‘Well-you didn’t have to make it so personal.’
‘Ah, but I did have to. We were speaking of the psychodynamics of emotion, and emotions are personal, subjective things which must be experienced to be understood. You were of the belief that you, as an educated man, were immune to this form of attack-so I ran a lab test to show you that no one is immune. Now just what did I say to you?’
‘You said-Never mind. Okay, so it was a test. But I don’t care to repeat it. You’ve made your point: I don’t like it.’
‘But what did I say? All I said, in fact, was that you were the legitimate offspring of a legal marriage. Right? What is insulting about that?’
‘But’-I stopped and ran over in my mind the infuriating, insulting, and degrading things he had said-and, do you know, that is absolutely all they added up to. I grinned sheepishly. ‘It was the way you said it.’
‘Exactly, exactly! To put it technically, I selected terms with high negative indices, for this situation and for this listener. Which is precisely what we do with this propaganda, except that the emotional indices are lesser quantitatively to avoid arousing suspicion and to evade the censors-slow poison, rather than a kick in the belly. The stuff we write is all about the Prophet, lauding him to the skies. . . so the irritation produced in the reader is transferred to him. The method cuts below the reader’s conscious thought and acts on the taboos and fetishes that infest his subconscious.’
I remembered sourly my own unreasoned anger. ‘I’m convinced. It sounds like heap big medicine.’
‘It is, chum, it is. There is magic in words, black magic-if you know how to invoke it.’
After dinner Zeb and I went to his cubicle and continued to bat the breeze. I felt warm and comfortable and very, very contented. The fact that we were part of a revolutionary plot, a project most unlikely to succeed and which would most probably end with us both dead in battle or burned for treason, affected me not at all. Good old Zeb! What if he did get under my guard and hit me where it hurt? He was my ‘family’-all the family that I had. To be with him now made me feel the way I used to feel when my mother would sit me down in the kitchen and feed me cookies and milk.
We talked about this and that, in the course of which I learned more about the organization and discovered-was very surprised to discover-that not all of our comrades were brethren. Lodge Brothers, I mean. ‘But isn’t that dangerous?’
‘What isn’t? And what did you expect, old son? Some of our most valuable comrades can’t join the Lodge; their own religious faith forbids it. But we don’t have any monopoly on hating tyranny and loving freedom and we need all the help we can get. Anybody going our direction is a fellow traveler. Anybody.’
I thought it over. The idea was logical, though somehow vaguely distasteful. I decided to gulp it down quickly. ‘I suppose so. I imagine even the pariahs will be of some use to us, when it comes to the fighting, even if they aren’t eligible for membership.’
Zeb gave me a look I knew too well. ‘Oh, for Pete’s sake, John! When are you going to give up wearing diapers?’
‘Huh?’
‘Haven’t you gotten it through your head yet that the whole “pariah” notion is this tyranny’s scapegoat mechanism that every tyranny requires?’
‘Yes, but-‘
‘Shut up. Take sex away from people. Make it forbidden, evil, limit it to ritualistic breeding. Force it to back up into suppressed sadism. Then hand the people a scapegoat to hate. Let them kill a scapegoat occasionally for cathartic, release. The mechanism is ages old. Tyrants used it centuries before the word “psychology” was ever invented. It works, too. Look at yourself.’
‘Look, Zeb, I don’t have anything against the pariahs.’
‘You had better not have. You’ll find a few dozen of them in the Grand Lodge here. And by the way, forget that word “pariah”. It has, shall we say, a very high negative index.’