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By Root 2240 0

and manipulation accompany the necessity to motivate troops to murder on command. You can’t take civilians from the street, give them a machine gun, and expect them to kill without question in a democratic society; therefore people must be indoctrinated to do so. This fact alone should sound off alarms in our collective American brain. If the cause of war is justified, then why do we have to be put through boot camp? If you answer that we have to be trained in killing skills, well, then why is most of boot camp not focused on combat training? Why are our privates shown videos of U.S. military massacres while playing Metallica in the background, thus causing us to scream with the joy of the killer instinct [sic] as brown bodies are obliterated? Why do privates answer every command with an enthusiastic ‘kill!’ instead of, ‘yes, sir!’ like it is in the movies? Why do we sing cadences like these?: ‘Throw some candy in the schoolyard, watch the children gather round. Load a belt in your M-60, mow them little bastards down!!’ and “We’re gonna rape, kill, pillage and burn, gonna rape, kill, pillage, and burn!!’ These chants are meant to motivate the troops; they enjoy it, salivate from it, and get off on it. If one repeats these hundreds of times, one eventually begins to accept them as paradigmatically valid.”277

HATRED

Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total: it pervades the relationship of man to his work, to the things he consumes, to the state, to his fellow man, and to himself.278 Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complex social machine to administer the technical machine he has built. Yet this whole creation of his stands over and above him. He does not feel himself as a creator and center, but as the servant of a Golem, which his hands have built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his cre- ations, and has lost ownership of himself.

Erich Fromm279

IF YOU RECALL, THE TENTH PREMISE OF THIS BOOK IS “THE CULTURE as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.” The fourteenth premise, somewhat related to the tenth, is, “From birth on—and probably from conception, but I’m not sure how I’d make the case—we are individually and collectively enculturated to hate life, hate the natural world, hate the wild, hate wild animals, hate women, hate children, hate our bodies, hate and fear our emotions, hate ourselves. If we did not hate the world, we could not allow it to be destroyed before our eyes. If we did not hate ourselves, we could not allow our homes—and our bodies—to be poisoned.”

This hatred can be more or less overt, in such manifestations as the Seekers of the Red Mist, the KKK, or the military (called “peacekeepers” by those in power, and “trained killers” by those who teach them their cadences). Sometimes the hatred is harder to see. As I tried to show exhaustively in The Culture of Make Believe, any hatred felt long enough no longer feels like hatred, it feels like what passes in this culture for religion, economics, tradition, the erotic (each of these being toxic mimics of what they would be in a human culture). It feels like science. It feels like technology. It feels like civilization. It feels like the way things are.

When you somehow extricate yourself from these iron cages of hate, what do you see?

I’m standing in line at a Safeway checkout counter, holding torment in my hands—torment I will soon enough take into my body—holding in my hands the processed flesh of plants and animals who were systematically enslaved and tortured, who were not merely killed—we all have to kill to eat: as a tree said to me, “You’re an animal, you consume, get over it”—but who were denied their very nature, disallowed from ever simply existing, from being who they are, free and wild.

I look at the magazines, so many processed women, artificial models showing others, by contrast, their