The Sexual Domestication of the Four-Brained Biped

Frank, the Hip San Francisco Disc Jockey, has finally cajoled his luscious wife (played by Marilyn Chambers, the Ivory Soap advertising angel) to join him on the swinging Bay Area orgy circuit. Remember? 1973? The Resurrection of Eve, the most elegantly arty (and frequently revived) porn epic to date? One panting-gasping-bongo-orchestrated reel too late, Frank is aghast by Eve’s suddenly awakened passions, especially for black young males with jumbo-sized prongs, “The way it used to be…” he starts to complain. And she tells him all. Everything. What’s really coming down. The straight scoop from Evolutionary Central, in just three little words: “It’s over Frank.” As the film ends, porn has at last achieved a typical European static-ambiguity ending (right out of Polanski’s Knife in the Water, in fact).

And Marilyn-Eve, fresh from her baptismal cleansing in 99 and 44/100ths pure Ivory, a true witch-initiate, spells out the next evolutionary mutation. The “search for the apocalyptical orgasm” has triumphed—the search which Mailer alone in “The White Negro” (1958) had defined as the vector of the Hip Revolution, before anybody else realized there was a Hip Revolution. Sexual Armageddon has arrived. We don’t need Steinem to tell us that the Patriarchal Age is over. We don’t need Alvin Toffler to remind us that the nuclear family has been fissioned along with the atom itself. We only need to look around to see that we are in the midst of the greatest bio-social upheaval since the Neolithic Revolution founded cities, created centralized government and domesticated humanity.

We are in the primitive, larval stages of the mutation. The chief cause of our accelerated changing, changing, changing, is the extension of our nervous systems through chemistry and technology (as Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan keep reminding us). Our culture is dramatically influenced by the fact that there are more scientists alive and engaged in research today than in all previous generations added together. Sexuality (along with every aspect of our culture) will be transformed more in the next thirty years than in the previous thirty thousand. (We will be mutating from gene-pool terrestrials to post-terrestrial singularity, for instance, much more rapidly than most people realize.)

Scan the socio-sexual trends—remember that all this is overture, preamble: The United States divorce rate is now almost 50 percent (and over 75 percent in California, the most avant segment of the union). The remarriage rate among the divorced is a fantastic 80 percent. These two facts mean that the U.S., the most advanced technological nation on the planet and the harbinger of change, de facto has evolved from a culture of traditional monogamy to one of consecutive marriage or serial polygamy. This is about as major a cultural change from frontier mores as if we had switched from Christianity to Islam.

Acceptance of pre-marital sex is no longer a minority or heretic stance. A clear majority of students in both a middle-class and a lower-class San Francisco high school, in a recent study, approve of what used to nervously be called “going all the way.” (Exact figures were 53 percent of the males and 58 percent of the females in the middle class school; 64 percent of the males and 48 percent of the females in the lower class school.) Paul C. Glick, senior demographer at the Census Bureau’s population division, reports that cohabitation outside marriage increased 800 percent during the 1960s. Illegitimacy increased 200 percent since the 1950s.

Other census figures show the number of new marriages falling and new divorces rising faster in 1975 than during the previous tumultuous decade. (Divorce stood at 2.2 per thousand in 1960, reached 2.5 in 1965, 3.5 in 1970, and is now over 4.6.) In New York State, the divorce rate jumped 300 percent between 1969 and 1975.

While communes, group marriages, crash pads, come and go, form, reform, break-out, start anew, no very exact figures on this retribalization are available, but the nuclear family is clearly evolving. A recent United Press study of 22 cities showed that in 54 percent of them, marriage license bureaus reported dramatic decreases in new marriages. In San Francisco, the drop was over 25 percent in five years.

Women are having more pre- and extra-marital sex than ever before. Six out of ten teen-age mothers are now unwed or got married about the time of giving birth. While male infidelity remains where Kinsey found it in the 1940s (around 50 percent), female extra-marital affairs have increased from about 25 percent to 40 percent; and this breaking out of the monogamy game is occurring earlier (average age 40 in Kinsey’s sample; average age 35 today). 50 percent of the wives in Bell’s latest study predicted that they “certainly” or “possibly” would have affairs in the future. This trend is strongest in the youngest (as always); in Kinsey’s females, only 8 percent had been unfaithful to their husbands by age 24; now it is 24 percent.

And in the Redbook study of last year, 40 percent of a large statistical sample (100,000 wives) complain that they are not having enough sex. Let us call this the “Resurrection of Eve” syndrome. It portends apocalypse in every bedroom.

Marijuana, used by only one or two hundred thousand (mostly Southern Blacks and Mexican-Americans) when Congress outlawed it in 1937, is now on the eve of decriminalization—used by somewhere between 30 and 40 million. A great deal of this Weed-smoking has erotic meanings, in several dimensions, as Barbara Lewis demonstrated at length in The Sexual Powers of Marijuana, and as antipot crusaders enviously suspected all along. 85 percent of the grass-smokers interviewed by Prof. McGlothlin in a 1968 study mentioned enhancement or stimulation of sex as one of their main reasons for using the heavily-penalized cannabis in preference to the legal anti-aphrodisiac alcohol.

The hipster search for the transcendental Maileresque or Reichian orgasm is not only the root of all this ferment but the beginning of the de-domestication of sex. Conservatives, of course, have been more aware of this, in their own suspicious way, then optimistic liberals and academic humanists. A whole phase of human civilization is ending. Nietzsche and Aleister Crowley saw moral (i.e. sexual) apocalypse clearly at the dawn of the 20^th Century and celebrated the collapse of domesticity (inaccurately) as the re-birth of heroic barbarism—Nietzsche’s “blonde beast” warrior-Superman, Crowley’s self-identification as the Great Beast in Revelations whose law was “Do what thou wilt.” Alas, both of these bards of evolution were better at analyzing what was dying-off than at discerning what was actually being born.

To see sex realistically (for once), try seeing it as part of the evolution of the nervous system. Mailer correctly identified the hip quest for erotic transmutation as part of the hipster’s “attempt to build a new nervous system.“ The extensions of our nervous systems, our self-created scientific sensors, are all exploding. The speed of communications increased 10⁷ times since 1900, and is accelerating faster in this decade. Speed of travel in the same period is up 10², data processing 10⁶ and known energy sources 10³. “UnWoManned” spaceships have reached other planets.

Prof. J.R. Platt of the University of Michigan, who made these calculations, comments ominously that “None of our social organizations are prepared to deal with change on such a scale.” Utopianism, Futurism, Science Fiction are the only realistic “politics” around these days. The mammalian Left and reptilian Right are both obsolete, blind, irrelevant. None of our social organizations can house the new humanity being born. We are literally, demographically, too big for the womb-cultures which nourished us.

The loosening of monogamous robotry has followed inevitably the rise of contraceptive effectiveness from 50–70 percent (douches and old-fashioned condoms) to 98–99 percent (the coil, the pill). The inevitable advance to 100 percent perfect contraception can be no further away than 1985. Pregnancy outside the womb will be common by 1990, completing the biological liberation of women and ensuring their political liberation. Genetic engineering means that longevity can’t be much further away—and some of the brightest young scientists in that field, such as Paul Segall of Berkeley, are already aiming beyond longevity for immortality. O’Neill’s space-cities, housing not monastic astronauts but families, tribes, human communities, will circle the sun, beginning the greatest evolutionary mutation since the ascent from the ocean to land.

We can now see that the domestication of humanity was a necessary but temporary stage.

The mammalian (and other animal) nervous system evolves in metamorphic stages, over long historical spans, and this is quickly recapitulated and imprinted for local conditions in each individual. Imprinting is a bio-chemical process in which certain pathways, patterns, networks are bonded in synergetic response-units, activated to trigger the same robot-reaction whenever similar events happen in the environment. Ethologists have demonstrated that conditioning can only build further associations onto the basic bio-chemical imprint. Conditioning cannot change or reverse imprint. The imprint stays in the neurons until it is changed bio-chemically. In most cases it stays until death.

The first circuit, formed in the evolution of the (marine) nervous system, and the first activated in each newborn human, is the bio-survival brain. This hooks the organism onto a maternal object and then slowly builds up a safe space of territory around her. This basic viscerotonic consciousness, being here-now, the DNA memory becoming identified with this nervous system in this small, helpless body, in this social grouping, now. Basic feelings of anxiety or security are set by this imprint, and never change (unless bio-chemical re-imprint is achieved by careful scientific or brutal brainwashing techniques). In popular speech, this is the “will.”

The second circuit evolved later in evolution (amphibian, post-marine), and deals with territory and status. As soon as the infant is able to walk, master gravity, exert muscular effort, and meddle in family politics (decision-making), the basic imprint is laid down. This is the emotional script, the tribal status, the sense of being strong-dominant-manipulative or weak-submissive-manipulated. In traditional language, this is the “ego.”

The third circuit evolved in early hominid society and deals with artifacts, from the flint-axe to the Orion starship, and with verbalization (laryngeal signals), from “Me Tarzan, You Jane” to “E = mc2.” The basic imprint is made by age 3 and is either “bright-dexterous” or “stupid-clumsy.” (Headstart programs failed because they started too late. Subsequent conditioning never reverses a basic bio-chemical imprint.) This circuit is usually called the “mind.”

These circuits are designed by the DNA master-blueprint for the survival of the individual organism.

The fourth circuit provides for the continuity of the species. This circuit connects the sexual apparatus to an imprinted social behavior syndrome. The first orgasms or mating experiences create the bio-chemical imprint—in the human class of life, the sexual “role.” Again, no amount of Behavior Mod or conditioning has ever shown any significant or consistent success in altering this basic bio-chemical imprint. This sexual impersonation is generally called the adult “personality.”

The sexual imprint literally freezes behavior into robot patterns almost as inflexible as the so-called “instinctive” mating rituals of birds and insects. Explicit male superiority, garter-belts, booze, black lace panties, cool jazz defines one human imprint group as rigidly as any twig-gathering pattern defines the ritual of any robin or sparrow. Attempted equality, long-hair, incense, grass, sleeping bags, Rock ‘n Roll defines another imprint group just as rigidly.

The division of labor and the wide varieties of cultural style, together with the astonishing ability of the nervous system to imprint almost anything, prevent domesticated humans from realizing that their socialized sex-roles are just as rote as those of the ant and the platypus.

A fifth neural circuit has been emerging for at least a few thousand years. It has given rise to a great deal of mysticism, occultism, witchery and superstition, together with astonishing, sporadic breakthroughs in art, music, and science. (There are also dawning sixth, seventh and eighth circuits, to be mentioned later.) The fifth circuit defines cybersomatic intelligence: the capacity to suspend, integrate, re-wire and hedonically engineer all the previous imprints in terms of direct, bodily sensation.

The first scientific study of this circuit, Cosmic Consciousness, by psychiatrist R.M. Bucke, proposed that this was a new evolutionary development, not a pathology, and seemed to be statistically increasing in recent centuries. Psychologist A.H. Maslow showed in The Peak Experience that this circuit appeared spontaneously in many cases, but only among “self-actualizing” (i.e. relatively undomesticated) individuals. More recently, Ornstein and his school have demonstrated that fifth circuit experiences are mediated through the right lobe of the brain, whereas circuits I-IV are mediated through the left lobe and lower brain centers.

Fifth circuit right-lobe experience is more or less familiar to:

1. Casual, recreational users of neurotransmitter chemicals, such as weed, who have mild-to-major fifth circuit raptures some of the times they turn on;

2. Scientific and shamanic technicians-of-the-nervous-system who have learned how to use such chemicals to re-imprint for Rapture Control, i.e. precise neurosomatic intelligence;

3. Other shamans and yogis who have learned how to turn on the rapture circuitry without ingesting biochemicals. This means producing similar bio-chemicals within the body, by various kinds of physiological stress. In yoga, this consists of what is now called “social deprivation.” In most forms of shamanism, it consists of cheerfully scaring the student out of his wits until the ecstasy-chemicals typical of death or near-death are released to produce a re-infantile state and allow for a new imprint;

4. Some epileptics (e.g. Dostoevski) and schizophrenics (e.g. Van Gogh) have occasionally triggered bio-chemical mutations to fifth circuit rapture.

5. Tantra. An excruciatingly sensual art in which sexual fusion is prolonged until a neural electric-storm (“the rising of the serpent”) triggers the neurosomatic mutation.

This cybersomatic fifth circuit is “polymorphous-perverse” in Freud’s dismal Teutonic jargon; “childish, playful, creative,” in Taoist descriptions; “just like ordinary life, but one foot above the ground” in the famous Zen metaphor. In some highly-significant and prophetic modern slang, it is “high,” “spaced-out,” “trippy,” “floating,” “flying,” “far fucking out.” It is the new nervous system Mailer’s 1958 hipsters were seeking, and their pursuit of apocalyptical orgasm was an intuitive sense of the pivotal role of Tantra (hedonic engineering) in this mutation to extra-terrestrial, post-domesticated evolutionary stages.

A grim warning against the fifth circuit, and a stirring defense of fourth circuit domestic robothood, has been presented by George Gilder in his melodramatic book, Sexual Suicide. Correctly sensing that recent explosions of Fifth Circuit rapture and the new age of freedom between the sexes poses an evolutionary competition for the four-circuited domesticated species, Gilder eloquently defends traditional gene-pool authorized sex-roles.

Among four-brained creatures, he says, “sex is bound to their deepest sources of energy, identity and emotion. Sex was the life source and cohesive impulse of a people, and their very character was deeply affected by how sexuality was sublimated and expressed, denied or attained.” By comparison, among post-domestic fifth-brained hedonists, Gilder says “sex is devaluated and deformed”—i.e., individualized, de-robotized.

Gilder understands how second circuit ego-politics and third circuit competence were basic preliminaries to the development of fourth-circuit sex-role. Among four-brained humans, he says, “The boy’s sexual identity is dependent on acts of exploration and initiative.” (Second circuit courage, third circuit dexterity.) “Before he can return to a woman he must assert his manhood in action. The Zulu warrior had to kill a man, the Irish peasant had to build a house, the American man must find a job.” (Just as robotically as the penguin must find a specially colored stone and bring it to his mate.) “This,” says Gilder, “is for them the classic myth and the mundane reality of masculinity, the low comedy and high tragedy of mankind.” Or of mammalkind or antkind.

“Female historians are different,” says Gilder, still identifying humanity with the four-circuit domesticated species and assigning women an insectile housekeeping role. We turn in relief to sci-fi prophet Robert Heinlein, who with relaxed precision suggests the multi-role flexibility of the post-genepool, post-domestic, post-terrestrial:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, conn a ship, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meat, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

The 110-billion cell human brain, including the Hedonic right lobe unactivated in domesticated primates, is designed to handle all these sex-role programs, and a million more; and to learn to reprogram itself for ever-higher intelligence, emotional stability and artistic-ecstatic meta-programming of its own programs.

Continuing his lonely struggle for domesticity, Gilder says, “Of all society’s institutions that work this civilizing effect”—domestication—“marriage is perhaps the most important…The family is the only agency that can be depended on to induce enduring changes in its members’ character and commitment.” We shall ignore the curious ambiguity of the phrase “enduring change” and simply add that the family is the only agency before Chinese Communism, to be precise, for Maoism is a philosophy of total hive-domesticity.

The sexual roles imprinted on the adolescent four-brained human Gilder calls “the sexual constitution” of the tribe. This constitution, he shrewdly notes, “will deeply influence the productivity and order of the community.” (Hive solidarity.) “It will determine whether social energies are short-circuited and dissipated or whether they are accumulated and applied to useful pursuits.” Useful means useful to the gene-pool, the hive; short-circuited or dissipated energies are those which produce somatic pleasure, interpersonal fusion, brain reward, personal growth, individual freedom.

The Sexual Constitution (robot imprint), Gilder gushes, “will determine whether the society is a fabric of fully integrated citizens”—an ominous phrase—“or whether it is an unorganized flux with disconnected individuals pursuing sex and sustenance on the most limited and anti-social scale.” What ominously Soviet semantics! The hive is all-virtuous; the free individual is, by definition, anti-social. Pravda would only improve Gilder’s rhetoric by adding “decadent” and “hooligan” to the adjectives decrying the self-actualizing hedonic individual.

“A job is thus a central part of the sexual constitution,” Gilder summarizes grandly. “It can affirm the masculine identity of its holder; it can make it possible for him to court women in a spirit of commitment; it can make it possible for him to be married and thereby integrated into a continuing community.”

These blatantly insectile moral views cause Gilder to be equally alarmed by all fifth-circuit manifestations—Playboy, Rock and Roll, Women’s Liberation, objective sexological scientists like Masters-Johnson, Gay Pride militants, hippies, liberal clergymen, anybody, literally anybody, who departs from the robot domestic imprint biochemically hooked into Gilder’s neurons at puberty.

So-called “future shock” is, of course, actually present shock. The present is the future of the nervous system, in four-brained humanity, because the neurons normally do not take new imprints after the sex-role is fixed at adolescence. Nixon’s sexual system was formed in 1925, Frank Sinatra’s in 1930, etc. Thus, it only takes 10 years for a liberal to become a conservative, another 10 to become reactionary.

But Gilder is a valuable witness. He makes explicit the preoccupations of fourth-circuit hive humanity with gene-pool continuity as opposed to individual evolutionary exploration. The positive moral values for Gilder are “productivity,” “fully integrated citizens” (hive units) and “social energies” (a curious phrase meaning individual energies preempted by the hive). The delightful Taoist-Einsteinian term “unorganized flux” becomes a sinful derogation to this stern moralist.

Maoism is the highest, and ultimate, form of terrestrial domesticated four-brained humanity. When a U.S. Embassy official admits ruefully that a woman can walk alone through a Chinese city at three in the morning, without danger, what American fourth-brained moralist is not envious, awed, secretly shamed? For the sake of evolutionary perspective, we have mildly satirized the domestic-social ethic, but we do not condemn it or despise it. “Women and Children to the life-boats first!” “Be ready to die for your tribe’s survival!” “United We Stand!” “Defend Our Turf!” Out of such gallant mammalian politics the survival of the seed was ensured, the species continued.

It does become ominous when defenders of status quo domesticity—whether of the nuclear family or the Maoist collective—justify legislative and coercive force to prevent the emergence of higher levels of consciousness and evolution. The social moralist then becomes a neurological fascist relentlessly opposed to any conception of human destiny higher than docile ant-hill productivity.

What Gilder and all orthodox moralists fear is the unfolding of the fifth neurological-rapture circuit, freedom from static imprints, disciplined release of right-lobe ecstasy, the joyful experience of Zen freedom, the spirit of levity which will free individual atoms to float loose from the gene-pool molecule and form higher units in neurological (and physical) Outer Space.

It must be emphasized that the evolution from fourth-circuit gravity to fifth-circuit levity is much, much more than a struggle between generations. The DNA strategy calls for continuous acceleration of the genetic script, and evolution has never happened faster than at present. The bitterness of the old species grows increasingly paranoid, violent, vengeful.

Think of the short-lived but symptomatic Spiro Agnew cult. The random shooting of longhairs. The death-wish implicit in Gilder’s grim title, Sexual Suicide. The blockage, after many long years, of all attempts to secure justice in the Kent State youth-massacre.

Think of this: in all our years of reading book reviews, after assuming that we had by now witnessed every extreme of spiteful cruelty that critics can impose on creative artists, only once have we actually seen a reviewer express the wish to literally murder the subject of a biography. Was this a response to the history of some great scoundrel and mass murderer, some notorious thug or dictator, a Hitler, a Stalin, a Mao, a Nixon? No. It was a commentary upon a book about Janis Joplin—a long, hysterical diatribe against Janis, actually, with little comment on the book’s own merits.

And this homicidal berzerkersang is historically important. The critic was (who else?) Midge Decter, one of the arbiters of New York lit-crit oligopoly, and the New York Times knew with intuitive precision that her polemic against Janis deserved a full spread over the first three pages. The middle-aged middle-class must have loved the review; it told them just what they wanted to hear. Many must have cheered aloud when Decter declared her instinctive impulse “to throttle her [Janis] on the spot.”

Decter is direct and honest. She articulates without hypocrisy what must surely be the most fascinating phenomenon in genetic history, the genocidal hatred of one generation for its own children.

We are all bored with “generation gap” debate, but Decter will not let the issue die. Janis, she writes, “was proclaimed by a whole generation in our midst to represent their best and deepest impulses…to know who Janis Joplin was is to know a good deal, if not indeed everything that matters about the epidemic of antic despair that carried off so many of our children in the late 1960s.” Please re-read the last two sentences and remember this is not some Dallas-based Fundamentalist but the middle-brow intelligentsia.

“Epidemic” means some form of plague or disease that was, fortunately, destroyed by the Watergate crowd, the stop-and-frisk-laws, the no-knock laws, the bugs and wire-taps, the legions of terrorized D.E.A. informers, the curfews against young people, the Gestapoization of America under the Nixon counterrevolution. “Antic despair” refers to the cheerful, generous cultural revolution which, among other achievements, permanently changed and improved the student-teacher-administrator relationship in our universities, clarified the relationship between the sexes, liberated the body to healthy hedonism, imported a dozen varieties of Oriental neuro-science (and two dozen varieties of Oriental charlatanism) which spiced-up and enriched our epistemology and culture, provoked the ecology movement, recreated a true love for nature and wild creatures, questioned the unquestioned careerist work ethic, ended the draft, stopped the war, spread the spirit of intelligent criticism so far that even Nixon, with the whole machinery of government beneath him, could not hold power once his crimes were published and documented.

“Carried off so many of our children” possibly refers to spiritual abduction. The “children” no longer buy the ethics, the politics, the aesthetics or the robot uniformity of Decter’s generation.

Certainly Decter cannot refer to the physical casualties of Vietnam (50,000 dead on the American side), Kent State, Jackson State, the hundreds of thousands neurologically damaged or ruined by dope busts and imprisonment. Can Decter face the fact that her generation’s anti-dope laws killed and warped more young lives than a century’s worth of the most ignorant and irresponsible misuse of Weed ever could?

The crowning irony is Decter’s naive belief that her generation has feasted deeply of the “true qualities of sexiness” while Joplin’s undomesticated fans, and Joplin herself, had “only simulation of sex and all the other riches of grown-up experience.”

Pity urges us to let that imbecility slide without comment. But apparently there are no holds barred in the domesticate’s genocide against the fifth-brain mutant. Since the young are too kind and too sophisticated to get into debates with Decter about whose sex life is “richer,” and since we are of the same age-group as Decter herself, let us say it once and for all. The erotic experiences of the fifth circuit, and of the 30–40 million young users of that fifth circuit stimulant, cannabis, are so varied, so uninhibited, so all-out far-out way-out intense, so artful, disciplined and stylish, so orientally rich and Tantrically ecstatic, so honest, so free of guilt and domesticated neuroses, so affectionate and tender, so merry and magnificent that they can be neither understood nor believed by Midge Decter.

The caterpillar cannot understand the butterfly.

After reading about Janis’ alleged participation with Hell’s Angels in what she calls an “unspeakable scene of degradation,” Decter expresses her desire to murder this “incorrigible child.” There speaks the authentic voice of the Grand Inquisitor. We should all be kinder and more loving with each other, in this period of evolutionary metamorphosis, but if we cannot manage that much generosity of spirit, we at least have the duty to respect the mysterious individuality of others. You don’t have to like Janis Joplin’s sexual imprint, Ms. Decter, anymore than she would have liked yours; but the desire to kill those who differ is the root of fascism.

Decter gloats that Janis died after “no more than a moment’s enthusiasm.” But millions of us live on a little warmer and shinier because Her radiation touched us. And the energy still moves the machinery of the “Janis Industry.” The record companies, who separated Her from Big Brother, still prosper off Her sound. Royalties are paid to Her biographers. Decter gets three pages up front in the Times Book Section to perform necro-sadism upon Her corpse. We hope this paragraph would compensate Her a little for Decter’s brutality. It’s a small act of gratitude to Janis. Her eyes would smile thanks and She’d hand us the bottle of Southern Comfort. Is it worse to shoot heroin with Janis than shoot heroines with Midge?

(This is not old history, by the way. The prisons are still full of sensitive young nervous systems, post-larval, open and vulnerable, but lacking the neurological know-how to deal with the violence of the moralists. They are there for the same reasons that Janis’ corpse is dug up and savaged by Decter: for no crime against life or limb, no theft or swindle, but the manifestation of cultural dissent.)

Civilization, as Freud dismally admitted, is based on authoritarian State-control over individual life and individual sexuality. Domestication, the fourth-brained stage of evolution, is, in fact, (as Freud also realized in his own jargon) “the sublimation and repression of Eros,” the creation of Gilder’s “social energy” out of the robotic submission of the masses. Monogamous marriage, the Mom-Dad form of child-rearing, although necessary to the fourth-brained stage of development, has mostly been a neurological and genetic trial of passage.

Domesticated robot-sex, as every sane person from Ibsen to Gloria Steinem has realized, is a socially-acceptable form of prostitution. He gives Her $$$$$. She gives Him a tepid orgasm. “Frigid fucking for Frigidaires,” as poet Kenneth Rexroth said so bitterly.

Most of the men who go to prostitutes, according to Judge Murtagh’s sane and compassionate book, Cast The First Stone, are married. Domesticates who are theoretically “getting their sex” from a female domesticated robot at home. What are they paying extra money for, to a stranger? The truth is funnier and more tragic than any satire. Harmless frivolities like fellatio, in almost all cases. Simple hedonic arts that their robot-mates did not imprint in uptight Christian culture and are too senile (at 25 or 35) to learn. A minority of johns, of course, are seeking fetish-relief-satisfaction of “bizarre” imprints which, statistically, just happen because of the vulnerability of the nervous system to imprint anything at the sensitive moments of adolescence. [Written in 1973]

The attempt to eroticize marriage has spawned the enormous industry of sex-manuals, sensitivity sessions, cosmetics, costumes, erotic reconditioning stimuli designed to free the robots enough to cure their more obvious miseries. It can’t work. You cannot recondition until you re-imprint. The fifth-circuit chemical, cannabis, has changed more sex compulsions than all the reconditioners and retrainers in the world—but at the cost of setting the post-larvals more free than the gene-pool will tolerate.

It is imperative to understand that no anthropological study of “primitive” tribal groups has found the prevalence of neurosis, hysteria, rape, violence, psychosomatic ailments, outright psychosis, typical of the urban hive and the Mom-Dad nuclear family. The extended family of the native village is always saner and more peaceful.

Industrial Civilization, based upon erotic inhibition and sexual domestication, is psychopathically dangerous, inevitably leading to the repression of women (it is always Eve who is to blame) and neurotic displacements of sexual charge into violent, coercive, often genocidal policies. Ashley Montague, the anthropologist, has commented ironically on the paradox: “all the civilized nations at war, all the savages at peace.” It is no paradox. Repressed sex is the most violently explosive neurological blockage possible.

Contraception and conscious procreative choice give us, for the first time in history, individual decision and individual responsibility for sexual behavior. At the same time, electronic communication-technology has made it possible to link humans into social molecules and ethical collectives based, not on robotic hive-morality, but on shared evolutionary goals, consciously chosen. Both are part of the mutation that is preparing us for Space Migration. The HO.M.E.s, of course, house the nuclear villages.

The first four neural circuits, with associated imprints and conditioned-reflex networks, are totally Euclidean, “square,” concerned with adapting and preparing the newborn to survive in the spatially polarized and hive-dominated terrestrial environment. They will not be adequate for outer space.

Circuit I “consciousness” masters forward-back strategies for survival; the first dimensions of Euclidean space.

Circuit II [1]

Circuit III “mind” masters right-left polarities of the nervous system itself. Right-hand preference and associated left-brain dominance creates Euclidean, Aristotelian, linear modes of “reality”-definition.

These stages “place” the nervous system in three spatial-psychic dimensions; the fourth stage “personality” mediates the evolution of the genetic seed in time by domesticating sexual behavior on a “moral” chess-board of squares and dogmatically marked “right” and “wrong” by the infallible authority of the Hive.

The function of the emerging larval nervous system is to focus, to select, to narrow down, to choose from an infinity of possibilities those spatial tactics, those survival-security strategies, those sequences which insure life and reproduction here in this local place of birth and growth. The infant is cellularly prepared to learn any language, master any art or science, play any sex-role, but is imprinted to fixate, follow, mimic the narrow offering of hive parochiality.

In so doing, four-brained humanity has paid a heavy price. They kept the Seed alive, they kept the gene-pool growing, but they lost the endowment of free choice and change. In less poetic terms, larval imprinting and conditioning focus awareness-potential on a trivial fragment of the possibilities for intelligence and experience in a 110-billion-cell bio-computer capable, for instance, of vast right-lobe meta-programs for Hedonic Engineering (Circuit V), psionic-neuroelectric multi-phase-intelligence (Circuit VI), genetic-evolutionary wisdom (Circuit VII) and meta-physiological synergetic fusion with Higher intelligences (Circuit VIII).

One-half of the nervous system, unimprinted and unconditioned, is kept from consciousness by the right-hand left-lobe imprints and sex-role robotry. The awakening of this repressed half of our heads (the “Buddha-Mind” of the East, the “Silent Self” of Western occultism) does not signal a return to high barbarism and Macho Boy’s-Adventure-Storyism, as was hoped by Nietzsche and Crowley, hysterically dreaded by Gilder and Decter. It is not just another civilization falling; it is a Post-Terrestrial Prometheus rising.

Behind the surface froth noted by the newspapers and the superficialities of hip-vs.-square, old-vs.-young, right-vs.-left, the new consciousness being born in the West as a result of turning on to Eastern brain-science will transcend terrestrial reality. It will not be Eastern-passive-yin (right lobe) or Western-aggressive-yang (left lobe), but both—entering Inner Space and Outer Space simultaneously, balancing the symbolic-rational mind of the third circuit with the Dionysian rapture-mind of the fifth circuit. It will be scientific in essence and science-fiction in style. It will be based on the expansion of consciousness, the deliberate self-disciplined raising of intelligence, new understanding and control of the nervous system, and will produce a quantum leap in joy, courage, security, warmth, curiosity and sense of humor.

Neurogenetic awareness will accelerate and finally resolve the angers, confusions and injustices in the old racist and sexist imprints, by making our Declaration’s “pursuit of happiness” a scientifically tangible, neurologically attainable goal.

The Post-Hipster Age will seek revelation and Higher Intelligence not in crude rituals addressed to anthropomorphic deities (Mommy and Daddy magnified) but in natural processes, the nervous system itself, the mysteries of sex, the genetic code, and especially in post-terrestrial exploration and communication.

And what will replace the Mom-Dad nuclear family? The question itself is larval, four-brained, an example of what McLuhan calls rear-view-mirrorism. The only question that need concern you is: what will replace it in your case? Or will you consciously, intelligently continue it? (It has well-known survival value and merits we do not deny.) All through history we have been going somewhere, as a domesticated group. Now we are going everywhere, in many different post-domesticated groups.

O’Neill’s space-cities, within half a century, will exhibit a spectrum of sexual patterns duplicating everything that has ever existed on earth: group marriage, sexual communism, polygamy, polyandry, Gay Pride (longevity will solve the Gay problem of survival as a self-contained culture without genetic link to the heterosexual hive), Amazonian female communes, etc. and dozens, later hundreds and thousands, of sexual groupings never tried under grim survival conditions on primitive planet Terra.

The categorical imperative of Kant asked: what is right for all men and all women? This is the key ethical question of terrestrial domesticated humanity; but it is now obsolete. The post-terrestrial question is individualized: what is right and wrong for me, and how do I find the other free, growing, post-larvals who also want to combine and explore in that particular multi-dimensional timespace continuum? In simplest terms, the meek indeed shall inherit the earth, and domesticate it totally in Maoist-insectoid fashion. The bold shall migrate to H.O.M.E.s (High orbital mini earths) aloft.

[1] The part about “Circuit II” was absent from the document. The following explanation can be found in the text «From Outer World to Inner World — To Inner Space to Outer Space» co-authored in 1974 by Timothy Leary and Robert A. Wilson: «Up-down, the basic gravitational sense, appears in all ethological reports of animal combat. Rear up, swell the body to maximum size, growl, howl, shriek or cringe, drop the tail between the legs, murmur softly, skulk away, crawl and shrink the body size. These are domination and submission, fight-flight signals common to iguana, dog, bird, and the Chairman of the Board of the local bank. These reflexes make up Circuit II “ego.”»