The Sheep Look Up

 The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner

NY:   Ballantine Books, 1972

ISBN 0-345-24948-8-195

(frontispiece) Please help

Keep pier clean

Throw refuse overside

sign pictured in God's Own Junkyard edited by Peter Blake

(page 14-15)  Sharp on nine the Trainites had scattered caltraps in the roadway and created a monumental snarl-up twelve blocks by seven.  The fuzz, as usual, was elsewhere - there were always plenty of sympathizers willing to cause a diversion.  It was impossible to guess how many allies the movement had;  at a rough guess, though, one could say that in New York City, Chicago, Detroit, LA or San Francisco people were apt to cheer, while in the surrounding suburbs or the Midwest people were apt to go fetch guns.  In other words, they had least support in the areas which had voted for Prexy.

"Next, the stalled cars had their windows opaqued with a cheap commercial compound used for etching glass, and slogans were painted on their doors.  Some were long:  THIS VEHICLE IS A DANGER TO LIFE AND LIMB.  Many were short:  IT STINKS!  But the commonest of all was the universally known catchphrase:  STOP, YOU’RE KILLING ME!

"And in every case the inscription was concluded with a rough egg-shape above a saltire - the simplified ideogrammatic version of the invariable Trainite symbol, a skull and crossbones reduced to
0
X

(291)  At the big Georgia paper mill the saboteur was obviously a chemist. Some kind of catalyst was substituted for a drum of regular sizing solution and vast billowing waves of corrosive fumes ruined the plant.  Anonymous calls to a local TV station claimed it had been done to preserve trees.

The same day, in Northern California, signs were posted on a stand of redwoods that the governor had authorized for lumbering: about 200 of the last 600 in the state. The sign said: FOR EVERY TREE YOU KILL ONE OF YOU WILL DIE TOO.

The promise was carried out with Schmeiser machine-pistols. The actual score was 18 people for 17 trees.

Close enough.

(291-292)  But the most ingenious single coup was later laid at the door of a Chicano working for the California State Board of Education. (Prudently he wasn't behind the door at the time; he'd emigrated via Mexico to Uruguay.)  He'd used the computerized student records to organize a free mailing of literally thousands of identical envelopes, every one addressed to somebody receiving public education in the state. They never did find out exactly how many there had been, because although they were all postmarked July 1st the mails were so lousy nowadays they arrived over a period of a week, and by the end of that time parents alert to protect their kids from commie propaganda had been warned to destroy the envelopes before the intended recipients could open them. But they guessed that 50,000 did get through.

On each envelope was printed: "A FREE GIFT FOR YOU ON INDEPENDENCE DAY, COURTESY OF THE "BE A BETTER AMERICAN LEAGUE." Inside there was a handsome print, in copperplate engraving style, showing a tall man at a table with several companions handing pieces of cloth to a group is nearly naked Indians of both sexes.

Underneath it was the caption: First in a Series Commemorating Traditional American Values. The Governor of Massachusetts Distributes Smallpox-infected Blankets to the Indians.

(320)  … Prexy said quote, Well, you don’t have to go abroad to know our way of life is the best in the world.  End quote.

(351-352)  … unanimously ascribed to fear of Trainite atrocities by traffic experts across the nation.  In many places the car per hour count was the lowest for 30 years. Those who did venture out this Labor Day often did not meet with the welcome they expected. In Bar Harbor, Maine, townsfolk formed vigilante patrols to turn away drivers of steam and electric cars, persons carrying health foods, and other suspected Trainites.  Two fatalities are reported following clashes between tourists and residents. Two more occurred at Milford, Pennsylvania, when clients at a restaurant, angered at not obtaining items listed on the menu, fired it with gasoline bombs. The owner later claimed that supplies had been interrupted by food-truck hijackers. Commenting on the event by the shore of his private lake in Minnesota, Prexy said, quote, Any man has a right to his steak and potatoes, unquote. California: experts at assessing mortar damage to the bay bridge…

(369-370)  reading, as you might say, from the top down:

Dead satellites.

Discarded first and second stages of rockets, mainly second.

Fragments of vehicles which exploded in orbit.

Experimental material, E. G. reflective copper needles.

Combustion compounds from rocket exhausts.

Experimental substances intended to react with the stratospheric ozone, EE., sodium.

Very light radioactive fallout.

CO2.

Aircraft exhaust.

Medium fallout.

Rainmaking compounds.

Smoke.

Sulfur dioxide.

Lead alkyls.

Mercaptans and other bad smells.

Car exhausts.

Locomotive exhausts.

More smoke.

Local fallout.

Products accidentally ventilated from the underground nuclear tests.

Oceanic fluorine.

Nitric acid.

Sulfuric acid.

Sewage.

Industrial effluents.

Detergents.

Selenium and cadmium from mine tailings.

Fumes from garbage incinerators burning plastic.

Nitrates, phosphates, fungicidal mercuric compounds from "compacted soils.”

Oil.

Oil derived insecticides.

Defoliants and herbicides.

Radio active this from aquifers contaminated by underground explosions, chiefly tritium.

Lead, arsenic, Oilwell sludge, fly ash, asbestos.

Polyethylene, polystyrene, polyurethane, glass, cans.

Nylon, dacron, rayon, teryline, stylene, orlon, other artificial fibers.

Scrap.

Garbage.

Concrete and cement.

A great deal of short-wave radiation.

Carcinogens, teratogens and mutagens.

Synergistic poisons.

Hormones, antibiotics, additives, medicaments.

Drugs.

Solanine, oxalic acid, caffeine, cyanide, myristicin, pressor amines, copper sulfate, dihydrochalcones, naringin, ergot.

Botulinus.

Mustard gas, chlorine, Lewisite, phosgene, prussic acid. 

T, Q, GA, GB, GD, GE, GF, VE, VX, CAA, CN, CS, DM, PL, BW, BZ.

CO.

- to name but a few.

(409-411)  Thank you. Friends and fellow Americans, no president of the United States has ever had a more melancholy task than I have at this moment.  It is my sad duty to inform you that our country isn't a state of war. A war that is not of our choosing. And, moreover, not a war with bombs and tanks and missiles, not a war that is fought by soldiers gallant on the field of battle, sailors daring the hostile sea, airmen streaking valiant through the skies – but a war that must be fought by you, the people of the United States.

We have been attacked with the most cowardly, most monstrous, the most evil weapons ever devised by wicked men. We are the victims of a combined chemical and biological attack. You are all aware that our crops have failed disastrously last summer. We, the members of my cabinet and I, delayed announcing the truth behind that story in the van I hope that we might contain the threat of the jigras. We can no longer do so. It is known that they were deliberately introduced into this country. They are the same pest which ruined the entire agriculture of Central America and led to the sad and unwished-for conflict in Honduras.

That by itself we could endure. We are resilient, brave, long-suffering people, we Americans. What is necessary, we will do. But alas there are some among us who bear the name ”American" and are traitors, determined to overthrow the legitimate government, freely elected, to make the work of the police impossible, to denigrate and decry the country we love. Some of them adhere to alien creeds, the communism of Marx and Mao; some, detestably, adhere to a creed equally alien yet spawned within our own borders - that of the Trainites, whose leader, thank God, is safely in jail awaiting his just punishment for kidnapping an innocent boy and imprisoning him and infecting him with foul diseases that endangered his life.

We are fighting and enemy already in our midst. He must be recognized by his words as well as his deeds. One of the great cities of our nation today writhes in agony because the water supply, the precious diamond stream that nourishes our lives, has been poisoned. You may say: how can we resist an enemy whose weapon is the very faucet at the sink, the very water-cooler we go to for relief in the factory or the office? And I will say this! It is you, the people of our great land, who must provide the answer!

It is not going to be easy. It is going to be very hard. Our enemies have succeeded in reducing our stocks of food to the point where we must share and share alike. Following my speech, you will be informed of the emergency arrangements we are putting in a hand for equal and fair distribution of the food we have. You will be informed, too, of the plans we have for silencing known traitors and subversives. But the remainder is up to you. You know who the enemy is – you met him at work, you heard him talking treason at a party, you heard about his attendance at a commie-front meeting, you saw the anti-American books in his library, you refused to laugh at his so-called jokes that dragged the name of the United States in the mud, you shut your ears to his anti-American propaganda, you told your kids to keep away from his kids who are being taught to follow in his traitor's footsteps, you saw him at a Trainite demonstration, you know how he lied and slandered the loyal Americans who have built our country up until it is the richest and most powerful nation in history.

My friends, you elected me to lead you into the third century of our country's existence. I know you can be trusted to do what is right. You know who the enemy is. Go get him before he gets you!

(427)  Commenting on the speed of this return to more-or-less normal circumstances in Denver, the President said, quote, It will be a source of dismay to our enemies to see how rapidly we can get the ship upstate back on an even keel. End quote.  Pockets of Trainite and black militant resistance in city centers up and down the nation are collapsing as hunger and cold take their toll, and the illnesses which are everywhere rife. New smallpox warnings have been issued in Little Rock and Charleston, Virginia. Pressure to put Austin Train on trial continues to grow, as the long delay has encouraged his supporters who eluded the mass roundup of subversives to resume their sabotage attacks and propaganda. Jigra [an invasive worm devastating crops] infestation has been reported in Canada and Mexico today. Now the weather. Over much of the West and Midwest acid rain has been falling, the result of atmospheric action on smoke containing sulfur, and…

(442-443)  “Thank you, my sick friends," Austin said as the cameras closed on him.  “Poisoned, diseased, and now about to be starved as well…  No, I'm not joking; I wish I were. And above all, I wasn't joking when I spoke of the people who have put me on trial as being stupid.

"That is the worst thing they have done to you:  damaged your intelligence. And it's small consolation that now they are doing it to themselves.

“Those charges that the intelligence of people in this country is being undermined by pollution are all true – if they weren't, do you think I'd be here, the wrong man, the man who didn't kidnap Hector Bamberley? Who could have been so silly?”

There was laughter. Nervous, drive-away-the-ghosts laughter.

“And because of that"– he drew himself up straight –"At all costs, to me, to anyone, at all costs if the human race is to survive, the forcible exportation of the way of life invented by these stupid men must… be... stopped.”

His voice suddenly rose to a roar.

"The planet Earth can't afford it!”

He's got them, Peg thought. I never believed he'd do it. But he's got them. Christ, that cameraman: he shaking, shaking from head to foot!  In a moment he's going to weep like Petronella did!

“Our way of life," Austin said, resuming a conversational tone.  ”Yes…  You're aware that we're under martial law? It's been claimed that we're at war, and that at Denver we suffered a sneak chemical attack. As a matter of fact, the stuff that caused the Denver Madness is a military psychotomimetic based on the ergot that infects rye, known by the US Army code ‘BW,’ manufactured on an experimental basis at Fort Detrick, Maryland, from 1959 to 1963, stored at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal until the latter year,and then disposed of in steel drums in an abandoned silver mine. Are you interested in hearing what happened to it?"

(445)  “When did you last bask in the sun, friends? When did you last dare to drink from a creek? When did you last risk picking fruit and eating it straight from the tree? What were your doctor's bills last year? Which of you live in cities where you don't wear a filtermask? Which of you spent this year's vacation in the mountains because the sea is fringed with the garbage? Which of you right now is not suffering from a nagging minor complaint - bowel upset, headache, catarrh, or like Mr. Bamberley there” - he pointed - "acute claudication of a major artery? Someone should attend to him please he needs an immediate dose of a good vasodilator.”

(445-446)  "In Europe, as you know, they've killed the Mediterranean, just as we killed the Great Lakes. They're in a fair way to killing the Baltic, with help from the Russians who've already killed the Caspian. Well, this is living organism we call Mother Earth can't stand that treatment for long – her bowels tormented, her arteries clogged, her lungs choked… but what happened inevitably as a result? Such as social upheaval that all thoughts of spreading this – this cancer of ours have had to be forgotten! Yes], there's hope! When starving refugees are besieging frontiers, armies can't be spared to propagate the cancer any further. They have to be called home – like ours!”

Again his voice rose to that pitch that commanded total attention.

"Keep it here! For God's sake if you believe in Him, but in any case for Man’s sake, keep it here! Although it's already too late for us, it may not be too late for the rest of the planet! We owe it to those who come after that there never be another Mekong Desert! There must never be another Oklahoma dustbowl! There must never be another dead sea! I beg you, I plead with you to take a solemn oath: though your children will be twisted, and don't waited, and slow of speech, there will remain somewhere, for long enough, a place where children grow up healthy, bright and sane! Vow it! Swear it! Pledge it for this species we have so nearly – Yes?”

Blinking at the cameraman with tear-wet cheeks, now sniveled, " I'm sorry, Mr. Train, but it's no good!" He tapped the earphones he was wearing. "The president has ordered you to be cut off!”

There was total silence. It was as though Austin were an inflated dummy and someone had just located the valve to let the gas out. He seemed inches shorter as he turned aside, and scarcely anyone heard him a mutter,”Well, I didn try.”

“But you mustn't stop!" Peg heard herself scream, leaping to her feet. "You –“

The wall behind him buckled and the ceiling leaned on his head with the full weight of a concrete beam. Then the roof began to cascade down on everybody in a stream of rubble.

(456)  We can just about restore the balance of the ecology, the biosphere, and so on  - in other words we can live within our means instead of on an unrepayable overdraft, as we’ve been doing for the past half century - if we exterminate the two hundred million most extravagant and wasteful of our species. [The approximate population of USAmerica at the time the book was written was 200,000,000.]

(456-457)  Opening the door to the visiting doctor, also to apologize for the flour on her hands – she had been baking – Mrs. Byrne sniffed.  Smoke! And if she could smell it with her heavy head cold, it must be a tremendous fire!  

"We ought to call the brigade!" She exclaimed. “Is it a hayrick?”

"The brigade would have a long way to go," the doctor told her curtly."It's from America. The wind's blowing that way."

Reinventing Collapse

Reinventing Collapse:  The Soviet Example and American Prospects by Dmitry Orlov

Gabriola Island, BC, Canada:  New Society Publishers, 2008

ISBN:  978-0-86571-606-3

(page 5)  Wars take resources;  when resources are already scarce, fighting wars over resources becomes a lethal exercise in futility.  Those with more resources would be expected to win.  I am not arguing that wars over resources will not occur.  I am suggesting that they will be futile, and that victory in these conflicts will be barely distinguishable from defeat.

(8-9)  But I am suggesting that where Russia bounced back because it was not fully spent, the United States will be more fully spent and less capable of bouncing back.

(11)  There is a lesson to be learned here:  when faced with a collapsing economy, one should stop thinking of wealth in terms of money.  Access to actual physical resources and assets, as well as intangibles such as connections and relationships, quickly becomes much more valuable than mere cash.

Editorial Comment:  Mutual aid, the way people pulled together in the first few months of the COVID pandemic.  That was a platform which could have been built upon much more solidly than it has, if it has.

(31)  It is in the nature of all information to want to spread freely, and networked computers make it ridiculously easy for it to do so.

(37)  There is a little secret that everyone knows:  the United States military does not know how to win.  It just knows how to blow things up.  Blowing things up may be fun, but it cannot be the only element in a winning strategy.  The other key element is winning the peace once major combat operations are over, and here the mighty US military tends to fall  squarely on its face and lay prone until political support for the war is withdrawn and the troops are brought back home.

Editorial Comment:  “We don’t do nation-building.” 

(53)  Camus also indicated a specific failure of both systems [Communism and Capitalism]:  their inability to provide creative, meaningful work.  We see this failure in the very high rates of depression.  We attempt to define depression as a psychological ailment, but it is a symptom of a cultural failure:  the inability to make life meaningful or enjoyable.

Editorial Comment:  All my notes on Gandhian or nonviolent economics are available through http://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2014/04/sarvodaya-swaraj-and-swadeshi.html  
The concept of swadeshi, local production, a daily practice of producing something, Gandhi also called the soul of satyagraha, truth force, political and social nonviolence.

(58)  ... the US desperately needs an enemy to justify having a military that cannot win.  This enemy must be safe to rail against, but obviously too powerful to attack directly, leaving a proud and purposeful paralysis as the only possible choice of action.

(82)  The last act in the American consumerist tragedy will end with the now naked consumer standing on top of a giant mound of plastic trash.  At the end of an economy where everything is disposable stands the disposable consumer.  But once the consumer is disposed of, who will be left to take him out with the trash....

Speaking of agricultural disasters as a class, it is worth noting at the outset that agriculture is seriously dull work, best done by decidedly simple people who do not mind bending down to touch the ground all day until they look like hunchbacks.

Editorial Comment:  This is ridiculous and offensively stupid on a variety of levels unless, of course, it's joke.

(85)  Shortly before the Soviet Union's collapse, it became known informally that the ten percent of farmland allocated to kitchen gardens (in meager tenth of a hectare plots) accounted for some 90 percent of domestic food production.

Editorial Comment:  He means fruits and vegetables not meats and grains.  USAmerican Victory Gardens of  WWII harvested an estimated 9,000,000–10,000,000 short tons (8,200,000–9,100,000 t) of fruits and vegetables in 1944, an amount equal to all commercial production of fresh vegetables or 50% of all the produce consumed that year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden#United_States_2).  1944 was only the second growing season of the program.  Imagine what we might have now if we'd continued with a Victory Garden and local agriculture program since then.  Imagine what we could do if we started now, and did it consistently, year after year.  See City Agriculture at http://cityag.blogspot.com for years of links to urban and advanced agriculture.

(91)  In the United States, medicine is for profit.  People seem to think nothing of this fact.  There are really very few fields of endeavor to which Americans would deny the profit motive.  It could be said that making a profit off the suffering of sick people is simply unethical:  it comes down to exploiting the helpless - a predatory practice that a civilized society cannot tolerate.

(114)  Although people often bemoan political apathy as if it were a grave social ill, it seems to me that this is just as it should be.  Why should essentially powerless people want to engage in a humiliating farce designed to demonstrate the legitimacy of those who wield the power?  In Soviet-era Russia, intelligent people did their best to ignore the Communists:  paying attention to them, whether through criticism or praise, would only serve to give them comfort and encouragement, making them feel as if they mattered.  Why should Americans want to act any differently with regard to the Republicans and the Democrats?  For love of donkeys and elephants?

Editorial Comment:  Voting is the least of democracy, which is do it yourself anyway, but in the present circumstances (today and the foreseeable future) a necessary and sometimes useful tool.

(133)  This, then, is the correct stance vis a vis the money economy:  you should appear to have no money or significant possessions.  But you should have access to resources, such as food, clothing, medicine, places to stay and work and even money.  What you do with your money is up to you.  For example, you can simply misplace it, the way squirrels do with nuts and acorns.  Or you can convert it into communal property of one sort or another. You should avoid getting paid, but you should accept gifts and, of course, give gifts in return.  You should never work for money, but always donate your time and effort charitably.  You should have a minimum of personal possessions, but plenty to share with others.  Developing such a stance is hard, but, once you do, life actually gets better.  Moreover, by adopting such a stance, you become collapse-proof.

The Devil's Horsemen: The Mongol Invasion of Europe

 In memory of Curtis Jones, student of strategy and history

The Devil's Horsemen:  The Mongol Invasion of Europe by James Chambers

NY:  Atheneum, 1985

ISBN 0-689-70693-6

(page 6)  “The greatest pleasure,” he [Chingis Khan] had said, “is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.”

(24-25)  And by the time the feasting and the entertainments had ended a secret treaty had been signed between Venice and the Mongol Empire.  The traveling Venetian merchants would make detailed reports of the economic and military movements in the countries that they visited and spread such propaganda as the Mongols required, and in return wherever the Mongols rode all the other trading stations would be destroyed and Venice would be left with a monopoly.

(34)  There were many Christians in the east who followed the teachings of Nestorius, a former patriarch of Constantinople who had set out for the east in the fifth century, after being deposed by the Council of Ephesus for refusing to recognize the Virgin Mary as the “Mother of God” and preaching that Christ was merely a man who had been endued with the Holy Spirit.

(36)  The Nestorian Christians who rode with Chingis Khan were Kerait Mongols.

(45)  His was the first great empire to know religious freedom and when the first western visitors reached Karakorum they were amused to find a city where churches, mosques, and temples stood side by side.

… and as a gesture to “consumer protection,” the death penalty was prescribed for merchants who allowed themselves to go bankrupt for the third time.

(60)  Apart from achieving its obvious purpose, the great hunt, which was controlled throughout by messengers and signals, must also have given the Mongol soldiers practical experience of the strategic principle that was to be such an essential basis of their supremacy, and which Napoleon later described as the first necessity of war, “unity of command.”

(65-66)  Napoleon said that the strength of an army, like the quantity of motion in mechanics, is estimated by the mass multiplied by the velocity, and on the basis of this formula alone the Mongol army that set out to conquer Europe, moving at more than twice the speed of its enemies, was the match for an army at least twice its size.  Yet the numerical odds against which the Mongols had been victorious were very often more than two to one and many of the principles developed and affirmed by theorists and strategists of later ages were already known to the Mongol “nation in arms” simply as military common sense.  At the end of the eighteenth century Clausewitz argued that the key to victory in all but a limited war was the destruction of an enemy’s army on the battlefield, while his most distinguished opponent, Jomini, a general on Napoleon’s staff, maintained that the key to victory was the progressive domination of the enemy’s territory;  with their usual thoroughness the Mongols believed and put into practice both theories.

(85)   The first western country to be affected by the Russian campaign was England.  Every year ships from the countries around the Baltic used to sail to Yarmouth to buy the rich herring catch, but in 1238 the people of Novgorod and its dependencies, who were preparing for the return of the Mongols and repelling the lesser incursions by opportunists in the west, kept their ships at home, while the ships from Sweden, Gotland and the Livonian coast were being used to transport the invading armies of Earl Birger and the Livonian Knights.  Consequently no ships came to England that year.  There was a glut on the herring market, merchants went bankrupt and even deep inland fdifty pickled herrings could be bought for a shilling.

…  Not only Frederick, but also King Louis IX of France and King Henry III of England received Moslem ambassadors, of whom the most notorious were the representatives of the sinister “Old Man of the Mountains” who commanded the Ismaili “Order of the Assassins."

(86-87)  In a conservative, reactionary and superstitious age, Frederick II stood out as a progressive and enlightened despot.  The grandson of Frederick Barbarossa and King Roger II of Sicily, he had been brought up in Palermo as a proud Sicilian.  He spoke Latin, Greek, Italian, French, and Arabic;  he had a passion for scientific experiment;  he had studied astronomy;  and he was also an accomplished falconer and an erudite ornithologist.  Since his scholarship had led him to look upon his European contemporaries with arrogant contempt and reject their backward traditions, his reason and his curiosity had led him to reach out towards the superior world of Islam and regard its princes as his only cultural and intellectual equals.  His Moslem mercenaries and his harem so scandalized the prudish and newly ascetic Christian clergy, against whose attempts to extend their temporal power he was an implacable enemy, that they gave him the nickname “Stupor Mundi."

(96)  … in the last resort Mongols could always retreat faster than any European army could advance.

(105)  In Germany it was said that the Tartars were the lost tribes of Israel and that Jews were smuggling arms to them, using barrels which they pretended were filled with poisoned wine, with the result that at several border posts Jewish merchants were indiscriminately slaughtered.

(110)  Among eight Mongol prisoners captured in Austria durring this reconaissance there was an Englishman.  He had once been a Templar, but after being banished from England for an unknown crime, he had travelled through the Middle East and entered the Mongol service as an interpreter.  It was said that he spoke seven languages.

(111)  Venetian merchants had provided the Mongols’ intelligence service with most of its information about the distribution of the European armies and the political allegiances of their princes, and Subedei would have been unlikely to allow an army to threaten so valuable an ally.

(116)  John of Plano Carpini was to travel through Russia and deliver his letter [from the Pope] in person to the “King of the Tartars.”

Friar John was the most experienced and distinguished of the ambassadors.  Aged about sixty, he had been born in Plano Carpini, a town near Perugia now known as Magione, and had been one of Saint Francis’s first disciples.  He was a jovial monk whose loyalty and solicitude for his brethren had earned him their love and respect and whose charm and judgement had won him the friendship of the Bohemian and Silesian royal families.  He was so heavily built and overweight that while he had been provincial vicar of Saxony he had found it easier to forsake the dignity of a horse to travel through the countryside on the back of a donkey.

(139)  Sergius maintained that the khan favoured the Christians and was contemplating baptism, but the friars could see for themselves that the worthy successor to Chingis Khan was careful to appear impartial, sharing his patronage equally among the religions of his subjects and diplomatically attending all their important ceremonies.  His mother Sorkaktani, who had died soon after his election, had been a Christian all her life, but she had set him a judicious example by founding a richly endowed Moslem college in Bukhara.

…  Archaeological research has revealed that it [Karakorum] covered an area of about one and a half square miles with suburbs beyond its four gates and Friar William [of Rubruck] was probably underestimating its size.  It contained twelve Buddhist, Taoist and Shamanist temples, two Moslem mosques, one Nestorian Christian church and palaces for members of the imperial family and court officials.

NB:  William of Rubruck wrote an account of his visit to the Khan

(149)  Just as the death of Ogedei had saved Christendom, the death of Mangku saved Islam.

(155)  The battle of Ain Jalut has been recorded as one of the most decisive and significant battles in the history of the world.  It was not a conclusive victory in itself and it was no dishonor to Georgian, Armenian and Mongol arms that the soldiers fought so well against such odds, but it destroyed the myth of the Mongols’ invincibility, it broke the momentum of their conquests and it marked the day when Islam was returned towards triumph from the brink of oblivion.  From that time onwards, while confusion and discord divided their enemies, the Mamluks flourished, the final methodical expulsion of the crusaders from Palestine began and Christian influence in Asia was eclipsed.

Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

 Dancing in the Streets:  A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich

NY:  Henry Holt and Company, 2006
ISBN-13:  978-0-8050-5723-2

(page 2-3 )  Emile Durkheim's notion of _collective effervescence_:  the ritually induced passion or ecstasy that cements social bonds and, he proposed, forms the ultimate basis of religion.

(6)  But as the anthropologist Michael Taussig writes, "It's the ability to become _possessed_... that signifies to Europeans awesome Otherness if not downright savagery."  Trance was what many of those wild rituals seemed to lead up to. and for Eyuropeans, it represented the very heart of darkness - a place beyond the human self.

(10)  [Victor Turner] recognized collective ecstasy as a universal capacity and saw it as an expression of what he called _communitas_, meaning, roughly, the spontaneous love and solidarity that can that can arise within a community of equals.

(11)  The self-loss that participants sought in ecstatic ritual was not through physical merger with another person but through a kind of spiritual merger with the group.

(23)  In his justly popular book _Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language_, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar argues for an optimal Paleolithic group size of about 150.

(24)  "Dance," as a neuroscientist put it, is "the biotechnology of group formation."

(33)  As Aldous Huxley once observed, "Ritual dances provide a religious experience that seems more satisfying and convincing than any other...  It is with their muscles that humans most easily obtain knowledge of the divine."

(44)  The rise of social hierarchy, anthropologists agree, goes hand in hand with the rise of militarism and war, which are in their own way also usually hostile ot the danced rituals of the archaic past.

(67)  E. R. Dodds, in his famous _The Greeks and the Irrational_, suggested that hair-tossing might be a universal hallmark of religious ecstasy.
NB:  head banging

(141)  The crushing weight of other people's judgments - imagined or real - would help explain the frequent onset of depression at the time of a perceived or anticipated failure...

(183)  Or, as some revisionist social psychologists put it very recently, the effect of fascism was to convince social scientists that "groups are inherently dangerous."

(186)  We begin with an important distinction:  The mass fascist rallies were not festivals or ecstatic rituals;  they were spectacles, designed by a small group of leaders for the edification of the many.

NB:  Society of the Spectacle - my notes are at https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2017/04/notes-from-society-of-spectacle.html

(186-187)  At Nuremberg, as at countless other rallies in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, the only spectacle on display was the military, the only legitimate form of motion the march.
NB:  No dancing

(208)  "rioting" ...according to LInda Martin and Kerry Segrave in their book _Anti-Rock:  The Opposition to Rock 'n' Roll_, "just involved kids dancing in the aisles at theaters;  jiving in their seats;  and stomping, clapping, and yelling a lot - having a good time, in short.  The authorities thought an audience should sit quietly and sedately, perhaps clapping a little at the end of the performance."
NB:  Applause in time in Europe and Latin America, English versus American debate

(211)  The motionless perception required of an audience takes effort, especially when the performance involves the rhythmic motions of others.  As we saw in chapter 1, recent research in neuroscience suggests that thte neuronal mechanisms underlying the perception of motion by another person are closely linked to the _execution_ of that motion by the perceiver.  To see a man marching or dancing, swaying as he plays the saxophone, or simply waving his arms to draw melodies from an orchestra is to ready oneself internally to join in the marching, dancing, swaying, or arm waving.

(214)  NB:  Only one footnote mentions the jitterbugs, none about ragtime and jazz

(218)  Thomas A. Dorsey  "Black music calls for movement!"  Mahalia Jackson wrote, "I want my hands... my feet... my whole body to say all that is in me.  I say 'Don't let the devil steal the beat from the Lord!'  The Lord doesn't like us to act dead.  If you feel it, tap your feet a little = dance to the glory of the Lord!'"

(225)  For most people in the world today, the experience of collective ecstasy is likely to be found, if it is found at all, not in a church or at a concert or rally but at a sports event.  Football, baseball, basketball, and hockey in the United States;  soccer worldwide:  These games now provide what the sports sociologist Allen Guttmann calls "Saturanalia-like occasions for the uninhibited expression of emotion which are tightly controlled in our ordinary lives."

(226)  Sports stadiums, however are round, so "the spectator confronts the emotion apparent on the faces of other spectators."  People may say they are going to see the Browns or the A's or Manchester, but they are are also going to see one another, and to become part of a mass in which excitement builds by bouncing across the playing field, from one part of the stadium to the other.
NB:  No discussion of Roman and Byzantine sports as politics;  no soccer war

(248)  Not only has the possibility of collective joy been largely marginalized to the storefront churches of the poor and the darkened clubs frequented by the young, but the very source of this joy - other people, including strangers - no longer holds much appeal.  In today's world, other people have become an obstacle to our individual pursuits.

(251)  The aspect of "civilization" that is most hostile to festivity is not capitalism or industrialism - both of which are fairly recent innovations - but social hierarchy, which is far more ancient. When one class, or ethnic group or gender, rules over a population of subordinates, it comes to fear the empowering rituals of the subordinates as a threat to civil order.

(255)  It is a measure of our general deprivation that the most common referent for _ecstasy_ in usage today is not an experience but a drug, MDMA, that offers fleeting feelings of euphoria and connectedness.

(259)  People must find, in their movement, the immediate joy of solidarity, if only because, in the face of overwhelming state and corporate power, solidarity is their sole source of strength.

Penelope Reed Doob _The Idea of the Labyrinth:  From Classical Antiquity Through the Middle Ages_
Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1990

Gustave Le Bon _The Crowd:  A Study of the Popular Mind_
NY:  Harper Torchbooks, 1971

William H. McNeill _Keeping Together in Time:  Dance and Drill in Human History-
Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1995

No _Crowds and Power_ by Elias Canetti
No _Samba_ by Alma Guillermoprieta

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside by Doris Lessing: Quotes and Notes

This is a series of lectures Doris Lessing did in Canada in the 1980s. With the concatenation of politics, pandemic, and climate on top of war, famine, and the usual disasters, I doubt that anyone in the world now, and certainly in the "developed world," is entirely sane. At the very least, we are all suffering from PTSD. Lessing spoke to that, way back then.

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside by Doris Lessing
NY: Harper and Row, 1987
ISBN 0-06-039077-8

(page 7) More’s Utopia, Campanella’s City of the Sun, Morris’s News from Nowhere, Butler’s Erewhon….

(9) … in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past and are permitted to be brutal and cruel.

It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.

I think it is sentimental to discuss the subject of war, or peace, without acknowledging that a great many people enjoy war - not only the idea of it, but the fighting itself.

(11) Seven years of war had left them [Zimbabweans] in a stunned, curiously blank state, and I think it was because whenever people are actually forced to recognize, from real experience, what we are capable of, it is so shocking that we can’t take it in easily…. It was evident that the actual combatants on both sides, both blacks and whites, had thoroughly enjoyed the war.

NB: Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard: “The whole point of war is to put women everywhere in that condition... [people who would do anything for food or protection for themselves and the children and the old people, since the young men were dead or gone away]… It’s always men against women, with the men only pretending to fight among themselves.”

(13) It is not too much to say that when the word “blood” is pronounced, this is a sign that reason is about to depart.

(21) … the Left might find it useful to say something like this, “It has been easily observable for some time that groups like ours always split and then the two new groups become enemies equipped with leaders who hurl abuse at each other. If we remain aware of this apparently inbuilt drive that makes groups split and split again we may perhaps behave less mechanically.”

(22) It is possible to sit through hours, days, of discussion about war, and never hear it mentioned that one of the causes of war is that people enjoy it, or enjoy the idea of it.

(23) Opponents are never hated as much as former allies.

(33-34) Brain-washing has three main pillars or processes, by now well understood. The first is tension, followed by relaxation. This one is used, for instance, in the interrogation of prisoners, when the interrogator is alternatively harsh and tender - one moment a sadistic bully, the next a kind friend. The second is repetition - saying or singing the same thing over and over again. The third is the use of slogans - the reducing of complex ideas to simple sets of words. These three are used all the time by governments, armies, political parties, religious groups, religions - and always have been used.

(35) The more sane we are, the more likely we are to be converted. But we may comfort ourselves with this: that brain-washing is usually not permanent. We may be brain-washed - by conscious or unconscious manipulators, or we may brain-wash ourselves (not uncommon, this) - but it usually wears off.

(36)… as all the philosophers and sages have recommended, we will all live our lives with minds free of violent and passionate commitment, but in a condition of intelligent doubt about ourselves and our lives, a state of quiet, tentative, dispassionate curiosity.
NB: negative capability as positive capability
"a writer's ability to accept 'uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,' according to English poet John Keats, who first used the term in an 1817 letter."

(39) … as if it were in some way reactionary or anti-libertarian or anti-democratic to look at the behaviour of human beings, at _our_ behavior, dispassionately, as something that one may learn to predict.

(40) Government by show business… Well, every authoritarian goverrnment understands this very well.

(44) The researchers of brainwashing and indoctrination discovered that people who knew how to laugh resisted best. The Turks, for instance… the soldiers who faced their torturers with laughter sometimes survived when others did not. Fanatics don’t laugh at themselves; laughter is by definition heretical, unless used cruelly, turned outwards against an opponent or enemy. Bigots can’t laugh. True believers don’t laugh. Their idea of laughter is a satirical cartoon pillorying an opposition person or idea. Tyrants and oppressors don’t laugh at themselves, and don’t tolerate laughter at themselves.

Laughter is a very powerful thing, and only the civilized, the liberated, the free person can laught at herself, himself.
NB: The smile on the bullet in Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

(48) But we also find our thinking changing because we belong to a group. It is the hardest thing in the world to maintain an individual dissident opinion, as a member of a group.

… If my guess is true, then it aptly illustrates my general thesis, and the general idea behind these essays, that we (the human race) are now in posssession of a great deal of hard information about ourselves, but we do not use it to improve our institutions and therefore our lives.

(53) It has been noticed that there is this 10 per cent of the population, who can be called natural leaders, who do follow their own minds into decisions and choices. It has been noted to the extent that this fact had been incorporated into instructions for people who run prisons, concentration camps, prisoner of war camps: remove the 10 per cent, and your prisoners will become spineless and conforming.

(57) This, [Milgram] experiment, like the many others along the same lines, offers us the information that a majority of people, regardless of whether they are black or white, male or female, old or young, rich or poor, will carry out orders, no matter how savage and brutal the orders are.

(60) Passionate loyalty and subjection to group pressure is what every state relies on.

(61) When I look back at the Second World War, I see something I didn’t more than dimly suspect at the time. It was that everyone was crazy.

(62) How is it that so-called democratic movements don’t make a point of instructing their members in the laws of crowd psychology, group psychology?

When I ask this, the response is always an uncomfortable, squeamish reluctance, as if the whole subject is really in very bad taste, unpleasant, irrelevant. As if it will all just go away if it is ignored.

So at the moment, if we look around the world, the paradox is that we may see this new information being eagerly studied by governments, the possessors and users of power - studied and put into effect. But the people who say they oppose tyranny literally don’t want to know.

(63) But wait… we all know the news is presented to us for maximum effect, that bad news seems, at least, to be more effective in arousing us than good news - which in itself is an interesting comment on the human condition.

Notes on Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class

The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen
Mineola, NY: Dover, 1994 (ISBN 0-486-28062-4)

(page 20) So soon as the possession of property becomes the basis of popular esteem, therefore, it becomes also a requisite to that complacency which we call self-respect.

(21) … but since the struggle is substantially a race for reputability on the basis of an invidious comparison, no approach to a definitive attainment is possible… pecuniary standing...

(22) An invidious comparison is a process of valuation of persons in respect of worth.

(28) It has already been remarked that the term “leisure,” as here used, does not connote indolence or quiescence. What it connotes is non-productive consumption of time. Time is consumed non-productively (1) from a sense of the unworthiness of productive work, and (2) as an evidence of pecuniary ability to afford a life of idleness.

(49) So, those offices which are by right the proper employment of the leisure class are noble; such as government, fighting, hunting, the care of arms and accoutrements, and the like, - in short, those which may be classed as ostensibly predatory employments.

(53) … pecuniary decency*… conspicuous consumption…

(54) It is not that the city population is by nature much more eager for the peculiar complacency that comes of a conspicuous consumption, nor has the rural population less regard for pecuniary decency.

(60) *In order to be reputable it must be wasteful.

(71) The caution has already been repeated more than once, that while the regulating norm of consumption is in large part the requirement of conspicuous waste, it must not be understood that the motive on which the consumer acts in any given case is the principle in its bald, unsophisticated form.

(94) The consumption of expensive goods is meritorious, and the goods which contain an appreciable element of cost in excess of what goes to give them servicibility for their ostensible mechanical purpose are honorific.

(100) … the canon [of conspicuous consumption] is to some extent shaped in conformity to that secondary expression of the predatory temperament, veneration for the archaic or obsolete, which in one of its special developments is called classicism.

(108) The standard of reputability requires that dress should show wasteful expenditure; but all wastefulness is offensive to native taste. The psychological law has already been pointed out that all men - and women perhaps even in a higher degree - abhor futility, whether of effort or of expenditure, - much as Nature was once said to abhor a vacuum. But the principle of conspicuous waste requires an obviously futile expenditure; and the resulting conspicuous expensiveness of dress is therefore intrinsically ugly.

(122) Except for the fear of offending that chauvinistic patriotism which is so characteristic a feature of the predatory culture, and the presence of which is frequently the most striking mark of reversion in modern communities, the case of the American colonies might be cited as an example of such a reversion on an unusually large scale, though it was not a reversion of very large scope.

(123) The leisure class is the conservative class.

… The office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent. This proposition is by no means novel; it has long been one of the commonplaces of popular opinion.

(124) Innovation is bad form.

Editorial Comment: Innovation now conspicuously consumed and consuming

(142) Mercantile pursuits are only half-way reputable, unless they involve a large element of ownership and a small element of usefulness.

(152) Moreover, the ostensible serious occupation of the upper class is that of government, which, in point of origin and developmental content, is also a predatory occupation.

(153) It is only the high-bred gentleman and the rowdy that normally resort to blows as the universal solvent of differences of opinion.

(157) It is noticeable, for instance, that even very mild-mannered and matter-of-fact men who go out shooting are apt to carry an excess of arms and accoutrements in order to impress upon their own imagination the seriousness of their undertaking. These huntsmen are also prone to histrionic, prancing gait and to an elaborate exaggeration of the motions, whether of stealth or on onslaught, involved in their deeds of exploit.

… Except where it is adopted as a necessary means of secret communication, the use of a special slang in any employment is probably to be accepted as evidence that the occupation in question is substantially make-believe.

(165) From the evidence already recited it appears that, in sentiment and inclinations, the leisure class is more favourable to a warlike attitude and animus than the industrial classes.

(181) Indeed, it is somewhat insistently claimed as a meritorious feature of sporting life that the habitual participants in athletic games are in some degree peculiarly given to devout practices.

(184) The predatory habit of mind involves an accentuated sense of personal dignity and of the relative standing of individuals. The social structure in which the predatory habit has been the dominant factor in the shaping of institutions is a structure based on status. The pervading norm in the predatory community’s scheme of life is the relation of superior and inferiors, noble and base, dominant and subservient persons and classes, master and slave. The anthropomorphic cults have come down from that stage of industrial development and have been shaped by the same scheme of economic differentiation, - a differentiation into consumer and producer, - and they are pervaded by the same dominant principle of mastery and subservience.

(189) It is not only incumbent on the priestly class to abstain from vulgar labour, especially so far as it is lucrative or is apprehended to contribute to the temporal well-being of mankind.
Editorial Comment: Monastic work rules of basic labor and service may contradict as does history of alternatives like Mondragon cooperatives

(204) This non-invidious residue of the religious life, - the sense of communion with the environment, or with the generic life process, - as well as the impulse of charity or of sociability, act in a pervasive way to shape men’s habits of thought for the economic purpose. But the action of all this class of proclivities is somewhat vague, and their effects are difficult to trace in detail. So much seems clear, however, as that the action of this entire class of motives or aptitudes tends in a direction contrary to the underlying principles of the institution of the leisure class as already formulated. The basis of that institution, as well as of the anthropomorphic cults associated with it in the cultural development, is the habit of invidious comparison; and this habit is incongruous with the exercise of the aptitudes now in question. The substantial canons of the leisure-class scheme of life are a conspicuous waste of time and substance and a withdrawal from the industrial process; while the particular aptitudes here in question assert themselves, on the economic side, in a deprecation of waste and of a futile manner of life, and in an impulse to participation in or identification with the life process, whether it be on the economic side or in any other of its phases or aspects.

(211) As has been seen in an earlier chapter, the canons of reputability or decency under the pecuniary culture insist on habitual futility of effort as the mark of a pecuniarily blameless life. There results not only a habit of disesteem of useful occupations, but there results also what is of more decisive consequence in guiding the action of any organised body of people that lays claim to social good repute. There is a tradition which requires that one should not be vulgarly familiar with any of the processes or details that have to do with the material necessities of life.

(228) … the leisure-class sense of the fitness of things, as appealing to the archaic propensity for spectacular effect and the predilection for antique symbolism…
NB: Society of the Spectacle

(234) In point of derivation, the office of government is a predatory function, pertaining integrally to the archaic leisure-class scheme of life. It is an exercise of control and coercion over the population from which the class draws its sustenance.

Nikola Tesla on His Inventions

My Inventions by Nikola Tesla
London: Arcturus Publishing, 2020
ISBN 978-1-78950-078-3

(page 17) When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance. There is no difference whatever, the results are the same. In this way I am able to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything. When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form this final product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived that it should, and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it. In 20 years there has not been a single exception. Why should it be otherwise?
[Tesla’s imagination and Einstein’s thought experiments. Did they ever meet?]

(21) The sight of a pearl would almost give me a fit but I was fascinated with the glitter of crystals or objests with sharp edges and plane surfaces. I would not touch the hair of other people except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver. I would get a fever by looking at a peach and if a piece of camphor was anywhere in the house it caused me the keenest discomfort.
[Do I dare to eat a peach? from the Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Tesla would have been interested in qi gong.]

(32) I am ambidextrous now but then I was left-handed and had comparatively little strength in my right arm.
[Tesla taught himself to be ambidextrous. A Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain exercise is to draw with the non-dominant hand and see what that does. I like to play stringed instruments with the non-dominant as well as dominant hand in my practice.]

(52-53) In 1899, when I was past 40 and carrying on my experiments in Colorado, I could hear very distinctly thunderclaps at a distance of 550 miles. The limit of audition for my young assistants was scarcely more than 150 miles. My ear was over 13 times more sensitive. Yet at that time I was, so to speak, stone deaf in comparison with the acuteness of my hearing while under the nervous strain. In Budapest I could hear the ticking of a watch three rooms between me and the time-piece. A fly alighting on a table in the room would cause a dull thud in my ear. A carriage passing at a distance of a few miles fairly shook my whole body. The whistle of a locomotive 20 or 30 miles away made the bench or chair on which I sat vibrate so strongly that the pain was unbearable. The ground under my feet trembled continuously. I had to support my bed on rubber cushions to get any rest at all. The roaring noises form near and far often produced the effect of spoken words which would have frightened me had I not been able to resolve them into their accidental components. The sun’s rays, when periodically interrupted, would cause blows of such force on my brain that they would stun me. I had to sumopn all my willpower to pass under a bridge or other structure as I experienced a crushing pressure on the skull. In the dark I had the sense of a bat and could detect the presence of an object at a distance of 12 feet by a peculiar creepy sensation on the forehead. My pulse varied from a few to 260 beats and all the tissues of the body quivered with twitches and tremors which was perhaps the hardest to bear.

(67) I rejected the inductor type, fearing that it might not yield perfect sine waves which were so important to resonant action.

(73-74) One day, as I was roaming in the mountains, I sought shelter from an approaching storm. The sky became overhung with heavy clouds but somehow the rain was delayed until, all of a sudden, there was a lightning flash and a few moments after a deluge. This observation set me thinking. It was manifest that the two phenomena were closely related, as cause and effect, and a little reflection led me to the conclusion that the electrical energy involved in the precipitation of the water was inconsiderable, the function of lightning being much like that of a sensitive trigger.

Here was a stupendous possibility of achievement. If we could produce electric effects of the required quality, this whole planet and the conditions of existence on it could be transformed. The sun raises the water of the oceans and winds drive it to distant regions where it remains in a state of most delicate balance. If it were in our power to upset it when and wherever derived, this mighty life-sustaining stream could be at will controlled. We could irrigate arid deserts, create lakes and rivers and provide motive power in unlimited amounts. This would be the most efficient way of harnessing the sun to the uses of man.

(80) ‘The Terrestrial Stationary Waves.’ This wonderful discovery, popularly explained means that the Earth is responsive to electrical vibrations of definite pitch just as a tuning fork to certain waves of sound.
[what would a world where Tesla’s World System works look like?]

(103) We are automata entirely controlled by the forces of the medium being tossed about like corks on the surface of the water, but mistaking the resultant of the impulses from the outside for free will. The movements and other actions we perform are always life preservative and though seemingly quite independent from one another, we are connected by invisible links.

(108) The proposed League [of Nations, My Inventions was first published in 1919] is not a remedy but on the contrary, in the opinion of a number of competent men, may bring about results just the opposite. It is particularly regrettable that a punitive policy was adopted in framing the terms of peace, because a few years hence it will be possible for nations to fight without armies, ships or guns, by weapons far more terrible, to the destructive action and range of which there is virtually no limit.

The Devils of Loudun - Quotes

 The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley

NY:  Perennial Library, 1952

(page 22)   But partisanship is a complex passion which permits those who indulge in it to make the best of both worlds.  Because they do these things for the sake of the group which is, by definition, good and even sacred, they can admire themselves and loathe their neighbors, they can seek power and money, can enjoy the pleasures of aggression and cruelty, not merely without feeling guilty, but with a positive glow of conscious virtue.  Loyalty to their group transforms these pleasant vices into acts of heroism.  Partisans are aware of themselves, not as sinners or criminals, but as altruists and idealists.  And with certain qualifications, this is in fact what they are.  The only trouble is that their altruism is merely egotism at one remove, and that the ideal, for which they are ready in many cases to lay down their lives, is nothing but the rationalization of corporate interests and party passions.

(66)  His career was a demonstration of the fact that, in certain circumstances, crawling is a more effective means of locomotion than walking upright, and that the best crawlers are also the deadliest biters.

(98)  We are born with Original Sin;  but we are also born with Original Virtue - with a capacity for grace, in the language of Western theology, with a “spark,” a “fine point of the soul,” a fragment of unfallen consciousness, surviving from the state of prmal innocence and technically known as the _synteresis_.

(115)  To sins of the will and the imagination kind nature sets no limits.  Avarice and the lust for power are as nearly infinite as anything in this sublunary world can be.  And so is the thing which DH Lawrence called “sex in the head.”  As heroic passion, it is one of the last infirmities of noble mind.  As imagined sensuality, it is one of the first infirmities of the insane mind.  And in either case (being free of the body and the limitations imposed by fatigue, by boredom, by the essentail irrelevance of material happenings in our ideas and fancies), it partakes of the infinite.

(134)  Few people now believe in the Devil;  but very many enjoy behaving as their ancestors behaved when the Fiend was a reality as unquestionable as his Opposite Number.  In order to justify their behavior, they turn their theories into dogmas, their bylaws into First Principles, their political bosses into Gods and all those who disagree with them into incarnate devils.  This idolatrous transformation of the relative into the Absolute and the all too human into the Divine, makes it possible for them to indulge in their ugliest passions with a clear conscience and in the certainty that they are working for the Highest Good.  And when the current beliefs come, in their turn, to look silly, a new set will be invented, so that the immemorial madness may continue to wear its customary mask of legality, idealism and true religion.

(156-157)  By those who serve him, a great man must be treated as a mixture between a god, a naughty child and a wild beast.  The god must be worshiped, the child amused and bamboozled, and wild beast placated and, when aroused, avoided.  The courtier, who, by an unwelcome suggestion, annoys this insane trinity of superhuman pretension, subhuman ferocity and infantile silliness, is merely asking for trouble.  

(174)  “The soul is immortal, created of nothing, and so infused into the child or embryo in his mother’s womb, six months after conception;  not as the brutes, which are ex traduce (handed on by parent to offspring) and, by dying with them, vanish into nothing.” - Robert Burton

(192)  Those who crusade, not _for_ God in themselves, but _against_ the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was, before the crusade began.  By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself.

(260)  Every crusader is apt to go mad.  He is haunted by the wickedness which he attributes to his enemies;  it becomes inn some sort a part of him.

(284)  Insofar as they are incarnated minds, subject to physical decay and death, capable of pain and pleasure, driven by craving and abhorrence and oscillating between the desire for self-assertion and the desire for self-transcendence, human beings are faced, at every time and place, with the same problems, are confronted by the same temptations and are permitted by the Order of Things to make the same choice betweenn unregeneracy and enlightenment.  The context changes, but the gist and the meaning are invariable.

(307)  We participate in a tragedy;  at a comedy we only look.  The tragic author feels himself into his personages; and so, from the other side, does the reader or listener.  But in pure comedy there is no identification between creator and literary creature, between spectator and spectacle.  The author looks, judges and records, from the outside;  and from the outside the audience observes what he has recorded, judges as he has judged and , if the comedy is good enough, laughs.  Pure comedy cannot be kept up for very long.

(312)  That the infinite must include the finite and must therefore be totally present at every point of space, every instant of time, seems sufficiently evident. 

(331)  The fundamental human problem is ecological:  men must learn how to live with the cosmos on all its levels, from the material to the spiritual.  As a race, we have to discover how a huge and rapidly increasing population can go on existing satisfactorily on a planet of limited size and possessed of resources, many of which are wasting assets that can never be renewed.  As individuals, we have to find out how to establish a satisfactory relationship with that infinite Mind, from which we habitually imagine ourselves to be isolated.

(350)  For these neo-conservatives [Communist Russia, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany] , mass intoxication was chiefly valuable, henceforward, as a means of heightening their subjects’ suggestibility and so rendering them more docile to the expressions of authoritarian will.