From Volume 3, Issue Number 42 of EIR Online, Published Oct. 19, 2004

From the LaRouche Youth Movement

This article is reprinted from The New Federalist of Oct. 18, 2004.

'Wild Animus' Beast-Man, Rich Shapero, Exposed! (Please, put your pants back on!)

by Wesley Irwin LaRouche Youth Movement

Four months ago, while organizing politically on the streets of Seattle, I noticed people distributing, free of charge, without any "catch," a massive number of novels with the title "Wild Animus." "Just take the book home with you and read it," they said. Over the course of the next few weeks, I began seeing the same operation at youth festivals, and even at a John Kerry campaign rally in Tacoma. Last week, a fellow organizer in the LaRouche Youth Movement Oakland local called and told me that the same thing was happening in San Francisco. In fact, at the event in the Bay Area, there were older people dressed up as "nerds" waving signs and shouting negative things about the book, who admitted, while on break, that they were paid actors demonstrating, in order to draw attention to the books, and that the goal was to distribute "1 million." The back cover of each book says 50,000 copies will be distributed to the public for free.

The book's author, Rich Shapero, who founded "Too Far: Fiction that ventures one step beyond" (www.toofar.com), wrote the book as close to a personal account as possible, while maintaining it as fiction, he says. The story is about a "disillusioned UC Berkeley graduate" who "leaves behind a world of protests and riots to follow a wild, inner calling." The main character, "Sam," who, like Shapero in the '60s, takes mind-bending trips on LSD, ends up following his "wild animus" up to Seattle, and then into the remote regions of Alaska where he has an inner "truth-seeking" experience that takes him all the way to the "breaking point" of his sanity. In the book, he turns into an animal, specifically, a ram, renames himself "Ransom," freaks out on his girlfriend, and ends up dying in the wilderness of Alaska.

- Twisted Philosophy -

This book is a detriment to the mental health of anyone who reads it, but far worse than the book itself is Shapero's own twisted philosophy. The Romantic and perverse notion that a human being can become more in touch with who he "truly" is, by isolating himself in the wilderness, and thinking about himself as an animal, is just plain stupid and insane. Shapero, in his own words, says, "What could be more natural than for humans to identify themselves with an animal that seems to mirror their temperament?"

What Shapero, a Baby Boomer who seems to have never outgrown the '60s, denies, however, is that the essence of what separates man from animal, is the innate principle of creative human reason, infinite potential for human discovery, and application of human discovery through technology. It's through the creative process of discovery, that we, who live in modern industrial civilization, have come to have the life expectancy, population growth, and standard of living that has been achieved only in relatively recent human history. That process is not only beneficial for us, but is built into our nature as the very purpose for human existence in the Universe. It allows us to transform the Universe's biosphere in profound ways, improving it, making it better than it was without us. We are, in essence, the gardeners of the Universe. Shapero's philosophy not only erases this truthful philosophical tradition, it "ventures one step beyond."

In an interview with the author, posted on his website, Shapero openly states his view of modern civilization: "We may as well enjoy it, because it won't last long. There will be more Dark Ages, and at some point, humans won't rule the Earth. I can imagine a couple of grimy fellows in animal skins carving up their kill with flint knives, talking about 'the dream time' when food was available on demand in brightly lit huts from people in funny costumes." Shapero goes on to call "infrastructure" (water, power, transportation systems, sewage treatment, etc), which is urgently needed today to maintain and increase the human population and standard of living in America, and the world, "superficial." The truth is, that without increased investment in the infrastructure Shapero calls "superficial," we won't be able to build civilization out of the past two generations of the free-market decadence that has destroyed our real, physical economy, and has brought America to the point where millions of children can't even afford basic health care.

- A Frightening Personal Life -

Not surprisingly, after majoring in "pharmacology" at UC Berkeley in the '60s, Shapero went on to become a successful "venture capitalist" in the current anti-"general welfare," "dog-eat-dog," "free-market" economy, and ended up working as managing partner for a company in Silicon Valley. It appears Rich not only ejaculated his "wild animus" onto the business world of high tech/communications, but also in his personal life, which I personally found quite frightening. When asked about it being unusual to use "the predator/prey relationship as a model for love," Beastman Shapero responded, "Often intimacy involves a dance in which those relationships shift. But there is always a hunter, and there is always a hunted. If there's love, there's going to be surrender. That's what's going on. One individual is the aggressor and the other succumbs." "In a love relationship there has to be surrender. And the model Ransom has for this is one animal killing another." Hey ladies, want to go on a date? This guy makes Freddie Kruger look safe.

Another troubling aspect of this Romantic, or should I say Satanic, ideology, is that the people at "Too Far" are pushing the idea that there is something "Classical" in these bizarre writings. "Ransom's sheep persona is reminiscent of Dionysus." "Animus feels like Zeus. He's temperamental. One moment he'll rage and be impossible.... This feels very Classical to me," says the "Too Far" interviewer, to which Shapero responds, "For sure. The religion of the ancient Greeks put the sacred very close to wilderness and nature.... [They] appreciated and were passionate about the inner wilderness and its relationship to the outer." This inner wilderness, or "animus," is described by Ransom (Shapero's own infantile-ego image), as "the passion within us that attacks to possess, and surrenders for love."

In other words, "animus" is the irrational ego, free of that pesky thing known as "reason" or "cognitive thought," without which the "savage" man acts like an existential sex monkey. Shapero proudly states as much when he says, "Writing has a cognitive element. It's through the mind.... The truth is that writing is about as interesting as a sensory deprivation experiment. It's all output and no input." Ransom prefers, instead of reasoned thought, to "use chants to invoke the stages in his mythos," and Shapero himself admits his own "explorations have taken the form of meditations on transcendence."

This is the complete opposite of the Greek method upon which modern European civilization is based. The method of Socrates and Plato was one of a dialogue process through which paradoxes were worked out by taking false axioms to their logical, infinite extensions, thus seeing where the contradictions lay. The participants in the dialogue thereby came closer to the truth through rigorous cognitive thinking and discussion, not though chanting, meditating, or rubbing their wild animuses up against each other.

- 'Too Far' Well-Funded -

This book is the first of a number to be promoted by "Too Far," whose staff is made up of well-educated venture capitalists/environmentalists. They are advertising that they are extremely "well funded" and are hiring "idea" people that fit their mold. Their editorial and creative director is a graduate of Oxford, and has worked on major Hollywood movies; their woman in charge of sales and marketing worked for the RAND Corporation, just to name two. Beyond the obvious cultural implications of the degenerate "Too Far" ideology, the stated intent of the publication is to raise funds for the Wilderness Conservation Project, which preserves "wilderness lands in the neighborhood of the settings for the Too Far stories, ... to help ensure that parts of our globe remain forever wild." The American Institute of Philanthropy is promoting the WCP heavily.

Why is this book being targetted into youth/political areas across Washington, Oregon, and California, weeks before what is probably the most important Presidential election in our lifetimes? It clearly promotes running away from facing today's frightening political realities, into a drug-induced schizophrenic escape into the wilderness, instead of effectively fighting (which the LaRouche Youth Movement is) against the mentally ill George Bush's, and Dick Cheney's preventive-war policy, which must be smashed if our U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence are going to survive. Why such heavy promotion of ideas that are a blatant cultural attack against the U.S. anti-oligarchical, republican tradition; specifically the idea that man is not an animal to be hunted and herded, but rather is "made in the image of God" because he has a mind, and his purpose is to use his mind to creatively change the world in which he lives through technological inventions? Cognition, expressed in physical-economic growth, is the principle for which our generation of youth must fight if we are to save our species from a new Dark Age. We cannot allow ourselves to be Romantically stroked into the fantasy world of the Boomer generation, by the likes of monkey-man Rich Shapero.

The next time you see Beastman Shapero or Dick Cheney expose themselves, tell them to keep their "wild animus" in their pants!

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