David Mamet: The Secret Knowledge

Temple Grandin, an animal behaviorist, cattlewoman, and designer of livestock systems, is autistic and writes extensively about the similarities between autism and animal thinking. Both think in pictures. Both learn through observation. A hand-reared animal does not know how to behave in the wild, what is food, what is threat, and how to behave toward its superiors. Stallions, she writes, have a reputation for viciousness but are not vicious because they are stallions, but because they, being valuable creatures, have been raised in isolation. They have never learned the submission and dominance patterns of the group.

College, while it may theoretically teach skills, also serves to delay the matriculation of the adolescent into society. He, thus, does not get a chance either to submit to nor to observe unfettered human interaction. This student, not surprisingly, develops a sense of immunity which, after graduation, often results in either a string of failures and rejections, or in his retreat to the exclusive coterie, and extended college-like atmosphere of protection, this last if he is blessed with the crippling curse of not having to make a living. 13

As we live by our brains, and as our brains function best through observation, the absence of actual experience of the world opens the student to formation of some conclusions which have no or only harmful application outside the halls of ivy. If he is rewarded by pleasing the teacher, that is, by repeating an endorsed behavior, he, like any other animal, is going to take his learning out into the world. “George Washington, Father of our country—have a pellet of food . . . Thomas Jefferson, third President, but owned slaves and kept a mistress—have an appointment as a graduate instructor.” Light comes on, pull lever, get pellet of food. This is fine for the rat, for the rat lives in the lab. In the wider world, however, the path to food is more demanding and its signals cannot be learned inside the lab. To keep pulling the lever when the technicians are gone is called the Cargo Cult.

The Trobriand islanders profited from the presence among them of the Allied Forces in World War II. The forces left, but the islanders kept building driftwood airplanes in the hopes of luring back the food and support.

“Thomas Jefferson, third President, adulterer, slave owner.” In the lab—get a pellet. Out of the lab—no pellet. Obvious answer—never leave the lab. But the Left may supply the pellet for the ex-student. It is now not a grade, but the protection of the herd.

The problem for the ex-student, however, may be different from that of the rat. The rat pulls the lever, but the college student has to supply a phrase , and the phrase has semantic content.

Semantics is the study of how words influence thought and action. “Sit down” will have a different response than, “Sit right down,” “Sit the hell down,” “Oh, sit down,” “Please sit down,” and so on. The college student is not merely pulling a lever, but repeating ideas. He, of course, comes to prize the ideas whose repetition rewarded him. He thinks these ideas themselves are good. How could he think otherwise? For they have brought him food, and so are good. And so unquestionable.

But like the rat in the wild, looking for something shaped like a lever, the released student/intellectual will and must look for opportunities to exercise his learned behavior, and win a reward. The reward may be status or position. It is, more usually, safety in the group.

Thomas Jefferson, slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever.

Why, then, should the student, raised in captivity, examine either the content or the consequences of this connection?

He is of that group, and rewarded for being of that group which knows that slave-owning is bad. But everyone knows that slave-owning is bad. The owners did as much as the slaves. There is no actual wider benefit or merit in being able to repeat it, so its repetition is useful only as a recognition symbol, allowing its utterer access to those whose thinking process is similarly limited.

Group recognition symbols are essential; that’s why we all play, “Oh, do you know . . . ?” That’s how our animal minds know whom to trust and whom to kill. But a further cost of these intellectual recognition symbols is a membership in a group trained to repeat rather than to consider.

Thomas Jefferson was an adulterer; so was every President, most likely. That’s why men get into politics; it gives them power. Power brings sex, just as it was in the cave days. Politicians are supposed to have a wife. With increased success they can have all the sex they want, so they are invited to commit adultery. And those who do not steal (and many do not, but some do), will bend the laws, some for personal benefit, for contributions, for the benefit of friends, some in the service of their Country, some through folly. Because they have power.

What else does power do? How might one abuse power? How does one seek it? Knowing the nature of power, why is one inclined to abdicate any power or reason, blindly praising a person or idea? 14Ideas may accrete into a philosophy, which is a coherent ordered view of the world, or they may accrete into an elaborated recognition symbol, a series of degrees like that of the Masons.

Che Guevara was a mass murderer; we have his depiction on the walls of our children’s rooms. We do not have there the picture of Charles Manson. Why? Che “sought power for the People.” How does one know? One has been told. But wait, as a politician, he was probably no different from Thomas Jefferson, which is to say, he was just a man. Is it different, being a mass murderer and being an adulterer? “Ah, but I have seen Che’s photo on the bedroom wall of my son.” Would I so mislead my son? Why not? It was done to you. And me.

Kindness is good. No doubt. What, however, is kindness? Kindness to the wicked is cruelty to the righteous. As a child I read of the Tibetan monk who left his home, walked a thousand miles and discovered, hidden in his robe, an ant which only existed in his home village. So he walked the thousand miles back to replace the ant, to avoid doing it violence. But how many ants did he step on on the way?

“Practice random acts of kindness.” Is it kindness to give a few dollars to a beggar who is likely to spend it on alcohol? Do I have the interest or ability to determine actually what his problem is, and if I should, how I should help him? Or is it just easier to give him the money? Of course it is, for it makes me feel good, as I may call it kindness.

Is it kindness to pass a real estate bill, which while rewarding some, harms most and brings our country close to bankruptcy?

The problems of the real world are real problems, and most of us are overprotected beings. You and I may pull the lever of Reward Me for the Right Answer—so far so good. But the effects will be far reaching, as our rewards have a semantic content, and our learned responses which we understand as “basic truths,” and, so, beyond question, will affect not only ourselves but others.

“Capitalism is bad”? Not the capitalism that founded and supported Stanford or Harvard or Penn; not that which makes our clothes, and cars and guitars, and brings the food and so on, and not that which employs and supports us, or has supported the parents which supported us; and not those businesses we, in our dreams, would like to create (“Gosh, I’ve got a billion-dollar idea”). But we have gotten the pellet for repeating that capitalism is bad, Thomas Jefferson was an adulterer, and the loop is closed because we have been rewarded. So let us vote for higher taxes on business, although if we look around, California, with the highest taxes in the country, is broke, having taxed business away. And let us vote for a top-down economy, for certainly Government, which destroys most everything it touches, can run the auto industry better than businesspeople can. But by what convoluted logic does it make sense that a man who never made a car can make cars better than an industry of carmakers? Do you want your surfboard made by a surfboard maker or an oceanographer? But Thomas Jefferson had slaves.