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, without 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 our selves, 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 evolution is no longer essentially physical. Our
environment is chiefly conditoned 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 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 modern society because when you are inside a
community, you are conditioned 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 unclear bomb. Of making the
effect on a reasonably advanced 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 conceive of what those pages might contain, but of course 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.