce him to vote for a particular candidate any candidate or to join in a political witch hunt. A certain precise mixture of religion, pornography, and pseudo science will sell an illustrated newspaper. A certain blend of wheedling, bribery, and intimidation will induce a young scientist to work on guided missiles or the atomic bomb. To determine these, we have our machinery of radio fan ratings, straw votes, opinion samplings, and other psychological investigations, with the common man as their object; and there are always the statisticians, sociologists, and economists available to sell their services to these undertakings.”
NORBERT WIENER
50/An Important Event Corporations are formal structures. They are organizations designed to process business. Taken as forms, they are, of course, quite neutral. There is, however, an event which occurs in the “life” of a corporation which tends to alter its original direction. It amounts to a modification of the corporate guidance system and is examined below.
51/Guidance System To the degree that a corporation serves the purposes of its original founder, it tends to be “humanoid.” Mr. Post cared very much about Postum and personally mixed, sipped and tasted the product as his personal substitute for coffee. Henry Ford I spent much of his early life under the hood of the Model T and would tolerate no compromise in its design. Walt Disney held exact standards for his cartoon characters, and Land of Land Cameras participates to
this day in Polaroid product as a knowledgeable inventor. Most of these originators incorporate for “tax purposes and limitation of legal liability,” which means that the corporation, a structural device designed to process money, is applied to the business of producing and selling the product.
The actual kind of product is not crucial to the „ conglomerates s under a single,
corporate structure. For example diversify and service many product
overall, corporate control. Thus, we see that the corporate structure serves as processing system and the originator serves as guidance system. When the originators, men personally and primarily concerned with the product, retire, die off or sell out, the guidance system which they embody is altered and in their stead the processing mechanism gradually dominates direction of production. To maintain apparent continuity of original guidance, the founder s name is often perpetuated through heirs, if available. In time, however, processing functions tend to override guidance functions. Thus the original guidance system loses primary control. Driven now by its inherent responsiveness to profit and loss, the corporation “homes” toward money as ultimate target. The product becomes more and more of an incidental, a sort of “necessary evil,” which is merely the vehicle for financial gain. This fact is plainly visible in the massive corporations of today wherein directors are rarely creator-inventors. Most of the originators have been replaced by money-managers, financiers, lawyers and account
ants. In contrast, smaller businesses tend to retain the originator and, thereby, retain the “personal touch.”
52/Different Skills Buying and selling, dealmaking, contracts, negotiation, markets, finance, the complete array of “corporate business,” requires entirely different skills from those required to actually create and make the product. There is an Est law which may be stated: in a corporation, human concern diminishes in direct proportion to corporate size, age and the replacement of creative founders by financial-legal business experts. Corollary: the more efficient the financial direction of a corporation, the more quickly emphasis is diverted away from human concerns into paths of maximum profit. No moral judgment is intended by the identification of profit as the overriding concern of major corporate structures nor is the morality of corporate directors at issue.
531 The Inhumans Television, radio, wire services, etc., convey not only mass advertising but, also, the warning voices of documentary film makers, concerned commentators and guardians of the quality of life; such as the late Rachel Carson, Ralph Nader, Paul Ehrlich, Bess Myerson, and others. With growing awareness, consumers begin to discover that even such basic staples as breakfast foods have lost their original purity as the corporation has lost the guidance of a concerned human and is now homing in on the primary corporate target: profit. Corporations are not concerned humans. They are linear structures. When they are guided by the profit and loss sheet they are simply being good corporations, inherently inhuman. What is at fault is the corporations’ first priority of accountability which emphasizes financial profit over human concerns. What is needed is a return to the original human guidance system; meaning, concerned people who accord priority to constructive contributions to mankind and the whole earth.
54/Military-Industrial Complex
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought by the militaryindustrial complex.”
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWEH
The probability that the Military-Industrial Complex will spontaneously cleanse itself of war is quite remote. The probability that it will cleanse itself of petroleum products is equally remote. The Establishment is heavy with aircraft, automotives, metals and chemicals. Petroleum is the very lifeblood of industrial machinery. Available now are far cleaner forms of energy but the expense of changeover is unprofitable. “Making money,” the corporations’ primary target, is what forces continuation of the use of petroleum products whose exhaust hydrocarbons pollute the atmosphere. Pollution is considered “the only acceptable solution” while increases in cost are considered “completely unacceptable.”
“Philip Sporn, former president and chairman of the American Electric Power Co., told a meeting of the National Conference on Air Pollution that work on air pollution control . . . has demonstrated that tall stacks offer an acceptableindeed, the only pragmaticsolution to the problem of disposing of sulfur dioxide available currently . . . Numerous studies seeking to reduce sulfur dioxide content in flue gas involve estimate increases in the cost of fuel which make the process completely unacceptable even before the operating problems have been evaluated by actual construction and operation ... It may be that there is a definite limit to the amount of sulfur dioxide that can be diffused to the upper atmosphere. It is possible, therefore, that high stacks can be accepted only as an interim solution. But, at present, they are the only acceptable solution available, and for a long time ahead, the diffusion limit will not be a problem . . . The high stack, properly designed, can, without question, meet every requirementecologic, economic and aesthetic”
Yearbook of Science and Technology
Without question?
Oil-spills will continue to destroy the coastline ecology because it remains profitable to carry oil in tankers. It is not now profitable for automotives to convert to nonpollutant fuels or steam-injection engines, so the major corporations will not do so. External combustion engines, which bum petroleum products so efficiently that there is no residual pollutant, are also practical but costly. Partial measures, designed to make smog invisible to the eye, will attempt to conceal the continued pollution of the atmosphere. “Cutting down” on pollution by cutting down on lead in gasoline will be made to sound cooperative but is, at bottom, productive of nitric oxides and protective of the internal combustion engine. Such accommodating approaches are, in essence, public relations cover-ups. Public relations experts are masters of “reasonable accommodation” as, for example, when extensive and obvious pollution of the California coastline by under-sea oil-spills forced talk of a shutdown of offshore drilling. The suggestion that concrete barge-caissons be sunk to seal off the wells which would then cease and desist pumping, was met by a masterful public relations solution which was to increase pumping in order to “relieve pressure.” Needless to say, pumping continued and spills recurred.
“The 70’s will see a rampage of ecological legal prosecutions for disservice environments created by old ‘services.’ This legal rampage against corporations will seem mysterious, polymorphous, perverse. In fact, it stems from the End of Nature, the beginning of the satellite environment. When the planet became the content of a man-made surround, it ceased to be Nature for its occupants. It has to be programmed totally from now on. It is our ‘oikos,’ our household.”
MARSHALL MCLUHAN
55/Efficient Managers Major American corporations, through mass advertising, do not hesitate to stimulate desires and appetities as they desensitize America away from awareness of the people’s real needs and best interests. “Selling the public” has become deliberate manipulation.
“Turns dirty exhaust into good clean mileage . .
STANDARD OIL
This seemingly forthright phrase is an example of devious wordcraft designed to sell gasoline with F-310 additive. Bought-and-paid-for endorsements by public figures such as Astronaut Scott Carpenter contribute an air of integrity to the manipulation.
“We found that if Air Pollution Control tells a power plant to get fly-ash out of the air, the plant dumps fly-ash in the water; and if Water Quality Control tells it to get the fly-ash out of the water, the plant collects it and makes it a solid waste problem.”
AMORY BRADFORD
The internal combustion engine was at one time a genuine advance, but due to massive proliferation, it now threatens the planet with its pollutants. One way or another, the constructive intent has been dissipated as the original purpose of service has been supplanted by purely financial interests.
“The automotive industry is the least scrutinized and most important source of harm. Automobiles generate over half of the air pollution. They are involved in 56,000 deaths, four and a half million injuries per year. It is hard to find a single product that can be improved so measurably with such an immense reduction of all this harm and waste and damage”
RALPH NADER
The men who now control most of the major U.S. corporations are financial experts, deal-makers, money-managers, buyers and sellers. Their staffs are lawyers and accountants while down the line, as a sort of “necessary evil,” often regarded as cogs in the machine, are those people who actually make the product. Let these work-specialists spend too much time or money on the control and elimination of waste products and the money-managers prevent it as “unsound,” meaning “unprofitable.”
561 Labor Unions At one time, labor unions struggled against business management to improve the lot of workers. Better pay, job security and Other benefits were won. In concept, unions are linear structures which, by organizing the masses of workers, pit their right to strike against the rights of ownership. By shutting down production, unions succeed in shutting down profits. Owners and management are thereby forced to decide between sharing more with the workers or being dragged under by the weight of non-functioning factories, plants, “means of production.” The struggle centers upon the mutually exclusive battleground of the work day, expressed as time and money, since a gain by one side in hours or wages is an automatic loss by the other and vice-versa. This is the classic Marxist “class struggle.”
571 Original Purpose The original purpose of unionism has been eroded by the gradual accumulation of the union’s powers in the hands of administrative officers. These officers were originally oriented toward the working man, but over the years their replacements have come from the ranks of the money-managers. Such financial expertise became vital to the administration of immense funds stemming from dues, assessments and investments. Ironically, the union became a business no different from other corporations. The result is that the money-managers of the unions and the money-managers of business corporations share identical interests. The concern of a corporate vice-president for intensely linear contract rules is so similar to the concern of a union vice-president for those same rules that the two men could switch chairs without altering the situation one iota. The union structure is spot-welded to the corporate structure by contracts and is made seamless by the bond of money-managers. The union structure, now a routine business, has been grafted, like a Siamese twin, to the established order. As a member of the Establishment, the union tends to resist the Movement. Where once the cry was to organize the unorganized, the cry today is to lock the doors. The Movement despairs of these locked doors and creates its “own things,” such as custom crafts, clothes, graphics, newspapers, underground films and independent recording companies. These free enterprises have enjoyed immense success since they are guided by their originators and are open to young newcomers who appeal to simul-sense tastes. In light of these new developments, organized labor unions are rapidly losing relevancy in the eyes of Movement generations.
581 Dont Rock My Barbecue Pit
“Repression and authoritarianism are on the rise in America because at its highest levels the society insists that things stay the way they have been, remain in a form familiar and amenable to control: this society believes it is better (for other people) to be dead than different.”
STAUGHTON LYND
Security is comparatively new to the rank and file union member and, in his view, the Movement poses a variety of threats. Skilled union labor is threatened by the unkempt newcomer who tends to undercut for less pay. Fear and anger grow in the recently arrived middle class whose new membership in the great American country club is paid for by union wages. That their children refuse to join the club and prefer hairy, patchwork nonconformity comes as a sharp blow.
Middle-class life, based upon obedient effort, seems to be negated by this new juvenile craziness and the breach is too profound to permit communication. Youthful advocacy of world-wide Peace, Love and Freedom is filtered by the entire lifestyle of the Industrial Age worker to mean Betrayal of the Flag, Immorality, Anarchy and Drug Addiction. Beset by credit-card debt, the respectable worker over 40, still haunted by family memories of the Great Depression, G.I. Joe, one step ahead of the finance company, clings desperately to linear job security in the only America he understands. To keep straight, “he walks the line.”
“One reason why the established order so vehemently resists change in our times is that their entire stake of security and status is in a single form of acquired knowledge, so that innovation for them is not novelty, but annihilation.”
MARSHALL MCLUHAN Understanding Media
59/Organized Religion Many religions are structured along the lines of an artificial family. The paternal figure of the priest guides the flock. Catholicism clearly reveals this structure wherein priests are called “Father,” senior nuns are “Mother Superior,” nuns are “Sisters” and monks are “Brothers.” The Papal “Father” is called “Papa” in Latin languages and addresses the faithful as his “children.” This paternal structure is evident even in improvised religions such as that of “Father Divine” and “Sweet Daddy Grace.” Since neolithic times priesthoods have organized group structures. The use of ritual languages such as Latin or Hebrew, plus traditional preservation of sacred scrolls, has tended to preserve the linear rules and commandments of religions. The advent of printed books further froze structured orders of all kinds. “Church-conditioned” individuals tend to “go by the book.” Religious orthodoxy, by definition, is obedient to the strict linearity of doctrine and hierarchy.
When church-conditioned individuals add corporate fealty to their lifeways they become doubly book-bound. Individuals brought up in religious families feel their security threatened by the “breakdown of organized religion.” What is breaking down is the linear structure of the hierarchy. The non-linear, electronic environment is not breaking down such things as Peace, Love, Freedom; not breaking down the whole earth; not breaking down the heavenly Cosmos; all of which are manifestations of that which religions call God. What is breaking down is the linear structure of the business-church, the corporate-church and the political-church which has been sold to the faithful as a loving, benevolent family. In years gone by, organized religions may well have personified loving families; simple, direct sources of benevolence. Now, as giant, linear structures they tend to endorse the imposition of order-by-force and thereby aid and abet the corporate power structure.
The Est law which applies to mega-corporations applies to mega-churches: to the degree that financial-legal priorities gain control, the original guidance system is no longer operative. The Church Corporate serves the profit and loss sheet and drifts away from God.
“I suppose the essence of religiousness is to break rules at the proper time.”
HAROLD JACKSON
District Attorney
Milwaukee Twelve Trial, 1969
60/Why War? The most profitable business of corporations is the manufacture of instant expendables called “consumer items.” An item consumed means a demand for more. The best consumer is an army. Hence, the Military Establishment.
“An army is a body of pure consumers. As the
army grew in size it threw a heavier and heavier burden upon productive enterprises: for the army must be fed and housed and equipped, and it does not, like the other trades, supply
any service in return except that of ‘protection’
in times of war. In war, moreover, the army is
not merely a pure consumer but a negative producer: that is to say, it produces tilth, to use Ruskin’s excellent phrase, instead of wealthmisery, mutilation, physical destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product”
LEWIS MUMFORD
611 Public Support
“The military budget for fiscal 1971 stands at $71.8 billion, but that is only the beginning. Nondefense segments of the federal budget are laced with costs that are basically military. By conservative estimates, these allocations in the new budget come to $20 billion, raising the annual cost of defense to $91.8 billion. Arthur Bums, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, makes a much higher calculation; he figures that the tangential military costs lift defense spending to more than $106 billion.”
“Hidden Costs of the Viet Nam War” Time Magazine, July, 1970
Millions of Americans work for corporations whose industrial plants produce war materiel. As in the case of the hydrocarbon engine, the changeover to peace products is by no means impossible but is not considered feasible by those sectors of the economy which are dependent upon government contracts.
“Abraham Morganstern, research director of the Electrical Workers Union, believes American workers have become overly dependent on war work. He predicts that the transition to a peacetime economy, which President Nixon has talked much about lately, will be more difficult than is generally realized. For one thing, says Morganstern, the backlogged demand for consumer goods is far less than it was just after World War II and the Korean War.”
“Hidden Costs of the Viet Nam War” Time Magazine, July, 1970
Another kind of advertising persuades industrial workers and their families, “the public,” that war is necessary and that “our boys must not have died in vain.” And so, fight on; pour good money after bad, pour live soldiers after dead, and keep the economy solvent. This advertising comes from the Pentagon, war-contract corporations, war-dependent unions and interested Congressional spokesmen.
“Economist James Clayton of the University of Utah estimates that the total cost of pensions for Viet Nam veterans alone will eventually reach $220 billion.
Economist Robert Eisner of Northwestern University calculates that the Viet Nam conflict has already cost the nation $219 billion. Direct war expenditures accounted for $113 billion. In terms of production lost because young men went into service or stayed in school to avoid the draft, the civilian economy lost another $82.5 billion, by Eisners estimate. The human cost of the dead and wounded is incalculable; the economic drain, in terms of demand and production that will never be realized, is calculated by Eisner at $23.1 billion.”
“Hidden Costs of the Viet Nam War” Time Magazine, July, 1970
62/Lobbies When President Eisenhower warned against the Military-Industrial complex as an unwarranted influence upon government, he brought to light the fact that such influence is exerted at all. The impact of such corporate influence on the laws of the land is, in fact, profound and is achieved by what is known as a “lobby.” The term comes from cornering legislators out in the front lobby and attempting to sway votes. Campaign contributions, hotel accommodations, food, liquor, cars; the “comforts of cashing in” are offered by lobbyists to every legislator in every state in America and to members of the U.S. Congress.
“Everything was provided by the lobbyists who ran permanent free-loading operations in their hotel suites, piling tables high with fried chicken, roast beef, lobsterand, of course, rye and scotch. The largesse went beyond food. Some legislators lived royally in hotel suites where meals, liquor, laundryand even companionshipwere on the house, the Third House”
JESSE UNRUH
It is not an illogical step for corporations that sponsor TV programs which sell F-310, DDT, cyclamates, etc., to sponsor Congressmen to help maintain business. Systematic efforts to purchase favorable legislation exist throughout America and the great corporations are the purchasers. It is a sound business expenditure for a national corporation to see to it that its interests are protected and furthered by laws enacted locally and federally. The laws which “regulate” the oil interests are specific examples as are the laws which “regulate” the automotive interests. The hydrocarbon engine represents an enormous financial investment and it is only prudent that it be protected by laws paid for by interested corporations. It is not because it is good for the planet earth, but because it is good business, that the atmosphere continues to be polluted.
“Almost each of the 80-odd agencies which shared management of the American environment had a history of its own, crusted over with an entrenched lobby, an entrenched congressional committee, an entrenched bureaucracy, each ferociously defending its own prerogatives.”
THEODORE H. WHITE
63/The Idiot King As linear organizations, giant corporations congeal like icebergs in the flow of America’s energies. Their ability to harden the laws in their favor, much like an ice jam, makes them the most serious of all impedances which obstruct the natural currents of change which ought to flow with freedom through the broad channels of the U.S. Constitution. These enormous bodies are not individuals, not citizens, and yet, with the advice and consent of their controlling stockholders (that tiny minority known as the “financial community”), these power structures control the jobs and control the laws and control the country. Their power is financial. And that power is unbridled. Moreover, there is no particular clique or cabal guiding this ponderous bulk. There is no leader or group of leaders with intelligent plans (other than to make more money). In supreme charge there is a profit and loss sheet. Like an idiot king, this fiscal report is surrounded by clever advisors who prolong his power and keep their jobs by finding ways to fatten him until he is swollen. In the eyes of a skillful money-manager, military contracts, in general, provide profits, so war is not to be ruled out. Those who are financially astute well understand that the business which dares take the lead in cleaning up pollution commits fiscal suicide. Therefore, the realistic and skillful money-manager hides pollution as best he can and blames everyone else while being careful not to rock the financial boat as it sinks in a sea of waste. The Movement, with childlike awareness, has discovered that the idiot king is actually destroying the world and has begun to challenge his rule.
64/Constitution Remembering their history lessons well, the Est people have debated the relevancy of 200-year-old American State Papers. Among other things, they have discovered that “inalienable rights” must be defended incessantly. They have also discovered that the U.S. Constitution, which was designed to guarantee life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and which presumes the individual innocent until proven guilty, is not, in and of itself, infallible. Subject to interpretation, it has been no guarantee of justice. Subject to different interpretation and to relevant amendment it is capable of such guarantee. The Est people are becoming aware that Corporate Finance has subverted the laws throughout the land by purchasing lawmakers via “campaign contributions” and “lobby gifts.” The Est knows full well that this form of subversion of Constitutional law is real and that it serves only the corporations’ profit and loss sheet. If the small group of specialists, the “skillful advisors,” have one supreme dedication, it is that of holding their jobs in the corporate structure. There is a cynical rule of corporate executive survival which says, “Don’t do your job; keep your job.” Those who adhere to this hope to ride the dinosaur indefinitely. However, they cannot continue much longer. The mega-corporation homes in on the wrong target; it has fooled too many of the people, too much of the time. There is now a new priority, a new prime target: the well-being of the whole earth. Financial experts specialize in money. Their prime interest is not: soil, seasons, weather, wildlife, food-chains, biology, nutrition, chemistry, physics, astronomy, cybernetics, hallucinogens, world cultures, world art, world peace, world love, world freedom. Without humane guidance, corporate bodies become overspecialized in financial affairs and fail to adapt to the changing environment.
65/Antagonist The “ecological antagonist” is not a man or group of men. It must be emphasized that major, corporate bodies are non-living structures; massive processing-systems. With atrophied guidance systems, they tend to be responsive primarily to profit and loss. The more swollen these corporate bodies become, the greater their destructive potential. Such misdirected bulk constitutes an immense threat as it collides or pollutes or flounders. Here is the stranger required by xenophobic instinct. The “men responsible,” such as corporate lobbyists, may aid and abet disaster by serving the corporate structure but they are merely messengers. Corporate directors and executive officers are not themselves the giant whale, they are like specialized pilot-fish searching out succulent deals. And, strange to say, the very hulk they serve cannot be called to ultimate account because the corporate entity has no finite substance; it is a contrivance, “a way of doing things,” which expands as more and more money is processed. When the financial lifeblood dries up, the corporation vanishes in a puff of bankruptcy notices.
Misdirected by a processing system which pretends to wise guidance but actually responds to financial stimulus before all else, the major corporation operates mechanically. Its responses are automatic. It acts.
66/Emergency Measures When public pressure to halt pollution begins to single out even one of the prime culprits, for example, petroleum, and when major corporations listed on the New York Stock Exchange are threatened by loss of profits, a crisis will be manufactured by the Establishment which will attempt to silence the public and will try to force the continued use of pollutants on an “emergency basis.” Emergency will become the war cry of the established order. The Emergency Crisis, named or not, will be World War III. It may spread through the Far East or it may develop out of the Middle East. It may come even closer to home by involving Cuba. It may come home by suspending traditional American freedoms.
“There’s no way out of it. The Jews are going to stomp all over Sinai, and the Arabs are going to cut the Jews’ throats and the Jews are going to cut the Arabs’ throats; the hippies are going to cut the cops’ throats and the cops are going to cut the hippies’ throats.”
ALLEN GINSBERG
67/ Speculation Although flare-ups may prolong the U.S. presence, the Far East conflict does not present a new emergency sufficient to warrant total silencing of American dissent. Cambodia stimulated dissent. Both the Establishment in America and the Establishment in Russia, each a military-industrial complex, will soon need a world emergency to maintain U.S. corporate power and U.S.S.R. elite-party political power. However, China, with its nuclear missile capability, tends to be a deterrent to world conflict, for it cannot be trusted to stay out. This frozen status quo creates the ultimate condition for the superstates to turn inward and bring violent repression down upon dissident populations. Probability points to increasing proclamations of great national emergencies which will remove Constitutional restraints from the linear forces of police and military.
“Some say we must ‘crack down’ that we must ‘smash’ the challengers and restore tight discipline. In periods of stress there are always some voices raised urging that we suspend fundamental guarantees and take short cuts as a matter of self-protection. But this is not our way of doing things short of a great national emergency!’
CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN E. BURGER
68/Barbed Wire The Movement, in its struggle for life on the planet earth, will find itself branded traitor by die linear war machine. Extraordinary powers will be assumed by the President and correction centers will be filled by those elements of society deemed subversive. “If a dictatorship comes to America, it will wave the stars and stripes and sing the National Anthem.” And its armband will carry the word “Emergency.”
“The thrust is everywhere the same, and so too the animus behind it: to equate dissent with lawlessness and nonconformity with treason. The purpose of those who are prepared to sweep aside our ancient guarantees of freedom is to blot out those great problems that glare upon us from every horizon, and pretend that if we refuse to acknowledge them, they will somehow go away. It is to argue that discontent is not an honest expression of genuine grievances but of willfulness, or perversity, or perhaps of the crime of being young, and that if it can only be stifled, we can restore harmony to our distracted society.”
HENRY STEELE COMMAGEB
691 Black View The first to be repressed will be Black Militants. J. Edgar Hoover has already pronounced them subversive. Black Militants have preached violent revolution where common sense says death is their only sure reward; but, under the backlash, they have gained the sympathy of the Black community. Harsh irony is to be found in the fate of Black Americans who now bear the double brunt of racism and repression. The struggle to participate in country club society has always tasted of ashes but now tastes worse as the doors are closed to Peaceniks.
70fDead End Militants in America must become aware of the dead end that they are boxed into by policies based on classic revolution. Study of Fanon has revealed that the American continental land mass is not Algiers. Studies of Mao, Lenin, Giap and of the Sierra Maestra may have awakened dreams of genuine revolution but efforts to implement guerrilla tactics do not work in a Constitutional Democracy with no “center of power” to overthrow. The capture of an American radio station is absurd when hundreds more surround it. The seizure of a state capitol is foolhardy with forty-nine more to go. Each state capitol has a House, Senate, Governor, U.S. Representatives and U.S. Senators; each State Militia is reinforced by federal units backed up by National Reserves capable of waging war in the Far East for ten years without once calling for full mobilization. Rehind this array of might is the world’s most destructive Air Force with capabilities ranging from napalm to the H-bomb.
“The fundamental principle is that no battle, combat, or skirmish is to be fought unless it wiU be won.”
71/Nowhere Militants now know that guerrilla warfare as practiced by Che or the Tupamaros may be effective in countries the size of Rhode Island where a single-city Seat of Power permits of seizure, but in the U.S.A., the Super- Power, a country sprawled across half of the globe with governmental control divided, checked, balanced, split, chopped and shredded geographically, temporally and personally, there is nowhere to start or finish.
“The Founders sought to approximate a true representation of the people by providing many different ways of counting heads. For the national government, itself a federation of states with complex forms of representation, they provided a House elected for two years from fairly small constituencies of equal size; a Senate in which one-third only was elected every two years from the statesthat is, from constituencies of varying size; a President, chosen, as they conceived it, by electors from the separate states, and for a term of four years, which did not correspond with that of any one group of the legislators; a judiciary appointed for life after confirmation by the Senate. Thus no two branches of the government were chosen by the same constituency or for the same term of office.”
WALTER LIPPMANN
This system of dividing power into many dimensions of space, time, weight and quality can only be suspended in National Emergencies. It can also be subverted by corporate lobbies who use money to influence the vote of legislators away from the true interests of the people. Apart from these two avenues of usurpation, the Constitution, despite its age, is wisely fashioned in its “design of divided powers” which makes it virtually impossible for a would-be dictator to simply take over. The best that a despot can hope for is a local domain such as Chicago or Alabama. Beyond district, city and state boundaries, despotic power drops off sharply. The Establishment, however, is the entire established order which exists throughout the nation in the form of all linear social structures and all social organizations. The Movement also exists throughout the nation as a non-linear population. Thus, interface between the Establishment and the Movement occurs “locally,” everywhere. The transformation occurs “locally,” everywhere, and is revealed in its national proportions only when it is reported by the electronic newsmedia.
72/Ethnic Bill of Rights With no specific person or place to overthrow, guerrilla warfare loses all direction. Pressed for a specific target to overthrow, certain militant theorists have singled out the U.S. Constitution as the “revolutionary objective.” At the “Revolutionary Peoples Constitutional Convention” (Philadelphia, September, 1970), Huey P. Newton, Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party, delivered a powerful speech. Eloquent and incisive, the address could well have reaped the ultimate whirlwind in that it called for a new constitution.
“The sacredness of man and of the human spirit requires that human dignity and integrity ought to be always respected by every other man.
We will settle for nothing less, for at this point in history anything less is but a living death. we will be free and we are here to ordain a new constitution which will ensure our freedom by enshrining the dignity of the human spirit.”
HUEY P. NEWTON Philadelphia, 1970
Newton’s challenging declaration led to a credibility crisis when, at a November follow-up meeting, nothing of substance materialized. This failure did not discredit Panther sacrifice but did reveal inconsistency. The Panthers strive for precise organization with regulations, titles, paramilitary nomenclature; the linear look is elaborate. However, it rests upon non-linear masses who might seem to respond to the structure, but, in actual fact, respond to the galvanic field of personal charisma. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., galvanized a great charismic field. After his death, the linear organization he headed lost its extraordinary influence. The “life” had gone out of it. Huey P. Newton also has authentic charisma which amplifies when extended by non-linear programs such as breakfasts for ghetto children, free shoes, community self-determination, etc. In contrast, Panther efforts to structure a quasi-Marxist, linear ideology drains energy from the charismic field. The Panthers are too often stuck with heavy rhetoric and have difficulty extending their militant image into creative action. Black solidarity, tenuous at best, cannot find unity in Old Left concepts. The ideological split between Newton and Eldridge Cleaver attests to this fact. As U.S. citizens, most U.S. blacks relate to the U.S. Constitution and infinitely prefer relevant amendments to scrapping the whole thing. The Panthers can avoid the linear trap of Old Left “socialist overthrow” by the tactical phasing of meaningful amendments into the original constitution which could amount to a powerful, new Ethnic Bill of Rights.
73/Unique Document No mere document can “do” anything. A piece of paper is not the real world. What makes the traditional U.S. Constitution so worth claiming by the Movement is that it is a linear, structured document designed to describe the greatest possible degree of non-linear, unstructured freedom through peaceful means. Although there is enough to work with now, the Constitution can be further clarified and improved by amendments (i.e., an Ethnic Bill of Rights; Corporate Guidance Systems, U.N. Responsibilities, etc.). Still unfinished, it can serve the changing times and should be made to do so.
74/Peaceable Assembly
“Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free existence thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Article I, Bill of Rights, U.S. Constitution
The people of the Movement do not have to ask permission to exercise inalienable rights.
“Freedom is and must always be at the beginning; it is not an end, a goal to be achieved. One can never be free in the future. Future freedom has no reality, it is only an idea. Reality is what is.”
KRISHNAMURTI
Not “we will be free.” We are free.
The Establishment knows that peaceable assembly is guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. However, local authorities have curtailed this right by depriving the Movement of suitable places, convenient and prominent, in which to assemble. Local ordinances prohibit parades, marches and massing without police permits. Local police suspend the Constitutional rights of the people “for the protection of the public.” Seeds of violence take root when local police attempt to enforce local ordinances which curtail Constitutional rights. The conflict is not new. Local and federal jurisdictional clashes have occurred from the beginning, the resolving of which is a traditional function of the Supreme Court
. the CIA, in theory merely an informationgathering agency, covers its far-flung operations in some 60 countries with a cloak of secrecy so thick that even Congress cannot penetrate it. The Army itself, entering the civilian arena, further endangers freedom of assembly and of speech by employing something like a thousand agents to mingle in student and other assemblies and report to the Army what they see and hear.”
HENRY STEEEE COMMACER
What is now discerned is the conflict between linear and non-linear lifeways which cuts across both local and federal jurisdictions. Linear people, linked by their pervasive structure, are intent upon enforcing the authority of the Mflitary-Industrial Corporate Power Structure. This Corporate Power Structure pretends to hold the Constitution captive by virtue of its corruption of legislators.
75/ Illegal Assembly Pre-demonstration legalities are usually contested in court prior to a mass assembly, and, as an assertion of authority, the federal court may order the local authorities to issue police permits. Thus far, the Movement is “properly in line” and often receives its guaranteed rights. However, the actual demonstration is subject to a different set of rules. As stated above, “Emergency” is the shield behind which local officers-in-charge wield power as they see fit. The operative phrase which clears the way for linear attack is, “This gathering is hereby declared an illegal assembly.” Pronounced by police bullhorns, it is an edict from which there is no immediate appeal. Whether it is or is not an infringement of Constitutional rights cannot be debated on the spot. Negotiation is not permitted nor is serious protest condoned. The “lawful order” to disperse is backed up by police and/ or military forces.
761 Police I Military Lines The police/military, severely structured organizations, made up of fines of identically trained men, dressed uniformly, obedient to lines of command, move in organized formations against the unstructured, non-organized, formless mass of diverse individuals who have been declared “out of line.” Weapon-carrying enforcers of local ordinances (the book) move with machine precision as they initiate crowd dispersal procedures.
“The regimentation of modern warfare carries much farther than the actual discipline of the army itself. From rank to rank passes the word of command: that passage would be impeded if, instead of mechanical obedience, it met with a more active and participating form of adjustment, involving a knowledge of how and why and wherefore and for whom and to what end: the commanders of the sixteenth century discovered that effectiveness in mass-fighting increased in proportion as the individual soldier was reduced to a power-unit, and trained to he an automaton. The weapon, even when it is not used to inflict death, is nevertheless a means for enforcing a pattern of human behavior which would not be accepted unless the alternative were physical mutilation or death: it is, in short, a means of creating a dehumanized response in the enemy or the victim.”
LEWIS MUMFORD Technics and Civilization
In the course of conflict between police/military procedures versus mass movements which gather to exercise Constitutional right of peaceable assembly, various individuals in the crowd find themselves in direct violation of more and more lines from the pages of the book.
“At 7 A.M. the Police Commander spoke over the public address system. He ordered the crowd to disperse. Immediately an arrowshaped ‘wedge formation of 300 police officers began to march down Clay Street, clubbing and Macing demonstrators and newsmen. An observer, a lawyer, testified: ‘They beat seemingly everyone who was near the front of the line. It didn’t seem to matter.’ ’’
Berkeley Campus, Tues., Oct. 17, 1967
Ordinances which are automatically violated by resistance to local police action are: “Resisting a Lawful Order to Disperse,” “Disturbing the Peace,” “Resisting an Officer,” “Disorderly Conduct,” “Resisting Arrest,” “Bodily Assault,” “Felonious Assault,” “Inciting to Riot,” “Conspiring to Riot,” “Conspiring to Cross State Lines to Participate in a Riot,” etc. The Constitutional right to “Peaceably Assemble” is rapidly buried under local, state and federal charges.
77/Line of March Marches are more readily tolerated by police authorities than are assemblies because a march is itself structured in a line and is organized. A line-of-march with a prearranged point of dispersal guarantees transience. The “order to disperse” is built in. Crowd marshals, civil deputies of police authority, each wearing a uniform armband, regulate the line of marchers according to rules set forth in the contract-permit. Thus lines of people are regulated by lines of authority. Linear order prevails.
78fVast Gatherings The right to assemble will become increasingly crucial as the transformtion unfolds. From time to time, the peoples of the Movement will gather together. Interspersed with medium-sized local gatherings, which will tend to meet increasing police/military measures, will be gigantic massings which must, eventually, become the target of repression. At issue is the U.S. Constitution. Local ordinances, justified or not, will simply try to wipe out the right of peaceable assembly because linear forces must attempt to contain, control and direct the non-linear Movement. Major infractions of established order such as radical destruction of property provides the Establishment with justification for the use of force. Minor infractions of established order in the form of “symbolic action,” such as flag burning, draft card burning, effigy hanging, name calling, etc., provide the Establishment with excuses, if not justification. Escalation of violence occurs as one rock is thrown, one police club strikes (not necessarily in that order), CN or CS gas is lobbed, canisters are tossed back, etc. The National Guard is activated. Mass arrests result. Death occurs. On grounds of controlling subversive activities, the Establishment evokes emergency measures which release local authorities to improvise as they see fit. The Constitutional right to peaceably assemble is thus repressed.
“Police always have a range of options for crowd control. At one extreme, they can grant permits for demonstrations and keep a minimum of police present, with reserves nearby. At the other extreme is the full denial of the constitutional right of assembly accompanied by military occupation. What makes the police choose the harder line is not the military threat presented by the demonstrators (which is usually nonexistent when compared to their own deterrent strength). The police take the harder line to make a political point, to frighten and intimidate.
TOM HAYDEN
The Trial
79/All Power Free Citizen, Huey P. Newton, carried the U.S. Constitution in one hand and a gun in the other. Local ordinances do not permit the bearing of arms while Article II of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights does. Newton personified the conflict between rights. He conceived of the “racist power structure” as usurping his rights under the Constitution. The local, linear Establishment saw clear and present danger in the shape of Newton’s gun and promptly declared an emergency. However, from the outset, Newton’s group had clearly designated itself as the Black Panther Party of Self Defense. Subsequently, various Panther spokesmen, authorized or not, have announced revolutionary aims inspired by Mao, Che, Fanon, et al. In their effort to avoid the concept of racist struggle, the Marxist concept of class struggle seemed to the Panthers to be a valid line. However, in actual practice, this later line tends to vary. The fire-power of the Establishment apparently convinced the Panthers that lining up in revolutionary rows to shoot it out is suicidal For a time, Newton appeared to have realized that revolution in the U.S.A., with its dispersal of power centers, is not only impractical, it is obsolete.
The Panthers find themselves strong on rhetorie but short on stratagems. The slogan, “All power to the people” reveals their view of themselves as a beleaguered minority. The slogan implies that the people do not really have power and must get it This is a far cry from Huey Newtons original stance which was and still is correct; that of a free man with the U.S. Constitution in one hand and a gun in the other for the purpose of protecting his inalienable rights of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. In October, 1966, the Black Panther Party distributed its original ten-point platform and program which opened with the words, “We want Freedom” and closed by quoting the Declaration of Independence. To “want Freedom” suggests that they don’t inherently and inalienably possess freedom. The fact is that they are U.S, citizens; free men by right of birth. A valid amendment of the platform might be, “We are free men and women. As free people we have the right to determine the destiny of our community.” The Black Panther Party for Self Defense, assuming the title to be an accurate representation, has already served as the advance guard of defense of the U.S. Constitution. It is to be hoped that they realize that this is their original and righteous role and do not long remain beguiled by the Old Left, linear concept of revolution.
“You denied me my right to defend myself. You think black people don’t have a mind. Well, we got big minds, good minds, and we know how to come forth with constitutional rights, the so-called constitutional rights. I am not going to be quiet. I am talking in behalf of my constitutional rights, man, in behalf of myself, that’s my constitutional right to talk in behalf of my constitutional rights.”
BOBBY SEAL.® Court Transcript, Chicago
The Corporate Structure is not the true power. Not a citizenry, it is merely an immense glut of money-processing machinery. Corporations are nowhere mentioned in the Constitution and do not vote. They are specifically restrained from meddling in the electoral process and yet their financial lobbies sponsor legislators and legislation. For radicals, militants and the Movement to allow the Military-Industrial complex to claim the Constitution is a mistake. The Establishment misappropriates it only to keep it from working. Power is not money. Power does not come out of the end of a gun. It takes a man to hold the gun, as Newton
did. The power was not the gun, it was Newton, the man. Walter Lippmann, throughout his writings, identifies the real power as people. Power is the people.
It is now time for that power to defend itself. It is time for the Movement to defend the U.S. Constitution which is theirs by right of birth. Not a symbol like a flag or a great seal or other patriotic emblem, the Constitution is the original structure designed to guarantee the unstructured freedom of peaceful individuals. Defense of the Constitution is defense of the individual. Free U.S. citizens are not rights-beggars. Rights are not gifts given by governments. Defense of the individual is the defense of inalienable human rights: Peace, Love and Freedom. The Movement can achieve coalition within the widest disparity if it recognizes that in the Constitution there exists a chart by which to navigate continuous change. This does not suggest a global application, but for America, in the coming decade of conflict, it provides valid, familiar and necessary articles of freedom.
“America is the only country in history in a position to bring about a revolution without violence and bloodshed. But America is not morally equipped to do so. Why is America in a position to bring about a bloodless revolution? Because the Negro in this country holds, the balance of power, and if the Negro in this coun-
try were given what the Constitution says he is supposed to have, the added power of the Negro would sweep all racists and segregationists out of office.”
MALCOLM X
Nobody can “give” rights. They already belong to the individual. They must be used and defended.
“Revolution without violence and bloodshed” is Malcolm’s vision of the transformation unfolding as the Constitution says it should. Only the corporate Establishment with its brainless, obsolete priority-of-profit obstructs the path of peace. The Movement will gain important ground if it claims its birthright, the U.S. Constitution, interpreted on the spot by free U.S. citizens and defended with all power. The time is past for trivial abuse and counterproductive ego trips. The Movement is strong enough to defend Peace, Love and Freedom.
80 /Why Any Form of Government? A thoughtful view of man in the mass must at times consider the civil populace as an inchoate swarm. The absence of any form of social organization would seem to reduce large numbers of people to a helpless crowd. Could Woodstock endure for a month? In Walter Lippmann’s view, the natural state of disorganized mass is chaos. At one time . . .
“A horde trampling all before them; then they are mobs which destroy each other; then isolated individuals, each man against all others in a life that is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’; until again, in the cycle of their impotent violence, they become a horde led by a master of the crowd.”
WALTER LIPPMANN
Lippmann’s vision is not exactly a picture of Peace, Love and Freedom. However, such warning against the irrational power of the mass indicates the need of some “wave-form-process” to ensure peace. The U.S. Constitution, at least, curtails the dominion of masters of the crowd. When not subverted by corporate lobbies, the Constitution provides a structure by which free men in free relationships may find ways to live at peace with just sufficient social form to maintain life-support technology, such as generator stations, electric grid systems, gas heating, water mains, planting/harvesting equipment, vehicles to carry food and other such sensible conveniences and necessities which we call “utilities” and “resources.”
81 /Life Support Systems The mega-corporation has shown itself to be incompetent by placing profit ahead of public service. It resembles those hospitals that won’t treat an injury until the bill is settled.
In the Movement, the Est people must come to grips with life-support systems, for in the transit time of the coming crisis all systems may shut down in a matter of hours. Consider a house as the systems stop due to some disaster. As the electrical system fails, the lights go out, refrigeration stops, appliances won’t work, radio and television turns off, heating fails, elevators stall. Add to this, failure of the water system: plumbing jams, washing ceases, vegetation dies, people cannot survive much more than a week. Add to this, failure of the food distribution system: supermarkets close, small stores shut down, household reserves are gone within days. Without food, animals and people die. Without medical supplies, food and water, power and light, contagion spreads and hospitals are useless. Add to this, failure of fuel delivery: cars and buses stop, communities are isolated. In heavy disasters, a dwelling is soon reduced to the level of the most primitive cave. People resort to hunting and building fires.
The systems of a house differ only in scale from the systems of a city. Civilization is paper-thin and when it tears, it tears in a matter of hours. The blackout of New York City in 1965 revealed the extent of dependency on one system. Electricity, gas, water, fuel and food can all shut down, and with them, life, as we know it, may also shut down.
The recent study of survival techniques by the Est is no accident. The Whole Earth Catalog devotes many pages to survival items. An encyclopedia of information and equipment, the Whole Earth Catalog is a vital reference for the Movement. Mastery of its contents brings into being the people of the Est. In and of itself, it warrants inclusion in The Steersman Handbook as an important chart by which to navigate the coming decade of conflict.
82/Pinpoint of Crisis It takes no gift of prophecy to identify the process by which the transit point of the great crisis can be predicted. The basic premise is precise: Dependent as it is upon linear, structured organization, the Establishment needs the cooperation of political officeholders to maintain its position of power. The steps are as follows.
83/Premises The House of Representatives and the Senate are already responsive to Establishment financial influence through lobbies and subsidized candidates. This is true on U.S. Congressional and on local, homestate levels.
Supreme Court justices are appointed by the President with Congressional approval. The complexion of the court grows less liberal with each appointment made by the present administration, liberal or conservative, strict linear views prevail.
The American Presidency is the most powerful political office and a President “outside” of the Establishment would pose a serious threat to the immediate corporate economy by bringing about “unprofitable” changeovers to the benefit of the people. New priorities, new directions and new designs, which are primarily life-oriented rather than profit-oriented, would severely restrict financial power. Financial power resists such restructuring. By the 1980s, present pollution levels and food distribution trends must have been halted and reversed. Thus, the brakes must be applied in the decade of 1970. There are two moments of opportunity to do so within the present system. These two moments are the last relatively peaceful opportunities to change course.
84/Prelude and Transit Zero The 1970s will see two Presidential elections: 1972 and 1976. These are the last two chances for a change in executive direction. 1972 is the prelude; 1976 is transit zero. 1972 may or may not begin President Nixon s second term. If he is not reelected, the new President will be either for or against the established order. If he is opposed to the established order and is not assassinated, he may turn the tide and the following construction need not apply. However, in the event that Nixon is reelected, he will continue to serve the Establishment and is not to be expected to end the influence of the Military- Industrial complex. He will continue to try to pack the Supreme Court with “strict construction” jurists. In need of emergency, he may be forced by both the Military-Industrial complex and the unruly Movement to involve the U.S. in more war abroad (so-called “limited war”), which will allow U.S. forces to remain in the Far East and will grant Executive Powers to deal with traitorous subversives. An alternative would be for the President to invoke extraordinary powers to deal with a domestic “Black Revolution.” Black Militants, with desperate and legitimate grievances, are already identified by the Establishment as the primary source of violence but, as white coalition radicals join the Blacks, the entire Movement must suffer severe repression which will include concentration camps in new, disguised forms. A symptom of this new repression may be seen in arrests of larger and larger groups of people with ever increasing frequency, which suggests the possibility that the new concentration camps are perhaps the local jails where long sentences are now served on the installment plan. Fragmented incarceration makes sense in fragmented repression; effective in local domains.
85/ Transit Zero 1976 will see the most violent paroxysm ever to seize the U.S., for in that year the Constitution calls for the Presidential election which will force the Establishment to submit to the count of heads at a time of gravest crisis. Unprecedented domestic Emergency powers may even repeal the “No Third Term” amendment. If not, a linear-minded representative of the Establishment, a “man of iron,” willing to use force, must attempt the highest office.
Election day, the first Tuesday in November, in the year 1976, is transit zero.
Exactly two hundred years after the birth of the nation, the Movement must bring about the birth of the transformation. In the hour of violence, the peoples of the Movement will face death. Within the Movement, ways must be sought to lessen the flow of blood.
Make no mistake: stoppage of the transformation is the stoppage of life itself.
861 Charts of Survival New techniques must be explored and implemented; techniques suited to a once and future democracy which has had its Constitutional vitality subverted by nonhuman corporate structures away from the true interests of the people into paths of financial expediency. The role of money must be examined as it relates to the Movement. Also to be examined is involvement for people who are beyond politics. Particularly, the concept of “choiceless awareness” must be considered as fundamental to the transformation. There must be no need to “decide”; no need to pledge allegiance. Through the simulsense, the Movement relates to the Cosmos, and if its principles of Peace, Love and Freedom are true, a great response will be forthcoming.
87/Dirty Word “Politics” has come to signify a remote morass of corruption. The very language of politics is designed to keep out plain talk by barriers of mumbo jumbo borrowed from the deliberate mysteries of law and finance. This language barrier is a traditional weapon used by insiders to keep outsiders out.
The use of special jargon is rooted in prehistoric times when priests and rulers wished to keep their manipulations secret from those they governed. The use of Latin by the educated classes formed a fortress of words which protected the schoolmen’s hoard of valuable thoughts.
Today, corporate finance is aided in maintaining its hoard of valuables by ramparts of legal, technical jargon. Moreover, the politicians’ boring talk is a technique of attrition, commonplace in market negotiations, designed to wear down outsiders. These tedious details are really part of civic management and are not of prime interest to professional politicians. Power is what really interests politicians. And, in America, power resides in the corporate purse.
“Money is the mother"s milk of politics."’
JESSE UNHUH
88/Political Leaders In the time of John F. Kennedy, when the Movement generations were first coming of age, the assassination of the young President removed a leader with the capacity to be linear and non-linear. Martin Luther Kang was similarly gifted, but soon after he linked the Asian war with the suppression of Blacks in America, he followed President Kennedy. Senator Robert Kennedy, in spite of tactical difficulties, also qualified as a political leader with appeal to non-linear generations. Again the Movement was crippled by assassination. These bloody events may be linked by conspiracy but none is needed by a linear, military-industrial structure which cultivates annihilation. The Movement, as a political body, was beheaded.
He helped a lot of people. He helped a lot of people.
I turned around and he was gone.
Popular Song
89/Beyond Politics The wearisome swamp of politics is designed to discourage non-linear people with their “lack of staying power.” Primitives have always been thwarted by the political fast shuffle. Neo-primitives are similarly swamped by linear procedures: fees, filing, registration, ordinances. The “Annotated Election Codes” fill volumes with legal fencework which might well be posted, “Keep Out” Only those members of the Movement who have both linear and non-linear capability, the Est, can find their way through the carefully constructed maze. But many do not have the inclination to drudge their lives away by working “inside” the established political order. Something beyond politics is required. Classic revolution is not the answer for it, too, with its structured doctrines, is primarily linear and attempts domination by force.
That which now must replace politics is not today’s blind “body rhetoric,” by which individuals court capture or casualty as they “lay themselves on the line.” Nor is it limited to empty talk which avoids action. Nameless as yet, it must change with change and must relate totally to the on-going, transformative process of the whole earth. Revolution, in its time, brought to life the revolutionary. The transformation now creates transformers who shape the flow of energy. The terms are electric because nature itself flows as currents of energy. The Electronic Social Transformation is man’s new discernment of ultimate reality. That which must replace politics must begin to understand the flows of energy which constitute man in mass society. Energy exchange is at the heart of all physical transactions. The Energy Body is real.
90IE = MC2 Electromagnetic terminology is no mere refiguring of speech. The underlying concepts are profoundly relevant: Communications Theory, Information Processing, Statistical and Group Mechanics, World Design and the concept of Resonance. Formulations such as these provide the most accurate, complete and valid descriptions of reality available to date. Giving heed to Norbert Wiener’s admonition that the human sciences are poor testing grounds for new mathematical techniques, the fact stands that new science can explore social processes and does reveal unexpected patterns plus new approaches to rigid problems.
Einstein’s historic equations revealed that material objects are congealed states of energy. In rigid matter or radiant flow, energy is mass and mass is energy as surely as water is the substrate of ice, or milk is the matrix of butter. Discrete matter, once believed to be made of finite particles, is now identified as “wave-form-process.” The connections between these massy densities are no longer conceived as linear bonds like wires or rods but are now known to be related each to each by “unstructured structures” described as fields. These field forms, invisible yet tangible, interrelate by virtue of vibrational characteristics. The principle of non-linear bonding is called “resonance.”
“Faraday conceived a new sort of real physical entity, namely the ‘field’, in addition to the mass-point and its motion. At first people tried, clinging to the mechanical mode of thought, to look upon it as a mechanical condition (motion or force) of a hypothetical medium by which space was filled up (the ether). But when this interpretation refused to work in spite of the most obstinate efforts, people gradually got used to the idea of regarding the ‘electro-magnetic field as the final irreducible constituent of physical reality.’’
ALBERT EINSTEIN Essays in Science
91 / The Kinetic Power of People The power of people is real. It is physical force. The count of heads in voting is a crude measurement of potential force inherent in the physical mass of men. The larger force would probably prevail if put to the test of civil war. To avoid such friction, which draws blood, the electoral count of heads awards victory to the larger mass. Designed to guarantee such counts, the U.S, Constitution serves as a safety device, a sort of circuitry, which permits the massive energy of an immense population to flow freely without undue interference which might overload with catastrophic discharge. Designed to permit transfers of power by balanced systems of processing circuits which transmit, modulate, conduct and resist, the Constitution parcels power in varying batches, sequences and intensities. At present, this Constitutional circuitry is jammed and malfunctioning but, even so, it is a valid instrument by which to govern the potential of public mass-energy.
Americans relate to the Constitution, one way or another. Honored or in the breach, its principles constitute America. The prime purpose of the President is expressed in the oath of office:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that 1 will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Article II, U. S. Constitution
Only non-human, non-citizens in the form of corporate entities can bypass the Constitutional system via financial channels. (Lobbies and mass propaganda-advertising.) This unwarranted influence, sought or unsought, short circuits the nation’s energies and impedes the free transmission of power.
92/FlashrGroups
“In order to find one’s place in the infinity of being, one must be able both to separate and unite.”
I Ching, Difficulty at the Beginning
The Movement gathers together spontaneously, then disperses. This does not mean holding together as enduring, formal organizations and it does not mean the structuring of stable hierarchies with The Leader and His Faithful Followers.
As conscious acts, the Est must carefully determine relevant occasions, places, times: the coordinates of potential massing. This is a linear capability. Notices of gathering, when wisely chosen, have vibrational affinity for the peoples of the Movement. Not blind response, but aware response, moves the mass to gather. Not every call will elicit response, for it is not a case of follow-the-leader. The Est Steersman must identify approaching event-landmarks. By pamphlets, posters, notices and word of mouth, he must bring the landmark event into the awareness of the collective consciousness of the Movement. Not cynical manipulation by mass advertising, the true word will be felt by the Movement to be relevant and will stir active response. The Movement responds to events without logical analysis. It knows. Along with conscious aiding of mass gathering, the Est Steersman must also develop the capability of dispersal. Bloodshed is not the object of gathering. The object is Peace. When the linear forces of the Establishment single out targets, the Est must divert the linear thrust. Such diversion must be audacious. It must command the attention of the linear force by engaging the senses. Sights, sounds, sensations, must shake the firing line. Linear forces cannot cope with variable, non-linear input.
Those who insist upon bloodshed wage warfare, not peacefare. Those who pride themselves on injury; those who flaunt woundstripes as marks of status; those who demand bloodstains as proof of commitmentare in chronic bondage to punishment.
The object of demonstrations is not arrest. It is not destruction. The object of demonstration is to further Peace, Love, Freedom.
Mythic events such as Chicago, Woodstock, Kent State are unstructured and, no matter who tries to “take credit” or who is held to “blame,” such events are not the result of conspiracy, planning or organization.
“. . . the burning of the Bank of America, I regard it as a mythic event, exactly. What would a mythic event be? Well, it would have to occur.
Then, it would have to be something that no one person or group of persons could be responsible for causing. Something so very large or complex that it seems to appear as by magic, a true manifestation . .
EDWABD LOOMIS
’ Bank Burning
$3/Compulsive Violence A certain stripe of “revolutionary” seems compelled to dwell on violence. This maiming hang-up is “not healthy for children or other living things.” Constructive people avoid being clubbed on the sensible grounds that a little concussion goes a long way. In contrast, Old Left radicals stand proud as the tallest taskforce C.O. in their condemnation of “liberals who wilt before the final line of fire.” This rigid, linear view demands that heroes stand up and be counted out. The Est principle of resonance (see below) sets free the aware individual from all doctrinaire concepts; free to sense and to flow with the vibrational field of the instant of happening. It should be obvious that the here-and-now, moment-of-actuality is beyond doctrinaire guidance. The true hero is not planned; he happens.
“Most young people could not relate to scheduling a riot, partly because of the debatable effectiveness of such tactics, but mainly because it was not a spontaneous reaction to an immediate situation. Weatherman violence was not dictated by a situation so much as by an ideology. Their violence was structured and artificial, because in their heads they were part of the Third World.”
TOM HAYDEN The Trial
94/Inside the System or Out? Many in the Movement fall prey to linear concepts of integrity by measuring the degree to which they “compromise” with the system. Working at a straight job is considered by some to be corrupt Earning a livelihood is obviously necessary to the care and feeding of self and/ or family. But profiting by the work of others is obviously quite different from earning a livelihood. In many enterprises within the Movement, profits are realized beyond the needs of livelihood. To the degree that such profits are held by individuals, they are of no benefit to the Movement. Shoe-box savings is not the issue. The issue is the recycling of energy, financial and otherwise, to the genuine benefit of the Movement. The Establishment, as a corporate structure with built-in distributors and merchandisers, may be expected to steal energy from the Movement. Creators such as film-makers and musicians are entitled to good livelihoods, but when they fail to recycle vast earnings to the benefit of the Movement, they block the flow of energy. The documentary film of Woodstock is an example of energy which ought to be recycled back into the Movement rather than be bled away.
The people of the Est have no need for measurement of their integrity because they are integrated. They are free men. As such, they are naturally “loyal to the Movement.” A morbid preoccupation of the Old Left was the temptation of “selling out.” Ethical lines were drawn between capitalist class and working class. Today, those old, opposing lines are relics of an age gone by. Now, there is only linear force attempting to impose established order upon the organic unfolding of the Cosmos. The notion of “selling out” the organic unfolding of the Cosmos is absurd.
“Z dont know about selling out; what I want is to be bought in”
SONGWRITER
The Est people are aware that there is no need to opt in or opt out since there is no more in or out. There is only the planet earth. The Est does not relate in the linear terms of the Establishment or the equally linear Old Left. The new stratagem is that which is beyond guerrilla warfare. It is a special application of peacefare and it is characterized by constantly changing its character. At one time it has precise objectives; at another time it is random and sporadic. It includes linear and nonlinear, as needed. It is called “resonance.”
“Consider simple water how it moves, Airborne or underground.
I say be fluid but unyielding
In the end we shall not be denied.”
LAWRENCE LIPTON
95/Resonance Operating inside the Establishment, the Est does not merely infiltrate and sabotage. Such tactics are obsolete. The Est permeates the Establishment and dissolves it. As sensitive as a Stone-Age hunter, the Est is totally aware of the true nature of the Establishment. Beyond mimicry, the Est does not merely imitate, it empathizes and takes on the vibrational frequency of the Establishment. As the Est gets into phase with the Establishment, it cannot be detected. Timed in precisely, the Est achieves resonance and it is here that comprehensive capability becomes formidable. With gradual, out-of-phase timing, the Est destroys the Establishment. This deliberate shift of phase is illustrated by Norbert Wiener in one of the charts of the transformation, Cybernetics (or “Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine”).
961Mongoose Tactics There is no reason to suppose that the individual motions of the mongoose are faster or more accurate than those of the cobra. Yet the mongoose almost invariably kills the cobra and comes out of the contest unscathed. How is it able to do this?
“. . . The mongoose begins with a feint, which provokes the snake to strike. The mongoose dodges and makes another such feint, so that we have a rhythmic pattern of activity on the part of the two animals. However, this dance is not static but develops progressively. As it goes on, the feints of the mongoose come earlier and earlier in phase with respect to the darts of the cobra, until finally the mongoose attacks when the cobra is extended and not in a position to move rapidly. This time the mongoose’s attack is not a feint but a deadly accurate bite through the cobra’s brain. In other words, the snake’s pattern of action is confined to single darts, each one for itself, while the pattern of the mongoose’s action involves an appreciable, if not very long, segment of the whole past of the fight. To this extent, the mongoose acts like a learning machine, and the reed deadliness of its attack is dependent upon a much more highly organized nervous system.”
NORBERT WIENER
Cybernetics
The Est people with their comprehensive capability have the advantage of simulsensory awareness over members of the Establishment who are limited by separate-sense, compartmented habits of thought. The pattern of action of linear-minded men is “confined to single darts, each one for itself,” while the pattern of Est action involves the entire, together, historical accumulation of mankinds capabilities.
97/ The Soft Establishment Within the established order, software is replacing hardware as electronics renders linear machinery obsolete. Artists, anticipating the dissolution of the machine age, depict sagging typewriters and soggy automobiles. Soft machines are displayed as museum pieces.
The softening of the Establishment is a process that can be hastened by tactics of resonance. The iron fist which will be used to crush the Movement in the earning decade of conflict may not be stopped but it can be cushioned.
98lEcotactics Def. “The science of arranging and maneuvering all available forces in action against enemies of the earth.”
The Sierra Club Handbook for Environment Activists (Ecotactics) is a chart for Steersmen which contains a bibliography of environment works plus practical tactics for day-to-day action against the crisis now confronting the whole earth. Unafraid of corporations, the handbook features an introduction by Ralph Nader.
“State and Federal agencies keep undisclosed data on how much different companies pollute. Thus has industrial lethality been made a trade secret by a government which presumes to be democratic. Corporate executivesas in the auto companiesspeak out against violence in the streets and are not brought to account for their responsibility in producing a scale of violence that utterly dwarfs street crime. Motor vehicles contribute at least 60 percent of the nations air pollution by tonnage, with one company General Motorscontributing 35 percent of the pollution tonnage”
RALPH NADER
Others are: the Environmental Handbook; Environmental Quality Magazine; Ecology Center reprints; Earthside Missile Base publications, etc.
99/Granular Tactics Along with modular resonance there are new tactics of mass action wherein the Movement can reduce bloodshed in the decade to come. Granular tactics resemble guerrilla tactics but differ qualitatively in that they help further the transformation. They borrow the key concept of “audacity” from guerrilla warfare.
“The guerrilla must be audacious”
CHE
Granular tactics amount to an “artificial revolution” in that they narrow the conflict down to a selected field and by focus-of-energy achieve a limited objective of sufficient importance to turn the tide.
Granular tactics takes its name from “grains” which intermingle like fine powder, concentrating in a given area until critical mass is achieved. The narrowing down of the target from the diffused national spread to a selected, local field permits limited energy to be concentrated.
“Limitations are indispensable in the regulation of world conditions.”
I Ching Limitation
A limited linear objective on a large but not impossible scale which can be achieved by the Movement is structured thus:
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The Movement does not have the voting strength to elect candidates throughout the nation.
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The Movement does have a large number of people willing to plug in on a political level within the system.
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If these people from all over the country concentrate on one state, they can pool their dollar bills, ideas and physical energies to get out a massive vote for an authentic Movement Candidate for State Governor. Movement Candidates for State Senators and Representatives could ride the same ticket
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California is the logical state to “capture.” By 1974, Governor Reagan will be 62 years of age and vulnerable as a third-term candidate.
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In spite of its heavy, straight population, California is still loose in terms of machine politics. The population still has delusions of “Frontier Freedom” as compared to the locked-in vote patterns of New York, Chicago, Boston and the Southern states. There is time left to migrate to California and to establish residence. Those unable to vote can work to help.
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California is one of the global epicenters of the Movement: Berkeley, Isla Vista, Big Sur, Mendocino, UCLA, the Strip, etc.
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The climate is right. The astrological signs are right. The crown chakra glows.
100/The Capture of California New voters, registration drives, plus the massive youth population in California, make it feasible to elect a Movement Candidate for Governor.
Why bother?
The elimination of Governor Reagan, who has openly announced his view on the bloodbath, is a worthwhile step. Election of a Movement Governor would guarantee at least one state which would restrain the use of the National Guard as an instrument of repression. Governors are state-level Commanders in Chief. California carries crucial weight in Presidential elections and could be the deciding factor in transit zero 1976. Since total blow-up will be simmering, during the next five years, it is part of the comprehensive capability of the Est to work within the system and, simultaneously, to work under, over and around the system. The Movement could use a Sanctuary of Freedom in the years to come and California is worth the struggle. It is an ideal area in which to begin to form Free Territories.
For those who feel a response to the above, a grassroots chart of straight politics is the book, Plunging Into Politics by Marshall Loeb and William Safire (David McKay Company, New York).
1011What Kind of Candidate? Men such as fepock, Nader or Ehrlich, and women such as Bess Myerson or Myrlie Evers, are not to be dismissed as Movement Candidates. Those who would dismiss “unqualified people” as unfit or unable to hold office have only to look at the administrative feats of Ronald Reagan of the Screen Actors Guild. If he is qualified, who shall scape governing?
The situation has moved beyond traditional politics. What is at stake is not merely California; not only America. What is at stake is the whole earth. Conflict in the coming decade can be lessened if State Power, anywhere, is in the hands of decent people who will not pull the trigger. However, if State Power is left in the hands of hard-line punishers, the crisis years will become increasingly bloody.
102lBridge Over Troubled Waters The total vocabulary of the Est includes revolution, but the Est is not deluded by revolutionary concepts, vestiges of the linear era of class warfare. But what about violence? Is violence ever justified? Is it a part of the Est vocabulary?
“I’m nonr-violent with those who are non-violent with me. But when you drop that violence on me, then you’ve made me go insane, and I’m not responsible for what I do.”
MALCOLM X
Self-defense is not violence. It is defense against violence. An act of violence differs qualitatively from an act of self-defense. Self-defense is a natural and necessary response to violence. The U.S. Constitution guarantees personal life and personal freedom. These qualities already belong to the individual and it is not an act of violence to defend them. When any so-called “law,” be it a local ordinance or a lynch mob, uses force against the U.S. Constitution, against peaceful life and peaceful freedom, those local ordinances or those mobs attack the ultimate law of the land as well as the inalienable rights of man and are themselves the source of violence.
“We arent hungry for violence; we don’t want violence. Violence is ugly, guns are ugly. But we understand that there are two kinds of violence: the violence that is perpetrated against our people by the fascist aggression of the power structure; and self-defensea form of violence used to defend ourselves from the unjust violence that’s inflicted upon us.”
BOBBY SEALE Seize the Time
It then becomes apparent that each side claims peace; each side claims foul; each sees the other as the source of violence. The issue is usually examined as “Constitutional law versus State law,” but it is here examined as “linear force versus life force.” That is to say, all law is the source of violence when directed forcibly against events which are peaceable. To counter this argument, the Establishment singles out the “lunatic fringe,” “hardcore radicals,” “the ten percent who deliberately provoke violence.” These are the “rock-throwing, bottle-tossing agitators who refuse to disperse on order.” These are “gun-happy black militants” and the “maniacs who burn banks.”
The linear mind of the Establishment lumps it all together and condemns it out of hand as revolution. The linear mind of the “revolutionary” cooperates by also lumping it all together and proclaims each confrontation as a stroke for the revolution. The Est, however, relates each specific situation to the whole earth; to Peace, Love and Freedom. The Est defends life. The Est defends freedom. The Est does not destroy; the Est creates. The Est dissolves force and violence. The Est subdues attack. The Est averts bloodshed.
103/Hard-Line Tactics The objective of classic revolution was to paralyze the life of a region by destroying state-owned life support systems after which the new state order would then take over. In contrast to this revolutionary objective, the object of the transformation is to further life by removing the stranglehold of the corporate power structure which corrupts and pollutes the life support systems. Revolution is willing to sacrifice life.
To the Est, life is sacred.
The adversary is the non-living, non-human, out-of-control Military Industrial Complex. It is obvious that there is great risk of accidental loss of life and limb in hard-line tactics of a gross destructive nature. There are better ways to granulate the power structure.
104/Intimations of the Transformation Throughout the Movement, serious thinkers are finding that revolution is no longer relevant. With its stirring history, revolution still appeals to many activists and also appeals to the Establishment as a familiar irritant which can be coped with by existing law. Hence, the preoccupation with revolution by the Establishment media. Within the Movement, however, awareness of the transformation is growing.
“A philosophy of liberation requires Transformation. It says that everything must be made new. But we must recognize that blackness, as so many people have said, is necessary but not sufficient. Being black is not enough. One must be black and ready and together.”
LERONE BENNETT JR.
Senior editor, Ebony magazine, August 1970
The “bloodless revolution” under the U.S. Constitution, which Malcolm X described in his speech of April 8,1964, is an intimation of transformation. Along with Malcolm, many dedicated radicals find themselves forced to modify the classic concept of revolution. An interesting example is Lawrence Lipton, whose column, “Radio Free America,” appears in the underground press. He writes, “Revolution is a process, not a single coup.” This innovative view of revolution as continuous process is a careful modification of the traditional “overthrow.” However, Lipton reveals vestiges of Old Left, linear bias as he continues, “It is the cumulative power of many alternatives that finally brings down the Establishment and brings in the new order.” This final clause expresses the linear concept of a structured “order” which is to replace that which is overthrown. In the new world of continuous change, the transformative process of the whole earth sweeps away all structured, fixed, rigid forms: there is no new order. To give Lipton the benefit of the doubt, he may well have meant “new order of continual change.” If so, he is among the first to abandon the outmoded concept of revolution for the actuality of transformation.
105! Transformer
“Transformation is not in the future, can never be in the future. It can only be in the now, from moment to moment.”
KRISHNAMURTI
In all of his writings, Jeddu Krishnamurti explores transformation. A profound Est, he is an accomplished Steersman who provides extraordinary / charts by which to navigate the coming decade of conflict. His Commentaries on Living (3 volumes) provide an extensive “ego-check” to help identify ego trips and to help dissolve destructive self-assertion. His austere truth frees the mind from the prison of linear thought. Awareness, meditation, the present, love, death; Krishnamurti’s field is the whole earth.
“Where love is, there is transformation. Love is transformation from moment to moment”
KRISHNAMURTI
For those who avoid “politics,” he has this to say,
“K. There is only total human action, not political action, religious action, or Indian action. Action which is separate, fragmentary, always leads to conflict both within and without.
Q. This means that political action is impossible, doesn’t it?
K. Not at all. The comprehension of total action surely does not prevent political, educational or religious activity.”
106/Age of Aquarius The peoples of the Movement place ultimate reliance in the Cosmos. The hidden powers of the universe control the planets including this one and if it is our karma to die in agony, so be it.
“In the fires that destroy the universe at the end of the Kalpa, what survives?”
Vedas
Occult interests do not relate with ease to voting registration drives. Just as it is the task of Est people to convince Neo-primitives to register and to vote, it is also the task of the Est to relate to mystic circles, ashrams, even covens and to speak the language of the Cosmos. Enlightened initiates will understand that “vote” comes from the Latin “votum,” meaning vow or wish or will. They will understand that the peoples of the Movement must begin to vote because the electoral process is the last peaceful path left. If registration is repugnant and seems to signify some symbolic “joining” the established order, the people of the Movement must be reminded that they are already registered by birth certificates, social security numbers, school enrollment records, census figures, withholding tax, draft status, driver’s licenses, etc. The Movement, being non-linear, is naturally resistive to registration. To list oneself is severely linear.
All of the various registrations noted above are compulsory. Registering to vote is voluntary. Repugnant, annoying; the act of expressing the individual will by vote is necessary to elect Movement Candidates in 1972 and 1976.
107/~No Party Due to the intensely linear requirements of a political party, it is next to impossible for the people of the Movement to line up as a structured membership bloc. Flash-groups, yes; a stable organization, no. For that reason, Movement Candidates must run as Independents. As they achieve prominence, organized blocs will seek alliance. Linear people are trained to join, follow, fill out forms, vote. This lifetime of literate conditioning accounts for the heavy write-in mail which always endorses the Establishment. The people of the Movement are non-writers, non-joiners, nonvoters. They will love-in, laugh-in and sit-in, but they won’t write-in. They prefer to vote with their bodies in the streets in formless masses. This preference makes them easy prey to law and order.” Thus, the one, sole, linear act which must be embraced by the Movement and made a ritual sacrament is the act of registering during Whole Earth Registration Week and voting on World Peace Voting Day.
The U.S. Constitution also provides new identity for Movement Candidates: Constitutional-Independent, Constitutional-Democrat, Constitutional-Republican. Names aside, what matters is the vote. What matters is the quality of the Constitutional Candidate. In selecting who to vote for, the Movement must ultimately rely on personal vibrations. Full awareness is needed to sense the human heart. Nixon, Muslde, McGovern, Lindsay, Kennedy, Agnew, Nader, Spock; the discerning of innate nature is the gift of simulsense.
108/What Comes After? In an attempt to assemble a set of charts by which to navigate the coming decade of conflict, The Steersman Handbook has concerned itself thus far with the relatively short-term future. Potential cataclysm, revealed by projections of present trends, is not mere prediction but is the inevitable consequence of increasing attempts by the linear social structure, the Establishment, to impose order by force upon an accumulating flow of non-linear energy, the Movement.
109/Prediction What lies beyond these shortterm projections is unknown. Speculation, which reaches forward to the century’s end, provides only a shadowy view. Beyond the year 2000, prediction gives way to prophecy. In such speculation, The Steersman Handbook finds small grounds for optimism. The present course of events foretells a time of profound troubles. The transformation is now in process; the bloody birth is actual. To the question, “Will too violent a birth result in the death of the mother earth?” the sad answer must be, as of the early 1970’s, “Probably.” Life on the planet will not survive if savage repression deforms the young. No-warrant arrests, no-knock entry, widespread surveillance, curtailment of freedom of the press, massive numbers arrested and jailed increasingly: blood-and-iron looms.
In spite of deep forebodings, The Steersman Handbook now turns away from fearful probability to explore “the way it ought to be.” In the ensuing elaborations the deliberate use of “will be” is mere assertion. Only a profound commitment, a surge of synergy arising out of the inner strivings of life, can bring about the world.
Thus, the concluding section of The Steersman Handbook is based upon the highly conditional prediction that in spite of harsh repression the Movement will prevail. The non-linear, simulsensory population bloc, moved by transformers, will unify around the Declaration of Defense of the Constitution. The Electronic Social Transformation will permeate the Establishment and will dissolve rigid structures. But what would this free and unimpeded flow then mean in terms of everyday life? In the event that linear capability becomes merely a useful part of the social vocabulary and not the predominant way of life, what then becomes of government? What becomes of law and order? What becomes of purpose? Goal-seeking? Incentive?
110/Transition Stage To permit the U.S. Constitution to function, the Movement will limit corporate power. This does not mean that the Movement is merely a variation of socialism which will “abolish private property.” The transformation goes beyond revolution, beyond socialist order, beyond any fixed, linear structure. What will be limited is blind, overblown bulk-organization. Vast, impersonal structures are already fragmenting, softening and dissolving. At the end of the past decade, it was evident that giant corporations were rapidly losing relevancy due to technological advances. This phenomenon of swiftening evolution keeps accelerating and daily evolution, at electronic speeds, is the transformation. This on-going, transformative process is not now subject to an orderly plan of government. It is beyond linear “procedure.” Ecologically at bay, the vast majority, silent and otherwise, will become aware of the brainless reflexes of major corporate bodies and will elect Movement Candidates who will alter these non-human mechanisms enough to halt their blind, destructive drift. The first step will be the effort to enact Pollution Deadline Laws which will specify the year 1975 as the time limit for industrialcorporate pollution to cease and desist. Other laws will be passed which will recognize the moneyprocessing nature of the corporate structure and will not permit this processing system to act as the primary guidance system. Corporate policy and corporate officers will be answerable to a board of directors (guidance committee) made up of ecosystem coordinators, design-scientists, creative experts and consumer-oriented, guidance personnel. Senior executive officers of the corporation will not be financial-legal-accounting personnel. This restriction will automatically divert the mega-corporation away from financial competition. Corporations will be limited in size, which will divide the giant corporation into smaller local businesses. The “loss of efficiency” which will result from these changes is really a loss of “financial authority.” No great wisdom will be jettisoned. Money processing machinery is not the best gyroscope for keeping the planet on a balanced course. Great profit and great loss have both done great damage. Legal limitation of corporate size will result in the splitting up of impersonal, ponderous giants into smaller businesses, which, guided by human concerns as their primary target, will run as efficiently as any small business and will relate with vastly increased sensitivity to the actual needs of the people. There will be no large businesses to put them out of business. Irrelevant enterprises will fail; relevant enterprises will provide personalized goods, services and better livelihoods for more people.
Ill I Livelihoods The notion of status will change drastically. The good life will be the simple life which relates to the Cosmos. The whole earth society will tend to become organic neighborhoods with places to live and places in which to “come to meet” such as markets, parks, fairs; places to eat, dance, play. These communities will have no rigid boundaries. They will not be closed, exclusive or isolated. They will be Open Communities in Free Territories and will resemble the old placename locales of the countryside. These Open Communities will be inhabited by several interrelating groups of about the size of large Italian families or Polynesian village tribes. They will care for children in much the same way as tribes, clans and other family groups do in simpler societies. Schools will be smaller, dispersed, with many more teachers. Teaching will become a primary profession and the mode of teaching will be non-linear, with no classrooms, no rows of desks, no fixed curriculum. Linear subjects will be taught as surrounds, like languages: the language of mathematics, the language of reading, the language of science. These difficult, linear subjects will be experienced as environments without grades or competitive comparisons. Field trips, on-the-job participation, films, TV, recordings, dramatizations will encourage total involvement. School will continue to be compulsory to relieve families of unremitting care of children, but will not command conformity. Comprehensive courses on whole earth systems, ecology, conservation, natural sciences, arts, crafts, etc., will draw out innate abilities of the young. The “schoolroom” will be the entire community.
Transracial relatedness will preserve ethnic identities.
Women will be totally free and equal.
1121 The Sociosphere Open Communities of the transformation will be related throughout the
land and throughout the world by the electronic communications web. Along with the hydrosphere and the biosphere, the earth now has an electronic “sociosphere,” which has brought into being the transformation and the Movement; McLuhan’s “global village.” The future, if there be a future for this sociosphere, will be examined below under long-range prophecies.
113/Incentive The preferred lifestyle of the future will be simplicity.
“Whoever rules a country by furthering simplicity is that nations blessing.”
The Book of Tao
This will include a personal home with sufficient food, clothing and basic comforts. Gardens of vegetables and flowers will be held in high esteem. Goal-seeking will be regarded as a linear skill and not as a way of life. The profit motive will be discouraged.
What then becomes of incentive? What then becomes of work? The answer is to be found in the concept of personal creation. Each individual will find self-expression. All of life will become personal, artistic expression of one kind or another. The domestic arts will be the center of .creation: building, gardening, cooking, decorating, entertaining; living well. Crafts will flourish such as
weaving, sewing, pottery, woodwork, stonework, ironwork, etc. Arts will occupy many: film, drama, dance, singing, writing, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, etc. Linear skills will continue to be socially useful as tools but not as a dominant way of life. Sports will tend toward active participation. Science will maintain the energy grids, life-support systems, and will continue to explore outer and inner space. Incentive, as a driving, competitive force, will give way to more creative, constructive inclinations. In a world at peace, monies now wasted on war will be recycled into teaching, learning and living.
114/ On-going Government In the early stages, government will persist but will be much modified to serve the needs of the people. Communication on every level will be of primary importance. On a local level, feedback from the people to their elected leaders will reveal authentic needs.
“Thus small, closely knit communities have a very considerable measure of homeostasis; and
this, whether they are highly literate communities in a civilized country or villages of primitive savages. Strange and even repugnant as the
customs of many barbarians may seem to us, they generally have a very definite homeostatic value, which it is part of the function of anthropologists to interpret. It is only in the large community, where the Lords of Things as They Are protect themselves from hunger by wealth, from public opinion by privacy and anonymity, from private criticism by the laws of libel and the possession of the means of communication, that ruthlessness can reach its most sublime levels. Of all of these anti-homeostatic factors in society, the control of the means of communication is the most important.”
NORBERT WIENER Cybernetics
Free and open communications belonging to the people will continue but will not be misappropriated by mega-corporations as they are today. Thus, the government will be sensitive to the people in every aspect. For example: an enormous segment of the people responds to popular music; a sensitive government will perceive the significance of this and will create a climate in which such music can be encouraged to flourish. Crowds will be provided places in which to gather. Lower admissions will permit performers to earn livelihoods but will discourage commercial exploitation. Neither corporations nor rmions will control artists.
A growing segment of the people relates to hallucinogenic drugs. A sensitive government will regulate drugs sensibly with regard to age groups and drug potency, treating the subject much as the laws treat alcohol today. The gravest threat to consumers of any substance is ignorance of the properties, purity and potency of that which is consumed.
Hospitals will no longer be in business to make money; they will pay employees more, provide better care and will come out even. Injuries will be treated first; the bill will be settled in due course. Malingering is a form of illness and will be diagnosed and treated as an illness. Health will be held in highest esteem. Nutrition will be a primary concern and natural, organic foods will replace forced, synthetic fare.
1151 The Future of Law and Order All social energy will flow through the U.S. Constitution. All structuring of power will be to ensure peace and freedom. No state or local ordinance will supersede the Constitution nor will emergency suspend it. No emergency is bigger than the Constitution. Courts will be restructured to serve living humans instead of corporate bodies.
IIG/Local Changes The most notable innovations will appear on the local level. The self-determination of Open Communities will tend to thin out police duties and will disperse police power. Traffic will no longer be a police responsibility; a Traffic Regulation Service will replace traffic police. This service will not carry weapons and can only issue notices of traffic violation. A Night Watch will protect the community during the hours of darkness according to the community’s self-determined needs. Activities even remotely political will not be subjected to police control. A system of Civic Aides, Public Counsellors, Event Steward Teams and Crowd Regulators will attend to the safety of mass gatherings. The right of the people to peaceably assemble will be of paramount importance. Places, prominent and convenient, will be provided. Civic permits will be minor routine. A selection of suitable areas will accommodate multiple assemblies. The tendency of the people to come together will be encouraged in every way.
117/Peace Officers The police will become authentic Peace Officers and will not use guns, clubs or other injurious means to subdue those who attack their fellow man. The role of Peace Officer will become an esteemed calling and particularly qualified persons will serve limited enlistments to insure no possibility of power abuse. Peace Officers will be under the direction of community guidance committees which will emphasize correct police function; said function being that of a processing system designed to maintain public peace. Civilian guidance will not permit the police authority to act as its own guidance system. This will limit police work as a profession in that it will not permit long-term professional officers to command the instrument of force. Related professions which seek to deter crime will come to the fore. Criminal psychology, crime prevention, crime detection and rehabilitation will progress as important peacekeeping functions. All told, the non-linear Movement will tend to reject all Enear regulation but circumstances will compel some degree of protection of the peace. Vestigial linearity will tend to create disruption as will Neo-primitive excess. The mating game has always given rise to challenging conflicts. However, the Est capability, linear and non-linear, will deal with all infractions of the peace with sensitivity and flexibility. It is important to keep in mind that the Est is not an organization and has no leader and no followers. It is made up of those people of the Movement who have simulsense awareness and include linear capability plus various technological and organizational abilities. This complete vocabulary of modes will be used flexibly as tools and not as a rigid way of life. Thus far, it may be noted that the transformation, as it is here predicted, functions under the Constitution as a free society, able to accommodate rapid and continual change. It is by no means an Orwellian dictatorship nor is it anarchy. More than anything it resembles a pleasant, peaceful, long weekend with power and fight, phones and television, arts and sciences, homes, hobbies and diversions; all working fine.
118/ The Future of Television As sponsors of almost all of television, the corporate power structure, in the early 1970’s, controls the content of the majority of programs. The conflict between the administration and the networks is the struggle for control of this means of mass communication. The battle centers around newscasts and editorial comment. Individual newscasters, whose views tend to accord with the network owners, are forced to guard freedom of speech. The television camera, which is genuinely impartial as a recording instrument, can only convey as much reality as the news editors select. Television of the future will change enormously with several entire channels devoted to continuous news coverage without sponsorship. The networks, which are actually sales organizations, will be limited in size along with all other corporations and will be forced to fragment. With the news channels free, the expensive-to-produce entertainment shows will no longer be paid for by corporate sponsors but will gravitate toward some form of pay television by which the viewer will select programs which appeal to particular taste. A National Arts Network will be a continuous channel of arts and crafts, teaching and exhibition. A World Languages Channel will run continuous language courses. Sports channels will carry local and national events. Cables, plus improved sets, will make UHF multichannel reception feasible. Major corporate control of television faces dissolution in the near future due to VTR, cassettes and other new technology.
At present, the public pays for TV programs by paying pennies extra for products of the corporate sponsors who then select the shows they wish to support with their commercials. Pay television will make possible a new era of artistic creation because the public will support artists of their own choosing without the corporate sponsor or the network as middleman. The public will “sponsor” whatever they select for viewing. A relatively small television audience of a mere one million viewers (as compared to the present thirty to sixty million per night) can easily support a preferred program. The preferred artist or performer will be able to create without restraint, much the way film-makers do in the present era of Movement motion pictures.
119/The Future of the Ego With goal-seeking reduced to a linear skill rather than a way of life, competition will not be held high. In its place, cooperation will become the operative principle. This may be hard to swallow for those who consider competition to be the prime mover of mankind. But it does not mean that human beings will cease to compete for mates or that the urge to excel will be abandoned. Personal drives to accumulate status or excessive possessions or extensive power, will modify. There will always be Neo-primitives who become obsessed by prestige, material things or power, but in a Constitutional democracy which does not submit to linear organization, it will not be possible to organize stable leader-and-follower situations. It will not be possible to accumulate corporate wealth or any surplus wealth beyond personal field-of-usage. Prestige will be accorded only to those who contribute with benevolence to the whole earth, however simply. Prestige will be the natural state of living well and peacefully as “gentle steward of the earth’s community of being.”
120/Drugs Tomorrow
“The current preoccupation with mind modifiers ranges from a hedonistic sensuality to a search for the highest of philosophic abstractions, from a tool for deriving scientific data to a sacrament taken to achieve loss of self and union with the ALL.”
SIDNEY COHEN The Beyond Within
Hallucinogens, which include LSD, marijuana, peyote, psilocybin, ayahuasco, etc., will not be classified with hard drugs.
Addiction to alcohol and/or drugs will reduce sharply as drives to addiction modify. Lack of self-esteem, lack of self-expression, lack of love; all that makes for self-destruction will modify. The shock wave of psychosis or neurosis, handed down from
generation to generation, will not be met by hostility. Injured psyches will be healed by advanced medical technology in an environment of Peace, Love and Freedom. In the Cosmic community, there will be no outcasts. Even the deranged will be cared for with sensitivity and love.
121/Altered States of Consciousness
“The exploration of the interior of the human brain will be as dangerous as that of the Antarctic continent or the depths of the oceans, and far more rewarding.”
DB. J. B. S. HALDANE
Vibrational frequencies, planes of existence, astral levels; all that was once the domain of the occult will become fields of exploration. Hallucinogenic drugs are now considered instruments of exploration by psychopharmacology and are considered sacraments by many initiates. Einstein’s demonstrations of relative time and relative space implies an “overlap” of nature. This “crack in the twilight” has long been explored by primitives via hallucinogens and will continue to be an important field of exploration for the Est.
122/The Future of Authority No longer imposed by force, authority will modify into personal
charisma or “field of influence.” Authority will go naturally to those who are listened to. “Authority,” along with many other words, will seem to take on new meaning but, in fact, will be relieved somewhat of its linear burden and will revert to its original, oral meaning: auto (self) orthos (right). The “self which originates the right” will be heeded as authority.
123/Limits of Prediction Mindful of the actual trend toward an ominous future, the above is offered as possible reassurance to those who see the transformation as impending anarchic chaos. If the world survives the time of transition, from 1970 to the year 2000, reverberations from the hour of transit zero must oscillate like dying waves and peace cannot be expected to prevail in every sector overnight. Indeed, enclaves of harsh linearity could hold out like bastions against the Movement. Chicago, under Mayor Daley, may remain a linear stronghold due to an entrenched hierarchy which enforces linearity with an iron fist. Another Est law might state that the authority required to enforce totalitarian linearity is derived directly from the despotic paternalism of a primitive individual who dominates a gan
glike clique which in turn domi-
nates an obedient, linear structure. Hitler was such an individual. Mussolini was not unlike him. Stalin, Franco, Papa Doc Duvalier; all enforced linearity with personal, paternal energy. Despots do not shrink at the use of force as the binding energy of their structures. Fear is the spur. It is worth noting that many who enforce linearity with the greatest brutality are themselves not all that linear. Goering, commanding a rigidly structured air force, in his personal life was disorderly. The Prussian General Staff and the precisely structured German Army were perfect linear instruments by which to transmit and to amplify the madness of Hitler. Linear social structures tend to be processing systems and are only as good or as bad as their guidance systems. Or, to put it crudely, “A fish stinks from its head.”
124/Prophecy Beyond the year 2000, prediction loses its moorings and drifts into prophecy.
At the risk of monotonous repetition, the stark facts tell us that the tide must soon turn or there will be no future for the peoples of the earth. Ultimate contamination, heat-death, radiation poisoning; it matters little how the biosphere extinguishes. The dead planet will continue to orbit the sun.
“The iron tree blooms in the void.”
Sanskrit
The alternative is life. Herewith, prophecy, uncertain; as sure as life now finds itself.
With transit zero as the turning point, the planet can survive. The Twenty-First Century can
unfold as a world of Peace, Love and Freedom. Nations, as we know them, will eventually become vestigial structures and in their place, creative cultures will keep alive history and tradition as treasured artifacts. But nations, as separate, bounded, belligerent powers will no longer exist. Armed forces will no longer be necessary. National governments will continue as administrative bodies but nations will no longer be bastions to defend. National groups will still be unified by land mass, language, cultural heritage, resources, goods and services but they will cease to be exclusive entities designed to “keep people out.” National borders will become vestigial. In place of divisive governments, a world information system will unify the peoples of the earth. The Communications State will regulate the life support systems of the planet through computer technology. Guidance of global systems will enhance energy flow and the ultimate ethic will be that which accords with the balance of nature.
125/Prophecy of Chofii
“GOAL: Nothing short of total transformation will do much good. What we envision is a planet on which the human population lives harmoniously and dynamically by employing a sophisticated and unobtrusive technology in a world environment which is “left natural.” Specific points in this vision.
• A healthy and spare population of all races, much less in number than today.
• Cultural and individual pluralism, unified by a type of world tribal council.
• Division by natural and cultural boundaries rather than arbitrary political boundaries.
• A technology of communication, education, and quiet transportation, land-use being sensitive to the properties of each region: Allowing, thus, the Bison to return to much of the high plains. Careful but intensive agricultures in the great alluvial valleys; deserts left wild for those who would trot in them. Computer technicians who run the plant part of the year and walk along with the Elk in their migrations during the rest.
• A basic cultural outlook and social organization that inhibits power and property-seeking while encouraging exploration and challenge in things like music, meditation; mathematics, mountaineering, magic and all other ways of authentic being-in-the-world. Women totally free and equal. A new kind of familyresponsible, but more festive and relaxedis implicit.”
CHOFU
4 Changes (Gary Snyder)
With respect and otherwise complete accord with Chofii, The Steersman Handbook has reservations concerning immediate fears of over-population of the planet. Recycling technology makes world-wide life-support feasible. Plentiful living space will be available since deserts and seas no longer preclude residence. Buckminster Fuller’s “floating city” is architecturally sound and is designed and ready for construction. Fuller’s geodesic domes, now in extensive use as radomes in the arctic, provide an example of protective environments. Paolo Soleri’s areology systems point to new possibilities. The development of the Apollo spacecapsules, which have survived on the moon, paved the way for life-support recycling systems in any and all environments. Food production and distribution threatens famine due to national and corporate barriers. With these barriers overcome, there need be no famine. In spite of world census projections which predict five billion people by 1982, birth control and distribution systems can surmount population problems. What is really pressing is the urban population crisis. Events in the coming decade of conflict will be the ultimate determinant.
126/ Outer Limits Paragraphs of prophecy could now ensue: nucleonic acid research and tissue-culture reproduction foreshadow genetic control. A benevolent guidance system is imperative to this perilous manipulation of life. Directional, coherent light in the form of lasers will profoundly affect communications. Atomic reactors will provide a universal source of electric power. Extrasensory perception will continue to become a controlled science. Precise experimentation will explore Kirlian fields, bio-luminescence, negativeion therapy, solar bio-influence, cosmic equilibria, pineal sensitivity, bio-rhythms, psychotronics, etc. Interspecies communication with creatures such as dolphins is under development. The process of aging is being explored and will yield changes in life expectancy. Cybernetics technology will make possible a one-day work-week.
Multiple presence, multiple consciousness, the annihilation of time and space; such prospects of the far future merge into the miraculous.
The Steersman Handbook is a read-out of the present decade of the 1970s. In the harsh light of today, the remote future is insubstantial as a dream. The actual world has entered its hour of gravest danger; the time of transformation is now.
1271 The Role of the Individual In the real world of constant change, the individual cannot remain inflexible. The old concept of character as something fixed and immutable gives way to an entirely new conception of the individual. A person is not a rigid structure. New and more accurate understanding describes the individual as a “process-person,” a configuration, not rigid, not unchangeable, not permanent. The electro-chemical constitution of man is a stabilization of energy.
Man is a physical configuration of swarms of atoms and electro-magnetic fields. An individual who speaks several languages moves without verbal obstruction from culture to culture. The individual who masters many role-languages; one who communicates on many levels in verbal and nonverbal systems, moves among the earth people as a spirit; a spirit capable of substance, sensitive to all that is; one who helps unfold the events of actuality: translator and instrument of the Cosmos. Est.
128/Consultations Charts are not authorities; they are not leaders or even plans. When consulted, they provide useful information; they give insight into what is to come. These charts, by which to navigate the coming decade of conflict, are for the Steersman to consult. The actual voyage is the ongoing, transformative process of life.
129/ Charts The following list is a basic library of non-specialized guidance sources relevant to whole earth understanding of the Est
• U.S. Constitution
• I Ching (Wilhelm-Baynes translation)
• Whole Earth Catalog (Portola Institute)
• World Design Science Decade (Buckminster Fuller)
• Utopia or Oblivion (Buckminster Fuller)
• Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Buckminster Fuller)
• Gutenberg Galaxy (Marshall McLuhan)
• Understanding Media (Marshall McLuhan)
• Counterblast (Marshall McLuhan)
o Book of the Tao (Lao Tse)
• Commentaries on Living Vols. (J. Krishnamurti)
• The First and the Last Freedom (J. Krishnamurti)
• Cybernetics (Norbert Wiener)
• Technics and Civilization (Lewis Mumford)
• Myth of the Machine (Lewis Mumford)
• The Beyond Within (Sidney Cohen)
• Man’s Presumptuous Brain (A. T. W. Simeons, M.D.)
• Ecotactics (Sierra Club Handbook for Environment Activists) Environmental Handbook (G. DeBell)
Plunging Into Politics (Loeb & Safire)
* The Whole Earth Catalog is the basic source compendium for Steersmen. All relevant publications may be ordered through it: Portola Institute, 588 Santa Cruz, Menlo Park, California 94025.
A wall chart of value to the EST is 4 Changes (CHOFU) printed by Noel Young for the Unicorn Book Shop and the Whole Earth Bookstore.
Earthside Missile Base (Lincoln, Calif.)
55 acre, U.S. Titan ICBM underground installation
abandoned by the government; purchased by the non-profit Experimental Systems Technology foundation as a major Ecology Center and world-wide information transmitter. An authentic “tiller of the world.” Write to Earthside Missile Base, Lincoln, Calif, or to Steersman, P.O. Box 8679, Universal City, CA 91608.
COSMOS
Nature, in all-inclusive totality. Universe. (Def. Buckminster Fuller, “The comprehensive integral-aggregate system embracing all the separate integral-aggregate systems of all men’s consciously apprehended and communicated experiences”)
ELECTRONIC ENVIRONMENT
Electronic input, the “daily diet” which conditions formative minds. Thus: television, radio, telephone, telegraph, wire-services, wire-photo, teletype, film, recordings, tape, etc.
ESTABLISHMENT
Overall population bloc which is not simulsensory and is fundamentally linear. The “established order.” Opposes the Movement Variously identified as: “Corporate Power Structure,” “Military-Industrial Complex,” “Silent Majority,” “Amerika,” “Straights,” etc. Tends to oe over 40 in 1970.
EST
Latin root, “It is,” hence, the Here and Now; instant of the present. Also acronyms:
Electronic Social Transformation
Eco-Strategy-Tactics
Environment Systems Theory
Equilibrium of Sensory Thresholds
Earth Survival Techniques
Exploration of Simulsense Totality
Ego Self Transcendence, etc.
Def. Complete representatives of the Electronic Social Transformation, the EST people are genuinely comprehensive and include all of mankind’s capabilities. Prime movers of the Movement, they are transformers of energy. Naturally at home in the simulsense, they are basically non-linear but have also achieved linear capability which they include as a useful skill but not as a dominant way of life.
granular tactics
"Artificial Revolution." Selected-field, focus-of-energy to achieve a limited objective of sufficient importance to turn the tide.
“Granular” from “grains” which intermingle like fine powder, concentrating on a given area until critical mass is achieved.
LINEAR
Book-conditioned, print-conditioned. Structured or organized in orderly sequence of lines as “line-of-print,” “line-of-thought,” “line-of-products,” “firing-line,” “ship-of-the-line,” “assembly line,” etc. Precise hierarchic “line of succession” or “line of command.” Rules-and-regulations, ordinances, law-and-order: “the book.” (Not to be confused with mathematical term, “linear equation” which is an equation of the first degree between two variables.)
LITERATE
Cultures conditioned primarily by reading and writing. The advent of typographic technology at Gutenberg brings about print-conditioning. Linear. One-at-a-time, compartmentalized, separate-sense.
MONGOOSE TACTICS
Conscious use of Resonance Phasing to permeate, modify and dissolve the Corporate Power Structure. See text, paragraph 96.
MOVEMENT
Overall population bloc which is non-linear and simulsensory. The Movement moves with the transformation. Tends to be under 30 in 1970. Opposed by the Establishment. Variously identified as “Under Thirty,” “Woodstock Nation,” “Youth Revolution,” “Now Generation,” etc. Includes Neo-primitives plus the Est people and relates to all peoples who are simulsensory. Thus, relates to authentic primitive peoples but does not automatically include them. (Tribal, religious, or hierarchic commitments of primitives often create structured, divisive barriers. )
NEO-PBIMrnVES
Non-linear, simulsensory peoples of the global, post-literate, electronic culture who resemble primitives in that they “skip” book reading and have no linear capability. No technical, structured capability. Incapable of stable organization. Play “by ear.” In benevolent aspect, close to the Cosmos; in malevolent aspect, dose to the predator.
NON-LINEAR
Random-conditioned, electronic-conditioned. Unstructured and non-organized in disorderly, out-of-sequence, overlapping, simultaneous mix. No hierarchy; no linear ordinances, rules or regulations. Natural or Cosmic “field-influence” as opposed to structured law-and-order.
PHASE
Matching frequency. Vibrational interlock. (Modulation of phase: wherein a strong interlocked signal alters and modifies a weaker signal by shifting frequency.) Tactical phasing, see Mongoose tactics.
POST-LITERATE
After the epoch of reading and writing. Those people conditioned by the electronic environment. Includes Neo-primitives (those with no linear capability who “skip” reading and writing). Also includes the Est people who are basically non-linear but have acquired linear capability and get into reading and writing as useful skills but not as a conditioned way of life.
PRE-UTERATE
Before the epoch of reading and writing. Those primitive peoples not arrived at scribal culture. Non-unear; simulsensory.
PRELUDE
Presidential Election of 1972. The next to last opportunity to change Executive direction.
PRIMITIVES
Non-linear, simulsensory peoples of pre-literate cultures. Authentic tribal natives. Aboriginals. “The Noble Savage.” In benevolent aspect, close to the Cosmos; in malevolent aspect, close to the predator.
RESONANCE
Non-linear bonding. Vibrational relatedness. Harmonic affinity. Physical interrelationships beyond linear, static groupings of discrete entities. (For Resonant Modulation see PHASE)
SIMULSENSE
Habitual mode of perception and conception brought about by several senses receiving input simultaneously. An overlapping fusion or sensory “mix”; not one-at-a-time; not in sequence; not separate or compartmentalized. A state of “multisense awareness” as differentiated from “single-sense focus of concentration.” The natural state of infants and young children before structuring of attention-focus dominates the sensorium. The natural state of primitive peoples. Maximal diencephalic relatedness to the environment with minimal cortical modification. Tends toward homeostatic relatedness to the environment. In benevolent aspect, close to the Cosmos; in malevolent aspect, close to the predator.
STEERSMAN
Those people of the Est who are competent to navigate the changing configurations of the transformation. Prime movers of the Movement, they are not leaders or superiors. They have mastered the charts of the coming decade of conflict. Beyond organization, they generate “fields of influence” which can structure and/or unstructure, separate and/or unite; at one with the unfolding of the Cosmos.
SYNERGY
Behavior of integral aggregate systems unpredicted by behavior of any of their components or subassemblies of their components. (B. Fuller)
TRANSFORMATION
The on-going, transformative process of change itself, ever changing. Rapid, constant, inexorable change. Not organized, not planned, no pattern, no structure, beyond revolution. Includes vestiges of revolution but arrives at no “new order.” The dynamic process of continuous change is the sole equilibrium. The concept of rigid, structured order is replaced by patternrecognition of the configurations of Cosmic now.
TRANSFORMERS
Those who further the transformation. Those who shape the potential energy of masses. Activists, not necessarily Steersmen; not necessarily Est (may be Neo-primitives but in benevolent; constructive aspect only). Active defenders of the Constitution.
TRANSITION
1950 to the year 2000.1975 is mid-point.
TRANSIT ZERO
The year 1976. Precisely: the first Tuesday in November, 1976. The Presidential Election which will determine the ultimate fate of the biosphere. The last chance to change Executive direction. The point of no return.
U.S. CONSTITUTION
Linear, structured document designed to describe the greatest possible degree of non-linear, unstructured freedom through peaceful means.