-Caveat Lector-
``Very nice,'' I said. ``But why did you bring me up here?''
``It's time for you to see the fnords,'' he replied.
Then I woke up in bed and it was the next morning. I made
breakfast in a pretty nasty mood, wondering if I'd seen the fnords,
whatever the hell they were, in the hours he had blacked out, or if I
would see them as soon as I went out into the street. I had some pretty
gruesome ideas about them, I must admit. Creatures with three eyes and
tentacles, survivors from Atlantis, who walked among us, invisible due
to some form of mind shield, and did hideous work for the Illuminati. It
was unnerving to contemplate, and I finally gave in to my fears and
peeked out the window, thinking it might be better to see them from a
distance first. Nothing. Just ordinary sleepy people, heading for their
busses and subways. That calmed me a little, so I set out the toast and
coffee and fetched the New York Times from the hallway. I turned the
radio to WBAI and caught some good Vivaldi, sat down, grabbed a piece of
toast and started skimming the first page.
Then I saw the fnords.
The feature story involved another of the endless squabbles
between Russia and the U.S. in the UN General Assembly, and after each
direct quote from the Russian delegate I read a quite distinct
``Fnord!'' The second lead was about a debate in congress on getting the
troops out of costa Rica; every argument presented by Senator Bacon was
followed by another ``Fnord!'' At the bottom of the page was a Times
depth-type study of the growing pollution problem and the increasing use
of gas masks among New Yorkers; the most distressing chemical facts were
interpolated with more ``Fnords.''
Suddenly I saw Hagbard's eyes burning into me and heard his
voice: ``Your heart will remain calm. Your adrenalin gland will remain
calm. Calm, all-over calm. You will not panic. you will look at the
fnord and see the it. You will not evade it or black it out. you will
stay calm and face it.'' And further back, way back: my first-grade
teacher writing FNORD on the blackboard, while a wheel with a spiral
design turned and turned on his desk, turned and turned, and his voice
droned on, IF YOU DON'T SEE THE FNORD IT CAN'T EAT YOU, DON'T SEE THE
FNORD, DON'T SEE THE FNORD . . .
I looked back at the paper and still saw the fnords. This was one
step beyond Pavlov, I realized. The first conditioned reflex was to
experience the panic reaction (the activation syndrome, it's technically
called) whenever encountering the word ``fnord.'' The second conditioned
reflex was to black out what happened, including the word itself, and
just to feel a general low-grade emergency without knowing why. And the
third step, of course, was to attribute this anxiety to the news
stories, which were bad enough in themselves anyway. Of course, the
essence of control is fear. The fnords produced a whole population
walking around in chronic low-grade emergency, tormented by ulcers,
dizzy spells, nightmares, heart palpitations and all the other symptoms
of too much adrenalin. All my left-wing arrogance and contempt for my
countrymen melted, and I felt a genuine pity. No wonder the poor
bastards believe anything they're told, walk through pollution and
overcrowding without complaining, watch their son hauled off to endless
wars and butchered, never protest, never fight back, never show much
happiness or eroticism or curiosity or normal human emotion, live with
perpetual tunnel vision, walk past a slum without seeing either the
human misery it contains or the potential threat it poses to their
security . . .
Then I got a hunch, and turned quickly to the advertisements. it
was as I expected: no fnords. That was part of the gimmick, too: only in
consumption, endless consumption, could they escape the amorphous threat
of the invisible fnords. I kept thinking about it on my way to the
office. If I pointed out a fnord to somebody who hadn't been
deconditioned, as Hagbard deconditioned me, what would he or she say?
They'd probably read the word before or after it. ``No this word,'' I'd
say. And they would again read an adjacent word. But would their panic
level rise as the threat came closer to consciousness? I preferred not
to try the experiment; it might have ended with a psychotic fugue in the
subject. The conditioning, after all, went back to grade school. No
wonder we all hate those teachers so much: we have a dim, masked memory
of what they've done to us in converting us into good and faithful
servants for the Illuminati.
from The Illuminatus Trilogy
-Anton Wilson & Shea-
fnord
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