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Lesson 45 |
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Of men and galaxies |
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What is the most influential factor in any human society? |
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In man's early days, competition with other creatures must have been critical. |
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But this phase of our development is now finished. |
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Indeed, we lack practice and experience nowadays in dealing with primitive conditions. |
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I am sure that, without modern weapons, |
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I would make a very poor show of disputing the ownership of a cave with a bear, |
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and in this I do not think that I stand alone. |
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The last creature to compete with man was the mosquito. |
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But even the mosquito has been subdued by attention to drainage and by chemical sprays. |
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Competition between ourselves, person against person, |
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community against community, still persists, however; and it is as fierce as it ever was. |
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But the competition of man against man is not the simple process envisioned in biology. |
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It is not a simple competition for a fixed amount of food determined by the physical environment, |
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because the environment that determines our evolution is no longer essentially physical. |
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Our environment is chiefly conditoned by the things we believe. |
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Morocco and California are bits of the Earth in very similar latitudes, |
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both on the west coasts of continents with similar climates, |
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and probably with rather similar natural resources. |
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Yet their present development is wholly different, |
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not so much because of different people even, |
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but because of the different thoughts that exist in the minds of their inhabitants. |
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This is the point I wish to emphasize. |
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The most important factor in our environment is the state of our own minds. |
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It is well known that where the white man has invaded a primitive culture, |
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the most destructive effects have come not from physical weapons but from ideas. |
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Ideas are dangerous. |
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The Holy Office knew this full well when it caused heretics to be burned in days gone by. |
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Indeed, the concept of free speech only exists in our modern society |
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because when you are inside a community, |
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you are conditioned by the conventions of the community to such a degree |
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that it is very difficult to conceive of anything really destructive. |
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It is only someone looking on from outside that can inject the dangerous thoughts. |
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I do not doubt that it would be possible to inject ideas into the modern world that would utterly destroy us. |
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I would like to give you an example, but fortunately I cannot do so. |
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Perhaps it will suffice to mention the nuclear bomb. |
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Imagine the effect on a reasonably advanced technological society, |
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one that still does not possess the bomb, of making it aware of the possibility, |
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of supplying suffcient details to enable the thing to be constructed 20 or 30 pages of information |
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handed to any of the major world powers around the year 1925, |
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would have been sufficient to change the course of world history. |
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It is a strange thought, but I believe a correct one, |
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that twenty or thirty pages of ideas and information |
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would be capable of turning the present-day world upside down, or even destroying it. |
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I have often tried to conceive of what those pages might contain, |
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but of course I cannot do so because I am a prisoner of the present-day world, just as all of you are. |
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We cannot think outside the particular patterns that our brains are conditioned to, |
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or, to be more accurate we can think only a very little way outside and then only if we are very original. |