Q. The truth of what you say in ATTACK! seems self-evident. I understand that the brainwashed public needs to be exposed to your persuasion as an antidote to the lies pumped into them by the media. But I don't understand why there are not a great many leaders of this country helping you in your efforts -- corporation presidents, statesmen, generals and admirals, celebrities, university presidents. Surely they are not all in the pay of the Enemy or taken in by his lies, are they?
A. In a sense, nearly all of them are, surprising as that may seem at first. They are in the pay of the Enemy to the extent that they have a vested interest in the maintenance of the System and the upholding of the current ideological orthodoxy. But even more so are they taken in by his lies -- to the extent that certain ideas are unthinkable to them, certain truths inadmissible.
A man who achieves high status in our society does so by learning a behavior pattern which fits well-established behavioral norms. By the time he might otherwise be ready to rebel against the alien domination and subversion of the society in which he has achieved success, he cannot do so. His behavior pattern is cast in iron, and he cannot change his ways, even if he wants to.
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[H]eresy has always been the enterprise of a vanishingly small minority in every age.
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Likewise, the very social status which he has so painstakingly sought binds him in iron chains. He must not -- he cannot -- stigmatize his gentility. He dare not espouse an idea which has been made disreputable.It may be easier to realize the strength of these bonds if we back off a bit and look at a historical analogue or two.
A century ago the leaders of Western society damned the greatest revolutionary of their day, Charles Darwin. Among these disapproving leaders were sophisticated, learned men, including thoroughly competent scientists, such as Louis Agassiz, the great naturalist, and John Herschel, the astronomer.
They condemned Darwin because his statement of the facts of biological evolution through natural selection contradicted the Hebrew myths in in the Book of Genesis. It may seem incredible to us today that scientists could ever have believed such nonsense, but the fact is that in the 19th century a literal belief in the Old Testament was assumed, beyond doubt or question, to be held by every "respectable" member of society, just as the equalitarian-humanistic myths of the TV religion of today are accepted without question.
People who should have supported Darwin simply could not. Their minds were too tightly bound by the chains of convention. They were conditioned, much in the way of Pavlov's dogs, to reject, without thinking, anything intellectually disreputable. It requires enormous courage and strength of character to buck the herd instinct -- to accept, even privately, a truly heretical idea, i.e., heretical to the members of one's own peer group. In any age, including ours, very few people possess such courage.
************************[T]hey did not have the moral strength to be heretics, to cut themselves adrift morally and intellectually from their peer groups and from the "respectable" society of their day.
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Gallileo Gallilei was not compelled to recant his scientific findings by cynics or ignoramuses, nor was Giordano Bruno condemned to the stake by a mob of rednecks or Yahoos for explicitly rejecting the anthropomorphic Jewish spookery of the Old Testament. The men who threatened Gallilieo with the rack and sent Bruno into the flames were undoubtedly intelligent and sincere men, learned men, sophisticated men -- but they did not have the moral strength to be heretics, to cut themselves adrift morally and intellectually from their peer groups and from the "respectable" society of their day. And it is a sad fact that the more successful a person is in a society -- the higher the status he achieves -- the more tightly his soul and his mind become bound by the chains of convention, and the less able he is to break free. Today an ex-senator or a university president can scoff publicly at those who condemned Darwin. And he may even scoff privately, or among the members of his own peer group, at those who burned Bruno, whose conceptions remain heretical to the larger society today.
But he cannot violate the intellectual mores of his own peer group. That would be true heresy, which has always been the enterprise of a vanishingly small minority in every age.
And there are good and natural reasons for this overwhelmingly strong tendency toward intellectual conformity: It guarantees at least a modicum of social stability. But it is unfortunate that it is as often a barrier to progress as it is to social regression.
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