Reforming Patterns The subliminal means of transmitting society’s conditioning is through tradition. Tradition is the past, acting in the present. Our history books are reports on the conflicts, the abrasions, caused by tradition and the rigidity it encourages. In the same way that we are attached, by the investment we have made, in our own personal progress (dating back to the day when we were able to speak our first word), so are we attached to the “progress” represented by our collective history—even intangible progression of such things as customs, morals, ideals, culture. Pride and tradition are as milk is to cream. The grid of society’s rules meet and connect with each other, and each time a rule becomes outmoded and is abandoned, a new one takes its place in the arrangement. With no dramatic break in tradition, society is modified from generation to generation, but does not radically change; as long as tradition maintains, there is no traumatic threat to the security of the established, of the “old guard.” (The avant-garde is simply the “new guard.”) Even saints follow their own tradition, else they wouldn’t be recognized by society as saints. Morality divides. Morals are society’s dictation of what will be accepted as normal behavior. Normal derives from “a rule,” a yardstick, and refers to a measurement of an average, of conformity to the pattern. In determining, for example, whether our sexual activity is normal, we make a series of divisive choices: whether, first, to engage in sexual activity at all, or not; then, whether to limit that sexual activity to one sex gender or the other; whether to engage in it with one partner or more than one; and so on.
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