Selection of course could be carried much further, even to the point of an illness that affects only people with certain traits of character, since character is an expression of an overall metabolic configuration. That is, there is a rage metabolism, a metabolism associated with covert hostility, and so on. So it would be possible to carry your selective pestilence much further.
Well, it seems that War, Plague and Famine are merging. What about the Last Horseman... Death, a pale horse, a pale rider? Can Death maintain a separation from the means by which Death is produced? Can he stay separate from the horseman and get out there and do the job, or is the union between Death and the instrument of Death about to be consumated? There are those who think so.
Herald-Tribune, June 8, 1970: “The Synthetic Gene Revolution.” This is the first synthetic gene by Dr. Hare Khorana, at the University of Wisconsin. And there’s been a lot of research since. They’ve created an artificial gene; news that ranks with the splitting of the atom as a milestone in our control or lack of control of the physical universe.
“It is the beginning of the end” - this was the reaction to the news from the science attache at one of Washington’s major embassies. “If you can make genes you can eventually make new viruses for which there is no cure. Any little country with good biochemists could make such biological weapons. It would only take a small laboratory.” If it can be done, someone will do it. To be sure, it’s almost science fiction but science fiction has a bad habit of coming true. In fact, it frequently surpasses the fact. The facts of science are now surpassing science fiction, and we have a lot of books that would be classified as scientific fact: a novel like The Terminal Man, there’s nothing in there that isn’t within the reach of modern technology.
Of course, the Gentlemen Riders have no meaning outside of human context, they are in fact human inventions. So let us examine the human context.
The first thing that would impress a visitor from outer space would be the tremendous, inexplicable gap between potential and performance. It’s amazing when you consider what the human organism could do in terms of its potential, and what it The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse By William S. Burroughs Page 2 of 4
actually does. No species that isn’t fundamentally flawed could be so stupid this consistently. Let us consider the human organism as an artifact. Comparative evolution will show us what is wrong with it and how far it has to go.
You have the first airplanes... now, take one look at that artifact and you see that everything is wrong with it. They were incredibly dangerous, they had a very short range, and to be anything more than a curiosity it has a very long way to go...
So now up here’s your present planes and rockets and so forth... and all the steps in between... well now take an artifact -
see, we can see that this artifact is in a rudimentary stage and that it has a very long way to go, we could see that back then. We don’t have to see all this development to know that if this is going to do anything at all it’s got to make a number of forward steps. Now take an artifact like the bow I’ll put it up here - what’s wrong with it? Very little. It’s gone about as far as you can go on the principle of a projectile propelled by an elastic spring - you can use rubber bands, it’s the same principle. The artifact is subject to a basic limitation: the stronger the bow, the more energy required to draw it. It can’t go very much further. Now of course modern bows have appeared and there are a lot of hobbyists who hunt with bows. They kill bears and I think even lions, and undoubtedly these bows, modern bows, are much better than anything that people had five hundred years ago. But they’re not all that much better. They’re not basically different or basically much better.
Now take another artifact down here, the flintlock rifle or pistol. Take one look at that artifact and ask yourself what is wrong with it. Just about everything. They didn’t even have the firepower of the bow; they took much longer to load and prepare them. They misfired very frequently; rain and wind would render the weapon quite useless - if rain gets in the pan it won’t ignite. Black powder is dangerous, very much more volatile than smokeless powder. It’s very dangerous to transport and use, static electricity will set it off; if you shuffled across the floor and picked up a canister of black powder that would be a very dangerous thing to do - it’d blowup... So it has a very long way to go.
Up here to modern automatic weapons, another factor comes in and that’s the factor of money. Money and profit becomes very important because as soon as an article goes into mass production they don’t want to know about a better article. And they particularly don’t want to know about one that is basically different, because the most expensive thing a manufacturer can do is to junk his dies. He’s got his dies set up to manufacture the very inefficient internal combustion engine, he doesn’t want to shift to a turbine. So he will suppress inventions. Very useful inventions are now suppressed...
And we can also see living creatures as artifacts. When you take an artifact like the weasel, well what’s wrong with it?
Well, not much. It’s limited, but in terms of its structure and goals it functions well enough; it has reached the limit of its development. And you look at the human artifact: what’s wrong with it? Just about everything, it’s right down here with the flintlock... It’s got a long way to go.
First the question as to what distinguishes the human animal from other animals is one of the very frequent questions, and Korzybski, who started the idea of general semantics, the meaning of meaning, had I think the best answer: it’s language.
But language must not be confused with communication. You see animals communicate and they talk, but they don’t write. They can’t make knowledge available to members of their species outside their communication range. Everything they learn they have to learn during their lifetime. Now a wise old rat will know a great deal about poisons and traps, but he can’t write a treatise which other rats could read, he can’t pass that knowledge on to rats over here or to future generations of rats... very fortunate... for us. Now to get back to the human artifact; one of the things that distinguishes man is language, that animals talk but they don’t write. They’ve got no way of writing something down so that it can be available through space and time. Actually, we know that some people don’t write, but the whole of human language they can pass on orally, which animals cannot. Language is essentially a symbolic system where something represents something else. You can’t draw a map, it doesn’t mean anything to an animal; you can’t get an animal to read a map, but illiterate, so-called illiterate people can.
Well, let’s consider the human artifact and what is wrong with it. Consider a creature that can live on the seacoast, watching ships come in, day after day, year after year, and still believe the Earth is flat because the Church says so. They knew the Earth was round. They believed it was flat. Or an artifact that can use cannonballs for 500 years before the idea of a cannonball that explodes on contact blossoms in this barren soil. I could go on and on.
So why has the human artifact stayed back with the flintlock? Well, I’m advancing a theory that we were not biologically designed to remain in our present stage any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole. The human is in a state of neotony - that’s a biologic word we’ve already heard from Dr. Lotsch used to describe an organism fixated at what would normally be a larval or transitional phase. Now ordinarily a salamander starts his life cycle in the water with gills; later the gills atrophy and drop off and the animal develops lungs and comes up to land: then they go back and spend the rest of their lives in the water and they have to come up to breathe. Just why they do that I don’t know.