 is a man of many talents and accomplishments. He's a doctor of philosophy, and he's very well known and respected in his own field of aesthetics. He is the president of the American Society for Aesthetics. He is the editor of the Philosophical Quarterly, The Monast. And he is an author of numerous publications, Human Conduct, Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, Understanding the Arts, and a number of articles in The Freeman, which are in the back of the room you might want to take a look at later on this afternoon. He was a friend of Ayn Rand and a member of her circle in New York from the late 50s to the mid-60s, when he then later moved to Los Angeles and became the head of the philosophy department at the University of Southern California. He then published what is perhaps a milestone in libertarian activism and thought, and that is his book, Libertarianism, at a time when there were not of any really good manifestos. That was one of the very first ones of the early 70s revival of libertarianism. He was also the first candidate for the presidency from the Libertarian Party in the United States. And he is also the author of a very eloquent statement. That is the statement of principles, the original statement of principles to the cramble of the platform of the Libertarian Party. That is a very beautiful piece of literature that I would urge you to read. If you have not read the original or have not read it in a while, that is very lovely. He is a longtime member of the Mount Pellerin Society and a frequent participant in international conferences, and I'm sure well known to a great many of you. He's a serious student of foreign policy in the Soviet affairs. And it's, of course, perhaps appropriate that we are meeting here in the Orwellian Year of 1984 in London, to hear him speak. The topic, the general topic that I was aware of what he was gonna talk about dealt with the fulfillment of 1984. And it kind of reminded me of all the hype that was going on just before the turn of the year, the anxious anticipation of the press was gonna have 1984 is coming, 1984 is here. What is it going to be like? And the question began to be, was 1984 going to be Orwellian? And I realized that either way you looked at it, the answer was going to have to be no. Because think about it. If it was really not a Orwellian prediction doesn't come true and we still have a semi-free society, the answer is no. But if it is an Orwellian society where there's censorship and you can't war as peace and slavery as freedom, that society is not going to admit it's authoritarian either. So the answer is also going to be no anyway. So the whole rule ha ha was over nothing. But the world is a very big place. It takes in a number of situations and Orwell has conceived of a number of things. So here we are, the citizens of Oceania have gathered to hear some of the perspectives of 1776 to 1984, Dr. John Hospers. As the title indicates, this talk will have a bit of an American slant for which I hope the members of this international body will forgive me. In 1776 there was a libertarian revolution in America. It occurred under an unusual combination of circumstances. Intelligent and dedicated men, educated in history and classics and imbued with the ideals of freedom because they knew tyranny firsthand, gathered together to form a new nation, not by force, but by mutual agreement. The constitution they devised was unique in history. Though it provided for protection of individuals against other individuals, it provided first and foremost for protection against the abuses of government itself. Its main aim was to check the violation of rights by the government of the citizens. They knew that the tragedy of history was that governments which were supposed to protect human beings from violations of their rights turned out to be the chief violators of those rights themselves, taxing, plundering and slaving. It was to be a severely limited government, the motto being bind the government with the chains of the constitution. When these men talked about freedom, they meant freedom from oppression, freedom from tyranny, freedom of speech and peaceable assembly, freedom of the press, freedom from confiscation of property, freedom from arbitrary search and seizure. They wanted to make decisions regarding their own lives rather than have officials in government making those decisions for them. They wanted the actions to result from their own choices, not from the choices of others. They wanted to institute a republic, not a democracy where majority women would rule, but to place limitations on the power of the majority. They wanted each individual to be free to live his or her own life as they chose as long as they did not forcibly interfere with the equal freedom of others to do the same. And then after all is the essence of libertarianism and that's why I called it a libertarian revolution. It was these political freedoms that they had in mind in developing the American constitution. They did not primarily have in mind economic freedom, freedom of production and trade. Nevertheless, with government explicitly restricted in what it could do, it was not permitted to enact measures to prevent enterprising people from improving their lot. And this they proceeded to do with such speed that within a century the United States had the largest per capita wealth in the world. This did not result from its supply of natural resources. Many other nations still mired in poverty had much more. It resulted from the release of human energy that the freedom made possible. At the beginning, the standard of living in America as elsewhere was extremely low, almost unimaginably so by today's standards. George Washington never heard of calories or vitamins. He lived on meats and starches through every winter. He never saw a glass of orange juice. His diet was so deficient that he lost his hair and his teeth at a very early age. His clothes were uncomfortable and unhygienic. He traveled on foot, horseback, or carriage without springs. His house had no toilet, no bathtub, no furnace, no heating stove, no light but candles. His standard of living was so high that not one person in 10,000 at that time could aspire to it. The revolution began to the 1770s and 80s in living conditions that had not changed scarcely since ancient times. In 1850, every woman made her household soap and candles. American women cooked over open fires as they had always done and has still do in greater part of the world. American women still spun thread and wove cloth. Yet in one century, in three generations, the release of human energy had created an entirely new world politically and economically. One example, what the newfound freedom achieved. More than 2,000 years ago, the Greeks knew the principle of the steam engine but they did not have the technology to develop it. In Germany in 1700, a steamboat ran on the River Elbe but the boatmen saw it as a threat to their livelihood and they burned it. Those steamboats were developed in England but there too they were under government control. The British government controlled their manufacture, their sale, their use. The controls were severe enough to make the manufacture unprofitable and the future uncertain and so it fell to America to develop the steam engine and that's where it was done. Of course, the same attempts were made in America as elsewhere, operators of sailing ships in New England demanded government protection against this new intruder which would soon destroy the sailing ship industry. But there was one difference. In America, any laws to control steamships to protect the sailing ships were unconstitutional and soon steamships were going up and down the Hudson and the Great Lakes and the Mississippi and the Missouri and they started finally to cross the Atlantic. They were fast, cheap, efficient. They captured the world's trade and soon they were found practically in every world port carrying cargo faster, more reliably than any sailing ship had ever done. The uncontrolled American economy had achieved this. The controlled British economy of that time had produced inferior ships. Parliament debated the issue. It was now a matter of survival and Rose Wilder Lane in her great book, The Discovery of Freedom, describes the outcome in this way, I quote. What had created the clipper ships? Not the American government, not protection, lack of protection. What made the British Marine at that time second rate? Safety, shelter, protection under the British Navigation Acts and at last the British government repealed the Navigation Acts and opened the British ports to the world. American clipper ships had done it. Half a century of Americans smuggling and rebellion and ineffectual blockades, seven years of war in America, the loss of the 13 colonies, all the sound and sensible arguments of British economists could not break the British planned economy. The American clipper ships did it. They were the final blow that brought down that whole planned structure. The great English reform movement of the 19th century was wholly negative. It was repeal, nothing constructive about it. It was a destruction of government's interference with human affairs, a destruction of the so-called protection that is actually a restriction on the exercise of natural human rights. In that mid-19th century period of the great individual freedom that Englishmen have ever known, they made the prosperity and power of the British Empire during Victoria's long and peaceful reign. And to that freedom, prosperity and power and peace, the American clipper ship contributed more than any one thing, an end of quotation. America's political freedom, of course, made possible its economic freedom. And the economic freedom made possible of prosperity never before sustained on this earth. In the years 1870 to 1890, the standard of living doubled. That is, you could obtain twice as much for an hour's work in 1890 as in 1870. And even so, the standard of living was low, compared with later. In 1900, there was a $40 a month mechanic working 10 hours a day, six days a week, tinkering at nights and on Sundays in the woodshed behind his little rented house, no bathtub, no running water, just a kerosene lamp in a cheap suburb of Detroit. Even Henry Ford did not imagine that his invention would change the face of the world. There were no cars at that time, no highways, no radios, no planes, no movies, no tall buildings, no electric lights, no toothpaste, no soda fountains, no bottled soft drinks, no hot dog stands, no high schools, no low shoes, no safety razors, no green vegetables in winter, none in cans, no baker's bread, no cakes, no donuts, no dime stores, no supermarkets, an orange was a Christmas treat, and a bathtub was something possessed only by the rich. But the automobile changed all of American life and life all over the world. The era of covered wagons and horses was over and the civilization we know today, which we all take for granted, was in progress. That's just one example. Of course, there are thousands. But as we describe and think of this progress, let's keep in mind one word of warning, and I quote for the second and last time from Mrs. Lane's book when she issued this warning. Do you assume that this world cannot vanish? This world that your grandfather could not imagine? That your children take for granted? Do you think that your grandchildren must surely inherit it? Do you imagine that the planes cannot be grounded, but the factories close, the radio be silent, the telephone dead, and the cars and the trains stop? Do you suppose that darkness and hunger and cold and disease that have never before been defeated and are now defeated only on a small part of this earth can never again break in upon all human beings? Do not be so short-sighted. The energies of living individuals must constantly create these defenses of human life and these extensions of human power. Relinquish the free use of individual energy and these defenses must vanished as the Roman galleys vanished. The whole modern world must disappear completely. Every effect ceases when its cause no longer operates. The whole modern civilization that is barely more than a century old has not yet established on any part of this earth can cease to exist. It must cease to exist if individuals forget the fact of individual liberty and abandon the exercise of individual self-control and responsibility that created this civilization. Young people who had known nothing but this new world naturally take it for granted. They see a great deal that is wrong with it, they can very easily imagine a much better world. So can any honest person. The eternal hope of mankind is the eternal human desire to make the world better than it is. But when they imagine that a control can exist which can be used over individuals to make a better world according to somebody's plan, they are then falling into an ancient delusion, a delusion from which most persons on this earth have never awakened. Unquote, part two. And now it's 1984. We're approaching the end of the 20th century. We're told that the 20th century has been the era not of individualism but of collectivism, not of capitalism but of socialism, not of peace but of war and terrorism, not of individual freedom but of government control, not of free traders on a free market but of concentration camps and torture chambers. We live in the Orwellian century, indeed the Orwellian year. How accurate was that vision? To what extent is the world today as Orwell envisioned it? Orwell was not a theorist as much as an opponent of lies, hypocrisy and tyranny. In the 1930s, when a publisher asked him to go to the North of England and report on the plight of factory workers unemployed in the depression, he went and became a socialist. He knew nothing of economics. He knew nothing about the causes of depressions. He just reported with knife edge clarity what he saw. When he joined the rebels in the Spanish Civil War to fight Franco, he soon found that the Russian communists had taken hold of it and the communists didn't want the independent workers union that Orwell was fighting for. The communists regarded these deviance from their views as more dangerous enemies than Franco's soldiers were. They placed them in military positions from which they knew they would never return. They killed them as if they who had come to help were the enemy. Orwell saw now that they were tyrants as ruthless as the ones he was fighting against. Both sides alike were alike in wanting absolute power, using it to stamp out the individual. Orwell felt betrayed. Recovering in a hospital from a wound, he barely escaped from Spain with his life. He may never have learned that the same Russian soldiers he saw in Spain were never permitted to return all the way home. On one pretext or another Stalin had them all shot. After all, they could not be permitted to tell their fellow Russians how much better things were in the world outside that people actually had watches and more than one suit of clothes, even in a poor country like Spain. Orwell was now disillusioned, just as much about the left as about the right. His countrymen, of course, were not. And London's West End literary critics spurned and hated him for exposing the dictatorships of the left to which they were now turning their allegiance. Orwell saw them both as ruthless tyrannies. He had seen the future and it worked too well. All men were equal, of course, sometimes in pay, but never equal in power. Some were more equal than others. Out of his experiences in Spain came Animal Farm. More than a dozen publishers rejected it because of its obvious parody of Soviet slogans. After all, the Soviets were now Britain's allies in the war, but to Orwell, this made no difference. The truth was still the truth. How did the trend toward 1984 begin? In the United States, along with Western nations, it all began innocently from the best of motives, especially after the depression of whose causes they had not the slightest comprehension. The voters wanted more and more things from government, preferably with no price tag attached. The first of these historically, of course, was education. Everyone in the United States can receive at least 12 years of free education. The motive, educating the youth, was doubtless a noble one. Yet the public schools today are turning out millions of functional literates and by every comparison made, the private schools are doing a far better job. The Americans wanted to be ensured against indigents in old age, hence social security. Though this system is now virtually bankrupt and the only way to keep the government's promise to care for people in their old age is to tax the earnings of the young cruelly, it is continuing. It is as if you lent Jones money on his promise to return it when you needed it, but when you needed it, it turned out he had squandered it all and now he has to steal to get it back for you. Then people wanted to be insured against unemployment. So unemployment insurance came to be. They wanted to be ensured against medical catastrophes. So Medicare was born. It is costing billions of dollars each year, including treatment of people with imaginary illnesses after all it's free and physicians padding bills and charging them to the government that is the taxpayer. The same with welfare, same with food stamps, programs full of graft, running with freeloaders, yet it would probably cost more to weed out the cheaters than it would to continue as before. But of course someone has to pay for all these benefits. Taxes grew higher and higher, but even the very high taxes were not enough to pay for the programs. So a national deficit was born. It grew and grew and continues. And then came a Republican president who said the tax structure was causing damage. It was causing businesses to go bankrupt from high taxes and regulations. He said people were being taxed so heavily as to jeopardize their productivity. So he proposed to cut down taxes and to cut down the insurance. Congress agreed to cut down the taxes, but not the insurance. And so the deficit deepened. Meanwhile, the president said we had neglected the first responsibility of government, namely defense. This too, he said, was insurance. Just as we want to insure against indigent old age, so we want to insure against the loss of our liberties. The democratic opposition went along, sulkily, and it proposed higher taxes to pay for defense insurance. But the higher taxes were unpopular. So they talked about taxing the rich. But that wouldn't do. As Sir Stafford Cripps had long ago pointed out to Englishmen in the late 1940s, if you taxed every millionaire 100% of his income, it wouldn't be enough to run the government one day out of the year. So the people will have to tax themselves more, or else do with less insurance. Meanwhile, high taxes hardened the productive arteries, and there is less employment to be found, and more and more people to go on welfare, increasing the tax burden still more. That's the situation we're in now. Each of the seemingly innocent steps along the way has catapulted us into 1984. The United States has a national debt of one and a half trillion dollars, enough $1,000 bills to extend from the earth to the moon. The interest on the debt will soon be the largest single expenditure of the government. The entitlement programs, like social security and Medicare, have burgeoned beyond all predictions, and no one knows where the money will come from to sustain them for more than a few years. A huge bureaucracy controls the conditions under which businesses can be run, with so heavy a hand that many small businesses that eat here are forced into bankruptcy. With the result that new products don't reach the market, any employees are laid off and in turn go on welfare. Many businesses spend up to 30% of their employee time doing useless paperwork for the government. The honest businessman who's trying to survive amidst the taxes and regulations at having an increasingly hard time of it, and the dishonest businessman who gets government subsidies, prospers, and even more so, the super big businessman who controls government from behind the scenes, using government to force competitive newcomers out through ever-new regulations. And so there's less incentive for the honest businessman to exert his efforts. If he succeeds against all odds, half his earnings are confiscated, and thus production, on which everybody's welfare, depends, languishes. Then more and more special groups arise to steal money from the government cookie jar, while fewer and fewer people are available to put money back in the cookie jar. And so the first group can outvote the second at the polls. And the courts, largely through Roosevelt's new deal appointments, have long since ceased to interpret the constitution in accord with the intent of the founding fathers, which is just as John Calhoun of South Carolina predicted in his treatise on government in 1827. The courts are themselves a part of the government in the long run, they will side with the government. And so the United States has become almost a semi-socialist state. Yet if there's any lesson of the 20th century, it's that socialism does not work. It doesn't motivate people, it discourages productivity, it encourages huge debts and tremendous inefficiency in any economy that adopts it. Consider Mexico, which is practically floating on seas of oil, and not even to cancel out its multi-billion dollar debt. But Mexico will not permit private ownership of oil lands. That would encourage large profits. That, of course, is immoral. No, the Mexican government itself owns the oil. And there's so much inefficiency and waste and corruption in the whole chain of command that Mexico is actually losing money on the oil. You'd think it would be impossible that a nation endowed with such a resource would be able to lose money on it, but they've done it quite in accomplishment. Or consider the so-called developing nations of central Africa, one after another of them after shucking off their colonial masters has become a socialist dictatorship. With great wealth in the hands of a few at the seat of government, nothing but widespread poverty among the rest. American loans haven't helped. They have simply lined the pockets of politicians and kept the dictatorships afloat. The International Monetary Fund hasn't helped. It has only encouraged the same profligacy and the rest resulted in the same widespread poverty. Wherever a socialist economy has emerged, it has resulted in the misallocation of resources, centralized control, graft and corruption, poverty and starvation. Certainly no lesson of history can be clearer than this one. But most of the poverty stricken people of for instance, Africa and Asia don't know why they are poor. They know nothing of economics or trade or balance of payments or international relations, but those who do are increasingly aware of the destructive efforts of socialism wherever it operates. Their politicians may still have to appeal to the popularity of government handouts for their own people in democratic nations. They do this to get a re-elected, but that socialist economies don't work is certainly well known where they exist. And yet there are still many who believe as they were taught in the 1930s that only a full socialist government represents a true brotherhood of man and looked to the Soviet Union, they once did as a realization of that ideal. That's the economic background to 1984. The lesson is that when you place more powers in the hands of government, it's going to abuse those powers. And that to entrust powers to the state is about as rational as to entrust the fox to guard the chicken house. Orwell, who never renounced his socialism, apparently never learned that simple economic lesson. He thought you could put the powers of enforced equalization of income in the hands of the state and expect the powers to remain within strict limits. He described vividly the long-term consequences of these policies, but he did not reject the policies that led to those consequences. Yet had he known the inevitability of this causal chain of events, he should not have been surprised. Still, the world as a whole is different today from Orwell's 1984. In the West, it's better. In the East, it's worse. In the West, the press is still relatively free. I say relatively. Papers and newspapers can still print what they want that isn't libelous or obscene, but often these papers are controlled by the very men behind the scenes who also manipulated the election of presidents and congressmen. The result is that much of the news that is of the most vital import never reaches us. Reasons why are indicated in that, for example, Anthony Sutton's latest book. That's another story. Nor does government control all industry. It takes the cream off the profits of any business that makes them and then cripples them with regulations so that productivity doesn't expand as it would by leaps and bounds with modern technology. Bureaucracies take positive delight in controlling producers and seeing yet another capitalist bite the dust. Even so, there are still many rags to riches stories coming true in spite of very difficult odds in the United States and even in the welfare states of Europe. The state has achieved the almost total capitulation of the educational establishment. Educators, by and large, believe they can make it better under government than in the marketplace. About half the educators teach socialism to their classes and one can get a PhD in economics without in American universities, without having heard of von Mises or in political philosophy without having read any of Hayek. Educators buy with each other for government grants no matter how useless or how often the same research has been done before. They don't want to be controlled in what they teach but they don't mind at all if the men on whose surplus they depend are totally shackled in their enterprises. Courses in social philosophy discuss how the world's goods should be distributed. But seldom concern themselves with how they are to be produced. Production is taken for granted. Yet if Orwell's 1984 does come to the West at the first sign of dissidence, these intellectuals would be the first people to be shot. The result of such education is that the effect of reading Orwell's 1984 is much less than it used to be. Many of them have been taught that America should be a socialist nation, that businessmen are all exploiters, that those who earn a living should sacrifice enough of it so that those who don't, to those who don't, so that they both get the same income, they think it quite all right for the government to control the economy and typically they agitate for more controls, not less. Much of what they read in Orwell, they find familiar. It's here already and it doesn't shock them. As to the continuing low-scale wars sapping the nations, they believe we're in that already. They're sort of used to it. As to the torture and murder, they may not like that part, but they doubt that in the real world much of this really went on. It has no sharp edge for them. They never lived through World War II. They've scarcely ever heard of Stalin. They've never read anything about the Soviet regime. If you told them about it, they think it's propaganda. They've never read Solzhenitsyn. They've scarcely heard of them. And of course their teachers never mention him for he's an embarrassment to them. What he reveals pricks too many holes in the collectivist views to which they're already committed. And of course the students don't read Solzhenitsyn on their own either. The products of the television generation don't read much of anything on their own. Nevertheless, here are the facts, some facts, compared with which even the worst of the fictitious situations in Orwell's world are relatively mild. The methods of Stalin were certainly crude, but under the circumstances effective. He didn't have to retrain people for the crimes he wanted committed. He just took the dregs of humanity, the people in prisons who love killing, promised them triple the wages they'd get anywhere else for just arresting people and torturing them, the very thing they enjoyed doing anyway. And to know, Osyenko writes in his recent book, the time of Stalin, that Stalin quote, selected hardened thugs and scoundrels who were born sadists, but who for all that were as devoted to their benefactor as only a member of an outlaw gang can be toward its chief. All the dregs of society rose to the surface. An investigator owned a bonus of 2,000 rubles for each confession under torture. Every petty thief, sadist or climber who was free to go at it as hard as he liked. During the war, when the Nazis marched into Soviet territory, even they were appalled at what they found amongst the day-to-day equipment of the Soviet state. Nikolai Tolstoy writes in his book, The Stalin's Secret War, they found instruments to break the bones of shins and arms and pierced the soles of feet and pull off the nails from skin to hands to squeeze the main nose ligament until the victim bleeds profusely. Recovered corpses resembled cuts of meat displayed on a butcher's slab. What prisoners had undergone was indescribable even by the survivors. The cries heard, said a poll in the NKVD, were not even recognizably human, end quote. Whenever the Soviets conquered other nations, the same techniques were used. Anyone who was suspected of harboring dissident acts or even thoughts, says Tolstoy in Stalin's Secret War, were tied to trees, quote. Some had their eyes slowly gouged out, others were scalped and had their brains squeezed out, men had their tongues torn, their sides and legs slowly cut open or bayonets stretched into their mouths and down their throats, unquote. The same can be expected of any nation that the Soviets may conquer in the future. It exceeds anything envisaged in Orwell's 1984. The same methods continue maybe with less intensity, but still go on today. The Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago wrote, quote, the Soviets are using recombinant DNA for military purposes. In at least one case, their scientists are attempted to combine venom-producing genes from cobras with ordinary viruses and bacteria. Such an organism would infect the body and produce a paralytic cobra neurotoxin, unquote. The Soviets also dropped poisonous gases and yellow rain, as is well known, on Laos and Cambodia and elsewhere in Afghanistan. In 1979, an explosion at a biological weapons facility in Svedlovsk released anthrax spores into the atmosphere, killing over 1,000 soldiers and civilians. And the Soviets here conducted tests with a reentry vehicle designed to tumble when reentering the atmosphere. The tumbling is to spray chemical warfare contents of the reentry vehicle over wide areas near the weapon, as the weapon nears the surface of the target, and so on and so on. The Soviets could only control people by Orwellian methods of propaganda and brute force. Once this is gone, their, of course, are massive defections. This is the Achilles' heel of the Soviet regime. In Sir John Hackett's history of World War III, this is what finally defeats them. Americans have taken comfort in the knowledge that the Soviet Union Achilles' heel, that is, unless it's tightly controlled, their people will rebel against them by the millions. In Hackett's novel, this is what happens. The Soviets invade Western Europe, but when one of their own cities is bombed, the ensuing bureaucratic chaos is so great that the Ukrainians, Uzbeks, and other oppressed peoples who have long wanted to be out from under the Russian heel take the occasion to form independent republics of their own, and that's the end of the Soviet Union as a unified power. The Soviets, of course, know this very well. That's why, for example, they invaded Hungary and Czechoslovakia, not Romania. Now Romania has not been submissive. It has good relations with Israel and China. It sent athletes to the Olympics. It's thumbed its nose at the Soviet Union countless times, yet there's been no retaliation. Why? Because unlike Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Romania presented no threat. Her existence does not threaten the foundations of communism. It has a cult of the supreme infallible leader. It has psychiatric prisons and watchtowers along its frontiers, and no Soviet subject dreams of escaping to freedom in Romania. So it's left alone. But the other nations to which Soviets might defect represent for the Soviet government a contagious disease that must be stamped out. And that's why the Soviet military strategy is quite different from the way it's conceived in the West. The popular opinion in the West is that any war would start slowly with conventional forces and only turn nuclear as the last resort after all else had failed. According to Suvorov, and it's inside the Soviet army, his book, the Soviet general command thinks the theory's so silly that they wondered whether the West was airing it only for purposes of deception or diversion. They were delighted when they found the West was taking it seriously. The actual tactics, says Suvorov, is quite different than I quote him. The turning point must be reached in a war within the first few minutes. The more terrible the weapon your opponent may use, the more decisively you must attack him. And the more quickly you must finish him off. You can only prevent your enemy from using his axe if you use yours first. What alternative could there be? He writes, in peacetime, Soviet soldiers desert to the West by the hundreds. Their sailors jump off ships in Western ports. Their pilots try to break through the West's anti-aircraft defenses. Even in peacetime, the problems involved in keeping the population in chains are almost insolvable. The problems are already acute when only a few thousand of the most trusted Soviet citizens have even a theoretical chance of escaping. In wartime, tens of millions of soldiers would have an opportunity to desert, and they would take it. To prevent this, every soldier must realize quite clearly that from the very first moments of war, there is no sanctuary for him on the other side of the nuclear desert. Otherwise, the whole communist house of cards will collapse. Unquote. So writes Suvorov during the last couple of years. Defector had a high position in the Soviet armed forces. According to Suvorov, the first stage would be an initial nuclear strike lasting about half an hour. The second stage would be less than two hours, a mass air attack of all the fronts by all the long range air force units carried out in a series of waves. The third stage, about half an hour, would be more rocket launchers now moved up from rear areas. The enemy will try to hunt out and destroy all Soviet rocket launchers so each of these should inflict the maximum damage on an enemy before this happens. The aim is to destroy the targets that survive the first and second stage. Then it goes on to describe later stages. I take these words seriously because they represent apparently actual Soviet plans once they have a chance to implement them. Surely, this considerations like this ought to unite libertarians in insisting on an effective defense, not offense, but defense. Even though it's government defense, to turn down the very concept of defense just because of this historical time in its government defense seems to me suicidal. And yet there are those who favor unilateral disarmament as if a totalitarian power inspired by our noble example would then lay down its arms. Others favor a nuclear freeze without verification, which amounts to exactly the same thing, unilateral disarmament. Welfare status meanwhile hide their heads in the sand saying if only the US spent its money on social programs rather than arms, somehow the whole problem would go away. If only we disarmed peace must somehow come. But what if the other side doesn't disarm and uses our peaceful acts against us? Blank out. This is the Achilles heel of the libertarian party, at least in America, happily not in Britain. It's not that they deny one's self-right to self-defense. It's that they disapprove of government defense and of course they have a point. Government is coercive, government is wasteful and all that. But at the moment government defense is the only game in town. We may not like it, but there it is. There's no other option right now than to be awkward to be defended against an aggressor. If libertarians wait till we have a non-governmental defense system, world catastrophe may be upon us and any aggressor may seize the opportunity to strike. I don't think that libertarian credo demands self-immolation as the price of adhering to a principle. Anyway, the fundamental principle of libertarian thought, it seems to me, is not opposition to taxation, it's not even the non-initiation of force. Behind that lies something even more fundamental, namely the value of individual human life. And any strategy that would unnecessarily risk the destruction of a nation or a continent in the name of a totally volunteeristic principle would be violating that even more fundamental principle. All actions after all have to be considered in their context and the present context and international affairs prominently includes governments. That's the fact, there's a barbarous world out there and there are people with enormous power who envy our prosperity and liberty and would take almost any risks to keep us from enjoying them. We cannot simply wish this away. Part three. Yet it's probable that the Orwellian vision of the world will never be realized. A world of governments headed by ruthless and despotic men. A world of rebellious subject populations who had to be kept in line through terror. That was the familiar world of Orwell's 1984. Big brother controls through fear, through constant intrusion. A world of indoctrination and coercion. But what if despots need not have rebellious populations? What if people can be conditioned through drugs and surgery and selective breeding and recombinant DNA to be passive vessels of big brother? Not rebelling against him, but being fully cooperative with him. Either through early conditioning or more promisingly through selective breeding, so as to eliminate the active and independent minds who are always the greatest threat to dictatorships. Then methods of torture and terror would not be necessary. If a world totalitarian state would come to pass, it would more probably not be on the Orwell model. It would be instead on the model of Huxley's brave new world. Huxley's controller saw that total control should start at conception. In hatcheries made possible by reproductive biology, embryos were molded to order by genetic means to become humans of certain types. The level of intelligence was controlled by manipulating the amount of oxygen given the fetus. Future sewer workers who didn't need much brains were produced on low levels of oxygen. Persons were induced to love their assigned status in the regime by the use of Pavlovian conditioning techniques and by sleep teaching and by a wondrous soma drug. Most of the techniques that Huxley fantasized for the distant future are already becoming available now. The rise of technology has been far more rapid than Orwell could have suspected and it has taken forms he couldn't have predicted. Already there are devices for pacifying troubled people, troubled some people and dissenters. For a time brain operations like prefrontal lobotomies were popular but now drugs are used because they're cheaper and can be used on a day-to-day basis. People can be kept under surveillance by locking transmitters to their bodies. Subhumans can even be created for doing menial work as a source of spare parts for human bodies. The ancient Stoics used to say, surrender everything you have, you have to accept your will. People may injure your body but don't let them injure your spirit. Even if you are sick or in pain, this need not affect you. Keep intact your inviolable will. Heroic words, but modern technology has made it possible to break the will. Tortures can be inflicted such as virtually nobody can resist. And anyway, various forms of truth serum can be forcibly injected so that you can't help revealing the truth under their influence no matter how much you may try to hide it. The will itself can be broken but a much simpler way has come into view. We can reshape people so that they don't want to resist. We are becoming capable of genetic engineering and we will produce whatever kind of people the rulers want. Maya Pines in her book, The Brain Changers writes, quote, in France where generation of peasant women have painstakingly force fed geese by hands, by their hand to fatten them for good foie gras, surgeons have begun to take over the jobs performing a delicate operation on the geese's hypothalamus to knock out their centers of society. This makes the geese eat incessantly of their own free will, so to speak. Damaging their insides and consuming as much as when they were stuffed by hand. To top it all, a drug company is now developing a chemical that can be injected directly into the animal's brains to produce the same effect in only a few minutes at negligible cost. And she adds, quote, there is something particularly revolting about these self-stuffing geese. Surely the American scientists who investigated the brain mechanisms responsible for appetite and satiety should have foreseen such applications of their work. It makes one wonder how our own brains may someday be changed and for whose benefit. What may all this research do to human beings? She asks, unquote, peace-loving rats that grew up in a laboratory had been turned instantly into killers by injected certain drugs into the hypothalamus. The transmitter acetylcholine caused the release of aggression. In other rats, this is a scientist inserted tiny hollow tubes into the rat's brains and then they put in a few drops of carbacol and the rats pounded on the mice and killed them with a single hard bite their first murder. And then the scientists found chemicals that would turn off the killer attacks. Methylatropine caused the wild rats to suddenly become pacifists walking to the mice, sniffing them, doing nothing else. Dr. Douglas Smith said that similar pharmacological prevention could control aggressive behavior in human beings after the manner of Anthony Burgess' clockwork orange. American psychologist B.F. Skinner, describing behavior engineering some years ago, said, we have the technology for installing any human behavior we want. And the University of Michigan psychologist, James O'Connell, proposed, quote, and this is an exact quote, we should reshape our society so that we all would be trained from birth to do what society wants us to do, unquote. The techniques are there. There are plenty of scientists who, to get government grants, would do anything the government says. The apparatus is in place. It would require only a change in government to put it into practice. Peter Beckman wrote a couple of years ago in his fine magazine, Access to Energy, quote, Orwell's 1984 will not come true. The West is moving not toward 1984, but toward the brave new world. In Orwell's fascinating vision, men are coerced into a society of slaves. In Huxley's novel, they are conditioned into it. In a recent speech, a German journalist noted the failure of Soviet propaganda. I guarantee you, he said, there are no communists under 40 in East Germany. The only communists are in the West, to which I, meaning Beckman, Czechoslovak, ex-patriot, add a guarantee that there are no communists under 40 anywhere in Eastern Europe and probably very few in the USSR itself. Why? Because the 1984 type of brainwashing does not work. Nobody is so stupid as to believe that American imperialists will kill widows and orphans for profit. Nobody, that is, who has force-fed such nonsense. Why then can large segments of the population in the West be made to believe that evil corporations driven by lust for profits will give cancer to anybody in sight, presumably including themselves, as well as future generations? Not, we submit, because of the rantings of the Jane Fonda's. They are themselves too 1984-ish to have any lasting effect. They probably just give most people the creeps. But in the brave new world, people are planned for work in urban factories and they are in childhood, shown pictures of flowers in the countryside and then given electric shocks. No need to coerce them into city living as they grew up. They hate the country quite naturally. So why do millions in America regard profit and capitalism as dirty words? Why do they distrust science and technology? Why will they let fraudulent charlatans frighten them out of their wits with witches' brew concocted with scientific vocabulary? Because they have been conditioned, no, not by Karl Marx's capital, but by NBC's Colombo, in which every businessman subtly and unobtrusively is a fool, a crook, or both, as he is in virtually every other TV series. For example, see Benjamin Stein's excellent book, The View from Sunset Boulevard. The average American now spends more time working, only more time working and sleeping than he does in front of the conditioning tube. There are a million other examples from the printed media, the movies, textbook, college courses, every conceivable channel of communication where the conditioning spices are added subtly but persistently. Unquote, that's Peter Beckman's quote. Now finally, part four. How plausible is this picture of the brave new world? Technology has made much of it possible. Such technology in the hands of governments would be terrifying. What are the actual chances of it happening? I can't say, of course, that nothing of the kind will ever happen, but I do want to mention some severe problems with it. In a brave new world society, whatever the state of technology is, however high, progress is likely very soon to stop. If government controls individuals and creates clones and generates inferior beings to do inferior work, who is going to generate the new ideas that will result in future progress? Government has never been known to be very adept at this enterprise. And unless the brave new world encompasses the whole earth, other societies will arise with fresh new technologies which will leave the brave new world far behind and hopelessly vulnerable. There is just no substitute for individual initiative and enterprise. Computers can only do what people program them to do, and when they need repair or improvement or replacement, ingenious minds must devise these improvements or in time other machines that could one day make computers themselves as obsolete as covered wagons. Only individuals with consciousness and intelligence can do this. Slaves can't, clones can't, even computers can't. And the very intelligence and ingenuity required to constantly improve the technology may also provide the means whereby individuals can outwit, sidestep, make side runs around the machinations of governments. Governments tend to be slow lumbering dinosaurs like years behind creative individuals. Computers in private hands can do marvel. Computers in government's hands have only made a mess of America's social security records. And the computers tend toward decentralization of labor which keeps people independent of each other. Consider the millions of persons who formerly had to go to work in city offices who can now make their livings and conduct their business through computerized information banks from their own homes. The same technology that governments can use to keep tabs on people, say for tax purposes or use surveillance against them can also be used by ingenious individuals to circumvent the dissemination of that information or that surveillance. Let me give just one recent example out of a Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago. The new technology has produced trees which grow to full height in six months and are stronger than almost any trees now existing. They are being grown cheaply and efficiently. Now, imagine what this will do for the price of lumber and then the housing industry. Multiply this invention by several thousand and you see what free minds can do and slaves cannot to enhance the condition of human life on this planet. The Soviet Union and China whose systems don't accommodate such creative innovation are ever hungry for Western technology. They're falling behind further each year. China is playing with its free enterprise zones and begging for more Western aid. The Soviets are becoming hysterical in their espionage against Western technology especially aerospace, computers, communications. Because of this widening technological gulf Russia's internal pressures are mounting steadily. Its economy is simply unable to come near matching the living standards of the free world. Besides Russia can't tolerate large information banks that amount of knowledge just can't be disseminated in a totalitarian state. And ironically I'm afraid it's these very pressures that may provoke them to create an external diversion, war in order to keep themselves in power. The strategy is similar to that of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Even so we have an advantage if we remain free. Quality will outrank quantity and quality is what free minds can produce. Even in war with every year that passes the outcome will be determined more by the quickness of information acquisition down to the millisecond than by quantity of weapons. If we know where their missiles are and precisely when we can neutralize them. Many experts already think the nuclear age is over and the electronic age has begun. And in that department the free world has no rival. This is not to say there isn't a great danger in the prospect of a Soviet sudden first strike since modern war does confer a great advantage on an aggressor. Only that in spite of the enormous war preparations the West has a great long run advantage if there is a long run at all. Yes the present condition of the world especially the totalitarian nations controlling populations with propaganda and terror. All this reeks of Orwell's 1984. But if we can get past the 1984 stage and that's of course a big if then there's reason to hope we can also transcend the brave new world. It's vulnerable too. And in the end probably self-defeating. It may be as Skinner said that we have the techniques for instilling any human behavior we want. Yes techniques of behavior modification can do wonders in making people do what other people want them to do. Surgery can remove portions of the brain that will suppress the will or the intellect. But surgery cannot create intelligence. Behavior modification can take away freedom. It cannot create it. These devices can produce a negative. They cannot create a positive. Of course one may say if governments succeed in controlling the technology they may say so what? Who wants freedom? Who wants individual differences and resourcefulness? Ah but they do need it. And that is the Achilles heel of the brave new world. As between two societies one with big brother at the top and a massive drones below. And the other with human beings exercising the intelligence to improve their condition which society will prevail. The rulers may attempt to control their subjects through behavior modification. But it's so doing they've destroyed their potential for future progress. The progress will then come from other societies which have not crippled their distinctively human potential. For instance, could either 1984 or the brave new world produce or tolerate if produced a creative tinkerer like Henry Ford? Human beings as Aristotle said are creatures with reason and will who confront alternatives and deliberate and choose an act. Only human beings in the whole universe as far as we know can do this. When left free to do this they can move mountains. But without the conscious and deliberate workings of human minds progress must stop. A society of drones cannot rise and improve its condition.