[Start of Lecture]

Thank you.

I want to talk to you now about something else that is very vague, but something that might be of some interest and is certainly in the field of total speculation. Total speculation is, of course, seldom obtainable, but in this case it is. And that is the future. This we can say is in the realm of speculation.

Now, a person who is apt to be challenged by his peers or "infeers" is very apt to fly into the future for his very solid utterances. The only trouble with that is, although he can never be challenged at the time, the future has a habit of catching up with one. And you could describe the future as a discarder of discredited prophets, which becomes the past. So we then have a definition for the past: The past is an area which is entirely full of discredited prophets.

But when we speak of the future we normally think of ourselves, our family, a particular group. How about the future of society? Very seldom has a man ever walked forward and seriously discussed the future of any given culture. He has hoped for it. He has worked for it. He has speculated about it. But to make any sound pronunciamentos, on a cultural level, concerning any given society, is not usually done.

But when it is done — no matter if it is badly done — it is quite often fantastically successful. Why? It's because everybody is too timid to put down a postulate for an entire culture. Most people are too timid to do that. They're too afraid of becoming a discarded prophet.

But perhaps it is better in the minds of some men to be right only for ten days or a year, and to have made a postulate which did at least become right for some period of time, than never to have prophesied at all.

Now, there have been chaps on the track who did prophesy; fellows of very ill repute indeed. We have fellows like Hitler. His prophesies were not the prophesies for a culture. They were prophesies for an insatiable ambition.

There have been other fellows on the track who have made prophesies for an entire culture — men like Hitler. And they have produced disaster, because they, again, were not really prophesying for an entire culture. They were prophesying because of ambition, and ambition alone. And so the ambition of an individual is crammed down the throats of an entire multitude, and necessarily then this becomes chaos. Wreckage is strewn in the wake of such an action.

Only in the field of — well I hate to say religion — in the field of philosophy has a prophesy of the future (laying down a postulate as to what the future would be like) ever been vaguely successful. And in this field we find the society going forward and not particularly disintegrating because of. And we find that from the field of philosophy we have achieved what future the culture does have.

It's an interesting thing to look back and isolate the source, usually, of any given era or period or political entity. We look back into Greece and we can actually spot the exact people and the exact statements which became Greece. We look at such chaps as Pericles. Pericles was just a politician, but we know him best because in his age Greek freedom and Greek art came toward the ultimate, and actually were never as good afterwards and had never been as good before.

But this chap had some interesting ideas, and he was not totally and only a politician. As a matter of fact, it's rather interesting to look over his record and discover he was a rather bad politician. So we must say he was a better prophet for his own culture than he was a politician for himself.

But he was a pretty good prophet. And he postulated the future, not only of Athens, but for other Greek states, for the Roman Republic (getting pretty wide), for France, for England and for the United States of America. Because he laid down a singular principle, and that principle was that the citizen should know more about government and should participate in it to the fullest extent. And this, carried forward — as he carried it forward in his own government — became the Age of Pericles. There was no higher level of Greek culture than this one age. "Everyone may participate. Every man's voice should be heard." And this was a wonderful thing, and so far as I know, had not been said before politically.

And so we have one man giving forth a postulate, since he just didn't say this should be, he said this will be. And he bent his own political efforts in the direction of making this come about. And even though he himself was not a successful politician, he put his postulate on the next 2300 years. He put his postulate on the world we live in much more solidly than another chap who used to give lectures by the Sea of Galilee. That's for sure. Because the great nations of the world which have since arisen, have arisen, actually, because they wished to emulate and follow in the path of free Greece.

The scholars of 150 years ago in this country were known as scholars simply because they knew about the Age of Pericles. If a man knew enough about that period he was learned, he was educated. If he could speak Greek as well, well, on a Sunday you might be able to touch him on the sleeve if you were lucky.

The learned men of the society studied these things. The Founding Fathers of the United States were themselves very educated along this line and practically no other. George Washington's aides were the glibbest chaps you ever saw in your life on the subject of what Greek general had done what, when. But they couldn't for the life of them have told you anything at all about what some American frontiersman had done fifty or a hundred years earlier. They were not educated in that. They were only educated in the classic tradition.

This very word classic tradition at one time meant only the Age of Pericles. Classic. What made it classic? Just that one thing: "Every man may have a voice and may express his opinion in his government and the actions of his culture. Men are entitled to that voice. And the culture itself should contribute to them the availability of information so that they can know what the culture consists of."

In other words, it was the duty of the culture to educate men into the existence of the culture. It was the duty of the individual, knowing these things, to contribute his own knowledge and his contribution to his own culture.

This was something new, and man had never learned this… had this before the Age of Pericles. Therefore, the great nations of earth since, which have sought to rise under the mantle of tyrants, have perished. They are dead. There isn't one alive today anywhere within the sphere of learning which we know as classical Greek history.

Now, we might point to Persia and say this wasn't the case in Persia. And I can point out to you that Greek history was never taught in Persia, any more than we now teach German history in our schools. They were enemies. The Oriental world was not taught any of this until recent times, and you'll find the entire Oriental world in foment. You find it bursting its bonds and leaping at the throat of every tyrant who raises his head. You find these people ungovernable. You find [the] entirety of Asia in a state of revolution today. Why? They just got through reading Greek history.

We read it 170, 180 years ago. Our learned men, our own leaders, the men who were to become captains and majors and generals, who were to become the fellows who wrote such things as the Articles of Confederation, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution — these men were learned only if they knew Greek history. And the very learning of it was really more than they could take, because they did not conceive within the compass of their own training that England was following through classic tradition.

Taxation without representation was not described as a sound principle in the Age of Pericles. Plato frowned upon it. Aristotle might have subscribed to it in a loose and drunken moment at a banquet of Alexander's, but never amongst his own friends. And so they frowned upon it. Across a bridge of two thousand years these men were taught to revolt against tyranny, and they did. And that is what the Age of Pericles did, and the postulate it laid on the future.

A fabulous thing to observe: We think "Love thy neighbor" has been the civilizing influence. It has not been. "Be free" has been.

The religious world may have dominated, at one time or another, the Middle Ages, but the religious world consisted in itself of a tyranny and was itself antipathetic to this very thing called freedom. Where we could have the word of one man saying, "All must now believe; all must now worship; you must keep your hand in your upper breast pocket while quoting Psalm 66 and in no other place," we did not have freedom. We had slavery.

And we also never taught very much about Greece until the day of the Scholastic. And it was an unhappy day that they reached into the tombs below the Vatican where they have kept all the books which were salvaged from the old Greek and Roman libraries, and brought out and gave to the world, like a little tidbit, the works of Aristotle as a scientific work, and formed the basis of what we called Scholasticism. And people read a little bit further and they found the rest of them. They found people like Plato. They found this fellow Socrates. They found these other chaps who had a lot to say. And all these chaps were talking about was freedom and there went the church. Boom!

You can recognize the truth of this. There was no stronger force on the face of earth, in 1400 and something, when Cesare Borgia was letting his sister poison some fellows so his uncle the pope could sell a few more seats in a few more monasteries. This was a tight, capitalistic, highly profitable tyranny, and it blew up in their faces. And it did an awful lot of very violent blowing up before we begin to hear about anything like freedom. Things started to blow up in sections, and they blew up in the face of religion.

We had such oddities as the entirety of Holland in revolt against tyranny. We had the oddity of Philip of Spain coming up to Holland and burning people in the streets for heresy. We had the people of Holland being butchered and run into the dikes, and we had them fighting down to the last man. With their preachers, they considered their first freedom, freedom of religion. And their preachers went about in the fields on a Sunday reading from a forbidden book called the Bible. And because Philip ran out of troops before Holland ran out of population, the yoke was overthrown. And that was the end of that particular regime.

And from there we had blowups the length and width of Europe. They were first striking for freedom for religion and out of that crew came the Puritan Fathers. It's very interesting, very interesting to trace it back, not as something speculative and not as something that you or I would then guess about, but to trace it back with such heavy-heeled strides straight back to the Age of Pericles.

Religion became free. And when it became entirely free, it itself, as a last tyranny, began to blow up. Freedom of religion destroyed religion.

Now, where did the United States ever believe that it could at any given time set up a regime upon the backs of people who were taught to be free? This would be one of the most adventurous actions ever taken by a man: to throw the United States under a tyrannical yoke. Oh, he might get away with it for five years. He might get away with it for ten years — if he had enough troops, maybe twenty-five years. But during that twenty-five years there'd be an awful lot of troops dead. And certainly at the end of that time man would have reasserted his birthright.

It would not really be possible to enslave the population of the United States. It would be possible to permit them to forget, or to teach them so much that was otherwise "very important" that the data would become swamped. You could over-educate them, swamp and drown these lessons of freedom, and gradually ban all the books that mention the Age of Pericles, the classic Greek, the history of Rome. You could throw these data away if you did it very carefully, but with what care it would have to be undertaken.

Chaps like me would have to be shut up first. That takes some doing.

Now, it's an interesting thing to look at a stable datum and discover that that stable datum has been the resulting cultures for some twenty-three hundred years. And that stable datum was, "I have a right to know about my government, to voice my opinions concerning it, to contribute to and participate in the political and economic activities of my age, time and people." Man believed that. Somebody told him he could. And that was back in the days of the classic Greek. And nobody's been able to stamp it out or handle it since. Wasn't that a terrible thing to do?

Think, think, think of what an awful thing this was to do. Think how mighty some of these rulers might have been. Think how overwhelmingly huge and beautifully carven their thrones might have been. Think of the architecture we've missed in their palaces and shrines of worship which were never built. Think of these poor chaps that dedicated to an enslavement of man, without any capabilities and no man to enslave. Awful. You can just see these fellows now. The uniforms they would have worn, never manufactured. The gallows they would have erected, never built. The prisons they would have filled, never even planned. I think it's a dirty trick on these fellows, don't you? What ambition has gone to waste here, because they've never managed it.

We have just gone through a considerable cataclysm that none of us really understand for what it was. The cataclysm was World War II. Why do we pay attention to World War II and not pay much of attention to the Korean War? Well, you could say one was fought by the United Nations and the other was fought by the United States. Yes. Yes, yes, that's true, except we lost all the troops in the Korean War.

No, the Korean War was not for any outright principle that we ourselves could define as part and parcel to our own beingness, so we had very little in common with the Korean War beyond the boo-boos of a few politicians who are since demised. These chaps are not politically active today. One of them tried to advise his own party about something just a few months ago and they laughed themselves sick.

Well, no, there was a difference between these two wars. They were quite similar in casualties. You may not realize that the Korean War lost three hundred thousand young Americans, but it did. It was a big war. We certainly didn't pay much attention to it. That's because it wasn't on the line of our own principles. But World War II was. We thought that that war was right down our alley and had to be fought when we really got busy fighting it. Everybody was insulted that he wasn't permitted to personally end the war. That was an interesting war.

Why? Because it was a war against tyranny. Because once more somebody had risen up within reach of our culture, and had dared to say "A tyranny shall exist. Men may not speak. Religion may not be free. No one has a right to either understand, participate in or contribute to his own government save as he is told to do so." And boy, we fought that one with enthusiasm. And boy, did he get killed! Wow! He got killed so hard his people doubted he's dead! He went into an inverted kill!

This guy Hitler had done something that was an anachronism. It was out of time and place. He thought he was living back in 450 B.C. He got stuck on the time track, and he set up a tyranny. And the next thing you know, everybody started shooting at it. Why? Because Hitler was a bad man? No, I dare say he was quite a clever fellow. Probably very nice to meet socially. You needn't have put out your best rugs, but probably got along all right socially. Chewed the rug, of course, and raved a bit, but he probably wasn't too bad. This fellow became — well, to put it very mildly — non persona grata. He was…

It's interesting that long before he became unpopular with Chamberlain over in England, that two or three hunters from England had already gone over to Germany and conducted still hunts on Hitler. Why this strange enthusiasm? Why Hitler? Well, he was handy and he had certainly set himself up as a target.

And thus you have the definition of it. A man who perpetrates a tyranny does not set himself up, if you please, anymore, as a tyrant. He sets himself up only as a target. Big difference. Once he set himself up to be invulnerable. Now he sets himself up to be vulnerable, and shot.

Look at the way this culture is educated. The die is cast and there it sits motionless in time. It says, "Man is destined and dedicated to freedom. He's destined for a long future span of self-rule, and that span shall not end until the knowledge itself of man has ended."

Now, today, just as in any other time, we do have amongst us men who believe it is possible to become tyrants without becoming targets. There are always psychotics and fools in any society, and they do set themselves up, and they do try to conduct themselves in this fashion. Whether they conduct themselves this way as a little Napoleon in some capitalistic level of a factory, or whether they conduct themselves as the manager of some cell down in the West End, or whether they conduct themselves in some tyrannical fashion even in their own home, they still set themselves up and they still get knocked down. In fact, I don't know what we'll ever do for tenpins if such men cease to set themselves up. It has become an unpopular action, no matter whether it's conducted on the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh or eighth dynamic. It's unpopular.

I imagine if you were to describe God in a popular fashion today, I'm afraid you would have to describe him as a fellow who let you make up your mind. I'm sure that would restore some of the popularity of this. Because he's not popular today. The government down here says that it was founded under God, but it doesn't believe it. The Senate opens itself in every session with a chaplain. They have an awful time keeping the senators quiet. It's an interesting world we're living in, They're still paying lip service to something, but they're not following it through.

Everywhere we have these small efforts to tyranny, and everywhere we see them fail. Do you know once upon a time it was entirely different than this? A man was only an important man in his village, he was only an important man in his area, if he was a tyrant, if he knew how to act like a tyrant. That was the way one had to know how to act. One had to know how to act like a tyrant.

How does a ruler act? Well, "Off with their heads. Nobody must think. Everybody must bow down." Oh yes, he was a good ruler. Every time he walked down Main Street, why, everybody knelt and bowed his head to the ground as he passed. That was a twenty- five-hundred-year-ago description of a good ruler. He was very well liked by his people. Nobody tried to assassinate him during his entire reign. Do you see this? In other words, a man that was a good ruler or a good family man or a good something or other was tyrannically good. He oppressed everything. He smashed down anything that came in his path. He was totally dominant where anything in his surroundings was concerned. And that was a man before Pericles.

He's not a man today. He's a target. And wherever he lifts his head: "Knock him off! Kill him! Shoot him! Drown him! Arrest him! He's crazy!" Oh, but this was once the socially acceptable thing to be and do — tyrannical, completely unreasonable, utterly didactic, completely conscienceless, without mercy — that was the way one acted. But not today.

Well, how do you suppose a society operated in those dark days? How do you suppose men really acted in those dark days? How did a society respond or not respond back in the days when every ruler had the right to cut off the head of every citizen without further protest of any kind whatsoever? Did man prosper? Nope. He prospered so badly, to tell you the truth, that he seldom wrote records about it. Now that's below writingness.

Every once in a while we read on a pyramid the saga of King Hamaradahugabunga, and it's all about King Hamaradahugabunga, but it's not about any subjects. It doesn't tell you, "Thirty-five thousand six hundred and ninety-two point three peasants were killed building this pyramid." Doesn't tell you that. It says, "Hamaradahugabungy built this pyramid as a toast to his own regime." Big guy. Big guy. When he walked through the streets he had people who walked before him with long whips and beat the populace out of the road. Great man. Quite a boy. He's awful dusty now. They dig up his mummies now and then, and dust them off and say, "This is Hamaramahugabunga." Put him in a museum for the little kids to sit and look at and suck lollipops and say, "Huh." They say, "Look Mummy: mummy."

Now, did they fare well? Yup. Society ran on an entirely different stable datum. Stable datum was this: that a society consisted of a number of slaves who work for a ruler. See? Simple. That's all you had. That's all there was to it. And some of the fellows who work for him are a little more in-team than others. They can wear hats. Otherwise, it's total oppression.

Well, did these societies succeed? No! Hamaramahugabunga succeeded, and maybe some of his guards succeeded, and maybe some of his torturers got good practice, but the society as a whole never did.

Those societies rose and fell with remarkable rapidity. They seldom became populous. They were engaged in petty wars and warfares which decimated them. They overran each other madly in all directions and wiped each other out. Why? Well, Hamaramahugabunga's army couldn't have cared less, to tell you the truth. And life didn't mean anything to them so they might as well chew up and slaughter any town they went through. Who cared? They didn't. Nobody cared about them, why should they care about anything else? And you had in action a society of criminals without responsibility or decency, and their arts have not endured.

Now, you could say, "Well, somebody dug up a bunch of stuff down on an island in the Mediterranean and it was great stuff. And it showed the Cretan society and the Minoan and the bull and all kinds of things, and they had nice palaces. And look at this beautiful society, because here we've just uncovered this beautiful palace. And it had eighty-nine rooms and, golly, it must have been quite a society." You bet it was quite a society! What did they dig up? They dug up the palace of Hamaragahugabunga. Sure. You bet it's a good society! From his viewpoint. Naturally it was a big palace. Where did the slaves live? Well, there are no real remains of those. You can occasionally find the remains of the officers' quarters.

Well, what happened to the people at large? Well, they didn't last, and these other people didn't last either. And their reigns rose and their reigns fell.

Well, what's amazing is the very few arts which they developed per century — the few arts which were developed per century. You'll find one art hanging on, rather badly done. Listen, you can talk a lot about the fancy cloth they used to have but you wouldn't wear it in a sports jacket. Nah. Leather is nice, but not for stockings. You wouldn't have put up with it. You would've considered it a hardship.

And yet they'd use that cloth and wear that cloth. You take the dye that used to come out of Tyre all the time, this indigo. They had a bunch of bugs there under the sea and they'd squash them and they got indigo dye. Now, that's the truth. That's why Tyre was so popular. And this purple, as absolute requisite for a Roman emperor and for other people, that all came out of this town called Tyre. And you know it wasn't sunfast? I hate to tell this on them. But it sure was popular for about a thousand years. For a thousand years? A sunfast color might have been popular for a thousand years but certainly not one that wasn't. That doesn't show very high progress, does it?

Well, I'll tell you how they did it. They had a boss, you see, and he was grabbed off by the King of Tyre, and this boss had a bunch of slaves, and they walked around and walked on the bugs and squashed them into the dye vats and that was the stuff. And then they sold that produce, and that was that. And that was the way they produced it and…

Well, you talk about tyranny of production. There was no self- determinism used in squashing those bugs with your feet at all. Somebody would say, "I'm only going to use my left foot today." Huh-unhhh, that didn't go. Somebody would say, "You know, I don't like purple feet."

They'd say, "Get in there, bum."

That was the dye industry of Tyre. And it went on that way for about twelve hundred years, I think — that I know about personally. Of course I don't know what the history books say. I never do. I don't read them. I either invent my history out of whole cloth or remember it. Because I find most historians are liars.

For instance, I'll tell you all I know about self-determinism and so forth taught in an academy. We had an academy that was up the street. It was about three blocks above Plato's old place. It was kind of fallen into disrepute at the time. And if you missed a question during the interrogation period you were given full power of choice. You were permitted to fight, with staves, the toughest boy in the school. You didn't miss many questions but you became a pretty good soldier.

They taught self-determinism. They say it was the biggest crime in the world not to make up your own mind on a question. It was an interesting thing. It was an interesting thing. It was an academy, a walking academy. Academy means a place where you walk around and talk about it.

I'm not to be quoted as an authority for history, because my memory gets spotty. But I can tell you this, I can tell you this for sure: that Tyre didn't change its manufactures, quality of production, and didn't much change its quantity for twelve centuries. Its revenues from this were very high, but never adequate to the feeding of the people of Tyre and no other industry was invented.

This is a culture? This is a forward-looking, active, producing culture?

Somebody walked into Tyre one day, and he said, "You know, I have some political opinions" — about 1000 B.C. — "political opinions." People didn't know what the word politics was, so they assumed that he was selling something, so they wanted to know where he kept the opinions and so forth. And he just got more wound up and more wound up, and the next doggone thing you know, they hanged him. The population hanged him. Why? Well, they couldn't understand him.

But after fifteen or twenty fellows like him had walked into Tyre, somebody got the idea one day. And he said, "What do you mean, political opinions? You got political opinions. You mean a person could have opinions on government? I get it! I get it. You could have an opinion about government. I'll get this in a minute. Now, a government — let's see, an opinion — a government could be good or bad, and I could say my opinion is the government could be good or bad."

Oooh! This is pretty revolutionary. Made him awful nervous. It was actually during the reign of that great democrat (heh-heh), Alexander the Great (who finished off, actually, the Age of Pericles), that Tyre fell. First use of the submarine. Alexander put some fellows in buckets and made them go around and saw down the piling on which some of the walls of the city stood, and that was the end of Tyre.

To show you how apathetic the joint was, by the way (it was very apathetic), Alexander, when he came by, gave some sacrifices out on the plain to the gods of the city, and the priests in the city nailed their own images — gods — to the altar and maligned them for wanting to betray the city to Alexander. See? I mean real high toned. You know? Lot of savvy. You know, smart.

And the population, seeing the priests do this to the idols, then knew it was all sunk anyhow and you couldn't get the walls manned. That was the end of Tyre. I mean, a good high state of enthusiasm, you know? Get in there and punch, you know?

Well, today you don't find too many of these bogholes, but that was a boghole. Nothing invented, nothing produced, nothing changed, no opinions, nothing to talk about, no-game condition, straightforward. You uncomfortably lay out under the sun and fried, and that was about the end of that culture. And I don't think any of you would say this was a good culture.

It was a culture without ice-cream sodas. But worse than that it was a culture that had no desire for ice-cream sodas even when they're extended. And that's pretty low down as a culture. I've even taken a Chinese culture in the lower villages of China, and so forth, and got them slap-happy on the subject of ice cream. I mean, ice cream you can pick up anybody on.

What and where does such a culture as that which grows under a tyranny — what and where does it do? Go? What happens to it? It never goes anyplace. It doesn't invent anything. It has no future. It's only future is represented by the many tombs of the tyrants which you see planted nakedly upon the plains where once- great cities stood. The tombs of the tyrants; that's about all that remains of those cultures.

But, by golly, you wouldn't say that this is all that remains of Greece. Do you know that very recently there was no archaeology outside of the Age of Pericles? Do you know that within the last seventy-five years a school had to rise and say, "There were civilizations before and after the civilizations of classic Greek. Why don't we study them?"

Everybody said, "Ho-hum. That's not archaeology." Archaeology was totally and completely anchored in only one spot — the high peak of Greek culture and the little period before and after it. And that was archaeology. That was the definition. It was the study of Greece. There was just nothing else.

And when this Mycenaean culture was finally discovered here at about the turn of the century, nobody would confess that it was an archaeological discovery because it wasn't related immediately to ancient Greece. And that famous businessman that dug it all up down there, this chap (this was right at the turn of the century) actually had to invent a bunch of fairy tales and get Achilles and the Trojan Wars and so forth all tied up with some of the Mycenaean discoveries to get anybody interested in them at all. Total thing was a total fabrication of fairy tale. He had to relate it to Greece before anybody would believe that it was archaeology that he was studying. Do you follow me?

Well, you can't say that that society that taught us to be free, at any time along the line, is only a collection of ruins. They're still shooting down there. The commies are fighting with other people and so forth. They're still shooting things up. They're still messed up one way or the other. After World War II, no great peace has descended, but those are not really the same people who lived in that period. But it is not a bunch of ruins. It is a bunch of ideas. It is a tremendous society.

The ideas in the Age of Pericles extended out to an entirety of the known world, and are here, and are around us today — this is a rather fabulous thing — to such a degree that I don't think anybody could set up a tyranny no matter how hard he tried. Hitler tried. Thirty million dead men later, he's failed. That took an awful lot of shooting, didn't it?

Well, all right. If you're going to set up a group, if you're going to set up a practice, if you're going to become active in any political sphere, then you'd better remember what succeeded. You'd better remember what has succeeded. The basic data of the last twenty-three centuries is still the basic data of a culture, and it is that basic data which will determine the future of this culture.

If the future is to be turbulent and upset it will be because some tyrant has become overly ambitious and his tyranny fails because of revolt against it. In other words, the turbulence of the future will be determined on the basis of whether or not somebody tries to upset this tradition or not. And if somebody tries to upset this tradition, then this culture is going to collapse, to the degree that it revolts.

Now, the only way you could get a total lose was for everybody to be dead, but there won't be any tyrant who will be able to impose his will upon any of the modern cultures to this degree now. Such a thing is all but impossible.

So you can predict that the future may have some wiggles and wobbles, and the future may have some wars, and the future may have some manning the barricades and shooting in the streets. But short of obliterating mankind with one bomb (the ambition of the AEC)… No, I beg your pardon, that's a confidential remark I made there. I miss these things. You're not supposed to mention the AEC. Let's see. What's something that can't fight back? Atomic science is one bomb that wipes out everybody at once. That's their ambition. Or one fallout that cripples everybody at a longer period. Now, that's their ambition.

All right. Now, that of course does vary the future. If that is continued in existence, and if that motto and hope for everybody's demise is permitted to continue, then it will have wiped out all parts of the game, and that will be that. And we won't have to worry about the future at all. And we won't have to worry about the trends of the culture and which way it's going and which way it's not going.

Well, I can tell you that there's one thing that would wipe it out as a threat, and that would be the same postulate as began in the Age of Pericles. Men have a right to political opinions on any subject, and they have a right to express those opinions freely in any place to anybody.

Now, given that, let's take a look at the AEC — excuse me, I keep mentioning that word. These bastards down here on the other end of this — these fellows actually are less information, less freedom of expression, confidential, secret, top secret, super- frantic-hysterical secret, don't even let yourself know when you read it. These chaps are going in the direction of a tradition which was dead twenty-three hundred years ago. Do you think they'll succeed? No. No.

They're trying to use "science," the new religion of this century, as a means by which to impose a tyranny upon the world - - but it is just another tyranny. That's all it is. It's just another tyranny. I don't care what kind of clothes it's wearing, it is just another effort to do more or less the same thing — deny people their right to speak to whom they wish about what they want to speak about. It's just another action.

You get a bunch of atomic scientists together, you'd find they were almost human. They'd talk amongst themselves. They'd exchange opinions. They wouldn't care whether it was Russian or British or French or American or anything else. You throw them in a room together and they'd yackle-yackle and get across the language barriers — probably talk with sine waves or something, you know. They wouldn't care less.

But people can make political capital of these boys. They can say, "You have something that's very secret. It is so secret that it appears nowhere except in every textbook in every library on the subject of atomic physics, in every library in the world. It's very secret. It would take a moron with an idiotic case of amnesia, days to figure out your most secret formulas. So therefore, you boys being possessed of this secret, mustn't talk. So that we (some unnameable we) can then impose our will on the communication lines of the world." Which is a tyranny.

"Now, if we could create a depression at the same time, then people would be willing…" (Ha. You see? See how the reasoning goes?) "…then people would be willing, you see, to accept a little further yoke, you know, a little government handout here and there and we could tell them where they are supposed to work and how they were supposed to work, and we'd give them money if we wanted to and if we didn't want to…" Real nice.

And they expect this beautiful, idyllic society to grow on the beauties of that new postulate. "We have secret weapons and secret sciences and people pretty soon will be in want so they will have to accept the mandates that are handed to them."

Yeah. The people will accept them. Did you ever hear little Johnny imitating gangsters and machine guns? Yeah. People will accept them. Um-hm. As a matter of fact, people never fight until they're desperate. Things have to go pretty wrong. It has to be pretty obvious. There have to be a couple of citizens hung on a lamppost. There has to be darn little bread in the locker. There have to be a lot of things present before people really look up.

And when they do look up and when they do notice, at last… The French Revolution's typical of this. They said, "You know, I wonder…" (along about days before the Bastille; years before the Bastille fell), you know, they sit around and they say, "Do you suppose that fellow that lives up in that big house that calls himself Sieur de Montaigne, do you suppose he has anything to do with the… with us not feeling exactly relaxed?" And finally some guys came along and they dug up the Age of Pericles in the textbooks and got them reprinted into "peasant." And they sold them under the counter and the next doggone thing you know, why, the French Revolution started when people stopped wondering, "Do you suppose there's any effort around here to suppress us?" It was how you defined suppression at the time, you see?

And one day they said, "You know, I'm sure there is. I'm sure. I could swear it. And Joe, Jacques, Jean! What do you know? You know I bet somebody's trying to keep us from speaking our right mind!" And boom! No Bastille. Boom! No monarchy.

And they got in the habit. And for just years, anything that put its head up that — somebody came up and wanted to sell you some crackers, all you had to do was point at him and say, "Tyranny — guillotine." Madame Guillotine made another widow. It was a most amazing reaction. All Europe was upset.

England was upset at the time, too. England was saying, "What do you know? That canaille has roused up and is killing our sacred brothers and we don't do a thing about it." They didn't, either. They quickly liberalized their laws. Very, very significant change. There was practically… By 1804, why, people were treading very cautiously politically in England, and by 1834, why, newly arisen King William quickly signed the Reform Bill, which restored freedom to everybody in all directions, fast. I think there was one riot. I think he was hit by one piece of mud. He signed that bill quick. In other words, tyranny had been educated to fall fast. And so it did.

Well, the soil in which a tyranny is sown, of course, is not when everybody is in want. That is the soil in which revolution grows. Tyranny is sown in times of plenty, when people exchange their rights for some material gain — they think. Tyrannies are sown at times when nobody is very watchful; where everybody has a full stomach; where everything is calm; nothing much appears on the surface, and then tyrannies show up and become very obvious when individuals, growing a little hungrier, a little less possessed of production, suddenly notice that there is somebody saying they mustn't talk, somebody saying they mustn't have opinions. And when people notice this they begin to get very restless. And if after that they get very hungry, there is a total fatality as far as the tyranny is concerned. That total fatality will ensue.

Now, it may take years for people to find these things out. But we're in such a period today — a period artificially imposed. I don't suppose there's any individual anyplace who wants actively to impose a tyranny on the United States (except a bunch of sons of bitches I've ran against recently).

Ah, these boys who do this today merely want gain for themselves. They say, "It'd be very nice and I would be very safe if," you know, "if I could suppress certain opinions being spoken. If I could do this." They nibble away just a little bit, you see. And then one fine day you look up and find a whole sphere of knowledge partitioned off for some good, adequate, reasonable reason.

What is this sphere of knowledge? Well, it's science. You say, "But we're supposed to have science. That's progress."

All of a sudden they see an electronics engineer and they say, "You know, you're supposed to be over there in that uh… behind that barbed wire over there." Well, the electronic engineers of the country have not yet noticed that they're inside barbed wire — they are — that they go backwards and forwards past armed guards to get to and from work.

I wouldn't work under these conditions. A fellow offered me a job one time. He said, "All you have to do is walk in here, leave your gun at the gate, walk in here and you're supposed to walk around for eight hours a day, and do so-and-so and so-and-so."

And I said, "In where?"

He said, "In that enclosure there."

And I said, "What's the difference between that and a prison camp?"

"Oh," he says, "you're nonsense. You get paid in there."

That was the first and only time the government offered me a post as a nuclear physicist. That was the end of that. The government offered me that post. They tried to kidnap me on another one, by the way.

They said, "You know you're still in the reserves and we can call you back to active duty on research in the field of the mind."

"You're still in the service," this admiral said. "Ha-ha. You change your mind any time, you know, about coming in. You can volunteer. Of course, I can put you back on active duty at any time, so you'd better volunteer. You'd probably feel better in there making seventy-five hundred dollars a year" — rather than whatever officers get these days — twenty-five cents an hour or something.

And I said, "Well," I said, "if you put it that way," I said, "I'm overwhelmed." I said, "There's nothing much I can do."

Here is actually a proposition of a person being seized because of his own knowledge, just the way you might seize a fellow who carved ivory well, back in the Dark Ages. He carved ivory well so he was seized. He was taken away and put into a position that he couldn't object to and he was made to work at a trade that he was good at but didn't particularly like. What's the difference? What's the difference?

Not very much. Except maybe I walk with faster feet sometimes. Of course, it was impossible at that time to resign from the service. A reserve officer had to continue as a reserve officer from there on out. But I was down to the Potomac River Naval Command, and I was through Bureau of Naval Personnel. It was Monday when he came to see me, and he was going to come back and see me Thursday. And when he came back and saw me Thursday he said, "Well," he said, "you've decided to come into the service as a civilian?"

And I said, "No, I haven't. I decided not to."

And he said, "Well," he said, "I'll have to call you back to active duty."

And I says, "Try and do it," and handed him my resignation, accepted. He was crushed.

But do you know that immediately predated, by one week, the opening of the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation of Elizabeth, New Jersey. There would have been no Dianetics, there would have been no Scientology, and there would have been no publications on the subject anywhere had this succeeded. Interesting, isn't it?

They didn't want to prevent Dianetics. They didn't want to prevent Scientology, the publications of books. All they wanted to do was get a piece of research done which they in their tyrannical fashion had decided was far more important than any other research that could be done. They wanted me to work on a project to make men more suggestible. Can you imagine me working on such a project? You can imagine me working on admirals to make them more suggestible, but not on people.

No, even in myself or any other scientist, in any engineer today, there is this background, there is this tradition: That man has a right to his own opinions, has a right to study them, has a right to know his government and his duties as a citizen, and to exercise himself in performing those duties. And he has a right to contribute to the society. And this we've known for twenty- three hundred years, and so today call ourselves a civilized race.

But in only the last six years have we known why. Only in the last six years have we actually directly contributed to this stable datum to make it more stable. Only in the last six years have we found the methods and modus operandi by which to make this future culture come true; the future culture in which men are actually all permitted to do this.

Men can become so depressed that they are not themselves capable of exerting their own self-determinism, because it doesn't exist. We can give it back to them. We can give them that thing which twenty-three hundred years ago, it was stated they must have in order to continue to be free. Therefore, we have a stake in the game, too.

Thank you.

Thank you.