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Or did he?

After high school I attended the Colorado School of Mines, a well-thought-of engineering school. I did this because I got an academic scholarship and because I’d been told—I’d internalized—that anyone who got through calculus in high school would be an idiot to pass up an opportunity like this: After college I would be sure to get a high-paying job, and isn’t that the point of life? Never mind that I didn’t like my high school math and science classes. But I still wanted to go to that school, didn’t I? Or I certainly wouldn’t have gone. Or would I?

These questions go to the heart of everything I’m writing about in this book, and go to the heart of how we’ll get out of this mess we’re in. We’ll talk about how in a while, but first I want to bring in another piece of this puzzle. I receive a lot of letters commenting on the books I’ve written, and many letters specifically about A Language Older Than Words, but no one has ever mentioned what I’ve always thought of as one of the most important sections of that book. This is the section where I describe how scientists set out to intentionally drive monkeys insane, to turn them into, to use their words, “monster mothers.” Now, part of the reason I put in that section is to ask the implicit question: What sort of evil people would set out to drive some group of others insane? (The answer, of course, is that normally we call these people advertisers, corporate journalists, drill sergeants, prison guards, teachers, or quite often parents.) But the real point is that the treatment these monkeys received from those who were already themselves psychopathological turned the monkeys irredeemably and irrevocably insane. Their insanity was permanent.335 They were forever unreachable. They were incapable of normal social relations, including normal sexual relations, and had to be impregnated by use of what the human psychopaths called “rape racks.” (We can ask, once again, what sort of twisted psyches could conceive such a device.336) Nothing other monkeys or humans could do would ever reach these violent and pathetic creatures.337 Their only relief from this pain of being who they’d been made into—and the only relief for those who then had the misfortune to come in contact with these insane monkeys—came through their own eventual deaths.

Recall the central point of R. D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience: People act according to the way they experience the world. If you can understand their experience, you can understand their behavior. So, a woman is taught at five years old that she will receive what she thinks is love when she is violated by her caretaker (she may also receive financial rewards). She is also taught that if she resists she will suffer violence and abandonment. How does this affect her later experience, her later behavior? I’m speaking not just of her sexual behavior, but other aspects, too. We can ask similar questions about my father. How did the abuse he suffered affect how he perceives the world, how he is in the world, how he treats the world around him? And how did my own abuse affect my perceptions, my being, how I treat the world around me? How did my schooling affect the decisions I made or didn’t make about going to a school to study a subject I did not enjoy? Did I want to go there? Who was the I who did?

I need to be clear. I’m not saying that every woman who was sexually abused hates sex, or is unreachable, or must follow some self-destructive path. I’m not saying that everyone who is abused ends up abusing others. I’m not saying that education is never helpful. I’m not saying there is no reason to write. I’m not saying that no one changes. I’m not saying that no one is reachable. I am saying that there are those who are not reachable. There are those who will never be reachable. There are those who have been driven permanently insane, and especially when they have the full power of social (including financial, police, military, and public opinion) support behind them, they will never change, never stop their destructive