MAN IS FUNDAMENTALLY AN ANIMAL. In contrast to man, animals are not mechanical or sadistic,
and their societies (within the same species) are incomparably more peaceful than man’s societies.
The basic question runs: What caused the human animal to deteriorate and become robot like?
When I use the word ‘animal’, I do not mean something vicious, terrible or ‘inferior’,
but a biologic fact. However, man developed the peculiar idea that he was not an animal;
he was a ‘man’, and he had long since divested himself of the ‘vicious’ and the ‘brutal’.
Man takes great pains to disassociate himself from the vicious animal and to prove that
he ‘is better’ by pointing to his culture and his civilisation, which distinguish him from
the animal. His entire attitude, his ‘theories of value’, moral philosophies, his ‘monkey
trials’,, all bear witness to the fact that he does not want to be reminded that he is
fundamentally an animal, that he has incomparably more in common with ‘the animal’
than he has with that which he thinks and dreams himself to be. The theory of the
German superman has its origin in man’s effort to disassociate himself from the animal.
His viciousness, his inability to live peacefully with his own kind, his wars, bear witness
to the fact that man is distinguished from the other animals only by a boundless sadism
and the mechanical trinity of an authoritarian view of life, mechanistic science and the
machine. If one looks back over long stretches of the results of human civilization, one
finds that man’s claims are not only false, but are peculiarly contrived to make him forget
that he is an animal. Where and how did man get these illusions about himself?
Man’s life is dichotomized: One part of his life is determined by biologic laws (sexual
gratification, consumption of food, relatedness to nature); the other part of his life is
determined by the machine civilization (mechanical ideas about his own organization, his
superior position in the animal kingdom, his racial or class attitude towards other human
groups, valuations about ownership and non-ownership, science, religion, etc.). His being
an animal and his not being animal, biologic roots on the one hand and technical
development on the other hand, cleave man’s life and thought. All the notions man has
developed about himself are consistently derived from the machine that he has created.
The construction of machines and the use of machines have imbued man with the belief
that he is progressing and developing himself to something ‘higher’, in and through the
machine. But he also invested the machine with an animal-like appearance and
mechanics. The train engine has eyes to see with and legs to run with, a mouth to
consume coal with and discharge openings for slag, levers and other devices for making
sounds. In this way the product of mechanistic technology became the extension of man
himself. In fact, machines do constitute a tremendous extension of man’s biologic
organization. They make him capable of mastering nature to a far greater degree than his
hands alone had enabled him. They give him mastery over time and space. Thus, the
machine became a part of man himself, a loved and highly esteemed part. He dreams
about how these machines make his life easier and will give him a great capacity for
enjoyment. The enjoyment of life with the help of the machine has always been his
dream. And in reality? The machine became, is, and will continue to be his most
dangerous destroyer, if he does not differentiate himself from it.
The advance of civilization which was determined by the development of the machine
went hand in hand with a catastrophic misinterpretation of the human biologic
organisation. In the construction of the machine, man followed the laws of mechanics
and lifeless energy. This technology was already highly developed long before man
began to ask how he himself was constructed and organized. When, finally, he dared very
gradually, cautiously and very often under the mortal threat of his fellow man to discover
his own organs, he interpreted their functions in the way he had learned to construct
machines many centuries before. He interpreted them in a mechanistic, lifeless and rigid
way. The mechanistic view of life is a copy of mechanistic civilisation. But living
functioning is fundamentally different; it is not mechanistic. The specific biologic energy,
orgone, obeys laws which are neither mechanical nor electrical.
Trapped in a mechanistic picture of the world, man was incapable of grasping the
specifically living, non-mechanistic functioning. Man dreams about one day producing a
homun-culus a la Frankenstein or at least an artificial heart or artificial protein. The
notions of homunculus, which man has developed in his fantasy, project a picture of a
brutal monster, manlike, but mechanically stupid, angular, and possessing powerful
forces, which, if they are set loose, will be beyond control and will automatically cause
havoc. In his film fantasia Walt Disney brilliantly captured this fact. In such fantasies of
himself and his organization, we miss every expression of that which is vitally alive,
kind, social and related to nature. On the other hand, it is striking that man invests the
animals he portrays precisely with those traits he misses in himself and does not give to
his homunculus figures. This, too, is excellently brought out in Disney’s animal films.
In his fantasies, man appears as a mechanical, vicious, overbearing, heartless,
inanimate monster, while the animal appears as a social, kind and fully alive creature,
invested with all the human strengths and weaknesses. We have to ask: Does man reflect
a reality in these fantasies? The answer is: Yes. He very vividly portrays his inner
biologic contradiction:
1. In ideology: vicious animal - majestic man;
2. In reality: kind, free animal - brutal robot.
Thus, the machine has had a mechanical, mechanistic, ‘dulling’, and ‘rigidifying’
effect on man’s conception of his own organisation. This is how man conceives of
himself: The brain is the ‘most consummate product of development’. His brain is a
‘control centre’, which gives the individual organs commands and impulses just as the’
ruler’ of a state orders his’ subjects’ about. The organs of the body are connected with the
master, the ‘brain’, by telegraph wires, the nerves. (A complete misconception naturally,
for the organs of the organism had an expedient biologic function long before there was a
brain in billions of organisms. And as physiology has experimentally proven, the
essential functions of life continue for some time in a dog or chicken from which the
brain has been removed.)
Infants have to drink a precise quantity of milk at fixed intervals and have to sleep a
precise number of hours. Their diet has to have exactly x ounces of fat, j ounces of
protein and % ounces of carbohydrates. Until the day of marriage, a man does not have a
sex drive; it begins to operate precisely on this day. God created the world in exactly six
days and rested on the seventh, as man rests from his machines. Children have to study x
hours of mathematics, y hours of chemistry, z hours of zoology, all exactly the same, and
all of them have to acquire the same amount of wisdom. Superior intelligence is equal to
one hundred points, average intelligence to eighty points, stupidity to forty points. With
ninety points one gets a Ph.D., with eighty-nine, one does not.
Away from the animal; away from sexuality!’ are the guiding principles of the
formation of all human ideology. This is the case whether it is disguised in the fascist
form of racially pure ‘supermen’, the communist form of proletarian class honour, the
Christian form of man’s ‘spiritual and ethical nature’, or the liberal form of ‘higher
human values’. All these ideas harp on the same monotonous tune: ‘We are not animals;
it was we who discovered the machine - not the animal! And we don’t have genitals like
the animals!’ All of this adds up to an overemphasis of the intellect, of the ‘purely’
mechanistic; logic and reason as opposed to instinct; culture as opposed to nature; the
mind as opposed to the body; work as opposed to sexuality; the state as opposed to the
individual; the superior man as opposed to the inferior man.
How is it to be explained that of the millions of car drivers, radio listeners, etc., only
very few know the name of the inventor of the car and the radio, whereas every child
knows the name of the generals of the political plague?
Natural science is constantly drilling into man’s consciousness that fundamentally he
is a worm in the universe. The political plague-monger is constantly harping upon the
fact that man is not an animal, but a ‘zoon politikon’, i.e., a non-animal, an upholder of
values, a ‘moral being’. How much mischief has been perpetuated by the Platonic
philosophy of the state! It is quite clear why man knows the politicos better than the
natural scientists: He does not want to be reminded of the fact that he is fundamentally a
sexual animal. He does not want to be an animal.
Viewed in this way, the animal has no intelligence, but only ‘wicked instincts’; no
culture, but only ‘base drives’; no sense of values, but only ‘material needs’. It is
precisely the human type who sees the whole of life in the making of money who likes to
stress these ‘differences’. If a war as murderous as the present one has any trace of a
rational function, then it is the function of exposing the abysmal irrationality and
mendacity of such ideas. Man would have good reason to be happy if he were as free
from sadism, perversions and meanness, and as filled with a natural spontaneity, as any
one of the animals, whether an ant or an elephant. As vain as man’s assumption was that
the earth is the centre of the universe or the sole inhabited planet, even so unreal and
pernicious was his philosophy that represented the animal as a ‘soulless’ creature devoid
of any morals, indeed, as morally repulsive. If, while professing myself to be a
benevolent saint, I should take an axe and crack my neighbour’s skull, there would be
good reason for putting me in a mental institution or in the electric chair. But this
juxtaposition exactly reflects the contradiction in man between his ideal ‘values’ on the
one hand and his actual behaviour on the other hand. His expressing of this contradiction
in high-sounding sociological formulas such as ‘the century of wars and revolutions’, or’
elevating experiences at the front’, or ‘the highest development of military strategy and
political tactics’, does not in the least alter the fact that it is precisely with respect to his
biological and social organization that man gropes in the dark and is so hopelessly
confused. It is clear that this frame of mind did not evolve naturally; it is the result of the
development of the machine civilization. It is easy to prove that, when the patriarchal
organization of society began to replace the matriarchal organization, suppression and
repression of genital sexuality in children and adolescents were the principal mechanisms
used to adapt the human structure of the authoritarian order. The suppression of nature, of
‘the animal’ in the child, was and has remained the principal tool in the production of
mechanical subjects.
55 Society’s socio-economic development has continued its
mechanical course until today in an independent way. The basis of all ideologic and
cultural formations developed and branched out hand in hand with the socio-economic
development: ‘Away from genitality’ and ‘away from the animal’.
It hasn’t been too long since we began to take cognizance of the devastating effects of
this devious biological development. One is easily tempted to look upon the state of
affairs too optimistically. One could argue as follows: There can be no doubt that man
went astray when he interpreted his own nature in terms of the machine civilization. Now
that we recognize this error, it will be easy to correct it. Civilization has to be mechanical,
but man’s mechanistic attitude towards life can easily be converted into an attitude based
on functional living processes. An astute minister of education could issue appropriate
edicts for the purpose of reshaping education. The error would be corrected in one or two
generations. That’s the way some clever men spoke at the time of the Russian Revolution,
1917-23.
This argument would indeed be correct if the mechanical view of life were merely an
‘idea’ or ‘attitude’. However, the character analysis of the average man in all social
situations brought a fact to light which we cannot afford to underestimate. It turned out
that the mechanical view of life was not merely a ‘reflection’ of the social processes in
man’s psychic life, as Marx had assumed, but much more than that: Over the course of
thousands of years of mechanical development, the mechanistic view of life has become
more and more ingrained in man’s biological system, continuously from generation to
generation. In the process of this development, man’s functioning was actually changed
in a mechanical way. Man became plasmatically rigid in the process of killing his genital
function. He armoured himself against the natural and spontaneous in himself and lost
contact with the function of biological self-regulation. Now he is filled with mortal fear
of the living and the free.
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by ontheotherhand Fri Mar 11, 2016 4:55 pm
Ferenc Puskás
