LEIF ERIKSON CABAL, LEGION OF DYNAMIC DISCORD, POSITION PAPER #00001

The Abolition of Stupidity

by Hagbard Celine

Two eminently intelligent men, R. Buckminster Fuller and Werner Erhard, have proposed that we can and should abolish starvation by the end of this century.

This goal is rational, practical, and desirable; so it is naturally denounced as Utopian, fantastic, and absurd.

I wish to propose a similar goal, which is also rational, practical, and desirable, and which will also be denounced as Utopian, fantastic, and absurd.

I suggest a worldwide War against Stupidity.

Although the stupid will naturally resent this, I address my ideas here to those who are not totally stupid or who are not stupid all the time, i.e., those rare individuals who have occasional lucid moments.

The arguments for this Revolutionary Notion are as follows:

1. Although one sounds like a satirist to say it, this planet does seem to be controlled by and largely populated by persons who are not in all respects reasonable men and women. Voltaire, of course, may have been exaggerating when he said that the only way to understand the mathematical concept of infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity; but the situation is almost that bad. To mention just a few examples from my own lifetime: Hitler murdered six million Jews for “reasons” that were totally insane; Senator Joe McCarthy led a crazy witch-hunt against Communists which ruined many innocent people and never succeeded in uncovering one absolutely definitive real Communist; Anita Bryant is currently waging a crusade right out of the thirteenth century against homosexuals; etc.

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that millions of humans have been murdered in the course of such irrational scapegoating throughout history. Since each of us belongs to some minority or other, any of us might be one of the targets in the next witch-hunt, and if they burn us there will be nothing left to cryonically preserve.

Nor is stupidity the exclusive trait of the stupid; you do not need a “vocation” for it, as you do for the priesthood. It seems to be a contagious socio-semantic disturbance which afflicts all of us at one time or another. Notorious examples can be found in the lives of “the Great,” such as Simon Newcombe (the astronomer who discovered Neptune) “proving” mathematically that heavier-than-air flight was impossible, the French Academy refusing to examine the evidence for meteorites in the eighteenth century, etc. (Some might include Einstein’s continuous attempts to refute the random factor in quantum mechanics as another example of stupidity in a fine mind.)

More generally, as Thomas Kuhn has shown in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, an exact measurement of the extent of stupidity among the learned is provided by the fact that every scientific revolution seems to take a generation. As Kuhn documents extensively, this one-generation time-lag seems to be caused by the fact that elderly scientists hardly ever accept a new model, however good it is, and the revolution is only fully accomplished when a second generation, with less prejudice, examines both the new and old models objectively and determines that the new is more useful.

But if science, the paradigm of rationality, is infested with enough stupidity to cause this generalized one-generation lag, what can we say of politics, economics, and religion? Time-lags of thousands of years seem to be normal in those areas.

Indeed, it was chiefly by contemplating religious history that Voltaire was led to conclude that human stupidity approximated to the infinite. The study of politics is hardly more inspiring, and any examination of economic debate strongly suggests that the theologians of the Dark Ages are still among us, operating in a new department.

I do not wish to enlarge upon this topic, since it has already been amply discussed by Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, among others. Let us just summarize the matter by saying that stupidity has murdered and imprisoned more geniuses, burned more books, slaughtered more populations, and blocked progress more effectively than any other force in history. It may be no exaggeration to say that stupidity has killed more people than all diseases known to medicine and psychiatry.

Various cures have been attempted, of course. Socrates thought he had found the cure in dialectic, Aristotle in logic, Bacon in experimental method, the eighteenth century in universal democracy and literacy, Freud in psychoanalysis, Korzybski in General Semantics, etc. Although all these inventions have been beneficial to some of us some of the time, they have not stopped the worldwide ravages of the plague, and they have not even abolished totally the occasional lapses into stupidity of their most accomplished practitioners (the present author emphatically included).

2. If intelligence could be increased, obviously solutions could be found more quickly to the various Doomsday scenarios presently threatening us.

(A) For instance, if each scientist working on the energy-resources problem could increase his or her intelligence by a factor of two, work that would otherwise require ten years could be accomplished in five.

(B) If human stupidity in general decreased, there would be less opposition to original thinking and to new approaches to our old problems.

(C) If stupidity decreased, less money would be wasted on vast organized imbecilities, such as the arms race, and more would be available for life-enhancing projects.

The same arguments apply to any other worthwhile goals: abolition of starvation and poverty, finding cures for cancer or schizophrenia, etc. There is nothing rationally desirable that cannot be achieved sooner if rationality itself increases. This is virtually a tautology, yet we seldom consider the corollary: Work to achieve higher intelligence is work to achieve all of our other goals.

3. Although dialectic, logic, experimental method, “democracy,” literacy, psychoanalysis, General Semantics, etc. have not stopped the world-round ravages of stupidity, they have created certain counterforces: some enclaves of (comparative) rationality in which humans function with (comparatively) less stupidity than is normal for this domesticated primate species. “We” as a species have learned a few things from each of these inventions.

Those who are skilled in dialectic will not be fooled by the empty rhetoric of the more vulgar demagogues. Logic protects some of us from the more absurd “intellectual” (or anti-intellectual) fads of the epoch in which we live. Experimental method has shown us how to avoid the pitfalls of purely abstract logic and connect our theorizing with actuality.

Democracy and literacy have made these previous inventions at least potentially available to huge masses rather than to tiny elites, although it remains true that you can lead the horses’ asses to wisdom but you can’t make them think. Psychoanalysis has shown us why even the most “rational” can become subject to compulsively irrational thinking. General Semantics has demonstrated the neurolinguistic reflexes that make it so difficult for humans to abandon an old model and accept a new one, and offers a few gimmicks that are somewhat helpful in breaking such reflexes.

But psychology has advanced quite a bit since Freud, psychoneurology since Korzybski, and Behavior Mod since Pavlov. We are on the threshold of a major breakthrough in the war against stupidity, just as surely as we are on the edge of achieving Life Extension and Space Migration. The Intelligence Revolution may even prove to be more wide-ranging in its effects than the quantum jumps to space industry and longevity.

4. Dr. Nathan Kline, who could be called a conservative in the area of neuropharmacology (on a scale in which Dr. Timothy Leary is radical and the U.S. government reactionary), has predicted in his Psychotropic Drugs in the Year 2000 that, within 20 years, we will have drugs to improve memory, drugs to erase unpleasant memories, drugs to increase or decrease any emotion, drugs to prolong or shorten childhood, drugs to foster or terminate mothering behavior, etc. It takes no imagination to see that such chemicals will allow us greater control over our own nervous systems than was ever possible in the past. Obviously, people will use and abuse these drugs in many ways, desirable and otherwise, but the most intelligent will use them in the most intelligent way, i.e., to increase their own neurological freedom, to deprogram their irrational programs, and generally to expand their consciousness and increase their intelligence.

The potential for neurological revolution implicit in such psychopharmacological advances should be quite clear to anybody who has any acquaintance even with so primitive a psychedelic as LSD. (One of the least-known facts about LSD is that the longest single research project with that chemical in the U.S., at the Spring Grove Hospital in Maryland, showed an average 10 per cent intelligence increase for all subjects; see Stafford, Psychedelics Encyclopedia.)

Walter Bowart has documented at length, in his Operation Mind Control, that hypnosis plus neurochemicals is more effective than ordinary hypnosis; that Behavior Mod plus neurochemicals is more effective than ordinary Behavior Mod; and that any mind-altering technique is more effective with neurochemicals than without. Bowart’s evidence is all drawn from the misuse or perversion of these techniques, in the Army and CIA research on brainwashing, but there is no reason why libertarian and humane persons cannot use such knowledge to decondition and deprogram rather than merely to recondition and reprogram. Safe and sane principles for such mind-expansion and intelligence-liberation are already given in such books as Dr. John Lilly’s Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, Neuropolitics, by Dr. Leary, and LSD: The Problem-Solving Psychedelic, by Stafford and Golightly. Please note that these books deal only with mind-liberation via LSD, but we are here talking about chemicals much more precise and predictable. (Please reread the last sentence.)

5. If psychopharmacology is beginning to offer us the chance to program, deprogram, and reprogram ourselves at will, we are entering a new stage of evolution. More than psychoanalysis or General Semantics or Transactional Analysis or est or whatever mind-altering techniques of the past one may like, neurochemistry represents a real quantum jump to a new level of freedom: the human nervous system studying and improving itself, intelligence studying and improving intelligence.

To be even more specific and definite about this, consider the October 1975 McGraw-Hill poll of scientific opinion about what advances can be expected before 2000. The majority of neuroscientists in that poll predicted specific drugs to permanently increase human intelligence (see No More Dying, by Kurzman and Gordon, p. 4). I have saved this for mention after the more general Kline predictions to avoid the impression that I am talking only about the increase of third-circuit linear I.Q. There are seven other kinds of intelligence.

6. There is a direct feedback loop between psychopharmacology and the other brain sciences, such as electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB) and biofeedback, etc. As William S. Burroughs says, “Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.” Jean Millay and others have demonstrated that yoga plus biofeedback produces detachment from imprinted emotional-perceptual sets much quicker than yoga alone. John Lilly has duplicated LSD effects with his isolation tanks. Jose Delgado has produced with ESB many effects previously found only with drugs.

It is commonplace for alarmists to warn us that the full armory of synergetically interacting neurosciences now evolving will allow unscrupulous governments to brainwash whole populations more totally than ever before. We need to realize that the same technology, wisely used by intelligent men and women, can free us from every form of neurotic and irrational rigidity, allow us to dial and focus our nervous systems as easily as we dial or focus a TV set, turning any circuit on or off as we choose.

Why be depressed when you can be happy, dumb when you can be smart, agitated when you can be tranquil? Obviously most people are depressed, dumb, and agitated most of the time because they lack the tools to repair and correct damaged, defective circuits in their nervous systems. The Neurological Revolution (chemical, electrical, biofeedback, and other) is giving us those tools. This HEAD Revolution has the Pleasure Principle to fuel it. That is, the more internal freedom you achieve, the more you want; it is more fun to be happy than sad, more enjoyable to choose your own emotions than to have them inflicted on you by mechanical glandular processes, more pleasurable to solve your problems than to be stuck with them forever.

Drugs to erase
unpleasant memories,
drugs to increase or decrease
any emotion,
drugs to prolong or shorten
childhood,
drugs to foster or terminate
mothering behavior.

In other words, Intelligence Increase basically means intelligence-studying-intelligence, and the first thing intelligence-studying-intelligence discovers is that the more intelligent you become, the more fun it is to try to become even more intelligent. (Which is just another way of saying that, neurologically at least, the more freedom you achieve, the more fun it is to work for even greater freedom.) Nobody is more interesting to anybody than is that mysterious character we all call “me,” which is why self-liberation, self-actualization, self-transcendence, etc., are the most exciting games in town. This hedonic feedback explains why anybody who has taken even one step down the path toward neurological freedom can never be content to stop there, but is drawn on to the next step, and the next, forever—or as long as Life Extension can give us of forever.

7. In summary, Intelligence Increase is desirable, because every single problem confronting humanity is either directly caused or considerably worsened by the prevailing stupidity of the species; it is attainable, because modern advances in chemical, electrical, and other forms of brain change are showing us how to alter any imprinted, conditioned, or learned reflex that previously restricted us; it is hedonic, because the more freedom and intelligence you achieve, the more you see the advantages in seeking even more freedom and even more intelligence. It can accelerate our progress toward Space Migration and Life Extension, and toward any other rational goals, by creating more rationality to work on those goals; and it can give us the wisdom to avoid the “bad” results of Life Extension and Space Migration that conservatives warn us about.

Like death and poverty, stupidity has been around so long that most people cannot imagine human life without it, but it is rapidly becoming obsolete. However many special-interest groups (politicians, clergy, advertisers, etc.) may profit from stupidity, humanity as a whole will profit more from its abolition. From here on, we should measure our progress toward our personal goals, and our contribution to humanity’s world-round progress, in terms of how much smarter we have gotten in the last year, the last month, the last week, THE LAST HOUR.

HAGBARD CELINE was trained in contract law and naval engineering but claims he acquired his real education playing the piano in a whorehouse. He is captain of the world’s largest submarine, the Leif Erikson, and president of Gold and Appel Inc., an import-export firm that has frequently aroused the suspicions of law enforcement agencies (“137 arrests and no convictions,” Hagbard brags). Some claim that he is a master of disguise and has successfully passed himself off under such alternative identities as Howard Cork, Hugh Crane, Captain Nemo, etc., and has appeared in countless epics and sagas.