| [00:01.49] |
Lesson 45 |
| [00:03.61] |
Of men and galaxies |
| [00:12.68] |
What is the most influential factor in any human society? |
| [00:19.40] |
In man's early days, competition with other creatures must have been critical. |
| [00:25.83] |
But this phase of our development is now finished. |
| [00:29.61] |
Indeed, we lack practice and experience nowadays in dealing with primitive conditions. |
| [00:36.39] |
I am sure that, without modern weapons, |
| [00:39.21] |
I would make a very poor show of disputing the ownership of a cave with a bear, |
| [00:44.59] |
and in this I do not think that I stand alone. |
| [00:48.63] |
The last creature to compete with man was the mosquito. |
| [00:52.80] |
But even the mosquito has been subdued by attention to drainage and by chemical sprays. |
| [00:59.92] |
Competition between ourselves, person against person, |
| [01:03.70] |
community against community, still persists, however; and it is as fierce as it ever was. |
| [01:10.86] |
But the competition of man against man is not the simple process envisioned in biology. |
| [01:17.37] |
It is not a simple competition for a fixed amount of food determined by the physical environment, |
| [01:23.88] |
because the environment that determines our evolution is no longer essentially physical. |
| [01:30.07] |
Our environment is chiefly conditoned by the things we believe. |
| [01:34.43] |
Morocco and California are bits of the Earth in very similar latitudes, |
| [01:39.78] |
both on the west coasts of continents with similar climates, |
| [01:44.55] |
and probably with rather similar natural resources. |
| [01:48.80] |
Yet their present development is wholly different, |
| [01:51.96] |
not so much because of different people even, |
| [01:54.50] |
but because of the different thoughts that exist in the minds of their inhabitants. |
| [02:00.12] |
This is the point I wish to emphasize. |
| [02:03.79] |
The most important factor in our environment is the state of our own minds. |
| [02:10.10] |
It is well known that where the white man has invaded a primitive culture, |
| [02:15.38] |
the most destructive effects have come not from physical weapons but from ideas. |
| [02:21.77] |
Ideas are dangerous. |
| [02:24.33] |
The Holy Office knew this full well when it caused heretics to be burned in days gone by. |
| [02:30.92] |
Indeed, the concept of free speech only exists in our modern society |
| [02:36.32] |
because when you are inside a community, |
| [02:39.27] |
you are conditioned by the conventions of the community to such a degree |
| [02:44.01] |
that it is very difficult to conceive of anything really destructive. |
| [02:48.75] |
It is only someone looking on from outside that can inject the dangerous thoughts. |
| [02:55.85] |
I do not doubt that it would be possible to inject ideas into the modern world that would utterly destroy us. |
| [03:03.99] |
I would like to give you an example, but fortunately I cannot do so. |
| [03:09.46] |
Perhaps it will suffice to mention the nuclear bomb. |
| [03:13.67] |
Imagine the effect on a reasonably advanced technological society, |
| [03:18.44] |
one that still does not possess the bomb, of making it aware of the possibility, |
| [03:23.45] |
of supplying suffcient details to enable the thing to be constructed 20 or 30 pages of information |
| [03:31.95] |
handed to any of the major world powers around the year 1925, |
| [03:37.46] |
would have been sufficient to change the course of world history. |
| [03:41.70] |
It is a strange thought, but I believe a correct one, |
| [03:45.06] |
that twenty or thirty pages of ideas and information |
| [03:48.72] |
would be capable of turning the present-day world upside down, or even destroying it. |
| [03:55.21] |
I have often tried to conceive of what those pages might contain, |
| [03:59.73] |
but of course I cannot do so because I am a prisoner of the present-day world, just as all of you are. |
| [04:07.74] |
We cannot think outside the particular patterns that our brains are conditioned to, |
| [04:13.33] |
or, to be more accurate we can think only a very little way outside and then only if we are very original. |
