Superman Deflate!

On the thread of time

There are two constructions before which the philistine prostrates himself: the State and the Ego.

If we fight a relentless battle against all cults that base themselves on these two objects of general veneration, we do not however assume that this boils down to simply manipulating the human imagination. They are real constructions that appeared in history, and they have had all kinds of important material effect. And this holds true as much for the various forms and types of State throughout history as it does for the great leaders and teachers thrown up by every people and in every epoch.

What we wish to assert is that just as the Marxist theory of the State, having resolved the enigma of how this formidable factor works, concludes by pensioning it off, so an analogous process happens with the ego, understood in the sense in which it has been understood by philosophers up to now, that is, not merely as the subject allegedly found eternal and absolute in every animal-person, but as the immaterial and imponderable entity that animates the Human being with a capital H, the great leader, the warlord, the innovator who appears in every page of official history.

Like the State, this leader “form” has a material basis as well and manifests the action of physical forces, but we deny that it has an absolute and eternal function: we have established it is a historical product, which in a given period is absent; it arises under given conditions, and under other given conditions it disappears.

Marx announced to the modern State its destiny was to be smashed to pieces. Engels, and Marx, defined the fate of the revolutionary State, which would follow it, as a slow withering away. For the exceptional ego there awaits the same fate, of a fading away and emptying, a deflation and dissolution (sich auflosen), an extinction and switching off (sich ausloeschen) as per Engels. Lenin has another expressive term for it: assopirsi [a dozing off].

Let us look back at the previous Thread on “The Battilocchio in History” to set out and better clarify, with strictly deterministic motives, how the role of the Battilocchio (as we dubbed the superman, the super‑size ego, the “one off” individual) that up till now has had an actual role, will have to go rid of, along with the other characteristics of class society, by the communist revolution.

Dozing off of the great men! To the latest examples we therefore say: “off to bed” you battilocchi! We should nevertheless accept there is a difference. The proletarian revolution will have to use the harsh and cruel tool of the class State, and continue using it to the end, by means of a dictatorship whose usefulness is in proportion to its openly declared usage, unmasked by lies about tolerance and democracy, until the stage is reached when it will be consigned, as Engels said, to the scrap yard of history. But as regards the Battilocchio as a tool, become truly dirty and repugnant, it can be dispensed with before the fall of capitalism. As soon as the proletarian class appears on the stage of history, it can and must substitute the leadership “form” with one of its own: the class party. This is why Lenin so often quoted the phrase from the Manifesto: the theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas and principles that have been discovered, by this or that would‑be universal reformer.

It was not Karl Marx’s manifesto, or his and Engels’ manifesto, it was The Manifesto of the Communist Party. It is from that point, without battilocchi, that we set out. Unfortunately they would rain down from every side, and it is due to them, unproductive from the start, that we owe the repeated setbacks; which are nevertheless inevitable, as every form has its social inertia, and the inertia of the battilocchi is more resistant than bugs are to DDT, adjusting with increasing virulence to the most drastic of disinfectants.

Yesterday

Naturalis Historia

How far does the practical functioning of groupings of human individuals, which have been forming since the appearance of the human species, revolve around the person of the leader, whose teachings or orders are accepted by all the other components? For the typical philistine this is a “natural” fact, a relationship that will emerge everywhere and at all times, because immediate and necessary, to the extent that if one day that group were deposited in some corner of the cosmos by an interplanetary space ship, and left to fend for itself, still leader would arise; and it would matter little if elected by God or by popular vote, if designated by a noble name or by an uprising of the masses, if favoured with physical presence and muscle power or with astuteness and brilliance of intellect; whether a David or a Gracchus, an Ivanhoe or a Masaniello, a Roland or a Richelieu…

We, as ever, look at the course of history and the bases of production, amongst which is included the type of sexual reproductive relations. These matters are dealt with best in Engels’ classic, and frequently recalled, text on the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. This text, let it be understood, is the party’s programme for ending the family, private property and the State, all of which is entirely predictable. So let us take a look at the doctrine of the beginning and end of the Battilocchio.

If we want to study the associations of living beings it is proper to go back beyond animals to plants. Modern science with its power to investigate, even if inexorably blinded by the division of labour and by specialization within artificially created disciplines, has already produced a lot of important research in these fields. The sociality of animals has already become a science, which through studying the relations between zoological species and between the species and the natural environment has become, as a logical consequence, an historical science, tracking the movement, spread and dispersion of the various types of animals in various regions. But the study of flora too, like that of fauna, with the simultaneous coexistence of millions of plants of given species in various places and at various times, has by now determined not only a history of the flora (tropical, temperate, arctic etc.) on the earth’s surface, but also a “phytosociology”, or the science of the effects of the “association” and “organization” of plants on the life of the individual phylum, and its evolving forms and internal processes. It is in fact noteworthy (but not a subject we can deal with here) that it is these sciences in particular that try to base themselves on mathematically based theories; which would introduce all orthodox thinkers to the criminal idea of using mathematical methods to predict human, spiritual and political events.

And now even inanimate nature has a history, and we allude not only to geology, which registers the transformations of minerals, rocks, magma and the earth’s crust over the course of the millennia, and for an incalculable period before organic life forms were present, or to the prestigious astrophysics which has dated the “fixed” stars. Radioactivity and the discovery of the components of the complex entity that is the atom, show that in a given sequence it, too, is “alive” and changes its species, from that of the heaviest metals to the most evanescent of gases. These transitions in turn contain inevitable laws of succession, and if in “philosophical” circles the reluctance of this kind of phenomena to “be predicted”, and their alleged rebellion against determinist causality, which is effective within the field of terrestrial and spatial mechanics (Cf. the article in Prometeo on “Marxism and the theory of consciousness”) has been amply speculated upon, we remark here only that Einstein ⁽¹⁾ announced that he had found the unifying relationships behind all this – showing that he was as materialist as us Marxists – with the formula: God does not play dice. A formula which for historical materialists could be: Gods and supermen can still play dice if it amuses them, since even without them we will continue along the same road, and use the same methodology – difficult though it may be – to investigate the relations between electrons, atoms, material bodies, plants, animals and humans, and the immense process of life and history itself which brings everything together, and draw certain magnificent itineraries from it.

The Earliest Communities

In the old polemic in defence of monogamy – which Engels demonstrated to be only one type of familial bonding, not just contingent and transitory like the others, but peculiar to today’s capitalist “civilization”, founded on the exploitation of the working masses – with the aim of exalting it as the only ideal and natural type of relationship between a man and a woman, while also invoking (certain) religions and the law (ubi tu Caius…) it was claimed that even animals, or at least those closest to us, were monogamous. This prompts the question as to whether among the various types of organization of animal societies the family could be said to exist, and if there could be a more extended version, with a leader or leaders. The first Battilocchi had horns then? So it appears.

The most advanced form of animal society is the horde. A few species appear as isolated individuals, copulating after lengthy intervals with members of the opposite sex. But even then for viviparous species, or at least for mammals, the first simple form of collective to take shape is the nest, in which the mother raises and instructs the offspring during the period they are unable to defend or provide food for themselves. Afterwards they all go off to live on their own. Given, however, that in many species the male also stays in the nest or den to participate in the raising and protection of the offspring, some people wanted to provide a naturalistic basis to the axiomatic rhetoric of the family being the basis of society.

Without doubt, most animals live together in herds, flocks, groups and bands, the most advanced of which is the horde.

So in the horde are sexual transactions free, or do families, even monogamous ones, exist within it, that is, does each adult male have his own female? Even the supporters of this thesis in Engels’ time admitted there were differences in the way the family and the horde had developed. As soon as we get on to the human species, we come across Morgan’s thesis that the first historical form is the gens, that is to say, a horde without families, and with free sexual relations. As we proceed from the stage of savagery to barbarism and on to civilization, successive limitations on sexual bonding are imposed. As the family gets gradually stronger, the community gets weaker, torn apart by competition, rivalry and disputes; egoism and individualism start to gain the upper hand, and start to conceal themselves under endless civil frills and epithets.

Returning to the animal horde, elephants, antelopes and llamas for example, it is plausible that there exists among them a fraternity and equality in feeding and defence which is naturally accompanied by free intercourse between individuals of the two sexes, and a common protection of the juveniles in the group. Is there a leader? There are instances of particularly vigorous adult males, and also of old males whose long life has turned them into “experts” in dealing with dangerous situations and searching for food and water etc., who act as guides, as a vanguard and who sometimes use their horns to settle fights between females or younger members. We can find no reason to deny that natural gifts mark out the president of the horde, who takes on a heavy burden and perhaps does not grab the best bits at feeding time or the best looking females for himself. There are types of animal society in which the reproductive function selects the leader: the female among bees, a male in groups in which he is the only one, as among poultry, and the basic social type is polygamy.

The problem of the assumption of a special leadership role in the group is therefore not resolved by invoking the principle of authority, religion, or ethics, which even our idealistic contradictors would not introduce into the field of zoology, but by registering the facts pertaining to the matter: food supply, protection of the members of the group from dangers apart from death from hunger or thirst, and perpetuation of the species. Even in the simplest forms of association among living beings, minimal though the organizational and leadership role may be, it has to be passed on from one generation to the next. There is no library, archive, school or press, and not even a language, but this “hand over” somehow takes place.

This tradition (which literally means transport from here to there, transmission, delivery in fact) starts out as a physical fact and underlies natural selection, leaving aside here the physiological problems and the slow modification of the individual organism of that given species. If you sit down to eat with a wise shepherd and you do not know what to choose from the common platter, he will say: front of the sheep, back of the goat. What does he mean? Do not take fright when a wise shepherd or a great philosopher is quoted… and things are left hanging in the air.

The sheep grazes on the grass on the ground and puts all its weight on its front legs, which are meatier and more muscular. The cunning gluttonous goat prefers the tops of bushes and clambers up to get at them on its hind legs, so it is lean at the front and fat behind. Without needing to flick through any instruction manuals, or go on any courses, the goat knows it needs to graze on the higher branches, and the sheep on the grass under its feet. In the Marxist construction of the theory of knowledge, analogous functions are performed by the goat’s backside, and consulting the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics by Emanuel Kant. It is a matter of knowing how to read one or the other text, and avoiding captious remarks. Probably, just as the lamb and the kid would not be able to enunciate the applied laws of gravity and natural selection, the great Kant knew how to syllogise on pure reason but not what cut of a spring lamb or castrated goat to choose: leg or shoulder?

Homage to the Mater

Let us pass now to the story of the human animal. The first phratries, which on other occasions we have joined in praising (in contrast to bourgeois Christian society) those non battilocchi authors who were Fourier, Morgan and Engels (not to mention Rousseau), were not divided into families, and they held everything in common. They had no conception of subjection of man by man to the extent that in the case of war between gentes the losers were all killed, it being inconceivable that they could be enslaved or admitted into the tribe without the mingling of bloodlines. It is only at the end of the great journey, when all moralists will be six feet under along with the battilocchi, that we will attain humanity, one communist gens. For now our job is to frayer le chemin, to open a path through rough terrain, without making a big fuss about it. Where we need to pass we need to cut our way through. There is no living proof of a tribe with indiscriminate sexual transactions that include those between successive generations, but it is clear that the existence of such a very early horde stage among people is confirmed both by analogy with animals, amongst which there is no barrier to the practice, and by the traces of it left in mythology and literature. But Morgan did track down among the American Indians (today, unfortunately, infested with syphilis, whisky, democracy and television) all the other types of cohabitation, or at least derived a brilliant outline of their structure from the curious terminology used to describe the relations of Kinship: all the men in the tribe are fathers, but there is just one mother, and her sisters are all aunts.

With the introduction of the single prohibition of the union of ascendant with descendent, there remained free intercourse of all men with all women and therefore (even under strict Roman law mater certa, pater autem incertus [mother known, father uncertain], good Latin even for Renzo) the only family relationship that is certain is that between the children and the mother, from whom all authority issues. The woman of the older generation stands above all of the progeny. It seems logical that since the children of both sexes live with the mother, it is she who is the “depositary” of the traditions passed on from one generation to the next. This was so for animals too, but a powerful means of transmission has been added: articulated language (q.v. Prometeo no. 2, first series: “The Genesis of Ideas”). Perhaps the most eloquent mother or grandmother, with a deeper or more persuasive voice, was everybody’s teacher and counsellor. All literatures contain traces of this social stage, called matriarchy or gynocracy, when everything, we believe, was better. This system of reproductive relationships and of spontaneous and communal social organization, with no trace of property or labour rights, also existed among the ancient Germans and the peoples of the north. Marx criticized Richard Wagner for a major historical error in having the characters in the Nibelungen proclaim their horror of incest between brother and sister, whereas in fact it was not considered immoral by the earliest races. In any case, in classical mythology Jupiter marries his sister, nor could things have gone otherwise for us lot descended from Adam and Eve.

We won’t trace out the series of family types here, in which a positive custom progressively prohibits marriage between close relatives, although there is marriage between one group of men and one group of women, non‑consanguineous beyond the second grade.

We are concerned here with how human organizations are managed and we cannot hide our broad sympathy for the matriarchal stage. Hear this description of the customs of the Seneca Iroquois by the missionary Arthur Wright, who associated with them in modern times, and have a laugh at the expense of the barbaresque bourgeois family head. On les aura’ again!

«The women took husbands from other clans. Usually the female portion ruled the house. The stores were in common; but woe to the luckless husband or lover who was too shiftless to do his share of the providing. No matter how many children, or whatever goods he might have in the house, he might at any time be ordered to pick up his blanket and budge. After such orders it would not be healthful for him to attempt to disobey. The house would be too hot for him; and he had to retreat to his own clan or start a new matrimonial alliance in some other. The women were the great power among the clans, as everywhere else. They did not hesitate, when occasion required, “to knock off the horns”, as it was technically called, from the head of a chief, and send him back to the ranks of the warriors».

In this society it is the woman that gives her name to the gens and to the offspring, and it is only the woman who can found a new gens.

Here we still do not encounter the species battilocchius clarissimus. Here we do not yet cross paths with superman. At most with superwoman, and she is much less of a nuisance because she provides material and tangible results, namely the generation and raising of producers. She could never have a default action for non‑compliance brought against her, that much is clear.

Today

A Sop to Refined Persons

The scientific verification of these first stages of human society, without families, without private property, without a State, and, we have added without discovering anything new, without great leaders, immediately caused much consternation to bourgeois science, worried about the formidable materialist construction that had arisen on these foundations. After having analysed, from that original point of departure in the higher state of savagery, the appearance at the same time of the polygamous then monogamous patriarchal family, basis of private property in land, of slavery, and then of serfdom and wage‑labour; and at the point of the passage from the state of barbarism to the first civilizations, the appearance of the political State, we had the premises to calculate, within a historical compass, and thanks to the theory of economic determinism and class struggles, the collapse of these forms, which the current regime continues to eulogize.

And Engels showed that, even then «it had become fashionable to deny the initial stage of the sexual life of human beings». This is no less fashionable today, to the extent that enormous efforts have been made to subject the science of social processes back to the old creationist and idealist leading ideas and to harness it to the immanent forms of rules of behaviour (law, morals, personal human attributes and so forth).

So superficial observers, in this field as well, shrug their shoulders at the information set out in Engels’ short text covering the fundamental discoveries made among various semi‑barbarous and half savage people in Polynesia, Central Asia, in the Arctic, etc. Such people crave news that is “up to date” So let us look at some results obtained since Engels’s time, despite the question having been clearly settled, like all Marxism’s other questions, and needing no further material confirmation.

In the news a few weeks ago it came out that a people had recently been discovered in the heart of the USSR which had been cut off for centuries from the rest of the world, shut off between the Elbruz and the Kasbek mountain chains in the Caucasus. The Russians are apparently building a road to reach it and “civilize” it (that network of the internal market, which from the very beginning changes everything). They live in tall houses without stairs and climb up a pole to get into them (Le Corbusier would hate it!), they have no writing, but obviously the old teach the young; but they are not the leaders. «The authority of the women, who often have more than one husband, counts for much more, as in certain regions of Tibet, for example, where polyandry and matriarchy are still practised and where jealousy is unheard of. (cf., Engels: if one thing is certain it is that jealousy is a relatively recent sentiment: response to the argument that male animals are jealous whereas in fact they only struggle to copulate with the one female sought, at that specific moment, by several males, the female only accepting one, which in the gens was ended by the ordered community). It sometimes happens that travellers to that country receive, as in Kipling’s Kim, offers of marriage or concubinage…». This people who are not led by battilocchi may have had contact with the crusaders in the Middles Ages: it intelligently respects the condition of living labour: it celebrates, although idolatrous themselves, Allah on Friday, Jehovah on Saturday and Christ on Sunday. But don’t worry, soon they will be Stakhanovized!

Gaia Versus Uranus

This article from the cultural pages might not seem that serious, so we will cite a piece of really outstanding research from 1953 by Professor K. Numazawa of the Nanzan University of Nagoya in Japan. He takes into consideration a whole series of myths with a common content: the separation of the sky from the earth, on which in the beginning it pressed down. These myths contain interesting common elements, which appear in the biblical version and in Greco-Roman mythology, but above all which run parallel through various zones and peoples in Central Asia. After raising the sky, the light of the sun begins to shine. In most cases it is a woman who achieves this liberation, a woman who grinds rice with a pestle or works a spinning wheel, which she had been prevented from doing, just as the herds of cattle and pigs had been crushed to the ground. Numazawa, who perhaps does not call himself a Marxist, although he is hundred times more Marxist than many who declare themselves as such, uses these detailed references to provide an interpretation of the myth in the two (inseparable) fields of production and social reproduction. The myth expresses the custom of the “visiting marriage” in which the man would visit the woman, and spend the night with her, and then having lost any rights at dawn, he would leave. The woman is the earth who alone removes the sky at the appearance of the sun and the light. In terms of production, we find ourselves at the stage in which cattle herding prevails, and the first type of arable agriculture consists of the cultivation of rice. «The myths have simply transferred what happens in the morning of every working day to the morning of the universe, to its creation». «The myths examined are products of the spheres of matriarchal culture». Lastly the author demonstrates the major geographical coincidence of the many myths studied with the heartland of matriarchal culture, which lay originally on the eastern slopes of the Himalayas, drained by the Ganges, Bramaputra and Irrawaddy rivers. We could find no better an example of a materialist study, a doctrine the author does not specifically mention, restricting himself to discussing his subject with scientific rigour and solid knowledge, which he indicates as the Background, that is the underlying structure, the substructure of the myths of the separation of heaven from earth.

Uranus, the god of the sky, forced his wife Gaia, the earth, to keep their offspring suffocated within her womb. Gaia gave birth to Saturn, or Cronos (Time), who got into his rhythm by striking his father with a sharpened scythe. Labour, as when Eve bit into the apple, and love, had been born, and Cronos can mark the moment when the new Gaia, the Revolution, will raise the dark sky of the class oppressors, the thieves of labour and of love.

Safeguarding Life

The procession of Battilocchi sets out from amidst the wreckage of primitive communism and matriarchy, when a complicated nexus of estates, groups of slaves and armed bodies of men needs to transfer its mechanism from one generation to the next, and to do so needs a centre, a vertex, a chain of command, a sanhedrin within which the keys and secrets of domination can be passed on. This is when the exceptional person appears on the scene and starts to perform his role, without doubt irreplaceable from the start.

For as long as defence and the material struggle against danger and attack is the main function of the leader, it is clear that being the biggest, with an exceptionally solid build and displaying considerable bravery is enough to qualify as leader; and all he has to do is choose a young successor to whom he can pass on the art of combat, archery and swordsmanship. When faced with Penelope’s deluded battilocchio‑like suitors, the Proci, Ulysses proved who he was, without saying a word, by arrogantly drawing back his huge bow as though it were just a twig. The same test was passed by his son Telemarchus, and instead of standing firm the pretenders made a hasty departure.

But nowadays we have writing, the press, the registry office and police files – i.e., the State – and any pettyfogger can pick a wallet and pinch an identity card, with absolutely no need to pit themselves against the powerful Ulysses, not even against his proverbial cunning.

Ulysses did not say, anticipating Louis XIV: the state is my triceps. The State appeared, according to Engels, among the Athenians, when power was passed from the agora, the assembly of the whole population (excluding slaves), to the military leader, the basileus, meaning king. We are nevertheless dealing not with a hereditary king and commander-in-chief, but an elected one. Only later did oligarchies and aristocracies appear. Little by little the machine becomes more powerful, but it also becomes easier to control, to find someone to be the engine-driver. With writing and schools there arises science, including the science of government: the means and the methods are contained in the laws and constitutions. Solon and Lycurgus are still just as famous as the great heads of State and military commanders.

It is clearly impossible here to trace out the whole of this process, which bit by bit made this formidable task of “changing the guard” no longer the responsibility of just one person, who would have required a really exceptionally powerful memory. Nowadays a government minister can be replaced in ten minutes, and any battilocchio whosoever can confidently nip across from, let’s say, the Ministry of Agriculture to the Navy, as though there were nothing to it. There are archives, secretaries, experts and so on right down to the typists and the calculating machines.

The same holds true in the field of culture and science. Pythagoras passed for one who was divinely inspired and today any five-year-old knows about his multiplication tables, and any ten-year-old about his theorem. So all of these children know about it. Galileo went crazy unravelling Aristotle’s writings which stated that weights fall with a velocity proportional to their mass, and today the law that they all fall at the same velocity is learned in the first year of high school. And so on and so forth.

Now we have calculators that have not only replaced Pythagoras’s tables and arithmetical operations but which can do integrations and differentiations which three centuries ago the brains of only two people in Europe could cope with: Newton and Leibniz. Now any idiot can do them. Discoveries too are no longer made by individuals, but by complex organizations dedicated to study, research and experimentation; the means for which can only be provided by capitalists or governments, even if they are total jackasses who know nothing about what they’re funding.

If the monk Schwarz – maybe he never even existed – was on his own when the mortar with nitrate, sulphur and carbon in it exploded, and gunpowder was discovered, it was not the same with the atomic bomb, whose active mechanism is not based on a single principle discovered by a single scientist. We could say the discovery that parts of the atom can be split off and manipulated goes back fifty years to Crooke’s tubes and to the earlier observation that electrical sparks can pass through extremely low‑density gases and produce various types of radioactivity, among which X‑rays, which were discovered in the previous century. And we could say that all this research into the complex constitution of the atom, before the Curie’s discovery of radium, is based on Mendeleev’s system, which established the idea that the atoms of the various elements were composed of some common ingredients in progressive concentrations; a hypothesis that goes back to Proust at the beginning of the eighteen hundreds, when Lavoisier set out the atomic hypothesis to explain chemical phenomena. The Greek atomists, such as Democritus, Leucippus and Epicurus, all had a premonition of this. In the history of invention it will eventually be shown that in ninety percent of cases the connection to named individuals, rather than to the process of technology prompted by productive requirements, is a myth.

Atomic Fission

Let us return to heads of State, politicians and warlords, and, if you like, revolutionary leaders. Up to now they had a part to play in events, even though always referred to in a very distorted and hyperbolic way. This role though is not that of a primary cause, a prime mover; and it does not constitute a necessary condition, though maybe it was when barbarian hordes were led across entire continents, their motion though time and space within the historical cycle dictated by the search not for glory, but for riches and food.

Such a role, which is becoming ever more constrained within a different scale of values, in which pugilists can be grouped alongside professors of the history of philosophy; with extremes of efficiency constantly converging on a common average, apart from the former having a submachine gun placed at his disposal, and the latter a good library.

It is no different for the political leader: we have in fact arrived at the point where those who want to improve their career prospects play down any outstanding qualities they may have and do not make use of them. Nevertheless, sometimes history shows it has a main actor, and sometimes that person’s name even becomes known throughout the world, although such an identification changes nothing, and in certain cases creates a major obstacle and a whole load of trouble, as in the case of the revolutionary movements we have discussed.

For a start, this single individual chosen within the general body of the species can be anyone.

Priming an atomic bomb happens like this. We have seen that an atom, extremely small though it is, is not indivisible, but is made up of even smaller particles. When activated, put simply, by an extremely powerful electric charge, in which it is possible to concentrate an amount of energy valued at millions of lire on your electric meter, a small particle (a proton or neutron in the simplest case of hydrogen, the smallest atom) is detached, and collides with another atom within the electrical field, causing it to split, violently and suddenly. The splitting means the particles of this atom in turn shoot out at an incredible velocity and collide with other atoms, which in their turn split as well, breaking into their component parts: this then produces so much energy (held prisoner in the seemingly inert atoms) that the electric meter would now read billions. The bomb has gone off. Practically at the same instant a chain reaction has taken place, through which each split atom splits the adjacent ones as well.

The battilocchio‑atom, from which other atoms receive the freed nucleus, after it was activated by a discharge of millions of volts, a higher electrical potential than a lightning bolt, could have been any one of them.

Do we mean to say that, just as all atoms are identical in the same chemical element, so too all individuals of the human species are exactly the same? Clearly not, rather we wanted to make the comparison to emphasize that, in the present historical stage, the leader’s job is such that it is increasingly possible to find someone to perform it by, as in the cyclotron, choosing any atom at all to be the first atom in the chain.

So, when the cyclotron is charged up in its state of perfect isolation (today the potential is earthed due to several instances of opportunist corruption leaking through the class insulator – the real technical problem of the cyclotron is not the enormous mass of energy, but precisely the insulation) and history issues its invitation to mankind, to find out who wants to be the fission atom, an anxious response will come from all those who would be do fine as fixed atoms.