The Adding Machine: Selected Essays

  And so, guided by the least intelligent, the least competent, the least farsighted and most ill-informed, the species invites biologic disaster.. . Other species have come and gone . . .

  Consider the dinosaurs ... A beast fifty feet in length and weighing thousands of tons, with a brain the size of a walnut... He had grave problems, but he could not worry. .. Many theories have been advanced as to why these magnificent creatures disappeared... Certainly one factor was size ... The carnivorous models were so large that the problem of obtaining adequate nourishment posed a chronic problem which over the centuries and the millennia must have become acute.

  One herbivorous species was equipped with thin long necks that become longer and longer to reach more and more fodder, they may have reached an impasse where even if they ate day and night they could not sustain their way of life .. . There was also the problem posed by emergent mammalian creatures eating their eggs, thus striking at the very roots of their survival... Let us imagine a congress and emergency meeting of the dinosaur leaders. The brightest and the best... or so they see themselves ...

  ‘Fellow reptiles, at this dark hour, I do not hesitate to tell you that we face grave problems . .. And I do not hesitate to tell you that we have the answer. . . Size is the answer... increased size ... It was good enough for me . . . (Applause) Size that will enable us to crush all opposition (Applause)... There are those who say size is not the answer. There are those who even propose that we pollute our pure reptilian strain with mammalian amalgamations and cross breeding... And I say to you that if the only way I could survive was by mating with egg-eating rats, then I would choose not to survive... (Applause). But we will survive ... We will increase both in size and in numbers and we will continue to dominate this planet as we have done for three hundred million years... (Wild applause).

  And this is what we are seeing and hearing at the present time ... At the time when the greatest diversity, and biologic flexibility moving towards mutation is needed for survival, we see a demand for increased conformity and standardization both in the West and in the Communist countries.

  Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination. Like the karate man who could slice the top off a beer bottle leaving the bottle standing. He was never in an actual fight — who would fight him? And the phenomenal gun artists like Joe Mac Givern were never in a gun fight. .. They were too good ...

  If intelligence is one of the last games, then proficiency must be carefully, uh, rationed .. . That is why intelligence agencies are reluctant to use polygraphs, except to weed out queers and drug addicts in their own ranks .. . Here is a spy novel by Le Carré called The Spy Who Came in from the Cold... Leamas is a false defector to the Communists, pretending to be disgruntled by the treatment meted out to him by British intelligence... Incidentally one of the oldest ploys in the intelligence game, the apparent defector... How long would he last on a polygraph?

  So the Johnsons have an incalculable advantage. They aren’t playing. They want to end the whole stupid game. To us, intelligence and war are only means to an end: SPACE EXPLORATION.

  Women: A Biological Mistake?

  I realize I am widely perceived as a misogynist. But quoting from the Oxford dictionary: ‘Misogynist — a woman hater.’ Presumably this is his full-time occupation? Korzybski, the founder of General Semantics, always said to pin a generality down; so what women? Where and when? My English nanny from the pages of The Turn of the Screw?’ She did teach me some useful jingles — ‘Trip and stumble, slip and fall...’ Or the old Irish crone who taught me how to call the toads and bring the blinding worm from rotten bread? How remote and nostalgic with a whiff of peat and pigsties. Or the Saint Louis matron who said I was a walking corpse? Well, it isn’t every corpse that can walk; hers can’t.

  Bring on the heavies. The femme fatale, in all her guises ... Kali does her sideshow coochy dance... the White Goddess eats her consort.. . the Terrible Mother goes into her act... the whore of Babylon rides in on her black panther screaming, ‘You fools! I will drain you dry.’ Enough to turn a man to stone. But these are only surface manifestations, B-girls in fact: servants. After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say ‘I WANT TO SEE THE MANAGER.’

  Women may well be a biological mistake; I said so in The Job. But so is almost everything else I see around here. The dinosaurs turned out to be a mistake too, but what are a few hundred million years, more or less, for such a noble experiment? And now — as the deadly cycles of overpopulation, pollution, depletion of resources, radio-activity and conflict escalate towards a cataclysmic sauve-qui-peut — thoughtful citizens are asking themselves if the whole human race wasn’t a mistake from the starting gate. The question then arises as to whose mistake, since mistakes imply intention — and I am convinced that nothing happens in this universe without will or intention.

  Now it would be presumptuous, not to say impious, to say the Creator has done a bad job; since a bad job from our point of view may be a good job from his or her or its point of view. The history of the planet is a history of idiocy highlighted by a few morons who stand out as comparative geniuses. Considering the human organism as the artifact of an intentional Creator, we can then see more or less where we are. To date, no super-genius has managed to achieve what might be called normal intelligence in terms of the potential functioning of the human artifact.

  ‘Look at this artifact’. The instructor holds up a flintlock rifle.’ What’s wrong with it? Quite a bit it still has a long way to go.’

  He holds up a modem automatic rifle. ‘Now we are getting close to the limit of efficiency for small arms on the principle of a projectile propelled by an exploding charge. Now look at this artifact.’ He holds up a cage in which a weasel snarls. ‘What’s wrong with this artifact? Nothing. It’s limited, but in terms of its structure and goals it functions well enough . . .’

  Take a look at the human artifact. What is wrong with it? Just about everything. Consider a species that can live on the seacoast, watching ships come in day after day, year after year, and still believe that the Earth is flat because the Church says so; a species that can use cannonballs for five hundred years before the idea of a cannonball that explodes on contact blossoms in this barren soil... I could go on and on. So why has the human artifact stayed back there with the flintlock? I am advancing a theory that we were not designed to remain in our present state, any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole forever.

  The human organism is in a state of neoteny. This is a biological term used to describe an organism fixated at what would normally be a larval or transitional phase. Ordinarily a salamander starts its life cycle in the water with gills; later the gills atrophy, and the animal develops lungs. However, certain salamanders never lose their gills or leave the water. They are in a state of neoteny. The Xolotl salamander found in Mexico is an example. Scientists, moved by the plight of this beautiful creature, gave him an injection of hormones, whereupon he shed his gills and left the water after ages of neoteny. It is perhaps too much to hope that one simple injection could jar the human species out of its neoteny. But by whatever means the change takes place, it will be irreversible. The Xolotl, once he sheds his gills, can never reclaim them. Evolution would seem to be a one way street.

  Considering evolutionary steps, one has the feeling that the creature is tricked into making them. Here is a fish that survives drought because it has developed feet or rudimentary lungs. So far as the fish is concerned, these are simply a means of getting from one water source to another. But once he leaves his gills behind, he is stuck with lungs from there on out. So the fish has made an evolutionary step forward. Looking for water, he has found air.

  Perhaps a forward step for the human race will be made in the same way. The astronaut is not looking for space; he is looking for more time — that is, equating space with time. The space program is simply an attem
pt to transport our insoluble temporal impasses somewhere else. However, like the walking fish, looking for more time we may find space instead, and then find that there is no way back.

  Such an evolutionary step would involve changes that are literally inconceivable from our present point of view. Is the separation of the sexes an arbitrary device to perpetuate an unworkable arrangement? Would the next step involve the sexes fusing into an organism? And what would be the nature of this organism? As Korzybski always said, ‘I don’t know. Let’s see.’ Is it too much to ask that this beached fish of a species — the human race — should consider the unthinkable, for evolution’s sake?

  Immortality

  ‘To me the only success the only greatness is immortality.’ James Dean

  Quote from James Dean the Mutant King by David Dalton

  The colonel beams at the crowd ... pomaded, manicured, he wears the satisfied expression of one who has just sold the widow a fraudulent peach orchard. ‘Folks we’re here to sell the only thing worth selling or buying and that’s immortality. Now here is the simplest solution and well on the way. Just replace the worn parts and keep the old heap on the road indefinitely.’

  As transplant techniques are perfected and refined the age-old dream of immortality is now within the grasp of mankind. But who is to decide out of a million applicants for the same heart? There simply aren’t enough parts to go around. You need the job-lot once a year save twenty percent of people applying. Big executives use a heart a month just as regular as clockwork. Warlords, paying off their soldiers in livers and kidneys and genitals, depopulate whole areas. Vast hospital cities cover the land from the air conditioned hospital palaces of the rich radiating out to field hospitals and open air operating booths. The poor are rising in huge mobs. They are attacking government warehouses where the precious parts are stored. Everyone who can afford it has dogs and guards to protect himself from roving bands of part hunters like the dreaded Wild Doctors who operate on each other after the battle, cutting the warm quivering parts from the dead and dying. Cut-and-grab men dart out of doorways and hack out a kidney with a few expert strokes of their four-inch scalpels. People have lost all shame. Here’s a man who sold his daughter’s last kidney to buy himself a new groin — appears on TV to appeal for funds to buy little Sally an artificial kidney and give her this last Christmas. On his arm is a curvaceous blonde known apparently as Bubbles. She calls him Long John, now isn’t that cute?

  A flourishing black market in parts grows up in the gutted cities devastated by part riots. In terrible slums, scenes from Breughel and Bosch are re-enacted... misshapen masses of rotten scar tissue crawling with maggots supported on crutches and canes, in wheel-chairs and carts ... Brutal as butchers, practitioners operate without anaesthetic in open air booths surrounded by their bloody knives and saws ... the poor wait in part lines for diseased genitals, a cancerous lung, a cirrhotic liver. They crawl towards the operating booths holding forth nameless things in bottles — that they think are usable parts, Shameless swindlers who buy up operating garbage in job lots prey on the unwary.

  And here is Mr Rich Parts. He is three hundred years old. He is still subject to accidental death, and the mere thought of it throws him into paroxysms of idiot terror. For days he cowers in his bunker, two hundred feet down in solid rock, food for fifty years. A trip from one city to another requires months of shifting and checking computerized plans and alternate routes to avoid the possibility of an accident. His idiotic cowardice knows no bounds. There he sits, looking like a Chimu vase with a thick layer of smooth purple scar tissue. Encased in this armor, his movements are slow and hydraulic. It takes him ten minutes to sit down. This layer gets thicker and thicker right down to the bone — the doctors have to operate with power tools. So we leave Mr Rich Parts, and the picturesque parts people, their monument a mountain of scar tissue.

  Mr Hubbard said: ‘The rightest right a man could be would be to live infinitely wrong.’ I wrote ‘wrong’ for ‘long’ and the slip is significant — for the means by which immortality is realized in science fiction, which will soon be science fact, are indeed infinitely wrong, the wrongest wrong a man can be, vampiric or worse.

  Improved transplant techniques open the question as to whether the ego itself could be transplanted from one body to another. And the further question as to exactly where this entity resides. Here is Mr Hart a trillionaire dedicated to his personal immortality. Where is this thing called Mr Hart? Precisely where, in the human nervous system, does this ugly death sucking, death dealing, death fearing thing reside ... ? Science can give a tentative answer: the ‘ego’ seems to be located in the mid-brain at the top of the head. Well he thinks couldn’t we just scoop it out of a healthy youth, throw his in the garbage where it belongs, and slide in MEEEEEEE. So he starts looking for a brain surgeon, a ‘scrambled egg’ man, and he wants the best. When it comes to a short order job old Doc Zeit is tops. He can switch eggs in an alley...

  Mr Hart embodies the competitive, acquisitive, success minded spirit that formulated American capitalism. The logical extension of this ugly spirit is criminal Success is its own justification. He who succeeds deserves to succeed he is RIGHT. The operation is a success. The doctors have discreetly withdrawn. When a man wakes up in a beautiful new Bod, he can flip out. It wouldn’t pay to be a witness. Mr Hart stands up and stretches luxuriously in his new body. He runs his hands over the lean young muscle where his pot belly used to be. All that remains of the donor is a blob of gray matter in a dish. Mr Hart puts his hands on his hips and leans over the blob.

  ‘And how wrong can you be? DEAD.’

  He spits on it and he spits ugly.

  The final convulsions of a universe based on quantitative factors like money Junk and time, would seem to be at hand . .. The time approaches when no amount of money will buy anything and time itself will ran out. In The Methuselah Enzyme by Fred Mustard Stewart, Dr Mentius, a Swiss scientist, has found the youth enzyme, which he calls Mentase. As it turns out, Tithy, for Tithonus, or Sauve, for sauve qui peut, would have been more apt. Young kids secrete this elixir and senior citizens need it special. Mentase is gradually phased out of the body from about the age of 25 to 60. The keyword is extraction. Mentius is a long way from the synthesis of Mentase but to use an untested substance extracted without their knowledge or consent from young people on old people? He feels a distinct twinge in his medical ethics. But Mentase he says grimly must not be lost to humanity. Mentius is regarded as a brilliant lunatic by his medical colleagues: where can he turn for funds? He takes on four rich clients who will bring the young donors . ..

  ‘He must have blacked out in the immersion tank, Bill reflects. Later he found a tiny sticking plaster up near the hair line ...’ The kids don’t know they are giving their Mentase to the elderly sponsor and here is one old creep who brings his own adolescent son to the clinic and sucks all the youth and goodness out of him. So the oldsters are getting younger and the kids ...

  ‘Hugh dear those interesting freckles ... What are they?’

  They’re liver spots. The doctor has to admit he has made a real dummheit all around. The old farts don’t produce any Mentase of their own all they have is what the doctor gives them. And now an emergency, a shocking emergency, quite unlocked for has arisen. The doctor reels ashen faced from his microscope. He knows that if the injections of Mentase are cut off the aging process will recommence at a vastly accelerated rate. The stricken senior citizen would age before one’s eyes. ‘While still alive, and aware of what was happening, you quite literally disintegrate,’ he tells them flatly. ‘The only relief you could possibly have would be to go insane.’

  And the good doctor has some news for the kids who are already comparing liver spots.

  ‘By cutting off part of your pineal gland we seem to have uh halted your production of Mentase and the result is in plain English that you are aging a hundred times as fast as normal,’ the doctor admits lamely.

  Acute shortage of Mentas
e. The key word is Extraction. The aging kids, now as lost to shame as their elders, in fact rapidly becoming elders, that is to say coarse, ugly, and as shameless as they are disgusting, go out to recruit more kids for the Mentase . .. paid in Mentase, of course, and each recruit must in turn recruit more donors. Think how that could build up in five years bearing in mind the extremely short productive period of the donors.

  Puts me in mind of the old fur farm swindle. You invest $500 and buy a pair of mink. The farm is usually in Canada which has always been a center for mail fraud. The farm will take care of your mink who will breed every six months producing a litter of eight or more mink who in turn will pair and breed at the age of six months. Get a paper and pencil... and that’s not all. .. some of the mink will be mutants green and blue and albino, and sea shell pink or maybe you hit the jackpot with rainbow mink, $2000 a pelt. As you luxuriate in rack after rack of ankle-length mink coats a letter etched in black arrives from the farm: regret to inform you your two minks died of distemper.

  The ravening Mentase addicts need more and more and more. Any purely quantitative factor is devalued in time. With junk money Mentase, it takes more and more to buy less and less. Maybe Mr Hart has a warehouse full of Mentase to obtain which he has depopulated a continent; it will run out in time. But long before it runs out he will have reached a point where no amount of Mentase he can inject into his aging carcass will halt the aging process.

  Mentase is a parable of vampirism gone berserk. But all vampiric blueprints for immortality are wrong not only from the ethical standpoint. They are ultimately unworkable. In Space Vampires Colin Wilson speaks of benign vampires. Take a little, leave a little. But they always take more than they leave by the basic nature of the vampiric process of inconspicuous but inexorable consumption. The vampire converts quality, live blood, vitality, youth, talent into quantity food and time for himself. He perpetrates the most basic betrayal of the spirit, reducing all human dreams to his shit. And that’s the wrongest wrong a man can be. And personal immortality in a physical body is impossible since a physical body exists in time and time is that which ends. When someone says he wants to live forever he forgets that forever is a time word . .. All three-dimensional immortality projects are to say the least ill-advised, since they immerse the aspirant always deeper into time.