CS Lewis’ example of the fine wine described at the end of Screwtape Proposes a Toast has a special logic to it. It is a mixture of the souls of those who were fanatical Calvinists with those who think only in terms of pilgrimages, sterility and hunger as real religion. That raw hatred was delicious to the palate of Hell.

And it is unending. Each group will be suffering eternally, but each group will also be blaming the other for their torment forever. Any lost soul who tried to be logical — they’re BOTH THERE — would be subject to the same solution used in both Hell and Canada. They would be punished.

I have noted people leaving BUGS because they found a Word. Our original editor went back to Iraq and became an Intelligence bureaucrat and his views changed right into Good Soldier views. At the end he nearly went ballistic at my objection to his Beloved Comrade Sergeant marrying a white woman.

I note we have not heard from Pain since he went off to theology school and told me that only “amateurs” think that Zoroastrianism had any effect on Christianity. That’s the last communication I remember from him.

CS Lewis said in his forward to the Screwtape Letters that the existence or nonexistence of actual demons has nothing to do with his faith. He was exposing the Mind of Hell.

What influence Zoroaster had or his very existence is not essential to my beliefs. And that is not what drove Pain off. Hell, I don’t even know for sure if he has been driven off. I’ve often been wrong and I expect to be wrong a lot more. But that is my point here.

I have been deserted or stabbed in the back many, many, many times by people who believed they had become Enlightened. These are exactly the people one recognized as being neither back-stabbers nor cynics. They are as honest as Torquemada or Cotton Mather ever were.

They simply have no room in their world for simple honesty or simple mercy or simple truth.

Everything warped about this kind of people is a warping of their natural feelings they were born with. They ban sex because it is abused. Jesus himself condemned prostitution and adultery. If he had been a later Christian, he would not have seen that much a distinction between prostitution and adultery and sex itself.

But Jesus was not a Zoroastrian. I think that, in a world where the two great monotheistic faiths were Zoroastrianism and Judaism, you could not see yourself as a scholar if you did not include Z in your discussions. That is a lot like people who claim to be Intellectuals today. They have to have a lot of Marxism in their discussions.

If you feel strongly about things, the temptation to become a Wordist eventually is almost irresistible. It is not natural for a human being to resist suggestion, as commenters have pointed out here and the Great Kresky said.

It is hard to be dedicated to the idea of human freedom without eventually becoming some kind of absurd Libertarian. We Are talking about something people die for, so it very quickly becomes capitalized. A person can believe in freedom, but can he go out and die for anything less than Freedom?

Can Salvation be “free and without price?” Not if Wordist Theologians have anything to do with it.

In order to save our race it is almost irresistible not to take on the trappings of swastikas and heel-clicking. Soon the swastikas and the heel-clicking and calling Hitler Adolf instead of Adolph become the focus of one’s attention.

It is very, VERY hard to explain to people that, though I have dedicated my life to a cause, that cause does not lead into a dead end of implications. To me, the moment a person begins to capitalize he ceases to be human.

My idea of freedom is the right to do as you wish. My idea of truth is whatever turns out to be fact. My idea of mercy is making people feel better than worse. Only in the white man’s world can these “simplistic” ideas make any sense at all.

In the Orient it all ends up in the dead end of Deep Philosophy. In Africa it ends up as spooks. In the white world, we are always turning into an alleyway of Wordism and slamming up against a brick wall.

But science has made it in the white man’s world because, despite all these dead ends, we still eventually end up heading generally in the way of truth, of reality, of what works. The only white societies that have gone down for good are the ones which were once white and are now brown.

That is the fact. That is the truth.

If you are building a house of cards, the last thing you want to see is someone fiddling around with the base. Wordists build the entire world on a long list of assumptions. Wordism is a  tower of cards, building on what earlier Wordists took for granted.

For example, in Marx’s youth The Dialectic was The Latest Thing. To a Wordist, the Latest Thing is always Forever, “This is the Year 2010″ or “This is the Year 1836.” The whole history of the world has been leading up to what we are finding out now. So Marx built his structure on the dialectic, the Now and Forever of his age.

Before Marx died he had to explain what the hell this dialectic thing was. It was about as up-to-date among his young followers as “23-Skidoo” would have been at Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s.

This is why I seem to be the only one who can see why Bible Fundamentalists and Marxists would be on the same side when it comes to history. Marx’s Theory of Class Struggle goes back to the Pharaoh-based history he was raised with, just as the Fundamentalists’ does.

Wordism is not based on truth. It is at the end of a huge, jerry-built tower of Truth, imposed Truth, required Truth. When Robert Ardrey popularized the fact that animals have wars and borders and class distinctions, it was not the anti-evolution fundamentalists who cried “Foul!!!”

It was the leftist professors. It was their whole Wordism that was based on Rousseu’s assumptions that animals only killed for food and held no territory and had no class distinctions. They were building this giant stack of cards and suddenly somebody was meddling with the very bottom of the tower.

I grew up with the assumptions that leftists were radicals. But unlike Marx I grew out of my youthful obsession. Wordism is rigidly conservative. After all, it calls itself Progressivism. You cannot call yourself progressive without knowing EXACTLY where society is GOING.

This is so basic everybody misses it. Progressivism has always meant that we were getting rid of the violence and class distinctions and obsession with territory that only man’s institutions had imposed.

Once again, respectable conservatism comes to the rescue. No one can make his living as a respectable conservative if he asks “What is a racist?” The professional progressives are not comfortable with anyone who asks “What are you progressing TOWARD?”

BUGS is the only place these questions are ever asked.

Conservatism, in fact, only gets its NAME from sharing the same assumption progressivism does. It only exists as a block in the path of what progressives want. So neither side asks what that is for exactly the same reason. The bottom cards in the conservative’s Wordist tower are as completely based on Pharaoh history as the progressive one is.

It is hard for us today to believe the assumptions about nature on which modern progressivism and, therefore, modern conservatism was constructed. The idea that animals have no borders and no class structure is at least as dead as Galen’s Humor Theory of Disease. But no one gets paid for saying that.

My time in Washington was the high point of direct mail as a new phenomenon. It also shows why so many people who came into professional political action at that time are so news oriented.

When you get a direct mail appeal and toss it away the first thing you wonder is how they AFFORD these things? Few get opened and even fewer bring in money.

Those who send these out are looking for a House List, a group of people who are interested in their particular cause and are willing to give money to support it. So you are on a huge number of lists which show your interest in a subject.

I have at least half a dozen mass mailings from McGovern asking for money for SPLC. That is because I show an interest in race.

Once you get a House List, you may rent it out for the use of others. A pro-life group will let a libertarian group try out its list because they are also anti-liberal.

House Lists for direct mail vary in size from a few hundred to a million in the case of groups like the NRA.
Direct mail was a breakthrough for anti-liberals because liberals had little use for this and did not develop it. The left is funded by limousine liberals, government contracts, and taking over large private endowments. Their money comes in huge chunks.

Direct mail is the ultimate bourgeois tactic.

So how do you get a House List? You try House Lists on causes overlapping with your own. No matter how big the House list is, you rent three to five thousand random addresses on it to test it. Since you need at least a one percent return, the size of the sample that is statistically significant has no relation to the total list.

If a list tests out and you get the minimum return from it you need to almost cover the costs of mailing, you rent the whole list. If you get a good return, you mail it again. The point is that you are looking for people who respond to YOUR message, and that becomes YOUR House List.

You mail your House List several times a year, telling them what you are doing and asking for more money to do it with. Liberals do not make such regular reports to their field hands. Direct mail became famous when it was discovered to be the only major asset anti-liberals had.

In my time, a House List address was worth about fifty bucks, discounting the amount you would get by mailing for donations over and over. You would rent it for two or three cents a name, for people to test it for their own purposes and to mail it if their test paid off.

And this House List becomes an asset. Almost every activist you heard of back then had one or two organizations that were his basic source of income. That’s how we kept people in Washington while liberals got them jobs at Ford Foundations they had taken over.

None of this is a revelation. As Paul Weyrich pointed out in my New Rights Papers in 1982, if reporters ask about how the groups are financed, he just said “It’s in your press kits, guys.”

In order to do a new mailing, which is your bread and butter, you have to come up with something that is going on in the news. The reason it is in the news is because it excites people and it is being talked about.

Contrast this with the Mantra. Here is what will change the real future but you are well aware of how hard it is for anybody obsessed with the latest news to be concerned about the real war.

The reason people who are really deeply concerned don’t make it to the top in a movement is exactly the same reason that Futurology has nothing to do with the future. Those who get in the limelight are interested in what is interesting here and now for fundraisers, just as futurologists are interested in the limitless potential of wind power because that is what the Politically Correct grant-givers want to talk about.

A lot of this political stuff is really just common-sense mechanics.

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