Taboo Game Quotes

We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them thatexcrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body. Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules.

You have seen that the universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game, and that there is no separate "you" to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. The only real "you" is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For "you" is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new.

Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure.

What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is an urgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained—though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is.

This state of affairs is known technically as the "double-bind." A person is put in a double-bind by a command or request which contains a concealed contradiction... This is a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't situation which arises constantly in human (and especially family) relations... The social doublebind game can be phrased in several ways:The first rule of this game is that it is not a game. Everyone must play. You must love us. You must go on living. Be yourself, but play a consistent and acceptable role. Control yourself and be natural. Try to be sincere. Essentially, this game is a demand for spontaneous behavior of certain kinds. Living, loving, being natural or sincere—all these are spontaneous forms of behavior: they happen "of themselves" like digesting food or growing hair. As soon as they are forced they acquire that unnatural, contrived, and phony atmosphere which everyone deplores—weak and scentless like forced flowers and tasteless like forced fruit. Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith—in life, in other people, and in oneself—is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.

The morality that goes with this understanding is, above all, the frank recognition of your dependence upon enemies, underlings, out-groups, and, indeed, upon all other forms of life whatsoever. Involved as you may be in the conflicts and competitive games of practical life, you will never again be able to indulge in the illusion that the "offensive other" is all in the wrong, and could or should be wiped out.

Am I just a game to you?” Hunter laughed again. “Maybe. But, I’ll tell you one thing for certain.” “What?” I asked breathlessly. He edged closer to me, sweeping a lock of hair behind my ear before breathing his hot breath on my neck. As he trailed his nose along the base, I shuddered. He stopped a moment and then carried on up towards my ear. “I always win,” he whispered.

Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that’s the whole fun of it—just what he wanted to do. He doesn’t want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise,

I looked up, and I really wished I hadn’t. My obsession with those eyes was playing a taunting game with me. His mesmerising gaze was like none other I had ever experienced in my life. It was almost as if he could reach into my soul and pick out all of my sins. Sins I didn’t want him to know about. Sins that would ultimately destroy me if they ever got out. If he knew my sins, he wouldn’t be kneeling beside me with my hand in his. He wouldn’t be sharing with me that look of promises to come. He would be disgusted with me. I was disgusted with me.

But this must not be confused with our usual ideas of the practice of “unselfishness,” which is the effort to identify with others and their needs while still under the strong illusion of being no more than a skin-contained ego. Such “unselfishness” is apt to be a highly refined egotism, comparable to the in-group which plays the game of “we’re-more-tolerant-than-you.” The Vedanta was not originally moralistic; it did not urge people to ape the saints without sharing their real motivations, or to ape motivations without sharing the knowledge which sparks them.

It isn’t always a matter, we should note, of identifying with the protagonist. No one I know, regardless of how much they love his novel, wants to be Humbert Humbert or Victor Frankenstein, although perhaps for different reasons. Or Heathcliff. Ever want to be Heathcliff? I didn’t think so. They are not the stuff of our fantasy lives, yet we may revel in their world, even while reviling their personalities. Consider Humbert. The narrative strategy Nabokov employs is very daring, since it demands that we identify with someone who is breaking what nearly everyone will consider the most absolute taboo. …Sympathy is out of the question. What the novel requires, however, is that we continue reading, something it audaciously gives us reason to do. The word games and intellectual brilliance helps, certainly; he’s detestable but charming and brilliant. The other element is that we watch him with a sort of appalled fascination: can he really intend that; does he really do this; would he really attempt even that; has he lost all sense of proportion? The answers are, in order, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Pretty clearly, then, there are pleasures in the text that are not inherent in the personality of the main character.

Maybe she was brought up to believe sex is naughty, and bondage games are a way to enjoy it without the attendant guilt. Perhaps she finds BDSM exciting because it’s taboo and sinful; your friend gets off on defying convention. Maybe she’s just bored of straight sex, or has a fetish. Take your pick.” - from 'The Etiquette of Lying

At the social/political/ juridical, etc., level, the organizing principle was less to do with games and more to do with the nature of taboos—enormously powerful, often enormously arbitrary, and (crucially) regularly quietly broken, without undermining the fact of the taboo itself. That last element, I think, is sometimes underestimated in the discussions of cultural norms, where they are both asserted and breached. Both those elements are foundational. — author interview

You have a taboo list?” Jade asked. “You don’t?” Lilah asked. Jade bit her lower lip and Adam laughed. “Jade has a list for everything.” “True,” Dell said, studying her, getting nothing from her expression. She had quite the game face, his Jade. “You do, you have lists for everything.” “Not everything.” “Jade, you have a list for every situation, big or small, from when to brush your teeth, to how to handle every potential patient to cross my door. Hell, you’ve got a list on what’s in your purse and my office fridge and—” “And don’t forget the list on how many different ways I could kill you,” she said, sipping her drink.

Anything you do to optimize your work, cut some corners, or squeeze more “efficiency” out of it (and out of your life) will eventually make you dislike it. Artisans have their soul in the game. Primo, artisans do things for existential reasons first, financial and commercial ones later. Their decision making is never fully financial, but it remains financial. Secundo, they have some type of “art” in their profession; they stay away from most aspects of industrialization; they combine art and business. Tertio, they put some soul in their work: they would not sell something defective or even of compromised quality because it hurts their pride. Finally, they have sacred taboos, things they would not do even if it markedly increased profitability. Compendiaria res improbitas, virtusque tarda—the villainous takes the short road, virtue the longer one. In other words, cutting corners is dishonest.

You Are What You Eat Take food for example. We all assume that our craving or disgust is due to something about the food itself - as opposed to being an often arbitrary response preprogrammed by our culture. We understand that Australians prefer cricket to baseball, or that the French somehow find Gerard Depardieu sexy, but how hungry would you have to be before you would consider plucking a moth from the night air and popping it, frantic and dusty, into your mouth? Flap, crunch, ooze. You could wash it down with some saliva beer.How does a plate of sheep brain's sound? Broiled puppy with gravy? May we interest you in pig ears or shrimp heads? Perhaps a deep-fried songbird that you chew up, bones, beak, and all? A game of cricket on a field of grass is one thing, but pan-fried crickets over lemongrass? That's revolting. Or is it? If lamb chops are fine, what makes lamb brains horrible? A pig's shoulder, haunch, and belly are damn fine eatin', but the ears, snout, and feet are gross? How is lobster so different from grasshopper? Who distinguishes delectable from disgusting, and what's their rationale? And what about all the expectations? Grind up those leftover pig parts, stuff 'em in an intestine, and you've got yourself respectable sausage or hot dogs. You may think bacon and eggs just go together, like French fries and ketchup or salt and pepper. But the combination of bacon and eggs for breakfast was dreamed up about a hundred years aqo by an advertising hired to sell more bacon, and the Dutch eat their fries with mayonnaise, not ketchup. Think it's rational to be grossed out by eating bugs? Think again. A hundred grams of dehydrated cricket contains 1,550 milligrams of iron, 340 milligrams of calcium, and 25 milligrams of zinc - three minerals often missing in the diets of the chronic poor. Insects are richer in minerals and healthy fats than beef or pork. Freaked out by the exoskeleton, antennae, and the way too many legs? Then stick to the Turf and forget the Surf because shrimps, crabs, and lobsters are all anthropods, just like grasshoppers. And they eat the nastiest of what sinks to the bottom of the ocean, so don't talk about bugs' disgusting diets. Anyway, you may have bug parts stuck between your teeth right now. The Food and Drug Administration tells its inspectors to ignore insect parts in black pepper unless they find more than 475 of them per 50 grams, on average. A fact sheet from Ohio State University estimates that Americans unknowingly eat an average of between one and two pounds of insects per year. An Italian professor recently published Ecological Implications of Mini-livestock: Potential of Insects, Rodents, Frogs and Snails. (Minicowpokes sold separately.) Writing in Slate.com, William Saletan tells us about a company by the name of Sunrise Land Shrimp. The company's logo: "Mmm. That's good Land Shrimp!" Three guesses what Land Shrimp is. (20-21)

The fear of a revanchist Germany was revived in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and the two Germanys made plans to reunite. Yet today German culture remains racked with soul-searching over its role in the world wars and permeated with revulsion against anything that smacks of military force. Violence is taboo even in video games, and when Parker Brothers tried to introduce a German version of Risk, the board game in which players try to dominate a map of the world, the German government tried to censor it. (Eventually the rules were rewritten so that players were “liberating” rather than conquering their opponents’ territories.)51 German pacifism is not just symbolic: in 2003 half a million Germans marched to oppose the American-led invasion of Iraq.

When Pfizer was getting ready to launch their impotency drug Viagra or sildenafil citrate, they realized that the topic was taboo and would provoke intense debate if the drug was presented as a cure for impotency. Which old man would admit he was impotent, went the argument. So the business and markeing strategist decided to work on what may have been termed the ‘social justice’ angle of presenting the problem. Since impotency was seen as an almost terminal disease that could not be cured, was there a way of repositioning it by a change in terminology? A few years before Viagra was launched, the company started seeding media about a new problem facing American men, it was termed ‘Erectile Dysfunction’ or ED. I came across an article on ED in Fortune magazine a year or so before the official launch of Viagra. The company had managed to create a new disease which had an acronym that could be remembered by the lay consumer instead of the derogatory term in use till then, ‘impotence’. When the drug, and the brand Viagra, was finally launched, it found ready acceptance and went on to become a billion dollar seller that created a whole new industry. Even US Presidential contender Bob Dole appeared in a television commercial for Viagra. Unlike in India, where prescription-only brands are not allowed to be advertised on television and print media, in the US, even politicians are game for starring in television commercials. Viagra

All this seems marvelously futile, and yet, when you begin to think about it, it begins to be more marvelous than futile. Indeed, it seems extremely odd. It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd - uncanny and highly improbable. G. K. Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at a gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don’t. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things. Why, of all possible worlds, this colossal and apparently unnecessary multitude of galaxies in a mysteriously curved space-time continuum, these myriads of differing [...] species playing frantic games of one-upmanship, these numberless ways of “doing it” from the elegant architecture of the snow crystal or the diatom to the startling magnificence of the lyrebird or the peacock?

The trouble with colorblind ideologies in text and culture is that by not noticing race, writers and other creatives do the work of encoding it as taboo. While silence and evasion around race in dystopian science fiction is 'understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture', implying the inevitability of a postracial future, this silence also has the effect of confusing readers.

Let us turn now to a study of a small Newfoundland fishing village. Fishing is, in England at any rate – more hazardous even than mining. Cat Harbour, a community in Newfoundland, is very complex. Its social relationships occur in terms of a densely elaborate series of interrelated conceptual universes one important consequence of which is that virtually all permanent members of the community are kin, ‘cunny kin’, or economic associates of all other of the 285 permanent members. The primary activity of the community is cod fishing. Salmon, lobster, and squid provide additional sources of revenue. Woodcutting is necessary in off-seasons. Domestic gardening, and stints in lumber camps when money is needed, are the two other profitable activities. The community's religion is reactionary. Women assume the main roles in the operation though not the government of the churches in the town. A complicated system of ‘jinking’ – curses, magic, and witchcraft – governs and modulates social relationships. Successful cod fishing in the area depends upon highly developed skills of navigation, knowledge of fish movements, and familiarity with local nautical conditions. Lore is passed down by word of mouth, and literacy among older fishermen is not universal by any means. ‘Stranger’ males cannot easily assume dominant positions in the fishing systems and may only hire on for salary or percentage. Because women in the community are not paid for their labour, there has been a pattern of female migration out of the area. Significantly, two thirds of the wives in the community are from outside the area. This has a predictable effect on the community's concept of ‘the feminine’. An elaborate anti-female symbolism is woven into the fabric of male communal life, e.g. strong boats are male and older leaky ones are female. Women ‘are regarded as polluting “on the water” and the more traditional men would not consider going out if a woman had set foot in the boat that day – they are “jinker” (i.e., a jinx), even unwittingly'. (It is not only relatively unsophisticated workers such as those fishermen who insist on sexual purity. The very skilled technicians drilling for natural gas in the North Sea affirm the same taboo: women are not permitted on their drilling platform rigs.) It would be, however, a rare Cat Harbour woman who would consider such an act, for they are aware of their structural position in the outport society and the cognition surrounding their sex….Cat Harbour is a male-dominated society….Only men can normally inherit property, or smoke or drink, and the increasingly frequent breach of this by women is the source of much gossip (and not a negligible amount of conflict and resentment). Men are seated first at meals and eat together – women and children eating afterwards. Men are given the choicest and largest portions, and sit at the same table with a ‘stranger’ or guest. Women work extremely demanding and long hours, ‘especially during the fishing season, for not only do they have to fix up to 5 to 6 meals each day for the fishermen, but do all their household chores, mind the children and help “put away fish”. They seldom have time to visit extensively, usually only a few minutes to and from the shop or Post Office….Men on the other hand, spend each evening arguing, gossiping, and “telling cuffers”, in the shop, and have numerous “blows” (i.e., breaks) during the day.’ Pre-adolescents are separated on sexual lines. Boys play exclusively male games and identify strongly with fathers or older brothers. Girls perform light women's work, though Faris indicates '. . . often openly aspire to be male and do male things. By this time they can clearly see the privileged position of the Cat Harbour male….’. Girls are advised not to marry a fisherman, and are encouraged to leave the community if they wish to avoid a hard life. Boys are told it is better to leave Cat Harbour than become fishermen....

without being owned by a man, and even with a husband she was limited. She couldn't go out by herself, she couldn't work, drive, or own money or property. I'd even heard that their physical appearance and clothes were dictated by the man, if he so chose, and arguing was completely taboo. Women were dependent to a humiliating degree.

When the outcome of a game is certain, we call it quits and begin another. This is why many people object to having their fortunes told: not that fortunetelling is mere superstition or that the predictions would be horrible, but simply that the more surely the future is known, the less surprise and the less fun in living it.

You know, Rick, I want to dislike you, but I can’t find a damn thing about you not to like. You’re successful, you’re well-spoken and well-rounded, you can talk about football and never tire of my shots at your sorry-ass Cowboys. You can play one hell of a game of basketball, you get along well with my brood despite their not-so-PC thoughts, you come from a good and stable home, and most importantly, you treat my daughter like she’s the center of your universe.” “she is the center of My universe, Sir. I’ll let the cheap shot about the Cowboys go for now,” I replied, chuckling.

You have like do-overs, like being in a Déjà Vu dream, that alters the space-time continuum. Think of it this way- life is like nothing but a preset sci-fi video game conjured for one higher power enjoyment, we are the main characters in this game. The one behind the concealment (We call that person on earth God, and the programmers that make it happen behind their smaller screen we call them angels.)

Maybe a slow dance wouldn’t heart? So, I walked over and asked him to dance. It was nice, he wasn’t creepy at all, and it was kind of sweet. He’s leaning against the wall and I am pressed upon him and out of nowhere I just kiss him like I never kissed another. Where half dancing and I am half grinding against him, he’s so in love with me I can just tell and make out. I never- ever thought that would happen. Ray is off with his little slut for the night anyways. It’s time for me to have some fun too. Two can play the cheating game! Isn’t spitefulness fun! Jenny cries when she sees us and stumbles off when she is on Kenneth’s lap. Jenny never cries! What is up with that? But, is she crying over me being with Marcel or him? They walk up after slow dances are over, Jenny and Ken throwing an arm around each of us like it’s been years since we were together, and we all are old buddies. She snatches the vodka from me and takes a sip while her arm is still wrapped around my shoulders, Jenny’s face is so close to mine, I can feel her eyelashes brush against my cheek. I forgot- I was still holding it when I had my arms wrapped around Marcel's neck. I guess I was lost in the moment. ‘Where did you go tonight Kar?’ She yells. Her voice is raspy but loud, even over the music and the wide-ranging sounds of everybody talking and laughing like idiots. ‘I was looking everywhere for you.’ ‘I was sitting here all night,’ I said, ‘total bull-crap,’ Ken, and Jenny says, ‘we saw you coming out of his room. All sneaking out of his room like you just had sex. And you obtusely changed, what did he do jizz all over your dress?’ ‘Nothing happened- I was just looking around.’ Ken- ‘Yeah we got it, you were looking up and kneeling on the ground, in his room. Am I right? And then you end up naked together in his bed slapping hips?

Why, of all possible worlds, this colossal and apparently unnecessary multitude of galaxies in a mysteriously curved space-time continuum, these myriads of differing tube-species playing frantic games of one

want games. I want filth. I want taboo. I’m so fucking hard and I need this to be nasty and hot.

Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It’s the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world.

Also by Alan Watts The Spirit of Zen (1936) The Legacy of Asia and Western Man (1937) The Meaning of Happiness (1940) The Theologica Mystica of St. Dionysius (1944) (translation) Behold the Spirit (1948) Easter: Its Story and Meaning (1950) The Supreme Identity (1950) The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) Myth and Ritual in Christianity (1953) The Way of Zen (1957) Nature, Man, and Woman (1958) “This Is It” and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience (1960) Psychotherapy East and West (1961) The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (1962) The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity (1963) Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship (1964) The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966) Nonsense (1967) Does It Matter?: Essays on Man’s Relation to Materiality (1970) Erotic Spirituality: The Vision of Konarak (1971) The Art of Contemplation (1972) In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915–1965 (1972) Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal (1973) Posthumous Publications Tao: The Watercourse Way (unfinished at the time of his death in 1973, published in 1975) The Essence of Alan Watts (1974) Essential Alan Watts (1976) Uncarved Block, Unbleached Silk: The Mystery of Life (1978) Om: Creative Meditations (1979) Play to Live (1982) Way of Liberation: Essays and Lectures on the Transformation of the Self (1983) Out of the Trap (1985) Diamond Web (1986) The Early Writings of Alan Watts (1987) The Modern Mystic: A New Collection of Early Writings (1990) Talking Zen (1994) Become Who You Are (1995) Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion (1995) The Philosophies of Asia (1995) The Tao of Philosophy (1995) Myth and Religion (1996) Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking (1997) Zen and the Beat Way (1997) Culture of Counterculture (1998) Eastern Wisdom: What Is Zen?, What Is Tao?, An Introduction to Meditation (2000) Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks: 1960–1969 (2006)

The social double-bind game can be phrased in several ways: The first rule of this game is that it is not a game. Everyone must play. You must love us. You must go on living. Be yourself, but play a consistent and acceptable role. Control yourself and be natural. Try to be sincere.

Faith is always a gamble because life itself is a gambling game with what must appear, in the hiding aspect of the game, to be colossal stakes. But to take the gamble out of the game, to try to make winning a dead certainty, is to achieve a certainty which is indeed dead.

The authorship question is a massive game of Clue played out over the centuries. The weapon is a pen. The crime is the composition of the greatest works of literature in the English language. The suspects are numerous. The game is played in back rooms and basements, beyond the purview of the authorities.

Why, of all possible worlds, this colossal and apparently unnecessary multitude of galaxies in a mysteriously curved space-time continuum, these myriads of differing tube-species playing frantic games of one-upmanship, these numberless ways of “doing it” from the elegant architecture of the snow crystal or the diatom to the startling magnificence of the lyrebird or the peacock?

No one can be moral—that is, no one can harmonize contained conflicts—without coming to a working arrangement between the angel in himself and the devil in himself, between his rose above and his manure below. The two forces or tendencies are mutually interdependent, and the game is a working game just so long as the angel is winning, but does not win, and the devil is losing, but is never lost. (The game doesn’t work in reverse, just as the ocean doesn’t work with wave-crests down and troughs up.)

For the world is a spell (in Latin, fascinum), an enchantment (being thrilled by a chant), an amazement (being lost in a maze), an arabesque of such stunning rhythm and a plot so intriguing that we are drawn by its web into a state of involvement where we forget that it is a game.

Moreover, such bragging is deeply offensive to those who do not understand, and who honestly believe themselves to be lonely, individual spirits in a desperate and agonizing struggle for life. For all such there must be deep and unpatronizing compassion, even a special kind of reverence and respect, because, after all, in them the Self is playing its most far-out and daring game—the game of having lost Itself completely and of being in danger of some total and irremediable disaster. This is why Hindus do not shake hands on meeting, but put their palms together and bow in a gesture of reverence, honoring the Godhead in the stranger.

Sacrifice demands purity, and isn’t worth as much without it. This is why people get so pissed off when athletes get busted for performance-enhancing drugs. If sport were merely a competitive quest for excellence, pharmaceutical augmentations would be considered an innovation, and their side effects would be considered the price of doing business. We would feel the same way about doped-up athletes that we do about doped-up musicians: it might make them better at what they do. It’s part of the world they live in, although it’s a shame when they overdose or die. But if deep down, we know that sport is the sacrifice of a hunter’s energy, then doping destroys the purity of the ritual, and that’s what leaves us feeling robbed. It also spurs people to cheer for younger elite cyclists like Taylor Phinney, who conspicuously eschew not only banned substances but milder performing-enhancing measures like “finish bottles,” the crushed-up caffeine pills and painkillers that riders gulp down in the home stretch.5 The nutritional taboos of the Paleo Diet mesh perfectly with this mythos. The living root of sport is why Jerry Hill does one-legged box jumps in the Games, coaching from the floor of the arena: no excuses. And it’s why, when we see Chris Spealler carrying a 150-pound ball across the stadium, it seems like one of the great, for-the-ages moments in sport.

We’re nothing but a blip in time. Forbidden. Taboo. And yet somehow that makes us timeless.

A large part of the mythology that develops around each of these doctrines, from its liturgy to its rules and taboos, comes from the bureaucracy generated as they develop and not from the supposed supernatural act that originated them.

So far has Western society departed from the ancient taboos against murder, theft, and rape that we are now faced with juvenile delinquents who have no inner check against wantonly assaulting other human beings at random 'for kicks' while we have adult delinquents capable of deliberately planning the extermination of tens of millions of human beings, in carrying out, also doubtless for kicks, a mathematical theory of games. Today our civilization is relapsing into a state far more primitive, far more irrational, than any taboo-ridden society now known-for lack of any effective taboos. If Western man could establish an inviolate taboo against random extermination, our society would enjoy a far more effective safeguard against both private violence and still impending collective nuclear horrors than the United Nations or the fallible mechanisms of Fail-Safe.

Human development at every point rests upon the ability to sustain tensions and control their release. At the lowest level this involves the control of the bladder and the bowels; and above that, the deliberate canalization of bodily appetites and genital urges into socially acceptable channels. What I am suggesting here, finally, is that the strict discipline of ritual, and the severe moral schooling of the taboo, were essential to man's self-control and in turn to his cultural creativity in every sphere. Only those who obey the rules are capable of playing the game; and up to a point, the strictness of the rules and the difficulty of winning without upsetting them increases the enjoyability of playing.

During World War II a friend of mine used to fly Chinese laborers over the Hump to work on the South end of the Burma Road. The long flight was, of course, ideal for gambling, but since there was not enough cash between them to make the game interesting, the stakes were that the final loser should jump off the plane. No parachute.

To go anywhere in philosophy, other than back and forth, round and round, one must have a keen sense of correlative vision. This is a technical term for a thorough understanding of the Game of Black-and-White, whereby one sees that all explicit opposites are implicit allies—correlative in the sense that they “gowith” each other and cannot exist apart. This, rather than any miasmic absorption of differences into a continuum of ultimate goo, is the metaphysical unity underlying the world.

The satirist rose up nobly, their chin to the sky. “It is best to raise our Princes on a high hill away from the city, away from the fields and the grasslands where our people do their labor. Far away from the sickness and the filth of the cities, where we have invented new ways to debase and ruin ourselves. Up here our Princes can concern themselves only with trim and taboos! Up here our Princes can play games of principle instead of working in the fields and the filth! Today the taboo is against going uphill too quickly! That is the most important thing!

That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self—the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever.

Free to be oneself" in fact means: free to project one's desires onto produced goods. "Free to enjoy life" means: free to regress and be irrational, and thus adapt to a certain social organization of production. The sales "philosophy" is in no way encumbered by paradox. It advertises a rational goal (to enlighten people about their wants) and scientific methods, in order to promote irrational behavior in man (to accept being only a complex of immediate drives and to be satisfied with their satisfaction). Even drives are dangerous however, and the neo- sorcerers of consumption are careful not to liberate people in accordance with some explosive end state of happiness. They only offer the resolution of tensions, that is to say, a freedom by default: "Every time a tension differential is created, which leads to frustration and action, we can expect a product to overcome this tension by responding to the aspirations of the group. Then the product has a chance of success." The goal is to allow the drives that were previously blocked by mental determinants {instances) (taboo, superego, guilt) to crystallize on objects, concrete determinants where the explosive force of desire is annulled and the ritual repressive function of social organization is materialized. The freedom of existence that pits the individual against society is dangerous. But the freedom to possess is harmless, since it enters the game without knowing it. As Dr Dichter claims, this freedom is a moral one. It is even the ultimate in morality, since the consumer is simultaneously reconciled with himself and with the group. He becomes the perfect social being. Traditional morality only required that the individual conform to the group; advertising "philosophy" requires that they now conform to themselves, and that they resolve their own conflicts. In this way it invests him morally as never before. Taboos, anxieties, and neuroses, which made the individual a deviant and an outlaw, are lifted at the cost of a regression in the security of objects, thus This sales 14 The System of Objects reinforcing the images of the Father and the Mother. The irrationality of drives increasingly more "free" at the base will go hand in hand with control increasingly more restricted at the top.