Richard Heffner Talks With; 10; Nicholas Samstag

Mr. Samstag, I was just looking back at your book, The Uses of Ineptitude, then your subtitle, or How Not to Want to Do Better. And I was fascinated by this little bit in your forward, where you say there are many truths, motivation is a coaxial, cable woven of many strands, and you say then one of those strands is that all my life I have had a tropism toward the negative and pessimistic. Habitually I see the seamy side first. All too often tacked and diplomacy looked to me amazingly like hypocrisy and can't. It is first nature for me to probe behind the friendly handshake, the bony smile, the I shouldn't say bony smile, I should say bony smile, but perhaps I really correct me. The gracious gesture where I find not always, but almost always, the clenched fist, the fixed jaw of the beaded trap. Is this the motivation of the book and things you write generally?

Well as I tried to say, it's a motivation. I think it's very hard to figure out what one's motivations are, or certainly what another person's motivations are. One of the ways of describing the human predicament today would be to say that everybody thinks he has the answer to everybody else's motivations and to sure that he has the answer to his own. I'm not sure that anybody knows why he does anything except that there are a great many reasons. Now one of the reasons why I write, why I talk, why I have the by-particular stance toward or against life is that I am more than other people I suspect, annoyed, exasperated, sickened by Kant and hypocrisy, probably because I have a tremendous tendency to go in that direction myself. I have must have made some sort of a pact with my soul at some time that I wouldn't give in to that particular greed and therefore I have been aware of it, the temptation every

time in a rose. I see red, I get very angry when people are obviously hypocritical. The least they can do when they're being hypocritical is to be graceful about it is to pay their audience the tribute of being careful, at least make the smile look as if it were a smile. Most of our men in public office, if not all of them and I can't think of an exception, maybe that's part of the bad bargain of running for public office, develop this wrinkling of the face in certain patterns as part of their profession and they don't even bother to wrinkle it correctly. There is a way of looking when you kiss a baby. If you can't look that way, if you can't take the trouble to look that way, you wouldn't to kiss the baby. You've only this with television, you could demonstrate the proper way of kissing a baby. No, I couldn't because I can't stand babies, nothing under two years old, they smell. Mitt, perhaps this is why you didn't go into politics.

That might be. It might be also, I don't like people very much, which is another reason. I like persons, but I don't really like groups of people. And why write? Because I can't think of anything else to do to keep me amused quite as much as writing to us. And that's the true answer. I've tried everything else. There's another thing that keeps me amused, but I'm getting older. Too old? Just older. All right, I won't pursue that, but I will go back to this tropism toward negativism and pessimism. One of the interesting things on this program is that it seems so clear that most of the people who have appeared to have atropisms, so it seems to me, in precisely the opposite direction toward an optimism, toward a kind of, perhaps even a polyanish attitude. Is this the distinction between those in public life and those who write? No, I think you're right. I think most people have atropism toward the optimistic point of view, because they are being so pointed, so pressed upon, so pressured by our times.

Our times are the good guy times. One of the epigrams in this book I brought with me says, the good guy is the enemy of America. I think he is. Everybody is expected to say nothing but good things about everyone, and consequently good things about everyone are a glut on the market. Nobody is there to point out the bad things. If you point out the bad things, you're anti, and somehow it's supposed to be bad to be anti. But 5,000 people, 4,999, are saying nothing but nice things in public, this is, about their friends, about their institutions, about the communities where they live, the colleges where they go. They don't mean them, but they know it's expected of them, and so they say them. When you talk about Kant and hypocrisy and your concern for them, are you suggesting that this is peculiar to 20th century America or mid-20th century America?

Are you suggesting that we were less hypocritical, less involved in Kant when we were boys? Well, you give me a wonderful opening there. I believe that hypocrisy is the cement, which holds together the rocks or the boulders that make power, and that as a civilization becomes more powerful, as an individual becomes more powerful, and not only becomes necessary for him to use more hypocrisy, it becomes necessary for him to use a better grade of hypocrisy. But without hypocrisy, which is a word that covers the multitude of virtues as well as sins, tacked as hypocrisy, courtesy is hypocrisy, diplomacy is hypocrisy. If hypocrisy is what you do not mean, when you come into a room and you say, I'm so delighted to see you, while in your heart you're saying, oh my God, this guy's going to spoil the evening for me, that's hypocrisy, although it's courtesy, to say you had a lovely dinner

when you haven't so many people do, that's hypocrisy. Good or bad? I'm not making a moral judgment, I'm observing that it's hypocrisy and that you have to have it. The only thing I object to is that the people who use it call it something else, they call it sincerity. Now, just a minute, you say the only thing you object to is calling a spade something other than a spade. You mean hypocrisy if properly labeled is acceptable to you? Not even labeled, labeled would imply an outer observer. If properly appraised by the user, I have no objection to it at all, I admire it as a matter of fact. It is one of the tools with which one constructs one's life, builds a career, gets along with one's friends, smooths the difficult course of matrimony and non-matrimony, it's very important, but it's so easy to fool yourself into thinking that these things which you say and do and don't mean are truths, and as soon as you've done that you're lost.

You know, I remember years ago when we first knew each other, came to know each other. I remember being so impressed by your continuing concern with this matter of power, and then as I read your later books, and I read what you have to say about hypocrisy and Kant, and I hear what you have to say about the seeming necessity for hypocrisy. I had the feeling that you were turning in another direction, now you seem to be going back to justifying this hypocrisy, this Kant in terms of structuring power. It is all right when it builds power because power is good. Is this what you say? Oh no, I'm not saying that. The thing that people will not accept in my books and I don't much care because I used to it, is that I have no moral point of view in these books at all. I just want people to know what they're doing. I don't think power is bad or good. I think it is. I think some powers get bad and some power is good, but I can't tell which it may turn out in a thousand years, that the greatest thing that ever happened to the human race was

Napoleon. I think is a beast to be compared with Mr. Hitler, although he is not compared with Mr. Hitler. People patting their lives on the methods of Napoleon. Now who am I to say whether power is good or bad, but it is power and you can recognize it when you're in its presence or read about it or think about it, and one of its greatest tools, one of its most important tools, is hypocrisy, which is the art, only sometimes it isn't used as an art, of making believe that you feel something that you do not feel. You make believe with your face, you make believe with your voice and you make believe with your actions. Now if you know what you're doing, that's all right with me. But I think it's dangerous, it's not hypocrisy in terms of what it does to the outer world, but in terms of what it does to those who practice it, who fail to admit that that's what it is. What does it do? I think it undermines all their sense of values. I think they don't any longer know what is good or bad. But you're not concerned about bad.

I think they become a happy hot dog, and therefore all sorts of disastrous things can occur as are occurring in our country at the moment, because we are very powerful. But what's the matter with happy hot dogs? If you say you have not passed judgment, if you do not take a position that is moralistic one way or the other, why are you concerned with the failure of values within the individual? Because it might affect me and my children. But then let's go back to the basic point. You are concerned with moral values. Only as it affects me. Passing judgment good and bad upon power as it is present. As it affects me. But I'm not sure that I can tell whether it's affecting me for the better or the worse. I know how I react at the moment. I know that my reactions can very often be false. I can resist like hell something which is very good for me. I can reach my arms out for something which will do me in. Let me go back to this matter of the seeming inevitability of the growth of hypocrisy and the spread of hypocrisy, lie, can't dishonesty.

As we get older, as we presumably mature, as we get more powerful, as a society does, I think this is what you are saying, that there seems to be an inevitable juxtaposition of growing hypocrisy. Not older but more powerful. I think it's older too because age often brings with it power. The elders of the Presbyterian church I've always thought of, for example, as outstanding as the Quack Salvers, which is one of my favorite words, I think that you have to watch that as you grow older because you grow more powerful and people listen to you. It's a danger at any age, it's a danger if you're young and strong, it's a danger if you're middle aged and rich, and it's a danger if you're old and holy. Old and holy, you're equating this with power. Yes, indeed I am. There is no greater power than to be old and holy. What about a nation then? What about this nation? Are you assuming that as we grow more powerful, we grow more hypocritical at this honest? Indeed.

Because as we grow more powerful, we have more to conserve, more to lose, more reason not to be adventurous. Why can't these things be done honestly? Why can't one conserve honestly? Why can't one defend oneself and grow honestly? Why? I never asked that question. There's no answer. I once said to someone and I don't say it to you, I say it's the idiot's question because we don't know why we're here, we don't know what we are. Someone once said we may be a butterfly dreaming that we're men. How do I know why? Well, I hardly know what. If I were to ask you a question, you're asking you a question about the growth of hypocrisy as a nation grows, you seem to be able to answer why. Why disturbs you when it seems to me when there is an answer you don't want to give? I take and turn around. If you're accusing me of inconsistency, I admit to inconsistency. I also admit to my inability to wrap my mind around these abstract questions with any degree of finality.

I mumble and grow and try to find the answers. There are no answers. The hypocrites will give you the answers. All right. You stop me there. I don't want to stop you. I really feel very sincerely about this. My major reason for doing this at all, the major reason why I'm here is because I'm trying to avoid being bored to death. There is no other reason. I don't expect to make any money out of this. You mean to say that if you weren't sitting here this afternoon, Mr. Samstag, you would be being bored to death. I can't believe it. No, no. I don't think that's true because I have perfected somewhat the art of avoiding being bored to death. But this is a new thing for me to do, for having done this for two years. So at least it's like going back to Egypt where I haven't been for three years. But I'm not going to withdraw quite so quickly from this area of discussing what you seem to feel as a necessary relationship between the growth of power and the growth of hypocrisy. Suppose one were to agree with this.

What do you see in store then for this country as it grows in power? The same thing that was in store for our own. Go ahead. I think that Justice Toyneby does, that I think that's what he thinks, that the story of history is the story of civilizations or powers that grow into K. And I think this one will decay. I think it's decaying now. I think that part of growth is decay. I think the minute that you were born you started to die, which of course is not a new philosophical thought. I think the moment that a civilization or a nation arises from surrounding barbarism or arises from the ruck of its compires, it begins to descend. And we have begun to descend. We will not be here forever. One of the signs of, I was told this once, I wish I could remember who told it to me. One of the signs of age is a lessening in your sense of fear. The young links in the jungle is constantly scared to death. His whiskers tremble, his nerves are tight, the slightest sound that is outside of the

normal environment, the slightest scent has him jumped one side. As he gets older and more powerful, and his synapses are covered with calluses, and he's been everywhere and seen everything, it takes a lot to get him excited, and pretty soon something eats him up and he's gone. I think this happens to people, good and stows, it's a good idea because otherwise they'd be around too long, and I think it happens to nations. I think it's happened to our nation long ago. I think that the situation we are now confronted with is the situation of an old and overconfident man who has forgotten what can happen to him. And it didn't take very long for us, it took longer, I guess, for the British Empire, and still longer for Rome. And maybe when France takes over, if she's going to be next, or South Vietnam, if that's going to conquer the world, it'll only be five years, instead of 50 years or 100 years. But this is a characteristic of age, this business of we are sure, we are confident, we

are moving here, we are moving there. We forget everything we ever learned in the dangers of our youth. We stick our necks into open traps, somebody's going to cut them off. So what is a function of age, not just of power? It's a function of age and power. But I believe that you cannot build power without hypocrisy. I think it's absolutely necessary. I believe that you can't build a life without hypocrisy. I'm not against hypocrisy, this is the thing that is so difficult to get across. It's all through my book, and very few people ever see it. If I take a copy and underline it, and green ink, then they see it. But I am not against hypocrisy at all. I merely say that you oughtn't to fool yourself. You ought to know inside yourself what you mean. Now sometimes you can't, but that's the only struggle that's worth undergoing, is to try and find out who you are, and part of who you are is what you believe. Now you don't have to tell the world what you believe.

It's all right to tell this girl that she's the most beautiful girl you ever saw, because you wanted to go on a weekend with you to Atlantic City, but you ought to know better. If you believe that she's the most beautiful girl you ever saw, every time you ask a girl to go to Atlantic City with you, you're an idiot. But these people act that way. I have heard so many thousands of men in business, very successful men, come and pump other men's hands and say, this is the greatest thing you ever did. Five times in a month, the greatest thing you ever did. Inside himself, the man whose hand is being pumped, could well be saying to himself, this is the greatest thing I ever did, I wasted my life. Instead of that, he looks the other man in the eye and says, thank you. This is praised from Sir Hubert if he knows the quote, which I doubt. And he doesn't mean it, and the man who's pumping his hand doesn't mean it, and nobody means it. It's just a way of rubbing flesh. And your concern here is not with the exchange of untruths? No. Instead, the both of these men believe what they're saying and shouldn't.

Why write about hypocrisy and can't then? To entertain myself. All right. I'm sorry. I come back to that all the time. Fair enough. And rather, you've told me that you're a new book that you're doing is entitled Bamboozled. That's right. Which is the story of how the advertising agencies and advertising professionals have deceived, built, bamboozled business. Not the consumer. Not the consumer. That's another book. And Eric Hodgons has written the introduction to this book, has suggested in his introduction that I write a second book on that subject. But let Eric write that. I'm not sure I want to think about advertising that much more. But the major thing about why book, if there is anything major about it, is that I don't know anybody else who's written a book on this subject. And it's going to be extremely unpopular with the advertising agencies. The major thing about the book, the major thing about the situation is that businesses men want to be bamboozled.

Into believing that advertising is effective. In believing ten delusions, which are listed in my book, the book opens with a story about a trip my wife and I made to Egypt, which I referred to earlier. And we went to Luxor, where everybody goes. We stopped at the Winter Palace Hotel where everybody stops and we were there for about a week, which is about why everybody does. And then we were leaving and they handed me the bill and they had jipped themselves. They had jipped themselves of about 75% of what we owed them. If it should have been a hundred piasters, they were charging us twenty-five piasters. So I pointed it out to them, to the cashier, who up to that time, it's spoken perfect English. Suddenly he couldn't understand my English. So he called one of the managers over and the manager who was a man who great polish didn't know what I was talking about apparently. I began to feel silly the way you do when you're trying to force money on people that don't want to take it.

And the concierge came over and listened for a minute and then touched my shoulder and drew me aside and said, you should pay them. You should pay them. They do not want to be wrong. Now this is the essence of my book, American businessmen have been wrong for so long about the way that they advertise. They have invited advertising agencies to deceive them for so long that they don't want them to learn the truth. They have a vested interest in believing certain things that aren't so. One of them, for example, just to wet your appetite, which is not easily wettable, is that the agency spends the client's money in the best possible way. For the client, of course it doesn't. It spends its money in the best possible way for the agency. Now nobody says this. You don't go to an agency which is famous for preparing good television programs and expect them to recommend radio. They don't have a radio department.

This is worth a damn. And they're not going to hire a whole radio department or not to prepare radio programs for you. So what you get is a very carefully worked out rationalization why all your money should go into television. Well, now of course you're talking about the details of technique. Always. Am I to understand too that you're suggesting that advertising itself, even when done in your terms appropriately, on radio when it should be radio, on television when it should be television, that advertising itself is not all that it has been cracked up to be. Cracked up by whom? Of course. By the advertising agency. Of course it isn't all that ought to be cracked up to be. My rationalization for advertising, which is also in the book, is the only one I can live with, which is as follows that the comparison, the assembly, metaphor, is a girl who is very attractive and who has a lot of money. And there are 12 men who are trying to marry her.

And she knows that every one of them is lying. Now the girl is the consumer and the 12 men are the advertisers. Now the girl has the right to hear what these men say. Even though she knows they are lying. It is better than being forced into the arms of one by a tyrannical father. And the men have the right to say anything they want, even though they lie. As long as they don't cause trouble, do damage to someone else, and that's what we've got government for, supposedly, to stop that. So they all lie. Every one of them. The one that lies the least tells a half truth. He just tells the truth about his product or service, which is to his advantage to have known, but he leaves out all the other things that are not to his advantage. So he's lying too, because a half truth is the most difficult kind of lie. But now you're talking about the relationship of advertiser to consumers. That's right. And that's what I thought you meant. Well, I meant first the relationship of advertising agency to the advertiser, to the sponsor, to the person who sells his goods.

Are you suggesting that advertising is ineffectual? No, advertising is all too effectual. All too effectual? All too effectual, as far as I'm concerned. Well then the bamboozled refers to what, just the techniques? No, the bamboozled refers to the fact that it could be even more effectual. I don't think it should be more effectual, but the businessmen do. And the businessmen are putting their money into advertising in order to get the maximum amount of sales response out of it. They are getting a great sales response out of it in many cases, but they could do every so much better if they weren't being fooled by various delusions, fostered in them, and they want them fostered in them by advertising agencies. So now why do you not want them to be more effectual? I think our civilization is too ridden now by things. Now we get back to this other effect, thinking of America, if you will, as an American citizen and a human being. I think that if we didn't race around after the latest model of cars, it's a cliche.

If we weren't constantly buried up to our neck in possessions, we might get interested in some things that are more important than possessions. And I think it's like carbon dioxide in the air. Carbon dioxide isn't poisonous, as you know, but it drives the oxygen out of the air. And you can't breathe after a while because there's too much carbon dioxide. Well, we've got too many billboards on them on the highways. We've got too many different radios and televisions in our home. We have too many gadgets to repair on our weekends, so that we haven't got any time to make friends with our children or talk to our gods or sit alone and ruminate. And I think this is partly the fault of advertising. But I don't think it's basically advertising's fault. I don't think it's anybody's fault. I think it's what happens when a civilization starts to decay. I think it's probably what happened in Rome. I keep saying. You think Rome had an ad man, too? I think Rome had an ad man, too. I think a lot of the Romans were great ad men, so do you.

Well, now... Look at Nero. I mean, where was there a theme song? Like Nero. Nero, my god, do they? Forget me. Forget me. I shouldn't say that we not fiddle around with this, but let's go back just for a moment so that I understand you correctly. You're saying that advertising is effective. Too effective. That's right. Does it make us do things we don't want to do? It gives us the excuse for not doing things which we ought to do. Does it make us do things that we don't want to do? No. Then... It provides the excuse for not doing things that we ought to do. That's very different. Yes, very, very different. I don't think advertising can make you do anything you don't want to do. I don't think that a dirty book can make any juvenile delinquent, but more delinquent. Then you're concerned, merely, with the spots it fills. It fills our lives with nothing, and there's no room for something, epigram. Consider it as such.

Yes, you may have. No, it's yours. It's on your program belongs to you. But let me just pursue this a little further. I'm really saying that an individual finds himself, he involved in things in which he would not be involved with or in, to forgive my grammar or lapses, were it not for the ad-man? That's it. You said it very well. But things, of course, is misleading. The word things is misleading, for example. The nicest thing to do for any human being, I say this with absolute dogmatism. In the winter is to go away to an island by himself in the Caribbean and sit on a beach for ten days or two weeks, where there's no one else. Except a girl he likes, let us say, with a book he likes and sit there and read and swim and have a pleasant, relaxed time. But advertising has paid us such pictures for us that we feel that we are growing old

or that we're not in the swim unless we go to Jamaica, Jamaica, Jamaica and play the bongo or whatever it is that you play and the people being what they are, they are seduced and one of the major points about my book is that an advertisement is a seduction and it is either a successful or an unsuccessful seduction, in the most cases successful or it wouldn't continue. I'm talking about television commercials that go on and on and advertising campaigns in the major select paper magazines that go on and on and these are successful seductions. We go to Jamaica, we go to Puerto Rico and we dance and we play golf and we stay up every night and we meet people and we shake hands and we don't like it. But we don't dare admit to ourselves that we don't like it. We say to ourselves in the secret recesses of our soul, there must be something wrong with me because this is the way you enjoy yourself. How have you possibly gotten into all these secret recesses so that you know we don't

like it? I have a familiar. I say, I say, all right, seriously, what makes you think that we have been seduced into doing things we don't want to do? Seduced into doing things we want to do, that's something different. You don't have to be seduced into doing things you want to do, do you? You have to be seduced into losing your inhibitions. You are. One of the things alcohol can do or drugs can do. Or advertising presumably. Well maybe, but I think mostly it's being seduced into doing things you don't want to do. I think of the great big ad or the great big ad man or the great big medium or the great big media and here we are. These unfortunate small little kind of unspeakable people because we can't speak back, we can't talk back, we can't react, we're just continually being seduced by the ad man. Is this the picture? I think this is a pretty generally true prick picture although I don't think most people would say so.

I think that what happens, and this is, again, said very seldom but have said in my book, that people don't pay very much attention to what they buy, to what they do with their time. They don't even pay attention to the doctors that they pick. They pick doctors for their personality. They pick major operations that perform because somebody recommends somebody who was recommended by somebody else because he had a nice smile. So is it any wonder that we don't spend much time worrying where we're going to spend our two-week vacation or our four-week vacation? And so we fill our lives, and I think we do, unthinkingly, because we value ourselves so little, because we have basically so much self-dustain. Now I believe this and I believe it not because of my familiar alone who is a very good familiar and operates well, but because I know, because I look at the symptoms, as do you. I mean, people are nervous, people are crowding our insane assailants, and now being given drugs so they don't have to stay inside, they can walk around outside, people are insecure. So you think we are what we are because of this horrendous ad-man?

Then if this is the case, you know, the next question always has to be, what do we do about it? And what are you suggesting? Well, I'm not suggesting anything to you. Just describing? And that's suggesting anything for anybody. I know how I'm meeting it, which is unsatisfactory, but not as unsatisfactory as it was 10 years ago. How you meet it is you're a fair, I just think that you ought to notice it. I think you ought to call it by its right name. And if you don't call it by its right name, I think you are a lost, and you in that sentence is the world, not just America. I think that Europe is becoming pragmatized, existentialism came from Europe to America and ran head on into the pragmatism of John Dewey. The pragmatism of John Dewey has been changed by that impact, so that America has been partly existentialized, but Europe has been partly pragmatized. And the reason that the two sides of the Atlantic are more and more alike is because something new has come up, which can be called pragmatistentialism, if you want to, and it's a combination

of not believing in anything and believing only in things. Existentialism, of course, removes God from the picture. Pragmatism says that there is no measure except practicality. So if you remove God from the picture and say there is no measure except practicality, you are in the advertising man's heaven. Which is, in your terms, the three letters USA. That's right. Still, you don't want to do anything about it. I don't want to do anything about it. I have absolutely never had, I have not, and never have had. And a particular desire to save the human race because I am never sure that it was worth saving. But suppose you were to be asked to give directions as to how to save the human race. What would your formula be? Well, I wouldn't give them because I wouldn't be the man. I am the naysayer. Remember the beginning of this conversation? There are people who are yaysayers. My point is that the world woulds are full of them wherever you pick up books.

It's the positive point of view. Everybody tells you how you can be affirmative about things. Nobody says, look at the dark side of the moon. I believe it's Samstag and a few darker friends. I know you don't like the word of the question, why? But I'll ask it anyway in knowing what I'm likely to get. Why look at the dark side of the moon? Just for entertainment, just for amusement? Yes, I think it's basically that. I'm awfully bored by having so many people tell me so many wonderful things about so many other people and so many institutions. I'll concede that America is compassionate and that we are a pioneer nation that has accomplished a great deal. Let our vitality is tremendous, that we bring up very beautiful children, that we've done this, that, and the other thing. I've heard all this until I'm green. The roots of our country in Jefferson and Washington and Hamilton, I'll give you everything there.

The remarkable document, the Constitution, was the Declaration of Independence, and all that. I wanted to say what was wrong with it. Nobody ever does, or nobody ever seems to. Who's there to say what's wrong with all of these things? You don't think that the young people on, let's take the young people who on the campuses over this past year have seemingly been in rebellion, are doing just that? Young people always do that, and it's always called juvenile. I was told just today, my second son and I can't get along very well together, and the man I had lunch with says, if you don't have a son who rebels at that age, you can worry and this has been true forever, that when you're 28, 19, 18, or 21, you must be rebellious. So there being rebellious is no sign of anything except that they're normal. You don't think there's a different quality to what's going on on the campuses during this past year? After all, the young people aren't swallowing goldfish, they're not even engaging in pantyraids, they're doing something very different. I think some of the young people are swallowing goldfish and engaging in pantyraids, but the ones that are serious, so close serious, are getting attention this year, it's fashionable.

Just fashionable? Or do you think this reflects something that can be so fashionable? No, I wouldn't say why is it that it's fashionable, because I can't get you to answer a white question. I could say, how is it fashionable? But I'll give up on that end of things. No, I'm very serious about this. You seem to feel that there is no nay saying on the part of those who also say what it is they can affirm in our heritage. And I ask you about these young people who seem to be saying there is much to affirm, very much to affirm, and seem to be saying that the myths and the hypocrisy and the cat and all of that which you referred to before, that this is a denial of what they see as the American promise, and they want a riddice of that. Which it happened is these are my allies, but they will outgrow it in six months. Six years?

Six, about three years. Three years, sorry. There was no change. They've always been my allies. I need grown-up allies. You think these young people will be absorbed into your admins' paradise? Certainly. Let them get to be 23 or 4 and get married and have a $10,000 house in the suburbs and the promise of a $14,000 one and they're lost to me forever. No, I have a feeling that the quality of these youngsters is something very, very different. In my generation, we swallowed goldfish. They do too. The crowd telephone booths a few years ago. A few years ago. I'm not talking about a few years ago. I'm not talking about crowding the telephone booths. I'm talking about what is going on. I'm talking, let's take this matter of the teachings. I'm not so sure about how I feel about the teachings, but how do you feel about them? They're simply the equivalent, the moral equivalent, not a war, but a swallowing goldfish or a crowding telephone booths. I think that they were always the kind of boys and girls that go to teachings, who were serious, but they were a smaller number, proportionate to all the other boys and girls.

We have even today, we still have these, what do they call them, jazz festivals in which the old type of goldfish swallower goes out and raises hell. As new type, as you call it, for the teaching, there are more of them today, because it's more popular, as I said, because it is the thing to do, and I really believe it's a fashion rather than anything else, that they'll get tired of this after a while. Now there will always be a hard core of having helped them sincere, young people who will stay that way, and they'll even give their lives what they believe, as the boys and girls of Britain show, keep marching up and down against the bomb. And there will be some, and always have been some, in the United States who will. But it's just like any election, you know, the figures as well as I do, that there are always so many people who always vote for public, and so many people who always vote for democratic, and then the election is swung by the people who sometimes vote one way and something other, which is not very many people.

Here we have the people in the middle are swinging toward the serious young people this year. Here they may swing toward the non-serious young people. And that's all that you give them. I really don't give them any more than that, but you mustn't listen to me on this thing without remembering where I stand. I'm the naysayer. Every time anything right happens, I am astonished, and I'm not astonished often. So that you would interpret... I don't believe there's been progress. I think this is what they had in Athens. This is what they had in Thebes. This is what they had in Sumeria. This is what they had in China, and the days of the First Dynasty, whenever that was, I don't see any change. There's a larger number of people all over the world. So there are more serious thinkers. As far as I'm concerned, I don't even think it's bad. I just think it is just as I don't believe it's bad of Hornets distinct, or a bees dissform. I think the people, when they become overcrowded, I read a piece the other day, which is very

relevant to this fascinating piece, somewhere, which compared what happens in cities, where human beings are overcrowded to what happens to animals when they are overcrowded. You may have read the same piece. No, I haven't. Or you take Reese's monkeys, or Canaries, or Lamas, or anything, and crowd them into a space where there isn't quite enough space for them. The homosexuals increase at once. The animals try to convince suicide. There are more abortions, the natural abortions, of course, in the animal kingdom. Juvenile of the frequency, don't forget that. That's right. The whole group tries to correct the overpopulation. Subconsciously, now, what's happening in the human animal is the same thing. It doesn't happen as much when you get out of cities, what happens very little out of cities, is when you crowd them together. And there is something instinctive in animals when they're crowded together that works against the life force.

This is comfort to me. I want to believe this. What? Excuse me. In what way do you want to believe this? I want to believe this because I want to believe there is something that will stop us from doing to ourselves, but I'm afraid we will do to ourselves. Crouting ourselves out of existence? We leave the blow ourselves out of existence or crowd ourselves out of existence. You know the strange thing is that I've been waiting for weeks now for someone to take this point of view, which I now must say, I fear, is my own. But when you take it, I tend to resist it, and I don't use it. What is there about me that makes everybody hostile? Oh, it's not just you, Mr. Samson. It's not just you. It's the unpleasantness of the idea is that I do fear we share because we're talking about process and rejecting it. Well, why do you care so much? Back at the turn of the road, back at the beginning of history when the Greeks won the battle against the Jews, and the human race decided, well, the

Western world decided that it would worship the mind instead of the intestines. We started in this direction, and the mind has been first in the Western world ever since. A head of instinct, a head of everything that was not mind, whatever it is, emotion, the boogie man, the inexplicable. We had to understand everything. If we couldn't understand it, then we would make ourselves understand. So we have understood ourselves into the hydrogen bomb, and we have understood ourselves into a population explosion. I don't understand that. What do you mean? We have understood ourselves into the population explosion. Because we have figured out how to make hydrogen bomb, and we have figured out how to keep people alive, but we haven't figured out how to kill them, except the two go together that way, don't they? At some point they might. That's not acceptable to hydrogen bomb, and we haven't used it yet. We haven't figured out how to get people to agree to control the size of their families.

Another piece that I found interesting, do you know the word Mekismo? No. It's wonderful word. I don't know whether it's Spanish, but it's used in Puerto Rico to describe a virility in a man, and it's manliness, but it's more than manliness. They found out when they tried to give the Puerto Rican women these birth control pills, that they wouldn't take them. Because when you are so poor that you have nothing to show that you are better than your neighbor except the children that you produce, you don't want a woman unless you will produce a child a year, and then you can say I have ten children, and he has only eight. So these women who took the pills and didn't have the children got kicked out, and this very quickly became obvious to the women of Puerto Rico, and they wouldn't take these pills, or they'd take them and throw them away. This is what I didn't understand about your saying, what you said about understanding, because this isn't the product of understanding, is it?

I think it's the product of misunderstanding. I mean, what we thought was that if we found a way of cutting down the production of a population, which was painless and inexpensive, that people would go for it, but they wouldn't go for it until you give them something else to be proud of, that they wouldn't go for it in India either. The women want to produce a lot of babies because the men have nothing else to show for for being alive except a lot of children. All we've had people here who have, from the scene, spoken differently about what I make all the progress made along these lines in India and in other parts of the world. I do see what you mean, but I go back to this matter of the unattractiveness of the constant naysaying, and you puzzle me. I don't mean that I'm puzzled by what you say, but you raise the question as to why this disturbs me, the unattractiveness of the naysaying.

And I suppose that there is, except in some blessed few of us, a great need to move, to see change and change in a direction that approximates goals that we set, progress. The idea of progress is, in certain ways, a very new one. But I presume I would think too that it is as old as human life. I think our differences lie on our definition of progress. My definition of progress, I think, involves the ability of a man to look at himself and see himself clearly, and to make his outer actions coincide with his inner feelings. I'm afraid that you are a definition of, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but most people's definition of progress has to do with better medicine, better education, better transportation, better homes, better clothing. Well, I don't put words in my mouth because you're wrong. It has to do with certain goals that may or may not have to do with kinds of transportation

and kinds of clothing and kinds of amounts of food, they have to do with goals, the kinds of goals that involve moral values that you don't want to talk about. No, I'm willing to talk about them. I'm not willing to make judgments at all. No judgments at all in terms of the things that you think, that you choose. Do you choose only those things that help you mirror reality, or do you choose those things too, that lead in a direction that seems to you to be desirable, rather than undesirable? And possibly is not related simply to seeing who you are and what you are. Well Richard, I try to remember the dust as motivation, as a coaxial cable. So it's existence, and I exist on many different levels. When I try to make a living, I do all the things that I detest in myself in order to make a living because I'm extremely efficient that way. And I know what I'm doing when I do it.

When I think about the human race as a human being, I'm a different person. When I think about the United States as an American, I'm a different person. When I think about New York as a New Yorker, I'm a different person. Well, we have to define what person you're talking to. I can make moral judgments with the best of them if you want me to. But in this particular talk, I'm talking only about myself with relation to myself, which is a relationship I've always been deeply interested in, and one in which I think I am the world's outstanding authority. I believe that I am happier. There go, I believe, everyone is happier, because I extrapolate my subjectivism when I can bring, and it isn't all the time, or even most of the time, or even often, but sometimes, when I can bring what I say and what I do, on an exact parallel with what I feel. Now my feelings change for a moment to moment, and from day to day and from year to year, and I don't feel the same way about anything today, as I did 20 years ago, I dare say,

maybe a few basic things. So I must constantly do this auditing, this casting up, whenever anybody puts a question to me, and how do I feel about this today? I have learned different things in the last 24 hours, new things. I have maybe poignantly felt something that I've never felt before. And this is my change, just to change within me, brought about by my environment, and about migrating, growing older, and wiser, I hope. But you know, it just occurs to me to think back to a program that we did together, oh, it seems to me back in the last century, on the question of leadership. Remember? I remember. And I wonder whether leadership isn't in its own way another form of delusion, and the acceptance of leadership, the kind of self-delusion, and whether this isn't necessary for a continuing, a growing, pardon me if you're using the word, a growing society, and whether there isn't some function to self-deception, and whether it isn't impossible at all times

to be so much on a level, on the level with yourself, or put it that way, that one can't move, knowing oneself, for what purpose, to what end, to stay where one is, or to move on. I wonder whether leadership, political, and otherwise, is possible, given this need of yours for, or this desire on your part, for an equation of what one says and does with what one feels. Well, leadership is possible for other people. There is a bug I read about not long ago, a fantastic story, very relevant to what you just said, I don't want to lose sight of that. This is a bug in Africa, which takes the form of a flower. There are, let us say, 500 little moors in this group, and they settle on a dead stick in the form of a beautiful flower, with the stamens and the pistols and the carolas and the petals, everything in place, beautiful colors.

The amazing thing about this is that there is no such flower. It could not have copied anything, this mass, intelligence, whatever it may be. Although there may have been such a flower, many centuries ago, eons ago, when these bugs began, you kill four of the bugs that help to form the heart of the flower. And four of the bugs that were forming the petals changed color and sit in the heart. You kill a third of the bugs, and the flower is still there a third smaller. Everybody has changed color enough, so that everybody can, so that you can make this flower again. What is the purpose of the flower? Nobody knows. It isn't to attract birds because birds eat bugs. Why do they do this? This was in a very, well, I don't remember the name of the author, but it was done by a man who was a scientist. I can't tell you why, Nick, I can't tell you. All right, now my point is that in the human race, there are purple bugs, and there are green bugs, and there are yellow bugs.

Some people are born to be leaders, and some are born to be observers, and some are born to be just nothings. Now you kill all the leaders, and some of the observers become leaders. You have to have a certain proportion, I suspect, in our species of every kind. And if you run out of one kind, because the war kills them all off, all because there's a disease which attacks only people with IQs of 160 or over, then the next level now develops an IQ of 160 or over. I don't know what does this, but I believe that this probably is true. It's a general thing in the animal kingdom, and we're animals. Well, you know, I began to think about this because I was just wondering whether there wasn't an equation between what you have said about the equivalent of no thyself, whether this doesn't remind me of, all right, be thyself, no thyself, and be thyself. Well, this wasn't the theme of the early movement in psychoanalysis, when so much emphasis

was placed upon knowing what one felt, and this next step was acting on what one felt because any disparity between the two was somehow or other denial of the human personality. Whether that wasn't indeed a very naive interpretation of the curative, therapeutic possibilities of psychoanalysis, and what, after all, is so magical about this, no thyself, be thyself, theme unless there is some further motivation, unless there is some further judgment. Does that be a generalized answer to that? I think there are specific answers. It's very good for me. I feel better since I haven't barked upon this course ever so much better than I ever felt before. Now, there must be other people like me. It doesn't have to be true for everyone.

Also, wasn't it Alfred Adler, or one of the very early disciples of Freud who said realization is no cure, all right, even there, they realized that understanding it didn't cure it. There is just a certain satisfaction of understanding it, which is terribly important and nourishing for me. But isn't, you use the word satisfaction, and I think now of the ways in which the abominable Edman, your abominable Edman, applies his trade by perhaps in one sense creating desires in us, fostering them, and then bringing about their satisfaction. And whether you yourself, just a few moments ago, hadn't in a very real sense, undermined this concept of satisfaction, and you seem to me to be saying that this is one of the great problems with our nation. We are constantly satisfying certain needs, and that satisfaction in itself is not an answer to the search for the good society, the good life.

The good life now. Well, maybe it has to do with one person. I don't believe I said that. I said we were satisfying one kind of need. We are over-satisfying one kind of need at the expense of not satisfying at all another kind of need, that we filled our lives with things and services which we were told were good for us and necessary so much so that we didn't have the time. You remember I said this, or the inclination to do the other things, which I think are necessary for a man to be self-fulfilling. This I don't blame on what you call, not I, the abominable ad-man. The abominable ad-man, or ad-man, is merely doing what we want him to do. The businessmen want him to do it, and the consumer wants him to do it. A part of my book says, and now we move to the consumer, that very often this girl who was listening to the proposals of all these men and knows that they lie will choose not the one who tells her the best story, but the one who is most charming and whom she knows is the biggest liar, because she finds him more satisfactory.

Thus will people buy, an automobile that they know has the reputation of being a bunch of tin, but it's very showy and it's a lot of fun, or they'll buy it because the boss drives one, otherwise because they always fancy themselves as the owner of one. They don't want the best, they want what they want. The girl is, if you want to, the girl is free choice, and the suitors are free speech, and the out of the free choice and free speech comes to the free market. Now the free market is an absurd thing in which people are always buying the things that they ought to want, but it isn't because they're being lied to necessarily, it's because they don't want the good things, they don't want the good men, they don't want the best food, they don't want the longest wearing suit. Why should they, they want what they want? You see, you throw me off, you say, why should they, just before I ask why, knowing they're coming in.

There is no reason why they should, they just do. But I thought before that you were putting much more emphasis upon the manipulative, the creative aspect of having a lot of emphasis on it, that I am not claiming that it's evil or wrong. I'm rightly claiming that it is, that it exists. All right, I'm not saying that you say that it is wrong, but I think that what you said before was indicated, at least it indicated to me, that though you say you will not pass judgment, you do, and you're concerned about that. Well, to this extent I am not consistent in that case, I don't want to pass judgment. I think I don't want to pass judgment. You know, this, this reminds me of a discussion I had with my eldest son that long ago, was longer ago than I think, as I now have realized, when he got out of college and talked about being a teacher, he was very, did very well at Colgate, and he came out with very high standards or marks and ethics, poetry, religion, and became an advertising man. But for a while we thought he was going to be a professor or an instructor in ethics,

poetry, and religion, and he changed his mind, now why did he change his mind? It seems to me that he changed his mind only because it seemed to him that it was so much easier and fatter alive to be an advertising man, and I wondered if you see the evidence of it and his old man. He said to him the eight one time later, I told him I was very disappointed in this. He said, why should I go ahead and not myself out, trying to teach ethics to a bunch of people who really aren't interested in them, or poetry to a very, I think, use some exotic word, some in-group, group of people when I can live the kind of life you do, and everything is so rich and easy and simple and pleasant, I too like to eat at the four seasons, I too like to go to Paris, I too like to do that, I said, we'll go ahead. You see Nick on that? On that very, very upbeat, highly moralistic note we're going to end this hour. That's what they're going to remember, Father of an End. Thanks very much Nick Samstag for joining me today.