(Continued from The United States & Totalitarianism)
- The same as usual? Medium coffee? You look tired.
- The Guru brought home the paranoid schizophrenic drug addict prostitute. You know her. The store threw her out twice, once for raving and making threats, the other time for dropping an unknown substance in the salad bar.
- You live with her?
- With the Guru. You know him too. He's always in the neighborhood, going around giving away money.
- He gives money to the prostitute.
- Yes. And keeps taking her home. But throws her out after a few days or a week.
- Why?
- Do you really want to know this stuff?
- You should write a book. It would be a best seller.
- I live with these people. I have to keep a distance.
- You'll make a fortune.
- Ok. This is what I can do. I'll begin with abstractions and work my way back to people. Like this: Totalitarianism is continuous ritual, of economics and violence, both inside the country and outside. The same idea can also be applied to individuals, economic and violent rituals in both private and public life. Take the case of the Guru. Every week he gets his allowance.
- From where?
- Family, trust fund. He gives it all to desperate people of the neighborhood.
- Why?
- He says he does it to cure himself.
- Of what?
- Mental illness.
- Is he crazy?
- Yes. Or rather, no more than our entire society is crazy. He tells everyone he is giving on principle, for god. He "looks after #1", isn't acting out of sympathy for other people.
- He wants to feel powerful. And that cured him?
- So he says. After he gives away his allowance he promises more to his "flock", he likes to promise to buy cars, keeping everyone around constantly demanding he perform on his promises, feeding his sense of importance. His phone never stops ringing.
- Did he promise you a car?
- Sure. Now economic ritual can just as easily be repeatedly making profit from transactions as repeatedly giving away money. To construct a ritual requires an enemy, a subject of violence. An empire will send its military to another country or bribe the rulers to open up markets and establish monopoly control. The same country could practice a totalitarianism of sharing where the violence was internal. The Soviet Union, after the violence of appropriating all property, made all of society dependent, begging a share in the giving back.
- I thought you said the Guru gets his money from family?
- They give him the money but they don't want to. He's violent in his insistence, raging and shouting as regularly as he hands out the money.
- A ritual.
- Yes. Violence required to get the money, followed by giving it away, over and over. That is the comparison to external totalitarianism, economic and violent: Economic ritual, the Guru giving away money and making promises buys gratitude and attention; Violent ritual: the Guru shouting and breaking things to obtain the money. The schizophrenic prostitute comes in in the comparison to internal totalitarianism. The last two times he brought her home, within a couple days he'd called the police and had her taken away.
- Why?
- He told her to leave and she wouldn't.
- Why not?
- He invited her there. She felt at home.
- Why did he tell her to leave?
- She didn't respect his authority.
- Did he want to sleep with her?
- Of course.
- And she wouldn't. Why not?
- He didn't perform on his promises of money and car.
- Why not?
- Maybe he's satisfied with the repeated rituals, violent and economic, of provoking the family's anger every time he brings home a paranoid schizophrenic drug addicted prostitute, and then the excitement of bargaining with her over her prostitution and the power of throwing her out.
- And she keeps coming back.
- She's desperate.
- Have you tried to talk with him?
- It's difficult. He admits everything: he has no sympathy for people, he gives away money as a self-therapy.
- But where did all this come from?
- God told him to. God is telling him now he will save the prostitute. I tell him he can't save her, he doesn't understand the world, he doesn't understand other people, he doesn't understand himself. He says he doesn't need understanding, god is looking after the success.
- What do you say then?
- That what he means by god is power and vanity, is the product of ritual.
- And?
- He doesn't understand.
P.S. The next morning, after the girl's calling, as she likes to do, the Guru's separated wife, threatening to cut her to pieces and gloating she had taken her place in the Guru's affections, the police arrived and dragged the girl off kicking and screaming. The Guru could be found later in the evening calling all his friends, inviting them to come over and have a good time with him.
2.
- That's the Guru. Where's he going?
- To borrow money from Rothschild, the old black guy who's living and dying at the bus stop.
- His name isn't Rothchild.
- No, I gave him the name when the Guru told me he was his banker after he'd given away his weekly allowance, usually by the next day the whole thing was gone.
- And that old guy, sleeps on the street, talks to himself, with open sores, convulsed with delirium tremens, he loans the Guru money? Incredible! I didn't even think he was sane.
- Who says he is?
- You admit the Guru is insane, at least.
- No. I don't think I can.
- It's sane every week to give away all your money and then borrow some back from a lunatic dying on the corner?
- Most people believe that if they follow the rules in life, do their job, they don't have to do more, what they have done is good. Is good for society. The Guru, by following the rule, give away all your income, and you'll be a good man, is a really example. If anyone is going to do social good by following rules, it's going to be him, right?
- I guess so. But he's insane!
- Why? Because he's established a kind of community, he living in his Beverly Hills apartment, with Rothschild dying miserably on the bus stop on the corner? Perhaps you mean that the community he makes is insane.
- Yes.
- So you think that there is something wrong with a life only of following rules, even when the rule is give away all your income.
- After listening to you, yes.
- Have you ever heard about the difference between making something by following a blueprint or according to a recipe?
- No. Tell me.
- A blueprint contains a description of the entire building, part by part. A recipe describes an activity, with the results of each step influencing the material the next step in the activity has to work with. A recipe does not describe the completed product. The genetic code in our bodies is a recipe how to make a body, not blueprint of the finished body. Ok?
- That's great.
- Now living a life by the rules we are trying to make a life according to a blueprint. The Guru has his rule, give away money, but the people he gives away money to don't enter into his in a way that develops his life.
- He doesn't cook with them.
- No. Nothing changes. What we see in the case of the Guru is how, despite the fact that most of us are living according to blueprint, we intuitively know that living according to recipe is right. We know something is wrong with a rich man making the poor man the object of his rule following, yet not taking the poor man into his life. In a life following recipe what the rich man has done with the poor man would influence the next step in his rule following. Instead the rich man pays no attention to the poor man's life, to his literal dying on the street, doesn't take the poor man into his life at all. In fact he holds himself even closer to following the blueprint, goes so far as, borrowing money from him, to use to poor man to smooth out the difficulties in his rich man's life of giving away money.
- Some people build houses, some people cook meals, some people give away money. They all think they are doing something good, something socially good. But they are not doing good if they don't take into the recipe of their lives the people who buy the houses or eat the meals or take their money. That's why you say the Guru is not crazy.
- Not crazier than the rest of us.
