The Young Radicals: A Symposium
Larner, Jeremy
1.) I am a radical because as a child I found myself in a world of lies. The three lies which, put together, make the biggest lie, are the lies of sex, money and authority. We were taught by...
...But I found I could not submit...
...My recalcitrance was not a decision...
...The next commitment is to one's immediate community...
...But the Western merchants have preyed on the rest of the world like vultures—Lumumba, Castro, etc., are their natural children, and the parent is always responsible for the child-parent relationship...
...If you don't love life, why be alive...
...consequently I am interested in the dissolution of the arms race, and all other fictions that bind men into hostile groups...
...But their limitations as people seem disastrous, and frustrate me insofar as they are my own...
...history is moving too fast and already there are signs of unrest and change...
...Perhaps that will be our choice only so long as we continue to export an exploitative capitalism...
...Somehow I'm going to make you see that people are all people, and not mere reds or blues...
...Now I admire their idealism and many of their ideals...
...To begin with I am nauseated by nationalism and all other forms of religion that preach superiority and hatred...
...That is why I don't find it much use to think of myself as a socialist, because it is my experience that a socialist politics does not get to the root of the matter—is not radical enough...
...They appear to be tedious, tired of themselves, full of self-hate, and chained to an idealism so abstract that it precludes all love of life...
...Without true education, however, democracy degenerates into the kind of selfish scramble we have at present in Washington...
...To his disgrace, Kennedy has consistently avoided his tremendous opportunity to inform and influence the public...
...Obviously, to achieve the pleasures men need we must do more, much more, than impose different political institutions on top of the same old system of unworkable assumptions and defenses by which humans have come to live...
...I understand that in the next ten years man's store of information about the world will double—a stunning conception...
...Since then Kennedy has proved himself a hipster in the worst sense—the sense in which Paul Goodman calls Madison Avenue intellectuals hipsters: he feeds on the worship of people he despises...
...Look, says the new Negro, I am not content to remain inferior...
...It's even possible that we need a whole new language —a more honest, more accurate language—a language of root perceptions...
...Not only do you miss the world's incredible luxuriance of textures, colors, personalities, but you are blind to the infinite visions of possibility which distinguish men from beasts...
...And that's only the beginning...
...But why insist on the Marxist order of things...
...I totally sympathize with, say, Castro's desire to free and nourish and educate his people—would that Kennedy felt so strongly about the same things...
...They say Kennedy is frustrated, but apparently he is too much the banker's son to consider dropping the hypocrisy and going all the way to enfranchise new democracies...
...and new scapegoats, new violence...
...That's the way life began on this earth, with single cells eventually coalescing in paleozoic seas—and that's the way it will surely end, unless men can find less totally destructive toys to play with...
...1.) I am a radical because as a child I found myself in a world of lies...
...As a radical, however, I will not limit myself to his sense of alternatives...
...The changes we need are so drastic that the human imagination cannot embrace them without casting aside a load of its oldest and dearest possessions...
...Political reform imposed from the top only leads to political regression and the need for new authority...
...Privilege and business also divide men into hostile groups, and therefore I am an advocate of political and economic democracy...
...2.) I am interested that men be the most and best they can...
...When the U. S. is ready to back a fascist rather than abandon United Fruit and Standard Oil, it is only logical that new nations will try to fight fire with fire...
...On national and international levels, I admire the peace-walkers and sitinners because they present the public with a fact, an undeniable portion of the truth...
...You lie when you say bombs are good for me...
...Certainly it means that each man will desire to seek and face his own truth...
...LEo TotsTOY...
...Surely this—and not arms-racing and not embracing rightists—is the kind of chance the U. S. must take...
...The development of a true education would involve unprecedented concern with communication, the outlines of which are already implied in our modern usage of such words as "orientation," "assumption," and the fascinating psychoanalytic word "resistance...
...As for old socialists, I feel strongly about them because they were the first grown-up respectables I met who shared some of my dissatisfaction...
...When I said this, or showed it, I was bitterly attacked, punished, humiliated...
...To seek truth men must have peace and freedom...
...I first saw Kennedy when he debated Nixon, and was appalled at his inarticulateness and lack of ideas...
...I was pressured to submit to these lies...
...I have participated in strikes, picketing, and propagandizing to end bomb-testing and bombmaking...
...if a radical can't come through for those around him, no contribution to humanity can compensate for the damage he will do...
...There is only one way to progress—the self-perfection of every human being...
...I'll sit right here/not buy your products/make life difficult, until you give me my rights...
...If only he would offend some group...
...I agree with Michael Walzer (DISSENT, Fall 1960) that authoritarianism is most effectively thwarted when the small groups that it affects simply resist...
...Yet how can you take seriously a man who goes along with the likes of Johnson, J. Edgar, Rusk, McCone, etc., etc., etc...
...We must risk a complete reorientation of the psyche—turn our whole culture inside out if necessary—to find new patterns of thinking and feeling...
...There is a chance that if our government were ready to haul in our merchant princes, and to tell Americans what it really means to be democratic, we might begin to have an influence in maintaining genuinely democratic regimes...
...4.) I dislike the phrasing of this question...
...By my continued stubbornness, I knew myself a radical...
...Considering this alone, it makes me sick to see political people so smugly contemptuous of the study of psychology...
...I simply knew that I could not be happy unless the world around me were drastically changed— specifically, I wished that others could yearn for truth as I yearned...
...I reject the implication here that the American choice is simply to support or not support soon-to-become-authoritarian regimes...
...Look, says the peace-marcher, I want to live...
...The three lies which, put together, make the biggest lie, are the lies of sex, money and authority...
...As he and Nixon traded memorized statistics, I was reminded of the run-of-the-mill half-bright campus politician: sober and eager to lead—he doesn't know where he wants to lead to, but that just leaves him flexible in times of crisis...
...This issue is eternal, I know, and perhaps not what is meant here by "issue," but we are living in the first years of history that man has had the power to destroy himself down to the last person...
...In fact, that lesson constituted almost the whole of my education, both at home and at school...
...5.) When Kennedy won office, Murray Kempton commented that "A nation of quartermasters has elected a P-T boat commander...
...3.) The radical must campaign for truth, beginning in his most personal relations...
...With the others, we just can't win nohow...
...The demagoguery and the Stalinism seem to me mainly infections caught from Western greed and pride...
...But they are so pathetically limited (one might even say conservative) when it comes to imagining new existential modes and relations and sequences which might make some of these ideals possible...
...Among other things, the achievement of pleasure depends on our methods of child-rearing, about which almost nothing is known...
...I am frightened but also thrilled to think that the Western intellectual vocabulary is washed up, and those who remain tied to it are spiritually dead...
...Given such democracy as we already have, perhaps we must find some means to make ourselves more free and healthy and creative first...
...But history repeats itself, and all things come to an end, and were I a rational man I would cry in the street like a prophet and tear my hair...
...Since the man will not tell the truth to the people, it is clear he has no faith in democracy—a shortcoming that could be fatal, for if democracy cannot be made to work, men will have small recourse from authoritarianism and authority-complexes...
...For this reason Kennedy is a dangerous man...
...Perhaps this means that all men will be artists—capable of creating pleasure each on his own...
...I learned from them to think hard, to pay attention to history, and to love and use irony...
...For example, I assent with all my heart to the notion that economic democracy is a necessary part of man's becoming free and healthy and creative...
...This politically complex issue is on a human level very simple: a small risk, prolonged over a long enough time, becomes a certainty...
...But because Kennedy has power, or seems to, there is a tendency among po litical people to take him seriously...
...Socialists who accept the accelerating-deterrent theory and rejoice in their realpolitik are victimized by the limitations of their abstract vocabularies...
...Benevolent temporizing does not alleviate, but merely postpones and intensifies the issue...
...But there isn't much time left—it's becoming increasingly clear that men will be either free and peaceful...
...Surely America cannot continue so torpid as she was in the fifties...
...Behind these issues stands the great existential issue—that men must somehow learn to enjoy themselves or else kill themselves from spite and frustration...
...There can be no meaningful left-wing politics in America until we demolish our ghastly lies...
...I am hoping for a longshot—that some of this knowledge may be about ourselves, and that it may be what's needed to turn the key to a different style of being...
...So it is boorish and stupid and inhuman to insist that human problems can be solved solely through politics...
...it was only a circumstance...
...We were taught by conscious threats and unconscious fear: sex is evil, money brings happiness, authority equals moral superiority...
...Man is the only animal who becomes, but when he insists too narrowly on the path of his becoming, his emotions get constipated and he makes life a drag...
...He has chosen instead to manipulate behind the scenes, toadying to congressmen and indeed accepting our necrotic Congress in its status quo...
...time and time again it was demonstrated how easy it would be not to be hated...
...The history of our century does not fulfill the prophecy that the discontent of exploited masses leads them to establish democratic governments and creative modes of living—all they want is a share of the spoils...
...or nothing...
Vol. 9 • April 1962 • No. 2
