Part XXV
4 In a cogent sense
5 Industrialization is a religion, and the first ever to promise self perpetuation.
6 Industrialization considered as a religion is also unique in that it has no priests,—that is if we except the self-appointed Publicitors who are willing; nay eager,—nay nuts to be druid Merlins, Richelieux, Rasputins, Savonarolas, or Wolseys to anybody with enough money,—their only criteria of authority.
7 But the Publicitors cannot be said to sufficiently comprehend Industrialization to be considered its representative priests. They are more in the nature of being its furtively meddling buffoons.
8 They make it a merry religion when they get fooled;—as they always do.
9 Industrialization is the first religion that is realistically universal.
10 It thrives in cross-bred reversion to a basic universal healthier man.
11 It needs no written creed, nor canon, for its own dynamics are insistent.
12 It has no geographical limits.
13 It is a streamline religion for it has vacuumized people into its lead edge lift rather than its being consciously espoused by people as in all former religions.
14 The scientists
15 who are responsible for its unveiling have never pled its cause; as missionaries,—nor taken advantage of its power for personal ends, —as priests,—nor excused it, or explained it,—as laity.
16 For Industrialization needed no succor or support within man’s physical powers to provide.
17 It needed only precise unveiling, that its cosmic majesty might speak silently for itself, to be tuned into by man through the realistic wave bands of scientific non-sensoriality.
18 In this connection resolving the broadcast into the limited sensorial band, it is to be comprehended that the automobile industry is not an industry apart from other industries as for instance the ‘‘watch industry.’’
19 The automobile industry is up to this minute INDUSTRIALIZATION itself developed quantitatively and qualitatively to its highest contemporary degree.
20 As such, industry centers around the automobile as the largest and most inclusive per capita consumer producer mechanical extension of U.S.A, man as of 1920 to 1940.
21 It is man’s latest mass method of physical transport extension, beyond which he popularly extends himself only in communication which involves no motion of his integral mechanism and therefore by ever more ephemeral extension means.
22 The automobile considered
23 as constituting the momentary prime focus of Industrialization itself,
24 is to be observed as progressively engulfing,—in method and principle,—producer-consumer articulation of all other of man’s extensions, for instance of his stove, and refrigerator.
25 Of course
26 most importantly at the moment man is, under the aegis of war grafting on his new wings within the industrial-biology laboratories and pilot plants.
27 In further exploration
28 of the canonless
29 industrial religion concept
30 it is discovered
31 that man in his automobile
32 has spontaneously developed a higher calibre of cooperative morality
33 than in all former history put together.
34 The U.S.A, man,
35 being broadly extended into locomotion by his automobile
36 experiences mutually and constantly the dual viewpoint shift from that of pedestrian to that of driver or rider.
37 And instead of just theoretically subscribing to the fact that there are always at least two valid viewpoints, he comes to a true comprehension of the fact, ergo, dawning tolerance in oldsters, native tolerance in U.S.A, youngsters.
38 This unquestionably is showing its effect on America’s viewpoint in world affairs today after twenty years of ever increasing high speed extension.
39 And starting first with a jalopy as his extension man learns to know himself by adjusting his carburetors grinding his valves checking upon his this and that until he checks back finally to his integral battery and radiator.
40 Thus good mechanics become as nature to the U.S.A.er.
41 One might be inclined to think that the automobile’s passe,—that both Europe and America have extensively arrived at an air age because of the dramatic shift of tactical world power from the water to the air just as it once shifted with world shaking force from the land to the water—a shift that began with the fall of Rome and its land legions
42 and ended with the hydraulic consolidations under the hand of Victoria, Queen of the British Empire.
43 Although this new tactical shift of vehicle and medium is epochal on the ephemeralization highway which creeps, walks, strides, hops, skips, and jumps, glides, flies, and finally telemotes via the solid-liquid-gaseous progression of elemental states in which mutability advances geometrically, the populace
44 of neither Europe nor America can in any sense
45 be as yet described
46 as air borne,
47 except in a rather strange special way.
48 That special air borne way
49 is peculiar to Americans only to date amongst all the world peoples for that special air way is by pneumatic tires, without whose pneumatic dynamics the automobile
50 its industrial production
51 and popular use
52 would not exist,
53 and which with a car per family
54 makes an American’s practical environment one thousand fold larger
55 than that of popular man of any other continent.
56 The dynamic philosophy of the U.S.A, man extended at speed on the highway, needs no logic beyond that of the intuitive dynamic sense to convince it
57 of the cooperative necessity of sharing the road
58 in an ever more standard manner.
59 When a five-ton mechanically extended man is coming at him in the opposite direction at such speed that they must pass one another on a narrow strip of earth at the rate of 120 miles an hour, ‘‘Keep to the Right’’ needs no priestly dogma nor police enforcement.
60 ‘‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’’ comes naturally in America,—on wheels.
61 Hints on what others have fatally failed in;—hints on not ‘‘passing’’ on curves, at hill tops—blindly, are all that the American needs—‘‘Danger air brakes’’ ‘‘Please blow your horn when wishing to pass’’ ‘‘Do not park on highway.’’
62 And while saying by rote ‘‘Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife nor his ox, nor his ass,’’ and wondering what would happen if they did and if by chance their neighbors might not be fresh out of the last two items,
63 fifty million U.S.A.ers
64 through this mechanically amplified means
65 of the automobile
66 in dynamic unfoldment
67 have empirically acquired good manners
68 and consideration of others in fact
69 as they might otherwise
70 never have succeeded
71 in a millenium of theoretical
72 lip service religion.
73 And that fulfills
74 the number one law of all religions.