The Bureau of Sabotage Lessons

A BuSab agent must begin by learning the linguistic modes and action limits (usually self-imposed) of the societies he treats. The agent seeks data on the functional relationship which drive from our common universe and which arise from interdependencies. Such interdependencies are the frequent first victims of word-illusions. Societies based on ignorance of original interdependencies come sooner or later to stalemate. Too long frozen, such societies die.

A Bureau is a life form and Bureaucrat one of its cells. That analogy teaches us which are the more important cells, which in greatest peril, which most easily replaced, and how easy it is to be mediocre.

Language is a kind of code dependent upon the life rhythms of the species which originated the language. Unless you learn those rhythms, the code remains mostly unintelligible.

The play of words can lead to certain expectations which life is unable to match. The is a source of much insanity and other forms of unhappiness.

All definitions, no matter the language, should be considered probationary.

Never underestimate the power of wishful thinking of filter what the eyes see and what the ears hear.

There is no such thing as pure objectivity.


Facts can be whatever you want them to be. This is the lesson of relativity.


Where is the weapon with which I enforce your bondage? You give it to me every time you time you open your mouth.


It is because you speak to me that I do not believe in you.


He was the kind of man who created his own death.

Body jargon hormone squirts, these begin to get at communication.

You can say things which cannot be done. This is elementary. The trick is to keep attention focused on what is said and not on what can be done.


It is impossible to see any absolute through a screen of interpreters.


Learning a language represents training in the delusion of that language.

A basic requirement for BuSab agents is, Perhaps, that we make the right mistakes.

If you say, “I understand.” what have you done? You made a value Judgment.


All the wisdom of the universe cannot match the alert willingness to dodge a violent blow.


One species can, all by itself, produce infinite varieties of experiences. The interaction between many species creates the illusion that infinity has been enlarged by several orders magnitude.

Providence and Manifest Destiny are synonyms often invoked to support arguments founded in wishful thinking.


If you believe yourself sufficiently hungry, you will eat your own thoughts.


No language has ever really come to grips with temporal relationships.

Delusions demand reflex reactions (as though they had autonomic roots) where doubts and questioning not only aren’t required, but are actively resisted.


Taken in isolated tandem, Government and Justice are mutually exclusive. There must be a third force at work for any society to achieve both government and justice. This is why the Bureau of Sabotage sometimes is called “The Third Force.”

Any conversations a unique jazz performance. Some are more pleasing to the ears, but that is not necessarily a measure of their importance.


The most common use of abstraction is to conceal contradictions. It must be noted that that abstracting process has been demonstrated to be infinite.

The value of self government at an individual level cannot be overestimated.

If words are your symbols of reality, you live in a dream world.



Justice belongs to those who claim it, but let the claimant beware lest he create new injustice by his claim and thus set the bloody pendulum of revenge into its inexorable motion.




How to start a war? Nurture your own latent hungers for power. Forget that only madmen pursue power for its own sake. Let such madman gain power–even you. Let such madman act behind their conventional masks of sanity. Whether their masks be fashioned from the delusions of defense or the theological aura of law, war will come.


All sentient beings are created unequal. The best society provides each with equal opportunity to float at his own level.



Law must retain useful ways to break with traditional forms because nothing is more certain than that the forms of Law remain when all justice is gone.


We will now explore the particular imprint which various governments make upon the individual. First, be sure you recognize the primary governing force. For example, take a careful look at Human history. Humans have been known to submit to many constraints: to rule by Autarchs, by Plutarchs, by Oligarchs, by tyrant Majorities and Minorities, by the hidden suasions of Polls, by profound instincts and shallow juvenilities. And always, the governing force as we wish you now to understand this concept was whatever the individual believed had control over his immediate survival. Survival sets the pattern of imprint. During much of Human history (and the pattern is similar with most sentient species) Corporation presidents held more survival in their casual remarks than did the figurehead officials. We of the ConSentiency cannot forget this as we keep watch on the Multiworld Corporations. We dare not even forget it of ourselves. Where you work for your own survival, this dominates your imprint, this dominates what you believe.


Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.


All persons act from beliefs they are conditioned not to question, from a set of deeply seated prejudices. Therefore, whoever presumes to judge must be asked: “How are you affronted?’ And this judge must begin there to question inwardly as well as outwardly.



Behavioral engineering in all of its manifestations always degenerates into merciless manipulation. It reduces all (manipulators and manipulated alike) to a deadly “mass effect.” The central assumption, that manipulation of individual personalities can achieve uniform behavioral reposes, has been exposed as a lie by many species but never with more telling effect than by the Gowachin on Dosadi. Here, they showed us the “Walden Fallacy” in ultimate foolishness, explaining: “Given any species which reproduces by genetic mingling such that every individual is a unique specimen, all attempts to impose a decision matrix based on assumed uniform behavior will prove lethal.”


We of the Sabotage Bureau remain legalists of a special category. We know that too much law injures a society; it is the same with too little law. One seeks a balance. We are like the balancing force among the Gowachin; without hope of achieving heaven in the society of mortals, we seek the unattainable. Each agent knows his own conscience and why he serves such a master. That is the key to us. We serve a mortal conscience for immortal reasons. We do it without hope of praise or the sureness of success.


The military mentality is a bandit and raider mentality. Thus, all military represents form of organized banditry where the conventional mores do not prevail. The military is a way of rationalizing murder, rape, looting, and other forms of theft which are always accepted as part of warfare. When denied an outside target, the military mentality always turns against its own civilian population, using identical rationalizations for bandit behavior.


No legal system can maintain justice unless every participant–magisters, prosecutors, Legums, defendants, witnesses, all–risks life itself in whatever dispute comes before the bar. Everything must be risked in the Courtarena. If any element remains outside the contest and without personal risk, justice inevitably fails.

People always devise their own justifications. Fixed and immovable Law merely provides a convenient structure within which to hang your justifications and the prejudices behind them. The only universally acceptable law for mortals would be one which fitted every justification. What obvious nonsense. Law must expose prejudice and question justification. Thus, Law must be flexible, must change to fit new demands. Otherwise, it becomes merely the justification of the powerful.



We are plagued by a corrupt polity which promotes unlawful and/or immoral behavior. Public interests has no practical significance in everyday behavior among the ruling factions. The real problems of our world are not being confronted by those in power. In the guise of public service, they use whatever comes to hand for personal gain. They are insane with and for power.


If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain the you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.


“Their law! It is a dangerous foundation for non-authentic traditions. It is no more than a device to justify false ethics!”


When the means of great violence are widespread, nothing is more dangerous to the powerful than that they create outrage and injustice, for outrage and injustice will certainly ignite retaliation in kind.

The attack by those who want to die–this is the attack against which you cannot prepare a perfect defense.


The more control, the more that requires control. This is the road to chaos.


QUESTION: Who governs the governors?
ANSWER: Entropy.


Given the proper leverage at the proper point, any sentient awareness may be exploded into astonishing self-understanding.

Knowledge is the province of the Legum, just as knowledge is a source of crime.


Does a populace have informed consent when a ruling minority acts in secret to ignite a war, doing this to justify the existence of the minority’s forces? History already has answered that question. Every society today reflects the historical judgment that failure to provide full information for informed consent on such an issue represents a s ultimate crime.


Does a population have informed consent when that population is not taught the inner workings of its monetary system, and then is drawn, all unknowing, into economic adventures?


The music of a civilization has far-reaching consequences on consciousness and , thus, influences the basic nature of a society. Music and its rhythms divert and compel the awareness, describing the limits within which a consciousness, thus fascinated, may operate. Control the music, then, and you own a powerful tool with which to shape the society.


Geriatric or other life extension for the powerful poses a similar threat to a sentient species as that found historically in the dominance of a self perpetuating bureaucracy. Both assume prerogatives of immortality, collecting more and more power with each passing moment,. This is power which draws a theological aura about itself: the unassailable Law, the God-given mandate of the leader, manifest destiny. Power held too long within a narrow framework moves farther and farther away from the adaptive demands of changed conditions. The leadership grows ever more paranoid, suspicious of inventive adaptations to change, fearfully protective of personal power and, in the terrified avoidance of what it sees as risk, blindly leads its people into destruction.


There are some forms of insanity which, driven to an ultimate expression, can become the new models of sanity.


Where pain predominates, agony can be a valued teacher.


In the classical times of several species, it was the custom of the powerful to nudge the power-counters (money or other economic tabulators, status points, etc.) into occasional violent perturbations from which the knowledgeable few profited. Human accounts of this experience reveal edifying examples if thus behavior .

Communal/managed economics have always been more destructive of their societies than those driven by greed. This is what Dosadi says: Greed sets its own limits, is self-regulating.


In a changing universe, only a changing species can hope to be immortal and then only if its eggs are nurtured in widely scattered environments. This predicts a wealth of unique individuals.


Choose containable violence when violence cannot be avoided. Better this than epidemic violence.

...to stand alone against all adversity is the most sacred moment of existence.