"The mass of humanity," he went on after a time, "hasn't that kind of
insight, education, nerve--"
"No. Maybe not. Hasn't--as I'd put it--even that much access to its own
instincts. Doesn't know even that clearly the relationship of ideals to
acts. Of material gains to inner responsibilities. That's the trouble
with the mass of humanity. It decides to use atom bombs--the work of a
few geniuses who, left to themselves, might not."
"Appalling," Tom said.
"Sure. But the moldboard plow is just as deadly as the bomb in the
hands of the common mass. And the implications of plows are much easier
for the common jerk to understand than the implications of nucleonics.
But he doesn't. So why worry about atomic bombs? Merely another aspect
of the same, deep, and ubiquitous nonsense."
We sat awhile.
"What," Tom finally said, "will the better world be like?"
"Woodsy," I answered.
I could hear his grin in his voice. "To restore and shore up the
topsoil?"
"Yep. To maintain the ecology that maintains man. And besides, woods
are pleasant."
"The rivers would be clear. The factories would dump their wastes in
the desert. And the sewage would go through processing plants and then
be put back on the land."
"Not many factories, anyhow," I said.
"No? Why?"
"Not nearly so many people, for one thing. People would--people
did--cherish each other more when they were scarcer. That's a
psychological aspect of overpopulation thus far hardly observed. There
are so many of us getting in each other's way and making life tough
by merely being that we tend to hate each other just from congestion.
Then--the people in the better world wouldn't be so crazed over junk.
A tenth of the factories we've got now would probably furnish all the
junk they'd want."
"Cities, do you think?"
"Maybe a few small ones--where people put in a few years before going
back to the open country."
"Villages? Small towns?"
"Sure. Lots of schools and colleges. Everybody would be pretty
bright--and pretty anxious to learn. Everybody would be artistic.
Everybody would want to do a certain amount of work with his hands."
"Why?"
"That's the instinct of the critter, isn't it?"
"How come they'd all be bright?"
"Because the biggest fun we're going to have--when we get that wise, if
we ever do--is breeding bright people. Living for the sake of future
generations--and having some happiness doing it. Happiness with sex,
amongst other things, when it ceases to scare us to pieces."
"Maybe," Tom's tone objected, "you might finally convince the folks
that knocking themselves off when they got useless was evidence of a
great love--an assimilated employment of the death wish. I can even
see certain remedial effects in the idea--if that were the common
philosophy: people would want to make a bigger effort while they did
live, for example. But you can't get dumb babies to knock themselves
off."
"You could start--though--at the other end. Clamping down on the people
who overproduce and are least qualified to do so."
"Birth control for the morons? The Jukes and Kallikaks?"
"Yeah."
"Too difficult. They fornicate when drunk."
"Then set your lab wizards to find an easy, lasting system. They
ought to work toward stopping the output of predefeated babies--of
society-defeating hordes of nitwits--as a compensatory duty for
working on longevity and the diseases of old age. Fill the drugstores
with something you take a sip of that'll sterilize you for five years
straight. Chocolate flavor. And back it with national advertising."
"Try to sell that idea! Every church would say it would mean the
suicide of the race."
"Suicide of church members, maybe! Kidding aside, the more intelligent
specimens of mankind, who do use birth control, still do have
offspring--on purpose. It's just that they're outnumbered--and the net
result is genetic decline."
"What else--in the better world?"
"No mummery about sex. No mysteries. The young allowed to develop
according to their impulses--without shame or restraint so long as they
aren't hurtful. The sex manners and aesthetics of the mature built upon
that background of unashamed, free experience."
"And what would those manners be?"
"Don't ask me! I'm a shame-produced human gimmick, myself."
"You're welching!"
"Not exactly. I suspect--in the better world--sex would be such a
different set of ideas and acts and experiences and feelings that we
can't even imagine them."
"Nobody would dare bring up kids that way."
"People already have dared. A school in England does it. A school for
difficult kids--not the socially elite specimens. And they turn out
fine. Normal; and nice people. Which is something you definitely cannot
say of the kids turned out by our own reform schools."
"It's hard to believe," Tom said.
"Isn't it! That's the trouble with truth--these days."
We went on talking for a long while about the better world.
As we designed it, that hot night, I kept thinking how much of our
envisioned heaven-on-earth was constituted of what are now considered
to be mortal sins.
By and by, Tom said, "Half the doctors in the Utopia would be
psychiatrists--right?"
"No."
"Doesn't it follow--in your idea of the state of things? Half the
people who go to doctors, you say, have psychological causes for their
physical symptoms. And I'd just about agree. Half the hospital beds are
occupied by nuts."
"The better world, though, is designed to keep people from getting
neuroses and psychoses--individually. And to stop the massive neuroses
and psychoses of nations and races."
"So it is!" He chuckled. "That's your everlasting premise, isn't it?
If all the people understood themselves, they'd live according to
their understanding, and be well, wise and happy, if not particularly
wealthy."
"Doctors, like factories, would be scarcer in the better world."
"But what in hell would people _do_?"
"Oh--they'd do unto others as they'd be done by. And they'd add a step
even to the Golden Rule. They'd do unto the unborn generations as they
would wish their ancestors had done unto them. The existing Golden
Rule--which nobody practices anyhow--is objective. Its subjective
counterpart refers to the people to come, not the people around at the
moment. That's the Golden Rule of instinct--what instinct is all about.
Evolution. The increase of consciousness down the aeons. Obvious,
isn't it--that the history of evolution steadily spells increasing
consciousness? Logical, therefore, that such is the inevitable bent of
the future of life--as life is conveyed in man, or as it might someday
be conveyed in another form, if man doesn't catch on, consciously, to
the scheme behind his consciousness."
"Biological immortality," Tom said.
"Psychobiological immortality. Only--modern man, being so pompous about
what goes on in his cortex and repressing so much of what goes on in
the rest of his brain, has construed the 'immortal' aspect of instinct
as a property of his ego. The natural urge to live through his species,
through kids--to love, that is--to be man's father--is drained off into
the asinine notion that his personal ego will live in a slap-happy
eternity."
"Man," said Tom, "has a pretty damned powerful feeling about that
personal immortality. Hard to shake."
"Why not? It's fashioned out of his most powerful instinct. The one
that supports life itself, reproduction, and that at least accompanies
evolution. Man takes that billion-year-old galaxy of instincts, filters
it through his cortex, and comes up with the idea of Heaven. It's a
childish mistake. But even a child, when it's mistaken about the actual
nature of an instinct, still has as powerful a compulsion in his error
as he would have if he were correct. Say he's frightened by something
that isn't really frightful: he's still just as much afraid. And
we--most of us--are in that state about pretty much all of our inner
selves."
"And have been, you think, for a long while?"
"Sure. Since thousands of years before Christ. You guys in medicine
ought to quit studying tissue per se--and study its functioning some
more. Contemporary man--as a rule--never gets even a glimmering of how
his personality is split and how the conscious part can bamboozle the
unconscious part--and believe it has got away with it. You know the
fact--you ignore the implications. For instance, Tom, we actually see
upside-down, right?"
"Sure."
"In our first few weeks--as babies, we react according to the fact of
our vision. We want to grab the top of something--but we reach for the
bottom--because human vision is inverted."
"It is."
"We learn--by experience--that we see upside-down. As we age--month by
month--we develop a 'mind' that makes the correction for us. By the
time we're some months old, everything 'looks' rightside-up. And only
once in a while, under peculiar conditions, does anybody's mind ever
glimpse the world the way his eyes see it--inverted."
"So what?"
"So--that is an example of useful autohypnosis. An immensely potent
example. It shows how the 'mind' can establish a set of facts directly
opposite to those observed by the eyes. A mind that can go through life
looking at an inverted world but 'seeing' it the way it is--manifestly
is capable of accepting almost any degree of suggestion from its other
parts, and its various senses--of accepting true suggestion or false
suggestion. Manifestly, it isn't necessarily 'right' or 'wrong' about
anything not proven."
"An argument for empiricism."
"Sure. But for psychological empiricism. That is--an argument for
refusing to take for granted any human descriptions of the nature of
mind, personality, spirit, psyche, soul--call it what you will--until
the descriptions have been pragmatically checked. Take my proposition
that all ideas of personal survival after death are misconstructions
of an instinct designed to apply to the psychological and biological
future of men on earth. Then look over some people who, as a group,
reject the idea of Heaven. The communists, I mean.
"I've pointed out--and brighter men have pointed out before
me--that when the materialist dialectic was applied on a mass of
people, it became a religion. Reason and logic departed. Dogma,
orthodoxy, emotion, creed, saints, apostles, holy orders, a Bible
with gospels--the whole, compulsive paraphernalia of religion burst
into being. What was intended as an abstract, atheistic, scientific,
materialistic pattern for living turned into the most fanatical
evangelism, the most bigoted crusade, the least logical movement
the earth has seen for ages. Lately, where the facts of the science
of genetics have proven contrary to communist dogma, the Soviet has
abolished science. The Roman Catholic Church never did anything more
religious, in the worst sense of that word--more superstitious--more
compulsive--or more absurd."
"What are you driving at?"
"Just this. What happened, psychologically, in Russia is one more great
proof of instinct. Until and unless you find out pragmatically what
instinct is, and what its laws are, no theory of government or system
for living will be anything but a set of compulsive simulations of
instinct. A religion. Communism was dialectical materialism so long
as men just talked about it; when they tried to put it in effect,
it became another faith, with the complete trappings of a faith.
Dialectical materialism not merely denies that men are instinctual--it
ignores the very possibility; as a result, its application drives
instinct entirely into the unconscious mind. You can see the proof of
that by reading in the daily papers what's happening in Russia or by
noting the Russian technique of debate. Pure theology. Pure nonsense."
"I wish you'd written more along those lines," Tom said.
"I'd planned to. I'd even started the first chapters. The calm,
collected, documented description of what instinct is and how it works.
It was going to be a scientific contribution. Jung explained to the
Freudians. Wylie explained to the Jungians."