These are the bad new days
September 20, 2004
REICH
You say Gurdjieff used the term "the horror of the situation"... What did he mean by that?
OUSPENSKY
Gurdjieff meant that as long as people think they are free, they will not work on the techniques to become free. He said it was hard work and that nobody would really try it until they became aware that none of us are free at present. The horror of the situation is that we think we are free and we therefore go on acting mechanically.
REICH
When did you become convinced Gurdjieff was correct about the horror of the situation?
OUSPENSKY
It was after the war started. I saw a lorry...
REICH
This was in Moscow?
OUSPENSKY
Yes.
REICH
You saw a lorry. What sort of lorry?
OUSPENSKY
It was a lorry full of artificial legs. Wooden legs, in those days. It was headed for the front lines.
- Robert Anton Wilson, Wilhelm Reich in Hell
Sunday, August 29, 2004: Some 200,000 individuals pour into the streets of New York City to protest the policies of the Bush administration. During the march, 1,000 coffins were carried past Madison Square Garden. These were not only the coffins of those who had lost their lives in the war on terror or during the invasion and continued occupation of Iraq. Some were reserved for those who have not yet died. This demonstration was more than symbolic. It represented not only future losses but also our nation's acceptance of those losses. This acceptance is one of conditioning, as mechanical as the system of economics so rapacious that it requires perpetual war to function.
President Bush recently admitted that his administration had "miscalculated" the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. But then added the war has been a "catastrophic success."
REICH
A lorry full of wooden legs. And this convinced you of the horror of the situation?
OUSPENSKY
The fighting had hardly started. Those wooden legs were for men whose real legs had not yet been blown off.
REICH
Men whose legs had not been blown off but would be blown off?
OUSPENSKY
Yes. As a mathematician, I had studied a great deal of statistical analysis. I knew the principles the War Office had used in calculating how many wooden legs they would need at the front in the next few weeks. Such mathematical predictions are exact, but only if people behave as they are expected to behave. Only if people are predictable.
REICH
Only if people are armored and mechanical...
OUSPENSKY
Precisely. In that moment, looking at that lorry, I understood the horror of the situation, I understood that two hundred real legs would be blown off, on schedule, and two hundred wooden legs would arrive to replace them, and it was all mathematically certain... Because there was no real consciousness in any of it, just robot reactions. And yet everybody involved had the illusion that they were free and they they were making rational choices. They literally could not see what they were doing or what was going on around them. They had literally taken leave of their senses.
- Robert Anton Wilson, Wilhelm Reich in Hell
When Bush says that he and his War Cabinet made a "miscalculation", he is saying that he believes the loss of American and Iraqi lives, while regretable, is little more than a variable in an equation. Higher than predicted but acceptable when engaged in the struggle for freedom.
Bush and his War Cabinet formulated a strategy, and American and Iraqi lives are sacrifices in the cause of an ideology.
On September 7 the number of Americans killed in action in Iraq reached the grim total of 1000. Enough to fill all of the coffins that were carried in the New York City demonstration on August 29.
Just a couple days after the mass demonstration, during the Republican National Convention, John McCain told CNN that American forces are likely to be in Iraq for "probably" 10 to 20 years. "That's not so bad. We've been in Korea 50 years."
Is this a revised forecast, based on what we know now? Another regretable miscalculation? Or has this been factored in all along? It depends on what you are willing to accept.
Bush and his War Cabinet rely on public acceptance in order to ensure a supply of enough young men and women to replace those lost. A sonambulant American public is essential so that war in the name of our "national ideology" can continue.
We now launch Ritual Reality with the conviction that our nation is on a very dangerous course. People not only need to be better informed--we need to interact with others who realize that changing this course is both necessary and possible. We need to change our collective mindset and demand more from ourselves and our institutions. In short, to evolve.
Our position is one that refuses to accept the machinations of a system that is willing to sacrifice lives to obtain "democracy" and "freedom." We must first understand that we are part of a system. That system warps our political and economic resources with a rapacious ideological vision of the world and the way it works. It does not have to be this way. Instead of spending billions of dollars to wage a war of freedom, why not spend billions of dollars exporting access to clean water, food and technology?
The problem is that our leaders are locked in fundamentally broken ideological frameworks. This dead-end thinking only serves to perpetuate a system which finds this sacrifice acceptible.
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