The Distilled Essence Of The Conservative Impulse

The overwhelming majority of all peoples across the globe, spanning all times and eras, of all races and cultures, of all classes, and of all religious practices are nasty, stupid, brutish philistines mired and wallowing in their own ignorance with no possibility of ever being elevated, ennobled, or deproletarianized without sustained, coordinated, and intense cultural pressure: i.e. totalitarianism.

This is not an indictment or judgment. It's just a fact.

It's also the distilled essence of the conservative impulse.

'Peak Experiences' and The Robot

Maslow described another typical peak experience to me later, when I met him at his home in Waltham, Mass. A marine had been stationed in the Pacific and had not seen a woman for a couple of years. When he came back to the base camp, he saw a nurse, and it suddenly struck him with a kind of shock that women are different to men. The marine had told Maslow: ‘We take them for granted, as if they were another kind of man. But they’re quite different, with their soft curves and gentle natures . . .’ He was suddenly flooded with the peak experience. Observe that in most peak experiences (Maslow abbreviates it to P.E’s, and I shall follow him), the person becomes suddenly aware of something that he had known about previously, but been inclined to take for granted, to discount. And this matter had always been one of my own central preoccupations. My Religion and the Rebel (1957) had been largely a study in the experiences of mystics, and in its autobiographical preface, I had written about a boring office job: ‘As soon as I grew used to it, I began to work automatically. I fought hard against this process. I would spend the evening reading poetry, or writing, and would determine that, with sufficient mental effort, I could stop myself from growing bored and indifferent at work the next day. But the moment I stepped through the office door in the morning, the familiar smell and appearance would switch on the automatic pilot which controlled my actions . . .’ I was clearly aware that the problem was automatism. And in a paper I later wrote for a symposium of existential psychology, I elaborated this theory of the automatic pilot, speaking of it as ‘the robot. I wrote: ‘I am writing this on an electric typewriter. When I learned to type, I had to do it painfully and with much nervous wear and tear. But at a certain stage, a miracle occurred, and this complicated operation was ‘learned’ by a useful robot whom I conceal in my subconscious mind. Now I only have to think about what I want to say: my robot secretary does the typing. He is really very useful. He also drives the car for me, speaks French (not very well), and occasionally gives lectures in American universities. ‘He has one enormous disadvantage. If I discover a new symphony that moves me deeply, or a poem or a painting, this bloody robot promptly insists on getting in on the act. And when I listen to the symphony for the third time, he begins to anticipate every note. He begins to listen to it automatically, and I lose all the pleasure. He is most annoying when I am tired, because then he tends to take over most of my functions without even asking me. I have even caught him making love to my wife.

‘My dog doesn’t have this trouble. Admittedly, he can’t learn languages or how to type, but if I take him for a walk on the cliffs, he obviously experiences every time just as if it is the first. I can tell this by the ecstatic way he bounds about. Descartes was all wrong about animals. It isn’t the animals who are robots; it’s us.’

Heaven lies about us in our infancy, as Wordsworth pointed out, because the robot hasn’t yet taken over. So a child experiences delightful things as more delightful, and horrid things as more horrid. Time goes slower, and mechanical tasks drag, because there is no robot to take over. When I asked my daughter if she meant to be a writer when she grew up, she said with horror that she got fed up before she’d written half a page of school-work, and couldn’t even imagine the tedium of writing a whole book.

The robot is necessary. Without him, the wear and tear of everyday life would exhaust us within minutes. But he also acts as a filter that cuts out the freshness, the newness, of everyday life. If we are to remain psychologically healthy, we must have streams of ‘newness’ flowing into the mind—what J. B. Priestley calls ‘delight' or ‘magic’. In developing the robot, we have solved one enormous problem—and created another. But there is, after all, no reason why we should not solve that too: modify the robot until he admits the necessary amount of ‘newness’, while still taking over the menial tasks.

– Colin Wilson "New Pathways in Psychology"

Money as Manure

Thornton Wilder channeling Ezra Pound:

"Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow."