Paleopuritanism and Neopuritanism

by Marvin Gardens

Spiro Agnew, like great Babylon in St. John’s Revelation, has fallen, has fallen! But the seeds he planted—little tiny Spirochetes, so to speak—have bloomed everywhere, and a new age of irrationalism is upon us. In particular, a new, improved strain of the old Puritan virus is loose in the land, represented on the right hand by Nixon’s Supreme Court and on the left hand by the fascisto-feminist wing of Women’s Liberation.

To a libertarian there is one rule in love as in all life: non-invasiveness. Do not enter somebody’s physical or mental “space” unless invited. This is rooted in ethology, in the biological basis of animal life, and was defined, in purely logical terms even before ethology emerged as a science, by Benjamin Tucker. The rule of non-invasiveness, also stated by Warren as “Mind Your Own Business,” means, when applied to sex, that when people make sexual overtures to you, you have a perfect right to say “Yes!” or “No!” as bluntly as necessary and without too excessive a worry about hurting their feelings or damaging their precious egos. They have entered your territory, and it is for you to decide whether to welcome them or chase them out. However, whatever they are doing without your participation, whether it be coupling in twos or in threes or in Mongolian clusters; whether it be hetero or homo or involves German shepherds, is none of your business, and you scarcely have the right to hold an opinion about it. Or, if you must have an opinion, you still owe them a decent respect for their privacy and should offer your words as a suggestion, not as a Divine Commandment.

This is simple and straightforward, and, even before the invention of libertarian ideology, has generally been accepted by highly educated men and women in all civilizations, although it clearly goes against the grain of most major religions.

Puritanism takes the opposite position, and Mencken was quite accurate in defining it as “the haunting fear that somebody, somewhere, might be having a good time.” The Puritan feels that what other people are doing in the privacy of their boudoirs, even if it doesn’t affect him physically, is of paramount importance and must be supervised and policed. Some health-food crusaders steer quite close to oral Puritanism in their obsession that everybody else eat the “right” diet.

The old, right-wing Puritanism generally favored heterosexuality, within legal (and, preferably, religious) monogamy. The new, left-wing Puritanism generally favors homosexuality or masturbation and regards heterosex as the Devil’s Workshop. The emotional tone and the desire to butt into other people’s private lives is the same in both cases; both are fascistoid and anti-libertarian.

Puritanism invades libertarian groups via the old Marxists (who were always Puritans) and the new feminists (who are not always Puritans). The key was the word “sexism,” which originally had a specific meaning akin to “racism.” That is, just as racism consists of a stereotyped negative response to a whole class of human beings selected by racial characteristics, sexism denoted, originally, a stereotyped negative response to another whole class of human beings selected by sexual characteristics. Words, however, do not often retain one simple meaning, as the semanticists know, and “sexism” soon acquired a penumbra of secondary and irrelevant associations. Pornography became “sexist,” erotica became “sexist,” and eventually, freedom itself became “sexist.”

For perfect precision, let me include here an attempted neurosemantic analysis of the Puritan reflexes. Although this analysis is technical, it is also, I hope, free of the ambiguities of most polemic on this subject.

The old, conservative Puritanism and the new, radical Puritanism are both based on phobic imprinting of the second neurological circuit (the motion-emotion circuit), together with identification reflexes in the third (semantic) circuit and further phobic imprinting of the fourth (sociosexual) circuit.

To quote Leary,

Both the Old Puritanism and the New Puritanism are forms of emotional plague.

Basic emotions are imprinted upon the second circuit during the crawling and toddling stages of infancy. Puritanism is imprinted when the child is taught aversive, loathing, shameful reflexes toward its own anal-genital parts. The parental figures first exhibit these reactions themselves, then withdraw love when the infant fails to exhibit the same reactions, then reward (reinforce) the infant for learning to exhibit these reactions. Permanent emotions of shame and guilt are thus imprinted, with considerable blurring of anal and genital distinctions.

These emotions, being largely glandular, function mechanically, as Gurdjieff emphasized. There is no so-called “free will,” “autonomy,” or “human dignity” on the emotional level. As Leary says so precisely, “Emotions are the lowest form of consciousness.… Emotions are caused by biochemical secretions in the body to serve during the state of acute emergency. An emotional person is a blind, crazed maniac.” Imprinted phobic emotions are the cause of that state of “chronic low-grade emergency” epidemic in our culture, according to Perls, Hefferline, Goodman (Gestalt Therapy). The phobic person enters each situation with the emergency reflexes already turned on.

There is no free will or human dignity on the emotional level.

The imprinting of the third, semantic circuit occurs when the child begins handling and questioning. This circuit “mediates fine, precise muscular activities, especially speech” (Leary). Depending on parental imprinting techniques, the child can learn to handle and question freely or to be clumsy, stupid, timid, fearful, etc. Usually, the imprint encourages dexterity and fluency in some areas and total taboo in others.

The blurring of anal and genital, characteristic of Puritanism, is here reinforced by parental vocabulary. The key words applying anal imagery to the genitalia are “dirty,” “filthy,” “barnyard morals,” “open sewer of pornography,” “pig,” “animal,” etc. “Smut,” from Old English smotten, to blacken or stain, cf. smudge, acts to generalize the anal phobia beyond sex to anything dark, including black humans, who are often irrationally feared or hated by both the old Puritans and the new Puritans.

The anality of the old Puritans was generally low-profile and “buried in the language,” through the constant dirt metaphor associated with genitality, or in such expressions as “Don’t be piggy, Johnny.” The new Puritans represent an unconscious irruption of these elements. Their favorite word is “shit,” which can appear as often as twice or more in each sentence. Jokes, of a childish nature, about flatulence are omnipresent and compulsive in their writings. The “pig” archetype is everywhere. When they rise above this infantile semantics, on occasion, it is only to the adolescent level of compulsive masturbation metaphor.

Thus, the Puritan personality starts from aversive emotional imprints, which are then complicated by a special reinforcing vocabulary associating all sexuality with the anal shit-dirt-mess aversion reflexes. The semantic imprint functions in harmony with the emotional-glandular imprint.

The fourth, sociosexual circuit is then imprinted with a “Mr. District Attorney” or “Holy Inquisitor” persona. Stimuli in the external world which trigger the anal guilt-shame reflexes in the Puritan are mediated through the semantic circuit, where the “smut” or “sexism” or whatever label is affixed, and the emotion is discharged by attacking the person who was the source of the stimuli.

The Pig Archetype is everywhere: “Don’t be piggy, Johnny!”

As Korzybski points out in Science and Sanity, this habitual confusion between internal evaluation and external stimuli is a neurosemantic habit acquired from traditional education. In general semantics, this habit is called “identification.” It is comparable to the conditioned reflexes observed by Behaviorists in animal studies; although normal for animals, it is abnormal for humans. It short-circuits the higher, cortical functions, and leaves the person operating on thalamic circuits only, thereby preventing the characteristically human functions of reason, science, creativity, invention, etc.

IDENTIFICATION IS THUS A MILD FORM OF HALLUCINATION. Those who identify their own imprinted emotional-glandular response with the external stimuli, for instance, cannot imagine how the stimuli appear to someone else who has not had their imprinting. In Korzybski’s metaphor, they act as if the map is the territory (or as Alan Watts says, they act as if the menu is the meal). Their own emotions are all that is real to them, in a taboo area covered by phobic imprint, and they have never experienced any stimuli in that area without anxiety, in a neutral or objective way.

As psychologist Theodore Schroeder pointed out, “obscenity” is the modern form of “black magic.” Both concepts are operationally meaningless; there is no instrument which, pointed at a book or painting, will tell how much “black magic” or “obscenity” is in it. These things are in the nervous system of the observer, imprinted in the manner described above. Attributing them to books, art, ideas, etc., in the external world, and seeking to punish the perpetrators, is the same kind of hallucination that produced the witch-hunts in which nine million innocents were killed.

Clarification of this issue explains what the Buddhists mean by “maya.” One could lead a group of both old Puritans and new Puritans through a gallery featuring photographs of flowers without any problem arising, even though flowers are the genitals of plants, as everyone who passed Botany 101 knows. However, try to navigate that group through an exhibit of photos of animal genitalia and almost anything could happen, when the emotional imprints are activated. The external stimuli (natural sexuality) are the same, but the imprints are different. Contemplation of this parable should clarify what Buddha meant in saying that most people see only their own “maya” and never experience objective fact at all. Of course, if the exhibit featured human genitalia, the fourth and third circuits would be activated, and a great deal of angry speech about “smut” from the first group and “sexism” from the second would be heard. All of this speech would confuse the internal glandular-emotional emergency imprint with the objective external stimuli, and there would be a desire to punish the photographer.

Emotional Identification is a mild form of hallucination.

This confusion of map with territory cannot be removed by argument or even conditioning, since it rests upon imprinting. Any attempt to discuss the problem rationally leads, inevitably, sooner or later, to some of the taboo words, phrases, associations, etc., which trigger the emergency reflexes again, and the rage reflexes, as always, follow swiftly. It is even dangerous to defend any person chosen as a target for the punishing discharge of the Puritans’ fear-rage secretions. The defender becomes the next target, as in the witch-hunts of the past.

Reich distinguished between neurosis, which is painful only to the carrier, and emotional plague, which is dangerous to anyone living in the same society with the carrier. In this sense, both conservative old Puritanism and radical new Puritanism are emotional plague, and the carriers are neurosemantic Typhoid Marys. No amount of sympathy for the carriers should blind us to the fact of their social role. Dr. Wilhelm Reich and Dr. Timothy Leary, the only scientists to dare to confront this problem directly, were railroaded into prison, not in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, but in the allegedly secular, supposedly scientific United States. “An emotional person is a blind, crazed maniac,” and the new Puritans, having an ideology which justifies them in indulging emotion and in refusing to attempt even an effort at reasonableness or fairness, are probably more dangerous than the old.

As soon as this analysis is understood, it should be, as far as possible, forgotten. The only way to deal with the new Puritans is the same way the libertarian deals with all human beings: non-invasively, rationally. One must act always as if the other party is a free, rational mind and never get dragged into their own childish and hysterical milieu. If they state that your position is pissy, shitty, and piggy, ignore that. Do not fall into replying in kind by stating that THEIR position is pissy, shitty, and piggy. Explain the libertarian position logically and clearly, as if you were dealing with rational adults. This will, in the long run, perform the one moral form of segregation: drawing all judicious observers onto one side of the issue and all the fools onto the other.

MARVIN GARDENS is the author of two best-selling novels (Vlad the Barbarian, Vlad Victorious) and is the founder and chairman of the Linda Lovelace for President Committee. He is currentty at work on a non-fiction book which, he says, “will demonstrate, beyond all possibility of doubt, that extraterrestrials have been among us since at least 1965 and have taken over control of publishing and all the mass media, which they are using to defame and discredit the traditional heroic image of mankind in all great art and literature, replacing it with mindrot and semantic black magic that will soften our moral fibres and make us easy prey to conquest, and they are furthermore plotting to slander me as a paranoid so nobody will take my warnings seriously. And they’re cutting the cocaine with Clorox, too.”