by Neil Robert Miller © 1995

Note: The two documents that follow, "The Messiah Syndrome" and "Autobiography of an American Paradigmisist", were written earlier this year by me, the author of Paradigm from California. Neither has been reviewed, edited, or, to my knowledge, even read by anyone before being placed at this site on the Internet on October 1st, 1995. That's the way it is, unfortuantely, with most everything I write.

The first document, "The Messiah Syndrome", was written as part of a group of rough notes that I wrote as a first draft for my planned, 1996 paradigm summary paper, which would be my fifth or sixth paradigm summary. "The Messiah Syndrome", tragically prevelant throughout the "therapy" and academic "community" of contemporary America, details one of the primary reasons why it is almost impossible for anyone to think through a paradigm like this without being personally destroyed by the professional community.

The second document, "Autobiography", was written to give some idea of the process involved in coming up with this paradigm. I focused on just those events that seemed relevant to the final figuring process. A rendition of the circumstances surrounding the formal figuring and writing processes begins about one third of the way through the document. Other accounts of the paradigm-writing period and my classroom work at McAteer High School, appear in various places in other paradigm documents.

These were originally produced as finely processesed documents, and translated into Acrobat form. I'm making them available here in harder-to-read, only lightly processed, "on-line" language, in order to make them available to readers who wish to scan them immediately, without downloading it or the Acrobat program. As with the summary document, without the processing, some of the color is lost, but the content remains essentially intact.

These materials are part of the Paradigm from California papers and, like all such papers, they are the exclusive intellectual and artistic property of Neil Miller - Copyright © Neil Robert Miller, 1978 - 1995. All rights strictly reserved. Except for limited personal use, such as downloading for reading off-line, they may not be reproduced in any form, without written permission. Neil Miller, P.O. Box 31035, San Francisco, California, 94131 e-mail neil@imaginenine.com

Both of these papers were written in 1995, the first in April, and the second in March.

The Messiah Syndrome
Autobiography


top up down position

Rough Notes for the proposed, all new, 1996 Paradigm Summary:

IX. The Messiah Syndrome

9. Professional persons are required by law to operate on the basis that there can be no high level solutions to the large scale problems that people face. This requirement is most overtly understood in the fields of law and psychiatry.

Persons in the professions and academia, particularly those concerned with the social sciences, have uniformly adopted, by law, the 'understanding' that there can be no high level solutions to the world's problems; you just get along as best you can in a word that's known to be unfixable. These matters are faced most squarely in the fields of law and psychiatry, wherein the professionals involved find themselves eye to eye with these matters in their daily work.

Rather than assist their overt client or patient or whatever, they find the strongest persons in the environs, and operate in what they think is that person's interest'..

They have concluded that there is nothing, really, that they or anyone else can do to change the overall system that causes the problems that they address. Thus, in their mind, no matter what they do, things never get better or worse - helpful to one is harmful to the other. They more or less figure out who the client is - the person coming to them with the problem (very rarely), the person's protection (the bill payer or employer), the professional person themself, or their own protection, their own above parties (most likely), or whoever, and they tailor their alleged assistance, legal, therapeutic, or whatever to what they understand to be the interests of that person.

Professional persons operate on the preposterous presumption that life itself operates on the same deranged basis that their above figures operate on.

The world is intrinsically an unhappy place, they have concluded, and more important, there's nothing anyone can do about it. This is difficult, particularly in the area of mental health, since all psychiatric problems emanate from the person's lack of caretaking and, more to the point, lack of protection for caretaking. Thus, the therapist spends most of their energy guiding their clients towards acceptance of an unhappy world, and therefore acceptance of the type of things in the world that evolution specifically arranged to make them unhappy.

Personality, or emotions, or ideas, or illnesses, those types of human properties, are created by a tribal or species-wide circumstance in the moment, specifically to serve the function of solving a tribal or species-wide problem over time. The idea that an upset person should sever their life from the higher level problem in the world at large, constitutes viciously destructive crackpot stuff, without one iota of defence in the clear light of day, and should never be confused with sanity, accuracy, or science.

The problem is that in the real life world of biology and human behavior, what is causing the psychiatric problem in the first place is lack of protection for caretaking. Mechanisms in the central nervous system of all humans are arranged to develop what are called 'psychiatric disorders' when caretaking goes awry, those internal mechanisms having the specific function of solving the problem in the larger world that caused the loss of caretaking in the first place. So nature has arranged for a person to correct the larger protection/caretaking problem through the mechanism of these 'disorders', while the psychiatrist insists that there is no problem of relevance in the larger world in the first place.

When the things that a person builds go awry, nature arranged that the person become very upset so as to help solve the larger problem. The job description of the professional person demands that they twist the person out of that sane and healthy continuation

So nature is insisting 'identify the larger problem in the overall cns chain and solve it, that's what these psychiatric problems were designed for in the first place, obviously" while the psychologist or psychiatrist is insisting - with scientifically incomprehensible and astoundingly direct inaccuracy - that the problem is within the person themself. I guess you have to call it crackpot science, you know, a bunch of deranged German guys sitting around a table under a bare light bulb, with funny hats and twisted looks on their faces. Intellectually speaking, that's about as high level as the protection gets for the world of psychiatry and psychological therapy.

At any rate, it's easy to imagine the number of suicides and other bad outcomes these professional people and academics have been a part of. With that many dead, you can imagine the investment in believing that "it all goes around and around" and "nothing you do really changes anything important anyway".

What happens if such a person is presented with some sort of large scale solution, which, if correct, amounts to a serious error in the person's life-long governing calculations, you know, the governing calculations that they've staked lots of other people's lives on, and their own? Being a liberal fellow, the legal, social, psychiatric, or science professional entertains the notion of a large scale solution, but concludes that if one existed, it must, necessarily, involve a savior of some sort. This lets the fellow, and, (whew) his protection off the hook, since it means any responsibility for outcomes is not his own responsibility and never was, or anyone else's either for that matter. This thought seems to make them feel better.

They conclude that if there could be an overall solution in the world at large, a deliberate, healthful, high level homeostatic change in the world around, it must necessarily involve someone else, not them, being the responsible party. Any solution or continuation that involves they themselves having to operate in a manner that might expose them to an evaluation of high level responsibility/irresponsibility could not possibly exist. That's rule number one.

So all association with higher level solutions in the world at large and related continuations must, if they could exist at all, must necessarily involve someone else having that responsibility in the world at large; someone else, outside the power of an ordinary mortal such as themselves. Hence, all conversation regarding high level solution, overall solution to any human problem at hand which a professional might be faced with, be it legal, social, psychiatric, or otherwise is always construed as messianistic; If there is a high level solution, then it must necessarily involve a messiah, they figure.

Thus, whenever a high ranking professional hears of some sort of plan, or even attempt at or desire for one, for altering an undesirable high level pattern in society at large, he thinks - I know this one: Messiah. For these professional people types, large scale societal solution equals messianistic solution. For the professional, it feels like the perfect avoidance of any awareness of personal responsibility for the crimes all around them, under any contingency; for professional people and academics, it seems to be 'the perfect crime', the archetype bourgeois frame of mind. For myself, I call this "The Messiah Syndrome", and, in order to receive or retain a license in any profession relating to the social sciences, one must prove, by their daily automatics, that they are afflicted with this particular, very rigidly maintained and obviously sociopathic disorder.

In short, if a person can only entertain a no-solution/messianistic-solution framework, and if the person cannot entertain an overall solution involving internal cognition, cannot entertain the idea of personal responsibility for determining accuracy in the world around them, claims to be neurologically blocked from being able to even entertain the idea of any personal responsibility for bringing about work-out-well continuations in the world around them, then that person has a psychiatric disorder which I call 'the messiah syndrome'. "Either no solution or the messiah solution". In the world of capitalist psychology, academia, psychiatry, and the social sciences, you gotta get it, you gotta have this disease, or you be sippin' wine on Mission Street before you know what hit you.

But what about the fabled Biblical tale of a messiah coming down to save everyone? What about that? The desperate graspings of your typical, professional, academic, or print or broadcast clown, or other corporate lackey.

Well, ok, maybe. Let's sort this one out. I think it's like this: Virtually every scientist or scholar who comes up with any new high level discovery, knows - necessarily, from their own experience - that if their solution works well, it will, in time, be superseded by something more advanced, something that better fits the larger context of a world in which the particular problem that they addressed is solved. This is a routine understanding that any discoverer of a high level matter is aware of. How about the biblical authors? Were they of the class of scholars that would have known that what they came up with would be superseded at some point? If they had any brains at all, they certainly would have figured that.

But there's another matter here. The solution that the bible gives seems to be ok, to at least some degree, as far as it goes, but it only identifies one third of the human judgment system, the part that is involved in "following" judgment, attachment judgment. There is no talk whatsoever that I know of, regarding an individual figuring out what is accurate, regardless of what attachment figures say. The bible seems to recommend that one finds the strongest attachment figure and believes him. It's all done with anecdotes and miracles - no math, logic, reason, science, etc.

This much is for sure, any group of words that refer to the killing of a large number of people as a victory, a victory in any human or biological sense of the term, passages that refer to any form of mass murder as any form of victory, any passages that make that association have nothing to do with any high level biological or bioecosystemic pattern emanating from anywhere within this bioecosystem or anywhere else, regardless of what some nazi/witch-burning/capitalist/ imbecile/king and his henchmen, or anybody else might claim. To ever equate mass murder with victory, EVER, is, obviously, a low level decision by some rather deranged persons rather than a continuance of any high level pattern. A religious mass murderer? A contradiction in terms, through all history and the whole world over. If the term "religion" is supposed to refer to "life's high level governing structure", this here bioecosystem that we're living in and its environs, then that statement, religious mass murderer, in itself constitutes a massive lie, and it is further, very much a 'consciously lying about what they actually perceive' type of lie. In that sort of case, both those behind the reporting of the events as well as those who are behind the events themselves are consciously lying about what they understand the truth to be.

Well, all that be as it may, still and all, it does seem pretty clear that at least some of the biblical authors were seriously out to put forth an overall work out well solution to the large scale problems that people face. But an overall work out well solution to the large-scale problems that people face cannot, rather obviously, be done with attachment judgment alone. The biblical authors must have known that something was very missing from their calculations. My own guess is that there were people around, desperate people, people like me, people who knew what was missing (intelligent cognitive figuring by the population at large) but were somehow dismissed and disassociated by the persons in charge of the writing project, or at least in charge of the particular writing project whose scrolls survived. Hope they weren't tortured to death out of hand, as is the current bourgeois practice regarding persons with useful clues.

But the authors whose works did survive, although discarding the most intelligent persons among them, did at least decide that they'd better make some mention, somehow or other, that there's more to it than what they were writing; they probably figured that they better mention that they were still missing something that would come in due course, later maybe, when maybe it wouldn't make them so uncomfortable. They should have put the whole cognition thing in in the first place, like those annoying people said, but at least they mentioned that there was another piece to come later. That's not much, but something anyway.

So instead of delving into the whole matter of "the individual's own personal responsibility for accurate, intelligent, cognitive figuring and conclusions irrespective of attachment figures" (heaven forbid) and instead of coming up with an elucidation of the processes therein involved (which should have formed at least a third of the core of the thing, if not two thirds), instead of getting it right the first time, and therein avoiding six thousand years of millions of horrors to come, they just said, well, someone else will come along later and finish the job - and they decided to refer to this not-as-yet-apparent phenomenon as 'the messiah'.

But they'd already set it up in the frame of following judgment, so some people figured, 'well, the bible says the key is to follow the big guy, and it also says there's more to be said. They must mean more following, maybe follow an even bigger guy, believe in even more strenuously, follow harder, or something'. Not too bright, but that's apparently what some people claim they figure. And of course the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, drools over that kind of stuff.

Well, if the term 'messiah' really was meant by biblical authors to mean the part that they hadn't figured out yet, the missing piece of the puzzle, still to come, the one that will finally solve this thing, well then, what they were grasping at was the cognitive portion of each individual's mind. Lo and behold (so to speak). Internal, responsible, cognitive, intelligent, work-out-well-all-around, careful, accuracy-based figuring in each individual, that's the part they were missing; that's the messiah. Kinda obvious, no?

It's like when Freud said that he knew about 'security' and 'anxiety' but there was some other piece of the puzzle that he knew was key but that he didn't know what it was and he wished someone else would figure it out (he'd be 'grateful', he said; well, how gracious, you're welcome Sigmund). Anyway, the full solution to Freud's puzzle was 'security' (protection), 'anxiety' (risk), and vitality (caretaking), this last and most key piece, of course, was invisible to him out of fear of " . . . being killed, professionally or even literally . . . " It was the communist part of the equation that he seems to have missed, surprise, surprise, and, since Freud lived on German turf in this century, well, his problem was obvious.

So anyway, back to the biblical prediction, if there really was a messiah coming, if they were right about that, what they must have had in mind was that there was some missing piece of what they were working on that they hadn't figured out yet. Actually, in their case, it wasn't so much a matter of them understanding that they would be eventually superseded, but rather a matter of them recognizing that they hadn't (like Freud) finished cracking their own case. They must have been writing that book for generations, centuries, even longer, and they must have been seeing that there was still something wrong, still something terribly amiss. In mentioning that they knew that there was still a vital piece to come, one that they hadn't figured out yet, they were being extremely responsible scholars, that's what you do, you give the clues to the next step, or at least inform that there is a required, still unknown next step.

The problem arises when people figured that what's still to come is more of the same: follow harder, ever more blindly, believe, believe, and believe again, etc. etc. Pretty messed up, if you ask me. That couldn't possibly be it; they already got all that following stuff down pat, whole bibles full, couldn't possibly be that that believe/follow stuff was what they had in mind to be likely to be the part that they hadn't figured out yet. That's the part (believing, following, anecdotes, etc.) that they already figured out and illustrated endlessly. They didn't need a messiah for that, they already had it.

So anyway, if the actual missing piece of the "solve-so-things-work-out-well-all-around" puzzle, if the missing piece of that puzzle can be referred to as the messiah, if the missing piece of the work-out-well puzzle was what the biblical authors had in mind when they said messiah, then, well, the messiah turns out to be the internal, cognitive, mathematical, five-senses, personally responsible, logical, singular-accuracy-based, same for everyone, reasoning portion of the human mind. That means you, the reader, you in particular (alongside six billion others). If one wanted to be dramatic, one could say "The Messiah is You", but actually, that's not actually true, it's more like "the messiah is the cognitive portion of your overall judgment system. And there are about six billion others who are in a similar predicament right alongside."

So 'The Messiah Syndrome' is a sociopathic mental disease, required by law of all social science professionals, and is manifested by a governing belief that there is either no real solutions to be found at all ('what's good for one is bad for another', a stinky trail of corpses left behind), or if there is an overall solution, it certainly could not involve their own responsibility, that is, must involve some sort of external savior, relieving them and their protection (how loyal) of any possible heat. Either there will be no solution in the world at large, or it will come in the form of a messiah; in any case, when a person is blocked from considering their own personal effect on large scale events and outcomes in the larger world, and insists that the very idea of a person having a high level effect on the world must, necessarily, be messianistic, they are said to suffer from 'the messiah syndrome'. In their minds, either no-solution, or the messiah-solution, but, at any rate, it's out of their hands. Classic bourgeois stuff.

The messiah syndrome, a psychotic mental illness, required by law for continued certification and heavily enforced across all professional and academic fields. One thing they've all signed in blood, they are personally not responsible parties in this world; if anyone ever could be, why, that must be the messiah. Well, these people are not exactly known for either their integrity or their brilliance.

Well, one last matter. If I (Neil) am informing you about these matters, and if I'm telling you to reason cognitively, overtly, and accurately, aren't I (Neil) telling you to follow me, believe in cognition, trust this pathway, etc. etc.?

I am telling you, I am attempting to influence you, overtly, literally, and in the clear light of day - in this case, specific words on paper - to follow me in the low level sense of me explaining why it turns out to be a good idea to actually do the thing that everyone says you're supposed to do (figure out, internally, carefully), but that everyone also says (wink wink) is all nonsense in the end. I am telling you to entertain the notion that careful, overt, same-for-everyone, c'mon, think about it, singular-accuracy-based figuring, to the highest levels required, is not at all nonsense, that every person can do that, accurately, extremely usefully, ongoingly; there's nothing nonsensical about it.

Once you actually consider this paradigm, 'Paradigm from California', which I've written, or, better still, the attached summary/abstract, once you actually consider it literally, carefully, cognitively, reasonably, critically, constantly testing for clarity and the presence or absence of self-evident accuracy, self-evident accuracy by your standards, without lying about what you understand, then, after that, you are on your own with your evaluations, your information gathering, your conclusions and decisions. I'm a teacher, get it? A public high school teacher. I introduce you to useful information, and ways of organizing it, and ways of using it to figure out useful stuff. Figure. Like logic, rational, mathematics, clear-light-of-day, comparisons, critical reasoning. That one-third part of everyone's thinking - the math part, the cognitive part - the one third part that, as genetically arranged, each person sees things in exactly the same way as every other person.

How to figure out what you need to know and why it's helpful to know; finding important but obscure information; useful organizing of the information, determining singular-same-for-everyone accuracy or inaccuracy, making lists of factors, figuring frameworks, figuring systems, defining questions, definitive, comprehensive answers. Building and using critical intellectual gridwork, permanent stuff. A schoolteacher, you know?. That's different from a messiah, see?

As I understand the popular conception of it, saviors don't build intellectual gridwork. Quite the contrary, they encourage shutting down that most critical portion of the mind and encourage a person to almost exclusively use their 'attachment' system, lock onto an attachment figure, and follow the flow. If it feels right, then it must be right, etc. etc. The capitalists and the bourgeoisie love it to pieces. Of course that particular system of high level mental organization has handsomely rewarded them with a trail of several billion grotesquely tormented corpses.

Well, back at school, the kids seemed to understand the distinction ok. But the professional people, boy, they are pretty dumb, let me tell you . . . I could tell you stories . . .

A person deciding to do some recommended reading and even deciding to go so far as to carefully evaluate what they read, over time, for accuracy, usefulness, clarity, and consistency, that's "following" at a much lower logical level than what is meant in the context of a messianistic leader.

Following at the high level means the ultimate judgment is elsewhere - you just have to decide who to believe, who to follow, who to trust - the internal, accuracy-based, case-by-case and side-by-side high level assessments, and critical comparisons with known, five-senses reality are out of your hands. Your first responsibility is to have faith, or believe, loyalty, stuff like that. As very high level concepts, those ideas have got nothing to do with what I am presenting.

Like I said before, all that "believe" stuff was all worked out in bible after bible, millenniums ago - we already got plenty of that, up to our eyeballs. That part of the solution, the attachment part, has already been in place for a very long time. Follow, Believe, I got it already. Enough already. It's not good enough. What the world needs now, is careful, alert, intelligent cognitive figuring on the part of each person. That means good nutrition, comfortable housing, little untimely loss, high quality art supplies, security of person, work-out-well useful work, superbly staffed, excellent public education facilities of all kinds; those are the things that engender the high quality intelligent figuring required for the solution needed this time around.

Good nutrition? Safe, comfortable housing? Excellent health care? Work-out-well-useful-work? all that stuff? Yum! Yaaaaayyyy Democrats. It is for this reason that it can easily be seen that the liberal Democrats, almost all the ones that I've ever looked at - Roosevelt, Stevenson, Kennedy, Humphrey, McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Como, Dukakas, Clinton (even the other Democrats were a thousand times better than the Republicans they faced) - the Democrats are the good guys, always were, and are. The Democrats always fight for the infrastructure - nutrition, housing, art supplies, work-out-well-useful-work, and all the rest - the infrastructure that engenders a more intelligent, thoughtful understanding on the part of the individuals of the entire population.

The Republicans, on the other hand, dishonestly fight against that type of stuff, they fight it tooth and nail, they fight to kill anything that would increase the intelligence or thoughtfulness of the members of the general population, and fight to kill it, dead, dead, dead. The Republicans feel psychiatrically compelled to keep everyone desperate and hostile. Somehow, deranged psychotics that they are, they feel safer whenever everyone is low and mean and desperate. I suppose it makes 'em feel confirmed and reconfirmed in their desperado operations. Guess they figure that if anyone ever figured out the difference between accuracy and inaccuracy, they figure they'd be in very deep trouble.

On the other hand the liberal Democrats are the good guys, education, housing, nutrition, work-out-well-work, all the things that are likely to engender intelligent, cooperative thinking on the part of the general population . . . well, liberal Democrats forever, that's what I say, and that's how I always talk and vote in elections, always. Well, as long as Clinton survives, it's Democrats, always, the good guys in any such contest, for sure. If he doesn't survive, of course, things might get pretty ugly everywhere, and also, well, this is the sort of case where there might be a low level exception or two, here and there.

I suppose I'd have to say that if Clinton goes down somehow, I presume the nazis would ferociously attempt to salt the Democrats with the most vicious crocodiles they could find, and, well, if that happened, I suppose that might be the end of that.

So anyway, as the person who discovered, figured out about, articulated, and presented this paradigm, this 'Paradigm from California', this phenomenon that will (well, actually, can) save us all, that phenomenon being the cognitive portion of each individual's internal evaluation and judgment system and the relevant biological blueprint of life that fits alongside it, as the guy who's bringing all that in from the blue, bringing in the part that biblical authors left out, discovering and presenting the part that is, in fact, the long fabled messiah, couldn't it be said that I'm the messiah? I mean, after all, you'd have to figure that the guy who discovers and tells you about what the actual messiah (cognition) actually is must himself be the messiah.

I don't think so. It's a fairly common thing to crack high level cases, Pasteur, Mendel, Curie, Archemedies, Maxwell, you could probably come up with scores, if not hundreds of just the best known ones. Not to mention the untold zillions of others who had it, who figured it out as good as, sometimes way better than the famous guys, but were murdered or tortured to death, or similarly died, desperate, in torment, and alone. But, the point is, coming up with something major and even presenting it oneself is not exactly unheard of in the history of science. Just because you come up with the sort of thing that Lavoisier or Newton came up with, doesn't mean you're a messiah.

True, what I'm presenting is an even bigger deal, at an even higher level than what those guys or Darwin or Marx or Copernicus came up with. So then, the top guy of all of them would be the messiah, right? No. Only if you're from New York are you allowed the special privilege of understanding me to be The Messiah, and even then, only if you are extremely respectful. As for the six billion full-fledged actual humans on the planet though, no, that's not right. The top person, in any sense, is not the messiah. The word "messiah" as generally understood explicitly means "someone who absolves you from personally, internally, on your own responsibility, figuring out based on what is singularly, same for everyone, and constant forever accurate and what will work out well". In other words, this whole idea of a messiah descending from the heavens to save everybody, or 'settle things' is an unfortunate, convoluted substitute for recognition of the internal cognition of each individual person as the key, long fabled, problem-solver.

The sort of people who have killed so much, by subtle manipulative means - social science professionals and academics and administrators, your typical psychiatrist, social worker, print or broadcast editor, legal advisor, not to mention those most disgusting butchers of all, their corporate and banking puppeteers - they are so stinky with blood, that they need to claim to think of it all as, out of their hands; that sort of person gravitates towards equating serious overall solution with 'messiahs'. In no way is that an accurate equation, and the epoxyed-together association of the two things - high-level-solution-equals-messiah-solution - brings forth obviously sociopathic outcomes and continuations. On the other hand, high-level-solution-equals-cognitive-solution brings forth sane and healthy outcomes and continuations.

Another problem for me about me personally being the messiah is that this messiah person also is explicitly said to have some superman properties, pull with the big stars, super pals 'n gals floating around, not to mention a well-planned afterwards-type life. To tell the truth, I wouldn't mind having at least a little of that, some of those things have occurred to me more than once, and, actually, I've been waiting, and begging, and hoping, and praying, and crying and screaming for years, for someone to make me an offer, but alas, I have none of those things. In fact, perhaps one of the reasons I survived at all and maybe even did a little better than some of those other guys, is the fact that I am kind of a little person, frail, timid, mousy, nervous, all alone, unhappily all curled up for days, months, years on end, a scaredy-cat par excellence, mumbling, stumbling, unlucky in the extreme, clumsy, graceless, toothless, a life-long failure with a inept sense of timing, and easily frightened away. Not exactly what you think of as messiah material. Not to mention an arrested development of some forty-odd years now and enough heavily compressed anger to make the world's big bad men look silly. Not only that, but, although I've almost never been punched, I am sure that one punch such as you see on television at the rate of ten per second, just one would break all my ribs and my face and kill me or maim me instantly.

In short, the usual understanding of the term messiah doesn't have any relevance whatsoever to my particular situation as far as I can tell; maybe I could don a funny hat, if that would make anyone feel better. Sure hope nobody gets pumped with the sort of twisted trash that makes them think I'm supposed to be crucified, typical corporate imbecile behavior (CIB). Anyway, as far as me personally being a messiah goes, please, get over it. As far as messiahs go, as I like to put it: 'You You You!' Not me. You. For myself, I plead, back problems.

Well, when you think about it, in the several million years of human evolution, it was mainly the physically weak, the very emotional, and the intelligent who had, over time, the best survival rate because those properties served the interests of survival of tribe and species. At least those properties are mainly what survived in humans, anyway. Well, anyway, maybe there's a connection . . . but only maybe . . .

Listen, get used to it, I have discovered The Answer (to how to make things work out well all around, major), and have written it up into several entirely publishable documents called "Paradigm from California", but I am NOT The Messiah. Once again, I have discovered
The Answer but I am NOT The Messiah. I am certain that it is possible for your average Homo Sapien to hold those two things in their mind at the same time, c'mon, you can do it. It's sort of like walking and chewing gum at the same time - a little complicated at first maybe, but really, not all that hard.

Maybe you could look at it this way, maybe you could say I'm a scientist with the 19th century frame of mind (cure the world) and a public high school teacher with 21st century information (the cure). The 20th century? what's that. Maybe that's what everyone's problem is; apparently, it's an unusual phenomenon. A throwback and a premonition, with the middle part missing. Where did that middle part go, anyway? It was right here a minute ago . . .

I suppose maybe one reason I wind up seeming a little unusual is because the rest of us were so viciously tortured to death, ripped limb from limb, and murdered out of hand, among hundreds of millions of loves of our lives, in Armenia, at Treblinka, in Leopoldville, Detroit, Santiago, the Plain of Jars, no doubt usually, in fact specifically, just as they were getting close, often, specifically because we were getting close. Ask the nazis, they'll tell you straight up That's Right!! To the nazis, to the Capitalists, to The Bourgeoisie, to the deranged, bloodthirsty, and satanic Corporate Imbeciles and their entire imbecile/idiot 'community', repulsive monsters all, just as someone is getting close, that is their favorite execution, big time. Malcom!!!

Maybe I'm just that one in a million random little fishie that happened to slip, stumbling, sleeping, screaming, through the net.

And oh god, lived to tell the tale.

Of course, so far anyway.

Autobiography of an American Paradigmisist

Possible Titles:

Disassociated Autobiographic Notes

Confessions of a Hard-Core Communist

Acute Obsessional Character Disorder; A Case History

Disassociated Psychiatric Notes

A cute Obsessional Character Disorder With a Side Order of Hysteria; A Case History

Phobia Deficit Syndrome

Megalomania and Masochism in a Patient with Hyper-Perceptive Schizophrenic Disorder and Compound Panic States

The Man Who Knew Too Much

One Little Boy

The Invisible Man

Memoirs of a "Solve By Clear-Light-Of-Day Figuring" Leftist

The French Revolution: Part Three

Prologue to a Scientific Revolution

The Making of a Paradigm

Application for a trillion dollar grant for me to take over the world and order everybody around

(c'mon, pleeeeasseeeee,
you'll like it, it'll be great . . .
c'mon, what's a trillion bucks,
pocket change. The Republicans
snort that up their nose in one term . . .
Me? I could take this planet in six weeks . . .
turn it into a palace, six billion people wide, a starship . . . )

Formative events:

born in Brooklyn in 1944, Nov. 13. dad was physician, mom was social worker.

raised in Flatbush - childhood in aftermath of W.W.II and McCarthy days. Directly.

summer camps - girls' camps, Sandy Neck (Mass.), Bearnstow (Maine), formative . . .

public school to eighth grade; teachers: PS 219, Mrs. Goldfarb, 4th grade (she liked me ); Somers (JHS 252), Mr. Bleckman (math) 7th grade (he taught us to figure out what was actually true when the advertisers lied to you); then three private schools, Joji Yakoshima, 9th grade, 'till 10, 11, 12 at Stockbridge, Mass. Charlie Wilborn, previously a CIA propagandist, in 10th grade and Ken Edlin, later a renowned physician, in 11th grade. With Charlie (a kind of a James Bond type, sort of), people on suspension would sneak under the windows to hear him teach; he taught Roman History with a deep belly laugh, 'specially the circuses; his descriptions of the rulers then, still flash through my mind now (have you noticed?); guess he was in a position to know . . . and Kenny, a brash kid, fresh out of Columbia, an incredibly entertaining math teacher, and, if he was sleeping with one eye open when you went over the wall (into the Pigalle) you better have it covered. And we always did. When the chips were down, which was often, he was always straight as an arrow; Kenny was very cool, in many ways. From the CIA and from offa the streets of Roxbury, both, the major teacher role models. And Hans Maeder, headmaster, a late 30's democrat-type political refugee from the Nazis, pals with Hammerskhold, Brandt, big time stuff, and a kind, gentle, strict, and intelligent person, all German, Hans was the good guys, for sure. And Alex, my best friend. And, Eileen . . .

'64 - Hiram College, one term, Mr. Ravits (English); he told me I was Melville's Bartleby, or maybe Melville himself; it took me thirty years to figure out what he meant, jeeez, are you supposed to do that to a poor sweet innocent little kid . . .

60's - DuBois Clubs NYC Education Officer. Recruited members by giving talks about the history of Vietnam and daily life under the Viet Minh . . . school integration 'study-ins' in Bedford-Stuyvesant . . . local safety officer at anti-war demonstrations . . . spokesman . . . Had my picture published in the paper right there next to J. Edgar Hoover's, him calling my group public enemy number one. Pretty good, huh? The drag queen Himself! Not everyone gets that, not just your ordinary, everyday garden variety communist, nosirree. But with the DuBois Clubs, I was iced, never did meet the more famous Club Officers . . . a decade later I was rejected from the Vencaremos Brigade, for not being political enough. It's odd, both the formal leftists and the Democratic Party have greeted me with almost exactly the same sort of straight arm. Iced . . . met Dellinger, Hoffman, Davis too . . . 'round the corner, up the street . . . same thing, ice ice baby . . . the invisible man . . . a pariah among pariahs, sort of like kings of kings, except going the other way . . . years later, in San Francisco and Berkeley too, from group after group, 'go away, you don't exist' . . . to this very day . . .

60's - Europe - Yugoslav labor camp, at 20 I was the oldest person (and the only non-Yugoslav) in a camp of thousands; the commanders were girls; we built a huge dike . . . M'lada, M'lada, Udarnik Brigida . . . uniforms, flags waving in the chill dawn wind . . . girls and guys, shoulder to shoulder, Serbs, Croats, Macedonians, Bosnians; sweat pouring down . . . the teeniest bikinis I'd ever seen . . . boisterous soccer in the afternoon; speeches, meetings, quiet songs in the evenings; hot rum for breakfast . . . everyone arm in arm . . campfires every night . . . and that huge, huge dike we were building, protecting the city of Zagreb . . . whenever I think of it, it always seems like a Chinese fairy tale . . . the dream time . . .

60's - on the road . . . u.s. mexico, europe, north africa . . . hitchhiked maybe 1,000 rides*, a few years . . . seemed to get along with long-haul truckers, don't know exactly why . . . big 'ole USMC tatoo on his arm, boxed-in ears, one meaty individual . . . the towns roll by . . . ". . . aaahhhh, McCarthur, phony sonofabitch . . ." <wha??> . . . '. . . peiping . . . now the Chinese, there's a sorry people, maybe the Communsits, maybe that Mao Tse Tsung can do something for 'em . . . ' <what the hell am I hearing . . . > . . . sleeping in barns, pickups, wheat fields in Iowa and Louisiana, guest rooms and saunas in Sweden and Finland . . . reading Fleming's 'Cold War and its Origins' as I traveled, that was my riff . . . the major factory work next to Turks in Berlin, waiting tables for the rich on the 'Grand Place' in Brussels, down and out in Kristansand at christmas . . . dreaming of Yemen with Tamar in Amsterdam . . .

60's - Pablo Light Show, Jay, the slide room at the Electric Circus, 'specially in the early days, Felt Forum at MSQ, we even played Carnegie, classical music, Satie, Miles, Winter, Bach, gorgeous slides, Jay in top form, incredible matrixes, they loved it . . . zillions of benefits, road tours . . . cameraman and teacher for Arnold Eagle at the New School, motion pictures . . . Photo instructor at Fairly Dickenson . . .

60's - hair down to my knees; nameless faceless homefront footsoldier of the day. Carefully made 50,000 photographs and 5,000 meticulously crafted prints, people in New York streets and environs. There's a main collection of 33. Couple of highest level curators examine them with their eyes popping out; talk of Aspen, social engagements . . . I talk of hard cash for art supplies and rent . . . come back when something happens . . . < not yet pal > . . . Bleeker Street at the Bowery for five years. Cockroaches and derelicts and gorgeous people and gorgeous pictures and gorgeous music and long warm talks in the night, and 200 demonstrations and tales of china and paris and chile and the whole world over and light shows and news reports and leaflets and journals and mount board and photons and books and developer coming out of my ears and washing through them. And alone, and down and out . . .

to SF - 1972

<< Chilean Coup - 1973 >> formative.

1974 - Desperation, in the extreme . . . dreams of doing a morning radio show . . . crash . . . the clocks, stop . . . on my thirtieth birthday, Nov. 13, Karen Silkwood is murdered . . . not a sign not a sign not a sign not a sign not a sign not a sign not a sign not a sign not a sign not a sign . . .

1975 - I visit NY and my mom and sister make me an offer, shock treatment or disownment (remains in force to this day . . . ). I choose the latter and high-tail it, quickly.

community groups - slide shows, la pena, mime troupe, Vanguard, Lone Mountain, project one, early and mid 70's. Pablo Media Artists and Technicians.

1977 - A school program director of a fading 60s' program picks me out of a CETA lineup of twelve photographers . . . Ruth Asawa, Leah Forbes nod their heads . . . Bernice Brown also, later . . .

McAteer High School. (!!!) SFUSD! I'm in! A real live high school, the genuine creature, captured! for starfleet, I can hardly believe it . . . 'the dove has landed' . . . in a daze . . . within a month, we have an exhibit of about three dozen mounted, enlarged, signed student photographs of families and friends, sharp and clean, excellent framing and expression, ready for the program's packed Thanksgiving dinner. My first real photo exhibition of my life and none of the photographs are mine . . .

1977 - Photography. 1978, CETA grant runs out, and in those Carter/Democrats days, administrators were looking for ways to keep kids in school (unlike later, under the Republicans, when they were looking for ways to drop them out) . . . < idle muse > 'always wanted to teach a class in how to read newspapers . . . ' < instant retort > 'what periods do you want . . .' ( . . . probably didn't hurt that the extra attendance brought in more than a million dollars in extra state attendance funds . . . also that the District Attorney, the Chronicle editorial page editor, a professor of child psychiatry at UC, a high level City administrator (two of whom wrote me beautiful letters of recommendation) all had daughters in my classes over the years, and the children of Republicans galore and Democrats, and feminists . . . so a sort of 'shell game' ensued, with some paper shuffling, and, me (eagerly) accepting that there will be no pay, no legal status, and no credit . . . (i'm used to it) . . . shhhhh . . .

Background - 1978 - ninth and tenth graders - day one: I pass out copies of a pair of articles, one from Fortune about what a sweetie-pie company Nestles is, and the other a pamphlet from a British mothers' group about Nestles and massive infant formula deaths in Kenya . . . "Somebody's telling the truth and somebody's lying, big time, your job is to figure out who, and our job is to figure out and articulate how you tell . . . "

term two: << an engine turns over (click, click . . .) >> . . . it's starting to look like something went wrong about ten thousand years ago . . . and we're gonna crack it . . . and fix it all up . . .

Research - 1979

Deanna at 15

'We have ignition . . .' . . . at last . . .

The Big Books begun, small group notes, foundation proposals, curriculum, class logs, exams, verbatims . . .

Margaret Singer takes over my case, she offers lithium and other psychiatric drugs. I put the question to my research classes at McAteer, who happened to be doing their research paper that term on "The Suppliers and Effects of Psychotropic Substances, Prescription and Street". They considered for a few days, 'should teacher take psychiatric drugs under the guidance of a psychiatry professional?', they did a little research, and came back with a resounding no (hey teach, you ain't crazy, they crazy . . . enough zombies around here as it is . . .). When I delivered the verdict to Margaret, she came back with the major green light for the big time research 'with those kids'. I think she liked the clear-light-of-day cognition, the scope and depth of sources, the overt/covert match-up regarding the work-out-well-all-around goal, and the absolute integrity. But then again, maybe she was just trying to get rid of me, bourgeois-style; to this day I don't know which. Anyway, she did a few last sessions with me in front of classes of her students, as demonstration classes at UC (she always said I'd make the world's greatest therapy teacher, then again, maybe it was a case of 'now this is a specimen . . .'), and bowed out. (. . . haven't talked to her in fifteen years . . .)

After four years at Mac, I was awarded a long awaited Teaching Diploma by my research students, my first (and only) credential of any kind.

. . . the dream time, again . . . fifteen camping trips, four or five days each, me alone with 12, 20, 30 kids in a far corner of a state or federal park, small groups, big group, talk talk, notes, notes, new games, discussion, verbatims, lectures, more notes, more notes, back in town, typing parties, food, music, lotsa folks hangin' out, five typewriters running non-stop for hours and hours - everything typed-in, the big books grow and grow . . . and foundation grant proposals, which I wrote, thirty thousand dollars delivered and eighty thousand promised . . . And in class, brought my own, warm, photo lights to replace the school's florescents, scores of postcards of classical paintings carefully mounted and arranged on the walls, gorgeous kids' pictures of friends and families too, dozens of current political magazines, carefully posted in large diamond shapes, always available, left and right, National Review, Nation, New York Times, Conservative Digest, Lesbian Tide, News of the World, South East Asia Chronicle, US News and World Report, Newsfront International, Forbes, Connexions . . . and right in the middle of a mainstream, big city high school . . . kids passing in and out to classes in the rest of the building, period by period . . . I build a free standing, three-tiered light table from my old Pablo days big enough for four kids to sit around. . . in one corner, kids painting slides, in another, coming up with mid-term exam questions which they'll then explain to everybody; along that wall, kids dry-mounting slick advertisements from 'Seventeen' for careful political scrutiny, and me, teaching classes of twenty, thirty, more, about Gold Flower and Communist Revolution in the Sinkiang Mountains in the 1930's, carpet bombing in Vietnam, the great Lawrence strike, Watergate, John Lennon, The French Revolution, S.E. Asia Electronics workers, corporations building dams and flooding homelands in the Philippines, mitochondria and homeostasis in the New England Journal of Medicine . . . Rm. 118, 3rd period, humungous, extremely serious, screaming, screaming 20 way political arguments about deep psychiatric matters with deeply hysterical fourteen year olds and me, their deeply obsessional teacher . . . I figured it was like Mao and Ching in the Forbidden City . . . except more advanced, they only had history and poetry; we had that, plus, Science . . . assigned, verbatim note takers . . . typed in at typing parties, transcripts gone over in class and argued about some more . . . filed in the big books . . . 'everybody's family lives a Tolstoy novel, a Homerian epic, a Biblical tale' . . . it was a scene . . . it was a scandal . . . it was The Oddesy . . . it was The Invisible Man, except not invisible with those kids, some of them even liked me . . . although it took me fifteen years to figure that out . . . dark rumors of "cult", drugs, molestation . . . surly teachers, surly parents . . . everything so illegal, no record of my existence . . . the District must have deniability . . . no money, nobody knows, nobody understands, nobody can stand to understand, apparently and frighteningly, except the kids . . . McAteer offers me my own site, I adamantly decline, refuse, I say, "no, I don't want to get isolated with this" . . . parents tell me that if I supported vouchers, I'd have my own school, I say never, the only boss I want to be accountable to is the general public, public schools forever, that's what I say . . . And everyday, in class, Photography, Background, Research, multiple class periods, and music, Deanna's music classes, the girl's chorus, "Hey Jude . . ." incredible, unbelievable, gorgeous . . . STUNNED EVERYONE . . . stunned me too, big time . . . this girl is ready . . . and hours and hours in the evening, talking with kids in cafes around town, in threes, fives, ones, in their homes, talking talking, notes notes . . . every term, sift the notes, the 'close friends paper' in two volumes four terms now, the news media paper, bring forward, sift, combine, crystallize, advance . . . every year, 'how could we have been so naive last year . . . ' every year . . . major leaps . . . I didn't know you could learn so much so quickly, year after year after year . . . and the big books, beautifully indexed, keep on growing . . . sift, bring forward, advance, gather, sort, arrange, explain, explain, crackin' sentences, crackin' cases, words, alert, cognitive, critical, straightforward, accurate/not-accurate, crystallize, advance . . . everyday, all the time, kids in my face, and me, desperate me, in their's, 5,000 stand-up classroom lecture hours, plus evenings, weekends, holidays, big time . . . work-out-well becomes work-out-well-all-around . . . we're closing in on a paradigm! . . . long warm talks in the dark of night . . . the dream time . . . again . . .

1983 - January 15th, Catastrophe.

. . . the clocks stop, again . . .


. . . and September 25, compounded.

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