All authority is a function of coding, of game rules. Men have arisen again and again armed with pitchforks to fight armies with cannon; men have also submitted docilely to the weakest and most tottery oppressors. It all depends on the extent to which coding distorts perception and conditions the physical (and mental) reflexes.
It seems at first glance that authority could not exist at all if all men were cowards or if no men were cowards, but flourishes as it does only because most men are cowards and some men are thieves. Actually, the inner dynamics of cowardice and submission on the one hand and of heroism and rebellion on the other are seldom consciously realized either by the ruling class or the servile class. Submission is identified not with cowardice but with virtue, rebellion not with heroism but with evil. To the Roman slave-owners, Spartacus was not a hero and the obedient slaves were not cowards; Spartacus was a villain and the obedient slaves were virtuous. The obedient slaves believed this also. The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly.
If authority implies submission, liberation implies equality; authority exists when one man obeys another, and liberty exists when men do not obey other men. Thus, to say that authority exists is to say that class and caste exist, that submission and inequality exist. To say that liberty exists is to say that classlessness exists, to say that brotherhood and equality exist.
Authority, by dividing men into classes, creates dichotomy, disruption, hostility, fear, disunion. Liberty, by placing men on an equal footing, creates assocation, amalgamation, union, security. When the relationships between men are based on authority and coercion, they are driven apart; when based on liberty and nonaggression, they are drawn together.
There facts are self-evident and axiomatic. If authoritarianism did not possess the in-built, preprogrammed double-bind structure of a Game Without End, men would long ago have rejected it and embraced libertarianism.
The usual pacifist complaint about war, that young men are led to death by old men who sit at home manning bureaucrat's desks and taking no risks themselves, misses the point entirely. Demands that the old should be drafted to fight their own wars, or that the leaders of the waning nations should be sent to the front lines on the first day of battle, etc., are aimed at an assumed "sense of justice" that simply does not exist. To the typical submissive citizen of authoritarian society, it is normal, obvious, and "natural" that he should obey older and more dominant males, even at the risk of his life, even against his own kindred, and even in causes that are unjust or absurd.
"The Charge of the Light Brigade"-the story of a group of young males led to their death in a palpably idiotic situation and only because they obeyed a senseless order without stopping to think-has been, and remains, a popular poem, because unthinking obedience by young males to older males is the most highly prized of all conditioned reflexes within human, and hominid, societies.
The mechanism by which authority and submission are implanted in the human mind is coding of perception. That which fits into the code is accepted; all else is Damned. It is Damned to being ignored, brushed aside, unnoticed, and- if these fail- it is Damned to being forgotten.
A worse form of Damnation is reserved for those things which cannot be ignored. These are daubed with the brain's projected prejudices until, encrusted beyond recognition, they are capable of being fitted into the system, classified, card-indexed, buried. This is what happens to every
Damned Thing which is too prickly and sticky to be excommunicated entirely. As Josiah Warren remarked, "It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly." Almost always, we have not understood them. We have murdered them and mummified their corpses.
A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely man the celebrated Marxian formula of "monopoly on the means of production." Since man extends his nervous system through channels of communication like the written word, the telephone, radio, etc., he who controls these media controls part of the nervous system of every member of society. The contents of these media become part of the contents of every individual's brain.
Thus, in pre-literate societies taboos on the spoken word are more numerous and more Draconic than at any more complex level of social organization. With the invention of written speech-hieroglyphic, ideographic, or alphabetical -the taboos are shifted to this medium; there is less concern with what people say and more concern with what they write. (Some of the first societies to achieve literacy, such as Egypt and the Mayan culture of ancient Mexico, evidently kept a knowledge of their hieroglyphs a religious secret which only the higher orders of the priestly and royal families were allowed to share.) The same process repeats endlessly: Each step forward in the technology of communication is more heavily tabooed than the earlier steps. Thus, in America today (post-Lenny Bruce), one seldom hears of convictions for spoken blasphemy or obscenity; prosecution of books still continues, but higher courts increasingly interpret the laws in a liberal fashion, and most writers feel fairly confident that they can publish virtually anything; movies are growing almost as desacralized as books, although the fight is still heated in this area; television, the newest medium, remains encased in neolithic taboo. (When the TV pundits committed lese majeste after an address by the then Dominant Male, a certain Richard Nixon, one of his lieutenants quickly informed them they had overstepped, and the whole tribe- except for the dissident minority- cheered for the reasertion of tradition.) When a more efficient medium arrives, the taboos on television will decrease.
APPENDIX MEM: CERTAIN QUESTIONS THAT MAY STILL TROUBLE SOME READERS
1. What was Mama Sutra's "reading," where Danny Pricefixer questioned her, actually all about?
Answer: It had nothing to do with the John F. Kennedy assassination, the Confrontation bombing, the Illuminati, or any of the subjects it seemed to suggest, except indirectly. She had aimed in the dark, and picked up bits and pieces of the old 'movie Manhattan Melodrama, thusly:
District Attorney Wade does not refer to the Dallas official who first proclaimed Lee Harvey Oswald's guilt over TV; it refers to the character played by William Powell in the movie.
Clark does not refer to any of the Captain Clarks we have encountered; it refers to Clark Gable, Mr. Powell's co-star. The Ship is sinking does not refer to the Illuminati spider-ships, or the ship piloted by Captain Clark; it refers to the General Slocum, as Mama guessed- the sinking of this ship on June 15, 1904, is the first scene in the movie. 2422 does not refer to the dates of Oswald's and Kennedy's assassinations, or to the old Wobbly address; it refers to a scene in the film where Gable, at a racetrack, walks from box 24 to box 22 (box 23 is never shown, his body being between it and the camera).