HIS69-159 Tied Chicken
Tied Chicken
HIS69
HIS69-159
Fritz George
$2.25
Foreword
Men have asked the question of what makes a man for thousands of years. What is or are the qualities that separate a man and a boy? The achievement of the treasured status of manhood is marked by many ceremonies in the different cultures of the world. Bar mitzvah, confirmation, the right to vote, the right to buy alcoholic beverages, the right to drive an automobile, all of these are various judgments by society of a boy’s ability to function as a man, but all of these are based on the boy reaching a certain age. Obviously manhood is not simply a matter of years. What then makes a man?
Tied Chicken examines this age-old question and proposes an answer for it. Manhood is the result and the reward of the process of learning self, control—control of the body and the mind so that the first will serve the second. The self-discipline which is necessary to stand up to pain and to bend it to the will is put forward as the essential ingredient that makes up a man. To be able to be the master of one’s own soul is to be a man.
There is an old German folk song called, “Die Gedanken sind frei,”—“Our thoughts are Free,” our minds are the masters of our bodies, or should be. If we can enslave our bodies as servants of our minds, then we have achieved as much freedom as is possible for mortal man. How can we accomplish this goal?
The problem of the mind’s control over the body has been pondered over the ages by many different civilizations, but the central element of all of the proposed answers has always been the control of pain. Fasting and whipping were used by medieval monks to control their bodies. Greek youths faced a training and initiation into the manhood they desired that closely resembles the methods used in Camp Swallowtail. All men must learn to surrender in order to command, just as candidates to become officers in the armed forces must learn to take orders before they are fit to give them.
Some readers may object to the sexual terms in which this answer is stated, but as long as the central problem is the conquest of pain, and as long as the chief reward of the Pleasure Principle is sex, then the bondage of the body and the discipline of the mind will always be concerned with pain and sex. As the last chapter of the book indicates, it may even be possible for some to be able to subjugate the body so entirely to the mind that the mind can become free to leave the body behind, at least for short periods of time. Then indeed, Die Gedanken sind frei!
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