We are living in a world where deviant opinions about religion are no longer dangerous, because no one takes religion seriously, and therefore you can be like Bishop Pike and question the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the reality of the virgin birth, and the physical resurrection of Jesus, and still remain a bishop in good standing. But what you can't get away with today, or at least you have great difficulty in getting away with, is psychiatric heresy. Because psychiatry is taken seriously, and indeed, I would like to draw a parallel between today and the Middle Ages in the respect of this whole question.
When we go back to the days of the Spanish Inquisition, we must remember that the professor of theology at the University of Seville has the same kind of social prestige and intellectual standing that today would be enjoyed by the professor of pathology at Stanford Medical School. And you must bear in mind that this theologian, like the professor of pathology today, is a man of good will. Intensely interested in human welfare. He didn't merely opine; that professor of theology knew that anybody who had heretical religious views would suffer everlasting agony of the most appalling kind. And some of you should read the imaginative descriptions of the sufferings of Hell, written not only in the Middle Ages, but in quite recent times by men of intense intellectual acumen. And therefore, out of real merciful motivation, the Inquisitors thought that it was the best thing they could do to torture heresy out of those who held it. Worse still, heresy was infectious, and would contaminate other people and put them in this immortal danger. And so with the best motivations imaginable, they used the thumbscrew, the rack, the iron maiden, the leaded cat-o-nine-tails, and finally the stake to get these people to come to their senses, because nothing else seemed to be available.
Today, serious heresy, and rather peculiarly in the United States, is a deviant state of consciousness. Not so much deviant opinions, as having a kind of experience which is different from "regular" experience. And as Ronald Lang, who is going to participate in this series, has so well pointed out, we are taught what experiences are permissible in the same way we are taught what gestures, what manners, what behavior is permissible and socially acceptable. And therefore, if a person has so-called "strange" experiences, and endeavors to communicate these experiences - because naturally one talks about what one feels - and endeavors to communicate these experiences to other people, he is looked at in a very odd way and asked, "Are you feeling all right?" Because people feel distinctly uncomfortable when the realize they are in the presence of someone who is experiencing the world in a rather different way from themselves. They call in question as to whether this person is indeed human. They look like a human being, but because the state of experience is so different, you wonder whether they really are. And you get the kind of - the same kind of queasy feeling inside as you would get if, for the sake of example, you were to encounter a very beautiful girl, very formally dressed, and you were introduced, and in order to shake hands, she removed her glove, and you found you had in your hand the claw of a large bird. That would be spooky, wouldn't it?
Or let's suppose that you were looking at a rose. And you looked down into the middle where the petals are closed, and you suddenly saw them open like lips, and the rose addressed you and said, "Good morning." You would feel something uncanny was going on. And in rather the same way, in an every day kind of circumstance, when you are sitting in a bar drinking, and you find you have a drunk next to you. And he tells you, [indistinguishable drunken ranting] and you sort of move your stool a little ways away from this man, because he's become in some way what we mean by nonhuman. Now, we understand the drunk; we know what's the matter with him, and it'll wear off. But when quite unaccountably, a person gives representation that he's suddenly got the feeling that he's living in backwards time, or that everybody seems to be separated from him by a huge sheet of glass. Or that he's suddenly seeing everything in unbelievably vivid, detailed moving colors. We say, "Well, that's not normal. Therefore there must be something wrong with you." And the fact that we have such an enormous percentage of the population of this country in mental institutions is a thing that we may have to look at from a very different point of view; not that there may be a high incidence of mental sickness, but that there may be a high incidence of intolerance of variations of consciousness.
Now in Arabian countries, where the Islamic religion prevails, a person whom we would define as mentally deranged is regarded with a certain respect. The village idiot is looked upon with reverence because it is said his soul is not in his body, it is with Allah. And because his soul is with Allah, you must respect this body and care for it, not as something that is to be sort of swept away and put out of sight, but as something of a reminder that a man can still be living on Earth while his soul is in Heaven. Very different point of view. Also in India, there is a certain difference of attitude to people who would be called Mast, because there is a poem, an ancient poem of the Hindus, which says, "Sometimes naked, sometimes mad, now as a scholar, now as a fool, thus they appear on Earth as free men."
But you see, we in our attitude to this sort of behavior, which is essentially in its first inception harmless, these people are talking what we regard to be nonsense. And to be experienced in nonsense. We feel threatened by that, because we are not secure in ourselves. A very secure person can adapt himself with amazing speed to different kinds of communication. In foreign countries, for example, where you don't speak the language of the people you are staying with, if you don't feel ashamed of this, you can set up an enormous degree of communication with other people through gesture and even something most surprising, people can communicate with each other by simply talking. You can get a lot across to people by talking intelligent nonsense, by, as it were, imitating a foreign language; speaking like it sounds. You can communicate feelings, emotion, like and dislike of this, that and the other; very simply. But if you are rigid and are not willing to do this kind of playing, then you feel threatened by anybody who communicates with you in a funny way. And so this rigidity sets up a kind of vicious circle. The minute, in other words, somebody makes an unusual communication to you about an unusual state of consciousness, and you back off, the individual wonders, "Is there something wrong with me? I don't seem to be understood by anyone." Or he may wonder, "What's going on? Has everybody else suddenly gone crazy?" And then if he feels that he gets frightened, and to the degree that he gets more frightened, he gets more defensive, and eventually they end up with being catatonic, which is a person who simply doesn't move. And so then what we do is we whiffle him off to an institution, where he is captured by the inquisitors. These are a very special priesthood. And they have all the special marks that priesthoods have always had. They have a special vestment. Like the Catholic priest at mass wears a chasuble, the mental doctor, like every physician, wears a long white coat, and may carry something that corresponds, shall we say, so a stole, which is a stethoscope around his neck. He will then, under his authority, which is often in total defiance of every conceivable civil liberty, will incarcerate this incomprehensible person, and as Lang has pointed out, he undergoes a ritual of dehumanization. And he's put away. And because the hospitals are so crowded with people of this kind, he's going to get very little attention. And it's very difficult to know, when you get attention, how to work with it.
You get into this Kafka-esque situation which you get, say, in the state of California, if you are sent to such an institute as Vacaville prison, which is as you drive on the highway from San Francisco to Sacramento, you will encounter Vacaville about halfway between. You will see a great sign which says "California State Medical Facility." The state of California is famous for circumlocution. When you go underneath a low bridge, instead of saying "Low Bridge," it says "Impaired Vertical Clearance." Or when you're going to cross a toll bridge, instead of saying, plainly, "Toll Bridge," it says "Entering Vehicular Crossing." And when it should be saying, plainly, "Prison," it says either "California State Medical Facility," or "California State Correctional Facility," as it does at Soledad. Now Vacaville is a place where people get sent on what they call a one- to ten-year sentence. And there is a supervising psychiatric medical sort of social service staff there, who examine the inmates once in a while because they have such a large number. It's actually a maximum security prison, much more ringed around with defenses than even San Quentin. I went there to lecture with the inmates some time ago. They wanted someone to talk to them about meditation and yoga, and one of the inmates took me aside - a very kind of clean-cut, all-American boy. And he had been put in there probably for smoking pot; I'm not absolutely sure in my memory what the offense was. He said, "You know, I am very puzzled about this place. I really want to go straight and get out and get a job and live like an ordinary person." He said, "I think they don't know how to go about it. I've just been refused release; I went up before the committee; I talked to them. But I don't know what the rules of the game are. And incidentally, the members of the committee don't either."
So we have these situations, you see, of confusion. So that when a person goes into a mental hospital and feels first of all perhaps that he should try to sort himself out and talk reasonably with the physician, there is introduced into the communications system between them a fundamental element of fear and mistrust. Because I could talk to any individual if I were malicious and interpret every sane remark you make as something deeply sinister; that would simply exhibit my own paranoia. And the psychiatrist can very easily get paranoid, because the system that he is asked to represent, officially, is paranoid. I talked with a psychiatrist in England just a few weeks ago. One of the most charming women I've come across, an older woman, very intelligent, quite beautiful, very reasonable. And she was discussing with me the problem of the LSD psychosis. I asked her what sort of treatments they were using, and all sorts of questions about that, and she appeared at first to be a little on the defensive about it. We got onto the subject of the experience of what is officially called "depersonalization," where you feel that you and your experience - your sensory experience - that is to say all that you do experience: the people, the things, the animals, the buildings around you - that it's all one. I said, "Do you call this a hallucination? After all," I said, "it fits the facts of science, of biophysics, of ecology, of biology, and much better than our ordinary normal experience fits it." She said, "That's not my problem." She said, "That may be true, but I am employed by a society which feels that it ought to maintain a certain average kind of normal experience, and my job is to restore people to what society considers normal consciousness. I have no alternative but to leave it at that."
So, then. When someone is introduced into this situation, and it's very difficult to get attention, you feel terrified. The mental hospital, often in its very architecture, suggests some of the great visions of madness, of - you know that feeling of - to use a Francis Thompson phrase, the corridors of the mind. If you got lost in a maze and you couldn't get back. You're not quite sure who you are, or whether your father and mother are your real father and mother, or whether in the next ten minutes you're still going to remember how to speak English. You feel very lost. And the mental hospital in its architecture and everything represents that situation. Endless corridors, all the same. Which one are you in? Where are you? Will you ever get out? And it goes on monotonously, day after day after day after day. And someone who talks to you occasionally doesn't have a straight look in his eye. He doesn't see you as quite human. He looks at you as if you're weird. What are you to do? The only thing to do is get violent, if you really want to get out. Well then they say that's proof that you're crazy. And then as you get more violent, they put you all by yourself, and the only alternative you have, the only way of expressing yourself is to throw shit at the wall. Then they say, "Well, that's conclusive. The person isn't human."
Well, the question has been raised a great deal in the last few days on the television, as to whether this is a sick society. And I have listened to a perfectly beautiful psychoanalyst with a thick German accent. Oh, marvelous things! "Eet ees quite obvious dat society is quite hopeless, you zee." And I have listened to full red-blooded Americans saying, "most people in this society are good people, and it's a good society, but we have a very sick minority."
Now, what I want to do in - certainly this first part of the seminar - is to call in question, very fundamentally, all our basic ideas about what is sickness, what is health, what is sanity, what is insanity. Because I think we have to begin from this position of humility; that we really don't know. It's reported that shortly before he died, Robert Oppenheimer, looking at the picture of technology, especially nuclear technology, said "I'm afraid it's perfectly obvious that the world is going to hell." It's going to destroy itself; it's on collision course. The only way in which it might not go to hell is that we do not try to prevent it from doing so. Think that one over. Because it can well be argued that the major troublemakers in the world today are those people with good intentions. Like the professor of theology, University of Seville, professor of psychiatry at wherever you will. The idea that we know who is sick, who is wrong. Now, we are living in a political situation right now where a most fantastic thing is occurring. Everybody knows what they're against; nobody knows what they're for. Because nobody is thinking any longer in terms of what would be a great style of life. The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There's no earthly reason; there's no physical, technical reason for there being any poverty at all anywhere. But you see, there are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money. They don't know how to use it, they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
I'm announcing not the date, but the intention of conducting a seminar for extremely rich people entitled "Are You Rich and Miserable?" because you very probably are. Some aren't, but most are. Now the thing is that we are living in this situation where everybody knows what they're against, even if they say "I'm against the war in Vietnam. I am against discrimination against colored people," or against any different race than the discolored race, and so on. Yeah, so what? But it's not enough to feel like that; that's nothing. You must have some completely concrete vision of what you would like, and therefore I'm making a serious proposition that everybody who goes into college should as an entrance examination have the task of writing an essay on his idea of heaven, in which he is asked to be absolutely specific. He is not allowed, for example, to say, "I would like to have a very beautiful girl to live with." What do you mean by a beautiful girl? Exactly how, and in what way? Specifically. You know, down to the last wiggle of the hips, and down to every kind of expression of character and sociability, and her interests and all. Be specific! And about everything like that. "I would like a beautiful house to live in." Just what exactly do you mean by a beautiful house? Well you've suddenly got to study architecture. You see, and finally, this preliminary essay on "My Idea of Heaven" turns into his doctoral dissertation. So in a situation where we all know what we're against, and we don't know what we're for, then we know who we're against. We're defining all sorts of people as nonhuman. We say they're totally irrational. They're totally stupid. People will say, "Oh, those niggers, they're all completely uneducated, they'll never learn a thing, there's nothing you can do about it, they're hopeless, get rid of them." The Birchers are saying the same sort of thing. Other people, the liberals are saying the same thing about the Birchers. "They're stupid, get rid of them." The only result, then, the only thing anybody can think of in this sort of situation is "get your gun." And this sets up a vicious circle, because everybody else gets his gun. And the point from which we have to begin, then, is that we don't know who is healthy and who is sick. Who is right and who is wrong. And furthermore, we have to start, I think, from the assumption that because we don't know, there isn't anything we can do about it.
There's a Turkish proverb that I like to quote: "He who sleeps on the floor cannot fall out of bed." Therefore, we should make it a beginning - a basic assumption about life - that even supposing you could improve society, and that you could improve yourself, you were never sure whether the direction you moved it in would be an improvement.
When we go back to the days of the Spanish Inquisition, we must remember that the professor of theology at the University of Seville has the same kind of social prestige and intellectual standing that today would be enjoyed by the professor of pathology at Stanford Medical School. And you must bear in mind that this theologian, like the professor of pathology today, is a man of good will. Intensely interested in human welfare. He didn't merely opine; that professor of theology knew that anybody who had heretical religious views would suffer everlasting agony of the most appalling kind. And some of you should read the imaginative descriptions of the sufferings of Hell, written not only in the Middle Ages, but in quite recent times by men of intense intellectual acumen. And therefore, out of real merciful motivation, the Inquisitors thought that it was the best thing they could do to torture heresy out of those who held it. Worse still, heresy was infectious, and would contaminate other people and put them in this immortal danger. And so with the best motivations imaginable, they used the thumbscrew, the rack, the iron maiden, the leaded cat-o-nine-tails, and finally the stake to get these people to come to their senses, because nothing else seemed to be available.
Today, serious heresy, and rather peculiarly in the United States, is a deviant state of consciousness. Not so much deviant opinions, as having a kind of experience which is different from "regular" experience. And as Ronald Lang, who is going to participate in this series, has so well pointed out, we are taught what experiences are permissible in the same way we are taught what gestures, what manners, what behavior is permissible and socially acceptable. And therefore, if a person has so-called "strange" experiences, and endeavors to communicate these experiences - because naturally one talks about what one feels - and endeavors to communicate these experiences to other people, he is looked at in a very odd way and asked, "Are you feeling all right?" Because people feel distinctly uncomfortable when the realize they are in the presence of someone who is experiencing the world in a rather different way from themselves. They call in question as to whether this person is indeed human. They look like a human being, but because the state of experience is so different, you wonder whether they really are. And you get the kind of - the same kind of queasy feeling inside as you would get if, for the sake of example, you were to encounter a very beautiful girl, very formally dressed, and you were introduced, and in order to shake hands, she removed her glove, and you found you had in your hand the claw of a large bird. That would be spooky, wouldn't it?
Or let's suppose that you were looking at a rose. And you looked down into the middle where the petals are closed, and you suddenly saw them open like lips, and the rose addressed you and said, "Good morning." You would feel something uncanny was going on. And in rather the same way, in an every day kind of circumstance, when you are sitting in a bar drinking, and you find you have a drunk next to you. And he tells you, [indistinguishable drunken ranting] and you sort of move your stool a little ways away from this man, because he's become in some way what we mean by nonhuman. Now, we understand the drunk; we know what's the matter with him, and it'll wear off. But when quite unaccountably, a person gives representation that he's suddenly got the feeling that he's living in backwards time, or that everybody seems to be separated from him by a huge sheet of glass. Or that he's suddenly seeing everything in unbelievably vivid, detailed moving colors. We say, "Well, that's not normal. Therefore there must be something wrong with you." And the fact that we have such an enormous percentage of the population of this country in mental institutions is a thing that we may have to look at from a very different point of view; not that there may be a high incidence of mental sickness, but that there may be a high incidence of intolerance of variations of consciousness.
Now in Arabian countries, where the Islamic religion prevails, a person whom we would define as mentally deranged is regarded with a certain respect. The village idiot is looked upon with reverence because it is said his soul is not in his body, it is with Allah. And because his soul is with Allah, you must respect this body and care for it, not as something that is to be sort of swept away and put out of sight, but as something of a reminder that a man can still be living on Earth while his soul is in Heaven. Very different point of view. Also in India, there is a certain difference of attitude to people who would be called Mast, because there is a poem, an ancient poem of the Hindus, which says, "Sometimes naked, sometimes mad, now as a scholar, now as a fool, thus they appear on Earth as free men."
But you see, we in our attitude to this sort of behavior, which is essentially in its first inception harmless, these people are talking what we regard to be nonsense. And to be experienced in nonsense. We feel threatened by that, because we are not secure in ourselves. A very secure person can adapt himself with amazing speed to different kinds of communication. In foreign countries, for example, where you don't speak the language of the people you are staying with, if you don't feel ashamed of this, you can set up an enormous degree of communication with other people through gesture and even something most surprising, people can communicate with each other by simply talking. You can get a lot across to people by talking intelligent nonsense, by, as it were, imitating a foreign language; speaking like it sounds. You can communicate feelings, emotion, like and dislike of this, that and the other; very simply. But if you are rigid and are not willing to do this kind of playing, then you feel threatened by anybody who communicates with you in a funny way. And so this rigidity sets up a kind of vicious circle. The minute, in other words, somebody makes an unusual communication to you about an unusual state of consciousness, and you back off, the individual wonders, "Is there something wrong with me? I don't seem to be understood by anyone." Or he may wonder, "What's going on? Has everybody else suddenly gone crazy?" And then if he feels that he gets frightened, and to the degree that he gets more frightened, he gets more defensive, and eventually they end up with being catatonic, which is a person who simply doesn't move. And so then what we do is we whiffle him off to an institution, where he is captured by the inquisitors. These are a very special priesthood. And they have all the special marks that priesthoods have always had. They have a special vestment. Like the Catholic priest at mass wears a chasuble, the mental doctor, like every physician, wears a long white coat, and may carry something that corresponds, shall we say, so a stole, which is a stethoscope around his neck. He will then, under his authority, which is often in total defiance of every conceivable civil liberty, will incarcerate this incomprehensible person, and as Lang has pointed out, he undergoes a ritual of dehumanization. And he's put away. And because the hospitals are so crowded with people of this kind, he's going to get very little attention. And it's very difficult to know, when you get attention, how to work with it.
You get into this Kafka-esque situation which you get, say, in the state of California, if you are sent to such an institute as Vacaville prison, which is as you drive on the highway from San Francisco to Sacramento, you will encounter Vacaville about halfway between. You will see a great sign which says "California State Medical Facility." The state of California is famous for circumlocution. When you go underneath a low bridge, instead of saying "Low Bridge," it says "Impaired Vertical Clearance." Or when you're going to cross a toll bridge, instead of saying, plainly, "Toll Bridge," it says "Entering Vehicular Crossing." And when it should be saying, plainly, "Prison," it says either "California State Medical Facility," or "California State Correctional Facility," as it does at Soledad. Now Vacaville is a place where people get sent on what they call a one- to ten-year sentence. And there is a supervising psychiatric medical sort of social service staff there, who examine the inmates once in a while because they have such a large number. It's actually a maximum security prison, much more ringed around with defenses than even San Quentin. I went there to lecture with the inmates some time ago. They wanted someone to talk to them about meditation and yoga, and one of the inmates took me aside - a very kind of clean-cut, all-American boy. And he had been put in there probably for smoking pot; I'm not absolutely sure in my memory what the offense was. He said, "You know, I am very puzzled about this place. I really want to go straight and get out and get a job and live like an ordinary person." He said, "I think they don't know how to go about it. I've just been refused release; I went up before the committee; I talked to them. But I don't know what the rules of the game are. And incidentally, the members of the committee don't either."
So we have these situations, you see, of confusion. So that when a person goes into a mental hospital and feels first of all perhaps that he should try to sort himself out and talk reasonably with the physician, there is introduced into the communications system between them a fundamental element of fear and mistrust. Because I could talk to any individual if I were malicious and interpret every sane remark you make as something deeply sinister; that would simply exhibit my own paranoia. And the psychiatrist can very easily get paranoid, because the system that he is asked to represent, officially, is paranoid. I talked with a psychiatrist in England just a few weeks ago. One of the most charming women I've come across, an older woman, very intelligent, quite beautiful, very reasonable. And she was discussing with me the problem of the LSD psychosis. I asked her what sort of treatments they were using, and all sorts of questions about that, and she appeared at first to be a little on the defensive about it. We got onto the subject of the experience of what is officially called "depersonalization," where you feel that you and your experience - your sensory experience - that is to say all that you do experience: the people, the things, the animals, the buildings around you - that it's all one. I said, "Do you call this a hallucination? After all," I said, "it fits the facts of science, of biophysics, of ecology, of biology, and much better than our ordinary normal experience fits it." She said, "That's not my problem." She said, "That may be true, but I am employed by a society which feels that it ought to maintain a certain average kind of normal experience, and my job is to restore people to what society considers normal consciousness. I have no alternative but to leave it at that."
So, then. When someone is introduced into this situation, and it's very difficult to get attention, you feel terrified. The mental hospital, often in its very architecture, suggests some of the great visions of madness, of - you know that feeling of - to use a Francis Thompson phrase, the corridors of the mind. If you got lost in a maze and you couldn't get back. You're not quite sure who you are, or whether your father and mother are your real father and mother, or whether in the next ten minutes you're still going to remember how to speak English. You feel very lost. And the mental hospital in its architecture and everything represents that situation. Endless corridors, all the same. Which one are you in? Where are you? Will you ever get out? And it goes on monotonously, day after day after day after day. And someone who talks to you occasionally doesn't have a straight look in his eye. He doesn't see you as quite human. He looks at you as if you're weird. What are you to do? The only thing to do is get violent, if you really want to get out. Well then they say that's proof that you're crazy. And then as you get more violent, they put you all by yourself, and the only alternative you have, the only way of expressing yourself is to throw shit at the wall. Then they say, "Well, that's conclusive. The person isn't human."
Well, the question has been raised a great deal in the last few days on the television, as to whether this is a sick society. And I have listened to a perfectly beautiful psychoanalyst with a thick German accent. Oh, marvelous things! "Eet ees quite obvious dat society is quite hopeless, you zee." And I have listened to full red-blooded Americans saying, "most people in this society are good people, and it's a good society, but we have a very sick minority."
Now, what I want to do in - certainly this first part of the seminar - is to call in question, very fundamentally, all our basic ideas about what is sickness, what is health, what is sanity, what is insanity. Because I think we have to begin from this position of humility; that we really don't know. It's reported that shortly before he died, Robert Oppenheimer, looking at the picture of technology, especially nuclear technology, said "I'm afraid it's perfectly obvious that the world is going to hell." It's going to destroy itself; it's on collision course. The only way in which it might not go to hell is that we do not try to prevent it from doing so. Think that one over. Because it can well be argued that the major troublemakers in the world today are those people with good intentions. Like the professor of theology, University of Seville, professor of psychiatry at wherever you will. The idea that we know who is sick, who is wrong. Now, we are living in a political situation right now where a most fantastic thing is occurring. Everybody knows what they're against; nobody knows what they're for. Because nobody is thinking any longer in terms of what would be a great style of life. The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There's no earthly reason; there's no physical, technical reason for there being any poverty at all anywhere. But you see, there are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money. They don't know how to use it, they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
I'm announcing not the date, but the intention of conducting a seminar for extremely rich people entitled "Are You Rich and Miserable?" because you very probably are. Some aren't, but most are. Now the thing is that we are living in this situation where everybody knows what they're against, even if they say "I'm against the war in Vietnam. I am against discrimination against colored people," or against any different race than the discolored race, and so on. Yeah, so what? But it's not enough to feel like that; that's nothing. You must have some completely concrete vision of what you would like, and therefore I'm making a serious proposition that everybody who goes into college should as an entrance examination have the task of writing an essay on his idea of heaven, in which he is asked to be absolutely specific. He is not allowed, for example, to say, "I would like to have a very beautiful girl to live with." What do you mean by a beautiful girl? Exactly how, and in what way? Specifically. You know, down to the last wiggle of the hips, and down to every kind of expression of character and sociability, and her interests and all. Be specific! And about everything like that. "I would like a beautiful house to live in." Just what exactly do you mean by a beautiful house? Well you've suddenly got to study architecture. You see, and finally, this preliminary essay on "My Idea of Heaven" turns into his doctoral dissertation. So in a situation where we all know what we're against, and we don't know what we're for, then we know who we're against. We're defining all sorts of people as nonhuman. We say they're totally irrational. They're totally stupid. People will say, "Oh, those niggers, they're all completely uneducated, they'll never learn a thing, there's nothing you can do about it, they're hopeless, get rid of them." The Birchers are saying the same sort of thing. Other people, the liberals are saying the same thing about the Birchers. "They're stupid, get rid of them." The only result, then, the only thing anybody can think of in this sort of situation is "get your gun." And this sets up a vicious circle, because everybody else gets his gun. And the point from which we have to begin, then, is that we don't know who is healthy and who is sick. Who is right and who is wrong. And furthermore, we have to start, I think, from the assumption that because we don't know, there isn't anything we can do about it.
There's a Turkish proverb that I like to quote: "He who sleeps on the floor cannot fall out of bed." Therefore, we should make it a beginning - a basic assumption about life - that even supposing you could improve society, and that you could improve yourself, you were never sure whether the direction you moved it in would be an improvement.
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