Adventures With Cassiopaea

Chapter 34

But now we come to that most interesting of times in Ira's life when new players enter the stage. And one of these was Morse Peckham, "the prize and pariah of Penn's English department." Morse Peckham was a "Renaissance man." He was a polymath whose depth of knowledge was matched by its breadth.

For Peckham, the life of the mind was the only life. This had been the case since childhood. He has described his parents as imbued in nineteenth-century culture; his mother read Tennyson to him before his naps. At ten, he was using chess pieces to emulate the stage movements of Shakespeare's characters. He was the first University of Rochester student to take graduate English work at Princeton, where he earned a doctorate, but not before serving in World War II, where he spent his European tour writing the official history of the Ninth Bomber Command. […]

[A] large man, more than six feet tall, with fine features and a beard… A lifelong bachelor, Peckham dressed elegantly, and smoked cigarettes in a long white holder. […]

The thrust of his work was transdisciplinary scholarship. […] He saw the culmination of [the romantic era] in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, and his book on romanticism, Beyond the Tragic Vision, would be hailed in academic circles as a masterpiece. By the early sixties, Peckham was starting a more ambitious project that would use his cultural knowledge to go beyond criticism of art, music, and literature and probe the essence of humanity itself. (Emphasis, mine) […]

At the time Ira Einhorn found his way into one of Morse Peckham's classes, Peckham was working in virtual isolation, living alone, sharing his intellectual theories and discoveries on a daily basis with no one. […]

[T]here was some heavy intellectual bonding between Ira Einhorn and Professor Peckham. While most of the students were gasping for breath at Peckham's hairpin intellectual turns, Ira would ostentatiously be keeping pace with the master, providing verbal footnotes or suggesting esoteric comparisons to the point under discussion. It was no secret that this mental jam session continued outside of class as well. […]

Inevitably, some of Ira's peers wondered how close the relationship really was. […] There is no reason to surmise that the speculation of homosexuality was in any way founded. […]

[Peckham] considered his mental life intense and thrilling, but it precluded any emotional life outside of the pursuit of ideas. "In Ira," he says, "I found someone whom I could try these ideas on. Because I didn't have anybody else."[Levy]

What were Peckham's Ideas? Some of his early work includes a study of various editions of Charles Darwin's "Origin of the Species." As already noted, he was interested in romanticism. In 1951 he published Towards a Theory of Romanticism in which he wrote:

"Shift away from thinking of the universe as a static mechanism, like a clock, to thinking of it as a dynamic organism, like a growing tree....For those who make the shift, the values of static mechanism - reason, order, permanence, and the like - are replaced by their counterparts in an organic universe - instinct or intuition, freedom, and change.

"Romantic thought is relativistic and pluralistic; it rejects absolute values, formal classifications, and exclusive judgments; it welcomes novelty, originality, and variety. It is less interested in distinctions than in relationships, particularly in the organic relationship which it posits between man and nature, or the universe, and (less often) between the individual and society. The great chain of being is replaced by an indefinitely extended and complicated live network of connecting filaments, as in the vascular system of a plant or in a mass of animal nerve tissue, by which every phenomenon is tied by countless direct and indirect contacts to every other.

"When a new fact appears, it is not just another link in the chain or cog in the machine; it is an evidence of organic growth and development, and its emergence changes every previously existing aspect of the universe. A new characteristic is evidence of a totally new and different world. Therefore a romantic artist will strive, not to imitate an ideal perfection of form which has always existed, but to originate a form which has never existed before and which will uniquely express what he alone feels and knows. To do so, he will rely more on imagination than on logic, more on symbols than on signs or allegories, more on unconscious than on conscious powers. He will believe that he is creating a genuinely new thing and thereby changing and renewing the whole of his organic universe." [Peckham]

He also wrote Explanation and Power: The Control of Human Behaviour in 1986 wherein his Darwinistic approach to cultural development is made clear:

"For human beings, the world consists of signs, and it is impossible for human beings to consider the world, or themselves from a meta-semiotic point of view or position. The world is an immense tapestry of innumerable threads, emerging and disappearing in the presentation and evanishment of indefinably innumerable designs, and human beings themselves form some of those same threads and patterns. We are figures in the tapestry we observe, and respond to, and manipulate. The old notion that the world is an illusion is sound, for no sign (configuration) dictates our responses. But it is sound only up to a point, because the physical character of the world limits the range of our responses. We can do lots of things with water, but as yet we have no way to build a skyscraper out of it, though the possibility has its charms; nor can we walk on it without doing something either to ourselves or to the water. Or to use another notion, the world is Idea, our Idea, but it is also Reality, Actuality, Factuality. The mind transcends the world, but then it does not transcend the world. Plato's demiourgos did not create the reality he set about ordering; he set about ordering a chaos, a recognition that human behavior works on material that is really there. Or, to put it in somewhat newer terms, the world is object, and man is subject, and the subject is different from the object but, nevertheless, somehow the same." [Explanation and Power: The Control of Human Behavior, Chapter III, "Culture and Social Institutions", section, "The Culture of Homo Scientificus", page 155]

Morse Peckham theorized that it was only through "cultural vandalism" - the aggressive undermining of established values through random, mindless acts of destruction - that social innovation was stimulated. He theorized that humans needed to push themselves to such disruptive extremes; otherwise there was no hope of matching the insects' astonishing ability to adaptively alter their physiology and behavior in a relatively brief time. Peckham theorized that our mammalian talents for memory and self-reflection serve largely to oppress us with the dead weight of the past. Unburdened by mammalian scruples, insects effortlessly practice the Nietzschean virtue of active forgetting: the adult fly doesn't remember anything the maggot once knew.

In short, Peckham was glorifying psychopathy, and in Ira Einhorn we see Peckham's glorified psychopath in action. About Ira Einhorn, Morse Peckham said:

"Ira stood out because of his really wide reading and his ability to understand what he read."

However, after spending some time OUT of Ira's direct presence, Peckham began realize that something was wrong in the interaction. He had the odd feeling that Ira was parroting his own words back at him.

"I was still very interested in him and very friendly with him, but I began to feel that talking to him was like being in an echo chamber, just my own ideas being fed back to me without any modification or any thought on his part." [Quoted by Levy]

Just like Ross Baker, Morse Peckham had fallen under the sway of the psychopath. But, he had also analyzed the problem, and in his analysis, he put his finger on one of the clues to identifying the psychopath. They are parrots, apes, echo chambers.But, as Baker pointed out, it was humbling to realize that, after a period in Einhorn's presence, he was having difficulty with his mental clarity. Morse Peckham, as brilliant as he was, took some time to come to this realization because he was, indeed, dealing with a brilliant psychopath.

As sympathetic as we may be for Morse Peckham and the fact that Einhorn duped him, there is something else crucially interesting about Morse. Let's go back to that most interesting remark about Morse Peckham: he did his Ph.D. where? At Princeton. When? Oh, in the same general time period as when Nash was there. And Peckham was, as some have described him, an "intellectual raider." He advocated that in order to be a "cultural historian," one had to "know everything." He would read so extensively in a field that he soon could think in the way the professionals in that discipline thought. And from looking at his work, we suspect that Morse Peckham was powerfully influenced by Game Theory.

What do we conclude? That Morse was part of a conspiracy? That he consciously was interacting with Ira, preparing him for his future role? Or, do we think that Morse was just simply who he was, and Ira was who he was, and maybe there was some "tinkering" with the Matrix to ensure that the two of them would come together so as to pump all those theoretical ideas into Einhorn's head, with the surety that he would put his own spin on them?

There is nothing simple about any of this. When you start pulling on these threads, you just never know what is going to spring out of the closet. What we discovered is a connection linking Peckham to the Telephone Company which later "utilized" Ira Einhorn as described by the Bell executive at Einhorn's bail hearing. AT&T's Experiment In Humanistic Education, 1953-1960. by Mark D. Bowles, suggests that Ira's "network," was designed to counteract a previous experiment in social engineering that hadn't turned out quite the way the experimenters wanted it.

The unexpected Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb in 1949 triggered a wave of paranoia and anxiety in the United States. As historian Vincent LaFeber wrote, "Few American officials had expected the Soviet test this early."(19) The result was a new era of "nuclear fear" that spread throughout the culture. [...]

English professor Morse Peckham designed the program [...]

One of the central reasons for instituting liberal arts training was to preserve the American way during the Cold War, yet the Viteles data indicate that the participants became more tolerant of non-capitalistic political ideologies. After training the number of participants who believed that liberty and justice were possible in socialist countries nearly tripled (Question 1), and significantly fewer participants believed that democracy was dependent upon free business enterprise (Question 3). Clearly, this represented a threat to AT&T's corporate leaders; no longer could they continue to support a training program that might undermine America's own economic system.

Again, Economics rears its ugly head. The one thing this report tells us is this: those guys in charge of all this aren't omniscient. But it was clear that, at the point in time when Ira Einhorn was in close association with Morse Peckham, the program that Peckham had designed, obviously with a particular agenda that supported the Economic theories that were being developed around the work of John von Neumann and John Nash, was now known to be a failure. Plan B was obviously going into effect, and Ira Einhorn was central to this plan: restore paranoia! Restore belief in Russian superiority or Russian evil experiments on mankind!

And so we wonder just what kinds of cerebral jamming Ira was doing with Morse Peckham?

In the fall of 1959 when Ira was a junior, he met Michael Hoffman. Hoffman was just entering grad school in English and the two soon became close friends. Hoffman soon married and had a child, and Ira regularly urged him to toss the "normal life," to ditch his wife and child and really "live." This gives us some clue to the effect Morse was having on Ira.

Ira had already decided that earning a living was not for him, so when Morse Peckham urged him to attend grad school, even offering to pay his tuition (!) he thought that was as good a way to develop an occupation for himself that was more to his liking. However, since he had been the resident "Falstaffian figure" at Penn, and had spent most of his time in reading, talking, sex, and doing drugs, as well as traveling extensively, he had to really scramble to convince his professors to accept his final papers as proof that he had successfully mastered his courses. Most of them did, but one gave him a failing grade which meant that Ira would have to repeat the course. He refused.

Ira's friends and family campaigned vigorously to get him to change his mind. His mother went to talk to the professor who said: "Look, Mrs. Einhorn, I don't even know what your son looks like - how can I pass him?"

Levy says that Ira finally changed his mind, suggesting that Ira could see that his own well-being was enough reason to bend to the dominance of the institution. He fulfilled his obligation under duress and with many complaints, and received his degree in 1961. However, considering the influence of Morse Peckham, we wonder about this uncharacteristic change of mind.

In 1962, Morse Peckham was in Europe traveling, and Ira's friend Michael Hoffman took a teaching job in Maryland. Ira wrote to him regularly, so there is something of a record of his thinking through this period. He also was writing in his journals. On December 14, 1999 2:53 PM, Ira Einhorn wrote in an email about these journals:

On the morning of March 28, 1979 […] a slew of Philadelphia police armed with a search warrant entered my small apartment. When they left, they carried away evidence, a partially decayed body, that effectively ended my life, as a social activist. They also carried away, for no apparent reason, all of my papers, including 63 volumes of personal journals and all the information that I had been collecting and distributing for years on my international information network.

I have never seen any of this material again. I probably never will. The private diaries were later turned over, as mentioned above, to a journalist who quoted from them extensively and often out of context in a book that painted me in totally black terms as a murderer. This use of my private work is of course illegal, but my situation does not allow me to do anything about it. It is part of the pattern that has characterised all official action in my case. Action that continues to this day.

When reading the above remarks, I was so astonished I practically choked. Notice that, the finding of the "partially decayed body" of Holly Maddux, the woman he was supposed to have loved dearly, was described by Ira as having inconvenienced him by "effectively ended my life as a social activist" !!! Not one thought for the fact that the "partially decayed body was once a living, breathing woman whose life as anything at all was effectively ended in a way that Ira simply does not grasp. No pity for Holly, nothing but self-pity for Ira.

He then goes on to feel sorry for the loss of his diaries. Oh, lord! How sad it is! "For no apparent reason," too! Never mind that the dead body of a woman he claimed to love was found in his house, there was "no reason" to take Ira's journals away from him. Poor widdle Ira. He's gonna cry now! And even more because of what was in those journals which he complains it is illegal to use because he is just so innocent and pathetic and abused and mistreated by those nasty people who think that it's not nice to bash people's heads in!

Levy quotes from these journals and from letters Ira wrote extensively. The reader may wish to obtain the book and read it a time or two to get the full impact of Ira Einhorn in all his psychopathic glory. But, this book is far more than just the story about Einhorn, it's a history of the politics and pop-culture of the 1960s and 1970s, the platform on which the New Age was constructed. There is no way to understand what is going on now without understanding what preceded it, and the part Ira Einhorn has played in creating the great Sideshow of the New Age - to distract attention away from the REAL Stargate Conspiracy.

Getting back to Ira and psychopaths, and Ira whining about how the police just for no reason stole his journals and how Levy was "plagiarizing" them to write about him, he has given us some interesting clues to the perceptions of the psychopath:

Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1970) and Konrad Lorenz (1966) proposed mechanisms that limit aggression in social animals. They noted that in animals such as dogs, who bare their throats when attacked by a stronger opponent, this display of submission results in a termination of the attack. James Blair, in 1995, proposed a model of psychopathy based on this idea: that there is a functionally analogous mechanism in humans: a violence inhibition mechanism (VIM) that is activated by nonverbal communications of distress - emotions, for example, or expressions of pain or suffering. Blair suggests that having a Violence inhibition mechanism is a prerequisite for the development of three aspects of morality:

1. the moral emotions (such as sympathy, guilt, remorse and empathy),
2. the inhibition of violent action, and
3. the moral/conventional distinction.

Blair proposes that psychopaths lack a functional VIM and this is why they are not affected by distress cues from others. Blair made some predictions based on his model

(1) that psychopaths will not make a distinction between moral and conventional rules;
(2) that psychopaths will treat moral rules as if they were conventional; that is, under permission conditions, the psychopaths will say that moral as well as conventional transgressions are OK to do;
(3) that psychopaths will be less likely to make references to the pain or discomfort of victims than the non-psychopath controls. [Blair & Morton, 1995, p. 13]

Using subjects identified by Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist Blair's research demonstrated that:

…while the non-psychopaths made the moral/conventional distinction, the psychopaths did not; secondly, and in contrast with predictions, that psychopaths treated conventional transgressions like moral transgressions rather than treating moral transgressions like conventional transgressions; and thirdly, and in line with predictions, that psychopaths were much less likely to justify their items with reference to victim’s welfare. [Ibid.]

Now, this little discovery of Blair's may be very significant: psychopaths treat conventional transgressions like moral transgressions. In short, what this may reveal, is the fact that the psychopath perceives something that another person does to them that they don't like as a "moral transgression. They may even see a disagreement with another person as a moral reason to cause them harm. This then leads to the idea that the psychopath perceives their own wants and desires as being "godlike," so to say. Anything done to the psychopath - for whatever conventional reason - any disagreement with the psychopath, is a "sin," so to say, and their responses to that "sin," are to complain about it as though something terribly and immorally wrong has been done to them. And this gives us a clue that the psychopath will seek to justify their truly immoral behavior as "moral," or on "moral grounds, all the while unable to see any moral justification of the other at all, in any way, shape, form or fashion.

This then leads us to the issue of ego. As Steven Levy wrote, Ira Einhorn had the Gibralter of self images. And the root of this ego is easy to trace: his mother. She had instilled a tremendously strong self-image in her son by her pride, her boasting of his mental prowess, her constant attention to developing his "superior" mentality, and her protecting him from consequences of his behavior BECAUSE of his "genius."

So, as a genius, as a "mythic, godlike being," Ira Einhorn could do no wrong in his own eyes. And so, he is not even embarrassed at what his journals reveal about him even though it makes a lie of everything he ever claimed to stand for in his carefully nurtured public image. As long as Ira himself, never admits a lie, he can continue to maintain his image, completely unaware of the effect of utter amazement he is having on those who KNOW he is lying! The psychopathic liar also knows that there are plenty of people who will believe lies over truth, even against the evidence, and he will cling, to the very end, to that group, that source of "food," knowing instinctively that if he ever admits a lie, he has lost his position as the "alpha male," that he believes himself to be. And loss of that position represents annihilation. And, as we have already seen, playing "semantic games" is the psychopath's solution to answering direct questions.

So, what was in the journals?

Continue to page 298

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