Notes from the Asperance Expedition
Armorer/Corporal YD-038 recording
Page Seventeen:
Tom Paine Maru by L. Neil Smith
Repression spares us the memory of birth, along with the painful remembrance of many agonies of childhood or adult life, but it has unfortunate side-effects. It creates the subconscious, which is simply a repository of repressed data. According to the praxeologists, a sane person would have no subconscious. It lowers effective intelligence by tying up physiological hardware, intellectual software, also, physical energy.
Worse, by separating the process of cognition from sensation, repression separates the human “life” — which suffers any number of painful experiences daily — from the human mind, in a misdirected attempt at protecting it. The mind — which evolved for billions of years to control a life — naturally looks for other lives to control, instead. The life, because it must, looks for other minds to control it.
The is the essence of the authoritarian personality, inclined to be as fully submissive as it is to be brutally domineering. The praxeologists believe the drive for power is inversely proportional to the remaining operative intelligence, which explains why individuals, climbing up the ladder of society, appear more stupid the higher they get.
Religion serves many functions in a culture. It gives supreme leaders the comforting feeling that there is a controlling mind above them.
According to Confederates, the happiest non-sane human being is a mid-level bureaucrat with lives to control below, minds above for guidance.
I would have to think about that one.
It certainly matched my experience.
– L. Neil Smith, Tom Paine Maru
Tags: authoritarianism, control, praxeology, psychology, repression
