A site dedicated to the rational study of the UMMO affair
D47-2 Earthly social system - Creation of reflexes
You answer yourselves, giving a multitude of simplistic explanations that are not very convincing. You almost always confine yourselves to repeating that old Earthly adage: Man is a wolf to man!
But your tragedy is not solved by uttering fine phrases laden with bitter poetic images, or by announcing in a hollow voice a long list of problematic causes.
On the contrary, you yourselves need to delve into the hidden background of the social structure in order to discover the genuine causes, Analyse them and then apply the appropriate therapy.
What do you do when you hear these paragraphs? Do you listen to them absent-mindedly perhaps, with curiosity maybe, waiting for the revealing sentence that in four short words will offer you the magic formula capable of filling your lives with happiness...? No, not even that naive craving has a place in your minds.
You are listening out of mere curiosity, speculating inwardly on the possibility that these lines may have been written by the men who come from another Planet, or on the contrary may have been concocted by an ingenious prankster or a paranoid mythomaniac
If we were to appear through that door at this moment, with an enigmatic air, and perform an astonishing technical marvel to prove our identity, you would feel fatuously happy at having witnessed what is for you a fantastic event. You would be content with having felt the intense emotion of taking part in a historic event, and once the first moments of astonishment had passed, Once the initial respectful fear that we would unintentionally instil in you had been overcome, you would surely rush stupidly at us to snatch shreds of our clothing or to ask us for autographs.
The worthy owner of this establishment would change the name “Café León” to “Café of Space”, and the neighbouring streets would swarm with little stalls selling ice cream and coloured postcards bearing the likeness of Mr Sesma Manzano, whom nobody would any longer take for a mere “eccentric”. Journalists would weary of writing inanities about us in newspapers that in the end would go on being used to wrap dripping fish...
But many of you would go on yawning as you read our reports on Sociology, without trying to decipher them, much less to put their guidance into practice. The contempt of the masses for the doctrine of Jesus Christ would go on being perpetuated, as would the general apathy towards everything that involves study, meditation, analysis and effort of application.
IF NOT, WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR IN US? Do you naively think that, if we really exist, we must present ourselves before public opinion, demonstrating the genuineness of our origin?
“In that way -you go on reasoning- you could make these statements before the information media of the Earth; Everyone would benefit from them: The Press, Radio, Television of the Terrestrial Globe would proclaim to the four winds the official news of your arrival”.
But: We suggest: Is it not ideas, reasoning, that carry in themselves the force of persuasion? How is it that you now listen to them without paying them much attention? Would they have more value if we stated them dressed in a fluorescent suit, before two hundred microphones and a thousand Television cameras in a New York park, facing hundreds of thousands of people?
Do you think us as thoughtless as those footballers of the Earth who accumulate in the muscles of their legs all the organic tissue they lack in their brain mass, and who keep appearing before thousands of their fanatical followers, disturbing the tranquillity of city life?
We are speaking to you of the terrible disorganization in your social structures; Of that cruel paradox maintained by you which allows a few thousand individuals to take their ease in their luxurious cars, while there is a lack of liquid fuel to transport agricultural surpluses to India, where millions are dying of hunger, and you want us to appear suddenly in the Place de la Concorde in Paris, so that thousands of idle bourgeois may flock there from all over the world with the sole aim of satisfying their curiosity to see some men who have arrived on the Planet from a distant star...
Would you find such senseless conduct more logical?
It is not fear that we feel. It is puerile to think that, at your present social level, we would suffer any persecution or harm at the hands of Earthmen.
It is you who would really be harmed by the blind commotion of hysterical masses in the face of sensationalism.
If you think that men from other worlds, whether ourselves or any others who may be analysing you at present, are more intelligent or possess a higher cultural level, at least be consistent and do not imagine that they will show themselves before people's eyes with the frivolity of film actors!!!
To what extent have you become steeped in the clichés of Science Fiction, that you await with primitive and morbid curiosity the moment when we appear before you?
Examine yourselves! Analyse yourselves, and let many of you humbly recognize that what you really want is not to increase your culture with what we can offer you, but to procure strong emotions for yourselves, to feel different from others after having had the opportunity to get in touch with us.
Do not regard these criticisms as a reaction of contempt towards you. We say all this to you with bitterness, aware that by behaving in this way you reveal an infantile brain structure in which tendencies towards primary and morbid objectives replace lofty transcendent motivations.
500. DISORGANIZATION OF THE EARTHLY SOCIAL NETWORK.
A thinker of the Planet Earth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, postulated that man is not evil by nature. It is the environment, it is society, that perverts the individual. It is the bad habits acquired by the child under aberrant pedagogical systems that give the human being that stamp of wickedness which characterizes his social conduct.
But how long are you going to go on using those childish concepts of good and bad men? The factors that influence the conduct of man cannot be formulated with such simplicity.
To avoid cumbersome reasoning in excessively technical language, we are going to give you a simple example:
For many generations back, a magnificent gold watch had been the object of the unfortunate curiosity of the young members of a family. Nobody knew how many times the boys had poked around inside it, unbalancing the anchor escapement, loosening its screws and putting its little pinions out of adjustment. The watch ended up falling into a muddy pond.
One day a certain Mr Rousseau passed by with his friends and, on seeing it surrounded by slime and mud, remarked sadly:
The watch is good: It is the dirty water and the mud that prevent it from working perfectly. It is the environment that disturbs it.
One of his companions, after taking it out and examining it superficially, argued:
No: The watch has a manufacturing defect. It is the watchmaker who is to blame for its uselessness...
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In an earlier report we reminded you that man INHERITS FROM HIS PARENTS certain nervous reflexes which constitute what you commonly call INSTINCTS.
But his subconscious memory also receives, by genetic means, multiple memories of the past. Images that only sometimes surface during those dreams so enigmatic to you, or under certain states of catalepsy.
But what is more serious: in that legacy which you have received through the genes transmitted from generation to generation, there lies hidden a whole network of nervous connections or conditional synapses, which constitute the true motivations of future inexplicable features of certain behaviours.
The mentality of a criminal psychopath is the consequence of a badly programmed brain. His repulsive tendencies, which drive him to rape a little girl and then murder her mercilessly, have as their “substratum” a badly encoded genetic code in which certain genes carry aberrant norms for establishing certain reflexes in the future brain of the foetal body.
The man of the Earth is thus subjected to terrible pressures in every direction, like a little boat of worm-eaten wood in the turbulence of the Storm.
Inspired by a pure soul, and with a body that from the physiological point of view is a marvel of constitution, he sees himself from the first moment as an integral part of a gigantic social network, as a node joined to other nodes by multiple arcs or connections that function disastrously; man tries in vain to establish contact with his fellows, to tune in to them so as to make himself understood, without managing to do so except in a mediocre way.
It is the system of communication that fails. You have not achieved the means of communication, the appropriate language, the adequate information technique which, by allowing men to understand one another, would thus achieve the maximum efficiency of the social network.
Thus arises the paradoxical situation of human beings who, surrounded by thousands of millions of their fellows, feel terribly alone, misunderstood, impelled to carry out certain acts of defence against other men, which disturb the Network still further.
And if at least his cerebral cortex were well programmed, if his nervous connections were not vitiated from the moment of fertilization by inherited motivations which in turn were the product of that same disorganization of the social network in which his ancestors lived...
What would you answer to a poor wretch who, a prisoner in a damp dungeon, his limbs and neck held by iron rings and with the echo of his own voice reflecting off the bare walls as his only cellmate, were to ask you naively: what is the formula for being happy?
You are completely mistaken if you think that there exists a magic formula, an ingenious device, that will manage to resolve in a few instants the disorganization of the Social Network of the Planet Earth and the altered morphology of human brains.
There do exist therapeutic procedures which, applied on a macrosocial scale and with discipline by you, with the whole People of the Earth submitting to the direction of our specialists, would succeed in accelerating the evolution of the whole globe along rational paths.
But the process would be slow, and some two hundred and fifty to three hundred Earth years would have to pass before appreciable results could be seen.
But this would mean submitting to a kind of paternalistic Dictatorship, run by technocrats from another Planet, who would treat you like children.
But you have too much vain pride to accept that long period of re-education wholesale. And we consider it immoral to force you to submit. The naive argument of certain Earthly moralists, who postulate that every man is obliged to prevent the suicide of his fellows, does not apply, because we, although we watch in horror the spectacle of a society which, without being spiritually mature, plays with terrible destructive weapons, have no absolute certainty that the end of the Planet Earth must necessarily be a nuclear hecatomb.
If on the Social scale we cannot offer you solutions for your remission, we hope in coming reports to suggest to you certain norms that will help you individually.
You therefore suffer from a serious deficiency. The serious lack of a rigorous critical spirit, and, what is more distressing: the lack of PATIENCE.
This IMPATIENCE Is characteristic of all people of low mental level. If you observe the process of Culture on your Planet, you will see that it has only been possible through the patient work of research in all the fields of Civilization.
TIME is needed to assimilate concepts, understand them and let them mature. Only the mentally retarded can believe that there exists a method for strengthening man spiritually that can be recorded in a score of typewritten pages and assimilated in barely two hours.
Let those who do not have enough patience for study, meditation and analysis consider themselves TOTALLY BEYOND HOPE. They are wasting their time listening to our reports; they will waste their time reading other treatises written by specialists of the Earth, for their ill lies in a cerebral insufficiency that could only be treated by means of neurosurgical techniques unknown to you. No Earthly psychiatrist will be capable of curing certain forms of mental deficiency, or oligophrenia in its least acute degree.
We pointed out to you a few paragraphs back that your didactic methods have a serious flaw. Since man subjected to such educational norms still remains a failure, you may ask yourselves: Are the principles on which such pedagogical norms are based false?
Our emphatic answer is: NO: Not at all: they may be insufficient and somewhat vitiated, but the latest Earthly Pedagogues and specialists have hit the “bull's-eye”.
But all of you have let slip from the field of your consciousness a small detail that is decisive for an educational plan to be efficient and fruitful: We shall explain it with an example.
Let us use as a simile an Earthly Radio receiver, or, for those who do not understand electronics, we shall also give the example of a motor car.
A Radio receiver is in essence an ELECTRICAL CIRCUIT or NETWORK. Its basic components are, for example, Inductances or coils, electronic Valves commonly called tubes, capacitors, resistors, high- and low-frequency transformers, switches, potentiometers and a loudspeaker. All these accessories are perfectly linked to one another by means of wires or conductors, forming a Network that is not put together at random but carefully designed so that the weak signals picked up by the aerial, coming from a distant station, are AMPLIFIED in such a way that at the end of the Network the loudspeaker offers us the harmonious melody being broadcast at that moment. There is no doubt that the simple crystal receiver of the twenties was much less perfect than the modern superheterodyne of today for Frequency modulation. And that the all-band receivers you have used in Project OZNA to pick up extraterrestrial messages leave much to be desired compared with our sensitive receivers with which we have picked up extragalactic signals on UMMO.
But we draw your attention to a peculiar fact COMMON TO ALL THESE DEVICES. All of them, more or less simple, more or less perfected: WORK. They will have a greater or lesser degree of selectivity or range, they will be able to cancel background noise to a greater or lesser extent. BUT: THEY WORK.
Now do a simple experiment: Take some pliers, pull out the chassis of your Radio or Television set, and CUT A SINGLE CONDUCTING WIRE. ONLY ONE!!! The receiver will stop Working. NOTE THE IMPORTANCE OF A SINGLE HUMBLE ELEMENT OF THE NETWORK!!! Its destruction is enough to make THE WHOLE NETWORK INOPERATIVE. It is not that it will work worse, more deficiently, NO: It is that it will NOT WORK. Because a Network is something indivisible in which the failure of a single component means the destruction of the WHOLE.
You yourselves could multiply the examples: The clogging of the jet of your car's carburettor or the melting of the antifriction bearing of a connecting rod is enough for the complex machine to stop working, even though the rest of the accessories are brand new; a bombing of a strategic communications Node can dislocate the defensive potential of a Country...
Well then: the serious flaw of your educational systems does not lie in their being more or less perfect. Any of them could prove fruitful, just as the performance of the rustic crystal detector set was fruitful, IF CARE HAD BEEN TAKEN THAT EACH OF ITS CONSTITUENT ELEMENTS DID NOT FAIL. Since at bottom ALL DIDACTIC SYSTEMS have as their objective the creation and correction of CONDITIONED REFLEXES, THE GENESIS OF A NETWORK OF REFLEXES.
It will be enough for one of those KEY reflexes to fail for the whole Network to collapse.
We wish to offer you in advance a real example (NOT A SIMILE) so that you understand it better, so that you realize the importance that must be given to the study of the physiological basis, that is, the study of the functioning of the REFLEX mechanisms.
A student decides to impose on himself a disciplined plan of Study. Every day at eight in the morning he is to get up and, before breakfast, he makes himself study ten pages of his Crystallography textbook.
So far the Plan is correct. Simplistic, if you like. Simple, like the crystal Radio of our example. What he is going to achieve, without realizing it (like the man who spoke prose without knowing it), is to train a series of elementary conditioned reflexes.
For many days he keeps to what he agreed. But one morning he decides NOT TO GET UP.
And to that end he reasons as follows.
“I still have six months of study left. What “matters is the whole set of days I am going to spend studying'. A single day missed COUNTS FOR NOTHING AGAINST THE WHOLE”.
If you think a little according to the Earthly logic that has been instilled in you, you too will think as he does.
The lad is right. A day off is no great disruption for the whole. THE WHOLE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE PART.
THERE LIES THE GREAT ERROR!!! That principle accepted by you, that the whole is more important than the part, is DANGEROUSLY FALSE.
That lad, without realizing it, by getting up faithfully every day, had succeeded in FORMING A USEFUL CONDITIONED REFLEX. But if he had studied the mechanism of such reflexes, he would have found that a single LAPSE can completely undo the reflex so PATIENTLY FORMED. In other words:
WHEN, DURING THE PERIOD OF FORMATION OF A CONDITIONED REFLEX, THE PROCESS IS ABRUPTLY INTERRUPTED, IT MUST BE REBUILT ENTIRELY, THE EFFORT MADE UNTIL THEN PROVING STERILE.
That is to say: it would have been much less harmful for the student in our example to spend a week at the end of the Course without studying than to have missed a single hour in the first days.
An insignificant part of the Process, a single hour, a humble wire of the Network, is MUCH MORE IMPORTANT than you could have imagined.
How is it that the Men of the Earth, who have accepted this principle of the validity of the Part against the Whole when they work in Electronics, in Astronautics, where even the smallest details can cause the launch of a missile to fail, in Industry, where the slightest fault in the production line paralyses the whole Factory, HAVE NOT REALIZED THAT THIS PRINCIPLE IS ALSO VALID IN EDUCATION; To the Point that Parents value only the Overall Education, without realizing the Terrible importance that certain lapses during certain critical periods can have...?
Meditate on this. Meditate on it, for in this false approach lies a very high percentage of the failures of the structure of the Earthly Social Network. It does not of course mean that you should be attentive to ALL THE SMALL DETAILS. That would be exhaustingly impossible. But rather that you should weigh up some of those details, giving them GREAT IMPORTANCE.
We shall continue our cycle from the first days of September. Good friends of The Earth: Until then We recommend to you Peace and Calm, Study and Meditation. Good friends of the Earth: Until Always!!!
