Today's revolution. At the present moment in time, there are actually two major revolutions
in progress. One is the real revolution. The other has many of the attributes of revolution,
but in point of fact, it isn't really a revolution, if we understand the meaning of the term.
I would like to begin by drawing your attention to a book written by Rose Wilder Lane entitled
The Discovery of Freedom, and I would like to read a few paragraphs from this work. I
quote,
When men try to make energy work, and it does not work, it fails to work because they are
not using that energy in accordance with its own nature. A gasoline engine will never run
on Water because it is not the nature of steam to explode when a spark touches it. When,
for 6,000 years, human energy does not work well enough to get from this earth enough
food to keep human beings alive, it does not work because men are not using their energy
in accordance with the nature of human energy. Every human being, by his nature, is free.
That is to say, he controls himself. But in the old world men believe that some authority
outside himself controls him. Now they cannot make their energy work by any such belief
because the belief is false. But they do not question the belief because when they submit
to a living authority's control and cannot get food, they can always blame the authority
and that gives them an alibi. This is what they have always done. The history of every
group of men who ever obeyed a living authority is a history of revolts against all forms
of that authority. Look at any available record of any people living anywhere at any time
in the whole history of the world. They revolt against their king and replace him by another
King. Then they revolt against him and set up still another king. In time, they revolt
against monarchy and set up another kind of living authority. For generations or centuries,
they revolt and change their rulers. Then they revolt against that kind of authority
and set up another kind.
From Nebuchadnezzar to Hitler, history is one long record of revolts, first against
When these revolts succeed, they are called revolutions. But they are revolutions only
in the sense that a wheel's turning is a revolution. This is an old world revolution,
and it is only a movement around a motionless center. It never breaks out of the circle.
Firm in the center is belief in external authority of some kind. They replace the priest by a
king, the king by an oligarchy, the oligarchs by a despot, the despot by an aristocracy,
the aristocrats by a majority, the majority by a tyrant, the tyrant by oligarchs, the
oligarchs by aristocrats, the aristocrats by a king, the king by a parliament, the parliament
by a Dictator, the Dictator by a King, the King by... There is 6,000 years of that in
every language. Every imaginable kind of living authority has been tried and is still being
tried somewhere on earth now. All these kinds have been tried too in every possible combination.
The priest and the king, the king who is the priest, the king who is God, the king and
a Senate, the king and the Senate and a majority, the Senate and a tyrant, the tyrant and the
The aristocrats, a king and a parliament, try to think of a combination. Somewhere it
has been tried. In 1920, the Albanians tried four quarter kings and aristocrats and a parliament
all at the same time. The Bedouin of Iraq used to combine a tyrant with a majority.
The emir had absolute power of life and death. He owned all the property, dictated all the
marriages, made all the treaties and raids and wars. If he made one decision that the
The tribe did not approve. His subjects killed him and gave another man the job. This works
all right, too, except the bedouin do not get enough to eat. Each of these kinds of
living authority and every one of the combinations has worked all right, except that the subjects
never do get enough to eat. That's the end of the quotation from Discovery of Freedom.
Let me go back over some of the important points that Mrs. Lane has brought out. First,
she points out that what we call revolutions are in point of fact not real revolutions.
They are simply revolutions in the sense that a wheel's turning is a revolution. Because
revolutions, as we have thought of them in the past, and as some of them are occurring
today are no more than a turning around a firm center in which is embedded the notion
that some external authority has to govern human beings.
The only real revolution that ever began to occur occurred in this country in 1775 with
The American Revolution, which at least as it was conducted at the outset, was a revolt
against authority per se. As it was put together, the original purpose was not to create a new
government but simply to get out from under the old, not to overthrow the old, to leave
that available for those who wanted it, but simply to get out from under so that men could
would be free and that was done with the knowledge and belief that each human being had certain
unalienable rights and that every human being had the same rights and therefore no human
being possibly could obtain to some kind of a rightful control of a second party without
that second party's consent.
Now that is a real revolution and that revolution is the real revolution that is continuing
in the face of any number of revolutionary appearing movements which are merely struggles
for power and replace in a sense the violence of a ballot conducted election with the violence
of a bullet conducted election. Today there are any number of groups which are violence
is prone. Some of them are in power, and some of them seek power. But these are not revolutionary
parties. Many people suppose that the communist movement is a revolutionary movement. It is
really not. It is as old as the hills. It is merely a struggle for power, a struggle
to take power away from those who have it and put it into the hands of those who do
do not have it. In that sense, it is just a turning of the wheel around a motionless
center, firm in the center is the belief that somebody has to run other people. Whether
it is going to be a group of people who represent the proletariat, so-called, or whether it
is to be a group of people who represent the bourgeoisie, so-called, or whether it is to
to be a group of people who attempt or try or possibly, in a sense, maybe even succeed
in part to represent both sides, the fact remains that this is a denial of the nature
of man. By man's nature, each one of us controls himself. That is a fact. It is a fact of nature.
True, we can influence others, we can frighten others, we can in fact kill others if we want to, but there is no way that we can control another.
The only energy that will cause you to flex your fingers or raise your arm is yours, and the only decision that will cause that to happen is your decision.
Of course, others may impose on you to get you to make that decision to conduct those
movements.
But in the end, the ultimate decision is yours.
And the way that you behave is the result of your own judgment because that is the way
nature has arranged it.
Each human being, in fact, controls himself.
Now the real revolution is the revolution that proposes to set the world into a condition
where that fact is recognized on as broad a front as possible. It is not presumed that
it is possible to teach everyone that fact even though it is a fact. At no time in the
and the History of the World have human beings ever agreed on anything. Even the shape of
the globe is still subject to dispute. We in the Western world generally agree that
the world is an orb, a sphere. But there is still a group of people in London who have
a flat earth society and who believe that all of the arguments relating to the shape
of the Earth as being spheroid are false and nothing but propaganda. They are entitled to
their belief. Anyone who wishes to believe whatever he wishes to believe is of course
entitled to believe it. The fact is, of course, that we have never agreed on anything and
therefore to expect that humankind will agree that each one of us is in fact in control
is, in fact, in charge of his own energy. Whether he controls his energy wisely or foolishly,
whether he does it courageously or in fear, these are factors relating to his environment,
to his conditioning, and to his general outlook. But the fact is that he and only he can control
Now that is the point. The real revolution is aimed at extending the American Revolution of 1775 into the future wherein we generally recognize that each man has a right to pursue his own destiny, to own his own property, to consider his own person as sacred, and to treat others in like manner.
Honor. Now that is the revolution. It is not a revolution that seeks power. On the
contrary, instead of seeking a power shift, it seeks constantly to diminish the accumulations
of power, even at those points where it detects accumulations of power being used theoretically
for good purposes. Put quotes around good purposes whenever you think of power being
are being used because the individual who is concerned with the true revolution recognizes that all power is rationalized.
Everyone who uses it always does so because he has what to him appears to be a good purpose.
Let me take a few of the wielders of power today.
There are, of course, in this country, two major political powers.
They are the Democratic and the Republican Party.
They are very large and they wield an enormous amount of power
in terms of their ability to control governmental agencies
or the administration itself wherein their ideas are imposed upon everyone else by force and violence.
Keep in mind that that is the whole function of government.
Its function is to arrive at a monopoly of power held by a limited number of people who
will impose that power on everyone else.
So your major holders of power today are those who legally hold it, those within legally
recognized and accepted organizations called political parties who manipulate the public
Mind through Propaganda, Speeches and Oratory into believing that if you grant one particular
group power rather than the other, everything is going to be fine for you. In point of fact,
the American public is beginning finally to be disillusioned in this area. We now detect
after long experimentation in this area that in point of fact, the differences that arise
Studies as a result of an election are academic in character. There are differences, of course.
They are differences in degree. But overall, the concept remains the central idea that
someone other than you has to make the meaningful decisions about what you do. And that is false.
That is contrary to the nature of life and to the nature of man as they are. In addition
to the legally entrenched political groups. There are some that are operating extra-legally.
I will mention just a few of them. By no means am I meaning to exclude others. For example,
one of the groups that is operating extra-legally today is the Mafia or the syndicates. Here
we have a group of men who operate not only in defiance of the law, but it has been fairly
The Theory of Money and Credit
People are fundamentally in what could be called the protection rackets. In essence,
if you analyze it, the mafia, the syndicates and organized gangsterism per se is doing
illegally precisely what the government is doing legally. The difference is the legality,
the legal sanction that is given to one body and not to the other. Aside from that, they
They are both in the game of protection. They are selling what purports to be protection,
and they sell it at monopolistic prices and enforce their collections. Now that is essentially
what they are. We simply have various gangs here, some of them who are legally sanctioned
and some who are not engaged in what is essentially the same business.
May I point out for emphasis that the legally sanctioned groups, to wit the political parties,
operate precisely the same way the syndicates and the mafia do. To wit, they create artificial
scarcities by passing laws which move into the economy and prevent people from producing
certain goods, prevent other people from trading with other people, and do other things of
a sanctioned nature which prevent a laissez-faire economy and militate against the idea of free
free trade and free exchange on the basis of individual desire.
So there is no real difference between the mafia and the people in political office except
the difference of legal sanction. And what we as the general public seem to do is that
we prefer, as Shakespeare said, to accept those dangers that we have rather than to
to fly to others that we know not of, and so we look with fear and apprehension upon
the syndicate and the mafia, which indeed we should. They are illegal, they are gangsters,
and they employ violence, but curiously we look with joy and with hope on the other gangsters
simply because they are legally entrenched, and we sanction them although their behavior
is the same.
Now moving still further out of the area of what is sanctioned and what is not, you have
a group of people who are seeking to take over the government. They are not truly revolutionaries.
They are simply engaged in trying to conduct violent elections. Possibly the most formidable
of this group would be the blacks, and notably the Black Panthers and other black militant
Organizations which are doing their best now to gain power. This is a false revolution,
because if they gain power, they would do precisely the same that the people in power
are presently doing. There is no progress here. There is no real revolution. It is only
again the turning of the wheel. Firm in the center is reliance upon the idea that somebody
has got to have power over other people. Now, the blacks justify their action here on the
grounds that they have been mistreated in the past. There is no question of that fact.
They have been grossly mistreated and abused in the past, an abuse and mistreatment and
prejudice that continues up to the present time. However, the same thing can be true
and the same thing can be said of every other group that ever existed and exists now.
All of us have been abused and mistreated in the past by various groups that are organized
to impose their wills upon us.
Perhaps the blacks form an outstanding and a very sensitive case, but others also are
in much the same category.
There was a time when we treated the Chinese the same way.
There was a time when we treated the Irish this way.
There was a time when we treated the Japanese this way. There was a time when we treated
the Germans this way. There was a time, and there may be a time again, when we feel this
way about the British, the French, the Yugoslavians, or the Abyssinians. It doesn't make any difference.
It is possible to engender prejudice and antagonism against any group. I recall that these same
things have been done against Jews, against Catholics, against Protestants, against Muslims,
Against Hindus, Against Buddhists. We can always organize hatred and prejudice against
some group and then mistreat them. And when we do, we awaken in them the desire to organize
with force and to gain power so that they can get their own back. And that's essentially
what you have here. The black movement, the black militant movement, is essentially aimed
Let's take another group, the KKK, the Ku Klux Klan. Here we have another group of militants
moving in exactly the other way. Here we have a group of militants who believe that the entrenched
holders of legalized power have never been severe enough, nor Christian enough, nor dogmatic
Take-Enough in order to obtain the kind of a society that the people who belong to the
KKK would like to see.
And therefore, they propose and often have taken power into their own hands to punish
individuals whom they felt were wrong, and here we have a case again of organized vengeance
conducted sometimes against a race or sometimes simply against individuals who in the minds
The weathermen, the splinter faction of the SDS that broke away only recently and attempts
here to in a sense carry on the same type of revolution that was called for by Karl Marx.
The Weatherman faction is essentially socialistic, if not communistic, and its whole aim is to
seize power in order that the economy can be revised in terms of a different plan of
distribution than a free market would make possible. That's essentially what it is.
about the government, the government has now stamped them out. I believe their leader has
been arrested. But in any case, the leaders of the Black Panthers have been arrested too.
So it doesn't really mean too much here. The Minutemen were simply organized along the
line of counteracting people such as the Weathermen. And here again, the Minutemen would believe
that the legalized and entrenched agencies of power have not done the job, that they
are, quote, soft on communism, unquote. And therefore, the minutemen propose to take power
into their hands in order to have their will enforced upon the masses of people. And so
So it goes. We have these pseudo-revolutionary forces who in point of fact are merely reactionary
forces. They are simply engaged in conducting violent elections because they don't believe
that a ballot-controlled election would get them anywhere. There aren't enough of them.
On any kind of nose-counting that you care to conduct, none of the groups that I've mentioned
could possibly win an election, and therefore, since they despair of winning an election,
winning a majority count, they simply resort to violence in order to obtain a monopoly
of power over the total society.
Now there are other splinter factions further down the line that are not as firmly entrenched
in power-seeking illegally, but nonetheless they do propose to seek power, and they propose
Here we have people who, as males, they tend to fall in love with other males, or as females,
they tend to fall in love with other females.
One of the interesting things, and in fact almost humorous things, is the current movement
just at this time where some of them are seeking, they say, to take over one of the counties
in California.
It happens to be a county with a very sparse population, and they propose to move into
to it in sufficient numbers so that there will be more members of their front there
than the existing numbers of persons in that county, at which point, operating within the
system and entirely legal, they would propose to elect themselves to public office and to
take over and run the county in their own favor. Of course, the existing residents of
the county are up in arms about it, and yet from the standpoint of legality, the Gay Liberation
is operating quite legally, according to the system and according to the guidelines set up, and the affair, I suspect, is largely a come-on, I think, or a put-on.
I think what they're attempting to do is merely to dramatize the nature of the system itself, wherein this could be done by anyone.
Any group of people who wanted to move into a sparsely settled place could do so, and ultimately take over.
Then there is, of course, the Women's Liberation Front. Here we have a group of rather militant
women. They are not trying to overturn anything, excepting laws that tend to give males advantage
over them, or possibly even laws that give them advantage over males. But they are operating
not to obtain total power, but to obtain reform through the use of power within the system.
Their group would be the John Birch Society aimed similarly, that is, they are seeking
essentially to have laws enacted to operate within the system and to retain the system,
but fundamentally to do it by obtaining power that will be used as they wish it. Along with
this would be the SDS generally and other various splinter groups.
Today there is a repolarization of thought. And again, let me stress, there really is
is just one revolution. And that is the real revolution, the revolution that proposes not
to switch power and move it from one group into another, but it proposes to diminish
the centers of power so that men can be free as individuals. Thank you.