The Secret Knowledge

by David Mamet

  The actual operations of a culture are deeply mysterious.11

  Those of us in show business spend our lives trying to understand, subvert, and predict the actions of the audience. It cannot be done.

  Not only will the audience endorse what it chooses irrespective of cajolery, but it will communicate its preferences instantly and without apparent intervention of traditional forms of discourse or of cogitation. For the audience reacts preconsciously; it will laugh, cry, fall asleep, gasp, or leave, without reference to reason, as a conjoined entity making its decisions in an unpredictable fashion, according to unstatable goals.

  The choices of the audience, of Napoleon’s army, of the folks in the elevator, are the working out of a mystery. It may be glimpsed, it cannot be understood, and to tinker with its processes is to court great risk.12

  4

  ALCATRAZ

  I was in the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, looking out of a big picture window at Alcatraz. I asked my ten-year-old, “Do you know what Alcatraz is?” He said, “Yes, it is a tourist attraction, but it used to be a federal prison.”

  Things change. Isn’t it interesting how kids learn? I got my information from Warner Bros. movies; where did he get his information from?

  In my racket, show business, one learns through doing and through watching. The second assistant cameraman spends years watching the shot being set up, lit, and prepared. Eventually he learns and advances toward the day he will be director of photography.

  There is no way to approximate the experience of failure in front of an audience. It has nothing to do with the censure of teachers who are, after all, paid to be nice to one, or at least, to keep one’s custom. Actors and writers stay in school to spare themselves that lesson. And they stay in school because they do not know any better.

  Temple Grandin, an animal behaviorist, cattlewoman, and designer of livestock systems, is autistic and writes extensively about the similarities between autism and animal thinking. Both think in pictures. Both learn through observation. A hand-reared animal does not know how to behave in the wild, what is food, what is threat, and how to behave toward its superiors. Stallions, she writes, have a reputation for viciousness but are not vicious because they are stallions, but because they, being valuable creatures, have been raised in isolation. They have never learned the submission and dominance patterns of the group.

  College, while it may theoretically teach skills, also serves to delay the matriculation of the adolescent into society. He, thus, does not get a chance either to submit to nor to observe unfettered human interaction. This student, not surprisingly, develops a sense of immunity which, after graduation, often results in either a string of failures and rejections, or in his retreat to the exclusive coterie, and extended college-like atmosphere of protection, this last if he is blessed with the crippling curse of not having to make a living.13

  As we live by our brains, and as our brains function best through observation, the absence of actual experience of the world opens the student to formation of some conclusions which have no or only harmful application outside the halls of ivy. If he is rewarded by pleasing the teacher, that is, by repeating an endorsed behavior, he, like any other animal, is going to take his learning out into the world. “George Washington, Father of our country—have a pellet of food . . . Thomas Jefferson, third President, but owned slaves and kept a mistress—have an appointment as a graduate instructor.” Light comes on, pull lever, get pellet of food. This is fine for the rat, for the rat lives in the lab. In the wider world, however, the path to food is more demanding and its signals cannot be learned inside the lab. To keep pulling the lever when the technicians are gone is called the Cargo Cult.

  The Trobriand islanders profited from the presence among them of the Allied Forces in World War II. The forces left, but the islanders kept building driftwood airplanes in the hopes of luring back the food and support.

  “Thomas Jefferson, third President, adulterer, slave owner.” In the lab—get a pellet. Out of the lab—no pellet. Obvious answer—never leave the lab. But the Left may supply the pellet for the ex-student. It is now not a grade, but the protection of the herd.

  The problem for the ex-student, however, may be different from that of the rat. The rat pulls the lever, but the college student has to supply a phrase, and the phrase has semantic content.

  Semantics is the study of how words influence thought and action. “Sit down” will have a different response than, “Sit right down,” “Sit the hell down,” “Oh, sit down,” “Please sit down,” and so on. The college student is not merely pulling a lever, but repeating ideas. He, of course, comes to prize the ideas whose repetition rewarded him. He thinks these ideas themselves are good. How could he think otherwise? For they have brought him food, and so are good. And so unquestionable.

  But like the rat in the wild, looking for something shaped like a lever, the released student/intellectual will and must look for opportunities to exercise his learned behavior, and win a reward. The reward may be status or position. It is, more usually, safety in the group.

  Thomas Jefferson, slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever.

  Why, then, should the student, raised in captivity, examine either the content or the consequences of this connection?

  He is of that group, and rewarded for being of that group which knows that slave-owning is bad. But everyone knows that slave-owning is bad. The owners did as much as the slaves. There is no actual wider benefit or merit in being able to repeat it, so its repetition is useful only as a recognition symbol, allowing its utterer access to those whose thinking process is similarly limited.

  Group recognition symbols are essential; that’s why we all play, “Oh, do you know . . . ?” That’s how our animal minds know whom to trust and whom to kill. But a further cost of these intellectual recognition symbols is a membership in a group trained to repeat rather than to consider.

  Thomas Jefferson was an adulterer; so was every President, most likely. That’s why men get into politics; it gives them power. Power brings sex, just as it was in the cave days. Politicians are supposed to have a wife. With increased success they can have all the sex they want, so they are invited to commit adultery. And those who do not steal (and many do not, but some do), will bend the laws, some for personal benefit, for contributions, for the benefit of friends, some in the service of their Country, some through folly. Because they have power.

  What else does power do? How might one abuse power? How does one seek it? Knowing the nature of power, why is one inclined to abdicate any power or reason, blindly praising a person or idea?14 Ideas may accrete into a philosophy, which is a coherent ordered view of the world, or they may accrete into an elaborated recognition symbol, a series of degrees like that of the Masons.

  Che Guevara was a mass murderer; we have his depiction on the walls of our children’s rooms. We do not have there the picture of Charles Manson. Why? Che “sought power for the People.” How does one know? One has been told. But wait, as a politician, he was probably no different from Thomas Jefferson, which is to say, he was just a man. Is it different, being a mass murderer and being an adulterer? “Ah, but I have seen Che’s photo on the bedroom wall of my son.” Would I so mislead my son? Why not? It was done to you. And me.

  Kindness is good. No doubt. What, however, is kindness? Kindness to the wicked is cruelty to the righteous. As a child I read of the Tibetan monk who left his home, walked a thousand miles and discovered, hidden in his robe, an ant which only existed in his home village. So he walked the thousand miles back to replace the ant, to avoid doing it violence. But how many ants did he step on on the way?

  “Practice random acts of kindness.” Is it kindness to give a few dollars to a beggar who is likely to spend it on alcohol? Do I have the interest or ability to determine actually what his problem is, and if I should, how I should help him? Or is it just easier to give him the money? Of course it is, for it makes me feel good, as I may call it kindness.

>   Is it kindness to pass a real estate bill, which while rewarding some, harms most and brings our country close to bankruptcy?

  The problems of the real world are real problems, and most of us are overprotected beings. You and I may pull the lever of Reward Me for the Right Answer—so far so good. But the effects will be far reaching, as our rewards have a semantic content, and our learned responses which we understand as “basic truths,” and, so, beyond question, will affect not only ourselves but others.

  “Capitalism is bad”? Not the capitalism that founded and supported Stanford or Harvard or Penn; not that which makes our clothes, and cars and guitars, and brings the food and so on, and not that which employs and supports us, or has supported the parents which supported us; and not those businesses we, in our dreams, would like to create (“Gosh, I’ve got a billion-dollar idea”). But we have gotten the pellet for repeating that capitalism is bad, Thomas Jefferson was an adulterer, and the loop is closed because we have been rewarded. So let us vote for higher taxes on business, although if we look around, California, with the highest taxes in the country, is broke, having taxed business away. And let us vote for a top-down economy, for certainly Government, which destroys most everything it touches, can run the auto industry better than businesspeople can. But by what convoluted logic does it make sense that a man who never made a car can make cars better than an industry of carmakers? Do you want your surfboard made by a surfboard maker or an oceanographer? But Thomas Jefferson had slaves.

  And this is a racist country. Q. Are you a racist? A. No. Q. When was the last time you heard a racist remark or saw racial discrimination at school or work? Ah yes, but I got the pellet. The pellet was fine, but it came with a price. The price was a limited ability to see the world. Do African Americans think it is a racist country? I’m sure they see subtle and not-so-subtle bias and prejudice every day. A Jew is aware of anti-Semitism of which the non-Jew is not. But under the law, this is not a racist country, and what other choice would you have? De facto, and de jure, this is a nonracist country, and the only other test I can see is that any taint of bias, any potential bias, whether it results in discrimination or not, must be eradicated at all costs. So let us enact hate crime laws, as if getting beaten to death were more pleasant if one was not additionally called a greaser. And let us ensure that the Government, to eradicate “hate speech,” will become the arbiter on all speech—that same Government whose very return address on the envelope awakens fear. Let’s give them more power, because I pulled the lever and I got a pellet. It’s a racist country, America is an exploiter. Capitalism is bad. Israel is corrupt.

  If we identify every interaction as possessing a victim, (find the victim, get a pellet), we are training ourselves away from the ability to ask what are the issues, how do I know, what are the biases of the reporters, how do the issues affect me, what, if any, is my responsibility?15

  Perhaps there is another view of the world, in which every transaction need not be reduced to victim and oppressor. What would such a worldview be? What skills might one need to see the world thus, as a flea market rather than a slave market? Identity politics reduce the world to victims and oppressors. But is there another way of looking at the world? Do we want, for example, to judge the rights and wrongs of the Middle East conflict on the basis of the predominant darker tint of one of the party’s complexions?

  Is not the federal Government which we revile the same Government we want to enlarge? Are not the same taxes we want to increase the same taxes we, every one, scheme to avoid, the same capitalism we are taught to loathe the same capitalism which allows us to thrive?

  Our task in life is not to guess which lever to pull, but to learn to determine, in the wild, as it were, how to support ourselves. Is this not a return to savagery? Not at all. It is a return to community, for in the free market, success comes only from the ability to supply the needs of others.

  We recognize it when the power goes off, or the rains or snow come, and we look to our neighbors for what we need, recognizing we are going to have to reciprocate, and are happy to do so. Will there be abuses? Of course. But our free enterprise system, and the free market in ideas brings more prosperity and happiness to the greatest number of people in history. It is the envy of the world. This envy often takes the form of hatred. But examine our local haters of democracy, and of capitalism, the American Left and their foreign comrades come a-visiting to tell us of our faults. They are here not because we are the Great Satan, but because here they are free to speak. And you will note that when they write they copyright their books, and buy goods with the proceeds.

  It is said that you don’t train the new puppy during the training periods; you’re training the new puppy every moment of the day. The puppy is a learning machine, as is the child and the adolescent.

  The transition from college marks the end of that period in which the child is effortlessly assimilating knowledge. Past this point, the changing of beliefs will be something of an effort. But there is always new information. Where and how do we learn to think for ourselves? In the world and only in the world. In the free marketplace of ideas, where one can run home neither to Momma nor to the enveloping warmth of the herd which has replaced her.

  Who is wise enough to untangle those processes of herd thinking which reward him? This was Freud’s question. How does the mind examine itself? How do we learn zero-based thinking? How do we learn to see things as they are and form our own opinions?

  In the free market, we learn to follow those courses which support us. We learn not to yell at the boss, to get along with our coworkers, to consider the other guy’s side of the story. And we love the victim of colonial oppression and capitalism ’til we’re asked to actually work to support or to abide him. And then we may think again, and ask what it will cost; and the vaunted “homeless” of our imagination, on our actual doorstep, may be reidentified as vagrants.

  For the Government, that is the men and women, as opposed to the Constitution, is a bunch of slaveholders and adulterers just like you and me.

  Society functions in a way much more interesting than that multiple-choice pattern we have been rewarded for succeeding at in school. Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more difficult and painfully acquired ability to formulate the questions.

  5

  LOST HORIZON

  The Liberal young are taught to shun work. They, like Marx and his beneficiaries, the French, find it an exercise both odious and superfluous. How could the young think otherwise, as they spend their four to six or seven years in pursuit of a Liberal Arts Education whose content, let alone whose purpose, no one seems quite able to describe (compare Existentialism, Deconstruction, Theory. Those incapable of recognizing bushwa may assume that someone else surely knows what these things mean. But, sadly, this is not the case).16

  These Liberal Arts victims were, fifty or sixty years ago, likely to be subsumed into actual enterprises and given entry-level jobs. Or, harkening back to their parents’ time, taught practicable (or at least merchandisable) skills, allowing them entrance into the various Professions.

  Currently, those entry-level or, indeed, make-work jobs once found in business are in minute supply—the economy has shrunk and will continue to shrink. Elective expansion of bureaucracy of both Government and Management has resulted in a decreased ability to accommodate the skill-less (both the children of the well-to-do anticipating a rise by mere heritage and those at the bottom, hopeful of the reality of the American Dream).

  The current economic jollity leaves the protected Liberal kid in a more extensive bind: unlike those of the lower or working classes, he will never dream of setting his hand to actual labor.

  He will not, that is, learn to be an electrician, a plumber, a firefighter, et cetera, and avail himself of the universal need for these services and their like to supply his living.

  No, the luckless product of our Liberal Universities, skill
-less, will not touch that item his culture named taboo: work. So we see the proliferation, in the Liberal Communities, of counselors, advisors, life coaches, consultants, feng shui “experts,” as the undereducated chickens come home to roost. Here we find the “energy therapist,” “past-lives counselor,” and those occupations just north of candle-maker, but accorded the respect due a skill or profession by community consent.17

  This courtesy is unconsciously extended by the Liberal Community to its unemployable young, as its final gift: they cannot be awarded a job, as there are no jobs, and they are inheriting a country bankrupted by their parents’ spending.

  What is this New Age “worker” selling? He is flattering his clients’ vanity through the pocketbook. This is a pretty good example of Mr. Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. We gain status, he teaches, through the display of wealth. But there is only so much wealth one can display, and the rich, having accrued wealth too copious for their own individual display, must display it through leisure. Sadly, though one may have innumerable homes, one can only have a finite amount of leisure—one can do nothing only twenty-four hours a day. But one is limited only by one’s purse in employing others to do more nothing on one’s behalf, their number and uselessness a reflection of their controller’s worth and status.

  Now we see the Liberal Young not flocking but stampeding into film schools. Why the stampede? The movie industry is bust, television has gone to the dogs (reality programming), and no one has yet figured out the transition to Internet distribution. There are, in short, no jobs at the end of this exhaustive four-year course of watching movies.

  There is, however, protection. The film school student is protected, by his community, in his election not to work.