The Secret Knowledge

by David Mamet

  But these feats, they explained, could only be performed under those special circumstances necessary for the intercession of the Spirits. The Spirit World demanded privacy. So, the cabinet in which the acts were performed must be closed. To still the doubts of the unbelievers, however, the Spiritualists would be bound, and the cabinet investigated by an impartial committee of the audience.

  Here we have a charming example of codependent thinking on the part of the audience, who, in this figure, represent our Electorate. Their will to believe is in direct conflict with their understanding. They may enjoy the demonstration only if it is believable, but they know it to be a hoax—what are they to do?

  The spiritualist and the politician are essentially magicians, one offering diversion, the other security, in exchange for a suspension of common sense.

  For, if the spiritualist could actually cause the instruments to play without his intervention, let him do it in the light—he cannot.

  Neither can the politician suspend the natural processes of bureaucracy by expanding them. He can at best, and only under special circumstances, perform the illusion of doing so—these special circumstances being that period prior to his inauguration, or a time of emergency sufficient to distract the populace or otherwise stay any outside power of verification.46

  How, for example, may a new agency, named Homeland Security, offer improvement over that security previously provided by various diverse government agencies, each of which itself originated as an amalgamation of its predecessors in the name of efficiency?

  This tendency toward elaboration is, of course, the way of the world. In the mobile society of our Democracy each new stage of elaboration is inaugurated by the selfsame vision: that what is needed is a centralized power, and a revision of laws to allow this efficiency. This is called a return to common sense.

  But how may it be common sense for the auto industry to be run by one with no experience of it? This might be envisioned only through the intervention of some magical power—the process taking place in the dark, or in some closed cabinet. This is the essence of the wish for a czar: “Do it, but don’t tell me about it, I’m sure it will be fine.” It is the wish to be dominated by a strong beneficent power—the wish, in essence, for enslavement. See the various programs headed over the years by “czars,”—the Poverty, Car, Energy, Drug, et cetera—all exercises in magical thinking. What have they accomplished? Nothing.

  How can a country grow rich through “redistributing” the wealth, by driving production overseas through taxation, by a refusal to exploit natural resources? This could be imagined only by those willing to suspend their understanding of the laws of cause and effect—the audience at a magic show.

  Curiously, as magicians know, the more intelligent the viewer, the more easily he may be fooled. For the less imaginative and less theoretical know that a rabbit may not be produced from any hat which did not previously contain a rabbit; that wealth can accrue neither to an individual nor to a society not committed to the production of wealth, and that no organization may be made more efficient by adding to its bulk.

  This delusion of an expanded government’s increased efficiency is, in Liberal thought, buttressed by a belief in such a government’s increased fairness—that more laws and more extralegal or administrative procedures will somehow bring about more and “better” justice than that provided by the Constitution. As some groups, we know, were discriminated against in the past, justice may now best be served by discrimination against other groups. This is suggested as a commonsense mechanical device. Psychologically, however, it is magical thinking: awarding to the State non-Constitutional powers, correctly deemed notorious when exercised by the individual.

  How may justice be served by awarding to any special group a preference? Such awards may be welcome to the recipients, and their contemplation enjoyable to those of the good-willed who are not adversely affected by the redistribution, but they cannot be just.

  Contemporary Liberal sentiment endorses the abrogation or elaboration of law to ensure that no one suffers, but the first and most important task of law in a democracy is not to right individual wrongs, but to ensure that no one suffers because of the State. And the simple, tragic truth is that this may be accomplished not by a Czar or a committee, or by reorganization, or by accession to office of the Benevolent or Wise, but only by limiting the State’s power.

  21

  RUMPELSTILTSKIN

  Freud posits three main aspects of the mind: the Id, which is the unmitigated urge or nonnegotiable demand (“I want it”), the Ego, which attempts to integrate this demand with the Ego’s other conflicting needs (“I know I want unlimited sex, but I also want to stay out of prison”); and the Superego, which is taxed with finding a solution to this hopeless and enervating struggle.

  Here is my example of the process.

  One finds oneself, in the middle of the night, stopped at a deserted intersection by a red light. The Id says, “What the hell are you waiting for, drive on.”

  “But wait,” says the Ego, “what if it is a trap? What if the police are hiding, right behind that road sign?”

  “No,” says the Id, “their car would not quite fit, and we would see the tires, for the love of God.”

  “But what if there is a hidden camera,” says the Ego. “Is it worth the risk? Why not wait the extra half-minute.”

  “You fool,” says the Id, “there is no danger. You weak fool.” This is, of course, intolerable. A random moment at a stoplight occasions a battle for self-esteem and psychic integrity. Even the changing of the light will not still the conflict, for one stands insulted and accused, and the question of what should have been done remains unanswered and unanswerable.

  However, comes now the Superego.

  “No,” it says, “It is not that you are weak and foolish. You are, in fact, both worthy and good, and I will tell you why: you stopped at the light because you are a Good Citizen. And you realized that if everyone obeyed only those laws the transgression of which would result in immediate punishment, where would Society be? I congratulate and honor you for your choice.”

  Everybody happy, well, I should say.

  As we have seen, all under the sway of the Nazi regime had to greet each other with the Nazi salute. Many found this, as it was an avowal of subjugation, intolerable. The Id said, “I will not give the wretched salute.” The Ego replied, “What does it mean? You don’t actually have to believe in the Nazis; it’s just a simple gesture, and performing it will save your life.”

  But this interchange, unfortunately, caused the individual to enter into a painful negotiation scores of times a day. To wit: “I do it, but I don’t believe in it. I am not a coward. I am merely making a rational and cost-effective accommodation. I am a worthy person, whatever the Id may say.”

  How can one eliminate the pain of the continual repetition of a distressing and seemingly insoluble negotiation?

  Here comes the Superego with a brilliant solution: let the gesture be consigned to the realm of the unconscious—it turns the continual nature of the repetition from a reiterated pain into a selling point. “Look here,” says the Superego, “there is just not enough time in the day to worry about it—we will let the dialogue lapse from consciousness, and replace it with unthinking habit.”

  But this instance differs from that of the stoplight.

  For here we have an unfortunate unresolved remainder. For though the conscious negotiation ceased, the salute survived.

  What was the effect, Bettelheim asked, of the now unconscious habitual repetition of a gesture of subjugation? The individual became a Nazi. How could he not? Was he not now pledging, unthinkingly, his loyalty scores of times a day?

  A friend reports that she saw a doyenne of the Left at a restaurant and asked her advice on some question of Liberal Doctrine. “Contact MoveOn.org,” the doyenne replied, “And do whatever they say.”

  The struggle of the Left to rationalize its positions is an intolerable, Sisyp
hean burden. I speak as a reformed Liberal.

  How may one support higher taxes and government intervention as an aid to the economy, when all evidence historical and current (cf. Greece), records the disastrous folly of such a course?

  How can one support racial preferences and set-asides, when they run contrary to the evidence of the results of all race–or genetic-based programs in history—their existence an incipient invitation to murder?

  How can one deny (as the Obama administration insists on doing) that the military threat to the West has a name, and that name is Islamic Fascism?

  Et cetera.

  These positions, ad infinitum, are incompatible with reason, and one can embrace them only with great assistance, which, unfortunately, for the Liberal, is forthcoming.

  That assistance is the Superego, capable of adjudicating all things.

  A proposition or a person emerges promising the impossible. (“The New Economy”), or crooning about the unquantifiable (“Change”), and the Liberal finds this soothing sound consonant with his self-image as a brilliant and compassionate individual.

  This individual is in the exact position of the confidence man’s mark. In fact he is the confidence man’s mark.

  Now, the main problem in structuring a con game is in answering the mark’s question, “Why me . . . ?”

  In the Spanish Prisoner, played for over two thousand years, and seen today in its incarnation as the Nigerian Letter, the individual is appealed to as one of noted repute and standing in the community, as someone who can be trusted with the confidence man’s improbable claim.

  The mark is flattered. He understands why he has been chosen. He has been chosen because of his excellence. How could one (the Confidence man) who was that perceptive, then, be other than honorable also? The question does not arise.

  The flattered mark glossing over all inconsistencies, and improbabilities, and indeed, impossibilities, in the confidence man’s story, forks out his money.

  The Liberal is flattered that he, in contradistinction to his benighted countrymates, has been chosen to advance the policies and doctrines of Liberalism. He, in endorsing them, is part of the Elite, one of those empowered to eradicate those historical evils entailed upon humanity because of the unfortunate delay of his advent. (“We are the people we have been waiting for,” Obama campaign, 2008.)

  He is the champion of Good, chosen because someone (the Candidate) has finally recognized his excellence.

  His problem resides in this: that the doctrines, policies, and programs presented for his endorsement are senseless and destructive, and can be so-proved by any slight referral of them to the impartial verdicts of history.

  What will the Superego do?

  It will ensure that the referral will never occur.

  How will it do this? By ensuring that the referral would occur only at the cost of relinquishing membership in the herd.

  The Superego cannot increase the benefit of compliance (as it did with the stoplight), but will increase the cost of noncompliance. Questioning = excommunication.

  The Left, in addition to its embrace of the false (higher taxes means increased prosperity for all), and its acceptance of the moot as incontrovertible (Global Warming); must account for the incidental effect of the sum of these decisions. This effect is the destruction of our culture.

  All strife to the Left is error, and poverty and all human ills eradicable by new programs. But these revolutionary revisions destroy the human ability to interact, which, in its entirety, is known as Culture.

  Note that, under the Statist revisions of the Obama administration, racial tensions have devolved to acrimony unknown in this country for decades. Sexual relations are universally subject to constant revision, and limits on language and behavior, once imposed unconsciously, and learned in family, community, and school, are returned to the conscious mind, erasing spontaneity and ease, and replacing them with consternation and fear.

  Our beautiful American language is now subject to revision by those screaming loudest, and we have the enormity of s/he, the clunky continuous reiteration of his-or-her, and so on. This revision is presented by the Left as an aid of equality, but its result is an atmosphere not of happy compliance, but of anxiety, circumlocution, and a formalism destructive of the free exchange of ideas.

  Our culture is being destroyed by the Left. What difference that the good-willed do so in the name of Equality? It is being destroyed.

  The decision to allow a thirteen-story Islamic Center to be built in the vicinity of Ground Zero may be defensible under the rubric of law; but it is a cultural obscenity, allowable only if the State, the Left, or the individual asserts that every decision must be adjudicated according to the new understanding of the anointed.

  The Government sues the State of Arizona for the enforcement of laws the passage of which are not only the right of the state under the Constitution, but the content of which is virtually identical with federal law.

  The State of California sentences the farmers of its Central Valley to drought, and their farms to destruction, because a small fish called the delta smelt has been declared endangered.

  That our culture is falling apart is apparent to any impartial observer. But what observer can be impartial? Conservatives are aghast; we are shocked at the actions of the Left, and we are astounded that they do not acknowledge these actions’ results.

  It is not that they do not care. But that they cannot afford to notice, for comparing their actions to the results would bring about either their ejection from the group (should they voice their doubts) or, should they merely follow their perceptions to their logical conclusions, the psychic trauma incident upon a revision of their worldview.

  The Superego, here, has made a terrible bargain.

  It has offered membership in a group whose size and power allows the individual to submerge his doubts. And then to forget them. But the cost is the surrender of his reason.

  He may live his entire life never talking to a Conservative, never reading a Conservative publication, or listening to any news at all save that of the Left. That four hundred Liberal journalists have been revealed as involved in a long cabal to distort that which they offer as news, in aid of Liberalism, makes no difference to the Liberal. It cannot; for he cannot risk his membership in the herd. And he must remain unaware of his bargain. Like the young lady in Rumpelstiltskin.

  The Gnome in the story came to offer her release from the Evil King. The gnome, however, was no one other than the Evil King, and his demands, like those of the King, eventually became intolerable. Prior to that point, she was dedicated to self-delusion. Maybe, she thought, this savior will aid me. Maybe, the Liberal thinks, this new iteration of Government Programs will prove useful. Perhaps this previous new panacea has failed (as all its like have failed) because it was Underfunded.

  The Liberal is caught. To reject the herd protection is to, inevitably, undergo the shame and humiliation of recognizing his prior, destructive folly.47

  So the Liberal stands pat. He, who never talks to anyone outside of this group, accuses the Conservative of being brainwashed; he explains the abysmal performance of Obama by saying “look at the mess he inherited,” as if the President did not campaign (as do all politicians) on the platform of cleaning up the prior mess. (Those of the same party as the outgoing incumbent campaign on improving his accomplishments—which is to say the prior mess.)

  The Liberal is subsumed in the herd. How, then, to explain, as he must, the unfortunate state of things? The herd supplies the answer: blame the Opposition.

  Obama’s plans are questioned? Call his opponents Racist.

  Palestinian Terrorists are dedicated to the destruction of our ally, Israel? Blame the Israelis for saddling us with a challenge to our delusion of Universal Brotherhood.

  The Left, in suspending reason and accountability, is ravaging our beautiful culture.

  But the necessity of Culture is a part of human interaction. Strand ten bus riders in a
blizzard, and they will extemporize their own culture.

  The drive to discard our evolved American culture, to replace it with the “reasoning” of idiot teenagers who have blessed, by their presence, the schools of the Ivy League, results, as it must, in a new culture. But in what does this culture consist?

  The Nazis and the Communists railed against and discarded religion, and instantly, automatically, created their own religion, each with all the formal trappings and operations of—though with different content than—those religions they displaced.48

  So the Left creates its own, new culture.

  But this culture is confusing, amorphous, and constantly shifting. It not only resembles, it is the Party Line, avant la lettre. The confused Liberal must grope, each day, to find how to explain (to his own satisfaction, for he will never talk to a conservative) the inexplicable vagaries of his tribe.

  How can he do so? “Call MoveOn.org, and just do whatever they say.”

  In what does this new culture consist? In obedience.

  22

  MY FATHER, AL SHARPTON, AND THE DESIGNATED CRIMINAL

  What is it that Liberal African Americans have not recognized about the Left? That there is no one home. The Left has abandoned the country, come out against capitalism, exploitation of resources, the free market, and work, and announced its refusal to defend our borders. All this as a matter of principle.

  Al Sharpton and those calling (under whatever name) for reparations for ancient crimes are, in effect, suing for crumbs from those they, by that suit, designate as their (somehow) superiors. But they have no superiors. There is no one home. The slave owners, along with the robber barons, and “the interests,” have left the building.

  Reverend Al Sharpton, in Chris Rock’s wonderful documentary Good Hair, takes on the overwhelming Asian ownership of hair salons in Black communities. He calls this ownership “exploitation.” But who is exploiting the Black community, the Asians who, perceiving a need, are catering to that need, or the Reverend Sharpton?