The Secret Knowledge

unwritten law. It has been noted that one might say, “My husband hit me,” but one never hears, “My best friend hit me.” This is a covenantal relationship, like that of the boyfriend and girlfriend, and it is understood as such, and, so, as unmodifiable.

Note, the marriage may be modified by a prenuptial agreement, by usage (an “open marriage”), by divorce or separation, or any number of mutually agreed upon or fought-out amendments. The relationship of the Best Friend is unmodifiable, because it’s based upon the unspoken understanding of complete loyalty.

The boy–or girlfriend, similarly, is a sort of best friend with the added component of sexuality. Many might cheat on their spouse, but to cheat on your girlfriend raises the question, not only to the perpetrator, but to any with whom he might share his transgression, “Why?” The covenantal bond here is stronger than the legal.

“This is my wife” conveys less information than “This is my girlfriend”; for the first may, but the second absolutely does inform the community of the speaker’s state of mind, intention, and expectations and demands for community performance. Here the two, having entered into a covenantal relationship, inform the community of their expectations of respect of the new member, such expectations being nonnegotiable.

Marriage, though sanctified through millennia of usage, is a codification of this primordial, prelegal urge to monogamy; just as the rules of sport are all an elaboration of the school yard wisdom of the pie: the (momentarily) better team has scored the touchdown, it must then kick off to the (momentarily) lesser team, which now will have the benefit of possession.

James Michener writes (in Kent State: What Happened and Why):The leadership of the movement [SDS] handed down the famous dictum, “Smash Monogamy”; this meant that husbands and wives or sweethearts who were getting too addicted to each other, had to split up. The idea was that if a man became too attached to a woman, it might impede his judgment if he were ordered to perform some dangerous task, or to involve him too deeply if he saw his girl being sent out on a mission from which she might not return. So the edict went out, “smash monogamy”; that’s when the phrase became popular, “I’m prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice.” This meant that, as a husband, you were prepared to turn your wife over to the guy next door (p. 149).

What did the SDS fear? The tendency of a person in a covenantal relationship to think rationally, thus, morally. They, like all radical groups, sought to subvert the conscience.

How to turn the nice middle-class boys and girls of my generation into the Killers of the Weathermen? They begin by exhorting each other to betray the one covenantal relationship they knew and respected—to sell out their sweethearts.

After that, everything is moot, for the betrayer has chosen his new community and they all must now abide by the same laws or suffer the shame of a degraded conscience.⁸³

The first rule of tinkering is, of course, “save all the parts.”

But in dismantling the social fabric, the parts cannot all be saved, for one of them is time. Time, we were told, is a river flowing endlessly through the universe and one cannot step into the same river twice. Not only can we not undo actions taken in haste and in fear (the Japanese Internment), but those taken from the best of reasons, but that have proved destructive (affirmative action); the essential mechanism of societal preservation is not inspiration, but restraint.

The two children with the pie will work it out, their only alternative is calling in an adjudicator, a parent. But the adult can only call in Government, control of whose own desires merely moves the problem to a less manageable level. For this new entity has to be provided for in some way, and it, or its assigns, either through good intentions, through corruption, or through the world’s favorite process of elaboration, will eventually get all the pie.

31

BREATHARIAN

Countries, like any organism, come into being, and mature, decay, and die. Any successful life form attracts: adherents, exploiters, imitators, sycophants, and parasites, as life can only live on life.

Bernard Cavanaugh was a mountebank in 1841. He claimed the ability to exist on no nourishment other than pure air. At his request he was imprisoned in a cell, and survived there, ostensibly without food, for a period of several months, after which he emerged healthy and having actually gained weight.

The effect, contemporary magicians tell us, is not difficult. Food may be secreted in or around the body, in clothing or actually woven into the cloth from which the clothing is made. It may be formed into the bricks, paint, plaster or bars of the cell, or passed by a confederate.

The only difficulty in the effect’s performance is the secretion and disposal of excrement.

The Socialist vision, similarly, is a trick. Man cannot live on air. He must live on food, and the other goods and necessities of life produced through the physical effort and thought of him and his contemporaries.

As civilization progresses and population grows, new and more productive methods must be developed to deal with both foreseeable scarcities and unforeseeable disasters and progressions.

Each of these new methods is, originally, the inspiration of one or a small group of individuals who think differently from their fellows.

Not all of these inspired visions are effective or effectible, so the various visions must compete—no government organization is wise enough to determine in advance which of a number of equally strange visions will succeed.

In order to compete, these visions need private funding.⁸⁴ As many of these inspirations originally seem impossible to accomplish, or, indeed, insane (the airplane, the radio, television, the automobile, the computer), the funding must come from those with sufficient disposable wealth to engage in what is, in effect, gambling. The competition between these competing visions eventually benefits all—if unfettered it will eventually discover new foods and methods of cultivation, of travel, new fuels—as it has throughout the history of free enterprise. For the potential reward of success is enormous—this incentive is the engine of progress, and its absence or stifling leads to stagnation and decay.

The Government can neither invent the automobile, nor, indeed, actually oversee its effective and economic production. It has bailed out General Motors and Chrysler, and this subvention will be seen to be not only an abrogation of the rule of law (the cancellation of obligations), but a vast waste of funds; for just as the camel is a horse put together by a committee, actual “government cars”,—should we devolve to that—cars put together under the supervision of a board of majority government appointees, will be neither fish nor fowl, nor sufficiently safe, efficient, attractive, affordable, durable, or fun. How could they be? They won’t be made by automakers—that is, by those in love with either cars, gain, or a combination of the two, but by apparatchiks. Who would buy such cars? ⁸⁵