BE ch 5 nerd wars

[Joseph Tracy]

The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem
is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and
their mission in this world is Bad Shit. We do know what's going on, and we
let it go on. As long as we can see them, stare at them, those massively
moneyed, once in a while. As long as they allow us a glimpse, however
rarely. We need that. And how they know it-”   Gravity’s Rainbow


 I think Pynchon is using The Man in the mode of black american vernacular to mean the dominant authority(money, flag, religion), but with the idea that it gets internalized and becomes a point of control through guilt and desire( the white albatross). That is, non-compliance with the dominant authority and values induces guilt and desire for compliance and the comfort of money/security that is hard or  almost impossible to resist.  For germans in WW2  this meant much the same as say for US soldiers in the Phillipines in the Spanish American war: aggression and murder become heroic. 
  Perhaps if the id is less repressed by conformity to authority, if it was shaped as for the Herero by the shared and distributed wisdom and skills of group survival,  it would be harder to establish a cult of authority and control. Nobody naturally likes to be owned or controlled or assigned a lesser status, least of all to be a Pavlovian science experiment in human manipulation.  Part of the wonder of Slothrop as a character is that his course is one of reverse engineering the internal ‘Man’. 
  He does this through ‘escape’. Escape was a more negatively loaded concept then, connoting betrayal of human responsibility.  What we are responsible for and to whom is still relevant and perhaps a bit subtle. But on his path he is both fleeing conditioning by The Man and looking for something outside those boundaries- freedom, naturalness, his animal self,  the joy of light, a harmonica, movement, rain, green hills, - looking for and finding  a new set of connections, a new way of being.
   
  I am reading 2 books that bring Pynchon’s summary of internal compliance and motivation into question as some kind of final word on ‘human nature’. One is Graeber and Wegner’s new book-The Dawn of Everything- which is a review with commentary of scientific data about human prehistory,  and the other is Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell which is a look at accounts of disasters since 1906 to present and the community response to sudden devastating loss and destruction.  The odd thing about disasters that destroy housing, businesses and other aspects of multi-tiered society is how cheerful and resilient survivors are. Even when everything people think of themselves as working for is gone, it was often more of a sudden deliverance than harbinger of despair, In the San Francisco earthquake/fire of 1906 butchers and grocers gave away meat and food, people immediately formed tent cities and soup kitchens and there was remarkable good cheer. The only serious problems came from an army outpost  which expected looting and shot many people almost entirely on mistaken grounds. In the Dawn of Everything we find out there were many large urban centers in the ancient world with no evdence of hierarchies and even few to no weapons.  The point is that there is no obvious evolution to the kind of stratified militaristic systems we feel we are stuck with. Humans can and have organized themselves around non authoritarian values.