Refund and Reparation

It is the great philosophy of not-know.

It says, “No matter how much you study the physical universe, you jerks, you ain’t going to know anything. You’re just a bunch of ignorant bums, because all of that is unknowable.”

How do you like that! It’s all unknowable.

And you know why the mind has not kept pace . . technology in it . . along with the pace of physics is because it was stopped on the track by the basic theory that you can’t know about it anyway. It’s impossible to know about, so therefore, you can’t know about it. So ever since that time, all they’ve been doing is quoting Greek philosophers.

Man, I had a few too many Greek tutors to go around quote ‘em! Aw, come off of that! You mean, you go upwards to twenty-three hundred years later, you’ve still got to have these guys haunting you? No, no thank you. No thank you.

A Greek tutor . . that’s something you get rid of in very early childhood. And you certainly don’t keep it through adulthood. And you certainly don’t keep it for twenty-three hundred years. Because the Greek philosophies are very fine, and we’re glad that man thought. But the last time I was down in Athens, I found out what the Greek philosophies were all about: if you couldn’t lick ‘em, you could confuse ‘em.

And they did it with two things . . philosophy and entertainment.

And I have seen better nightclub operation in a perfectly lousy hole-in-the-wall, nobody-ever-heard-of-it nightclub in Athens than you would find in the finest theaters of New York City. Guys just operating for buttons. They were really good. They were very, very good. They were very good at it. They have saved this all through the centuries. They are the original cabaret owners.

After you get the enemy there and he’s conquered you and so forth, you show him conclusively that he can be out-created by turning loose a bunch of dancing girls on him that really get his eyes popping. And he forgets to conquer. They did it to the . . they did it to race after race. They did it to Persians, and they’ve done it to Egyptians and they’ve done it to Romans. And they’re still on top. Pretty interesting.

It’s a modus operandi for conquest. And so is philosophy. If you want a complete catalog of the Greek philosophies, take something on the order of the Prehav Scale and figure out each one totally dramatized, and write a total philosophy around that level of the Prehav Scale.[1] And say that is it, and there is only this, and you’ve got one of the Greek philosophies . . or one of the Persian philosophies, or one of the Egyptian philosophies.

Try it some time. Just try and look at the level of the Prehav Scale and figure out what would be a philosophy that obscured everything under the sun except this one thing . . what kind of a philosophy it’d be. After you’ve thought about it for a while, it’ll suddenly dawn on you that you are looking at the philosophy of something like Rosicrucianism. That is it, you see?

Or you’re looking at the philosophy that was practiced in Egypt, or you’re looking at Stoicism. Just look at No Effect. There’s No Effect on the Prehav Scale. Now just figure out what kind of a philosophy would you work out that would totally bar out any slightest effect of any character. And you wind up with Greek Stoicism. And similarly, you can do this with every level of the Prehav Scale. It is a reactive scale. So, of course, there’s a broad appeal.

Any time you’re too broke, your case has gone to pieces, and you’ve become utterly unprincipled, somewhere up the track, and you land amongst the wogs, always remember that you can dig up a piece of the Prehav Scale and get a marble palace with a gold roof.

Just figure out where they sit on the Prehav Scale and dream up a philosophy to prove it. And if you prove it conclusively that that’s where they sit on the Prehav Scale and this is the very best thing to do . . ahhh, they’ll make you the governor of the joint as well as the high priest.