Molestation and Its Relationship to Sacrifice
The question of sacrifice and self-sacrifice is a very interesting one.
As I view the nature of man, it seems to me that many times human beings have been engaged in actions which demand the sacrifice of other people.
We are constantly engaged in erecting a value system of our own, which we then seek to impose on others of our kind.
And in so doing, we violate their particular value mechanism and we, in essence, sacrifice their values to ours.
Or, another way of putting it would be to say that we sacrifice their wills to our will.
That would be a sacrifice.
But I'm often asked about this question of self-sacrifice and I'd like to deal with that right now.
I will contend that there is no such thing. Not really.
A person who says that he is practicing self-sacrifice is actually engaged in massaging his own ego.
Very definitely. He is seeking, probably, to let you know how important he is and what a great person he is, that he is willing to do certain things that are very difficult and that are obviously costing him a great deal, and he is simply wallowing in self-approval.
He's not engaged in a self-sacrificial action.
He is simply engaged in an ego elevating procedure.
And this is what happens, I think, in that area.
Let me give you an example of what I mean and how this relates to the general manner
in which human beings conduct themselves.
Let me take an illustration.
Here we have a man walking over a bridge that spans a stream.
This man can't swim.
He looks over the rail, and there's a child thrashing about in the water, and the child
screams, help, I'm drowning.
As I've said, the man on the bridge can't swim.
And he sees the child about to drown.
Now what does he do?
Well I don't know what he will do, but let me suppose that even though he cannot swim,
he now throws off his coat, kicks off his shoes, and goes over the rail in an effort
to save the child.
Is that an act of self-sacrifice? No. The man is actually engaged in fulfilling his highest
value at that time as he sees it. Granted, he can't swim. But what he is doing is this.
In essence, all of these things have flashed through his mind. He is saying, I've got to
try to prevent loss. In this case, the loss of the child. Why? Because he feels that he
would have a guilty conscience if he didn't at least make an effort to try to save the child.
Or he also would say, there's a gain to be had here, if by some fluke I can manage to save that
child, what a marvelous plus factor. Actually he sees both of these as plus factors. Now as far as
winning approval of others is concerned, what a marvelous way to win the applause of multitudes.
Here is a man who admittedly can't swim, who jumps in risking his own life and saves the child, maybe.
Whoa, he could expect a good round of applause.
And what about the idea of pleasing himself, of self-approval?
No man would ever try more diligently to win self-approval than the man who couldn't swim,
who would try to do it to save someone's life.
This man is simply wallowing in self-esteem.
And if you talk to him, he will tell you that he is willing to sacrifice everything he has
for someone else.
He is not sacrificing a thing.
He is fulfilling his highest value and taking fantastic pleasure and profit in so doing.
Now let me take that same illustration and reverse it.
Here we have a man walking across the bridge and he also cannot swim.
And here we have the child in the same perilous condition, screaming, help, I'm drowning.
And this man looks over the rail and says, sorry, kid, I can't swim.
And he walks off and goes on his own way.
Now what is he doing?
Well the curious thing is, he's doing the same thing in relation to the drives.
In other words, he is saying to himself, I've got to prevent a loss and the most important
person not to lose is me.
So I'm just not going to run the risk.
And he goes on his way to prevent that kind of loss.
How about the gain aspect?
Well, he says, it's certainly a gain if I don't risk my life for the kid.
Besides, if I jumped over, I'd probably help to drown him.
Maybe the kid can make it without my help.
I don't know that.
But I do know that I can't swim.
So this man is engaged in rationalizing his action in precisely the opposite way as the
Now, this second man isn't going to anticipate that there's going to be a big crowd of people
applauding his action, because we tend not to applaud that type of action.
But what this second man is saying to himself is this.
I think that those people who understand, that is, the real intellectuals, the people
that I value, the people that I associate with, when I tell them what I did here, they
will pat me on the back and say, man, that took courage.
You waited correctly and you behaved correctly in spite of popular pressure, which would
have told you that you should lay yourself down as a possible sacrifice for the child.
So he will take pleasure here in knowing or believing that other people will applaud his
action even though it will be a different group of people who applaud.
And in the final analysis he will say, well, this means self-approval.
So here we have a case of two men faced with exactly identical situations, behaving in
opposite ways but motivated by the same fundamental drives.
This is why I think we can correctly say that the drives that we have that lead us and cause
us to act as we do are fundamentally inherent, and they are not really the result of individual
procedures.
And all of this ties to this question of molestation and sacrifice and self-sacrifice.
Thus, I would like to establish that, as I see the nature of man, self-sacrifice is impossible.
It just doesn't happen.
But sacrifice can happen, and it happens at those points where an individual inflicts his
will on another.
Thus, for instance, the man who decides to walk off and leave the child drowning has
has not hurt the child. He did not inflict his will on the child. He just didn't help
the child. He is not guilty of any action against the child. He is just not a cooperator
in helping to save the child. Now, if the man had jumped in and in process had helped
to drown the child, then he would have inflicted something on the child and the child would
would have been his victim and would have been molested by him, even though the man
was trying to help him.
Of course, if there was another man who had thrown the child in in the first place, that
man would have been a prime child molester and we obviously wouldn't waste much sympathy
on him.
But the fact would be that an act of molestation would be an act of imposed sacrifice on someone
Thus if, and this will be a very difficult point I think for some to grasp, if we are
talking in terms of a person wanting to kill himself and we prevent him from killing himself,
the act of preventing a person from taking his own life would be an act of molestation.
Whereas if a person does not want to kill himself but is killed by another, then that
is an act of molestation.
In other words, molestation, as I am trying to set it up here in this framework of reference
to sacrifice, would be an action wherein the will of a person is violated by the imposition
of another party's will, irrespective of the action taken. An action that might be beneficial,
but that is imposed, is molestation. In other words, if I came to you and I said, here is
a hundred dollars and I insist that you accept it, and you didn't want it, but I did insist,
Say at the point of a gun that you take that $100, that's molestation, even though you
might very well benefit by having the $100.
And of course if I came at you with a gun and took away five cents, that too is an act
of molestation.
It isn't the action itself, it is the imposition of the will of someone else over your will
that causes you to be molested, victimized, and hence a human sacrifice.
Now, the thing that we're primarily concerned with here is trying to devise a system for
human living that will avoid human sacrifice.
And in order to try to avoid human sacrifice, we have to recognize the supreme importance
of the human will.
We must recognize that the human will is the man's most basic property, it's his most
basic individualistic item, and he must be left free to exercise it in his own way, providing
only that he molest no one else in so doing.
In other words, the wisdom of the man in exercising his own will may not be thrown into the equation
here to weigh what is right or wrong.
Instead, the question that must be faced constantly is the question of who is deciding what a
particular will will do.
Is it the man himself or is it somebody else imposing on him?
Whether the imposition is good or bad is meaningless in this context.
What is important is who is running you, you or me, and that's what we mean here.
Often we are asked, what do you believe?
Do you think man is basically good or basically evil?
And I would have to reply that man is neither basically good nor evil.
Man is basically egocentric.
He is self-oriented and self-interested and he is basically seeking the good for himself.
Even when he thinks he's not, that's really what he's doing.
He is engaged in seeking good for himself.
He is not seeking evil.
Now, if men, of course, were basically good, well then, of course, there would be no requirement
at any time for some control to be put on top of them because they would be so basically
good that no external control could even be dreamed of and we could forget it.
Of course, on the other hand, if men are basically evil, then we couldn't afford to have a control
put on top of them because that would be a control containing power and force in the
hands of men who are basically evil.
And if men are basically evil, then you couldn't afford to have such men with power.
If men are basically evil, the less power they have, the better.
So we have a problem here if we are talking about a species that is either basically good
or basically evil.
Actually, that's not the case.
Man is basically a seeker of the good.
He is a prophet seeker.
That is to say, he seeks what I have called plus factors in all his actions and he seeks
to maximize his own well-being by whatever it is that he does.
So that is really the nature of man as I see him in this connection.
Now in order to understand this more fully, I'm going to a little later on get into the
property area and discuss it at length.
But I want to right now stay a little further with this molestation area because I want
I want to introduce this to the level of morality and what I mean here about creating a social
order or a system that does not require some imposed force upon anyone.
This is what I think we want to aim toward because of the obvious fact that if the analysis
The exercise used here is a proper one and has any validity.
It follows that no man is going to approve of his own molestation.
Every human being will want to fulfill his own will in the matter, and providing he limits
the exercise of his will to himself and to those things that are his, then there is no
No way that by doing that he could impose on anyone else.
And therefore it would be a very good system, if we could devise it, wherein individuals
would manage their own affairs and their own lives, providing they didn't have someone
else being imposed on them from above, taking away their opportunity to do what they want
to with themselves and with what is theirs.
So that's what we want to think about.
We want to think about a way of doing this that would be successful and meaningful that
would tend to minimize or even hopefully eliminate acts of imposed sacrifice.
You see, self-sacrifice I have ruled out by definition.
So sacrifice exists and what we want to do is to create a social system wherein human
Human Sacrifice Disappears, where nobody is going to sacrifice anybody else ever for
any reason.
Now that of course would be, this is certainly utopian, it sounds like pie in the sky, but
I'm not so sure that it's impractical for the reason that every time we have a case
In the face of molestation, we have what we want to call aggression, that is, the person
who is molested feels himself to be victimized, he feels himself to be the victim of an act
of aggression.
Now, I know of no scholar who differs on this.
Everyone agrees here that the natural result of an act of aggression is frustration.
Every person who experiences aggression is frustrated.
The reason he's frustrated is because someone else is deciding what he will do and his own
will has been thwarted.
So he's frustrated.
Now what does he do as a result of his frustration?
The evidence is overwhelming.
He commits aggression.
You have a kind of interplay here, an interrelationship, an endless circle.
The person who is aggressed against is frustrated and because of his frustration, he will aggress
somewhere else.
Now, interestingly, we don't necessarily aggress against the person or the organization
or whatever it was that we think aggressed us.
He'll aggress on something else that's handy. A man will go to work and the boss will growl
at him, and he can't growl back to the boss. So he'll be angry, he'll have a good head
of steam, he'll get in his car, and he'll drive around a corner too fast and splash
mud on somebody. Well, that's to commit an act of aggression. He didn't really mean to
to Hurt the Party but he just wasn't taking the proper precautions and so he commits an
act there that relieves him of his frustration.
Well what happens to the party getting splashed?
Well he's frustrated and so then he goes and balls out his wife.
Well his wife didn't do anything to him but somebody else did so he passes it on to her.
If she's not there he kicks his dog, he does something, he takes it out because he's got
to relieve his frustrations, or he's going to become repressed and possibly he can become
a mental case unless he does get rid of his frustrations, all right?
Then would it be so impractical to try to construct a system which would begin reducing
the element of aggression and the consequent element of frustration?
It seems to me that this would be a very practical thing.
Because the more we can eliminate the one, the more we would tend to eliminate its reaction.
And the consequence would be then, with the passing of time, the level of aggression and
frustration would both begin to diminish and this would tend to maximize human well-being.
That's what we want.
So once we recognize that the source of all frustration is just one thing, it is the violation
of Your Will, where you want to do something that's perfectly proper with yourself or
with something that belongs to you, and for some reason you are prevented by another will
that takes precedence over your own.
Now that's where frustration arises.
That's an act of aggression, or if you like, it's an act of sacrifice.
You have been sacrificed, or your values have been sacrificed, to somebody else's values.
And when this happens, you resent it. You may not do anything about it at the time,
but you have a frustration. One frustration adds to another. These things build up and
pretty soon you blow your top. Now this happens socially, between individuals. It happens
between groups. It happens between nations. This is the fundamental source of war and
disorder in our whole human arrangement. So obviously if we can get to the cause of
Now, when I talk in terms of a moral arrangement, I want to make one thing clear here.
In speaking of morals, most people use the term morals and ethics interchangeably, and
I propose to make a separation.
I'm going to refer to morals as that area of thought dealing with objective reality.
In other words, I'm going to contend that moral law, if it exists at all, would have
to exist at the level of principle.
It would be a derivative of nature, that is a derivative of things as they are, and it
It would not be the product of the human value system, whereas I will use the word ethics
to relate to the product of the human value system.
Ethics is the study of values.
When we are studying ethics, we are studying to try to find out what is good and what is
not good and what is better and what is worse.
We're concerned constantly in terms of evaluation procedures.
That's the purpose of ethics, to try to arrive at what is good.
But the concept of morality, although it may contain an ethical characteristic, I want
to remove here from any theological overtones.
The concept of morality, as I wish to use the term here, would relate to those things
that ought to exist because of the nature of man in his relationships with other men.
Now I'm not speaking here of those things that men ought to do simply to preserve their
own lives.
As I view that, this is not a moral or an ethical question.
If we have a man alone on an island, obviously it is true that if he cannot get enough to
eat, he will die. If he cannot find shelter of some sort, he probably will die. If he
catches cold or gets some other type of germ or contagion of some sort, he will die. There
are many things that could kill him. If he finds himself falling off a cliff, he will
will die. There are lots of things that can do him in. In order to survive, he will have
to do those things that he ought to do in order to stay alive. That is, he will have
to obey natural law in order to continue to function, if he intends to continue to function.
Fine. Now when we are talking in terms of inter-human relationships, well, we are not
We're not dealing with a man alone on an island, but we're dealing with human beings in interplay,
action and reaction between them.
It is here that we get into the question of morals and ethics.
It is not now merely a question of how do I survive.
The question is, how do I survive in a moral context in which you also survive?
Because the concept of morality would have to be predicated not merely on what I have
to do to stay alive, but what I must do so that I do not prevent you from staying alive
if it is your wish to stay alive.
I may not presume to keep you alive if you want to die, but I may not presume to let
you die if you want to stay alive, or to compel you to die if you want to stay alive.
So then my relationship to you, if it is to be a moral one, must be a relationship of
non-molestation and non-sacrifice.
So this would be the moral theater.
It would be the area that exists between human beings in an interpersonal relationship.
And what I would like to suggest is that the ideal to be attained here would be the same
ideal for both of them that would exist on a desert island.
In other words, I should do nothing to you that would prevent you from also following
the rules of nature and getting enough to eat and getting a place to sleep and shelter
and so on, so that you could look after yourself.
If I intervene to prevent you from doing this, then of course I am molesting you.
On the contrary, if I do not intervene, I have no obligation to keep you going.
I simply must not, if I am to be moral, I must not prevent you from exercising your
will over yourself and what is yours.
If you want to stay alive, that's your business.
If you want to die, that's your business.
that I may not intervene if I am to be moral.
So here we have a moral concept, and I'd like to sum it up this way because I think it is
predictable, excuse me, I don't mean predictable here.
I think it is observable, let me say, that moral law is predicated upon a universal situation
that we can observe. It is observable when it comes to the question of molestation, sacrifice
and so on, that no human being ever approves of this when it's happening to himself. Every
human being by his nature rejects his own sacrifice at the hands of another. Every human
being will reject his own molestation at the hands of another. In other words, we have
a predictable reaction here.
And that puts it in the area of principle.
A principle is a predictable outcome from a specific set of factors.
And here we have specific factors that tell us that it doesn't make any difference who
the person is, how old he is, or what his race or nationality or religion or condition
in life may be.
He will not approve of anybody else imposing their will over him, and thus sacrificing
him or molesting him.
So we have a common denominator here from which to reason in an effort to establish
a moral relationship.
So the moral relationship that I'm talking about would be limited to inter-human relationships,
And the ideal would be a human relationship, an inter-human relationship, in which we try
to maintain for each one of the persons present the condition that they would have if they
were alone.
In other words, it is my job to see to it that I do not impinge my will on yours, ever,
for any reason, good, bad or indifferent.
Now that would be the ideal to arrive at, and that would be the moral law.
The moral law would be the law of non-molestation.
If we are to live in a world where no molestation occurs of any sort, it will have to be that
kind of a world.
The kind of a world in which we recognize the absolute right of the other party to mind
make his own affairs, control his own life, make his own decisions, and act on them in
respect to those things that he owns without any interference from me or anyone else for
any reason, good, bad, or indifferent.
If we can work toward that, and I think we can, then I think we will be doing a very
worthwhile thing.
And that's what we want to try to do in this course that we're offering.
Thanks very much.
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