Page:Michael Velli - Manual For Revolutionary Leaders - 2nd Ed.djvu/27

 powers of such an individual are synonymous with the powers of an office, and thus a given individual is in all respects identical to all the other individuals who personify the powers of the given office.

Although the total immersion of an individual in an office is an acute mental disorder, as will be shown below, it is frequently experienced as a social privilege, as a form of wellbeing. This is not a case of being meek in order to be exalted; it is not a case of deferred enjoyment, of present suffering for the sake of future exaltation, of self-estrangement as a means to a later reappropriation of self-powers. On the contrary, this subjective experience of wellbeing, this "self-satisfaction," is completely gratuitous; it has no human motivation. The experience of being privileged is itself lodged, not in the individual, but in the office. The "self-satisfaction" is characteristic of the given office.

This phenomenon of a total negation of self-powers accompanied by an internalized official self-satisfaction is extremely widespread among members of the academic establishment, formerly known as clerics, later as clerks, in France known as functionaries of the State, and known in the United States as professors. A professor is a clerk or functionary whose specific office it is to profess the thoughts of a given profession. In the past, at a lower level of personification of social powers, a similar functionary was said to profess the thoughts of a given school, or to read the conceptions of a given area of knowledge; this left open the possibility that, on another day, the same individual could profess the thoughts of another school, or read the conceptions of another area of knowledge. However, at the present level of personification, the individual is, or embodies, a given school of thought or area of knowledge. For example, a given functionary is a Sociologist, Economist, Anthropologist, Physicist. Furthermore, this is all the individual is, in exactly the same way that a chair is all that a chair is. An Economist cannot become an Anthropologist without ceasing to be what he was, any more than a chair can become a table without ceasing to be a chair, without first being decomposed into lumber and nails.

The individuals who occupy the offices of the academic establishment collectively personify the entire spiritual life of modern industrial society. The type of behavior which can be expected in these individuals has been illustrated by an experiment carried out at a major U.S. university. The "subjects" of the experiment were modern intellectuals. The experiment contained a random sample of individuals picked from among those who consider themselves, and are, military physicists, philosophers, mathematicians specializing in nuclear war, musicologists, specialists in the social-psychology of concentration camps, historians, price theorists, as well as aspirants to these offices. The "subject" of the experiment, the professor, is shown a room equipped with an electric chair. He is told that a "pupil" will be strapped to the chair during the course of the experiment. He is also told that the experiment is about "learning theory." Neither of these statements is in fact true; they are designed to elicit the behavior the professor would exhibit if the situation were real. In actual fact the