part0020

Paul Krassner’s iconoclastic journal. The Realist, has published more of my writings than any other American magazine, and there was a period in the late 1950s and early 1960s when I might have given up writing entirely if Paul had not gone on publishing my work. I think everybody in the "counterculture" owes a great debt to Paul Krassner, but I perhaps owe him more than anyone else.

The first two of these three pieces were written in the 1960s; the third is newer, and was written in 1985. I will speak more about the third piece later, but now I find it illuminating that the 1960s articles deal with, respectively, the most savagely Darwinian of Tennessee Williams's dramas and with the Marquis de Sade. The reader might think I was rather morbidly preoccupied with violence and sadism at that time; and, indeed, I was.

Although I became a pacifist so far back I cannot exactly date my "conversion" (if that's what it was), my opposition to warfare escalated in the 1960s in exact proportion to my horror at the non-governmental violence that was becoming more and more common in America then and has continued to proliferate. It seemed to me, and still seems to me, that sado-masochism plays a far larger role in "normal" psychology than most commentators realize; my fascination with the theories of Dr. Wilhelm Reich is largely based on the fact that he explored this subject with more insight and courage than most Freudians, who are aware of it but prefer not to notice or speak about its political implications.

Let me make it clear that I am not the same kind of "pacifist" as Gandhi or Joan Baez. I am not as "moral" as those noble souls, and certainly not as dogmatic and self-righteous; I do not feel comfortable sitting on a perch of assumed "moral" superiority and lecturing down at the "sinners" below me. I have always had a basically scientific worldview (however eccentric it is in some respects) and have never believed in metaphysical "evil." I tend to think that all the violent sadism in the world, which horrifies me emotionally, is still perfectly natural and is the inevitable product of the past 3 billion years of evolution. I suspect that all viable planets pass through similarly bloody stages in the evolution upward to higher and higher consciousness. I am almost entirely lacking in "morality" in the conventional sense, and find it hard to despise any organism—fish, reptile or mammal. Since I am also a relativist rather than an absolutist, I have no hesitation about being violent in self-defense, and Gandhi and Ms. Baez would regard me as a very sinful chap indeed.

My brand of pacifism is based, first of all, on my own emotional repugnance for cruelty toward women and children (modern warfare being increasingly destructive to civilians, including women and children). Such an emotional prejudice is admittedly personal and subjective and not expected to move anybody who sincerely likes the idea of bombs and napalm dropping on defenseless populations; but my pacifism is also based upon factors which I believe can be proven to be in the rational self-interest of all. That is, I agree with Einstein and Bertrand Russell and the whole band of radical scientists who assert that we are very unlikely to survive a nuclear war.

Even here I am a heretic. I think we as a species might possibly survive one nuclear war, if it is a short one and limited. I believe Herman Kahn is right in claiming that such a limited nuclear war is statistically slightly more likely than the Holocaust predicted in professional pacifist agit-prop.

Nonetheless, it seems obvious to me that we cannot survive a series of nuclear wars—at some point, the death of Earth will become inevitable—and I am not sure that even a limited nuclear war will remain limited when one side sees that it is losing. In short, I think if we are to survive, we have to ban warfare eventually, and the risk gets worse every year as more and more scientific brains work on the problem Bucky Fuller defined bitterly as "delivering more and more explosive power over longer and long distances in shorter and shorter times to kill more and more people." Before that process culminates in Armaggedon, we must learn the arts of peace, and we better start studying them avidly right now. We should have started the day after Hiroshima.

This seems so obvious to me—and I note that even Neanderthals like Ronald Reagan give occasional lip-service to it—that I have been driven repeatedly over the years, but especially when the following two essays were written, to ask the inevitable question: if rational self-interest does demand that we abandon our traditional violent approach to international relations, why is it that most people still passively tolerate the growing nuclear stockpile that moves us closer to annihilation every day? The only answer to that which makes sense to me is Freudian and perhaps Reichian, and the Vietnam War brought all this home to me even more than the Nazi horrors had, because in Vietnam it was my countrymen and contemporaries who were happily toasting women and children with napalm. Any theory about Eichmann that eased my anxieties broke down when I tried to apply it to Lt. Calley, who was the product of the same socio-economic-cultural environment that had produced me.

I began to fear that people are not guided by rational self-interest; sadism and masochism may play a larger role in human psychology than we like to admit. The masochism of the masses may even, as Reich claimed, summon the most sadistic "leaders" who can be found. People tolerate weapons of megadeath not just because they like the idea of Russian women and children being toasted and roasted and barbecued in nuclear hell, but because they like the idea of this being done to women and children generally, including "our" "own"—and because they like the thought of it being done to themselves . In short, the "moral majority" likes nuclear war for the same reason it likes hellfire-and-damnation sermons. It enjoys wallowing in the imagery of ultimate sadism and ultimate masochism both. Maybe Hell is so popular, and nuclear war (man-made Hell) is so popular with the people who dig Hellfire theology, because the masses want to suffer more than they want anything else.

These anxieties run through all my novels and even haunt the one play I have written. I am sourly amused that some critics complain that I am "too optimistic" or "too Utopian." I guess critics of that ilk only read every second page. My "optimism" is an act of will—a revolutionary act of defiance, perhaps—but it is not based on any innocent illusions about what human beings have been doing to each other since the dawn of history.