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“You’re aberrated in one way,” he said to Will. “I’m aberrated in another. A schizoid (isn’t that what you are?) and, from the other side of the world, a paranoid. Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life. Were you ever interested in power?” he asked after a moment of silence. “Never.” Will shook his head emphatically. “One can’t have power without committing oneself.” “And for you the horror of being committed outweighs the pleasure of pushing other people around?” “By a factor of several thousand times.”
“Don’t ever forget, Miss Radha; to the senseless nothing is more maddening than sense. Pala is a small island completely surrounded by twenty-nine hundred million mental cases. So beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king.”
“These people just leave the unfortunate neurotic to wallow in his old bad habits of never being all there in present time. The whole thing is just pure idiocy! No, the man with the cigar didn’t even have that excuse; he was as clever as clever can be. So it’s not idiocy. It must be something voluntary, something self-induced—like getting drunk or talking yourself into believing some piece of foolishness because it happens to be in the Scriptures. And then look at their idea of what’s normal. Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to his society.”
It’s all part of the campaign against Palanese independence. God is Dipa’s alibi. Why can’t criminals be frank about what they’re up to?
“The postman,” Radha added, “delivers a thirty-night supply at the beginning of each month.” “And the babies don’t arrive?” “Only those we want. Nobody has more than three, and most people stop at two.” “With the result,” said Ranga, reverting, with the statistics, to his pedantic manner, “that our population is increasing at less than a third of one percent per annum. Whereas Rendang’s increase is as big as Ceylon’s—almost three percent. And China’s is two percent, and India’s about one point seven.”
All the important foreigners—diplomats galore, British and American oilmen, six members of the Japanese trade mission, a lady pharmacologist from Leningrad, two Polish engineers, a German tourist who just happened to be a cousin of Krupp von Bohlen, an enigmatic Armenian representing a very important financial consortium in Tangier, and, beaming with triumph, the fourteen Czech technicians who had come with last month’s shipment of tanks and cannon and machine guns from Skoda.
“And these are the people,” he had said to himself as he walked down the marble steps of the Foreign Office into Liberty Square, “these are the people who rule the world. Twenty-nine hundred millions of us at the mercy of a few scores of politicians, a few thousands of tycoons and generals and moneylenders. Ye are the cyanide of the earth—and the cyanide will never, never lose its savor.”
“Keeping babies alive,” he said, “healing the sick, preventing the sewage from getting into the water supply—one starts with doing things that are obviously and intrinsically good. And how does one end? One ends by increasing the sum of human misery and jeopardizing civilization. It’s the kind of cosmic practical joke that God seems really to enjoy.” He gave the young people one of his flayed, ferocious grins. “God has nothing to do with it,” Ranga retorted, “and the joke isn’t cosmic, it’s strictly man-made.
No harbor, no Portuguese. Therefore no Catholic minority, no blasphemous nonsense about its being God’s will that people should breed themselves into subhuman misery, no organized resistance to birth control.
formulated by Jesus himself. ‘To those who have shall be given, and from those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have’—the bare possibility of being human. It’s the cruelest of all God’s jokes, and also the commonest.
“And how did the Raja and his subjects react to Paleo-Birth Control? With horror?” “Not at all. They were good Buddhists, and every good Buddhist knows that begetting is merely postponed assassination. Do your best to get off the Wheel of Birth and Death, and for heaven’s sake don’t go about putting superfluous victims onto the Wheel.
And that’s a subject,” he added, turning to Will, “that somebody ought to make a historical study of—the relation between theology and corporal punishment in childhood.
people’s theology reflects the state of its children’s bottoms. Look at the Hebrews—enthusiastic child-beaters. And so were all good Christians in the Ages of Faith. Hence Jehovah, hence Original Sin and the infinitely offended Father of Roman and Protestant orthodoxy.
And look at the Quakers. They were heretical enough to believe in the Inner Light, and what happened? They gave up beating their children and were the first Christian denomination to protest against the institution of slavery.”
Back to Augustine, back to Martin Luther—back, in a word, to the two most relentlessly flagellated bottoms in the whole history of Christian thought.
Luther was systematically flogged not only by his teachers and his father, but even by his loving mother. The world has been paying for the scars on his buttocks ever since. Prussianism and the Third Reich—without Luther and his flagellation theology these monstrosities could never have come into existence.
LABORATORY. The door beneath the board was ajar; he pushed it open and found himself on the threshold of a long, high-ceilinged room. There were the usual sinks and worktables, the usual glass-fronted cabinets full of bottles and equipment, the usual smells of chemicals and caged mice.
Lenin used to say that electricity plus socialism equals communism. Our equations are rather different. Electricity minus heavy industry plus birth control equals democracy and plenty.
Electricity plus heavy industry minus birth control equals misery, totalitarianism and war.”
three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse.
along with transcendental experience we systematically cultivate skepticism. Discouraging children from taking words too seriously, teaching them to analyze whatever they hear or read—this is an integral part of the school curriculum.
“But what you can get out of a book is never it. At bottom,” Dr. Robert added, “all of you are still Platonists. You worship the word and abhor matter!”
ololiuqui
Morning Glory
Animal experiments
Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions.
“But that’s only to be expected,” she added with a laugh. “Fat people enjoy company—even when they’re meditating.”
“which is better—to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?”
“Parrots for you,” said Will, “mynahs for little Mary Sarojini. You people seem to be on remarkably good terms with the local fauna.” Vijaya nodded. “Pala is probably the only country in which an animal theologian would have no reason for believing in devils. For animals everywhere else, Satan, quite obviously, is Homo sapiens.”
“So you’re improving the race.” “Very definitely. Give us another century, and our average IQ will be up to a hundred and fifteen.” “Whereas ours, at the present rate of progress, will be down to about eighty-five. Better medicine—more congenital deficiencies preserved and passed on. It’ll make things a lot easier for future dictators.”
