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Mass Media's New Methodism

Well, I don't care what you do with him. Of course, you have to get him out of the way, because he might do something again. I -- what I'm arguing against is all the sentimentality to -- to judge these things around this insane man. Society is not interested in this -- in these freaks, and these feeble-minded, and in these idiots, and so on, you see. That's one story that has been overdone in this country. It is interested in the heredity of its order that can go down through the ages. That's the first thing.

The second comes from a surplus, if we are very well established, if the society is defended, and armed, and vigorous, and well-educated, and so on and so forth, then you can bend over and say that the weak elements have to be treated nicely and decently. But as you know, for the last 50 years, before the two world wars, the ladies of -- in this -- of this America who run after all the show, the churches, and the -- the whole education, and the arts, and all the -- and the women teachers, they thought that the interest in the criminal was the most important thing. The interest in the freak, you see. This is the wrong emphasis, because there is no historical group whose heredity, whose fecundity does not take first seat before its existence at this moment.

You see it. I mean, your generation has given the wonderful answer to all the statisticians who have said that America would be over-aged and se- -- senile in 1960. Here are 6 million young children born in this country. That is the real answer of your generation to all this stuff of -- that a sterile, over-aged society is of equal reality as a society whose renascence, whose constant rebirth, whose constant regeneration is first ascertained. We live fortunately in such -- at such a turning point where it is -- obviously is the greater concern of people to have children, you see, than to have the idiots built up to a higher IQ. Now I have nothing -- against idiots being educated, you see. But obviously, the first concern of a society is that there are no idiots. Isn't that very simple?

The interest in the murder is something sicklish in this country, the interest in the -- in the criminal. I mean, the Hauptmann case will always stand out, not as a terrible case with regard to the kidnaping of the child only, but with the courtroom procedures, and the newspapers. The -- the -- the criminal cases don't belong on the -- on the title page of your papers. As long as you allow this, you are -- have to be ashamed of yourselves. And you are -- don't know -- even know that this is criminal, the -- what these newspapers' editors -- do. They haunt you every day with another crime. What have you to do with this? Go your way, and have all the great problems of injecting into your children some vigor. That's more important than all these crimes which you {-- fed}. What do we have to know about all these crimes? No concern of a decent man.

You know nothing but this. You only hear in politics and everything, the crime. {Addiction}. And Mr. Hearst has invented this. You read the London Times. They -- why are the English people such a sturdy race? Why ca- -- don't they -- depend on this standard of -- high standard of living? Why have they this tremendous character? And they'll outlast the -- all the Americans, I can tell you this. You think the Americans are -- are on top, and dominate the world now -- and the English are finished. I can sh- -- only say you one thing -- to -- to say one thing to you: the hydrogen bomb will not be thrown over England, but it will be thrown over this country. There is no country in the world that is in greater danger than the United States. Europe is absolutely safe, because Russia wants to have Europe. It doesn't want to destroy it. But it does want to destroy this country, because we are rich. The poor today are safe. The rich are in danger. It's all nonsense what you say, "Europe is done." We are done, if we go on like that. Europe is absolutely safe. Nobody's going to destroy it.

And why? Because nobody in England cares for anything but heredity. And in this country, everybody cares for crime. You just compare the title page of the New York Times and the London Times, and you see what I mean. There is no title page in the New York -- in the London Times, because people live quietly.

And your generation has to revolt against all this. You have to live without newspapers for three or four years, a band of you, a group of you. And that group is then entitled to govern the United States. And you have to live three or four years without radio, and without gramophones, and all this television business. Then you can come back and use these mass media for the -- governing other people. But only the group that is absolutely superior to these mass media will be allowed to govern, because government means to be ascetic about the means of life. And just as the Methodists have ruled this country for the last 150 years because they didn't smoke and they didn't drink, so the next Methodist group in this country will be the people who do not read the title page of the

American newspapers, who just won't read them.

And you will not look at boxing and wrestling matches, or -- football matches, or baseball matches, or -- on television. And you have to look at them; you think you must. Therefore you are absolutely unimportant in life. People who have to depend on some such things are no longer important in history, because you can't make a new start. You depend on something utterly meaningless.

And what the Methodists did to this country was to make people, in a cold, unheated civilization with no central heating, no electric light, they made them independent of the unpleasantness of their environment. And the nonsmoking, and not-drinking of these Methodist people showed them to be rising above their environment. Now today this isn't your problem. Smoking and drinking today are not important vices, gentlemen; and girls are not important questions. The mass media are the important perversions of -- of thinking, and of the human mind. So you have to protest against these mass media.

But I don't see any American boy or girl who knows what his next religion should be. You don't want to have a religion. You don't want to band together for any rebellion, or for any doing anything creative. You have given up every hope that you are important. And yet the whole world is yearning for a group of Americans who laugh off Hollywood, who laugh off television, who say, "What? This country is spending $2 billion annually for television. It's a shame! It's a scandal!" And it is a scandal at a time when we complain that we cannot pay $2 billion for foreign aid, for hungry people. Then we buy television sets for $2 billion a year here. If this isn't shameful, I don't know what is shameful. It's all done for prosperity.

Well, you haven't even heard, you -- that something is expected from you. And you haven't heard -- for the last 15 years on this campus, I have tried to shout myself hoarse, that every generation has to found a new religion. Not a sect, not a church, but a religion in the sense that you are obliged to inject something unheard, t- -- untold, never lived before in to the life of the race. And this abstemiousness of the mass media, that's what you are expected to perform. And you can be sure, the group that does this is the next government of the United States or of the world at large.