breakout 'social philosophy' essays

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+\chapter{Creep}
+
+When Helen Lefkowitz said I was "such a creep" at Interlochen in 
+1956, her remark epitomized the feeling that females have always had about 
+me. My attempts to understand why females rejected me and to decide what 
+to do about it resulted in years of confusion. In 1961-1962, I tried to 
+develop a theory of the creep problem. This theory took involuntary 
+celibacy as the defining characteristic of the creep. Every society has its 
+image of the ideal young adult, even though the symbols of growing up 
+change from generation to generation. The creep is an involuntary celibate 
+because he fails to develop the surface traits of adulthood--poise and 
+sophistication; and because he is shy, unassertive, and lacks self-confidence 
+in the presence of others. The creep is awkward and has an unstylish 
+appearance. He seems sexless and childish. He is regarded by the ideal adults 
+with condescending scorn, amusement, or pity. 
+
+Because he seems weak and inferior in the company of others, and 
+cannot maintain his self-respect, the creep is pressed into isolation. There, 
+the creep doesn't have the pressure of other people's presence to make him 
+feel inferior, to make him feel that he must be like them in order not te be 
+inferior. The creep can develop the morale required to differ. The creep also 
+tends to expand his fantasy life, so that it takes the place of the 
+interpersonal life from which he has been excluded. The important 
+consequence is that the creep is led to discover a number of positive 
+personality values which cannot be achieved by the mature, married adult. 
+During the period when I developed the creep theory, I was spending almost 
+all of my time alone in my room, thinking and writing. This fact should 
+make the positive creep values more understandable. 
+
+\begin{enumerate}
+\item Because of his isolation, the creep has a qualitatively higher sense of 
+identity. He has a sense of the boundaries of his personality, and a control of 
+what goes on within those boundaries. In contrast, the mature adult, who 
+spends all his time with his marriage partner or in groups of people, is a mere 
+channel into which thoughts flow from outside; he lives in a state of 
+conformist anonymity. 
+
+\item The creep is emotionally autonomous, independent, or 
+self-contained. He develops an elaborate world of feelings which remain 
+within himself, or which are directed toward inanimate objects. The creep 
+may cooperate with other people in work situations, but he does not develop 
+emotional attachments to other people. 
+
+\item Although the creep's intellectual abilities develop with education, 
+the creep lives in a sexually neutral world and a child's world throughout his 
+life. He is thus able to play like a child. He retains the child's capacity for 
+make-believe. He retains the child's lyrical creativity in regard to 
+self-originated, self-justifying activities. 
+
+\item There is enormous room in the creep's life for the development of 
+every aspect of the inner world or the inner life. The creep can devote 
+himself to thought, fantasy, imagination, imaging, variegated mental states, 
+dreams, internal emotions and feelings towards inanimate objects. The creep 
+develops his inner world on his own power. His inner life originates with 
+himself, and is controlled and intellectually consequential. The creep has no 
+use for meditations whose content is supplied by religious traditions. Nor has 
+he any use for those drug experiences which adolescents undertake to prove 
+how grown-up they are, and whose content is supplied by fashion. The 
+creep's development of his inner life is the summation of all the positive 
+creep values. 
+\end{enumerate}
+
+After describing these values, the creep theory returned to the problem 
+of the creep's involuntary celibacy. For physical reasons, the creep remains a 
+captive audience for the opposite sex, but his attempts to gain acceptance by 
+the opposite sex always end in failure. On the other hand, the creep may 
+well find the positive creep values so desirable that he will want to intensify 
+them. The solution is for the creep to seek a medical procedure which will 
+sexually neutralize him. He can then attain the full creep values, without the 
+disability of an unresolved physical desire. 
+
+Actually, the existence of the positive creep values proves that the 
+creep is an authentic non-human who happens to be trapped in human social 
+biology. The positive creep values imply a specification of a whole 
+non-human: social biology which would be appropriate to those values. 
+Finally, the creep theory mentioned that creeps often make good grades in 
+school, and can thus do clerical work or other work useful to humans. This 
+fact would be the basis for human acceptance of the creep. 
+
+In the years after I presented the creep theory, a number of 
+inadequacies became apparent in it. The principal one was that I managed to 
+cast off the surface traits of the creep, but that when I did my problem 
+became even more intractable. An entirely different analysis of the problem 
+was required. 
+
+My problem actually has to do with the enormous discrepancy between 
+the ways I can relate to males and the ways I can relate to females. The 
+essence of the problem has to do with the social values of females, which are 
+completely different from my own. The principal occupation of my life has 
+been certain self-originated activities which are embodied in "writings." Now 
+most males have the same social values that I find in all females. But there 
+have always been a few males with exceptional values; and my activities have 
+developed through exchanges of ideas with these males. These exchanges 
+have come about spontaneously and naturally. In contrast, I have never had 
+such an exchange of ideas with females, for the following reasons. Females 
+have nothing to say that applies to my activities. They cannot understand 
+that such activities are possible. Or they are a part of the "masses" who 
+oppose and have tried to discourage my activities. 
+
+The great divergence between myself and females comes in the area 
+where each individual is responsible for what he or she is; the area in which 
+one must choose oneself and the principles with which one will be identified. 
+This area is certainly not a matter of intelligence or academic degrees. 
+Further, the fact that society has denied many opportunities to females at 
+one time or another is not involved here. (My occupation has no formal 
+prerequisites, no institutional barriers to entry. One enters it by defining 
+oneself as being in it. Yet no female has chosen to enter it. Or consider such 
+figures as Galileo and Galois. By the standards of their contemporaries, these 
+individuals were engaged in utterly ridiculous, antisocial pursuits. Society 
+does not give anybody the "opportunity" to engage in such pursuits. Society 
+tries to prevent everybody from being a Galileo or Galois. To be a Galileo is 
+really a matter of choosing sides, of choosing to take a certain stand.) 
+
+Let me be specific about my own experiences. When I distributed the 
+prospectus for \journaltitle{The Journal of Indeterminate Mathematical Investigations} to 
+graduate students at the Courant Institute in the fall of 1967, the most 
+negative reactions came from the females. The mere fact that I wanted to 
+invent a mathematics outside of academic mathematics was in and of itself 
+offensive and revolting to them. Since the academic status of these females 
+was considerably higher than my own, the disagreement could only be 
+considered one of values. 
+
+The field of art provides an even better example, because there are 
+many females in this field. In the summer of 1969 I attended a meeting of 
+the women's group of the Art Workers Coalition in New York. Many of the 
+women there had seen my Down With Art pamphlet. Ail the females who 
+have seen this pamphlet have reacted negatively, and it is quite clear what 
+their attitude is. They believe that they are courageously defending modern 
+art against a philistine. They consider me to be a crank who needs a "modern 
+museum art appreciation course." The more they are pressed, the more 
+proudiy do they defend "Great Art." Now the objective validity of my 
+opposition to art is absolutely beyond question. To defend modern art is 
+precisely what a hopeless mediocrity would consider courageous. Again, it is 
+clear that the opposition between myself and females is in the area where 
+one must choose one's values. 
+
+I have found that what I really have to do to make a favorable 
+impression on females is to conceal or suspend my activities----the most 
+important part of my life; and to adopt a facade of conformity. Thus, I 
+perceive females as persons who cannot function in my occupation. I 
+perceive them as being like an employment agency, like an institution to 
+which you have to present a conformist facade. Females can he counted on to 
+represent the most "social, human" point of view, a point of view which, as I 
+have explained, is distant from my own. (In March 1970, at the Institute for 
+Advanced Study, the mathematician Dennis Johnson said to me that he 
+would murder his own mother, and murder all his friends, if by doing so he 
+could get the aliens to take him to another star and show him a higher 
+civilization. My own position is the same as Johnson's.) 
+
+It follows that my perception of sex is totally different from that of 
+others. The depictions of sex in the mass media are completely at variance 
+with my own experience. I object to pornography in particular because it is 
+like deceptive advertising for sex; it creates the impression that the physical 
+aspect of sex can be separated from human personalities and social 
+interaction. Actually, if most people can separate sex from personality, it is 
+because they are so average that their values are the same as everybody else's. 
+In my case, although I am a captive audience for females for physical 
+reasons, the disparity between my values and theirs overrides the physical 
+attraction I feel for them. It is hard enough to present a facade of 
+conformity in order to deal with an employment agency, but the thought of 
+having to maintain such a facade in a more intimate relationship is 
+completely demoralizing. 
+
+What conclusions can be drawn by comparing the creep theory with my 
+later experience? First, some individuals who are unquestionably creeps as 
+far as the surface traits are concerned simply may not be led to the deeper 
+values I described. They may not have the talent to get anything positive out 
+of their involuntary situation; or their aspirations may be so conformist that 
+they do not see their involuntary situation as a positive opportunity. Many 
+creeps are female, but all the evidence indicates that they have the same 
+values I have attributed to other females---values which are hard to reconcile 
+with the deeper creep values. 
+
+As for the positive creep values, I may have had them even before I 
+began to care about whether females accepted me. For me, these values may 
+have been the cause, not the effect, of surface creepiness. They are closely 
+related to the values that underlie my activities. It is not necessary to appear 
+strangely dressed, childish, unassertive, awkward, and lacking in confidence 
+in order to achieve the positive creep values. (I probably emphasized surface 
+creep traits during my youth in order to dissociate myself from conformist 
+opinion at a time when I hadn't yet had the chance to make a full 
+substantive critique of it.) Even sex, in and of itself, might not be 
+incompatible with the creep inner life; what makes it incompatible is the 
+female personality and female social values, which in real life cannot be 
+separated from sex and are the predominant aspect of it. 
+
+Having cast off the surface traits of the creep, I can now see that 
+whether I make a favorable impression on females really depends on whether 
+I conceal my occupation. Celibacy is an effect of my occupation; it does not 
+have the role of a primary cause that the creep theory attributed to it. 
+However, it does have consequences of its own. In the context of the entire 
+situation I have described, it constitutes an absolute dividing line between 
+myself and humanity. It does seem to be closely related to the deeper creep 
+values, especially the one of living in a child's world. 
+
+As for the sexual neutralization advocated in the creep theory, to find a 
+procedure which actually achieves the stated objective without having all 
+sorts of unacceptable side effects would be an enormous undertaking. It is 
+not feasible as a minor operation developed for a single person. Further, as 
+the human species comes to have vast technological capabilities, many 
+special interest groups will want to tinker with human social biology, each in 
+a different way, for political reasons. I am no longer interested in petty 
+tinkering with human biology. As I make it clear in other writings, I am in 
+favor of building entities which are actially superior to humans, and which 
+avoid the whole fabric of human biosocial defects, not just one or two of 
+them. 
+
+\clearpage
+{
+	
+
+2/22/1963 
+Henry Flynt and Jack Smith demonstrate against Lincoln Center, February 22, 1963 
+(photo by Tony Conrad) 
+}
+\clearpage
+
+