sex is for; and every adultery adulterates it, every infidelity betrays it, every cruelty clouds it.
THE INWARD EDUCATION
124 Man should not be, above all, necessary to society; he should be above all necessary to himself. He is not educated until his self has been analysed and he understands the common psychological mechanisms. At present we teach the persona, not the real self. The persona is made up of all the incrustations, however formed, that hide what I really feel and what I really think. It is plain that we must all have some persona; but not that we should hide so much of our real selves as our societies and their educational systems now require. We must not teach how to conform (society does that automatically) but how and when not to conform.*
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE NOW
125 In this universe of mirrors and metaphors, man reflects and parallels all the realities. They are all in each mind, but deep. The infinite process is made finite in each thing; each thing is a cross section of eternity.
126 The end of all evolution is dissolution. This is not absurd. It would be absurd if the end of evolution was the perfect state. It would be absurd if evolution had any other end but dissolution. Evolution is therefore meaningless if it is evolution towards. It is now or nothing. A better state, a better design, a better self, a better world; but always these things beginning now.
127 The whole is not a chain, but a spinning top. The top spins on, but stays in one place. One can point to a link in the chain or a point on the road and say ‘That is the best place to be’; but a top is always in the same place. The weight of the top must be distributed evenly about its central axis, or the top will tilt and wobble. All those tendencies, in so many religious and political philosophies, to think and persuade away from the present life, from the now; those attempts to make us put the great weight and energy of our beliefs and hopes in some other world (heavenly or Utopian) are like erratic movements of weight inside the top. We disperse our powers centrifugally. The real meaning of life is close around the axis of each now.
128 It is not by accident that the discovery of self is not encouraged by the state. An educational system is organized by the state to prolong the state; and the discovery of the self is also often the discovery of what the state really is.
129 Our present educational systems are all paramilitary. Their aim is to produce servants or soldiers who obey without question and who accept their training as the best possible training. Those who are most successful in a state are those who have most interest in prolonging the state as it is; they are also those who have most to say in the educational system, and in particular by ensuring that the educational product they want is the most highly rewarded.
130 State and government are ways of thinking of the then; they are systems of the then. We say ‘He lives in the past and we say it with pity or contempt; yet most of us live in the future.
131
132 It is true that many of us live in tomorrow because today is uninhabitable. But to make today habitable is not in the interest of the state. It is principally the inadequacies of the state that force man to live in the future; and the main reason for these inadequacies is that the states of the world refuse to act jointly and do these two essential things – depopulate and educate.
INWARD KNOWLEDGE
133 Most of us still carry in our minds the myth of a clearly marked frontier between the healthy and the sick; and perhaps in no area so much as mental health, which happens to be the area where such demarcations are most absurd. The endless fun made of psychiatry, and especially of psycho-analysis, is a sure sign of fear. The ‘healthy’ among us tend to cherish our phobias and neuroses; we do not want them exposed.
134 There is no greater inadequacy in our present systems of education than the attitude to psychology. The notion that school psychologists should devote all their time to the ‘sick’ (the neurotic or backward students) is absurd. The ‘healthy’ need their attention just as much. A key subject in any education in humanity must be general psychology; and a key service must be the personal analysis of each student.
135 This is not the place to discuss the comparative merits of the different schools of psychological theory. But since the psychological aspect of an education in humanity must have a strong social bias, we should certainly pay far more attention to the biological theory of domination-subordinance.
136 This theory has sprung from the study of non-human primates like gorillas and chimpanzees. It has been discovered that their relative domination over or subordinance to one another depends largely on size and (outside the periods when females are in heat) nonsexual factors akin to human self-confidence. Thus a large female and a small male in the same cage will be respectively the dominator and the subordinate; the male will ‘present’ (adopt female copulatory positions) as a sign of submission. We must realize that all humans adopt (or veer between) one or other of these roles,
137 But of course human beings are not caged and live in far more complex situations; and it is the chain- reaction aspect of this relationship need that is the most dangerous for society. The conscious subordinate in regard to one person will become the more or less aggrieved dominant in regard to another. Human subordinates are generally conscious of their subordination, and the secret displeasures it brings them, and so the road to a compensatory pleasure elsewhere in their lives becomes only too clearly signposted. The general ‘historical resentment’ or sense of inferiority felt by the German people between the two world wars leads straight to the persecution of the Jews. The vicious circle of sado-masochism in society is only too easily and naturally established.
138 Birds provide us with the clearest example of the mechanism nature has evolved to deal with this vicious circle – that is, ‘territory’. In some species, the biological value of nesting in large colonies is so great that their sense of territory is small; and in these species we find highly developed systems of pecking-order. Such species gain both ways. They are defended by sheer numbers; and the ones who get pecked to death are the weakest individuals. Other species, at any rate during the breeding season, establish areas on which no other pair may trespass with impunity. Under this system they are less prone to infectious disease, famine, and so on. That both systems work we may see clearly in the Corvidae (the most ‘intelligent’ bird family) in which closely-related species have adopted different systems. Thus jackdaws and rooks live largely communally; while crows and magpies live largely in pairs or small families.
139 Man utilizes both systems. We defend ourselves and organize our essential needs communally; and it is in these communal situations, which obviously require hierarchies of command and importance, that we see most clearly the workings of the human pecking-order. But we equally demand domains analogous to the territories of the solitary species, in which we can be the dominants. Though we more naturally think of spheres like the home, the garden, the property and possessions we own, as our ‘territory’, we all carry about with us a much more important psychological corpus of emotions and ideas and beliefs. This
140 A very frequent demarcator of this mental territory is the Jungian complex. A complex is an idea or group of associated ideas about which we cannot think rationally and objectively, but only emotionally and subjectively. Jungian theory explains the complex as the conscious manifestation of unconscious fears and desires; but complexes also serve very well as warnings to other members of the species not to trespass in this area. A
