{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this

(Philosophy 9, November 13th, 1953. Track Number 2.)

Today there is in The New York Times the installment of Winston Churchill's history of the Second World War. And there is a very tragic column, the first column of this second part of The New York Times where this is published now. You may have seen it. I want you all to read this for the next -- our next meeting. The first column, where he describes the deadly hia- -- hiatus, how he -- as he calls it, or hiatus, between the victory on the battlefield and the understanding of what this victory im- -- implied, because there was a dying president in the White House, and nobody in this country was able to throw the switch from war to peace.

I think I should lay much stress on this, because all our crisis in America at this moment stems from this tragic month of April and May, in 4- -- 1945. And for our course, the important is that I tried to draw your attention to the fact that the mystery of any society is in its power to change from war to peace, and from peace to war. As a definition I offer you, quite dogmatically -- because as you know, I love dogma -- that only this is sovereign however in the world which can go from war to peace and from peace to war. There are many entities which can go from peace to war, like Mr. Hitler's machine. And there are many, perhaps, who can try to get from war to -- into peace. But what we call today "Russia" and "America" as world powers are powers which can go from war to peace, and from peace to war. And that is not understood by you. You still think that in the United Nations there are sovereign nations united. That isn't true.

Sovereign is only that living entity in your own heart, too, which can go from peace to war, and from war to peace by a decision of his own volition -- volition. And this is our -- the present-day situation: that neither can France go to war against Germany now, nor can England go to war against France, nor can Ireland go to war against Belgium, nor can Spain go to war against Italy, nor can Greece go to war against Yugoslavia, despite the Trieste incident, by the way. Mr. Tito cannot do it. All these ramblings -- rumblings today still are dreams from independence which have lost all meaning. You can have a police action on these little bor- -- boundaries. But what we call "a war" and what we call "a peace," and the freedom by which we can say "This is war, and now is peace," you see, has suddenly been confined to two -- the two great powers of America and Russia. But again with the qualification, gentlemen: for the next 30 years there can be no war between Russia and America, obviously, because neither one is sure of the allies which it would have to drag into such a battle before it knows that it can come out again. You can start a war, of course, any

day, you see. But you are not at all sure that you can then have any peace, ever.

So the -- the warmongers in this country, the people who want to have a preventive war with Russia, and throw the bomb on Moscow, that's -- you know, Mr. Forestal died over his issue. He lost his mind, because he felt there was so much danger for Russia that -- for America that -- better do it right away.

They are quite right in -- we are quite right in feeling the incredible tension and in saying, "Let's do away with it." Only nobody has yet found a recipe by which he could promise that out of such a war, the United States would ever be able to have a peace again, because obviously this -- this land mass of China, and Mongolia, and Russia, and India, and Persia, and Afghanistan -- you can destroy it, you can dis- -- dis- -- incapacitate it, but there would be no peace. There would be nobody to conclude a peace with in the first place. And we -- you perhaps, should all Dartmouth go there and administer Siberia?

That is, we are quite in- -- unable to govern the show. The -- this part of the world cannot be governed by us. Therefore , even if we conquer, you see, the solution is not there, because we wouldn't have a correspondent, we wouldn't have somebody to -- with whom to talk, to make peace. And yet we ourselves cannot place us over there, you see, and govern it as a -- as a colony. This is a simple fact today.

This is overlooked in all theories of government, political science -- even in the Constitution of the United States. I mean, in -- people have no imagination about the central problem, gentlemen, that the life of a political body depends on its still being able to do both, to go from peace to war, and from war to peace. And as I told you, it is very easy to do one of the two things. Mr. Hitler could go to war. The German emperor could go -- be -- have his country dragged into war in 1914, because every German knew that with the destruction of Austria-Hungary, Germany was licked, was -- you see, couldn't go on living. So when Austria-Hungary threatened to be dissolved, by disintegration, with the -- with assassination of its crown prince in 1914, the Germans went to war. And then they found to their great amazement that they couldn't get peace, under no circumstances. There was nobody willing to conclude a peace with them. So they got in Versailles the first dictated peace. And as you know, it was no peace. And we have exactly the same situation today, that we are quite unable at this moment to see how to make peace. And the -- we live in this twilight between war and peace at this moment, which you call the Cold War. But it isn't a cold war. It is just the absence of peace. The -- people can't talk with -- with the two parts of Germany, you see. The Russians talk to one part, and we talk to the other. A funny situation.

Therefore -- some -- this -- this world war -- I'm -- has to be brief on this. In my course in 58 this is dealt with at greater length. You have to understand, gentlemen, that a tremendous revolution is represented and constituted by the world wars, the two world wars. In the two world wars, all nationalism has been -- swept away. The idea in Europe of sovereign nations who one day can go to war, as in 1870, or we in 1898 against Spain, you see, these nice, limited wars -- that's all over. No one power at this moment can know that it can make peace again after a war. And -- I think that is the real world revolution of our time. And in the face of this, the Rus- -- so-called Russian Revolution is not a revolution at all. It's a very minor thing that Russia at this moment is industrialized. It's a very boring thing, too. I mean, what can the Russians do? They build factories in imitation of the Americans. It's not very original what the Bolsheviks do.

So please begin to see, gentlemen, that Communism and fascism are not the powers that govern the world at this moment, or are the great spiritual movements of our time. This has been the fallacy of your elders, as you know, and since I have combated this in this country for the last 20 years, I have -- take -- feel at liberty to draw your attention to this. In 1924, I published an essay, trying to -- to state that the deeper issues of our time were those connected with the war problem. And that the so-called social problems, the questions of labor and capital, and of industry and so, are very minor indeed compared to this, that suddenly there were no na- -- sovereign nations anymore.

And I think that future historians will say that the period from 1914 to 1945 or 1952, with the Korean armistice, that they were indeed of a revolutionary character. But this was a revolution, gentlemen, which took place above the heads of the civilian mind, of the civilian heads. They didn't understand what the war was doing to them. All the national statesmen, gentlemen, had a -- were confined to an outlook of the self-interest of their respective nation. And therefore, God, or fate, or providence, or politics, or however you define your own faith in the movements of the universe, went over the heads of the alleged actors in this play. Neither did Mr. Churchill, nor did Mr. Roosevelt, nor did Mr. Wilson, nor did Mr. Hindenburg, nor did Mr. Hitler know what they were playing. They played their game. But all the games these different people played, you see, in the end resulted in something not one of them had wanted, had anticipated, had planned, had purpose of -- in any degree.

This is so important, and so difficult, gentlemen. This world revolution is a real revolving of our concepts of life, because the wars came over the heads of the civilians who had studied civil life, and only knew of their nation as the field of their activity. And there the world came suddenly into their backyard, and into their front room, into their hall, and said, "You are inside such a wheel -- such a totality," you see, "that you can't move one pawn, one soldier on the

Dutch frontier of Germany without getting into a Korean incident." And it is this interaction which we have, after all, lived to see. You get the air bridge in 1949 at Berlin. And then you get the Korean invasion on the other side of the globe. So that you see that everything moves everything else. And there is no longer this nice idea that America can declare war on Mexico and then come home triumphantly or -- declare war on Spain, and get Cuba and all the Puerto Ricans in New York.

Gentlemen, the last two wars have therefore a special character. The character which leads me to teach this course. The special character is that your philosophy of humanity is found to be faulty, because it has only dealt with peacetime problems. You can s- -- think of any system of philosophy of the last 400 years taught in the departments of philosophy. You can call on any po- -- sci- -- political science department in this country, or in Europe, you see, and war is treated as an exception. War is treated as something that ought not to be. And that's still the deep feeling in this country, that war is the exception, and the peace is the rule.

Now all -- everything that I have tried to tell you, gentlemen, is that simply is not so, because we all live in peacetimes on the structures that we have learned by bitter experience in war. You remember everything we said about the American Constitution being the net result of the revolution war. And that's why we know what is right, because in a war this was put to the test and was found necessary. Once you see this, gentlemen, you must begin to feel how -- the purely civilian mind lets you down, how a philosophy like that of Mr. John Dewey, for example, the founder of progressive education, had -- just has no -- no understanding of the impact of war on human justice, on the constitution of a country. You can't find a word in him about this. He just doesn't know. I have studied this very carefully, and it's very tragic, because obviously a man like Dewey is a very great man. He is the Confucius of America. And he has settled this society as long as it doesn't have to arm. Is it all right? You see.

What is the difference, gentlemen, between a war philosophy and a peace philosophy? Is -- the peacetime philosophy asks, "What can I do?" It begins with freedom, and it begins with plenty of time. In warti- -- in war we have seen there is no time at my disposal. Man lives to gain time. That's why he needs peace. But he must know that it's all borrowed time. It's all time wrested from catastrophe. That makes man serious. Now you have lived in a society for the last 250 {150?} years in which the people in the secular branch, at least, not in the religious, tried to sell you the playboy idea that man must wake up and try to find what he can do, and assess his -- his playground for his own activity. Then make himself, you see, his pa- -- make his { } find satisfaction in his own purposes and aims. Well, that's a fool's paradise. It's a paradise, all right, but

only, I'm afraid, a fool's paradise, because that isn't the story.

All the people who popu- -- people the United States knew better. They had a haunting desire to escape military service abroad. That's why they came here, to a large extent, you see, and to get away from the wars over there, because America at that time was still outside the -- the danger zone of -- of organized war. But it was only a short lease on life, so to speak. This continent was new. This continent was, therefore, for the time being, out of the picture of other people's ambitions. Not even quite, you know, the Mexican landing, or the French -- Maximilian shooting. So the things weren't quite so peaceful as they looked. And you had a revolution in South America every -- every week. And you still have it in Bolivia. Just have to -- to go there. And you can be sure, you see, that's included in the -- in your travel bureau's ticket, some revolution in Las -- Paz.

Well, that's quite serious, gentlemen. It means that your whole picture of the world in which you are allowed to live is utterly wrong, because you always -- as you remember, begin with thinking peace is normal. And the world revolution of the last two world wars, gentlemen, if you would digest it, you would gain again the leadership of the world. But you can't get the leadership at this moment, as long as you think that peace is normal and wars are incidents of life: casual, and accidental, and just at the outer -- outskirts, and could be better not touched, and certainly not thought about. War has to be made the starting point of thinking.

And you -- we have -- I therefore have tried to have you analyze the play situation, you see, where we are spared this, you see, and you'll remember when we said that then we dispose of time and space then at -- at our will. And then you must have the courage to face the opposite situation of war, where there is no space and no time allotted to your own free decision, because you are beleaguered; you are ambushed.

Then you will understand, gentlemen, that any peacetime society is a compromise between war and peace. The -- our factories are the fruits, as you know, of scientific thinking. And scientific thinking is based on experiment. And experiment is based on play of the imagination, on trying -- trial and error. That is, all we have in peacetime production, gentlemen, is based on a surplus of being allowed to try without consequence.

War and marriage are the two cornerstones of serious life with which we cannot experiment. But with science, we can experiment. Now all our production today, therefore is, gentlemen, gained time as a result of -- the fact that your ancestors had time to experiment. Experiment belongs to the non-serious part of

life, because it can go wrong. It is not devastating if -- in an experiment, the experiment miscarries.

When you kindly will take to this pamphlet of mine on the multiformity of man, you will find there a comparison between a shepherd in Montana in a snowstorm, in winter time, and an experiment carried out in a Harvard physics laboratory. The ratio of error which a shepherd in Montana can afford, under the circumstances of the climate there, is perhaps 1 percent of error. If he commits more mistakes in treating the sheep, they'll all die from exhaustion in the blizzard. And he'll be killed probably himself when he goes out in this blizzard trying to rescue his sheep. That is, in serious business out there in nature, he cannot afford a mistake -- or at least, very few. In a laboratory, the scientist is all the better the more mistakes he dares to make. If he makes 99 mistakes, he may find the 100th time something. Mr. Ehrlich, who invented, as you may have heard, the first medicine against -- against syphilis, called his -- his final medicine 606, because he constructed 605 drugs before he found the right one. Now you have to give a man time to try 605 obviously, you see, before he can hit on 606. But you can't marry 606 wives. Even Mr. Ibn Saud didn't do this.

Well, it is -- this is completely forgotten in our society, gentlemen. Even war, the First World War was treated by the American people as an experiment. It didn't work, so they went home and said, "We won't do it again." So they had to do it again in all earnestness. If they had stayed on the job the first time, they wouldn't have had -- go -- to go back the second time. The same is true of marriage. You can marry -- get four divorces. But the more -- oftener you get a divorce, the less is there any -- any probability that you'll find the right mate, you see. I mean, probing in marriage with divorces doesn't lead to any finality. I'm sure Mr. Bertrand Russell is going to marry a fifth time. And that's why he's no philosopher. You shouldn't read him. But he's treated here in this country as a philosopher. He's a playboy. And he doesn't understand the two things of life: war, against which he protested in 1916 in England; and marriage, you see. He always mistakes having secretaries and having wives, as many people do in this country.

Now I'm very serious, gentlemen. You will not grow up to be real men if you do not know when we can experiment, and when -- where we cannot experiment, obviously. This is the whole line that a man must go -- that what we call a grown-up person. A person is grown up when he can distinguish when he plays golf, and when he is in earnest. And many people grow up to 70 and 80 -- see all these ladies who try to be y- -- look young at 75, and the men just as well. They want to be boys and girls. And they are called this way in this country. But who can take them seriously?

I have a friend who has never grown up. He is a justice of the Supreme Court. And he has spoiled his -- his daughter. And they are very close. And he has ruined their -- her life. She has never been allowed to grow up, because he hasn't grown up. Well, the other day, he was rung up. There was a teleph- -- telegram waiting from New York. And they couldn't get through ri- -- the -- was -- line was busy. And he -- immediately his courage fell. He of course has a bad conscience. He knows that he has ruined his daughter's life by keeping her in complete dependence on him. And so he broke down and began to pray that God might spare him this tragedy that his daughter probably had been run over, or been killed, or I mean, some nightmare he painted, you see, in his neur- -- neurosis. And -- man of 50 years of age.

Well, of course, nothing happened. It was a very happy message he had to receive over the cable. I just got the letter from his wife, telling me the whole story. And this man played with prayer, which is quite serious, you see. He had no news, no bad news, but immediately he contacted God Almighty, he thought, you see, in play, asking for forgiveness and for being spared when there was nothing to pray for.

This is an abuse of prayer, and I thought I should mention it to you, because it seems to me that most people who do pray in this country, pray for nonsensical things. As you know, the only prayer that is valid is a prayer where we -- pray that our will may not be done, but God's will. So if you pray for being spared something, you certainly -- that's not a real prayer. That's a childish pray- -- prayer. Now it seems that most people pray for -- for being made happy, or for being -- earn a million at the horse races, or something like that. Well, that isn't prayer. That's playing with prayer.

And the terrible thing at this moment -- that's why I have to tell you this -- is that religion has gone completely today on the side of play. If this man was grown up, he had to wait for the real facts of this telegram, you see, because that's just a question of childish nerves, that he had the jitters. And at 50, you don't take your own nerves seriously, you see. I wait for the real fact. And there was nothing to break down, you see. He couldn't.

So this is childish, typically childish, because it was a situation of his own imagination only, of his fancy, you see. He was not face-to-face with a tragedy. He was not face-to-face with an event. He was not face-to-face with anything really created in the real course of life, but he was just nervous. This, to fill out with prayer, was an abuse of his relation to his maker. And I'm afraid I have to tell you this, because nobody else tells you this, that this is vastly in -- in this country now called "religion." It is the play side of religion, if you can see this, because its like a little child, you see, that is afraid without any reason. We have

enough reason to pray to God Almighty to find out what His will is. But we have to wait until we know what is meant. And if you get just into the nervous state and mistake this for -- reality, you see, you are confounding again war and peace, play and seriousness.

And I think this example should just strike home with you, because you must see that today religion is in this terrible predicament that this is ridiculous. It's childish. It's Sunday school religion. If people pray because they are nervous, well, nobody is interested. And they certainly won't move the world and they won't do anything important. This man of course stopped praying as soon as a good telegram came, you see. Contact was -- the line was -- you see, immediately the -- the communication was no longer needed. He had nothing to say to his creator afterwards, when it was serious, you see. That's -- that just shows that the whole thing was nothing but a show, a burlesque show played before his own self-consciousness.

And therefore, gentlemen, today I don't believe in the religious revival in America, because people have become girls and boys, and they no longer know the -- the difference between seriousness and play, and I'm very much shocked by the -- by the falsification and the sell-out of religion, because any minister allows his flock to pray on such nonsense. And you can blaspheme God just as much when you pray in a playlike fashion on unreal situations. Do I make myself clear, why this is unreal, why the nerves of this gentlemen don't count for anything in the history of the world, you see? Let him get drunk. That's much better than to pray in such a situation, where he only was afraid, you see, without having any reason to be afraid. He couldn't wait till the telephone call came through.

And I -- I think therefore we have such a hard time today to allocate the rights of any religious beha- -- attitude and so, because I'm afraid most people whom you meet deal with religion in such a way, they use it as a drug for their nerves, as a perfectly minor business. Gentlemen, there are serious questions, I mean. It is -- for example, a -- a real question which takes some faith if I think of this college: Should I teach you these truths? That's a very important question. I haven't found the answer. I think it's -- perhaps perfectly useless. And it's not easy to teach 15 years with always this question before you, that it's probably perfectly useless to tell you this, because all my colleagues tell you the opposite.

That's serious. I haven't invented this quandary. It's there. It's a dilemma, you see. And that's how real life is. It is full of conflicts. And it is not of my making. Can't do anything about it. There it is. Somebody else must arbitrate this, you see. There's no solution.

Only to show you there is enough serious business to find out what the will is which -- by which we could come -- get -- come -- have peace and make progress, and stabilize society. But these are real issues. They are very great conflicts, because people are different, gentlemen, have different minds, think different things, have different beliefs. And -- and we have not the same belief at this moment in the world. People have very different religions, although they -- they do not call it religion. But what is called religion is so sweety that it ha- -- is only therefore 8-year-old children.

And that's why this -- I -- I'm sure this war-revolution has come about, to drive home this one thing, gentlemen: that you ought to know what is serious and what is not serious. This is much more important than to know what religion or what the state is, because the state and the Church you can also play with. And then it is no longer a state or -- or Church.

And this is the terrible state of affairs today, that if you do not first erect this great dualism between seriousness and play, nothing else will be of any avail in your education. You have to have a yardstick by which you say this is playing with religious content, you see, and this is real religion. And you must admit that people only discuss today religion or non-religion, you see. But that -- isn't the issue, obviously. You cannot know what religion is if you see nine -- nine-tenths of -- of this so-called religious province, or jurisdiction, you see, to be just used as its -- as playing with religion. It's something quite different from religion. Most suburban Christianity is just a nice play. It's a ritual. It has nothing to do with religion. It's its imitation.

So gentlemen, that's why at this moment we have to go back to something even before this division of Church and state, or of religion and work, or wa- -- we -- we have to go back to the simple question of war and play, because they are the two extremes of reality.

All -- now, let's turn back to our industrial province. When the fruits of victory are put to use, there is a surplus of time in which we can probe and experiment. And all our laboratories, all our playgrounds are bearing testimony to the fact that we have gained some time in which we are not under immediate pressure, in which we can postpone decisions. And so we go to work. Work is the first province which comes from our desire to have peace, into fruition.

And in our workshops, gentlemen, there is today a scientific principle at work, and that is -- we base our production on experimentation. We have a certain amount of mistakes that can be made, and we choose the best result. Think of this problem of our aircraft industry: when to go into mass production. You know, it's a very central question. If you go too early into mass production,

the type will be obsolete before it is, you see, the serious moment comes. Therefore, you have to make a compromise between probing and experimenting with new types of motors and wings, et cetera, and going into production. There -- there you have it very -- very typically, you see. How much time? That's decisive, you see. And this time is a surplus out of the serious danger, you see, looming at the bound- -- border of an enemy, you see, invading. We have to calculate: how much time do we have to spare, so that we can first experiment and get a better machine, you see, and then go into mass production?

If the war had come about in 1948, we obviously could not afford to have Pratt & Whitney first experiment with the jet planes. We just had -- would have had to produce at that time then the planes -- B-29, et cetera -- as they were. As you know, we took our time enough to go over to a completely new principle of -- of aircraft. And therefore we have reached now a new level of -- of aircraft production, and probably will never go back, you see, get -- go away from the jets. That's -- don't you think that's true? I mean, that we'll probably stick to the solution gained by -- by jet flying, which is -- utterly different from what we did in the last 30 years. It is really not the same machine anymore, the same idea of flying. I mean, it's a very radical revolution, but it depended on the question: did we have in 1948, '49 -- did we have time still to experiment with jets? Ja?

(Well, did Hitler have time to experiment with V-2? Ever { } he used it right off the bat, didn't we?)

Pardon me?

(The V-2 rocket, in the Second World War. Hitler used that immediately, didn't have time to test it.)

Ja, well, that was war, obviously. But I mean, people have thought that if he had had a year longer time, he probably would have wrecked Britain with his V-2, and he had a V-3 coming, too, you see. So, I mean, there it was decisive. If you read Churchill's memoirs, the havoc done in England was terrific. I myself have a friend who lost her two children in such an -- in such an air-raid. On her arms, a child was bombed. She escaped, and -- and the child was bombed in her kitchen in -- in Buckinghamshire, in England. So it was pretty serious.

(Which is more productive, peace or the time you have to experiment in or { } of war?)

Well, if peace is lived in -- under the threat of war, it's productive. If peace is lived as you have tried to live in the '20s of the 19th -- 20th century, it is perfectly unproductive. It leads to 11 million people unemployed.

You see, we have been saved this time by the threat of Russia. What -- where would America be in the last eight years, or after these eight years without the constant threat from Russia? Everything that has been done in a reasonable manner in this country has been done because of the Russian threat. So we have to go down on our knees and thank the -- our enemy for keeping us awake, because otherwise this country wouldn't have stayed awake at all. That's the -- the -- the truth of the matter. And of course, the other way it's true, too; that the Russians are only -- have been kept going {by us}. A good enemy is a good thing.

You know what the famous statesman said? "O God, please protect me before my friends -- against my friends. Against my enemies, I'll protect myself." The enemy you can protect yourself against. But your friends you cannot protect yourself against. They are dangerous. They take you in.

Once you see this raft of peace, this float in a -- in a sea of troubles, you get more respect for the peacetime order. It is something miraculous, that isn't given naturally, but which we must keep going, you see, with -- with many good efforts and a very great desire to do justice to this miraculous achievement, that there is a peacetime society. All I invite you only is to give more admiration to the good life you are allowed to lead at this moment. It is most admirable that there is such a time in which we still can experiment, and work, and organize production.

Now, as to the insight of this society to which we now -- we turn, we already found the arrangement to be, by and large, management, sales, markets, l- -- how -- research -- that's { } I think that's the best word, and workshop. I do not agree with the report -- who was giving -- write- -- reading the report? -- you made a mistake when you said, "The salesman and the workers were the soldiers." I tried to tell you that the workers are only soldier-like fighting in a strike, but they are not considered as fighting, you see, because "fight" entails unknown reactions. The market is unknown, is shiftless, is -- every moment is different. You have -- may observe it, but still you are always taken by surprise. Do -- you know how many television sets will be sold by Christmas. You know that's a very critical point at this moment, because the -- the wholesale people are stuck with 2 million sets.

So gentlemen, the workshop does the repetitive work. Anything repetitive is not quite serious. As long as you can say, gentlemen, that you have breakfast every morning at 9:30 at the earliest, you are in peace. A doctor doesn't know this, because he is in a serious situation, a war situation. He may have no breakfast; he may have to have breakfast at 6; he may have to have breakfast at 9. He doesn't know. You see, he can -- has no routines with regard even to

breakfast, because it's so serious. But you are. We -- you can say that every -- day of the week you will be found, you see, in the morning, in -- in the coffee shop, and in the evening in White River. Or in your fraternity, which is a port of White River -- whiskey.

Repetition, gentlemen, is always in the safety corner. Wherever -- the worker therefore is deprived of identity with soldiers. You -- I cannot stress sufficiently, gentlemen, that Communism has completely mistaken the situation. Communism started, as you know, by logical study of peacetime things -- thinking that the workers would make the revolution. Who has made the Russian Revolution? Not the worker, but the soldiers at the front. They went home. That was the end of the Russian war, and the beginning of the Russian Revolution. And they -- then they tried to found councils of soldiers and workers, thinking that soldiers and workers would be on equal terms. It doesn't work that way. The worker is only on even terms with the soldier if he takes a rifle and becomes a soldier. But a peacetime worker is just not in the same sense a fighter as a soldier is. It is -- all Communism has refuted itself, because the soldiers made the Russian Revolution, and not -- and the same in -- in Tito. In Tito's Yugoslavia, the -- his -- his guerrillas made the Communist revolution of Mr. Tito, so-called, you see, and not the workers. Not at all.

And that's the -- why -- why a French Communist in any Bolshevik sense. He's a civilian who has a grudge against a capitalist order. I would have in France, too. But that's civilian Communism, you see, and has nothing to do with Bolshevism. And you can have 5 million boats in -- in Paris. And -- and just the same, they all go fishing. Nothing happens, because this is only a worker's ideology there, Communism. But in Russia it was something quite different. It was a defeat in a war, and perhaps a resistance in France is a little bit of what belligerent Communism is in Russia, you see, because they were real soldiers in a serious business of war.

That's why a -- Communism to me is such a silly business, because it has no -- no way of reaching into the structure of society, because the theoretical, economic Marxism, you see, purely economic, without the military, is just not able to cope with the -- with war -- the war issue. Mr. Tito's adherents have nothing to do with industry, you see. The -- the -- they were just as much peasants who -- as they were intel- -- intelligentsia, or what-not. Nothing industrial about it.

Well, that leads too far. But I warn you, don't consider this as a pale scheme. This is learned by bitter experience from the fact that the -- Communism and liberalism both have led you astray. They have tried to tell you that the civilian mind can think out the future. But the civilian mind cannot do this, because

the civilian mind plans, estimates things already known. And that's always only possible in peacetime, an estimate of the costing office. The worker's work has been estimated by management beforehand. You build a bridge, and you say, "I need 100,000 working hours." And then you say, "How many workers?"

So gentlemen, the situation in industry is even that abstract that the workers are not constituting the factory, but the amount of work that has to be done decides how many workers are asked to do it. You can do the same amount of work in three shifts, you see, in a short time, with three many -- three times as many people, or you can stretch it out and work one shift and have it done in three -- in the triple of the space of time needed.

Therefore management decides, for example, how many workers are needed for the work. This should make it quite clear to you that the worker doesn't enter the factory as a person. The worker -- labor -- what we call the "labor force" -- enters the factory as much as electricity or steam for a repetitive, estimated, and planned purpose. And he is only treated there as participating in an nth of the effort. The worker constitutes in a factory not a personal effort, but an nth of the whole effort, which is estimated and planned. He is invited to come, because you need 10 men to load a truck. So he's one-tenth of the men loading the truck. He's not asked because he's such a wonderful man, you see, and singled out. He's asked as one of 10.

This abstraction goes even further, gentlemen. And it has led to all the problem of watering labor in our industry, which is as you know of great concern to the management. What is watering labor? You know, in -- in England they call it this way. I don't know how it's called here. You say "watering"?

(Featherbedding.)

Yes, featherbedding, yes. Yes. You just become a member of the brotherhood of engine and locomotive driving.

What does this mean, gentlemen? The central problem of in- -- of labor, again unrecognized by the civilian mind strangely enough, is that if you work with other people in shifts, there must be a smooth-running -- the three shifts must, by and large, achieve the same amount. And you would be an eel -- how do you call a man who -- a squealer? You would be a yellow -- yellow, that's it -- you would be yellow if you would, by your strenuous exercise of effort, expose and show up your comrades as working too little. It is the solidarity, gentlemen, of three men doing the same work from 8 to 4, from 4 to -- to midnight, and from midnight again to the next morning which comes out in this problem of featherbedding.

I give you the -- so to speak, uppermost example of solidarity there, because you again are completely looking in a wrong direction when you think of the solidarity of the people who know each other in a factory and go together to work at the same hour, and therefore love each other as brothers. This is all sentimentalism, this kind of unionism. The cause -- the in- -- eradicable cause for featherbedding, or what the English call "watering labor," is something which you all must succumb to -- I would, too -- if you have to deliver the goods in line with two other men who take over and replace you when you are absent. Then you three men must be one in your effort. And they must be down on you if you show them up and show that they are la- -- laggards, and lazy.

The shift system of a modern factory, you see, may not exist in many places. I mean, only a few places may work on -- in -- shifts. But ideologically, potentially, it is there in the costing office. It is the privilege of any management to be able to think that the same work can be done in a hurry, in shifts, or can be stretched out, you see, and actually -- be left to one shift every day, of eight-hour or 40-hour week. But this outer appearance of some factories working in shifts and some not must not mislead you. The principle of our capitalistic market soc- -- -seeking society -- because capitalism is market-seeking, you see, trying to create a market, to find a market, you see, yet unknown -- this warfare against the market, or for a market, this market-seeking of our production, this marketseeking society lives only by its power to estimate how much the cost will be to be put on its product. Otherwise it cannot go seeking, you see, sales on the market. You have to know first what it costs you. You cannot make your price and then produce.

Since you cannot, by the laws of our -- of our economy do this, the potential worker in a factory is always considered to be one working in shifts. That is, in the abstract. As one equals -- or what I call in the formula in my pamphlet, one -- three equals one. The iron machine runs 24 hours a day. The electricity is there. The steam is there 24 hours a day. The light can burn 24 hours a day. In the same sense, the labor force in a factory theoretically could work 24 hours. When management says, "No, you go home at 4 o'clock," it does this to its dismay. It must weigh the evidence. The interest on its investment, as you know, goes by the day. They have been as you know, an abstract here. And they even charge you as much interest for the month of February as they charge for the month of December -- 28 days for the bank are just the same as -- as 31 days in December. The interest is such an interesting institution.

Through this interest rate of our changing business -- because this business is contracting and expanding all the time, and therefore has to depend on financing, you see, in a constantly changing manner -- this shrinking and expanding business, gentlemen, therefore has an interest to produce rapidly, to

produce so that the interest rate per capita of the labor force is low. If I occu- -- have three people working per diem, the wages of these three people obviously, you see, in proportion to the interest to be paid on the investment, you see -- in -- as investment capital, is smaller. So if you -- receive one dollar per hours and I have to pay 24 hour- -- dollars in wages, you see, and I have to pay $16 in interest, obviously the proportion is 16 to 24. If I, however, have to pay $16 interest, and I only occupy people who receive $8 you see, I cannot get enough work out of the $8 people -- wage-earners, you see, to pay off my interest of $16. Whereas I can hope, if I pay $20 in wages, they produce so much, you see, that I can easily pay the interest.

Therefore gentlemen, will you kindly introduce into your thinking this -- it's a very simple, but very central consideration. The secret of modern industry is that theoretically we work in shifts. We all do. We are all replaceable. You know, our universities work in shifts. The University of Chicago has no vacation. There is a summer quarter. And the -- the instruction just goes on. Everyone has three months of vacation, as is true of a person. But the university is open 12 months. That's a typical working in shifts, because it pays more. The -- the -- the -- the grounds -- the campus of the university, the laboratories, the library, everything is -- is used for 12 months, so it is less expensive.

May I invite you to think this through, gentlemen? Then you see that -- what modern industry is. It is really nature changed into technology, or technocracy, or a technical -- our techniques, our industry is second nature, is a nature transformed, but keeping one feature of nature, that it runs incessantly. Nature, you see, is serious, cannot be stopped. Water runs down, the electric power has to be produced. Otherwise it goes to waste over the dam. Now we have this -- dam here between -- at Wilder, as you know, between White River and us. Therefore, it is better for the electric power plant to be able to send us the electricity 24 hours a day. And so they invite the factories to have night shifts, you see, and they try to have us build up bonfires in -- with electricity and -- and illuminations all the night long, because they want to get rid of their night load.

Nature is incessant, is in perpe- -- perpetuity. Our modus- -- modern industrial production -- again, I have tried to elaborate on this in my pamphlet, which you all have to have read next week -- is the imitation of nature. A factory, gentlemen, is -- has a shelter, has a roof, but it is not a normal human building. A factory is nature sheltered, is nature transformed into a technical process. But it borrows -- or it adapts itself to nature. It borrows from nature, I might say, you see, this being -- going all the time, this being endless.

If workers even go home, therefore, that's a fiction. An idle factory, you

see, is so to speak only fictitiously so, because the investment, the interest, the raw material, the electricity, the oil, everything demands constant, you see, movement. If this is so, gentlemen, you understand that man is not up to the occasion. Man is a foreigner in any technological process, because he has to eat, and to relax, and to play, and to go home, and to make merry. Man is a foreigner in nature. And man is only naturalized in a factory by the shift system. You are in a factory only there if two others can replace you at the other hours of the day. Wherever you have the transition of -- from handicraft, or from patriarchal society to modern industrial conditions, you will find that every man becomes replaceable.

I give you an instance in my pamphlet of a man, a superintendent of work in -- at the Boston Railroad system -- subway system, who didn't want to take a leave and -- until he broke down. He th- -- thought he was irreplaceable. And so he tried to work 24 hours a day, which you cannot do. And he -- when I met him, this man, he was going crazy. I mean, he was on the way out. And you will find that one of the -- perhaps in Tuck School they have told you this -- a man who thinks he cannot take a leave usually is -- is susp- -- suspect of being an embezzler.

In modern industry we want to be able to look into the desk of every college president, and every executive, you see, because he -- he too must be considered replaceable. So impersonal is industry, you see, that a man who has a vacation must find somebody who can act in his stead. Therefore he is not personal -- a person in industry, gentlemen. But he is one out of three. The old worker -- worker's movement knew this in Europe. They always spoke of the "iron worker." Thereby they meant the machine. For example, the coal miners always said, "The iron worker puts us out of business, because we human forces cannot compete with this insatiable and indefatigable machine. We -- they never -- the machine never tires, and when we come and say we won't work 13 hours a day," the management is dismayed because they think, "Well, if only we could have a machine. The machine would not be tired," you see. So they introduce a machine and so many men are made idle because man cannot compete becau- -- simply because he has to sleep, and to eat, and to go home.

This is the real reason, of course, of -- all the implications of the industrial revolution. But you see, liberalism did not want to see that in a factory a man is not treated as a person, with a name, but as a number. They had the ideology, "All men are equal." And so for a long time in good conscience -- I've talked to many managers on this, and I worked in a factory myself, and I ran a factory paper -- the real gap between the factory worker and management is that management, especially in this country, has upheld the fiction that it was bargaining with the individual worker, for example. You know the struggle of the

collective bargaining. They could not understand that a worker knew all the time that he wasn't hired as a person, you see. But he was hired one out of three. Now they have learned their lesson, and now they have collective bargaining, but what does this mean, gentlemen?

Now again a terrible abstraction prevails, and people think that all these millions -- workers of America are -- are represented by Mr. {Ryan} in New York. They aren't. The problem of human relations to the machine is the simple thing that an iron man -- an iron worker and three human beings would be -- -- can be considered equal. If you can find what a man should be paid, you see, for serving one machine over 24 hours, then you can settle. And that's what the unions practically now do. I mean, they try now to individualize per machine the kind of work that is done. But they hate all personal treatment of one man, you see, and on the other hand, they have learned already that they can't have an overall wage for all workers in a place. They have there to specify the machine that is served. And so they have a very artificial system as you know of -- of surp- -- of pluses and minuses with regard to the individual wage, which is a great {headache}.

But we come from a realm of fiction, gentlemen. The -- the humanist, the Dartmouth College graduate who founded a factory had the idea that he hired individual workers as to person, and the workers were told by their union men that all workers should work under s- -- more or less the same conditions. You know Marx's slogan even was, "To everybody according to his wants," you see. Both are extreme fictions.

In the middle, there is however a revolutionary situation, because it is neither the situation of the liberal mind, the college-boy mind, that here is Arthur Smith, wonderful -- I mean, halfback, or infield, or what-not, you see, known for his personal capacity, most reliable man on campus. And there is -- not on the other hand this ocean of workers of the army -- of -- of hands offering their services. It is very much in between, that our -- according to the state of our technological progress, gentlemen, in every one moment, what is expected from a man must be in line with the two people who can replace him. Two is of course arbitrary. You can have work in four shifts, you understand. But it is worth your while, gentlemen, to understand that what we call a "labor force" demands from a man that he lets himself in on a process as a soldier in a platoon, in which he is one out of three or four. And so my equation for the worker ran that he will be the most unhappy of men if he isn't -- treats himself three to -- equals one.

Gentlemen, I have an example. In our little town, there is a man who takes care of the minks, these animals who al- -- allegedly produce such wonder-

ful fur coats for our ladies. This man works seven days a week. He is a fa- -- grandfather and father of a family. He -- if you come to his place, you think he's wonderful. He lives out in the country, you see, as -- like a farmer. The man works seven days a week, from the morning, 8 o'clock, to 10 o'clock in the evening. He's not unionized. He treat- -- thinks that he's working individually as a person. He's a slave. In -- these minks of course don't want to eat every seven days. The owner of this -- of this mink farm, you see, sleeps seven days a week, and so this man has to work seven days a week.

And that is -- happens because this man hasn't learned the lesson -- this -- this individual, you see, that in modern industry he's lost if he treats himself as concluding -- an individual bargain, an individual contract over his personal, you see, investment there. He goes to pieces. He ruins himself. No holiday. Nothing.

And that's going on here right under your noses, and you don't even know it. You know nothing of what's going on in these villages. It -- would be frightened. That isn't right. There's no justice done, certainly. This man deserves better, but he has no other place to go. And that's the only industry in town, you see. And so he is one worker, so to speak, showing you that this system won't work. In the old community with a religious tie, they had to gi- -- let him off on Sunday, obviously. He had to go to church. Now modern society doesn't know anything of Church or such thing, so holiday isn't respected. He has no Sunday. He has no Saturday afternoon. He has no evening. He just works from the -- 8 o'clock in the morning to 10 o'clock at night, seven days a week. And that's all next door to the liberal arts college where people are so human and humanistically minded, and think that everybody should be treated as a personality. Well, he is treated as a personality in reverse.

So because -- modern industry, gentlemen, is a 24-hour process, and 24 hours are too much for any one human being. Therefore nature, gentlemen, cannot be taken on by individuals. You and I are too weak against the aggression of nature, because nature is water. Nature is fire. Nature is storm. Nature is electric power. Nature is impinging on us and goes to ruin if you not all the time harness it and do something with it. Horses, well, you could put in a barn, you see. And there they were standing, they're also lying, you see. But the other things, the power we store nowadays, they are far too demanding. They have to flow constantly. Think only of the disruption that happens if you have to store too much oil at once, because you have four weeks of a vacation, you see. You interrupt the whole transportation of oil from Texas if you suddenly, you see -- a big plant doesn't use up the oil that comes in through the pipeline regularly.

[tape interruption]

In wartime, we have always treated the war guard as this incessant, you see. They are not the fighting soldiers, but they are on guard. The workers are in the same boat. That part of an army life you find in the worker, because the -- the watch has to be manned 24 hours a day, regardless of where people -- soldiers are in the most stupid su- -- circumstances, the guardhouse is there, you see, and you have to stand out every -- is it every two hours here? When -- ja? You shift every two hours?

(Four. Four.)

Oh, you can't stand four hours. The individual couldn't. Wie? Aren't you relieved in two hours?

(Four.)

Well, in our army, it was two hours. Four hours seems to me quite impossible, I mean. How can you dispose of your physique for four hours? Wie? Is it really true? Four hours?

(Yeah.)

Single or two? Two together four hours, or one? Who has been in the army?

(Sir, at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, I believe that the soldiers have their choice between standing a four-hour watch or a six-hour watch.)

Six hours?

(Yes. Well, there they're marching up and down.)

Well, still you can't go march up and down six hours. Have you ever tried it?

(I wouldn't { }.)

Wie?

(I imagine I will.)

I'm interested. Of course, every army has their special regimen. But it seems to me that six hours is nothing any human being can -- can guarantee. You cannot -- you see, you cannot know of yourself enough to be able to serve

six hours in a row on watch. I don't see it.

(Well, I know -- I have a friend in the Navy who says that he stands fourhour watches.)

(In the Navy, it's four-hour.)

But the sit -- they sit, don't they? Wie?

(I don't think he sits.)

No?

(I don't think so.)

(You can't sit on a watch.)

Navy is a kingdom by itself. So I don't know the sequence. Is it four hours? But isn't this -- is this outside or inside?

(Interior guard.)

Well, the inside I could understand.

(I don't know whether it's --)

But in a storm outside, you can't.

Well, however this may be, gentlemen, this element of steady repetition, which the army has by putting out watches, this has been taken up by our workers. And if you look at the work a good worker does today in a factory, it's really that he's watching the process of natural forces. If you think of a loom, you see, where a man can watch -- four or five looms nowadays, you see, at one time, and only has to do something when something goes wrong at one machine, you -- we come very near this idea that the worker, more and more perhaps, will be the -- the man watching the machine. He will do little more. I understand this. But the idea is really to make him the guardian of the forces of nature.

But we are still very far behind with building into our humanistic tradition this simple fact: that when you enter a factory, you do not enter it as a person. You have to qualify that you are able to work in a team, as we call it. Now on a team, it isn't your person that matters. But the evenness, the -- being

able to run smoothly in the same way as others, your extraordinary effort is not -- only not wanted, but would be harmful and cumbersome.

And you know what a struggle now the -- is -- is still fought in the minds of very good people in this country who cannot reconcile their reminiscences of pioneering days, where every man just came out with his personal talents and gifts, and with this new situation where the machines demand regularity more than they need personality. And why we speak of labor, gentlemen, then is explained.

And this is the secret I wanted to offer you today as its -- to its meaning. That we have the abstract idea of labor is after all a very strange expression. We live today, as you know, in a terrible world in which you have Father Day, and Mother Day, and Youth Day, and Labor Day. And these are all abstractions. You shouldn't celebrate Labor Day and Mother Day as long as you have your own father and your own mother. The -- their birthday is the day to celebrate. It is terrible to find -- just for the hatmakers and the flower sellers to have -- to have a Father and a Mother Day. You really shouldn't try to avoid it,. But it comes from all the work we do, because the work has become labor.

In 1935, gentlemen, that -- let me be the finishing touch -- in 1935, the Supreme Court of the United States passed a verdict -- passed a judgment that labor was to be a commodity, to be sold over the counter. The vote was 5 against 4. And one of the four dissenting justices was Evans Hughes, the chief justice of the United States, a sturdy Republican. Not a Democrat. And he knew by that -- at that time that this would invite disaster, that Roosevelt had to do something against such an atrocious decision. And so next year came the middle of -- the packing of the courts. And in order to outrun Mr. Roosevelt, the -- the chief justice in a second case prevailed. And out of the majority of five, who had said that labor was a commodity became a minority of four. And five justices now in 1936 admitted that labor was not a commodity. They had found the solution -- the middle-wage solution. Labor is neither a person -- personal, nor is it a commodity. It is man himself in a different state of aggregate. It is man where three equals one. It is like a soldier on watch, where the people who man the watch are quite indifferent to the commander who puts 24 hours -- 24 men in a -- in a -- in a guardhouse, and says, "You man these watches. And how you do it, that's up to the sergeant there," you see.

-- This is the great story, gentlemen, of the reversal of the -- of the case against -- the State of New York, I think it was, against the people -- People against the State of New York -- on the -- onthe question, "Could there be a minimum wage?" You see, in the state of New York, and it was -- had to be debated on the question whether labor was a commodity, or whether it was not.

If it was a commodity, the government couldn't interfere with the prices of a commodity. Therefore there could be no minimum wage. If, however, a man went into a factory in person -- let us better say, himself, you see, if he did -- couldn't sell his commodity away from himself, then you could have a minimum wage, because the -- Constitution forbids to interfere with the selling and buying of goods.

So the peace of this country at that time depended on the wisdom of the chief justice of the United States and his influence on his colleagues. And when you hear the -- the -- this argued in your lecture courses in political science, you only hear the New Deal mentioned, and you hear mentioned the packing of the court, the idea that Roosevelt had that there should be new judges, younger judges.

Gentlemen, the real story is in this one decision. The real story is that -- that the people of this country, when they came to grips with the industrial problem in the Depression, found that the judiciary was lagging a hundred years behind the facts. The judges still thought, as in 1810, that labor was a commodity. They knew it was not personal, you see, when I worked in a factory. And they called it a commodity, which is begging the question, because how can I be here -- go into the factory, and have sold my labor as a commodity, you see? My legs, my genitals, my heart, my brain: they are all in the factory. So I cannot sell myself into slavery, obviously. So this whole fiction, that I sell my labor as a commodity, which probably is still in you -- many of your brains, is just iditic, absolutely idiotic, because it's -- suffers from a man his own existence while he is in this factory eight hours. You cannot sell part of your life, obviously, without enslaving yourself.

But this is still going on in many brains in this country. Fortunately the bench has long overcome this handicap. They have agreed to admit what we have implored them to admit for the last 50 years, that labor meets -- or finds -- takes man into a situation of uniformity with his -- the other men who man the same machine. That if working in shifts is the basic principle of industry, you see, the incessant running of the process -- what we call "process of production," then force is my quality as a human being inside the factory, because I am there used as -- with regard to the energy which must be -- seem to be inexhaustible. I must combine, therefore, as in a combine in the harvest season, with other men to achieve this constancy, this perpetuity.

And so here -- I leave this to you. Please begin to learn that as long as you call labor "labor," and think of it as a commodity, you are making for civil war, gentlemen, and you are making for Communism. And you can be a very good Republican citizen and still make for Communism if you treat your brother man

as selling a commodity called "labor" over the counter. There is no counter. There is no way of selling the state of aggregate into which I am transformed when I become a laborer. Just as you don a uniform when you become a soldier, and don't sell your service to your country, as a soldier, it's impossible to think, because you can be killed in action, so you agree when you enter a factory to abdicate your full personality and to become one of them. And that's all you do. But that's enough. And you have to learn, therefore, gentlemen, that man has different states of aggregate, like water, and ice, and steam, which is known to you in -- in nature, you see, so you too pass from a personal to an impersonal state. And if the factory is well run, you recover your personality unharmed, and un- -- un- -- unshaken. No harm done. You have just been somebody different while you were working there.

Thank you.