There is a point at which it becomes perfectly clear to you that you are not something struggling against everything else or being victimized by everything else, but that what is going on—insofar as you can experience it—is your own doing. And the flip from one state to the other is just like getting the knack in swimming, riding a bicycle, or any other athletic or artistic activity.
To learn an excellent discipline, and to learn it well, you’ve got to goof your way into it.
What is the meaning of your understanding what I’m saying? See? We’re all sitting around here, and you are listening to these signals, and you are interpreting them into signals of your own. But look at the situation from above: what a crazy assembly! Because what we are doing, gathering here, making noises (and very complicated noises), is essentially no different from what this tree is doing out here, spreading out its branches with all these little twigs and things sticking out—and by Jove, what is it doing?
Understanding this to be so—that we should be madmen in the sense of abandoning this whole project of the survival of the race, civilization, and so on—this is the only way in which we can restructure human life, and unplug various purely abstract and political engines that are totally destructive.
What is important is what is unimportant, which is the jazz. And that is important, not that it should go on, but in the doing thereof. So this creates what some people might call a new political strategy, which we will call the politics of diversion. That is to say: living a style of life which everybody sees that we’re enjoying and is so great, they’ll say, “Oh, I wish we could be like that.”
It is through application and study and earnestness that we have the atom bomb. We say, “Well now, look at all the things we civilized people have achieved!” Uh… yeah, but you’re about to blow up the planet, which seems to be the price of it.
You cannot employ non-hostile, non-destructive technical skill unless you realize basically that you yourself are this whole domain of nature. That’s the real you. You are not in a fight against nature. You’re not here to conquer nature—because there’s nothing to conquer! It’s all you.
When you use technology to bulldoze everything into submission, you’re fighting yourself. You’re all tied up, clutched up, like the person trying to lift himself off the floor by his own bootstraps. And in that process you’re dissipating all your energy on something that can’t be done, and therefore you’re just getting tired out, and you’re going to drop dead.
Irresponsibility is the basis of responsibility. That, if we destroy the basic irresponsibility, the consequent style of responsibility that we learn is useless, because it’s all for nothing.