“Of course the system can not be beaten on its own terms. It can be beaten by creating terms outside the system. One hole and everything leaks out. To use a simple illustration: Imagine an island completely isolated from outside contacts. This island is governed by the control of money. The inhabitants are granted money = power comfort security if they serve the interests of money and in exact quantitative measure for the services performed. Now imagine someone who does not wish either to advance in the hierarchy of the system nor to suffer its sanctions who points out that quite other norms are possible. The whole weight of the system will be directed against him. All existing systems are based on absolute monopoly – the premise that no other system is possible – monitored by the hierarchical lie that all spiritual and temporal rewards can only come through the system. The pyramid of Life Time Fortune doling out stipends of the life time and fortune they have stolen and monopolised, the communist hierarchy of power, the Catholic Church’s monopoly of the Grace of God, such systems of so called mystic initiation as the Gurdjieffians and the Scientologists.. it is all the same thing: total monopoly of a commodity whether spiritual or temporal and a payoff in the monopolised commodity… A childish game that must end if the human experiment is to continue.”
William Burroughs to John Broderick 18-xii-1965
