WILD SURMISE

AUGUST 1985 # MINUS 3

AN ALMOST ANONYMOUS INFORMAL NOTE

THE PRICE OF CHANGING YOUR MIND

Any war is conducted at terrible cost. American battle deaths in Vietnam numbered about sixty thousand. An article printed hare two months ago said that the actual loss of American lives, including the aftermath, has been over ten times as high. A serious study must be done to determine if that is true, and if true to determine causes. Before determining causes, some guess work must be done, such as this article. If you find this threatening, offensive or in poor taste, multiply it by six hundred thousand; but remember it is guesswork still. It must be tested.

The adaptability of humans has been exaggerated. People don't adapt; people lie.

What of death? Death and life are true opposites, exhausting all forms; the yet-un-dreamed-of must be in some form alive now if it is ever to be. Pasteur proved it. Define either life or death and you have defined the opposite as well. There are two things that can be said for certain. Death is absolutely inevitable, and death is absolutely permanent. "Poet" could almost be defined as somebody who talks about death, because there is a strong tendency to fall incoherent. Thinking of the inevitability and permanence of death could paralyze your rational faculty; don't let it. Like the lynx of the fable, you must look this demon steadily in the face.

Death is inevitable and permanent. If you are a Zoroastrian, a Christian fundamentalist or if you followed the logic in the preposterous notion of the universe last issue, you will object that time has a discrete beginning and a discrete end. The end may come before the death of any individual, so death is not inevitable, and after the end even the permanence of death may not be reliable. I want to exclude such consideration from the discussion. You may protest that you believe in reincarnation or that in infinite time any bunch of atoms will find their way back together by chance. The documentation for reincarnation and the chance (ever any reasonable available time) of identical twins by other than the usual means are both very small.

Still, there is a flaw in the armor of death, a pattern that may be exploited. Both inevitable AND permanent – that's very odd; nothing else in the known universe that is EITHER inevitable or permanent. Suppose you are given a picture of a boat with a black cross on it; you might reasonably suppose it was a picture of a boat with a black cross on the boat. A second picture shows another boat with the identical cross, and so does a whole stack. Eventually you say, ahh, there is no black cross on any boat; all these pictures were taken through a periscope. Any condition which is invariably observed is an artifact of observation. Who, then, observes death? Society is the observer.

What is death? They say among the Eskimo, when a man's teeth gave out, he left the community and went out to sit on an ice floe and drift away. Given the available diet, his time was up. He was already dead. I rather suspect that among the Picts of Britain, death was declared and hope abandoned when there was nothing left but bones. There was a time in this country when a mirror held before the nostrils was arbiter; if the mirror fogged, the person yet lived. That system was probably treacherous on a warm dry day. Lack of all electrical activity in the brain was once promoted, but it, too, is tricky. There is a story about a researcher who took a bowl of jelled dessert into a typical intensive care hospital ward, put it in bed, hooked up a number of life support systems and measured its electroencephalogram; The machinery induced enough electricity in the dish by the machinery so that it could not be pronounced "brain dead." I thought the researcher should have been arrested for murder when he unplugged the thing, but there is no justice any longer. Nowadays, we often use the heart beat, but that has required some interpretation ever since the first heart bypass pump.

The question is not neutral. We cannot take the Pict approach. We want to be able to obtain vital organs from the dead to benefit the living, not before hope is lost for the dying, but as soon after as possible. We are ready to change our criteria if the technology changes. Thus death is a socially defined, not an absolute, event.

The same must be true, in some measure, of life.

There is another point about death. Death is often sudden. About half of American males will die of heart disease. Half of them will experience sudden death, death within an hour of onset of illness, as the first sign or symptom of disease. Half of this group will in turn be found at autopsy to have normal coronary arteries supplying their hearts. So at least one out of eight males will die of some process that is abrupt in onset and is accompanied by no solid physical evidence of fixed disease. No doubt the same process kills a significant number of others, who have some disease but actually die of this process (presumably spasm of the coronary arteries or some reflexly stimulated electrical event).

There is a drug, I think it is cholestyramine, that lowers blood cholesterol. The drug was given to a large number of subjects in hopes that it would lower the death rate due to disease of the coronary arteries. This was a properly conducted, controlled experiment. Cardiac sudden deaths, dropped significantly. The overall sudden death rate, however, was unchanged. Automobile accidents and suicides rose as cardiac deaths fell. It was determined that these really were traffic fatalities, not people who had died suddenly of heart disease while at the wheel of a car. Yet it was found that neither emotional depression nor loss of mechanical coordination nor loss of visual acuity was a side effect of the drug.

Women, it seems, seldom die suddenly. There are two exceptions. 1) Women may die suddenly, like men, if they smoke heavily or drink heavily or live alone or have emotional problems. 2) They are also at risk if they are black and diabetic and hypertensive and overweight. Excluding the second group, in which multiple factors seem to conspire against them, it looks as if there is a common emotional denominator in the factors that push women into the same statistical category as men.

It seems that a sort of emergency button in the human makeup lets a person die. Under extreme circumstances, he may find that button. If not, he may take other action. That's not to say you do not use what skill is at your disposal to prevent sudden death. But you may take some comfort if you fail.

What of adaptability?

Adaptability is heavily advertised. Why did the dinosaurs die out? Every child knows – because they couldn't adapt. They swam, they flew, the walked on two feet and on four, they were herbivores and carnivores, had armor on their head or tails or none at all. They ranged from modest size to enormous, spanned three geological eras, but they couldn't adapt.

We, on the other hand, rushing headlong into having a single effective gene pool, a single world economy based on cereal agriculture and fossil fuel exploitation, a single government system based on social welfare and armed police, a single set of mutually interpretable languages, and more than one religion and lack of same eager to convert everybody else, we are adaptable.

Who is adaptable? Certainly not our society; we have not got away from cereal agriculture since it was introduced in Iraq ages ago. Certainly not our society; we are the only group of living things that imprisons and executes its members for behavior that the group finds noxious. Certainly not our society; we still fight wars eons after it is known that people get hurt.

As individuals we are adaptable, surely. But that does not mean that we are able to live without social support. It only means we are able to adapt to any society that is ready to support us. In fact, it has been seriously proposed that the personality is like a bundle of twigs. Each twig represents things one believes in and holds dear. Together they have shape and strength, but individually they are subject to change. Mental health is defined as the ease with which such change is made; flexibility IN ALL MATTERS is the perfection of health.

That is an extreme (and, I think, dangerously misleading) statement. Here is another extreme statement. I invoke it in order to lay it to rest. This is how to brain wash someone.

1) Get control over your subject, by force or guile.

2) Deprive him of his accustomed sensory inputs, people he knows and objects he is familiar with, even his own clothes.

3) Deny him any form of self expression, by word or act.

4) Overload his senses with novel and confusing things. Try to get his attention thoroughly focused on things he does not remember or understand.

5) If he is very tough, arrange an injury or illness.

6) Persist for two months or until he is suicidal and hallucinating floridly.

7) Begin to mold his thoughts and actions, rewarding him far every gesture that comes closer to the final result you want.

8) Give him back a sense of control and mastery as he conforms to what you want.

In the end he will be no more or less cheerful and energetic than when you captured him; his new beliefs will be as firmly ingrained as his old. He will have no sense of paradox, inventing and interpreting memories to match his new set of values, religious beliefs, likes and dislikes or whatever you have foisted onto him.

That is the classical statement of brainwashing. It has been observed happening to a greater or lesser degree, sometimes accidentally, sometimes not, in a large number of groups of people: prisoners of war, convicts, religious converts, prostitutes, survivors in open boats, soldiers in combat, medical students confined to iron lungs. It has never been the subject of a controlled scientific experiment. Lack of experimental verification is acceptable, since it would start out effectively with an abduction, a crime considered as vile as murder. Nor has it been the subject of careful long term follow-up. That lack is not acceptable any longer.

Classical brainwashing may, indeed, occur, but it may be lethal to a high proportion of the people exposed to it.

What of people?

Classical brainwashing sounds a lot like the ordinary push and shove of life. We are always surrounded by sensory input telling us what we are with precious little to challenge the proposition. We have no outside check on reality. (Peace you Zoroastrians; debate is confined to present space-time.) We fall ill. Surely in the course of events, our personalities, even our memories are rewritten every few weeks.

That being the case, it is possible to say that the human mind is an illusion after all, that nothing exists, is conscious, except the broad society. Only a large group is able to collect enough brain power together to carry out thought. One skull simply can’t hold enough. Porpoises have bigger individual brains, but they haven't put theirs together as we have ours.

In fact, they say a properly trained parrot can talk with a facility and usefulness far beyond that of gorilla using sign language. Despite a bigger brain and a perfectly serviceable language, the ape cannot make up for the bird’s disposition to talk. Brains is not the point; consciousness is the result of the ability to pool brain power. Dismiss from your mind the fear that another race is superior to your own because they are individually smarter. (Actually, it seems to me that there is an uncontrolled variable in the experiments with apes and birds talking: they bird sounds very much like a person, and knows it; the ape looks a lot different, and knows it. I shall not give up on the apes talking better until they slip a person in a gorilla suit into the lab to conspire with the gorillas.)

So some sort of social cybernetic process hooks us all together, performs thought and then assigns, for its own convenience, a personality to each of us. That personality may be an illusion; it is certainly very vulnerable. Deprived of the support of peers, it withers away.

You may object that just because the personality fades away in the absence of social support does not mean it is an illusion any more than the fact the body perishes without an atmosphere means that the body is an illusion. True, perhaps. But (1) finding that the personality does not exist goes a long way toward explaining why it seems to be subject to inevitable laws of death, the likes of which govern nothing else in the known universe, (2) there is an independent check on the body; we can weigh it, and (3) it is the fragility of the personality that is the point.

Do you remember the fire breathing liberals? In their heyday they proposed to remake the WHOLE WORLD along the pattern of their own commendable social theories, enforcing their improvements with armed police. How many people does it take to consider you have a social unit? Ten? A thousand? Certainly no more than a million. Given a lot less than a million members, a social unit is a higher order of life, capable of long term survival, of development of independent arts, value systems, government – a complete system, needing nothing beyond itself but peace and a place to stand. It's loss would be incalculable. Well the liberals, the ones I met, were out to alter profoundly all but one, keeping the individuals alive to incorporate into their own system.

(Liberals are not alone in seeking change. Modern conservatives may try to protect you from war, famine, plague and liberals, but perhaps not from immigration, destruction of the landscape, pollution of the environment or prolonged severe economic growth.)

Not all individuals survive change.

Remember step 6 in brainwashing. Insanity and suicide are two marks of successful indoctrination. The third and most dangerous of all may be death by self neglect or by coronary spasm.

What is it like? How does it feel to be faced with a change so profound that a person begins to look for the escape button? Let me run through a few of the more obvious things. I hope you are not familiar with many. (This is grim stuff. You may skip the part between sets of asterisks without losing the line of argument.)

* * *

Lump in throat. When you are lost, you may panic. Panic doesn't mean you run screaming through the woods. Panic is that little catch in your throat. When it happens, sit down and wait for it to go away. You are not thinking your best. When it is more severe, it is like a ball coming up in your throat, threatening to choke you. In fact, it may be your laboring heart pulling on your esophagus.

Weeping. Men weep. They just may not tell you about it. Water runs at the eyes, nose and mouth. Tears taste sweet, snot tastes salty, bile tastes bitter.

Sighing. Perhaps it is the recovery phase of temporarily neglecting to breathe. Perhaps, like the lump in the throat, it is a response to pressure changes in the chest.

Sobbing. As weeping becomes more severe, breathing becomes uneven. The body and hands may move in an uncoordinated way, instead of being about the business of wiping eyes and nose.

Crying. A sustained wavering musical note often very high or very low.

Wretching. The parasympathetic nervous system gets stimulated, again probably because of major pressure changes. There may be vomiting or dry heaving.

Numbness. Sense of not feeling anything.

Sense of unreality. "I don't believe it."

Self justification. Recurrent thoughts on the subject, "but I really am a good person after all," particularly when nobody else has questioned the matter.

Memory locks. Creating forbidden zones in the mind where unmanageable thoughts are quarantined.

Angina. Sense of pressure in the chest, like a metal glove closing around the heart pressing the strength out of it and pinching it at the joints of the armor. This particularly when something breaks a memory lock.

Torpor. Indisposition to do anything at all.

Rage. Poorly developed, considering the provocation, and even more poorly directed; often perversely focusing on a friend.

Gloom. All pervasive, self defeating.

Fear. Actually profound lack of fear or even of common prudence.

Dreams. In which it is all right again.

Mood swings. Under stress the body releases chemicals called "endorphins," which elevate the mood, alleviate pain and probably induce the euphoria certain runners report. In the male, androgens, with their own effect on mood, fluctuate hour by hour. The balance between hormone levels and inconstant memories shifts rapidly.

Drug use. If available, mood altering drugs may be taken, such as tobacco and alcohol. In theory, they might help, but generally they introduce their own mood swings, which may be hard to distinguish from the underlying problem.

Hallucinations. The motion pursuit reflexes of the eyes lose their efficiency so that still objects may seem to move and interpretation of the speed of moving objects becomes erratic. At the extreme, the fixed stare may so fatigue the retina that visual imagery is deceptive, and objects may be perceived that do not exist at all.

Distortions of self image. The perception of the size and proportions of the body may be unrealistic and even seem to be changing. Confusion. Sudden urgent wonderings of "What DID happen?" often preceding failure of a memory lock.

* * *

These are danger signs. Some may be pathological, but most of them are probably defense mechanisms of one sort or another. Still, it looks as if the end is frequently fatal, even in the presence of friends, well wishers, substantial resources and basic rugged health. Knowing danger signs would be more useful if appropriate remedies were obvious. It is certainly hard to believe that in the end, one is left with the same hearty, vibrant, fun loving person one started out with.

Does it happen? Victims of kidnappings and hijackings have long term problems, but if there were a ten percent death rate over five years, surely we would know about it.

Does it happen? Consider the plight of the immigrant into the United States. If he comes from a poor community, he will have little encouragement to come home; he will be able to help his people in the short term more with the money he can send if he stays than with his own heart and mind and hands if he returns. Staying, he must decide whether to assimilate, to learn the new language and the new rules. If he does not, he creates in this country, to which he has some reason to be grateful, the seeds of civil war and partition of the nation say about fifty years from now. If his own heritage includes revolutions, rapacious landlords, cruel dictators and masses more concerned with reproduction than with learning, he may be more painfully aware of the dangers of a polyglot nation than the natives. But before you ask him to assimilate, go back and read that section between asterisks. I wonder what the overall immigrant death rate is.

Pity, if you have the heart, the terrorist. What must he have gene through before he decided that it was proper to plant bombs that blow up total strangers? What must he go through again before he is able to kneel beside those strangers and begin to rebuild the world they both want? He cannot go back home; war is in his home. Have you noticed that in the modern world there is a category of war that never seems to end?

Does it happen? Alas, it looks as if has happened six hundred thousand times right in front of our noses. The experience of war and the return took a terrible toll the return ten times the more dreadful.

Perhaps it was all Agent Orange, the toxic defoliant many of our troops were exposed to. I understand that there is a plan to distribute $150 million to totally disabled veterans exposed to Agent Orange or to families of deceased. A court estimated there would be 48,000 such veterans. As of the first of July, there had already been 245,000 claims filed. That is a totally independent line of evidence, supporting the notion that the death and disablement rate among the veterans has been inordinate. How big a factor Agent Orange itself is, is not clear.

We must find out for sure. How many have died? Is death after returning proportionate to the intensity of combat experience? To the rate of exposure to Agent Orange? Are some races or ages more vulnerable than others? Did those who returned to their old sweethearts, old home towns and old jobs do better than those who took to wandering? Perhaps there is some way to help as yet unguessed. In any event, we should know the true cost of what we have done.

We should also know the probable cost of whatever we undertake, either as individuals or as a society.

Booty

Editors Note:

WILD SURMISE is an occasional newsletter on speculative matter. So far, three more issues are planned. In the next, Booty goes eye to eye with Einstein. (The smart money is betting on Einstein.) After that, Booty will tell us about love. (The odds are that he doesn't mention sex once.) Issue zero will take up the weather. That ought to be a relief, a nice neutral topic, full of spring showers and gentle autumn evenings, but you never know with Booty; he'll doubtless find treason in it somewhere.

M has complained that it keeps sounding as if Booty is the brains of the outfit, so I ought to set the record straight: Booty has studied six languages and speaks most of them very badly. M speaks seven languages like a native, if you count six dialects of Neanderthal.

We are still trying to stay anonymous around here. If you write us a note and want to remain anonymous too, mention it.

MILD SURPRISE

The pretty girl on the expedition was big. She was well built, nicely proportioned, aloof and tall, tall, tall. I've always liked big girls. Of course any girl clad in a wet suit and helmet, face mask, snorkel, scuba rig, weight belt, gloves, boots, diving knife, buoyancy compensator, pressure gauge, depth gauge and watch looks a lot like a great pile of diving equipment. And under water, size and weight mean almost nothing. But it was impossible to forget that she was pretty, and big.

I was delighted when the dive master, actually a good looking girl herself, came across the littered white deck of the dive boat and told me I had drawn the pretty girl as my buddy for the second dive of the day. I gave my best casual, "0 yeah. Sure," and went back doing what I had been doing, which was staring into space recovering from the last dive. Actually, I found I was already recovered.

We suited up and clambered down the ladder into the gentle, clear blue water. I am a pretty good, buddy; if I don't have you in view, I am looking for you, and if I am out of reach, I am swimming toward you. We swam like soaring birds in tight formation, banking, hovering, diving gently among the fish rich reefs. I think I was averaging three to six inches from her the whole time, never touching, listening to someone playing music in same far off garden of the mind. Reefs loomed around us, rich in color, marred by caverns, haunted by strange jewel like life. Star fish as large and complex as tumbleweeds. Fire coral, burning to the touch. Brain coral. Staghorn. Horrified looking eels. Vegetable seeming sponges and anemenes. And always the troops of fish, fish, fish. Short, high, big finned reef dwellers, built for sudden starts and immaculate maneuvering rather than speed or endurance, colored like courtesans, as close to each other as the two of us were.

She peeled away, did a half roll and arced up to face me. For a moment, she made a few gestures. Then she threw out her arms like a shade tree. Well, I'm not much on sign language, but when a girl spreads her arms open, there are certain reflexes. I took her in my own arms. At first, she seemed surprised, and then she quickly curled up on my knees and let me wrap my arms around her. There we sat a long time in the shadow of the reef, not moving, only great plumes of air going up and away. She was using up a lot of air, poor dear thing. I was too, but then I am an air hog anyway. Exhale three times, inhale once, make the moment last.

Eventually, I tapped her shoulder and showed her our air gauges. It was time to go back to the boat. We returned again in tight formation, even closer than before, the whole world seemed to be shades of pink. At the ladder, I gestured she should go first, and when her flippers vanished started up myself. The moment my head broke the surface, three muscular tenders yanked me out of the water and slung me spinning across the wet deck to fetch up against a rack of air tanks. Happily I peeled of mask, snorkel and helmet.

Two of the tenders were peering down at the ladder speaking urgently. "See him?"

"No"

"See any others?"

"No."

The pretty girl was talking to a group. "M wasn't afraid at all. (He protected me.) But that shark was thi-i-is big."

Then she threw out her arms like a shade tree.