[00:00.49]In man's early days. competition with other creatures must have been critical.
[00:06.69]But this phase of our development is now finished.
[00:10.41]Indeed, we lack practice and experience nowadays in dealing with primitive conditions.
[00:16.90]I am sure that, without modern weapons, I would make a very poor show of disputing the ownership of a cave with a bear,
[00:24.96]and in this I do not think that I stand alone.
[00:28.76]The last creature to compete with man was the mosquito.
[00:33.09]But even the mosquito has been subdued by attention to drainage and by chemical sprays.
[00:39.72]Competition between our selves, person against person, community against community, still persists, however; and it is as fierce as it ever was.
[00:50.58]But the competition of man against man is not the simple process envisioned in biology.
[00:56.70]It is not a simple competition for a fixed amount of food determined by the physical environment, because the environment that determines our evolution is no longer essentially physical.
[01:08.89]Our environment is chiefly conditoned by the things we believe.
[01:13.29]Morocco and California are bits of the Earth in very similar latitudes,
[01:18.74]both on the west coasts of continents with similar climates, and probably with rather similar natural resources.
[01:27.52]Yet their present development is wholly different,
[01:30.85]not so much because of different people wish to emphasize.
[01:42.64]The most important factor in our environment is the state of our own minds.
[01:48.08]It is well known that where the white man has invaded a primitive culture, the most destructive effects have come not from physical weapons but from ideas.
[01:59.41]Ideas are dangerous.
[02:01.77]The Holy Office knew this full well when it caused heretics to be burned in days gone by.
[02:08.22]Indeed, the concept of free speech only exists in our modern society
[02:13.81]because when you are inside a community, you are conditioned by the conventions of the community to such a degree that it is very difficult to conceive of anything really destructive.
[02:25.71]It is only someone looking on from outside that can inject the dangerous thoughts.
[02:32.12]I do not doubt that it would be possible to inject ideas into the modern world that would utterly destroy us.
[02:40.07]I would like to give you an example, but fortunately I cannot do so.
[02:45.41]Perhaps it will suffice to mention the unclear bomb.
[02:49.60]Of making the effect on a reasonably advanced technological society, one that still does not possess the bomb,
[02:57.23]of making it aware of the possibility, of supplying sufficient details to enable the thing to be constructed.
[03:05.33]Twenty or thirty pages of information handed to any of the major world powers around the year 1925 would have been sufficient to change the course of world history.
[03:17.62]It is a strange thought, but I believe a correct one, that twenty or thirty pages of ideas and information would be capable of turning the present-day world upside down, or even destroying it.
[03:30.85]I have often tried to conceive of what those pages might contain,
[03:35.68]but of course outside the particular patterns that our brains are conditioned to, or, to be more accurate,
[03:43.57]we can think only a very little way outside, and then only if we are very original.
