D95 Cancellation of a planned contact in London.

Copies: 1

Addressed to Dionisio Garrido Buendía

MADRID SPAIN

 

Madrid, 19 August 1970

 

 

Our esteemed Sir:

 

We send you our respectful greetings.

 

The letter we sent you not long ago is known to practically all your interested brothers, according to our news. We thank you once again for the interest you devote to us, and we understand that the summer holidays are a serious obstacle to your own internal communications, so we excuse the few omissions we have recorded in the circulation of our letter.

 

I would wish, sir, to convey to you in some way, with all sincerity, our present ideas about these strange relations with you, even at the risk of repeating ad nauseam concepts and particular points of view of ours which we set out at the time in earlier letters signed by me or by some of my brothers.

 

Our present fear centres on a series of complex considerations which any sharp analyst among you would undoubtedly accept. In the first place we will allude to the possible sterility of our relations. It is undoubtedly not within the field of our practice to intervene actively in a way that violates your dearest freedoms, not even by exercising an advisory function, which would inevitably constitute a veiled form of coercion or paternalism. And this is so even if you yourselves, adopting a stance we would describe as intellectual masochism, were to beg us to accept any kind of submission, even at the level of individuals. We repeat: this would not be accepted, since we judge it an evident violation of our ethical code, which postulates deep respect for the idiosyncrasy and evolutionary dynamics of native bio-rational groups.

 

But you yourselves are witnesses that in practice such an idea is difficult to put into practice, because of the inevitable opposition of the psychosocial conditioning factors that prevail among you. How could we prevent -always on the real assumption that we respect your forms of conduct and your affective and rational processes- your being affected by our influence when you receive our reports and our letters? For some of you, the aura of mystery that inevitably surrounds us increases our prestige, and if, moreover, our testimony of forming part of an exanthropological social network from a distant cold star is accepted with a wide margin of probability, our reputation must increase still further, with its charge of suggestiveness and potential for intellectual irradiation.

 

In this way, any suggestion of ours, any mere opinion, any timid advice of ours sketched without the slightest coercive intention, may be turned by you into a powerful spring of conduct that morally forces you to follow a line or policy of action to the detriment of your most valuable freedoms of choice. The risk is so evident that we do not think it necessary to insist too much on pointing it out. It would, on the other hand, be unjust to describe such an influence as nefarious or alienating in the sense that, for example, it would constitute for you an embryo of psychopathological disturbances. We imagine you are aware that this is not the meaning of our fears.

 

To mitigate these effects, we could present you in our writings with more aseptic versions -and something of this governs our strategy regarding our communications- or interrupt these strange contacts for ever, a solution which, although drastic, would cut the germs of the problem at the root. But this last alternative, which we assess from an affective or sentimental angle, we know will be described by you as cruel, and for that reason we have not wished to adopt it unilaterally without your prior consent.

 

One must become fully aware that any solution definitively adopted cannot be satisfactory for everyone at the level at which we find ourselves.

 

For the degree of complexity that processes of this kind reach over time, especially when semantic forms and mental structures as different as ours are involved, makes tensions and disturbing implications that deteriorate the general picture inevitable.

 

A good example of this is the reticence and veiled dissension, in short the uneasiness, with which our latest suggestions about future relations with the Madrid and Barcelona groups have been received. Suggestions which we now assure you were not intended to be coercive but simply to provide guidance.

 

All this gives us a feeling of bitterness. Do not describe it as a reproach to you. Your brothers and you are not to blame for these mental maladjustments, which are ultimately a by-product of mental schemes of the men of EARTH distorted by a sequence of very complex social traumas whose aetiology is difficult for you to differentiate.

 

That is why we prefer to rectify. We will rectify as many times as necessary in order to spare you bitter disappointments and internal dissensions among your brothers. We will share our correspondence between both groups: CEI and ERIDANI indiscriminately, and since the journey to London has caused you concern and surprise, we cancel this contact, which was not indispensable anyway, until circumstances more favourable than the present ones allow that conference to be held in the coming months in BARCELONA or MADRID without risk of interception. Our suggestion of contributing financially to the expenses of that journey was in no way a paternalistic way of imposing our rules on you. You should not have felt humiliated by an offer whose only object was to compensate for the serious inconvenience associated with our initiative of talking with you.

 

We understand, and we feel guilty for not having better taken into account your own feelings. We will make even greater efforts from now on not to force you to adopt resolutions that depart too far from your daily habits. Inevitably a proposal such as the one described has caused the alterations in your private lives that we alluded to at the beginning of the letter, and it is our obligation to correct our original assumptions as far as possible. Forgive us for that transgression of our own morality.

 

Finally, we beg you not to feel uneasy about these somewhat sharp statements, nor to generate in yourselves a feeling of guilt that does not exist. That would precisely worsen the picture we are trying to purify. We have operated under the assumptions of a situational morality which must be modified according to this same changing situation.

 

It only remains for us to exhort you once more to maintain independence of judgement regarding us. Make compatible, as far as possible, the respect moved by a legitimate curiosity towards these -for you- very strange letters with your own critical rationalisations of the problem. And since we do not wish it either, do not let yourselves be carried away by our versions and advice until a process of mature analysis and objectification of them makes their acceptance viable.

 

Sir: I beg you to restrict to the utmost the making of copies of this and future letters, until the conditions of insecurity have changed. On this point we do dare to maintain an imperative request. Send only one reproduction to your brothers in Seville and Barcelona, sealing the letter with wax and sewing the whole with twine to prevent any possible violation of its content without their knowing it.