Gorman ("The Specter") Takeshi & Neo-Freudian Revisionist Quackery

[Terrance]

> 
> The illness theme is interesting and to my mind important (I will
> try to get back to it and to your questions later, little busy at the
> moment), not least of which is the use of "illness" as a form
> of control and enforced dependence, aka, as used against Zoyd.
> It dovetails with some of the feminist issues in the novel, which
> are also simmering on the back burner.

Freud's hypothesis of the death instinct and its role in civilized
aggression shed light on one of the neglected enigmas of civilization;
it revealed the hidden unconscious tie which binds the oppressed to
their oppressor, the soldiers to their generals, the individuals to
their masters. The wholesale destruction marking the progress of
civilization within the framework of domination has been perpetuated, in
the face of its possible abolition, by the instinctual agreement with
their executioners on the part of the human instruments and victims.
Freud wrote, during the First World War: 

Think of the colossal brutality, cruelty and mendacity which is now
allowed to spread itself over the civilized world. Do you really believe
that a handful of unprincipled placehunters and corrupters of men would
have succeeded in letting loose all this latent evil, if the millions of
their followers were not also guilty. 

But the impulses which this hypothesis assumes are not compatible with
the moralistic philosophy of progress espoused by the revisionists. 

"Death, in Modern Karmic Adjustment, got removed from the process." 
VL.175