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