gat

social insecurity is the direct legacy of our economic management and its quantitative values.
Autonomous Technology
The simple truth is there is no way to control this massive corporate/school thing from the human
end. It has to be broken up. It has become a piece of autonomous technology. Its leadership is
bankrupt in ideas. Merchants are merchants, not moral leaders or political ones. It surely is a sign
of retrogression, not advance, that we have forgotten what the world’s peoples knew forever. A
merchant has the same right to offer his opinion as I do, but it makes little sense for people who
buy and sell soap and cigarettes to tell you how to raise your kid or what to believe in. No more
sense than it does for a pedagogue to do the same. How would a huckster who pushes toothpaste,
a joker who vends cigarettes, or a video dream peddler know anything about leading nations or
raising children correctly? Are these to be the Washingtons, Jacksons, and Lincolns of the
twenty-first century?
The timeless core of Western tradition, which only the cowardly and corrupt would wish to
surrender, shows that we can’t grow into the truth of our own nature without local traditions and
values at the center of things. We do not do well as human beings in those abstract associations
for material advantage favored by merchants called networks, or in megalithic systems, whether
governmental, institutional, or corporate. In his book An Open Life, Joseph Campbell put his
finger on the heart of the matter:
[It is] an Oriental model. One of the typical things of the Orient is that any
criticism disqualifies you for the guru’s instruction. Well in heaven’s name, is
that appropriate for a Western mind? It’s simply a transferring of your
submission to a childhood father onto a father for your adulthood. Which
means you’re not growing up.... The thing about the guru in the West is that he
represents an alien principle, namely, that you don’t follow your own path, you
follow a given path. And that’s totally contrary to the Western spirit! Our
spirituality is of the individual quest, individual realization—authenticity in
your own life out of your own center. (emphasis added)
Mario Savio, the 1960s campus radical, stood once on the steps of Sproul Hall, Berkeley, and
screamed:
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes
you so sick at heart that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part,
and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon
the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve
got to indicate to the people who own it that unless you are free the machine
will be prevented from working at all.
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