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A.R.Yngve
PARRY'S PROTOCOL
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Chapter 20
- Patrick, when was the first time you experienced the feeling that other people were out to get you?
- On the day I became six years old.
- Tell me about it.
- It was my birthday party. I got a lot of fine presents from all my relatives. Uncle Dan, who made much more money than my father, gave me a battery-powered fire-truck, with wire control and a pull-out ladder...
- Yes?
- I was overjoyed; this was before all toys became computerized. Uncle Dan looked at me in a strange way, and asked me if he and I could go out in the backyard to play with my new fire-truck. Then suddenly my mom went afraid; she took me by the arm and said I'd just had a cold and shouldn't be going out. I knew she was lying, and it was a rather warm day by the end of April, but I didn't say anything that time.
When everybody had left and Mom was cleaning the house, I asked her why she had lied. She lifted me up into her lap and looked very sad. She told me that Uncle Dan had been very sick, and done terrible things. She was afraid that he was going to try doing something terrible again. She was very harsh when she warned me: "Patrick, always be careful with people you don't know. Sometimes you can't even trust those you think are your friends! Always remember that!"
That night, I sneaked out of the house and threw my uncle's present down a ravine. I cried myself to sleep over the fire-truck I didn't dare to keep; I had liked it, but now it was tainted with his evil intent. Mom didn't say anything when she discovered it was gone; Dad discovered it a bit later, but he said nothing either.
- Did you ever see your uncle again?
- No, never. A year or so later, I heard he'd died in some kind of unexplained accident.
- What did you feel when you heard of his death?
- I felt a great relief, as if some invisible threat had been moved away. That is, until I started to become aware of other things.
- Give me an example.
- Already at my first day in school, I saw how there were different factions of children forming on the schoolyard. They were somehow directed into separate clusters... as if there were invisible magnets under the ground, pulling them along. Girls over there, boys over here, white children here, Black children there, Catholic children here... they seemed to lack a will of their own, no minds of their own.
There were some oddballs and outcast children who were attracted to my company, but they all seemed totally different and alien to me. Sometimes a bully tried to pick on me, but the moment I started to fight I showed him a lesson. When I fought I was ruthless... I always carried a fistful of sand in my pocket, that I could throw in his eyes. I really tried to kill the opponent, make him blind; tear his nose off. I almost succeded in doing that once; it was the proudest moment of my early schooldays.
- How old were you then?
- Eight.
- I know you finished school early, with excellent grades in Language and Arts. What made you decide to become a teacher, and why teach Philosophy with a specialization in Logic?
- When I finished college by the end of the Seventies, I was extremely worried about the global condition. I lived in constant fear of global nuclear war breaking out any moment, and I had sleeping difficulties. Other students offered me dope, to help me sleep, but I never took any. Didn't trust them. I've never been a religious person, so I hoped philosophy could offer me a rational, logical way of understanding and dealing with the human condition.
- Try summing up your experience of the university years.
- Work, frustration, isolation. I managed the studies the way I managed school and college: say and do just as much as they expect of you -- no more, no less. When I graduated in the early Eighties, I began looking for teaching assignments all around California.
- What was your view of the world at that time?
- I can't see why we have to go through all this, there are old interviews where I say the same things.
- I still want to hear you say it. Please go on.
- I realized that invisible forces beyond my control were in motion, for purposes I could not understand. Behind the arms race of the superpowers, and the threat of a world war, were a few hidden groups who played a cynical game with world control at the stakes. I decided to get a regular job and live an ordinary life on the outside, while trying to gain insight into the conspiracies in my spare time.
- Did you come to any insights during your time as a teacher?
- I've mentioned them before: the hidden groups have certain limitations in their use of power. For example, they cannot read or control people's minds directly. Their main means of manipulating people's actions are indirect influence: the mass media, religion, political ideologies -- false constructs which appeal to our primitive, selfish instincts.
Bread and circuses, yeah. Already the Roman emperors knew that. Bread and circuses -- it's mostly so efficient, that the powerplay of the hidden groups is almost laid bare -- people see it without seeing it. I made this frightening discovery: that people often openly admitted that they felt manipulated, but didn't protest. There was some kind of programmed impulse to obey, which occurred after puberty -- a little earlier in women. I realized that there was yet another, hidden power behind those who fought for world dominion.
- Do you know anything about this "second power"?
- Not much. But I'm constantly trying to gather facts and fit them into some coherent pattern.
- You mentioned a programmed impulse to obedience...
- ...which occurred after puberty, yes. After a while, educating became my cover for subversive action; the young are in a period of flux when they are susceptible to non-conformist modes of thinking. I tried to sow the seeds of critical thought into my lectures, but I had to proceed with caution; there were informers among the students. Thanks to one of those, I lost my job at an L.A. university and had to take a job at a less esteemed university, which had recently been built in a Spanish-American district in San Diego.
- What exactly led to the unfortunate incident in San Diego?
- Hold it, Doc. Time to have a break for more air, or my canary will die.
- By all means... I'm suffocating myself.