In man's early days, competition with other creatures must have been critical.

But this phase of our development is now finished. Indeed, we lack practice and

experience nowadays in dealing with primitive conditions. I am sure that, with-

out modern weapons, I would make a very poor show of disputing the ownership

of a cave with a bear, and in this I do not think that I stand alone. The last creature

to compete with man was the mosquito. But even the mosquito has been subdued

by attention to drainage and by chemical sprays.

Competition between ourselves, person against person, community against

community, still persists, however; and it is as fierce as it ever was.

But the competition of man against man is not the simple process envisioned

in biology. It is not a simple competition for a fixed amount of food determined

by the physical environment, because the environment that determines our evo-

lution is no longer essentially physical. Our environment is chiefly conditioned

by the things we believe. Morocco and California are bits of the Earth in very

similar latitudes, both on the west coasts of continents with similar climates, and

probably with rather similar natural resources. Yet their present development is

wholly different, not so much because of different people even, but because of the

different thoughts that exist in the minds of their inhabitants. This is the point

I wish to emphasize. The most important factor in our environment is the state

of our own minds.

It is well known that where the white man has invaded a primitive culture the

most destructive effects have come not from physical weapons but from ideas.

Ideas are dangerous. The Holy office knew this full well when it caused heretics

to be burned in days gone by. Indeed, the concept of free speech only exists in

our modem society because when you are inside a community you are condi-

tioned by the conventions of the community to such a degree that it is very

difficult to conceive of anything really destructive. It is only someone looking on

from outside that can inject the dangerous thoughts. I do not doubt that it would

be possible to inject ideas into the modern world that would utterly destroy us.

I would like to give you an example, but fortunately I cannot do so. Perhaps it

will suffice to mention the nuclear bomb. Imagine the effect on a reasonably ad-

vanced technological society, one that still does not possess the bomb, of making

it aware of the possibility, of supplying sufficient details to enable the thing to be

constructed. Twenty or thirty pages of information handed to any of the major

world powers around the year 1925 would have been sufficient to change the

course of world history. It is a strange thought, but I believe a correct one, that

twenty or thirty pages of ideas and information would be capable of turning the

present-day world upside down, or even destroying it. I have often tried to con-

ceive of what those pages might contain, but of course I cannot do so because

I am a prisoner of the present-day world, just as all of you are. We cannot think

outside the particular patterns that our brains are conditioned to, or, to be more

accurate, we can think only a very little way outside, and then only if we are

very original.

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