CELINE'S LAWS
by Hagbard Celine
As every thinking person has noticed, our national life has
become increasingly weird and surrealistic. The waiting lines at
banks and post offices are growing longer all the time, even
though demographers tell us US population is no longer rising.
The street signs more often than not say WALK on the red and
DON"T WALK on the green. You can't get a plumber on the
weekends. Nobody has been able to explain the cattle mutilations
yet. Every survey shows that the price of consumer goods, the
number of violent crimes, and the eerie popularity of THE GONG
SHOW are ominously accelerating.
I believe I have found the explanation these distressing
trends. Needless to say, I cannot present, in a short article,
all the evidence which I have accumulated in three decades of
careful metasociological research; that will have to await the
publication of my three-volume study, "Why Everybody Is Going
Bonkers." Here I can only mention the thousands of depth
interviewws, the innumerable flowcharts and helix-matrix
equations, the vast files of computer readouts, the I CHING
divinations, and other rigorous scientific techniques used in
developing what I modestly call Celine's Laws of Chaos, Discord
and Confusion.
Celine's First Law is that National Security is the chief
cause of national insecurity!
That may sound like a paradox, but I will explain it at one.
Every secret police agency must be monitored by an elite corps
of secret-police-of-the-second-order. There are numerous reasons
for this, but three are especially noteworthy.
********************************************************************************************
NATIONAL SECURITY IS THE CHIEF CAUSE OF NATIONAL INSECURITY!!!
*******************************************************************************
1). Infiltration of the secret police, for the purpose of
subversion, will always be a prime goal of internal
revolutionaries. This is an ordinary part of the spy-counterspy
game. There is nothing Weather Underground would like better
than having a few agents in the FBI or CIA, for the same reasons
that the FBI or CIA would like to have a few agents in Weather
Underground.
2). Such infiltration will also be a prime goal of hostile
foreign powers, for the same reasons.
Please note that these are simple facts of the secret-police
game, well-known even to the general public, the subject of many
ingenious plots in popular spy films, and not particularly
alarming...yet. Nonetheless, the seeds of Chaos, Discord,
Confusion, and Paranoia are already here, for the simple reason
that once a human being develops the habits of worry and
suspicion, he or she finds increasing justifications for more
worry and more suspicion. For instance, Richard Q. (not his real
initial), one of my interview subjects, became concerned, after
ten years in the CIA, with the possibility of infiltration by
"extraterrestrial" agents. He was eventually retired when he
began to claim that demons in the form of dogs wanted him to
assassinate Laverne and Shirley.
3). Secret-police officials acquire fantastic capacities to
blackmail and intimidate others in goverment.
Stalin executed three chiefs of his secret police in a row,
because of this danger. One of my informants claims that every
president since the National Security Act was passed in 1947 has
learned how to have sexual intercourse without making a single
audible sound, because of the possible electronic eavesdroppers.
As Nixion says so wistfully on the Watergate transcripts, "Well,
Hoover performed. He would have fought. That was the point. He
would have defied a few people. He would have scared them to
death. HE HAS A FILE ON EVERYBODY!" . Thus, those
who employ secret-police organizations MUST monitor them th be
sure they are not acquiring too much power.
In the United States today, the superelite that monitors the
CIA is the National Security Agency. ( And a group called "The
Store" monitors the NSA).
Here is where a sinister infinite regress enters the game.
Any such elite, second or third order secret-police agency must
be, according to the above pragmatic and necessary rules, subject
to infiltration by native subversives or hostile foreign powers,
or to acquiring "too much power" in the opinion of its masters.
(It may even be subject, if Richard Q. was correct in his
anxieties, to extraterrestrial manipulation). And so, it, too,
must be monitored by a secret police of the third order.
But this third-order secret-police (such as Nixon's notorious
"plumbers", or more currently, "The Store"). is also subject to
infiltration or to acquiring too much power...and thus, with
relentless logic, the infinite regress builds. Once a goverment
has n orders of secret police spying on each other, all are
potentially suspect, and to be safe a secret police of order n+1
must be created. And so on, forever.
******************************************
* THUS WHO EMPLOY SECRET *
* POLICE MUST MONITOR THEM TO *
* BE SURE THEY ARE NOT ACQUIRING *
* TOO MUCH POWER. *
******************************************
In practice, of course, this cannot really regress to
infinity, but only to the point where every other citizen, or
until the funding runs out, whichever comes first.
National Security in practice, then, must always fall short of
the logically ideal infinite regress which we have shown is
necessary to the achievement of its goal. In that gap between
the ideal of "One nation under survillance, with wiretaps and
mail covers for all" andthe strictly limited real situation of
finite funding, there is ample encouragement for paranoias of all
sorts to flourish. In short, every government that employs
secret-police agencies must grow more insecure, not more secure,
as the strength, versatility, and power of the secret-police
agencies grow.
For instance, a certain left-wing nation which has employed
secret-police agencies for 61 years has now reached the point
where the leaders are terrified of painters and poets. In
another, right-wing nation infested with secret-police agencies,
several purges have been caused by three practical jokers who
regularly call middle-rank officials on the phone and talk in
what appears to be a code. The secret police, of course, are no
fools, and are aware that this might be what it in fact is, a
form of anarchist humor; but they can't be sure.
What usually happens in such cases is this: an official
receives one of these mystery calls, saying perhaps "Pawn to
queen rook five. No wife, no horse, no mustache. A boy has never
wept nor dashed a thousand kim." He knows immediately that
surveillance upon him will be increased tenfold. In the next few
days, while memories of all his mistakes, small bribes,
incautious remarks, and other incriminating events haunt his
imagination, he observes the increased surveillance, and begins
to suspect even the most loyal of his subordinates of watching
him with eyes that miss nothing and to give a sinister
interpertation to everything. Within ten days, he usually
attempts to contact a foreign goverment to seek political
sanctuary, and the secret-police net closes on him.
By the same process of worry leading to more worry and
suspicion leading to more suspicion, the very act of joining a
ecret-police organization will eventually turn a man or woman
into a clinical paranoi; in layman's terms, "bananas" or "wigged
out." THE AGENT KNOWS WHOM HE IS SPYING ON; BUT HE NEVER KNOWS
WHO IS SPYING ON HIM! Could it be his wife, his girl friend, his
secretary, the newsboy, the Good Humor man?
For these reasons, secret-police agents develop elaborate and
complex theories to account for what is actually going on.
According to one of my tables of data, there isn't a single
theory held by professional conspiracy buffs which isn't also
believed by many members of our various secret-police agencies.
In fact, the exact percentages of believes in these extravagant
scenarios are quite similar among a group of 1,000 CIA agents and
a control group of 1,000 readers of the underground press, as
shown in table 1.
Table 1. True Believes in various Conspiracy Theories Among CIA
Agents and Underground-Press Readers.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:: :: :: UNDERGROUND PRESS ::
::CONSPIRACY THEORY :: CIA :: READERS ::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
::The Yankees (Eastern :: :: ::
::millionaires) run :: 25% :: 30% ::
::everything :: :: ::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:: The Cowboys(Western :: :: ::
:: millionaires) run :: 25% :: 15% ::
:: everything :: :: ::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:: It's the result of :: :: ::
:: civil war between :: 23% :: 17% ::
::Yankees and Cowboys :: :: ::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
::It's the 33 degree :: :: ::
:: Masons :: 5% :: 5% ::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:: It's the Jesuits :: 5% :: 5% ::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
::It's the Elders of Zion :: 2% :: 2% ::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
::It's the Military :: :: ::
::Industrial Complex :: 1% :: 2% ::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
::It's the Bilderbergers :: 1% :: 2% ::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
::It's the Gnomes of :: :: ::
:: Zurich :: 1% :: 2% ::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
::It's the Lesbian :: :: ::
:: Vegetarians :: 10% :: 28% ::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
::It's the Rock n Roll :: :: ::
:: Empire :: 2% :: 2% ::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
a). Source: Gallup, Roper, and Hogtied, "WHO'S WATCHING WHOM"
(Washington, DC: US Goverment Printing Office, 1979), p. 432.
b). All figures are percentages. Figures do not add to 100, for
a variety of reasons. For a list of them, please send 25 cents
and a list of suspicious persons in your neighborhood to the US
Dept. of Bedding, Washington DC 20001.
c). Includes those who blame it all on the Bavarian Illuminati;
those who hold a multiconspiracy theory (e.g., the Lesbian
Vegetarians are allied with the Yankees and Bilderbergers against
the Cowboys, the TV Networks, and the Cattle Mutilators); those
who believe it is all part of the UFO Cover-Up; and those who
claim that demons in the form of dogs told them it's connected
somehow with the alligators in New York's sewers.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
************************************
* IN RUSSIA, THE GOVERMENT IS *
* TERRIFIED OF PAINTERS AND POETS! *
************************************
Now, Table 1 clearly gives a picture of a rather schizzed-out
nation. This is the result of the impossible infinite regress
and its resultant of worry leading to more worry.
Furthermore, if there is a secret police at all, in any nation
you care to imagine, every branch and department of that
country's government becomes suspect, in the eyes of cautious and
intelligent people, as a possible front or funnel to the secret
police. (That is, the more shrewd citizens will recognize that
something titled a branch of the HEW or even PTA might actually
be run by the CIA). Inevitably, the government as a whole, and
many nongovernmental agencies, will be regarded by reasonable
persons with fear and trepidation. Proverbs like "One can't be
too careful these days" and "Better safe than sorry" become a
kind of sinister folk wisdom.
But further yet: any government which already has a secret
police (and a secret police monitoring the secret police, etc).
will become alarmed on observing that its more hip and
intelligent citizens now regard it with loathing and misgivings.
The government will therefore increase the size and powers of the
secret police. This is the only rational move, within the
context of the secret-police game.
******************************
* SOMETHING PASSING AS A *
* BRANCH OF HEW MIGHT BE A *
* FRONT FOR THE CIA! *
******************************
(The only alternative was once suggested sarcastically by
playwright Bert Brecht, who said, "If the government doesn't
trust the people, why does'nt it dissovle them and elect new
people?" No way has yet been invented to elect a new people; so
the police state will instead spy on the existing people even
more vigorously).
This, of course, creates additional paranoia in both the
governors and the citizens, because a suffciently pugnacious
secret police will eventually "have a file on everybody,"
including its own creators. This leads to another infinite
regress: the more people will loathe the government, the more
power will be given to the secret police.
Thus, whether any of the hypothetical conspiracies mentioned
earlier really exist or not, a system of clandestine goverment
inevitably produces, in both the rulers and the ruled, a mood of
paranoia in which such conspiracy theories flourish.
This escalating sense of suspiciousness is accelerated by the
fact that every secret-police organization engages in both the
collection of information and the production misinformation.
That is, you score points in the secret-police game both by
hoarding signals (information units)---that is, by hiding facts
from competitive players---and by foisting false signals (fake
information units) on the other players. This creates the
situation which I call Optimum Fuckup, in which every participant
has rational (not neurotic) cause to suspect that every other
player may be attempting to deceive him, gull him, con him, dupe
him, and generally misinform him. As Henry Kissinger is rumored
to have said, "Anybody in Washington these days who isn't
paranoid is crazy!"
One could generalize the remark: anyone in the United States
today who isn't paranoid must be crazy!!!
**********************************
* "IF THE GOVERMENT DOESN'T *
* TRUST THE PEOPLE, WHY DOESN'T *
* IT DISSOLVE THEM AND ELECT A *
* NEW PEOPLE?" *
**********************************
The deliberate production of misinformation (or, as
intelligence agencies more euphemistically call it,
disinformation) creates a situation profoundly disorienting to
the philosopher, the scientist, and the ordinary Joe who wants to
know the best time to go to the bank. The desire to discover
"what-the-hell-is-really-going-on" (the definition of science
offered by physicist Saul-Paul Sirag) is totally incompatible
with the circulation of disinformation; we all need to know, at
least roughly, what the hell is really going on if we are not to
stumble around like blind robots colliding with things we weren't
told were there.
Maybe the UFO's really exist---or maybe the whole UFO
phenomenon is a cover for an intelligence operation. Maybe there
are black holes where space and time implode---or maybe the
entire black-hole cosmology was created to befuddle and mislead
Russian scientists. Maybe Jimmy Carter really exists---or maybe
he is, as the National Lampoon claims, an actor named Sidney
Goldfarb specially trained to project the down-home virtues that
the American people nostalgically seek. Perhaps only three men
at the top of the National Security Angency REALLY know the
answers to these questions---or perhaps those three are being
deceived by certain subordinates (as Lyndon Johnson was deceived
by the CIA about Vietnam) and are as disoriented as the rest of
us. Such is the logic of a Disinformation Matrix.
Personally, I find it easier to believe in UFO's than in black
holes or Jimmy Carter; but that may just indicate the damage to
my own brain caused by the Optimum Fuckup of the Disinformation
Matrix.
According to a recent survey 19 per cent of the population
believe the moon landings were faked by Stanley Kubrick and a
gang of special effects experts. Perhaps these archskeptics are
the sanest ones left among us. Who among the readers of this
file has a security clearance high enough to be ABSOLUTELY sure
that these ultraparanoids are wrong?
This general tendency toward chaos discord, and confusion,
once a secret police has been established, is complicated and
accelerated by Celine's Second Law, to wit: "Accurate
communication is only possible in a nonpunishing situation."
This is a very simple statement of the obvious, and means no more
than that everybody tends to lie a little, to flatter or to
protect themselves, when dealing with those who have power over
them, especially the power to punish. (this is why communication
between parents and children is notoriously befoolzled).
Every authoritarian structure can be visualized as a pyramid,
with very few at the top and very many at the bottom, as in the
flowchart of any corperation or bureaucracy. On each rung,
participants bear a burden of nescience in relation to those
above them. That is, they must be very, very careful that their
natural sensory activities as conscious organisms---the acts of
seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, drawing inferences
from perception, etc.---be in accord with the wishes of those
above them. This is absolutely vital; job security depends on
it. It is much less important---a luxury that can easily be
discarded---that these perceptions be in accord with actual
reality.
*************************
* COMMUNICATION IS ONLY *
* BETWEEN EQUALS. *
*************************
For instance, in the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, the agent had
to develop the capacity to see godless communists everywhere.
Any agent whose perceptions indicated that there were actually
very few godless communists anywhere in this country wold
experience what psychologists call cognitive dissonance: his or
her reality grid was at variance with the official reality grid
of the pyramidal authority structure. To talk about such
divergent perceptions at all would be to invite suspicions of
eccentricity, of intellectual wiseacreing, or of being oneself a
godless communist. The same would apply to any Dominican
Inquisitor of earlier centuries who lacked the capacity to see
witches everywhere. In such authoritarian situations, it is
important to see what the authorities see; it is inconvenient,
and possibly dangerous, to see what is actually there.
But this leads to an equal and opposite burden of omniscience
on those at the top, in the Eye of the authoritarian pyramid.
All that is forbidden to those at the bottom---the conscious
activities of perception andand evaluation---is demanded of the
master classes, the elite and the super-elite. They must attempt
to do the seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking,
and decisionmaking for the whole society.
But a man with a gun (the power to punish) is told only what
his target thinks will not cause him to pull the trigger. The
elite, with their burden of omniscience, face the underlings,
with their burden nescience, and receive only the feedback
consistent with their own preconceived notions. The burden of
omniscience becomes, in short, another and more complex burden of
nescience. Nobody really knows anything anymore, or if they do,
they are careful to hide the fact.
As the national security paradigm approaches (or attempts to
approach) the ideal infinite regress of spies-spying-on-spies-
spying-on-spies, etc., the resultant general trepidation causes
all persons to hide anything they know (if it differs from the
official reality), not only from their superiors, but from peers
and inferiors as well. Anybody, after all, might be part of the
nth-degree secret police. "One can't be too careful these days."
The burden of nescience becomes omnipresent. More and more of
reality becomes unspeakable.
But as Freud noted, that which is objectively repressed
(unspeakable) soon becomes subjectively repressed (unthinkable).
Nobody likes to feel like a coward and a liar constantly. It is
easier to cease to notice where the official reality grid differs
from sensed experience. Thus Optimun Fuckup gradually becomes
Terminal Fuckup, and rigiditus bureaucraticus sets in; this is
the last stage before all brain activity ceases, and the society
is intellectually dead.
Celine's Third Law is like unto the first two, and holds that
AN HONEST politician is a national calamity.
At first glance, this seems preposterous. People of all
shades of opinion agree that at least on the axiom that we need
more honest politicians, not more crooked ones. Please remember,
however, that people of all shades of opinion once agreed that
the Earth is flat.
Your typical dishonest politician (bocca grande normalis) is
interested only in enriching himself at the public expense, a
goal he shares with most of his fellow citizens, especially
doctors and lawyers. This is normal behavior for our primate
species, and society has always been able to endure and survive
it.
********************************
* NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING, OR IF *
* THEY DO, THEY ARE CAREFUL TO *
* HIDE THE FACT! *
********************************
An honest politician (bocca grande giganticus) is far more
dangerous. He or she is sincerley commited to bettering society
by political action. In practice, that means by writing and
enacting more laws. Indeed, many groups of idealistic citizens
publish rating sheets on politicians every year, and those who
have created more laws are estimated as having higher value than
those who are frequently absent when bills are voted upon. The
assumption is that adding more laws to statute books is a
positive achievement, like adding more money to our paychecks or
more art works to a museum.
A little thought, however, shows that this assumption is not
tenable. Every law creates a whole new criminal class; for
instance, when marijuana was illegalized in 1937, several hundred
thousand formerly law-abiding citizens became criminals
overnight, by Act of Congress. As more and more laws are passed,
more and more citizens become criminals. The chief cause of the
rising crime rate is the rising number of laws being enacted. An
honest politician, who keeps his nose to the grindstone and
enacts several hundred laws in the course of his career, thereby
produces as many as several million new criminals.
It is furthermore mathematically demonstrable that the more
laws there are, the more restrictions there are on the freedom of
the individual. If there were, say, only three laws in a given
society---e.g., Thou shalt not kill; thau shalt not steal; thou
shalt not lie or defraud---there would be only three restrictions
on freedom, which all rational persons would accept as obviously
necessary to the maintenance of order. When there are several
hundred thousand restrictions on freedom, most of which are felt
as extremely irksome by large segments of the populace.
In fact, it would take a brigade of lawyers several weeks,
minutely examining your affairs, to determine if you are a
criminal. Certainly, no ordinary citizen has the time or
research facilities to discover if he or sshe is in violation of
one out of skillions of laws currently on our statute books. In
many cases, two lawyers consulted independently will give
opposite opinions about whether or not a given course of action
is in violation of the statutes.
And new laws are being enacted all the time. Obviously,
unless there is a sudden paper shortage, the number of laws on
the books will eventually reach the point satirized by T.H.White,
in which "everything not prohibited is compulsory." It would
then probably only take a few years or decades more for a cadre
of honest politicians diligently writing even more laws to reach
the complementary point where "everything not compulsory is
prohibited."
*********************************
* EVERY LAW CREATES A WHOLE *
* NEW CRIMINAL CLASS OVERNIGHT! *
*********************************
At that stage the nightmare world of Orwell's 1984 will be
achieved. Crooked politicians, merely interested in the normal
human activity of making themselves rich and comfortable, could
never create that ultimate horror; but honest and idealistic
politicians bring us closer to it every day, with every new law
they enact.
These three generalizations---that national security produces
national insecurity; that authoritarianism produces
miscommunication and eventual idiocy; and that honest politicians
are a plague upon society---will be found to fully explain the
Decline and Fall of Rome, the Decline and Fall of the British
Empire, and the Decline and Fall of any country you care to name.
They are as universal as Newton's laws of motion and apply to
ALL cases. Of course, the American Sociological Association says
I am mad. Mad, am I? They said the Wright Brothers were mad.
They said Edison was mad. They said Baron Frankenstein was
mad...
HABARD CELINE was trained in contract law and naval engineering
but claims he acquired his real education playing the piano in a
whorehouse. He is captain of the world's largest yellow
submarine, the Leif Erikson, and president of Gold and Appel
Inc., an import-export firm that has frequently aroused the
suspicions of law enforcement agencies ("137 arrests and no
convictions," Hagbard brags). Some claim that he is a master of
disguise and has successfully passed himself off under such
alternative identities as Howard Cork, Carl Cory, Hugh Crane,
Clutch Cargo, Captain Nemo, etc., and has appeared in countless
epics and sagas.
I am mad.
