123 In an education in humanity the teaching on this matter must surely be based on the following considerations:
(A) One great argument for more teaching of self-analysis, and for more analysis of the self in general, is that half the pain caused by the affaire and the broken marriage, and the very causing itself, is due to the ignorance of each of both each and the other.
(B) The excessive commercialization of sex, and especially of the affaire, is not the brightest jewel in capitalism’s crown.
(C) Of all activities, sex is the least amenable to general judgements. It is always relative, always situational. It is as silly to proscribe it as to prescribe it. All that can be done is to educate about it.
(D) To teach the physiology of sex without the psychology of love is to teach all about a ship except how to steer it.
(E) Spokesmen for ‘morality’ have no right to condemn or to try to prevent any kind of sexual relationship unless they can demonstrate that it is bringing society more unhappiness than happiness. It is always easy to produce illegitimacy, divorce, and veneral disease statistics; but the statistics of sexual happiness are harder to come by.
(F) A child is a law against adultery; and though an adulterer can no longer break the law, he can still break the child. But as children grow, divorce becomes less and less a crime, since the disharmony the growing child increasingly takes note of may do as much harm as the ending of the marriage.
(G) Just as surgery can be abused, so can divorce. But that a thing can be abused is never an argument against it.
(H) The noblest relationship is marriage, that is, love. Its nobility resides in its altruism, the desire to serve another beyond all the pleasures of the relationship; and in its refusal ever to regard the other as a thing, an object, a utilizability.
(I) Sex is an exchange of pleasures, of needs; love is a giving without return.
(J) It is this giving without return, this helping without reward, this surplus of pure good, that identifies the uniqueness of man as well as the true nature of the true marriage. This is the quintessence the great alchemy of sex is for; and every adultery adulterates it, every infidelity betrays it, every cruelty clouds it.
THE INWARD EDUCATION
124 Man should not be, above all, necessary to society; he should be above all necessary to himself. He is not educated until his self has been analysed and he understands the common psychological mechanisms. At present we teach the persona, not the real self. The persona is made up of all the incrustations, however formed, that hide what I really feel and what I really think. It is plain that we must all have some persona; but not that we should hide so much of our real selves as our societies and their educational systems now require. We must not teach how to conform (society does that automatically) but how and when not to conform.*
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE NOW
125 In this universe of mirrors and metaphors, man reflects and parallels all the realities. They are all in each mind, but deep. The infinite process is made finite in each thing; each thing is a cross section of eternity.
126 The end of all evolution is dissolution. This is not absurd. It would be absurd if the end of evolution was the perfect state. It would be absurd if evolution had any other end but dissolution. Evolution is therefore meaningless if it is evolution towards. It is now or nothing. A better state, a better design, a better self, a better world; but always these things beginning now.
127 The whole is not a chain, but a spinning top. The top spins on, but stays in one place. One can point to a link in the chain or a point on the road and say ‘That is the best place to be’; but a top is always in the same place. The weight of the top must be distributed evenly about its central axis, or the top will tilt and wobble. All those tendencies, in so many religious and political philosophies, to think and persuade away from the present life, from the now; those attempts to make us put the great weight and energy of our beliefs and hopes in some other world (heavenly or Utopian) are like erratic movements of weight inside the top. We disperse our powers centrifugally. The real meaning of life is close around the axis of each now.
128 It is not by accident that the discovery of self is not encouraged by the state. An educational system is organized by the state to prolong the state; and the discovery of the self is also often the discovery of what the state really is.
129 Our present educational systems are all paramilitary. Their aim is to produce servants or soldiers who obey without question and who accept their training as the best possible training. Those who are most successful in a state are those who have most interest in prolonging the state as it is; they are also those who have most to say in the educational system, and in particular by ensuring that the educational product they want is the most highly rewarded.
130 State and government are ways of thinking of the then; they are systems of the then. We say ‘He lives in the past and we say it with pity or contempt; yet most of us live in the future.
131 The state does not want to be; it wants to survive.
132 It is true that many of us live in tomorrow because today is uninhabitable. But to make today habitable is not in the interest of the state. It is principally the inadequacies of the state that force man to live in the future; and the main reason for these inadequacies is that the states of the world refuse to act jointly and do these two essential things – depopulate and educate.
INWARD KNOWLEDGE
133 Most of us still carry in our minds the myth of a clearly marked frontier between the healthy and the sick; and perhaps in no area so much as mental health, which happens to be the area where such demarcations are most absurd. The endless fun made of psychiatry, and especially of psycho-analysis, is a sure sign of fear. The ‘healthy’ among us tend to cherish our phobias and neuroses; we do not want them exposed.
134 There is no greater inadequacy in our present systems of education than the attitude to psychology. The notion that school psychologists should devote all their time to the ‘sick’ (the neurotic or backward students) is absurd. The ‘healthy’ need their attention just as much. A key subject in any education in humanity must be general psychology; and a key service must be the personal analysis of each student.
135 This is not the place to discuss the comparative merits of the different schools of psychological theory. But since the psychological aspect of an education in humanity must have a strong social bias, we should certainly pay far more attention to the biological theory of domination-subordinance.
136 This theory has sprung from the study of non-human primates like gorillas and chimpanzees. It has been discovered that their relative domination over or subordinance to one another depends largely on size and (outside the periods when females are in heat) nonsexual factors akin to human self-confidence. Thus a large female and a small male in the same cage will be respectively the dominator and the subordinate; the male will ‘present’ (adopt female copulatory positions) as a sign of submission. We must realize that all humans adopt (or veer between) one or other of these roles, irrespective of sex. The common organizational behaviour known as boot- or arse-licking is a clear example of the subordinate role. The man who goes in for it is metaphorically ‘presenting’; and it is not for nothing that the two commonest obscenities in every language are ‘Fuck you’ and ‘Bugger you’. They are both assertions about dominance, and the nature of the dominated.