WEBVTT NOTE A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Human Spirit: The Luddites Revisited 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.000 I didn't expect to come to Alabama to catch a cold, but so be it, I can do that back home. 2 00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:17.000 I actually arrived at this conference by air, and there's really nothing remarkable in this by itself. 3 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:23.000 Over the years I've flown to numerous locations without feeling any more of a need to mention this fact 4 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:27.000 than to mention the fact that I filled my car with gasoline last week. 5 00:00:27.000 --> 00:00:36.000 But this is my first airline flight in almost 18 months, and it's my sincere desire to be my last for a long while. 6 00:00:36.000 --> 00:00:41.000 It's not that I had no place to go during this time period. 7 00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:51.000 I've taken trips from Los Angeles to such places as San Francisco, Aspen, Denver, Phoenix and Tucson, but in each case I've driven. 8 00:00:51.000 --> 00:01:01.000 And I refuse to fly unless, as in the case of this conference, time constraints really permit no other option. 9 00:01:01.000 --> 00:01:05.000 Now, it's not that I have a fear of flying. I've always enjoyed the sensation of flight. 10 00:01:05.000 --> 00:01:11.000 Nor do I have any fears after, excuse me, 9-11 that someone's going to hijack a plane and plow it into a building someplace. 11 00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:19.000 I figure that the best security that the airlines have right now against hijackers is the presence of 200 or more passengers 12 00:01:19.000 --> 00:01:25.000 who because of 9-11 would likely take any hijacker and probably stomp them to death. 13 00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:34.000 My refusal to fly instead is grounded in that most basic of economic explanations that simply costs too much. 14 00:01:34.000 --> 00:01:42.000 And I'm referring not to the airfares themselves, thanks to various internet services, one can usually find decent rates. 15 00:01:42.000 --> 00:01:54.000 The costs of which I refer are those that most of us in our thoroughly institutionalized, regulated, catalogued and policed world too often fail to incorporate into our cost-benefit analyses. 16 00:01:54.000 --> 00:02:10.000 The psychic, emotional and spiritual costs through our very sense of being by having one's body, clothing, luggage, handbag or other belonging subject to searches, gropings and inquisitions by functionaries of the state. 17 00:02:10.000 --> 00:02:19.000 One of my credit card companies informed me that because of my long-time usage of their card, I'm entitled to free airline tickets to virtually any place on earth. 18 00:02:19.000 --> 00:02:30.000 And while my wife and I love to travel, even with free tickets, having to endure such dehumanizing intrusions upon myself involves a cost that is beyond my means to pay. 19 00:02:30.000 --> 00:02:38.000 I offer this as an example of how I choose to deal with what I regard as the most pressing problem now confronting mankind. 20 00:02:38.000 --> 00:02:48.000 The expansion of institutional power over the lives of men and women, and its corollary, the ever-continuing demeaning of the human spirit. 21 00:02:48.000 --> 00:03:01.000 One of the many unintended consequences of our commercial and industrialized civilization has been an ever-widing division between the physical and the spiritual nature of what it means to be human. 22 00:03:01.000 --> 00:03:09.000 This division began at least as early as Descartes, whose mind-body dualism helped us accept such a division of our basic nature. 23 00:03:09.000 --> 00:03:19.000 Had we been a bit more attentive, we would have become aware that it was such spiritually driven periods as the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution 24 00:03:19.000 --> 00:03:24.000 that fostered the discoveries and inventions that blossomed during the Industrial Revolution. 25 00:03:24.000 --> 00:03:44.000 Most of us have forgotten how our imagination, intuition, passions, sentiments, dreams, emotions, speculations, and unconscious forces have been principal contributors not only to finding a sense of meaning in our lives, but to improving our material well-being. 26 00:03:44.000 --> 00:03:51.560 It should be evident that our modern world is in a state of destructive turbulence. 27 00:03:51.560 --> 00:03:56.200 A major cause of this turbulence, I believe, is to be found in conflicts that arise within 28 00:03:56.200 --> 00:04:01.780 us and with others as a consequence of our accepting this division between our physical 29 00:04:01.780 --> 00:04:04.840 and spiritual natures. 30 00:04:04.840 --> 00:04:10.840 We are tearing our world apart because we are inwardly torn apart by our refusal to 31 00:04:10.840 --> 00:04:15.560 to Live Integrated Lives To express the proposition in the language 32 00:04:15.560 --> 00:04:25.140 of economics, our actions are producing inefficient and dysfunctional consequences because we 33 00:04:25.140 --> 00:04:31.440 are systematically ignoring some of the primary costs associated with our behavior. 34 00:04:31.440 --> 00:04:36.320 As the study of chaos or complexity informs us, it's the nature of complex systems to 35 00:04:36.320 --> 00:04:40.140 occasionally shift into periods of turbulence. 36 00:04:40.140 --> 00:04:52.640 This seems to result from a failure of the system to remain resilient to the forces that work upon it and the efforts to stabilize that system through structured mechanisms and practices that seek to resist change. 37 00:04:52.640 --> 00:05:08.040 The marketplace operating through the pricing system provides for continuing responses to such pressures and in so doing sustains an order through fluctuation in which no market participant can ever be assured of the stability of its position. 38 00:05:08.040 --> 00:05:13.040 Those of us who are interested in revisionist approaches to economic history have discovered 39 00:05:13.040 --> 00:05:17.520 that not everyone is content to live in an ever fluctuating world. 40 00:05:17.520 --> 00:05:22.560 As a consequence, many marketplace participants, particularly in the 20th century, call upon 41 00:05:22.560 --> 00:05:28.920 the nation-state to use its coercive powers on behalf of the structuring of their interests. 42 00:05:28.920 --> 00:05:33.640 Government regulation of trade, production, labor, product standards, pricing and sales 43 00:05:33.640 --> 00:05:39.960 practices, licensing and other entry restrictions, tariff and taxation policies, and wars are 44 00:05:39.960 --> 00:05:43.520 among the more familiar examples. 45 00:05:43.520 --> 00:05:48.040 But such political structuring has its cost, as everyone here is doubtless aware. 46 00:05:48.040 --> 00:05:53.520 Indeed, Murray Rothbard was one of the pioneers of modern efforts to identify the motivations 47 00:05:53.520 --> 00:05:57.320 and analyze the consequences of corporate state regulatory schemes. 48 00:05:57.320 --> 00:06:02.640 I always thought if someone was going to build, do a statue to Murray, they'll just have the 49 00:06:02.640 --> 00:06:08.720 There's a phrase, cuibono, underneath it, and that would be that. 50 00:06:08.720 --> 00:06:13.040 As a result of research efforts engaged in by economists, historians, lawyers, and students 51 00:06:13.040 --> 00:06:18.160 of government, it is now difficult for anyone to avoid the fact that the political structuring 52 00:06:18.160 --> 00:06:24.320 of modern society has generated both economic and social costs of great proportion. 53 00:06:24.320 --> 00:06:29.640 I trust that there's no elaboration of that, and it needs to be made here. 54 00:06:29.640 --> 00:06:34.320 But there's another cost that's not received as much attention, a cost which I believe 55 00:06:34.320 --> 00:06:39.280 is now being called up for payment by increasing numbers of people. 56 00:06:39.280 --> 00:06:44.200 It is a cost to the human spirit, occasioned by the demeaning nature of the political structuring 57 00:06:44.200 --> 00:06:46.460 of our lives. 58 00:06:46.460 --> 00:06:51.060 What does it mean to the inner sense of being in each of us, to have our lives subjected 59 00:06:51.060 --> 00:06:56.780 to restraints, mandates, prohibitions, and other controls promised upon each of us being 60 00:06:56.780 --> 00:07:10.780 It is these costs to the human spirit that most threaten the well-being of all mankind, and to which the attention of intelligent men and women must now be directed. 61 00:07:10.780 --> 00:07:15.780 As Viktor Frankl observed in his Nazi concentration camp experiences, 62 00:07:15.780 --> 00:07:22.680 What hurt so much was not the physical pain inflicted by brutish guards, but the indignity, 63 00:07:22.680 --> 00:07:27.540 the lack of respect shown to one as a human being, the loss of a sense of individuality 64 00:07:27.540 --> 00:07:35.220 in being shorn of everything, personal possessions, even one's body hair, that made one unique. 65 00:07:35.220 --> 00:07:41.060 I believe that each of us has a fundamental need for spiritual or transcendent experiences, 66 00:07:41.060 --> 00:07:45.740 A need to connect up with the universe in a way that is meaningful to our innermost sense 67 00:07:45.740 --> 00:07:48.180 of who we are. 68 00:07:48.180 --> 00:07:52.660 These needs, which often find expression as emotional experiences, have sometimes been 69 00:07:52.660 --> 00:07:59.020 referred to as HEEC experiences, or what others call a sense of cosmic consciousness, or an 70 00:07:59.020 --> 00:08:04.180 order of truths which transcends the sphere to the external sense. 71 00:08:04.180 --> 00:08:09.060 I will go further and suggest that this need for a sense of integrated wholeness underlies 72 00:08:09.060 --> 00:08:15.380 sometimes through a highly energized consciousness, sometimes at an unconscious level of awareness, 73 00:08:15.380 --> 00:08:18.380 almost all of what we do in life. 74 00:08:18.380 --> 00:08:22.340 While as an agnostic I'm not referring to spirituality in its more familiar setting of 75 00:08:22.340 --> 00:08:27.420 organized religion, it might include that expression as well. 76 00:08:27.420 --> 00:08:31.020 Religious systems have prevailed in one form or another since the earliest known records 77 00:08:31.020 --> 00:08:37.340 of mankind, reflecting this powerful inner need to feel connected to the universe. 78 00:08:37.340 --> 00:09:02.340 The Federal Reserve manifests itself elsewhere in the sciences, poetry and other forms of literature, invention, art, the desire for learning, music, architecture, dance, procreation and the raising of children, philosophy, the enjoyment of nature, and the desire to make the world a better place, all derived from the spiritual need. 79 00:09:02.340 --> 00:09:17.340 So too, I believe, does that beautiful prehistoric handprint, found in an underground cave in France, in which one of our ancestors appears to have reached out to us over many thousands of years as if to say, I was here. 80 00:09:17.340 --> 00:09:27.340 The true believer, the agnostic, and the atheist all desire to know the answers to the kinds of questions that are asked by students of both religion and science. 81 00:09:27.340 --> 00:09:35.340 Where did it all come from? Where is it all going? And what rules are in place while we're here? 82 00:09:35.340 --> 00:09:40.340 Even men and women who define their daily pursuits as being more practical than spiritual 83 00:09:40.340 --> 00:09:48.340 might ask themselves why it is they pursue wealth, fame, power, or status in their undertakings. 84 00:09:48.340 --> 00:09:54.340 They might discover that the satisfaction of such ends would allow them to transcend their more limited sense of self, 85 00:09:54.340 --> 00:10:13.340 for a long time, institutions have persuaded us to seek our sense of transcendence through them by being of service to an institutional hierarchy and perhaps enjoying power and status within such an apparatus. 86 00:10:13.340 --> 00:10:22.340 I recall as a teenager, my father trying to interest me in joining the young man's version of a fraternal organization to which he was a devoted member. 87 00:10:22.340 --> 00:10:27.660 And apart from the fact that my unwillingness to join almost any organization can probably 88 00:10:27.660 --> 00:10:32.700 be traced back to some genetic marker in my DNA, I inquired us of the purpose in joining 89 00:10:32.700 --> 00:10:33.700 this organization. 90 00:10:33.700 --> 00:10:40.260 Well, so you can move up into ever-higher positions in the organization, he responded. 91 00:10:40.260 --> 00:10:43.020 Why, I asked. 92 00:10:43.020 --> 00:10:47.940 Well, so that you can have more authority and prestige, he said. 93 00:10:47.940 --> 00:10:48.940 In order to accomplish what? 94 00:10:48.940 --> 00:10:59.700 Sad to say, this reflects the kind of vicious circle in which most people find their needs 95 00:10:59.700 --> 00:11:06.140 for transcendence ensnared by organizations that have become their own reasons for existence. 96 00:11:06.140 --> 00:11:09.780 Organized religions too often leave men and women with rigid dogmas rather than spiritual 97 00:11:09.780 --> 00:11:11.820 awakenings. 98 00:11:11.820 --> 00:11:16.020 Corporate enterprises often foster the kinds of identities I once heard at a business conference 99 00:11:16.020 --> 00:11:20.100 Wherein a man introduced himself as, I am Xerox. 100 00:11:20.100 --> 00:11:29.820 He probably was, you think of a Xerox machine as producing endless supply of clones. 101 00:11:29.820 --> 00:11:34.780 In his clarity adding machine, Elmer Rice introduces us to the dispirited employee whose 102 00:11:34.780 --> 00:11:39.380 greatest ambition would be that he, quote, might sit in the gallery of a coal mine and 103 00:11:39.380 --> 00:11:45.660 operate the super hyper adding machine with a great toe of his right foot. 104 00:11:45.660 --> 00:11:49.580 And of course, there's that most dehumanizing and degrading corruption of these needs for 105 00:11:49.580 --> 00:11:52.060 transcendence, the state. 106 00:11:52.060 --> 00:11:56.620 Over the years, I've read hundreds of personal statements by students seeking admission to 107 00:11:56.620 --> 00:11:59.180 the law school where I teach. 108 00:11:59.180 --> 00:12:03.300 There's an almost universal theme running through most of these statements. 109 00:12:03.300 --> 00:12:06.980 With a law degree, I will be better able to use the powers of government to make life 110 00:12:06.980 --> 00:12:10.860 better for people. 111 00:12:10.860 --> 00:12:13.900 Schools and universities have helped train students to think that transcendence can be 112 00:12:13.900 --> 00:12:20.140 be found in politics. But politics, being grounded in coercive power over others, doesn't 113 00:12:20.140 --> 00:12:26.300 allow us to connect up with others. Instead, it divides us into opposing groups and creates 114 00:12:26.300 --> 00:12:33.860 conflict. What lies we tell our children about political systems, lies promising young men 115 00:12:33.860 --> 00:12:38.460 and women the status of heroes, while turning their minds and bodies into so much fungible 116 00:12:38.460 --> 00:12:43.680 cannon fodder to be consumed in perpetual wars for perpetual peace, and downgrading 117 00:12:43.680 --> 00:13:04.680 and the other victims as collateral damage, but greater indictment of the state's contempt for the spiritual quality of human beings than the neutron bomb, a device that only destroys people, not the physical structures, natural resources and technologies that are of value and importance to institutional interests. 118 00:13:04.680 --> 00:13:18.680 The neutron bomb is the state's message that it tells us in every war, for only we will listen, namely that the institutional hierarchy has taken inventory of all its assets and the bottom has fallen out of the market for human beings. 119 00:13:18.680 --> 00:13:27.680 Far too many of us, unfortunately, have come to regard the material costs of governmental undertakings as the only ones worthy or capable of sound analysis. 120 00:13:27.680 --> 00:13:35.680 For too many economists, only those costs and benefits capable of being quantified are deserving of critical evaluation. 121 00:13:35.680 --> 00:13:43.680 The human costs in terms of suffering, death, humiliation, or the diminution of the spirit can be talked about or acknowledged, 122 00:13:43.680 --> 00:13:47.680 but are rarely brought into the inquiry as a decisive factor. 123 00:13:47.680 --> 00:13:55.680 I recall a conference which I once attended in which a well-known, I might add non-Austrian, 124 00:13:55.680 --> 00:14:00.360 And economist, and a man for whom I hold a great deal of respect, did a cost-benefit 125 00:14:00.360 --> 00:14:03.760 analysis of governmental behavior in general. 126 00:14:03.760 --> 00:14:08.120 He didn't mention any of the spiritual factors that were of interest to me, so I asked him 127 00:14:08.120 --> 00:14:14.720 afterwards how he would do a cost-benefit analysis of Auschwitz or a Soviet Gulag. 128 00:14:14.720 --> 00:14:18.280 And he admitted that there were important costs associated with such systems, but confessed 129 00:14:18.280 --> 00:14:22.660 that since they could not be quantified, they really couldn't be talked about in any more 130 00:14:22.660 --> 00:14:33.660 The legal profession suffers from this same preoccupation with mechanistic and material assessments of the propriety of institutional behavior. 131 00:14:33.660 --> 00:14:50.660 In place of quantitative analysis, lawyers dwell on such notions as procedural due process, to insist that acceptable procedures be employed before depriving individuals of their life, liberty or property. 132 00:14:50.660 --> 00:14:58.660 If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the road to tyranny is paved with procedural due process. 133 00:15:10.660 --> 00:15:19.660 There was a time when substantive due process was given more respect, but such inquiries had become decreasingly relevant in our Panglossian world. 134 00:15:20.660 --> 00:15:29.660 I recall a conference at Claremont College in 1972, which Murray Rothbard ended up in a polite but energized debate with Harold Demsets. 135 00:15:29.660 --> 00:15:39.660 Murray was insisting that moral and other philosophical values had to be given greater consideration in economic analysis than was the habit of most economists. 136 00:15:39.660 --> 00:15:47.660 Demsets, as I recall, was making much the same response as the aforementioned economists when confronting my cost-benefit question. 137 00:15:47.660 --> 00:15:57.660 Murray was concerned with how to help young people understand that the study of economics was about something far more vivid than could be explained in terms of cost accounting. 138 00:15:57.660 --> 00:16:01.660 And in the sentence, I shall never forget, Murray said, 139 00:16:01.660 --> 00:16:06.660 Herald, these young kids are not going to be willing to go to the barricades in defense of lowered transaction costs. 140 00:16:06.660 --> 00:16:23.660 Precisely. And neither is anyone else, nor should they be. 141 00:16:23.660 --> 00:16:29.660 Some may respond that the study of economics, law, history and other fields of human behavior 142 00:16:29.660 --> 00:16:34.660 ought not to incorporate emotional, spiritual, and other subjective values, 143 00:16:34.660 --> 00:16:41.660 but the analytical process ought to proceed from a more detached, value-free perspective. 144 00:16:41.660 --> 00:16:47.660 But the failure to incorporate such subjective factors does not reflect a value-free approach. 145 00:16:47.660 --> 00:16:51.660 It only smuggles into the analysis an alternative set of values 146 00:16:51.660 --> 00:16:57.660 that presumes spiritual considerations to be unworthy of the attention of intelligent persons. 147 00:16:57.660 --> 00:17:07.660 Such an approach is punished on the illusion long since demolished by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle that one can observe the world in some allegedly objective manner. 148 00:17:07.660 --> 00:17:16.660 This approach further fragments us, giving us an incomplete assessment of the impact of various policies and practices on human beings. 149 00:17:16.660 --> 00:17:21.660 It ignores the inherently subjective nature of all values. 150 00:17:21.660 --> 00:17:29.980 It is to the spirit, and I mean that quite literally, of Murray's comment that my remarks are addressed. 151 00:17:29.980 --> 00:17:35.180 The lives of increasing numbers of men and women have become dispirited, without a sense 152 00:17:35.180 --> 00:17:39.340 of meaning to be found in the well-organized madness that has produced our normally neurotic 153 00:17:39.340 --> 00:17:41.620 culture. 154 00:17:41.620 --> 00:17:47.220 Murray understood, as do most of us here, that life is self-directed activity, mobilized 155 00:17:47.220 --> 00:17:53.260 by individualized, self-seeking purposes, and that efforts to usurp such control, such 156 00:17:53.260 --> 00:18:00.060 as through the coercive powers of the state, are inherently at war with life itself. 157 00:18:00.060 --> 00:18:06.060 Life in other words is inseparable from liberty, and any evaluation of institutional behavior 158 00:18:06.060 --> 00:18:10.380 must proceed from an awareness of this fundamental fact. 159 00:18:10.380 --> 00:18:17.180 All costs of human action must be accounted for, particularly those that cannot be measured. 160 00:18:17.180 --> 00:18:23.940 I'll state the proposition as bluntly and as radically as I know how. 161 00:18:23.940 --> 00:18:29.540 I favor the free market only because I value individual liberty. 162 00:18:29.540 --> 00:18:34.740 And I value individual liberty because that condition alone permits the greatest opportunities 163 00:18:34.740 --> 00:18:40.680 for the full expression of the inner sense of what it means to be human. 164 00:18:40.680 --> 00:18:45.260 If one could make the case that an alternative economic system would better serve these humanizing 165 00:18:45.260 --> 00:18:50.600 I would embrace it but I'm convinced that such is not the case that the 166 00:18:50.600 --> 00:18:54.620 alternative systems others propose always seem to end up grounded in some 167 00:18:54.620 --> 00:19:00.480 form of political coercion however subtly smuggled into the equation while 168 00:19:00.480 --> 00:19:04.060 I'm willing to use philosophical reasoning and economic analysis to 169 00:19:04.060 --> 00:19:09.500 support my case for the free market make no mistake about it it is the intuitive 170 00:19:09.500 --> 00:19:14.300 emotional spiritual side of my being that impels me to embrace marketplace 171 00:19:14.300 --> 00:19:23.300 and the communist economics in general and the Austrians who are more attuned to the importance of these invisible means of support in particular. 172 00:19:23.300 --> 00:19:37.300 I will even go so far as to declare that because of my insistence upon liberty, I would support free market systems even if it were shown that the marketplace was a materially inefficient means of providing for goods and services. 173 00:19:37.300 --> 00:19:54.300 There is nothing remarkable in the approach that I take to ideas. The writings of other men and women often provide useful sounding boards for the development of my own thinking about my place in the world. 174 00:19:54.300 --> 00:20:02.300 But whether consciously or unconsciously, I have always judged such works by the standard of their consistency with my own inner sense of being. 175 00:20:02.300 --> 00:20:08.300 It was never logic nor other forms of reasoning that attracted me to one thinker or another, 176 00:20:08.300 --> 00:20:12.300 but whether my own spirit was reflected in their writings. 177 00:20:12.300 --> 00:20:17.300 At no time in my life have I found any philosopher who adequately responded to the question 178 00:20:17.300 --> 00:20:21.300 I remember asking myself while I was in law school. 179 00:20:21.300 --> 00:20:28.300 One Sunday afternoon, my wife and I were walking near the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago 180 00:20:28.300 --> 00:20:40.300 When my inquiry focused on this question, why should I have to justify my desire for liberty on any grounds other than the fact that I do not choose to be coerced? 181 00:20:40.300 --> 00:20:49.300 Why, in other words, did I need to rationalize my claim to immunity from trespasses by appealing to anything beyond my own will? 182 00:20:49.300 --> 00:20:59.300 This question was being forced up into my consciousness by my own spiritual voices that I knew were never going to be content with being repressed. 183 00:20:59.300 --> 00:21:03.300 The spiritual depletion of our lives can be identified in numerous ways. 184 00:21:03.300 --> 00:21:09.300 The anger, violence, and depression that have become commonplace in society. 185 00:21:09.300 --> 00:21:18.300 School children who have had their sense of spontaneity and adventure numbed by drugs to make them more amenable to the control of parents and school officials. 186 00:21:18.300 --> 00:21:36.300 Adults who drug themselves with legally prescribed tranquilizers, antidepressants, or amphetamines, or alcohol, or who resort to illegal drugs in order to seek through chemistry what they cannot find within themselves or their social systems. 187 00:21:36.300 --> 00:21:42.300 Why do we not grasp the message hidden in popular names for such substances? 188 00:21:42.300 --> 00:21:46.300 A synonym for alcohol is spirits. 189 00:21:46.300 --> 00:21:58.300 While various drugs are referred to as angel dust, ecstasy, paradise, blue heaven, joy powder, or God's medicine. 190 00:21:58.300 --> 00:22:05.300 Instead of condemning and criminalizing drug use, which only adds to the loss of control people have over their lives, 191 00:22:05.300 --> 00:22:12.300 intelligent people might ask why so many men and women are unable to find spiritual expression in their institutionally centered lives 192 00:22:12.300 --> 00:22:16.300 and look for it in AIRSAT's forums. 193 00:22:16.300 --> 00:22:18.300 Nearly 30 years ago I wrote a Law Review article titled, 194 00:22:18.300 --> 00:22:21.300 Violence as a Product of Imposed Order. 195 00:22:21.300 --> 00:22:24.300 It developed the proposition that when the state forcibly mandates 196 00:22:24.300 --> 00:22:29.300 or prohibits behavior contrary to what individuals would otherwise choose for themselves, 197 00:22:29.300 --> 00:22:32.300 violence is often a consequence. 198 00:22:32.300 --> 00:22:36.300 I greatly expanded on this theme in my book, Calculated Chaos. 199 00:22:36.300 --> 00:22:38.300 Consistent with the study of complexity, 200 00:22:38.300 --> 00:22:48.300 The complexity, efforts to impose order often generate disorder. While what appears to us as disorder reveals upon closer examination, patterns of orderliness. 201 00:22:48.300 --> 00:22:59.300 The disorder resulting from state imposed order can be found in increased social violence, wars, wars as familiar to everyone in this audience, various economic dislocations. 202 00:22:59.300 --> 00:23:15.300 This disorder may also become internalized within each of us, as we become increasingly beaten down by a sense of powerlessness over our own lives, and may eventually surrender to an inner despair that finds expression as, what's the use? 203 00:23:15.300 --> 00:23:29.300 In the language of students of chaos, unless we reverse our entropic decline, unless we can rekindle the inner fire that has gone out through our neglect, we may collapse into a spiritual bankruptcy. 204 00:23:29.300 --> 00:23:33.300 An experience I had a number of years ago provides a helpful metaphor. 205 00:23:33.300 --> 00:23:42.300 I attended a photographic exhibit in which a scientist was reporting his experiences in observing the eye of a mosquito under a microscope. 206 00:23:42.300 --> 00:23:48.300 Initially the eye was afire, with brilliant dancing colors of orange and green. 207 00:23:48.300 --> 00:23:52.300 Suddenly the eye turned black. 208 00:23:52.300 --> 00:23:55.300 The mosquito was dead. 209 00:23:55.300 --> 00:23:58.300 The fire had gone out of the system. 210 00:23:58.300 --> 00:24:03.300 For any who doubt the power that the human spirit exerts over our sense of life, 211 00:24:03.300 --> 00:24:07.300 recall the impact of some of the visual news images from recent years. 212 00:24:07.300 --> 00:24:13.300 The naked Vietnamese girl running and screaming down a road following an American napalm attack. 213 00:24:13.300 --> 00:24:17.300 Pictures of the Berlin Wall being torn down by individuals. 214 00:24:17.300 --> 00:24:23.300 Or the photo of one of the many millions of victims of American terrorism, Elian Gonzalez, 215 00:24:23.300 --> 00:24:30.300 with a machine gun shoved in his face by one of Janet Reno's stormtroopers. 216 00:24:30.300 --> 00:24:35.300 Or consider that most powerful of photo images, one that hangs on my office wall, 217 00:24:35.300 --> 00:24:42.300 of that young man, Wang Weilin, confronting that role of impenetrable tanks in Tiananmen Square. 218 00:24:42.300 --> 00:24:48.300 Western journalists, trained to feed off leftovers thrown under the trough by their political masters, 219 00:24:48.300 --> 00:24:52.300 tended to see only political symbolism in this event. 220 00:24:52.300 --> 00:24:58.300 But it wasn't the American flag or the dollar sign around which these young people rallied, 221 00:24:58.300 --> 00:25:01.300 but the Statue of Liberty. 222 00:25:01.300 --> 00:25:31.300 This man did not seem intent on overpowering the state, or even the tanks, but to make a declaration on behalf of reclaiming the human spirit, it was the spirit of mankind, represented in the form of a solitary human being, standing up to the faceless, dispirited machinery of state power that set a common shield up the spines of most of us. 223 00:25:31.300 --> 00:25:40.300 This war upon the human spirit is at the core of the crisis now being faced by all of Western civilization. 224 00:25:40.300 --> 00:25:50.300 Modern society is in a state of turbulence brought about in large part by politically generated efforts to maintain static equilibrium conditions, 225 00:25:50.300 --> 00:25:59.300 practices that interfere with the ceaseless processes of change that provide the fluctuating order upon which any creative system depends. 226 00:25:59.300 --> 00:26:08.300 Institutions have trained us to insist upon the certain and the concrete, and to dismiss the uncertain and the fanciful. 227 00:26:08.300 --> 00:26:20.300 The creativity has always depended upon a fascination with the mysterious, and an appreciation for the kinds of questions that reveal more than answers can ever provide. 228 00:26:20.300 --> 00:26:26.580 When creative processes become subordinated to preserving institutional interests, when 229 00:26:26.580 --> 00:26:32.060 the glorification of systems takes priority over the sanctity of individual lives, societies 230 00:26:32.060 --> 00:26:36.500 begin to lose their self-sustaining vibrancy and may collapse. 231 00:26:36.500 --> 00:26:42.500 In the words of historian Jacob Burkhart, the essence of history is change, and the 232 00:26:42.500 --> 00:26:49.900 way of annihilation is invariably prepared by inward degeneration by decrease of life. 233 00:26:49.900 --> 00:26:53.900 Daniel and Ariel Durant expressed the point more poetically, perhaps. 234 00:26:53.900 --> 00:27:04.900 Civilizations begin, flourish, decline and disappear, or linger on as stagnant pools left by once life-giving streams. 235 00:27:04.900 --> 00:27:09.900 Institutions, being ends in themselves, resist change and favor the status quo. 236 00:27:09.900 --> 00:27:17.900 Life, on the other hand, is change, is adaptation, creativity, novelty. 237 00:27:17.900 --> 00:27:27.900 The study of complexity, which has a great deal to inform us about turbulence, tells us that there is no determinism at work dictating how we shall respond to such turbulence. 238 00:27:27.900 --> 00:27:30.900 We do, however, seem to have two choices. 239 00:27:30.900 --> 00:27:42.900 One, to continue structuring practices that allow entropy to accumulate within the system, rather than fostering processes that enable entropy to work itself out of the system, as is the case in the marketplace. 240 00:27:42.900 --> 00:27:46.900 A strategy that will finally result in entropic collapse. 241 00:27:46.900 --> 00:27:52.080 There is a second choice, adopt more effective organizational systems premised upon an awareness 242 00:27:52.080 --> 00:27:54.860 of the fluctuating nature of order. 243 00:27:54.860 --> 00:28:01.180 In the words of Eric Jantz, this would involve the dismantling of social control hierarchies 244 00:28:01.180 --> 00:28:05.180 and strengthen autonomy of the subsystems. 245 00:28:05.180 --> 00:28:09.640 In words of particular interest to this audience, Jantz adds the premise of those interested 246 00:28:09.640 --> 00:28:13.920 in applying chaos concepts to social arrangements. 247 00:28:13.920 --> 00:28:18.860 The more freedom and self-organization, the more order. 248 00:28:18.860 --> 00:28:22.500 Terry Pratchett expressed the thought more succinctly. 249 00:28:22.500 --> 00:28:27.300 Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. 250 00:28:27.300 --> 00:28:36.740 Chaos always defeats order because it is better organized. 251 00:28:36.740 --> 00:28:42.740 If we wish to reinvigorate our devitalized and dehumanized civilization, why do we continue 252 00:28:42.740 --> 00:28:50.500 insisting upon the preservation of those structured systems that are bringing about the collapse of our once vibrant societies. 253 00:28:50.500 --> 00:28:56.900 The answer, I believe, lies in the fact that we've become attached to the institutional forms which, at one point in time, 254 00:28:56.900 --> 00:29:01.740 we regarded as little more than tools for the accomplishment of our purposes. 255 00:29:01.740 --> 00:29:07.060 The business system, with its varied corporate forms, was one such tool. 256 00:29:07.060 --> 00:29:16.060 We discovered that we could cooperate with one another by organizing ourselves into economic units by which goods and services could be produced and exchanged. 257 00:29:16.060 --> 00:29:24.060 This proved quite profitable to us, not simply in the conventional sense in which we measure success by a dollar surplusage of income over expenses, 258 00:29:24.060 --> 00:29:29.060 but by a sense that the overall quality of our lives was improving. 259 00:29:29.060 --> 00:29:36.060 Over time, the organizational systems we had founded came to take on purposes of their own, hence became institutions. 260 00:29:36.060 --> 00:29:47.060 And because we were deriving so much benefit from their operations, we allowed our thinking to imagine that our well-being was dependent upon the supremacy of their interests over our own. 261 00:29:47.060 --> 00:29:55.060 It should be apparent to any thoughtful person that it was our thinking and imagination that created the organizational tools. 262 00:29:55.060 --> 00:30:07.060 and that our well-being is found in our continuing energized awareness and not in the perpetuation of any organizational forms we might have created along the way. 263 00:30:07.060 --> 00:30:17.060 In such ways do we overlook the danger that lies hidden in all creative undertakings, the temptation to repeat our past successes. 264 00:30:17.060 --> 00:30:23.060 Our attachment to institutional systems is manifest in other areas of our social practices. 265 00:30:23.060 --> 00:30:29.060 Schools whose curricula have taken priority over the learning experiences of children. 266 00:30:29.060 --> 00:30:35.060 Churches whose insistence upon dogmas and rituals have long drowned out the inner voices seeking spiritual fulfillment. 267 00:30:35.060 --> 00:30:48.060 And what should be most obvious to everyone here, political systems which, while originally rationalized as systems for the protection of individual liberty and property interests, have become their own raison d'etre 268 00:30:48.060 --> 00:30:54.060 and routinely pillage, coerce and kill their alleged masters. 269 00:30:54.060 --> 00:31:04.060 The extent of attachment and dependency upon the state can be seen in the willingness of most of our neighbors to think of themselves more as Americans than as free individuals. 270 00:31:04.060 --> 00:31:14.060 If spiritual needs are central to our lives and if institutions dominate our lives, would not these entities find it in their interest to seek to satisfy these ends? 271 00:31:14.060 --> 00:31:17.060 Is this in fact not the role that churches play in our lives? 272 00:31:17.060 --> 00:31:24.060 At first glance, the answer might appear to be yes, but upon closer examination we discover that such is rarely the case. 273 00:31:24.060 --> 00:31:31.060 Churches institutionalize God and in so doing have discouraged us from seeking our own godliness. 274 00:31:31.060 --> 00:31:40.060 The inadequacy of institutions to satisfy our needs for transcendence is found in the fundamental distinction between individual and collective behavior. 275 00:31:40.060 --> 00:31:48.060 Spiritual expression, like other forms of emotional experiences, is peculiarly individualized in nature. 276 00:31:48.060 --> 00:31:57.060 For the same reason that only each separate person can satisfy hunger or thirst or feel fear, love or any form of excitement, 277 00:31:57.060 --> 00:32:02.060 only individuals can experience their inner being as connected with the rest of the universe. 278 00:32:02.060 --> 00:32:05.060 Passion is confined to individuals. 279 00:32:05.060 --> 00:32:20.060 Institutions are but abstractions, the creatures of human thought, but the currency of thought is other abstractions, words, and spirituality is wrapped up in experiences that transcend thought. 280 00:32:20.060 --> 00:32:33.060 Institutions function only through individuals, and individuals can supply such organizations with abstract, secondary expressions of inner experiences, but they can never move beyond words. 281 00:32:33.060 --> 00:32:45.060 Words. For words, as Alfred Gorszybski reminds us, are never the thing to which they refer. The map is not the territory. 282 00:32:45.060 --> 00:32:54.060 Relating all of this to political systems, a given state may, with the best of intentions, associate itself with the abstraction of liberty. 283 00:32:54.060 --> 00:33:02.060 Indeed, even the current Bush administration defends its repressive status policies as Operation Enduring Freedom. 284 00:33:02.060 --> 00:33:13.060 But the word liberty, being an abstraction, is always less than the experience of not having one's will violated with regard to one's person or property. 285 00:33:13.060 --> 00:33:24.060 Because liberty as a word is less than the experience of liberty, it must, within a legal and political context, always be subject to interpretation. 286 00:33:24.060 --> 00:33:34.060 The inner experiences that we associate with our spiritual needs do not translate into anything of value or even comprehension to institutions. 287 00:33:34.060 --> 00:33:43.060 This is why in an institutionalized world, whatever is non-material tends to be regarded as immaterial. 288 00:33:43.060 --> 00:33:47.060 How are we to reclaim the spiritual dimension of our nature? 289 00:33:47.060 --> 00:34:10.060 The answer to that question, I believe, lies in returning to the point at which we lost contact with this part of our lives, namely when we accepted the mind-body division of our nature and as a consequence became attached to and made ourselves dependent upon those institutional forms that promised us physical security in exchange for our subservience to their interests. 290 00:34:10.060 --> 00:34:16.060 What does it mean to restore our material and spiritual integrity by giving up our attachments to institutional systems? 291 00:34:16.060 --> 00:34:20.060 Are these just more abstract ideas of which to entertain ourselves? 292 00:34:20.060 --> 00:34:30.060 Well, to get some insight into an answer to this question, I want to revisit those hobgoblins of the Industrial Revolution, the Luddites. 293 00:34:30.060 --> 00:34:37.060 Because I've long defended the Industrial Revolution as perhaps the most humanizing period in human history, 294 00:34:37.060 --> 00:34:41.060 You may ask what possible message I could derive from the Luddites. 295 00:34:41.060 --> 00:34:50.060 The word itself conjures up images of collective ignorance, mob destructiveness, and the dangers of mass-mindedness. 296 00:34:50.060 --> 00:34:57.060 For the most part, the Luddite movement emerged from craftsmen whose economic interests were challenged by the emerging factory system, 297 00:34:57.060 --> 00:35:06.060 and whose machine-breaking responses derived from the same kind of anticompetitive sentiments that were to later fire the progressive and New Deal eras. 298 00:35:06.060 --> 00:35:10.060 Maybe they were the first anti-trust people, I don't know. 299 00:35:10.060 --> 00:35:17.060 So as to relieve any sense of anxiety, you may be feeling it even the suggestion that we revisit the Luddites. 300 00:35:17.060 --> 00:35:21.060 Let me assure you that I'm herewith making no defense of machine-breaking riots, 301 00:35:21.060 --> 00:35:26.060 nor am I embracing the neo-Luddite sentiments favoring the technological dismantling of modern society, 302 00:35:26.060 --> 00:35:31.060 a theme that runs through various writings today. 303 00:35:31.060 --> 00:35:37.060 I do believe, however, that the Luddites may have been about something more than the reactive destruction of machines. 304 00:35:37.060 --> 00:35:43.060 I suspect there was an awareness exhibited today by members of the Amish subculture 305 00:35:43.060 --> 00:35:49.060 that becoming dependent upon technological systems portended an eventual loss of our sense of humanity, 306 00:35:49.060 --> 00:35:54.060 a fear that society would quickly become dominated by a technical imperative 307 00:35:54.060 --> 00:35:59.800 in which everything, including human beings, would become little more than standardized, 308 00:35:59.800 --> 00:36:04.080 fungible institutional servomechanisms. 309 00:36:04.080 --> 00:36:09.200 The libertarian and anarchist traditions have at their very core an insistence upon supporting 310 00:36:09.200 --> 00:36:15.560 the individuality, the autonomy, and spontaneous nature of each human being, and to distrust 311 00:36:15.560 --> 00:36:33.640 Those who question the validity of these concerns might ask how and why a nation, so long steeped 312 00:36:33.640 --> 00:36:41.520 in the rhetoric of individual liberty, has so easily been turned into a mass-minded collective. 313 00:36:41.520 --> 00:36:45.640 The temptation of many who observe the dehumanizing nature of our modern world is to lash out 314 00:36:45.640 --> 00:36:49.480 at the technology that they perceive as the explanation. 315 00:36:49.480 --> 00:36:54.520 But to do so makes no more sense than attacking gun manufacturers or gun owners for the violence 316 00:36:54.520 --> 00:36:59.240 committed by those few who use guns as tools of destruction. 317 00:36:59.240 --> 00:37:04.320 I recall as a child at the end of World War II, hearing otherwise intelligent people arguing 318 00:37:04.320 --> 00:37:09.280 that dumping military weapons into the seas would end wars. 319 00:37:09.280 --> 00:37:13.920 Such thinking completes the vicious circle of mechanistic thinking. 320 00:37:13.920 --> 00:37:19.400 Humans become machine-like while machines take on the human attributes of will, directing 321 00:37:19.400 --> 00:37:20.400 our behavior. 322 00:37:20.400 --> 00:37:26.640 It is not technology that has turned human beings into dispirited mechanisms, but our 323 00:37:26.640 --> 00:37:32.120 willingness to think of our lives as dependent upon such technologies and attaching our sense 324 00:37:32.120 --> 00:37:37.780 of identity to the systems that produce and control such technologies. 325 00:37:37.780 --> 00:37:42.100 Those who reject technology outright make as big a mistake as those who allow themselves 326 00:37:42.100 --> 00:37:45.460 to become attached to technologies. 327 00:37:45.460 --> 00:37:49.140 Each dismisses an important aspect of our humanity. 328 00:37:49.140 --> 00:37:51.540 We are tourmakers. 329 00:37:51.540 --> 00:37:56.140 The machines that we create are expressions of our nature, extensions of the human life 330 00:37:56.140 --> 00:37:58.180 process. 331 00:37:58.180 --> 00:38:01.740 To think otherwise is to fragment ourselves. 332 00:38:01.740 --> 00:38:07.220 The industrial revolution, inventiveness, discoveries, the building of skyscrapers, 333 00:38:07.220 --> 00:38:13.220 The churches and other cathedrals have all been expressions of the human spirit. 334 00:38:13.220 --> 00:38:19.220 We should ask ourselves, what were the inner forces that drove Edison to continue inventing? 335 00:38:19.220 --> 00:38:26.220 Might it have been the same spiritual need that kept Van Gogh painting and Beethoven composing? 336 00:38:26.220 --> 00:38:35.220 But to attach ourselves to their created forms is to institutionalize and petrify the very spirit that created them. 337 00:38:35.220 --> 00:38:39.220 to worship the structure by dissipating the process. 338 00:38:39.220 --> 00:38:47.220 Furthermore, because we have created machines, they provide us an opportunity to discover a great deal about our sense of being. 339 00:38:47.220 --> 00:38:53.220 Have we projected onto their forms and systems a sense of how we think of ourselves? 340 00:38:53.220 --> 00:38:58.220 Are machines our cloned images in which we see our own reflections? 341 00:38:58.220 --> 00:39:03.220 How else do we explain the machine-like ways in which we think of ourselves? 342 00:39:03.220 --> 00:39:13.220 We speak of getting warmed up for work, or running out of gas, or being turned on or turned off by others. 343 00:39:13.220 --> 00:39:21.220 We imagine ourselves to be big wheels in life, or cogs in the machine, who may on occasion get our wires crossed. 344 00:39:21.220 --> 00:39:30.220 We suffer from burnout and let off steam so as not to blow a gasket or a fuse or become unhinged. 345 00:39:30.220 --> 00:39:40.220 We speak of having a screw loose, of going to pieces, and resort to drugs or alcohol in order to get fixed or to get in gear. 346 00:39:40.220 --> 00:39:53.220 We speak of ourselves as assets or resources to our workplace or community, and are more likely to regard our brain as computer-like than to think of computers as brain-like. 347 00:39:53.220 --> 00:40:01.220 Now those who don't understand the Amish often imagine that their resistance to new technology arises from a sense of evil in such tools. 348 00:40:01.220 --> 00:40:03.220 This is not the case. 349 00:40:03.220 --> 00:40:12.220 The Amish do employ tools, but if someone wants to consider bringing a new technology into the community, the Amish study it with this thought in mind. 350 00:40:12.220 --> 00:40:21.220 Will acceptance of this technology make us dependent upon the external world, such that we will be tempted to change our ways? 351 00:40:21.220 --> 00:40:25.220 What if you and I began thinking this way? 352 00:40:25.220 --> 00:40:29.220 Can our work become what farming or carpentry are to the Amish? 353 00:40:29.220 --> 00:40:37.220 Or what architecture was to Frank Lloyd Wright, namely expressions of our inner spirit in the material world? 354 00:40:37.220 --> 00:40:42.220 Rather than seeking employment primarily by the standard of how well the job pays, 355 00:40:42.220 --> 00:40:49.220 can we discover a kind of work that is so inwardly rewarding that we would pay someone to let us do it 356 00:40:49.220 --> 00:41:04.220 I assume that most of us in this room have developed a strong dependency on computers, a tool that has managed to insinuate itself into our lives in recent years. 357 00:41:04.220 --> 00:41:09.220 How many intrusions and restrictions in our lives have we begun to accept? 358 00:41:09.220 --> 00:41:17.220 For example, government surveillance of our email and internet website visits, rather than give up the convenience of our computers. 359 00:41:17.220 --> 00:41:22.220 What if state or federal governments were to announce significantly greater inroads on our liberties? 360 00:41:22.220 --> 00:41:30.220 Proposals I hate to offer, even as hypotheticals, given the present propensity to elaborate upon any form of restriction in our modern world, 361 00:41:30.220 --> 00:41:35.220 has a price to pay for our being entitled to continue enjoying this technology. 362 00:41:35.220 --> 00:41:45.220 How many of us, even in this room, could be prepared to walk away from these machines and return to pen and ink and Xerox machines? 363 00:41:45.220 --> 00:42:05.220 Perhaps the Ledites, whose fears were machine-centered, have less to offer us in our search for the reclamation of our souls than to another group long revered by my Irish ancestors and perhaps for such genetic reasons by myself, the Leprechauns. 364 00:42:05.220 --> 00:42:12.220 For those of you whose upbringing has been so destitute that you cannot even imagine the existence of these wondrous beings, 365 00:42:12.220 --> 00:42:19.220 and for those of you who long ago gave up your childlike assurances of the enchanted nature of the world in which you live, 366 00:42:19.220 --> 00:42:22.220 let me introduce you to the leprechauns. 367 00:42:22.220 --> 00:42:29.220 According to Irish folklore, which by the way is the only publication of record acknowledged by these beings, 368 00:42:29.220 --> 00:42:37.720 The Leprechauns were very industrious souls who placed great value on two factors in their lives. 369 00:42:37.720 --> 00:42:40.720 Number one, their accumulated gold. 370 00:42:40.720 --> 00:42:44.220 Number two, their individual liberty. 371 00:42:44.220 --> 00:42:47.720 No sackcloth aesthetic they. 372 00:42:47.720 --> 00:42:52.720 The Leprechauns loved their material wealth and would do just about anything to keep it. 373 00:42:52.720 --> 00:42:58.220 If you managed to steal any of their gold, there would be hell to pay in their efforts to get it back. 374 00:42:58.220 --> 00:43:08.220 Many a tale has been told of these mysterious folk hiding in bushes and watching with both sadness and anger as thieves stole their hidden treasure. 375 00:43:08.220 --> 00:43:18.220 They nevertheless would not reveal themselves, for the one thing they would never risk in trying to protect their gold was their liberty. 376 00:43:18.220 --> 00:43:26.220 If we are to end this material and spiritual divisions in our thinking and learn to live with a sense of wholeness that most of our lives lack, 377 00:43:26.220 --> 00:43:36.320 Can we learn from the Amish, or better yet, the Leprechauns, how to value our material tools and other possessions without becoming attached to them? 378 00:43:36.320 --> 00:43:48.020 Can we understand that the greatest threat to our individual liberty has always been found in our willingness to value anything beyond ourselves more highly than we do our own sense of being? 379 00:43:48.020 --> 00:43:57.660 Can we end the practice of progressively lowering the price of our liberty as we negotiate for the preservation of our attachments? 380 00:43:57.660 --> 00:44:03.300 Our well-organized world has become less and less relevant to the inner lives of most men and women. 381 00:44:03.300 --> 00:44:13.420 Those of us who have a passion for individual liberty have a wonderful opportunity to address these unfulfilled needs in ways that no others of whom I am aware have managed to do. 382 00:44:13.420 --> 00:44:17.980 This is a great opportunity for people of our thinking. 383 00:44:17.980 --> 00:44:23.360 When millions of human beings throughout the world come together in demonstrations to protest 384 00:44:23.360 --> 00:44:29.260 a war even before it's begun, you can be assured that the human spirit remains alive beneath 385 00:44:29.260 --> 00:44:35.600 the surface of events in our lives, that the inner voices that define the essence of humanity 386 00:44:35.600 --> 00:44:41.960 have not been fully ground down by the dehumanizing machinery of state power. 387 00:44:41.960 --> 00:44:47.380 But to communicate with others as to these concerns requires a totally new perspective. 388 00:44:47.380 --> 00:44:52.800 How we view economic systems or law or the study of history is a subset of the question 389 00:44:52.800 --> 00:44:55.620 of how we view individual liberty. 390 00:44:55.620 --> 00:44:59.560 And whether we value individual liberty or not is a subset of our attitudes about the 391 00:44:59.560 --> 00:45:02.800 sanctity of life itself. 392 00:45:02.800 --> 00:45:07.660 As a consequence, if we are to understand economics, law, history, or any other area 393 00:45:07.660 --> 00:45:13.660 of human behavior with wholeness and integrity, we must learn to incorporate a spiritual awareness 394 00:45:13.660 --> 00:45:16.260 into our analyses. 395 00:45:16.260 --> 00:45:20.900 We must, in other words, abandon our fragmentary and divisive approaches to understanding the 396 00:45:20.900 --> 00:45:23.380 human condition. 397 00:45:23.380 --> 00:45:29.060 We must learn a new language, one that can translate our inner voices into our conversations 398 00:45:29.060 --> 00:45:32.300 with the outer world. 399 00:45:32.300 --> 00:45:37.100 We have figured out how best to provide for the satisfaction of our material needs. 400 00:45:37.100 --> 00:45:41.840 Those at this conference understand the importance of reclaiming control over our lives, property 401 00:45:41.840 --> 00:45:44.480 and transactions with others. 402 00:45:44.480 --> 00:45:50.220 We now need to focus on the question, why is it important to do so? 403 00:45:50.220 --> 00:45:55.860 Do we understand the significance of reclaiming the spiritual dimensions of our humanness? 404 00:45:55.860 --> 00:46:01.620 Can we learn to calculate all these factors into our thoughts and actions? 405 00:46:01.620 --> 00:46:06.300 Once we ask such questions with regularity, we may look to the day when the human spirit 406 00:46:06.300 --> 00:46:10.700 walks away from its self-imposed bondage. 407 00:46:10.700 --> 00:46:16.380 In that day, men and women may discover that death in service to the state is not heroic, 408 00:46:16.380 --> 00:46:21.660 that obedience to power does not confer meaning upon one's life, and that a lengthened leg 409 00:46:21.660 --> 00:46:26.420 chain is not to be confused with liberty. 410 00:46:26.420 --> 00:46:32.420 We must begin with the awareness that abstractions, such as institutions, are spiritless, sterile 411 00:46:32.420 --> 00:46:38.740 entities, able to pursue their ends only through the actions of individuals who identify themselves 412 00:46:38.740 --> 00:46:46.820 with Institutional Purposes and that the interests of humanity transcend such artificial forms. 413 00:46:46.820 --> 00:46:55.180 Only individuals suffer pain, dream, experience love and joy, and eventually die. 414 00:46:55.180 --> 00:47:00.820 Only individuals make value judgments and act in furtherance of such values. 415 00:47:00.820 --> 00:47:05.740 Only individuals transport through DNA the future of mankind from one generation to the 416 00:47:05.740 --> 00:47:08.100 next. 417 00:47:08.100 --> 00:47:14.060 Each of us is biologically and experientially unique, and liberty is the only condition 418 00:47:14.060 --> 00:47:17.440 in which we can express our uniqueness. 419 00:47:17.440 --> 00:47:21.680 If we are to discover our connectedness with the world, we must understand that what we 420 00:47:21.680 --> 00:47:26.860 have in common with one another is the need to protect the conditions in which the liberty 421 00:47:26.860 --> 00:47:30.340 of each of us can be exercised. 422 00:47:30.340 --> 00:47:36.860 Only as we learn to respect the inviolability of each individual can mankind hope to survive. 423 00:47:36.860 --> 00:47:44.420 You and I are mankind, its present and its future. 424 00:47:44.420 --> 00:47:50.120 We must then declare to ourselves, as well as to our neighbors, that mankind, integrated 425 00:47:50.120 --> 00:47:55.940 in both body and spirit, will not only survive, but will prosper in this world. 426 00:47:55.940 --> 00:48:02.460 That life belongs to the living, not to abstract collectives, regardless of their exalted trappings 427 00:48:02.460 --> 00:48:07.060 of the Duration of Their Tenure Over the Minds of Men and Women. 428 00:48:07.060 --> 00:48:11.720 We must further declare that the spirit of mankind is going to survive on this planet 429 00:48:11.720 --> 00:48:17.660 in the only place where it can ever be found, namely in the autonomous and spontaneous expressions 430 00:48:17.660 --> 00:48:18.660 of individuals. 431 00:48:18.660 --> 00:48:26.300 It is time for those who believe otherwise to stand aside as we support one another in 432 00:48:26.300 --> 00:48:28.380 the effort to reclaim our souls. 433 00:48:29.380 --> 00:48:31.380 Thank you very much.