Babylon

CHAPTER 7. Homo Zapiens

On the table the ouija board looked like a tank on the central square of a small European town. The bottle of Johnny Walker standing beside it reminded Tatarsky of the town hall, and so in his mind the red wine he was drinking was fitted into the same pattern. Its vessel, a long narrow bottle, was like a Gothic cathedral occupied by the Communist Party committee, and the void within the bottle was reminiscent of the ideological exhaustion of communism, the senselessness of bloodshed and the general crisis of the Russian idea. Setting the mouth of the bottle to his lips, Tatarsky finished what was left of the wine and tossed the bottle into the waste-paper basket. ‘The velvet revolution,’ he thought.

Sitting at the table in the tee shirt with the inscription: ‘Rage Against the Machine’, he finished reading the manual for the ouija board. The helium pen he’d bought in a kiosk by the metro fitted into the slot without any effort and he secured it in place with the screw. It was suspended on a small spring that was supposed to press it against the paper. The paper - an entire pile of it - was already lying under the ouija board. He could begin.

He glanced around the room and was just about to place his hands on the board, when he rose nervously to his feet, walked across the room and back again and drew the blinds over the windows. After another moment’s thought, he lit the candle standing on the table. Any further preparations would simply have been laughable. In actual fact, even the ones he had made were ridiculous.

He sat down at the table and set his hands on the ouija board. ‘OK then,’ he thought, ‘so now what? Should I say something out loud or not?’

‘I summon the spirit of Che Guevara. I summon the spirit of Che Guevara,’ he said, and immediately thought that he ought not just to summon the spirit; he ought to ask it a question. ‘I’d like to know… mmm, let’s say, something new about advertising, something that wasn’t in Al Rice or comrade Ogiivy,’ he said. ‘I want to understand more than anybody else.’

At that very instant the ouija board began jerking epileptically beneath his spread palms and the pen set in the slot traced out a string of large capital letters at the top of the sheet of paper:

IDENTIALISM AS THE HIGHEST STAGE OF DUALISM

Tatarsky jerked his hands away and stared in fright at the words for several seconds. Then he put his hands back and the ouija board began moving again, but this time the letters produced by the pen were small and neat:

These thoughts were originally intended for the journal of the Cuban armed forces, Oliva Verde. But it would be foolish to insist on matters of such petty detail now that we know for certain that the entire plan of existence, in which journals are published and armed forces engage in action, is simply a sequence of moments of awareness, united solely by the fact that in each new moment the concept of the preceding moments is present. Although from time without beginning this sequence remains unbroken, awareness is never actually aware of itself. Therefore the condition of man in this life is lamentable.

That great champion of the liberation of humanity, Siddhartha Gautama, has indicated in many of his works that the principle reason for the lamentable condition of man in this life is first and foremost the very conception of man’s existence, life and lamentable condition - that is to say, the dualism that imposes the division into subject and object of something that in actual fact has never existed and never will.

Tatarsky pulled out the sheet of paper covered in writing, set his hands on the ouija board and it trembled into motion again:

Siddhartha Gautama was able to convey this simple truth to many people because in his time their feelings were simple and strong, and their internal world was clear and unclouded. Hearing a single word could completely change a man’s entire life and transport him instantly to the other shore, to a freedom unconstrained in any way. But since that time many centuries have passed. The words of the Buddha are now accessible to all, yet salvation comes to but few. There can be no doubt that this is the result of the cultural situation that the ancient texts of all religions called the ‘dark age’ to come.

Comrades in the struggle! This dark age has already begun. And its onset has been brought about primarily by the role that the so-called visual-psychic generators or type-two objects have come to play in the life of man.

In speaking of the fact that dualism lisas engendered by the arbitrary division of the world into subject and object, the Buddha was concerned with subject-object division of the first type. The major distinguishing feature of the dark age lies in the decisive influence exerted on the life of man by subject-object division of the second type, which in the time of the Buddha simply did not exist.

In order to explain what is meant by objects of the first and second types, let us take a simple example, a television set. This is simply a box with a glass wall, which we are free to watch or not watch. When an individual’s gaze falls upon a dark screen, the movement of his or her eyes is controlled exclusively by internal nerve impulses or the psychological process taking place in his or her consciousness. For instance, an individual might notice that the screen is fly-spotted. Or he or she might decide that it would be a good idea to buy a television twice as big. Or think that it would be a good idea to stand it in a different corner. Until a television is switched on it is in no way different from the objects with which people had to deal in the Buddha’s time, be it a stone, the dew on a blade of grass or an arrow with a divided head - in short, everything that the Buddha used to illustrate his talks.

But when a television is turned on, it is transformed from an object of the first type into an object of the second type. It becomes a phenomenon of an entirely different order. And although the person looking at the screen does not notice this customary transformation, it is truly immense. For the viewer the television disappears as a material object that possesses weight, size and other physical properties. Instead of this the viewer has the sensation of being present in a different space, a sensation familiar to all who are assembled there.

Tatarsky glanced around, as though expecting to find himself surrounded by this assembled company, but of course there was nothing to be seen. As he removed another sheet of paper covered in writing from under the board, he figured out roughly how long the paper would last, then set his palms back against the wooden surface.

Comrades in the struggle! The question is - who is actually present? Can we say that it is the viewer himself?

Let us repeat the question, since it is extremely important: is it possible to say that the television is being watched by the individual who is watching it?

We assert that it is not, for the following reason. When the individual viewed the television while it was switched off, the movement of his or her eyes and the flow of his or her attention were controlled by his own voluntary impulses, chaotic though they may have been. The dark screen with no image of any kind did not exert any influence over them, or if it did, it was only as a background.

When it is switched on, a television almost never transmits a static view from a single motionless camera, and therefore the image on it is not a background. Quite the contrary, this image changes at an extremely rapid rate. Every few seconds there is either a change of camera angle or a fade into close-up on some object, or a switch to a different camera - the image is constantly being modified by the cameraman and the producer who stands behind him. This changing of the image is known as technomodification.

We ask you to pay particularly close attention at this point, since our next thesis is rather difficult to grasp, although in essence it is extremely simple. In addition, the feeling might arise that we are dealing with something that is insignificant. But we make bold to assert that we are in fact dealing with the most real psychological phenomenon of the end of the second millennium.

The changes in the image produced by various technomodifications can be correlated with a virtual psychological process in which the observer is forced to switch his attention from one event to another and select the most interesting content from what is taking place - that is, to manage his own attention as the makers of the programme manage it. This psychological process creates its own virtual subject, which for the duration of the television programme exists in place of the individual, fitting into his or her consciousness like a hand into a rubber glove.

This is similar to the condition of possession by a spirit. The difference lies in the fact that in this case the spirit does not exist; all that does exist are the symptoms of possession. This is a virtual spirit, but from the moment the viewer entrusts the programme-makers with redirecting his or her attention at will from object to object, he or she effectively becomes this spirit, and the spirit, which does not actually exist, possesses this viewer and millions of others.

What is taking place could appropriately be called the experience of collective non-existence, since the virtual subject that replaces the viewer’s actual consciousness is absolutely non-existent - it is merely an effect created by the collective efforts of editors, cameramen and producers. However, for the individual watching the television there is nothing more real than this virtual subject.

Furthermore, Lapsang Suchong of the Pu Er monastery believes that if a certain programme, for instance a football game, were to be watched simultaneously by more than four-fifths of the population of Earth, this virtual effect would become capable of displacing from the aggregate human consciousness the collective karmic vision of the human plane of existence, the consequences of which could be unpredictable (it is entirely possible that to the hell of molten metal, the hell of knife trees etc. there would be added a new hell, the hell of an eternal football championship). However, his calculations have yet to be verified, and in any case this is a matter for the future. Here we are interested not so much in the frightening prospects for tomorrow as in the no less frightening reality of today.

Let us draw our first conclusion. Corresponding to the object of the second type, that is, to a television that is switched on, we have a subject of the second type - that is, a virtual viewer, who manages his or her attention in exactly the same way as a programme production crew does. Feelings and thoughts, as well as the secretion of adrenalin and other hormones in the viewer’s organism, are dictated by an external operator and determined by the calculations of another individual. And of course, the subject of the first type does not notice the moment when he is displaced by the subject of the second type, since following this displacement there is no longer anyone to notice it, as the subject of the second type is unreal.

But it is not merely unreal (this word is in effect applicable to everything in the human world). There are no words to describe the degree of its unreality. It is a heaping of one unreality upon another, a castle constructed of air, the foundations of which stand upon a profound abyss. The question might arise: why are we wallowing in these non-existences, attempting to gauge the degree of their unreality? However, this difference between subjects of the first and second types is of extreme importance.

Subject number one believes that reality is the material world. But subject number two believes that reality is the material world as it is shown on the television.

As a product of false subject-object division, subject number one is illusory. But at least there is an observer of the chaotic movement of his or her thoughts and moods - in metaphorical terms we can say that subject number one is constantly watching a television programme about himself or herself, gradually forgetting that he or she is an observer and identifying with the programme.

From this point of view subject number two is something absolutely improbable and indescribable. It is a television programme watching another television programme. Emotions and thoughts participate in this process, but the individual in whose consciousness they arise is entirely absent.

The rapid switching of a television from one channel to another, which is used to avoid watching the advertisements, is known as zapping. Bourgeois thought has investigated in considerable detail the psychological condition of the individual who engages in zapping, and the corresponding thought patterns, which are rapidly becoming the basic forms of the modem world. But the type of zapping that is considered by the researchers of this phenomenon corresponds only to switching between channels by the viewer.

The switching to and fro of the viewer that is controlled by the producer and cameraman (that is, the forcible induction of subject number two by means of technomodifications) is a different type of zapping, a coercive form, study of which is effectively prohibited in every country of the world except Bhutan, where television is forbidden. But coercive zapping, whereby the television is converted into a remote control for the viewer, is not simply one method among others of organising an image sequence; it is the very foundation of television broadcasting, the major means by which the advertising-informational field exerts its influence on consciousness. From this point on, therefore, we shall refer to the type-two subject as Homo Zapiens, or HZ.

Let us repeat this extremely important conclusion: in the same way as a viewer who does not wish to watch the advertisements switches between television channels, instantaneous and unpredictable technomodifications switch the actual viewer to and fro. Assuming the condition of Homo Zapiens, the viewer becomes a remotely controlled television programme. And he or she spends a significant part of his life in this condition.

Comrades in the struggle! The position of modern man is not merely lamentable; one might even say there is no condition, because man hardly exists. Nothing exists to which one could point and say: ‘There, that is Homo Zapiens.’ HZ is simply the residual luminescence of a soul fallen asleep; it is a film about the shooting of another film, shown on a television in an empty house.

At this point the question logically arises of why modern man has found himself in such a situation. Who is trying to replace the already deluded Homo Sapiens with a cubic metre of empty space in the condition of HZ?

The answer, of course, is clear: nobody. But let us not become fixated on the bitter absurdity of the situation. In order to understand it in greater depth, let us recall that the main reason for the existence of television is its advertising function, which is indissolubly linked with the circulation of money. We shall therefore have to turn our attention to that area of human thought which is known as economics.

Economics is the name of a pseudo-science that deals with the illusory relations between subjects of the first and second types as they are involved in the hallucinatory process of their imaginary enrichment.

This discipline regards each individual as a cell of an organism that the economists of the ancient world knew as Mammon. In the educational materials of the Front for Full and Final Liberation it is called simply ORANUS (which translates into Russian as ‘moutharse’). This more accurately reflects its real nature and leaves less scope for mystical speculation. Each of these cells - that is, each individual, when regarded as an economic entity -possesses a kind of social membrane that allows money (which plays the role of blood and lymph in the organism of oranus) to pass into and out of the cell. From the point of view of economics, the function of each of these cells is to absorb as much money as possible through this membrane and to release as little as possible back through it.

But the imperative of oranus’s existence as a whole requires its cellular structure to be bathed in a constantly increasing stream of money. Therefore oranus, in the process of its evolution (and it is located at a level of evolution close to that of a mollusc) develops a primitive nervous system, the so-called ‘media’. This nervous system transmits throughout its virtual organism impulses that control the activity of the monadic cells.

These impulses are of three types, which are called oral, anal and displacing wow-impulses (from the commercial ejaculation ‘wow!’).

The oral wow-impulse induces a cell to ingest money in order to eliminate its suffering as a result of the conflict between its self-image and the image of the ideal ‘super-self created by advertising. Note that the point does not lie in the things that can be bought for money in order to embody this ideal ‘self - the point lies in the money itself. Certainly, many millionaires walk around in rags and drive cheap cars, but in order to be able to do that one has to be a millionaire. A poor man in the same circumstances would suffer inexpressible agonies as a result of cognitive dissonance, which is why many poor people will spend their last penny in an effort to dress well.

The anal wow-impulse induces the cell to eliminate money in order to experience pleasure from the coincidence of the above-mentioned images.

Since the two actions described (the ingestion of money and its elimination) contradict each other, the anal wow-impulse acts in a concealed form, and the individual genuinely believes that the pleasure is derived not from the act of spending money, but from the acquisition of a certain object. But of course it is quite obvious that as a physical object a watch that costs fifty thousand dollars cannot afford an individual any greater pleasure than a watch that costs fifty dollars - the whole point lies in the amount of money involved.

The oral and anal wow-impulses are so called by analogy with sphincteral functions, although it would be more accurate to compare them with inhaling and exhaling; the sensation that they induce is akin to psychological asphyxia, or, by contrast, hyperventilation. This oral-anal irritation achieves its greatest intensity at the gaming table in the casino or during speculation on the stock market, although the means of wow-stimulation may take any form.

The displacing impulse suppresses and displaces from an individual’s consciousness all psychological processes that might hinder total identification with a cell of oranus. It arises when a psychological stimulus contains no oral-anal components. The displacing impulse is a jamming signal that blocks the transmission from an undesirable radio-station by generating intense interference. Its mode of action is admirably expressed in the sayings: ‘Money talks, bullshit walks’ and, ‘If you ‘re so clever, show me your money.’ Without this lever of influence oranus would not be able to make individuals function as its cells. Under the influence of the displacing impulse, which blocks out all subtle psychological processes that are not directly related to the circulation of money, the world comes to be seen exclusively as the embodiment of oranus. This produces terrifying results. For instance, one broker from the London Stock Exchange has described his hallucinatory vision of the world, induced by the displacing wow-impulse as follows: ‘The world is a place where business meets money.’

It is no exaggeration to say that this psychological condition is widespread. All the questions dealt with in modem economics, sociology and culturology are in effect the description of metabolic and somatic processes occurring in the organism of oranus.

By its nature oranus is a primitive virtual organism of a parasitic type. Its distinctive feature is that it does not attach itself to any single donor organism, but makes other organisms into its own cells. Each of its cells is a human being possessing unlimited potential and endowed by nature with the right to freedom. The paradox lies in the fact that oranus as an organism stands much lower on the evolutionary scale than any of its cells. It is incapable of abstract thought, or even of self-awareness. One might say that the famous eye in the triangle that is depicted on the one-dollar note actually sees nothing. It was simply daubed on the surface of the pyramid by some cartoonist and nothing more. Therefore, to avoid confusing the theorists of conspiracy, with their inclination to schizophrenia, it would be more correct to cover the said eye with a black blindfold.

Oranus has neither ears, nor nose, nor eyes, nor mind. And of course, it is far from being the embodiment of evil or the spawn of hell that many representatives of the religious business would have it be. In itself it wishes for nothing, since it is simply incapable of wishing in the abstract. It is an inane polyp, devoid of emotion or intention, which ingests and eliminates emptiness. Each of its cells is potentially capable of realising that it is not one of oranus’s cells at all, in fact just the opposite: that oranus is merely one of the insignificant objects of its mind. It is in order to block this possibility that oranus requires the displacing impulse.

Previously oranus possessed only a vegetative nervous system, but the emergence of the mass media has allowed it to evolve, developing a central nervous system. In our times oranus’s most important nerve ending, which reaches every individual, is the television. We have already mentioned that the consciousness of the television viewer is displaced by the consciousness of the virtual Homo Zapiens. Now let us consider the mode of action of the three wow-impulses.

In his or her normal state the human individual is theoretically capable of identifying the wow-impulses and resisting them. But Homo Zapiens in unconscious fusion with a television broadcast is no longer a personality, merely a condition. Subject number two is not capable of analysing events, in exactly the same way as an electromagnetic recording of a cock crowing is incapable of it. Even the illusion of critical assessment of what takes place on the screen is itself part of the induced psychological process.

After every few minutes of a television programme - that is, within the consciousness of subject number two - a sequence of advertising clips is shown, each of which is a complex and carefully constructed combination of anal, oral and displacing wow-impulses, which resonate in phase with various cultural strata of the psyche.

To employ a crude analogy with physical processes, the patient is first anaesthetised (subject number one is displaced by subject number two) and then follows a rapid and intensive session of hypnosis, each stage of which is fixed in the memory by means of a conditioned reflex mechanism. At some stage subject number two switches off the television and once again becomes subject number one - that is, an ordinary individual. After that he no longer receives the three wow-impulses directly. But an effect is produced similar in nature to residual magnetisation: the mind begins to produce the same influences for Itself. They arise spontaneously and act as a background against which all other thoughts appear. While the subject in the condition of HZ is subject to the three wow-impulses, on returning to a normal condition he or she is subjected to the action of the three wow-factors that are automatically generated by his or her mind.

The constant and regular assumption by an Individual of the condition of HZ and exposure to the displacing wow-impulse lead to the development in consciousness of a specific filter that allows the ingestion of only that information which is saturated with oral-anal wow-content. The individual, therefore, is not even afforded the capability of inquiring after his or her own true nature.

But just what is this true nature?

By virtue of a number of circumstances that we have no space to deal with here, each individual can only answer that question for himself or herself. No matter how lamentable the condition of the ordinary individual might be, he or she still has the opportunity to find an answer. But subject number two has no such opportunity, since he or she does not exist. Despite this (or possible, precisely because of it), the media system of oranus, which transmits the three wow-impulses through the informational field, confronts HZ with the question of self-identification.

Now we come to our most interesting and paradoxical conclusion. Since subject number two does not possess any inner nature, the only possible answer for it is to define itself via a combination of the material objects shown on the television, which are quite clearly neither it nor any part of it. This is reminiscent of the method of apophatic theology, in which God is defined through what He is not, only here we are dealing with apophatic anthropology.

For subject number two the only possible answer to the question ‘What am I?’ is:Iam the individual who drives such-and-such a car, lives in such-and-such a house, wears such-and-such a type of clothes.’ Identification of the self is only possible through the compilation of a list of goods consumed, and transformation is only possible by means of a change in the list. Therefore, most objects advertised are associated with a specific personality type, character trait, propensity or quality. The result is a completely convincing combination of these properties, propensities and features, which is capable of producing the impression of a real personality. The number of possible combinations is practically unlimited, as is the scope for choice. Advertising formulates this as follows:Iam a calm and self-confident individual, therefore I buy red slippers.’ The type-two subject, wishing to add to its collection the qualities of calmness and self-confidence, achieves this by remembering that it must buy red slippers, which is accomplished under the influence of the anal wow-factor. In the classic case the oral-anal stimulation forms a closed loop, as in the famous instance of a snake biting its own tail: you need a million dollars to buy a house in an expensive neighbourhood, you need the house to have somewhere to wear your red slippers, and you need red slippers to provide you with the calmness and self-confidence that will allow you to earn a million dollars, in order to buy the house in which you can wear the red slippers, thus acquiring the qualities of calmness and confidence.

When oral-anal stimulation forms a closed loop, we can say that the goal of advertising magic has been achieved: an illusory structure is created that has no centre, although all objects and qualities are related to each other via a fictional centre that is called ‘identity’.

Identity is the type-two subject at the stage of development when it is capable of existing independently without constant activation by the three wow-impulses, under the influence only of the three residual wow-factors, generated independently by its own mind.

Identity is a false ego, which says everything there is to be said about it. In its analysis of the modern human situation, bourgeois thought regards the violent escape from identity back to one’s own ego as a tremendous spiritual achievement. Perhaps that really is the case, since the ego is non-existent in relative terms, while identity is absolutely non-existent. The only difficulty with this is that it is impossible, since there is nowhere to escape from or to and nobody to escape. Despite that, however, we might allow that in this situation the slogans ‘Back to the ego!’ or ‘Forward to the ego!’ do acquire, if not actual meaning, then at least a certain aesthetic justification.

The superimposition of the three wow-impulses on the more subtle processes taking place in the human psyche is the source of all of the mediocre variety of modern culture. A special role is played in this by the displacing impulse. It is like the rumbling of a pneumatic drill, which drowns out all other sounds. Any external stimuli apart from the wow-oral and wow-anal impulses are filtered out, and the individual loses interest in everything that has no oral or anal component. In this brief article we do not consider the sexual aspect of advertising, but let us note in passing that more and more frequently sex becomes attractive only because it symbolises the vital energy of youth that can be transformed into money. This can be confirmed by any competent psychoanalyst. In the final analysis the modern individual experiences a profound distrust of practically everything that is not connected with the ingestion or elimination of money.

Externally this is manifested in the fact that life becomes ever more boring, and people become evermore cold and calculating. In bourgeois science the new code of behaviour is usually explained by the attempt to maintain and conserve emotional energy, which is a response to the demands of the corporate economy and the modern lifestyle. In actual fact there is no less emotional content in human life, but the unremitting influence of the displacing wow-factor results in all of the individual’s emotional energy being shunted into psychological processes related to oral and anal wow-content. Many bourgeois specialists instinctively sense the part played by the mass media in the paradigm shift that is taking place, but as comrade Allende junior used to say, ‘They are searching for a black cat which has never existed in a dark room which will never exist.’ Even when they go so far as to call television a prosthetic support for the wrinkled and withered ‘self, or say that the media inflate a personality that has become unreal, they are still missing the point.

Only a personality that was real can become unreal. In order to become wrinkled and withered, this ‘self would have had’ to exist. In the preceding argument, and also in our previous writings (see The Russian Question and Cedera Luminosa) we have demonstrated the groundlessness of this approach.

Under the influence of the displacing wow-factor, the culture and art of the dark age are reduced exclusively to oral-anal content. The fundamental feature of this art may be succinctly defined as ‘moutharsing’.

A black bag stuffed with hundred-dollar bills has already become the supremely important cultural symbol and a central element of the majority of films and books, for which the trajectory of its path through life provides the mainspring of the plot. In more precise terms, it is the presence in the work of art of this black bag that stimulates the audience’s emotional interest in what is taking place on the screen or in the text. Note that in certain instances the bag of money is not directly present, in which case its function is fulfilled either by the participation of so-called ‘stars’, of whom it is known as a certain fact that they have such a bag at home, or by persistently touted information about the budget of the film and its takings at the box office. In the future, not a single work of art will be created simply for its own sake; the time is approaching when books and films will appear in which the dominant element of content will be a secret hymn of praise to Coca-Cola and an attack on Pepsi-Cola - or vice-versa.

The effect of the impact of oral-anal impulses is to encourage the development in the human individual of an internal auditor (a typical market-economy variant of the ‘internal party committee’). He constantly assesses reality exclusively in terms of property and performs a punitive function by forcing consciousness to suffer intolerably as a result of cognitive dissonance. The oral wow-impulse corresponds to the internal auditor holding up the flag ‘loser’. The anal wow-impulse corresponds to the flag ‘winner’. The displacing wow-impulse corresponds to a condition in which the internal auditor simultaneously holds up the flags ‘winner’ and ‘loser’. It is possible to identify several stable types of identity. These are:

a) the oral wow-type (the dominant pattern around which emotional and psychological life is organised is an obsessive yearning for money)

b) the anal wow-type (the dominant pattern is the pleasurable elimination of money or the manipulation of objects that are surrogates for it, also known as anal wow-exhibitionism)

c) the displaced wow-type (possible in combination with either of the first two types), in which the individual effectively becomes insensitive to all stimuli apart from oral-anal impulses.

The relative nature of this classification can be seen from the fact that one and the same identity may be anal in relation to those who stand lower in the wow-hierarchy and oral in relation to those who stand higher (of course, there is no ‘identity in itself - we are concerned here with a pure epiphenomenon). The linear wow-hierarchy that is formed by numerous ranked identities is known as a corporate string. It is a kind of social perpetuum mobile; ifs secret lies in the fact that any ‘identity’ is obliged constantly to validate itself against another that is located one step higher. In folklore this great principle is reflected in the colloquial phrase: ‘keeping up with the Joneses’.

Individuals organised according to the principle of the corporate string are like fish threaded on a line. But in this case the fish are still alive. More than that - under the influence of the oral and anal wow-factors they crawl, as it were, along the corporate string in the direction that they think of as up. They are driven to do this by instinct or, if you will, by the urge to find the meaning of life. And from the point of view of economic metaphysics the meaning of life is the transformation of the oral identity into the anal.

The implications of the situation are not exhausted by the fact that the subject who is overcome by the influence of the three residual wow-factors is obliged to regard himself or herself as an identity. Coming into contact with another human being, he or she sees him or her as an identity too. The culture of the dark age has already correlated absolutely everything that can characterise a human being with its oral-anal system of coordinates and located it in a context of endless moutharsing.

The displaced wow-individual analyses everybody he or she meets as a video clip saturated with commercial information. The external appearance of the other person, his or her speech and behaviour, are immediately interpreted as a set of wow-symbols. A very rapid and uncontrollable process is initiated, consisting of a sequence of anal, oral and displacing impulses that flare up and fade away in consciousness, determining the relations people have with each other. Homo homini lupus est, as one inspired Latin saying has it. But man has long ceased being a wolf to man. Man is not even an image-maker to man, as some modern sociologists assume. It is all far more terrifying and much simpler than that. Man is wow to man - or if not to man, then to precisely another such wow, the result of which is that, projected on to the modem system of cultural coordinates the Latin saying becomes:

‘Wow Wow Wow!’

This applies not only to people, but in general to everything that falls within the range of our attention. In assessing what we are looking at, we experience a weary sense of depression if we do not encounter the familiar stimuli. Our perception is subjected to a specific form of digitization - every phenomenon is disassociated into a linear combination of anal and oral vectors. Every image can be precisely expressed in terms of money. Even if it is emphatically non-commercial, the question immediately arises of how commercially valuable that type of non-commercialism is. Hence the feeling, familiar to us all, that in the end everything comes down to money.

And indeed, everything does come down to money, because money has long since been reduced to nothing but itself, and everything else proscribed. Surges of oral-anal activity become the only permitted psychological reaction. All other mental activity is blocked.

The type-two subject is absolutely mechanistic, because it is an echo of electromagnetic processes in the cathode-ray tube of a television. The only freedom that it possesses is the freedom to say ‘Wow!’ when it buys another thing, which as likely as not is a new television. This is precisely why oranus’s controlling impulses are called wow-impulses, and the subconscious ideology of identialism is called ‘wowerism’. As for the political regime corresponding to wowerism, it is sometimes known as telecracy or mediacracy, since it is a regime under which the object of choices (and also the subject, as we have demonstrated above) is a television programme. It should be remembered that the word ‘democracy’, which is used so frequently in the modem mass media, is by no means the same word ‘democracy ‘ as was so widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The two words are merely homonyms. The old word ‘democracy’ was derived from the Greek ‘demos’, while the new word is derived from the expression ‘demo-version’.

Ana so, let us sum up.

Identialism is dualism at that stage of development when the major corporations are finalising the division of human consciousness which, being under the constant influence of oral, anal and displacing wow-impulses, begins independently to generate the three corresponding wow-factors. This results in the stable and permanent displacement of the personality and the appearance in its place of the so-called ‘identity ‘. Identialism is dualism that possesses a triple distinction. It is dualism that is: a) dead; b) putrid; c) digitised.

Numerous different definitions of identity could be provided, but this would be a senseless exercise, because in any case it does not exist in reality. At the stage of identialism, the individual for whose freedom it was once possible to fight disappears completely from the field of view.

It follows, therefore, that the end of the world, which is the inevitable outcome of the wowerisation of consciousness, will present absolutely no danger of any kind - for the very subject of danger is disappearing. The end of the world will simply be a television programme. And this, comrades in the struggle, fills us all with inexpressible bliss.

Che Guevara

Mt Shumeru, eternity, summer.

‘ Sumer again. We’re all Sumerians, then.’ Tatarsky whispered quietly and looked up. The grey light of a new day was trembling beyond the blind at the window. To the left of the ouija board lay a heap of paper covered in writing, and the weary muscles of his forearms ached. The only thing he could remember from all that writing was the expression ‘bourgeois thought’. Getting up from the table, he went across to the bed and threw himself on to it without getting undressed.

‘Just what is bourgeois thought?’ he wondered. ‘God only knows. About money, I suppose. What else?’