exercise in the world. Perhaps I had always felt that I
knew what I WPS thinking, that I was aware of myself.
But, of course, like every man, I hadn’t the faintest damn
idea of what was going on inside my head. Head-tripping
in countless other minds, I had left the territory of my own
thoughts sacrosanct. Perhaps because I was afraid of what
I might find.
In those rambles, stirring down into my own id and ego
and superego, I found that I was purer, cleaner, less
rotted than I might even have hoped for. There were
things, of course, that terrified me and revolted me. But I
took heart in that they indicated my basic humanness, my
basic brotherhood with men, despite the fact I was made
from chemical sperm and chemical ovum.
In that one long night, I finally understood the nature
of society as I never had before. I had wrongly judged
men. I had labeled them as inferior to me, when this was
not the case. Some were inferior, some my equal, some
even my superior in ways. Each minim of intelligent life
on this planet was such an individual spark, such a varying
quantity and quality that no sweeping comparison could
ever be made. What I had always sensed and what I had
misinterpreted was that society was inferior to me. No
man. Society.
Society was an agglomeration of individuals equaling
less than its separate parts. In governments and institu-
tions, the men chosen to rule, chosen to make policy and
enforce decision, were those elected by the society that
supported them—and because each member of society is
different, because some median must be reached through
the ballot, mediocre men assume office. The very intelli-
gent vote for the intelligent candidates, but no one else
does, for everyone else distrusts intellect. The reactionary
and blind vote for their own slogan shouters, but no one
else does. In the end, the people in the middle range elect
their people, simply because they are in the majority. We
get the mediocre. And because the mediocre are ill-gifted
to deal with the problems of all factions of society, they
make bad government and bad institutions. They distrust
the intellectual and do not rely upon his wisdom. They
fear the reactionary and the blind because such people
threaten progress (a commodity the middle has been told
to embrace all its life). They repress the intellectuals and
the reactionaries and embrace their own people. But be-
cause they are mediocre, their own people are not served
well, and corruption flourishes. Where each individual of
society may be capable of governing his own sphere, the
agglomerate government is incapable of governing any-
thing except through intimidation and pure luck.
It may have been something that most people understand
early in life, but it was a revelation to me. To win the
games of existence, one must not attempt to fight by
society’s rules, because in most cases, one is fighting indi-
viduals, and not society. To win, one must attack the
game on individual terms—not against a stereotype, not
against a societal image, but against the other man, the
single adversary.
The way to deal with Morsfagen was not as a tendril of
the military plant, but as a man. His weaknesses did not
lie in his adherence to the consensus—the consensus was
too huge ever to be weak at all—but with himself, in his
own human psyche.
Still, my problem was not solved. If I was not god, not
the superior creature I had thought I was, how could I act
at all? How could I function as an ordinary man? From
birth, I had come to think of myself as something special,
something sacred and superhuman. The attempt, now, to
operate as just another man, would run against the grain
of a lifetime of smug theory and self-delusion.
And then, quite suddenly, I knew what I had to do. It
came like the nick of a razor in the morning, making me
jerk with more surprise than it deserved. I should have
understood what had to be done some time ago. I had to,
finally, become the supreme being, the god, that I had