Transcript
{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this
This is our last week. And I promised you to take you back sufficiently far so that you could see this whole last century and-a-half perspective. But before doing so, and offering us thereby perhaps some more perseverance and some more patience than the usual life {of today is given}, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that there is an abundance of no- -- names and notions about modern man in industry and in production. And while we have, with regard to the people in the Church, and with regard to the public, rather a stereotyped expression, like "individualist," and -- and "congregation" in the Church, there is to -- to this day no common nomenclature with regard to the hard facts of life in industry.
I have put here a list at random. I t- -- warned you that people tried to understand industry by the shopworn political terms of "social democracy." Social democracy, you can split, of course, in "socialism" and "democracy," and then you get it -- both. It is not an accident that Low- -- that Norman Thomas, the socialist candidate, has given up socialism, as you know, recently, and said, "There was just no socialism in the United States." He could also have said, "We already have too much of it."
And the -- for the onlooker in Europe, I said to you, there is not much difference between Russian industrial system and American industrial system. We work from the bottom up, and the Russians now try to come from the top down. In their haste to -- to reach bottom--they haven't reached it, yet--but our big corporations have all, as I put here, become more of less public utilities. And they are giants of capitalism, or of technocracy, if they aren't monopolies or trusts.
Here you see, we have still floundering, or laboring, or vacillating several expressions to try -- which try to get behind the s- -- real secret of man in industry. And I put tentatively here a word which I recommend to your attention, which you rarely find, the word "forces." Of this we'll speak in a minute. This word "forces" on the part of the individuals who do the work--in industry, the employees--would then be balanced by another expression, "powers," on the other side. The powers today in industry are the -- usually mentioned the big corporations; but there's the government, there's the army, there are the col- -- the monasteries; there are the big landowners. So "powers" is the -- perhaps the correct term of expressing the new awareness that powers and forces, and not individuals, are needed to run our indus- -- -dustrial existence.
What I have to elucidate before going back in history, is the word "mass." I
have used it in the singular to draw your attention to the fact that we are strangely indifferent to the meaning of "masses" today. Just -- most people use it comparatively, de- -- pejoratively by saying, "Well, masses are just to be bribed, or to be intoxicated, or to be bought," or to be -- you see, treated as -- with sensations, to be -- to be lured, to be -- to be persuaded. You just have to think of The Hidden Persuader, this book written by this advertising devil and -- in -- in -- on the Hudson River. Who knows the book, The Hidden Persuader? Ja.
Well, they all treat man as a -- the basilisk does the -- the animals he wants to eat. They -- he stares at them until they voluntarily jump into his mouth.
Now the word "mass" -- however has a much more necessary and fruitful explanation, I think. The churchmen in the first thousand years of the Christian era knew very much about mass, massa. And they distinguished between the mass of perdition and the good mass, because "mass" means dough. It means just the dough out of which the bread is formed. And this original meaning is very important, because it is the good expression for the -- one of our greatest and abiding features which neither the republic of the United States, nor the Church takes much -- into account, that we are plastic. "Massa" expresses that side of us which enables circumstances to mold us.
Now in industry, in as far as it is true industry--that is, progressive and scientific--every technical process will be superseded by a more advanced process. That is, what we call "industry" cannot be compared to any form of production that had existed before -- till -- down to 1800 or 1850, because all former processes of industry were established with the idea that after this invention had been made, this building had been erected, this farm had been homesteaded, that it would go on from there for time immemorial in the same manner. Technical -- techniques didn't change down to 1800 in such a way as to impress people with the principle of science: that every one technological process has to give way to a better process. As you have accepted, the -- that from wood burning you go to gas burning, you go to electricity, and you go to oil burning, and you may go to the atom reactor.
-- In other words, the mortality of the means of production, the transiency of the specific means of production is the character of production in our era, wherever it is rightly grasped and treated. If you get any system of thought in industry, by which a corporation, for example, entrenches itself in its way of producing--I'm not speaking of the commodities it puts out, but -- its way of producing--it does wrong against the spirit of industry, and it is a sinner that has to be persecuted. You call it here trust-busting, or you call it monopolistic sen- -- tendencies. But I think they are much less dangerous, this aspect of the thing, a monopoly, than the simple question: can General Electric buy up an invention
by which an electric bulb can be produced more cheaply? Which they do.
Obviously that's treason, because the principle on which all this production line is pr- -- is based all over the world today is that it came into being in substitution, you see, in replacing a more antiquated process, and therefore, it itself comes into existence under the implication that it will recognize this law.
We had a great example of this international fact with the atom bomb, which the government of the United States thought it could keep a secret. In as far as it was a scientific discovery, that's impossible. Science belongs to the -- mankind. There is an equation, and it absolutely was abortive, the attempt. Five minutes later, it was known to the other side just as well. No such scientific secret can be kept in this modern world, because science -- and in this sense, democracy--or science and the community of mankind--are identical twins. Science came into being at the very moment when rational man, Sir, your favorite -- bugbear -- when rational man inherited from the Church the obligation of being universal man. This is not in -- in existence in Greece, in antiquity. That's why the Greeks had no modern science. That's one of the -- mistakes of all your textbooks. Plato was not a university professor, because it was a closed shop, a secret school which nobody could join who had different opinions, or who had progressive opinions beyond Plato. Platonism couldn't change. You expect from any university that it can change, that it can go on from one principle of a school to another principle. You take it for granted that this happens all the time here at UCLA.
So don't be betrayed. The Greeks had no modern science. It's one of the heresies of our textbooks, with their inclination of paganism, that they do not want to owe anything to the Christian era, and say "It's all -- ancient." They never had anything like a science, because they never recognized that a slave had the right to know as much as the king, and as the priest -- or as the philosopher. We don't believe this. Once the telephone, everybody can use the telephone, you see.
Any technical invention in our era is based on the principle that science is as universal as the belief in God. Our knowledge of the world corresponds to our belief in one god; one god, one world. The Hindus believe in many worlds. That's why they have castes. They have 136 castes, because there are any number of worlds in which the universe, so to speak, is scattered. It is very disagreeable for modern scientists to admit that they owe all their position in society to Christianity. But it is the truth. It's a Christian process, what we call "modern science," and it has inherited from Christianity that it is for all men. Because all men are the children of one creator. And therefore creation too is open to the whole world.
Now modern industry, every factory, every corporation, every inventor is in the midst of this stream with which we water the earth by our genius, by our spirit, by which we flood out all niches and corners of the land. Whether you get water here from the Colorado River, or whether you shoot satellites to the moon, or whether you fly in a jet plane with oil that has been shipped from Venezuela, the earth is one, and it is the Lord's. And it is no -- of no special denomination--in the widest sense of this word, "denomination"--nobody can hold any of these industrial processes under his name forever. A patent lapses after 10, 12, or 15 years, according to the countries, because it has to lapse within a lifetime, because you cannot hold any secret of nature to yourself, even financially, by copyright and royalty.
Wherever this principle has been violated, it has hurt the man who violated it more than anybody else. But you have today therefore in industry this problem: that the man who works in such a transient process must remain plastic. Nobody can--even the president of Standard Oil--cannot be guaranteed a lifetime position. He can be -- can be guaranteed money, like this Milton Berle, who gets till 1981, $150,000 a year. But perhaps the -- the company is broke by 1970. One doesn't know. With such a high salary, they have to pay, I don't know.
In money, you can -- guarantee yourself, but not in occupation. Because there is no arrangement today in the world, in the industrial world, in the technical world, in the world of production which can guarantee this process that exists today for the future. It has -- may have to be given up for some other technological process that is more adept.
We are in the midst of the struggle to make this law recognizable and to put it on the statute books. I know there are many sinners in all countries in industry, which try to prolong their prerogatives beyond the time of their technological leadership. That is, they say, "We will prevent the next process to come in." But I'm confident that they will be swept out, because the flood of this movement across the earth, to find the better and more realistic, and more econom- -- economic steps to exploit I think is irresistible -- "irrepressible," I would call it. There is not only an irrepressible conflict, but there is also--as in the Civil War it was called--but there is also this irrepressible co- -- substitution of one means of production for another. This is our only safeguard, gentlemen, by the way--and ladies--for our freedom. Not one of these industrial giants has a right to call himself immortal. The government of the United States cannot die, because there has to be government. But it is not true that we have to live by wood. We may have to live by plastics. And on it goes with plastics. I don't know what the next thing there will be.
We -- now at this moment live in the cellophane era. I hope we -- to see
the day when not everything has been wrapped so artificially into cellophane. It prolongs the agony when you open it. But that's just a -- a phase.
Everything then in industry is in phase, that is, transient. And therefore, the employees of industry are transient, too. Now it is the quality of mass, of dough, of moldable, plastic humanity as well as material, that it can recoil, that it has resilience, that after having -- used in a certain direction it can recoil and be used again in another direction. Employees in the modern world have to have this resilience. And that's why they are rightly called in a good sense, "mass." They are plastic, pliant. They can be re-employed, and re-deployed, as an army -- does in -- at the front. When a company is re-deployed, it means that it folds up, and goes in another direction.
And therefore all our social benevolences are -- would be quite wrongly placed if we would complain only about the fate of modern man that he has to be mass. In as far as he is used in production, that the fact that he is dough is an advantage and is a burden he carries for the rest of society. In any way in which you and I can adapt ourselves, you see, to a momentary need which is transient -- it may only last for five years as long as this kind of technology prevails, you see. In as far as we carry this burden and are willing to be molded, and then recoil, and take on our free and shapeless self again, in as far as we remain in this plasticity, we carry the -- man's burden on this earth. And it is not true to mourn over this aspect of mass. Whereas a farmer, or a doctor of old, or a minister did well to shape his profile in such a way that you could see from afar, "This is a farmer," and "This is a minister," we today have to be very anxious not to be shaped so pronouncedly in one way, because we do not know whether this society can make use of it -- of us, you see, 10 years from now in this same shape.
So I wouldn't call it "shapelessness" which is demanded from us. But I think the word "plasticity" is a -- expressing it very truly. It means that we have to be ready to be molded in a certain transient form.
The terrors of masses, which today people in political science bewail -- or in -- in the churches -- comes if this plasticity is carried over into other ways of life outside the processes of production. Which -- what is good in your professional activity obviously is a curse, if as a parent you are molded by your children. That's of course the mass movement we have today, that the teen-agers run the show, and that the parents have to order the food which the children command to have, because they get this -- this -- this -- in the lottery, they get so many bonuses.
So "mass" has two meanings: the indispensable meaning of a scientific way of producing the daily necessities of life. Please take this -- well to heart. You
find this nowhere, unfortunately, because masses today are treated wholesale, as though there was not a distinctive line to be drawn between the greatness of our way of producing things by masses, by moldable, plastic, transient forms of occupation. And the other, the transgression of masses, which happens always in -- in life, in society, that a thing that is good in its own place becomes horrible and leads to perdition and to annihilation of human values when it is allowed to overstep its limitations, you see, and enter other fields. In marriage, you cannot be mass.
I had this experience yesterday. I visited a family. They have a beautiful daughter of 17. The -- the mother is dying from multiple sclerosis. She'll have two years to -- to live. She -- wants to see this child of course started in life before she goes. The child has to go to an eastern college. They come from Greenwich, Connecticut, originally. She lives here only for the sake of the climate, the mother. And so the -- child of course has to go to college rigidly. She has to be one of the mass that goes to college today. She cannot nurse her ch- -- her mother. Her mother has a refugee girl to take care of her instead, a student here at UCLA, by the way. And the girl has to go, and I said -- to a fashionable college.
I said, "At least introduce this girl to some of your best friends, to their families, so that she has more a personal status over there. Since you cannot go -- have to -- had to leave the East. You still have friends. Please write her letters of introduction. Don't give this girl over to this -- to this, you see, mass production of brides, which we call today a college. And -- don't let her by accident meet -- meet the boy from Harvard." That's all she wants, of course. "But make her preserve her status, because when she enters the house of a friend of yours, she will be of course seen in the light of her real environment, and she will ma- -- be able to make a better choice, and the boy will see her in a truer light."
They -- didn't -- declined. That was too bothersome. Why ask their friends to receive the child? There's mass in the worst sense of the word. Here are people of -- with a background, with friends, and they do not even know what friends are for.
And I find this everywhere. This complete capitulation. You shelve this child, put her in the oven, you see, of the mass called today "college education," and there she is just treated as part of the dough. This is the mass of perdition against which the Ch- -- fathers of the Church had granted under the Roman caesars, and we are exactly in the same boat. That's wrong mass. Quite unnecessary mass. It comes just from the feeble-mindedness and the cowardice of the parents, who don't want to take any personal steps. They would -- don't want to particularize, so to speak. It's -- all has to be done with the general denominator.
Well, you find it in school, you find it in the Church, where nobody opens the mouth when the minister is a heretic, because you have all to take in good cheer, so the greatest nonsense can be preached from the pulpits, and they still think it's Christianity, because it is dreg -- Christian Church. And it's all mass.
I find mass today everywhere in the professions. You find it with the fashions of the doctors, who only know of the latest medicine. When you remind them that their grandmothers used a very good medicine, they say, "That's oldfashioned. You cannot use this." You can, I assure you, if you are not mass. If you haven't been molded over- -- rashly into -- just in -- into this accidental, transient form of modern medicine, which has forgotten all wisdom of the ages.
So give me any time a doctor who says, "I will not make use of an operation, and I will not make use of this latest -- antibiotic," and I bless him, because he's not a mass doctor.
Mass today has -- has, so to speak, an unlimited goal in fields where it doesn't belong at all. It is necessary in production. And there is -- is its nobility, and there i- -- are the rewards to be reaped. A worker who has to be molded, as a mere employee, a white-collar employee, that -- these are the worst. They have just to do what they are told; and they have no life of their own. And it -- the work means nothing in their own life. And they bear the brunt of -- at the firing line, so to speak, of our own survival. And I have great admiration for the starvation diet in which they are placed by the kind of work they have to do.
And I warn you to overlook the austerity, the asceticism, you see, that is higher today in work than it was in the old monasteries in the Middle Ages for a monk. The kind of work today is -- is this kind of asceticism which society demands from every member to a certain -- to a certain extent. What you have to -- to learn is to draw the line. In every moment, mass and mass of perdition are in -- so to speak, have to be disentangled. You always have to find ways and means of limiting this plasticity. And you have to know that mass is neither in itself bad nor good. But that there is mass that is needed and necessary, and there is mass that is of the devil.
So do not bandy around the word "masses," if you can help it. Begin to speak of "mass," and you suddenly will find yourself able to distinguish the spirits, you see. If -- soon as you de- -- learn to use the singular, "mass," I think, you no longer can bandy the -- around with "mass media," and so on. Mass media are quite unnecessary. They are just good for the advertiser. I mean, why shouldn't you have your -- capella choir in your own home? Why shouldn't you -- fiddle? Why must you listen to the music that is fabricated on -- in the air? I don't see this at all. If I -- I -- I think that you all should wake up to the fact that the music
is of your own making. And that any song sung by yourself is 10 times or a thousand times worth more than any symphony orchestra to which you listen over the air. There, mass is bad. Or at least, this is second-rate. You -- you can listen to the symphony orchestra, but only if you balance it by some activity in music on -- on your own part. He who never sings himself certainly doesn't deserve to be sung to.
So this facility, you see, which you have today in -- in enjoyment all the values of the whole world put before your feet, whether it's Tyrolean folk song, or Croatian folk's -- dance, or Bali strip-tease, or whatever it is, that's ridiculous. There you behave -- are molded, behave plastically, passively, where it is -- would be up to you to create the best dance and the best song yourself. There the word "masses" is lulling you to sleep. You have abdicated, and say, "It has to be mass media." I don't see it. I don't see it.
I saw a -- a picture of a policeman taking an ax, and demolishing--what was it?
({ }.)
Wie?
({ }.)
What? Juke boxes, yes. No, it was slot machines.
(Sheriff.)
Well, I hope one day he will go one day and -- and use the hammer, the ax for the juke boxes, and all the artificial music you hear, instead of making it yourself. You are all obliged to make the music yourself. What shall become of a world in which you are no longer tuning forks, and no longer the carrier of the -- of the voice of praise and delight, yourself? You think you can -- you can rent music?
This is the divine privilege of every human being to live musically, and to be rhythmically, and to breathe rhythmically. And you have to do this. And you cannot abdicate this; because the factories have mass production, so you have music mass production. There you have that the -- the line to be drawn between masses and mass -- necessary mass and quite unnecessary sandstorms of masses. In the field of the intellect, in the field of examinations, I mean, this whole business machines for -- used for students, you see. I told you the story of the girl who cannot graduate, because she was mistaken to be a male in this -- by the
punch machine, you see. So the -- she cannot graduate.
Now it is no accident, then, that such a new fact that industry is based on transient forms of using men and materials--based on transient forms--because it is scientific, and science is based on research; and research therefore brings about perpetual change. It is not an accident, I said, that the terms we shall find -- use for man in industry are still in forming. And I put these various words here, because I think that the final aus- -- -come will have to be, for very deep-seated reasons, forces. I think the word "labor forces" would explain, for example, what -- can be done for a worker in -- in industry and what cannot be done for him in industry. He cannot become a person in industry. That's an illusion. But he can be treated -- he hasn't to be treated just as mass, but as a force, which I think has some higher status. And this is what I now have to try to explain.
Before I however go to this, I want you to understand that this moldability, this plasticity of the masses of course corresponds to a kind of rigidity on the employer's side. We have today, instead of employers, as you well know, corporations. That is, we have legal persons. And it is the great irony of the 14th Amendment that what was officially said to be for the Negro was used to en- -- enable the corporations in this country to -- occupy the nation -- a nationwide market. Founded in one state, they quoted the 14th Amendment and said, "You cannot in any other of the 47 states," you see, "hinder us to sell, and to trade, and to work, and to produce, because the 14th Amendment protects any member, you see, any person." And they said that the legal person was a person in the sense of the 14th Amendment.
Now in the erection of corporations, gentlemen, you really touch a background of history that has nothing to do with our own days. The idea that there can be legal persons is a very strange one. What's strange about a legal person? You and I, we all must die. And against our horrible qualities--every human being has horrible qualities--there is one big ward, and one big remedy: we have to die. Even the worst of us, one day it's over with. And that's I think very wholesome for the regeneration of the human race, and of human society, that we cannot last, that we are mortal.
The legal person is immortal. And that is a fantastic idea, to tell you the truth. In a transient society, as we have it, of scientific change, of the news every day, things change even more rapidly than our lifetime. In our lifetime, we have seen these changes. And there we establish, in the middle of the flood, legal persons that cannot be overtaken by death. This idea has not grown up in our own society. I think our own society would have been quite unable to conceive of an idea of the perpetuity of anything, because we are adamantly set against it. We don't want such a thing. Everything must be of today. And if -- the lady ca- --
who came from California back to our church, entered the church one Sunday before I left there, and cried out in -- violently, "What a rotten place! This carpet has been here 20 years ago," when I left for California. So she considered already a church, you see, completely obsolete, because the carpet -- the rug was 20 years of age.
I think if this happens in a church, where the bones of St. Peter, you see, lie in the ground now in Rome since 67 of our era, and our -- the Church is therefore very venerable -- especially venerable, you can see what happens in -- in the industrial environment, the firms should disappear. They should have a lifetime of five years, 10 years, then go out of business. As they all do, I mean. If you look really into the history of these legal persons; they have amalgamated; they have been swallowed up; they are owned by a holding company. They change their existence all the time. You cannot recognize it. You go by any name of a firm, then you suddenly are told that they are owned by somebody quite different, you see, somebody else. As I heard -- I learned this first about Sears, Roebuck, I was really -- really quite depressed, because Sears, Roebuck was such a -- as you know, such a -- a -- a household word. And there was no Sears, there was no Roebuck, you see. And at best, you knew the name of the manager.
The corporation owns its existence to the traditions of the Church. It was the Church that demanded to be recognized as immortal in the flux of feudal -- chieftains and kings who came and go, where even the dynasties died out, where the children in the cradle already died, where you had a children's mortality of human beings, that the average age of man was 22. In those days, something had to remain and abide. And it -- were those places that have been sanctified by the death of some martyr, where God had spoken: "Here a good man died; here the -- the -- the bo- -- the soil is sanctified."
The first step came in the development of civil law, beyond the stage of inheritance, litigation for inher- -- I told you, was the building up, the founding of corporations in the Church that would be immortal. Litigation over inheritance is the first legalized order in society. And the second was the -- the in- -- interposition, you may say, the imposition on this life of flux, and of mere discipline, and of mere oral law and custom by the written documents which gave churches like--here the missions, for example, San Ju- -- Juan de Capistrano, or so--permanency. Regardless of who functions there, the corporations were made permanent.
That is, the second act of -- of civil law which was invented, you may say, between 500 and 1000 of our era, in the main--or 1100 of our era--was a very creative period in that it established all the big cathedrals of Europe, all the monasteries of which the names -- is still familiar to you. If you think of Chartres
and Saint-Michel, the famous book by -- by Henry Adams, it is directed towards an era in which not the dynamo of the factory prevails, as you know, but he opposes the dynamo of the factory to the corporations of the saints in the Middle Ages. Who has read Henry Adams? Oh, is this already gone by? You haven't read it? Have you heard of him? Oh, read it.
The -- I think for -- any -- any American, it is very important to be confronted with the fact that there is the corporate life, you see, which in a day of haste, in a day of unhealthy warfare, epidemics, plagues, is able to stem the tide of time. And you -- we here today, who are healthy, who never die, who have an incredible expectation of life, we live a life of hectic change. And we are quite surprised that there are these strange entities called corporations, which have inherited the authority of the dead hand of the Church: not to die, to be eternal, to be -- to be immortal.
Let me dwell for a moment on this. I will give you then more chapters. The law of marriage is the third chapter in the history of the civil law. The law of contract -- or of the market place is o- --that's the only one of which you have any notion--came in, let us say, in 1600; that's of course a little too precise; you can also put it in 1500--and lasts to this day, or you may say, to the world wars. It ended when the Russian Revolution broke out, and when our war industry made it impossible to treat the worker in peace, just like a cog on the wheel, when the dole, when the unemployment insurance and so became necessary, because the same men who were unemployed also had served in the war and therefore had to be kept as members of the republic, of -- of the commonwealth. That's the great story of the two world wars, by which the American laborer entered the realm of society in his own right, because if you ask a man to serve as a conscript in the army, you cannot let him starve at peace times.
So we have today unfolding before us the civil law for masses. And this way, we can already express this, {"express the need."} Let me s- -- tell you a little bit about the first and the second period now. Do I have still any time left? Ja.
What I try to tell you is, that in any of these 4- or 500 years of legal history and economic development, all thinking was around one principle, prevailingly. Today, as I told -- we saw, the contract between a woman and his -- the laundry, was explained in terms of free contract. And you will s- -- remember that these old judges in 1935 still held that a minimum-wage contract -- law could not be imposed, because women were free bargainers, so they acted just as anybody who buys and sells on the market place. You couldn't interfere with this. And it took 15 years of hard struggle, and a change of heart among these judges of the Supreme Court to convince people that women were not real bargaining parties on the market place, where you buy food and where you buy laundry, but that
they were something different. What, they didn't quite know. But they felt, "We cannot force the law of the market place on these people." That's all we know today, so to speak, officially. The judges would be hard-put if they would have to explain what these women are really doing, you see. They have no new philosophy, but they have at least given up the old.
The overextension of the principle of the market place then may show you that we are this moment, here, at the break of thinking in terms of Chapter 4 of civil law, you see, and trying to grope for the problems of the masses, of labor forces. And it is a very -- great moment in the history of the human spirit, but you will not do him justice, if you think it's a change from the Cold War into the Warm War, into the Hot War, into the Green War. It is a change from 500 years or 400 years of thinking into I hope a period of another 400 years. You -- I feel that you are all starved by thinking in terms of the next year or the next 10 years. Give that up. For a student of mankind, or the student of history, these horizons which you have of the future cheat you out of all historical perspective.
Would you take this down? A man has exactly as much past as he has future. And he has as much future as he has past. If you have 5,000 years' background in your knowledge about cave man, and you have no faith in the next 400 years, you mis- -- can -- must misread history completely. You cannot have despen- -- despondency about the next 10 years of a third world war, or whatnot, or Communism coming or what-not, and -- and understand history. You can only understand that much past that you project also into the future.
Now I feel very much at ease, because my future is just as long as my past. And you have no understanding of history whatsoever. I've convinced myself of this in -- through all your papers--because you have no future in your { }. You don't believe that you should already make arrangements for your great-grandchildren. Great-grandchildren? You laugh, you see. Probably won't have any, although you all produce children -- now en masse. But what do you offer them? Just physical existence, pablum, and vitamins. That's no future. That's ridiculous. Or perhaps a stratospheric science, with oxygen pumped into their lungs artificially. Where's the future in your vision, in your poetry, in your novels, Sir? That's the problem of the poet. They have no future. They are all existentialists. They are all despondent. It's all A la Recherche de Temps Perdu.
Severely decadent. That's what this country is at this moment. Decadence means to believe more in the past than in the future.
So still it is a great moment, because it's up to every one of you to see that we must think now about modern masses in industry in terms that have nothing to do with the market place. The life of a young man at -- of 18 who has to spend
50 years coming, as a clerk, is a serious problem. And it certainly cannot be solved by entering contracts. Be it -- be it union contracts, or -- is -- his career, his remaining resilient, his remaining a human being depends obviously on quite a different way of thinking. This -- exactly this problem was -- has happened five times before, or four times before -- or -- five times before.
Originally, I told you, people lived by discipline, by iron discipline. They formed an army, a marching army, these migratory tribes, for example, you see. But when a -- the chieftain died, they stopped everything. They went to great lengths, of course, of burying him with his -- half of his fortune, and the other half had to be distributed. But more than that. At that time, the litigation over inheritance meant the succession into his office. The king, the chieftain, the judge, the general, the colonel, the captain, you see, the farmer, they had to find somebody who took care of the -- his business, of his office. We have divorced this today. Under the law of the market place, we divide his money. But he has been retired from his office long before, and his successor comes, you see, not under the -- so much under the civil law, when you think of it, but the election of the board of directors, you see, of a new chairman. But it's the same problem. Only we have split it up into the law of the market place here, and the law of succession and inheritance there.
In the first era of our law, of our humanity, this was all one. And you see it very clearly from one problem. All laws of contract at that time were solved as problems of adoption. If you wanted to give money to a person, you couldn't give it to him. You had no right to do this. But if you adopted him to be your heir, he could, so to speak, fictitiously, you see, by this ceremony share your fortune. So everything in antiquity, what had to be done outside the family -- of -- blood relation, was done by adoption. You find that from the very beginning, the oldest legal rule, so to speak, and legal fictions were those of adoption. By -- course, by adoption, you could give a man a place in -- in the family, in society, which he hadn't by birth.
And so perhaps I'm -- this one example may suffice. I do not know, if you have such training in your thinking so far, it is difficult, perhaps. I want to say -- say, it is possible to develop a whole system of human relations around the problem of making a will and having a successor by inheritance, because you can expand among the living, by -- legal fiction all these processes through -- by which you become the heir of somebody -- by which you become the successor.
I always say that our vice-president is a last remnant of this phase, you see. We adopt him as a successor. He's nobody in his own right, except Mr. Nixon, of course, who's very much in Mr. Eisenhower's right. But that's the first time in the history of the vice-presidency. And that's a change in the Constitu-
tion. So far, the vice-president was held in abeyance as the heir presumptive, you see, for the emergency. And every country, even the wildest democracy, needs one such rule about the successor for an emergency. And you have there the rudiment of the old law of succession, which by the -- election of the vice-president, is secured. And that it is a law -- law of succession comes out by the very fact that no vice-president can be nominated against the will of the president. It has always been the ritual that the president has the last word to say about the vice-president.
That shows you that -- here is the father and his son, a king and his crown prince. And you must understand that there can be no constitution in the world which has not this one monarchical feature of succession. It is an error, which is only too prevalent in this country, that this is a democracy pure. All good government is mixed government. And every government contains element of monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and dictatorship. Our president is dictator in times of war; and Lincoln emancipated the slaves as dictator, in no other -- capacity. And he knew it, and it had been prophesied by John Quincy Adams 30 years earlier, that this would have to be the way of freeing the slaves.
A commander-in-chief always is a dictator. Has to be. That's war. There's no time to wait. A successor has to be a found person, you see. You can't have a vacancy. A judiciary has to be aristocratic, because you -- a judge must qualify. Aristocracy is where the owners of a privilege or a position decide who can join them. Any club is aristocratic, because they ballot the member in. That is, those who are the members decide who shall be the next member. That's -- has nothing to do with democracy. Free Masons are an aristocratic institutions -- institution. Of course, they are. They are a club. Where you ballot in, by the existing membership, the standard is protected by those who are in, you see, and they raise the -- the incoming member to their standard. This is aristocratic principle.
So please understand that when I talk now of succession, I'm talking even today of something that is still vital in our society, despite the inheritance tax. Succession today is the burning issue for the corporations. They cannot find successors in the bigness of their -- of their businesses, because -- you know who has to be a successor? That's a very simple rule of which the ancients knew and of -- which you today have forgotten.
There are no successors in General Motors or in Ford to be had, because you -- the successor can never be a yes-man. A yes-man is always a subaltern. And if you take your successor because he flatters you, or he's nice to you, you make the wrong choice. It is absolutely no reason to make that person into the successor who pleases you. Quite the opposite. The most displeasing fellow is very -- more -- much more apt to be your successor than anybody else, because
he doesn't care for you. And that's the quality you need. He must be a man who doesn't care for you. But he can do the job. And -- usually you are independent, and that's why you are valuable -- wherever you are. And therefore, you must look for a man who prefers to do the job to paying lip service to your majesty.
And as soon as a democracy has to be flattered, it has no successors. And that's the case, I mean. It's already -- for the last 30 years has been the great question mark. How can you get -- presidents who are not photogenic, but who are ugly, and who are unpleasing, like Grover Cleveland? That's a good president. He didn't please anybody. -- A president has to be unpleasant. That's his business. Do you think you can smile and smile, and then be hard against the Russians? It's just ridiculous.
Every qualification you now demand from a president speaks against him, because the whole law of succession has fallen in- - into oblivion. But I assure you that thousands of years of mankind--not just the last -- 500 years from -- from Christian -- birth of Christ to 500, but before, of course--all thought, all fruitful thought, has centered around this question: who can succeed? Because the great fear of mankind was our mortality. And here was a -- a deserving general. There was a good king. There was a good prince. There was a prophet. Who -- how do we replace the man? Obviously the henchmen were the ones who must not succeed him, you see, because they were henchmen. And wherever the henchman come -- runs up, you are in trouble.
I have to stop here. I'm sorry.