Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 107
distances in shorter and snorter times to kill more and more people."
Before that process culminates in Armaggedon, we must learn the arts of
peace, and we better start studying them avidly right now. We should have
started the day after Hiroshima.
This seems so obvious to me—and I note that even Neanderthals like
Ronald Reagan give occasional lip-service to it—that I have been driven
repeatedly over the years, but especially when the following two essays
were written, to ask the inevitable question: if rational self-interest does
demand that we abandon our traditional violent approach to international
relations, why is it that most people still passively tolerate the growing
nuclear stockpile that moves us closer to annihilation every day? The only
answer to that which makes sense to me is Freudian and perhaps Reichian,
and the Vietnam War brought all this home to me even more than the Nazi
horrors had, because in Vietnam it was my countrymen and contemporaries
who were happily toasting women and children with napalm. Any theory
about Eichmann that eased my anxieties broke down when I tried to apply it
to Lt. Calley, who was the product of the same socio-economic-cultural
environment that had produced me.
I began to fear that people are not guided by rational self-interest; sadism
and masochism may play a larger role in human psychology than we like to
admit. The masochism of the masses may even, as Reich claimed, summon
the most sadistic "leaders" who can be found. People tolerate weapons of
megadeath not just because they like the idea of Russian women and
children being toasted and roasted and barbecued in nuclear hell, but
because they like the idea of this being done to women and children
generally, including "our" "own"—and because they like the thought of it
being done to themselves. In short, the "moral majority" likes nuclear war
for the same reason it likes hellfire-and-damnation sermons. It enjoys
wallowing in the imagery of ultimate sadism and ultimate masochism both.
Maybe Hell is so popular, and nuclear war (man-made Hell) is so popular
with the people who dig Hellfire theology, because the masses want to
suffer more than they want anything else.
These anxieties run through all my novels and even haunt the one play I
have written. I am sourly amused that some critics complain that I am "too
optimistic" or "too Utopian." I guess critics of that ilk only read every second
page. My "optimism" is an act of will—a revolutionary act of defiance,
perhaps—but it is not based on any innocent illusions about what human
beings have been doing to each other since the dawn of history.