The Final Circle of Paradise

In the middle of the last century, Olds and Miller had conducted experiments on brain stimulation. They inserted electrodes into the brains of white rats. They employed a primitive technology and a barbarous methodology, but having located pleasure centers in the rats' brains, they succeeded in having the animals press the lever which closed the contacts to the electrodes, hour after hour, producing up to eight thousand auto-excitations per hour. These rats did not need anything in the real world. They weren't in the slightest interested in anything but the lever. They ignored food, water, danger, females; they were indifferent to everything except the stimulation lever. Later, these experiments were tried on monkeys and produced the same results. Rumors were about that someone carried out similar experiments on criminals condemned to death…

That was a difficult time for mankind: a time of struggle against atomic destruction, a time of increasing limited wars over the entire face of the planet, a time when the majority of mankind was starving, but even so, the contemporary English writer and critic Kingsley Amis, having learned of the experiments with rats, wrote: "I cannot be sure that this frightens me more than a Berlin or a Taiwan crisis, but it should, I believe, frighten me more." He feared much about the future, this brilliant and venomous author of New Maps of Hell, and: in particular, he foresaw the possibilities of brain stimulation for the creation of an illusory existence, just as intense as the actual, or more intense.

By the end of the century, when the first triumphs of wave psychotechnology were realized, and when psychiatric wards began to empty, amid the chorus of exulting cries of science commentators, the little brochure by Krinitsky and Milanovitch had sounded like an irritating dissonance. In its concluding section the Soviet educators wrote approximately as follows: In the overwhelming majority of countries, the education of the young exists on the level of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This ancient system of education always did and continues to posit as its objective, first of all and above all, the preparation for society of qualified but stupefied contributors to the production process. This system is not interested in all the other potentialities of the human mind, and for this reason, outside of the production process, man, en masse, remains psychologically a cave dweller, Man the Uneducated. The disuse of these potentialities causes the individuals' inability to comprehend our complex world in all its contradictions, to correlate psychologically incompatible concepts and phenomena, to obtain pleasure from the examination of connections and laws when these do not pertain directly to the satisfaction of the most primitive social instincts. In other words, this system of education for all practical purposes does not develop in man pure imagination, untrammeled vision, and as an immediate consequence, the sense of humor.

The Uneducated Man perceives the world as some sort of essentially trivial, routine, and traditionally simple process, a world from which it is possible only by dint of great effort to extract pleasures which are, in the end, also compulsively routine and traditional. But even the unutilized potentialities remain, apparently, a hidden reality of the human brain. The problem for scientific education consists precisely in initiating the action of these possibilities, in teaching man to dream, in bringing the multiordinality and variety of psychic associations into quantitative and qualitative coordination with the multiordinality and variety of interrelationships in the world of reality. This problem is the one which, as is well known, must become the fundamental one for mankind in the coming proximate epoch. But until this problem is resolved, there remains some basis to fear that the successes of psychotechnics will lead to such methods of electrical stimulation as will endow man with an illusory existence which can exceed the real existence in intensity and variety by a considerable margin. And if one remembers that imagination allows man to be both a rational being and a sensual animal, and if one adds to that the fact that the psychic subject matter evoked by the Uneducated Man for his illusory life of splendor derives from the darkest, most primitive reflexes, then it is not hard to perceive the awful temptation hidden in such possibilities.

And therefore – slug.

It is now understandable, I thought, why they write the word "slug" on fences.