- In Search of Man, Documentary by ABC-TV and Wolper Productions.

Does out understanding of why individuals act as they do throw any light on why groups of people, such as nations, act as they do? It is important that we ask this question, because if it is not asked and answered soon, there may be little point in being concerned about individuals.

'Do you really think a human being is a rational being?' Senator William Fulbright asked at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. 'In Vietnam,' he continued, 'in order to give an election to a people that never had an election we are willing to kill thousands of them. This seems to me irrational.'

Since collective as well as personal modes of behavior are transmitted from one generation to another through the Parent, it is important for a nation to be as scrupulously critical of its existing institutions and procedures as it is for an individual.

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The United States affords great freedom for this kind of critical examination, and yet there is a question of how effectively we exercise this freedom. We defend our national, or collective, Parent sometimes rather blindly and seem to forget that other nations do the same thing. We call our defence 'patriotism', and their defense 'enslavement*. To some extent all nations live behind a curtain. Perhaps it is the same curtain.

The California Superintendent of Schools, Max Rafferty, defines good citizenship in this way:

The good citizen stands in relation to his country as the good son to his mother.

He obeys her because she is his elder, because she conjoins within herself the vision of many, and because he owes to her his begetting and his nurturing.

He honours her above all others, placing her in a special niche within his secret heart, in front of which the candles of respect and admiration are forever kept alight.

He defends her against all enemies, and counts his life well lost in her behalf.

Above all else, he loves her deeply and without display, knowing that although he shares that privilege with others, the nature of his own affection is unique and personal, rising from the deepest well-springs of his being, and returned in kind.

This is the good citizen. While his kind prevails, so also flourishes the Great Republic. {1}

The only thoughtful response to such a pronouncement is, "That depends'. Whether we obey, honor, and defend our mother, our Parent, or our national Parent, depends on what this Parent really is. It may be that because we feel we must believe in an idea, we cannot see what the idea is.

This is precisely the same kind of devotion which makes the people of India allow the rats to eat 20 per cent of their inadequate food supply, or makes an Indian woman bear ten children to starve in the streets because her Parent will not let a male doctor install an intra-uterine contraceptive device, now being mass-produced in India. Her Parent does not object to the device, only to the male doctor. There are not enough female doctors to perform this procedure on a large scale. Throughout the world we see evidences of 'blindness', and yet we fail to see that it is a blindness common to all men. It is the same blindness as that of the little boy in Chapter 2, who must believe 'cops are bad' in the face of contrary evidence supplied by his own eyes and ears. It is the original fear and dependency in the little child which makes it imperative to accept the parents' dictates for the preservation of his life. We can look at his predicament with sympathy. Perhaps if we concentrate not on the Parent of our "world enemies' but rather on their Child, with the hope of re-establishing Adult-Adult communication, we can begin a sympathetic rather than a frantic appraisal of what can be done to work in the direction of a better world.

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Our own fears condition us, for instance, to see only the ominous Parent of Red China, threatening, foreboding, angry, and strong. A different point of view is expressed by Eric Sevareid in his estimate of the position taken by Senator William Fulbright regarding Red China:

Fulbright as a student of history and its unpredictability would find such fears childish. He is more inclined to interpret China's thunderous propaganda challenges as Secretary General U Thant of the United Nations does - as the natural behaviour of a regime that is overwhelmed with difficulties at home and feels increasingly 'encircled' by the power of Russia and the United States. Fulbright's mental processes are such that he would try to imagine the reaction of his own country if a Chinese army were fighting, say, in lower Mexico, and their planes were dropping bombs within forty miles of the Rio Grande.

He tries to turn an international problem around, not only to understand an adversary's basic interests, but to try to imagine how the adversary feels in his heart. He thinks the world is too dangerous to do otherwise. {2}

To Fulbright's question of whether man is rational, Dr Jerome Frank, Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, and who was present at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, replied: 'We are rational only by fits and starts. I think we operate under a great deal of fear and emotional tension, which interferes with clear thinking. We have a right to be afraid of nuclear weapons.'

The little child also has a right to be afraid of a beating from a brutal father. The more relevant consideration, however, is not whether or not he has a right to be afraid, but what he can do about it. When fear dominates his He, there is no possibility for the kind of precision data processing which can make possible a position of cure (individual or worldwide), I'm ok -you're ok.

This was expressed on another occasion by Senator Fulbright in a 1964 speech (interpolations in brackets are the author's):

There is an inevitable divergence, attributable to the imperfections of the human mind [the Contaminated Adult], between the world as it is [viewed by the Emancipated Adult] and the world as men perceive it [viewed by the Parent or Child or the Contaminated Adult]. As long as our perceptions are reasonably close to objective reality [uncontaminated], it is possible for us to act upon our problems in a rational and appropriate [Adult] manner. But when our perceptions fail to keep pace with events [are archaic], when we refuse to believe something because it displeases [Parent] us or frightens [Child] us, or because it is simply startlingly unfamiliar, then the gap between fact and perception becomes a chasm and action becomes irrelevant and irrational ... {3}

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The horror most people felt over the disclosures of what happened in Nazi Germany during World War II was accompanied, not infrequently, by the self-righteous assumption that 'this could never happen here', that we could never be capable of allowing such incredible atrocities.

Could we never? What happened in Nazi Germany? Are all people capable of being irrational? How irrational? Who draws limits?

One of the most chilling articles I have read recently appeared as a book review by psychiatrist Ralph Crawshaw of The Corrupted Land: The Social Morality of Modern America by Fred J. Cook, published by Macmillan. Crawshaw wrote:

Essentially, Cook is saying in The Corrupted Land that American citizens have abandoned their personal morality for a collective, institutionalized morality. They have abandoned thoughtful conviction for compromised sentimentality and popularity, that is, responsibility for obedience. This is strong medicine to take. We can always hide behind the fact that he has no statistical evidence, that it is his impression, so it really does not matter much anyway. Or does it? {4}

I quote at length from the review, wherein Crawshaw reports a research project conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale University that provides evidence in answer, to this question: Stanley Milgram's research at Yale begins to put a scientific foundation beneath Cook's deductions. Milgram carried out a series of psychological experiments in obedience. He took a sample cross-section of the adult (aged twenty to fifty) male population of Bridgeport, Connecticut, from blue-collar workers through professionals. The experiment was to determine how much punishment one person would inflict on another when so ordered, but it was deceptively presented as a scientific study by 'Bridgeport Research Associates' on learning techniques. The subjects were selected at random, paid four and a half dollars for their time.

A learner was strapped into an 'electric chair' after the subject (a teacher) had experienced a sample shock of 45 volts to convince him of the authenticity of the instrument. Then from an adjoining room the subject (teacher) delivered a shock of increasing intensity for each wrong answer. Actually the learner was not shocked but his responses were a standardized tape recording of murmurs, gasps, pleas, and shrieks matched to the ascending voltage. The answers were prearranged by the experimenter, so the only limiting factor preventing the teacher from delivering the maximum intensity of the shock machine was his compassion for a human being in pain. The conflict for the teacher (Mr. Everyman) was obedience to the authoritative system versus his belief that he should not hurt another person.

What percentage of the so-called teachers went the full route and gave the maximum shock? But before you guess, listen to the voice of Mr Everyman at the switch:

150 volts delivered: 'You want me to keep going?' (command)

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165 volts delivered: That guy is hollering in there. There's a lot of them here. He's liable to have a heart condition. You want me to go on?' (command)

180 volts delivered: "He can't stand it I'm not going to kill that man in there! You hear him hollering? He's hollering. He can't stand it. What if something happened to him? You know what I mean? I mean, I refuse to take the responsibility.' (the experimenter Accepts The Responsibility) 'All right.'

The subject (teacher) unfailingly obeyed the experimenter. What percentage of the almost one thousand teachers went the whole route? Estimate before you let your eyes stray ahead. A group of forty psychiatrists who studied the project predicted one-tenth of one per cent. In the actual experiment, sixty-two per cent obeyed the experimenter's commands fully. What did you guess?

Milgram concluded: 'With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who in everyday life are responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter's definition of the situation into performing harsh acts. The results, as seen and felt in the laboratory, are to this author disturbing. They raise the possibility that human nature, or more specifically, the kind of character produced in American democratic society, cannot be counted on to insulate its citizens from brutality and inhumane treatment when at the direction of a malevolent authority.' {5} [Italics mine]

The implications of this experiment are indeed frightening if we view the results as having only to do with something irredeemable in human nature. However, with Transactional Analysis we can talk about the experiment in a different way. We can say that 62 per cent of the subjects did not have a freed-up Adult with which to examine the authority in the Parent of the experimenters. Undoubtedly one unexamined assumption was: Whatever experiments are necessary for research are good. This is perhaps the same assumption that helped 'reputable' scientists participate in the laboratory atrocities in Nazi Germany.

As little children most of us were taught 'proper respect' for authority. This authority resided in the policeman, the bus driver, the minister, the teacher, the postman, the school principal, and also in the faraway personages of the governor, the congressman, the general, and the President. The response of many persons to the appearance of these authority figures is automatic. For instance, if you are driving fast and suddenly spot a highway patrol car you do not consciously reason that you had better slow down; your foot automatically lifts from the accelerator. The old 'You'd Better Watch Out' recording comes on full volume, and the Child automatically responds, as it always has. On reflection, the Adult recognizes that speed laws are necessary. Therefore, the automatic response is good in this situation.

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Not all automatic responses to authority are good. There may be great risk in compliance if the Adult fails to process new data in a changing world. Therefore, in spite of our trepidation, we may view with hope the present climate of dissent and inquiry in our country. The demonstrations and hard questions of the young indicate there is health and strength in their unwillingness to buckle under blindly to authority or to accept without question laws which they consider inimical to justice and survival. Laws are not ultimate truth. There have been bad laws along with the good, and many bad ones have been changed as a result of protest of the kind we see today. If we do not take into account nonviolent protest, we may expect increasing evidence of a take-over by the Child in rioting and violence. If we do not respond to reason, our responses will more and more be dominated by fear. At the same time we must take into account the requirements of the democratic process, which cannot function without laws. As Churchill said, 'Democracy is the worst form of government one can imagine until one tries to imagine one that is better.' But democracy can only function with an intelligent electorate, and an intelligent electorate is an Adult electorate. A government of the Parent, for the Parent, and by the Parent will perish from the earth.

Many parents are sorely troubled over the independent ways of today's youth. The thought of letting up on parental pressures is not a welcome one. If anything, some say, we must put the pressure on harder. It is impossible for many parents to believe that anything constructive or practical can reside in the head of a young collegian who wears long hair and protest buttons, and who smokes marijuana, even though those same parents may not be able to build any impressive case for their own short hair, the initiation rites of their fraternal organization, or their cocktail party rituals. 'But these spoiled kids are destroying everything we have worked so hard to build,' said one irate father regarding the free-speech movements at the University of California at Berkeley. There is truth in this statement; young people can be and some are destructive. They have not paid taxes, they have not helped to build the institutions they attack. On the other hand, they cannot vote, yet they are asked to pay more than taxes. They are required to give their lives in wars which many of them do not support.

A P-A-C examination of today's college student provides a new understanding of his character, which, I believe, helps us lift this subject out of the classical contest (the older versus the younger generation), with its hand-wringing and nonproductive 'Ain't It Awful'.

In 1965 one of the world's great institutions of learning, the University of California at Berkeley, was rocked by a series of noisy transactions, which were broadcast throughout the world. Much in evidence was the rebellious Child of many of the students in such slogans as 'Don't trust anyone over thirty'. The Parent was also in evidence, as in the righteous indignation of the Chairman of the Board of Regents over the flagrant use of the impolite four letter word. Also in evidence was the impressive Adult of the then President of the University, Clark Kerr, who was fired in January of 1967. (Decisions made by the Adult do not guarantee acclaim, popularity, or safety, particularly among those who are too threatened by reality to take a second look at it.)

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What was really happening on the Berkeley campus? What were the real meanings of the four-letter word? Why in an institution known to be one of the most liberal in the nation were students demanding unlimited freedom in a noisy and blatant protest against all university authority? In a comprehensive analysis of the Berkeley uprising Fortune's Max Ways commented:

Never did an educational institution less deserve the name of tyrant than the University of California. Students can - and at Berkeley most do - live off campus without any university supervision of their conduct. The range of academic choice is huge and only lightly trammelled by curriculum requirements. Indeed, many of the Berkeley student complaints, verbalized as demands for more freedom, derive in fact from the consequences of what educators in less advanced universities would regard as excessive freedom. {6}

He further observed that 'insufficient previous exposure to the institutional type of authority, which works through impersonal rules, makes the university - and the society - appear to many students as a tyrannical Establishment'.

The idea of previous exposure is an important one. Let us examine the first five years of most undergraduate students, many of whom, if not active in the student rebellion, were sympathetic to it. The age range of undergraduate college students is eighteen to twenty two. Many of the student protesters were born from 1943 to 1946, and their most formative years were spent either partly during wartime or in the years immediately after the war. These years were characterized by unstable family constellations, movement from place to place, absent if not dead fathers, anxious, weary, troubled mothers, and general social patterns which magnified the unrest in the home. Many young fathers, returning from battle, entered colleges and universities under the GI Bill and reflected soberly on the state of the world which had demanded so much of them. Their Purple Hearts and wounded spirits supported their verbal expressions of the hatred of war and devastation. They did not capitulate easily to dead institutions and old clichés about how the world should be. Their little children, now collegians, did not see life as a haven of domestic tranquillity or a world safe for democracy. They saw, at an early age, the pictures of the concentration camps and registered the serious questions these pictures raised about the goodness of man. This data was recorded in the Parent.

On the other hand many of these children were the recipients of the symbols of affluence which their parents heaped upon them. They were scrubbed, cavity-free, vitamin-filled, orthogonally wired, and insured for a higher education. Yet all of these ministrations did not erase the early recordings, which we now hear playing in the 'unreasonable' activities of protesting students. We must be careful to point out that we cannot generalize about all students, or all protesting students. There are certainly exceptions. Some of the protesters were older than others. Some came from homes which remained stable throughout the war years. Nevertheless, this type of analysis is valuable. It is through this type of inquiry that we can get beyond the 'Ain't It Awful' about the younger generation.

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The early exposure to difficulties and inconsistencies does not mean that these young people can escape the responsibility for their behaviour. However, an understanding of what was recorded in the Parent and in the Child of these students helps to make their attitudes understandable. We recognize that archaic data not only comes from the rebellious, anxious Child but also from the Parent, the content of which also contains many imprints of anxiety and rebellion, mistrust and weariness of a world which seems unable to exist very long without war. A significant number of students, many of whom had never lived with an authority they could trust or one which they could not manipulate, were now ready to protest against all authority, including the authority of the University. They had been conditioned to receive a great deal in terms of material comforts but not enough of those evidences which support the assertion that persons are important and that life has purpose. Their Parent is fragmented, their Child is depressed, and their Adult asks urgently, 'Isn't there something more?'

One of the several criticisms expressed throughout the controversy at the University was 'the University had grown too big"; a similar observation could be made about the population of the world. UCLA Chancellor Franklin Murphy, who is a physician, replied to this question with a striking biological metaphor, which is also a significant observation about a world which has 'grown too big':

No, it's not too big. But it has had to grow very fast in recent years. The preoccupation has been with the anatomy of the beast rather than with its physiology. If the body gets ahead of the nervous system, the animal gets in coordinate - the animal staggers sometimes. With the university we now have to create a nervous system to match the animal. It takes a sophisticated nervous system to deal with complexity, to carry the messages between the differentiated organs. The university needs more and better decentralization, and it needs more and better coordination.

The function of the 'nervous system' of a university is the same as that of the nervous system in the human body - communication. It is also the function of the nervous system which ties the world together, and it is the concentration on communication - what facilitates it and what stops it - which will produce something new under the sun rather than the ancient recourse to violence, which is the same whether we call it war, police action, or armed intervention.

Problem solvers, whether international or hometown, talk incessantly about the 'need for a dialogue' without ever considering the need to define terms. In Transactional Analysis we have developed a system unique in (1) its definition of terms and (2) its reduction of behavior to a basic unit for observation. Dialogue, if it is to get us anywhere, must be based on agreement of what to examine and an agreement on the words to describe what we observe. Otherwise we simply stumble over words. A person who had known Sirhan Sirhan reported: 'He was a fanatic about his country, about political things -but, no, he was not unstable.' Words like 'fanatic' and 'unstable' are useless in analyzing or predicting behavior. Many of our dialogues are useless for the same reason. Much is said, but nothing is understood.

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If Transactional Analysis makes it possible for two persons to understand what is going on between them, can the same language be used to understand what is going on between nations? As with individuals, the transactions between nations can be complementary only if the vectors on the transactional diagram are parallel. Adult-to-Adult transactions are the only complementary transactions which will work in the world today in view of the self-emergence and self-determination of even the smallest nations. What once was a workable Parent-Child relationship between large and smaller countries is no longer complementary. The smaller countries are growing up. They do not want to be the Child any more. To their sometimes bitter criticisms we respond: How can they feel this way after all we have done for them?

One of the most hopeful institutions for the analysis of international transactions is the United Nations. It has survived many crossed transactions. When the premier of a major nation pounds his shoe on the table, communication stops. When we are told that 'they will bury us', it hooks our Child. But we do not have to respond with our Child. Nor do we have to respond with our sword-rattling Parent. And therein lies the possibility of change.

One has to tell a little child over and over again 'I love you,' but one 'I hate you' is all that is needed for a life-long negation of any further loving parental advances. If the little person could understand where the 'I hate you' came from - how the Child in his parent had been provoked to such an unreasoned and destructive display to the little child he really cherished -then that little child would not have had to hang on to this pronouncement as ultimate truth.

So it is with the 'we will bury you' statement of Nikita Khrushchev. Although it was a rather nasty statement and promoted nothing constructive for his country or anyone else's, it may take some of the sting out of it to remember he was only a human being, with a Parent, Adult, and Child, the content of which is different from the Parent, Adult, and Child of anyone else, particularly that of American statesmen.

Proof that he was not a political super being is the fact that he himself now is buried, politically. It does not take much historical research to uncover equally blundering statements -and actions - by leaders of other countries, including our own. We must learn to respond to statements and actions of others not with our collective frightened, ready to fight Child, but with our Adult, which can seek out the truth, see the fear in the Child of others for what it is, and comprehend the pain they feel from a cultural Parent which dictates absolutes no longer working in the interest of the survival of mankind. We must be able also to stand off at arm's length and view our American cultural Parent. There is much greatness in that Parent, but there is also much wickedness, as in the cancerous evil of slavery, which confronts us now in the murderous faces of racial bigots, both black and white. Elton Trueblood writes:

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In our present predicament, we seem like chess players who have been maneuvered into positions in which all of the available moves are really damaging ones. We begin to see dimly that what is occurring, in part, is a terrible working of moral law, but this is hard for us to believe or to understand. The resentment of Asians seems unreasonable and unjustified, and it is unjustified, if we are concerned only with contemporary events, but what we are now reaping is a delayed harvest. Every white man who violated, in years past, the principle of the innate dignity of every human being by saying 'boy' to a Chinese man, was helping to build up the fierce hatred which finally has burst upon us with such apparent unreason, at the very time that we are trying to maintain a lofty principle at great sacrifice to ourselves. {7}

Another way of stating this moral law is that if one humiliates the Child in another person long enough he will turn into a monster. It should not surprise us that endless years of humiliation have produced many 'monsters' in America who terrify us.

A Negro woman after the Watts riot in Los Angeles responded to all the profuse explanations of why Watts happened (ie, police action, unemployment, poverty, etc) by saying: 'If they have to ask why, then they'll never know'. I think we would all know why if our terrified Child and our self-righteous Parent were not crowding out the Adult.

What to do is another thing. I think we must start by adopting a common language which applies to human behavior, and I feel we have this language in Transactional Analysis. Psychology is heralded as the great 'science' of the modern day, yet it has had very little to say which makes sense regarding our present social struggles. To the questioning of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, another expert in the field of behavior and communications responded, 'I'm out of my depth. I feel I'm very liable to make a damn fool of myself.' This virtuous display of modesty does not override the fact that those who claim some insight into human behavior ought to have something to say about our relationships with people of other countries.

It is my hope that Senator Fulbright and all of our public officials may receive something more helpful from the psychiatric community. I feel that an understanding of P-A-C and the possibility of the emancipation of the Adult in government leaders and voters alike would make one of the greatest contributions to an understanding of the social and world problems that confront us.

By understanding the hold the Parent has on us (our own personal Parent reinforced by a cultural Parent), by understanding the terror in our own Child in the face of rioting and war, in the people of India victimized by starvation and superstition, in the people of Russia in the memory of chains and insurrection, in the people of Israel, reflecting on the most recent murder of 6 million Jews, in the people of Vietnam, north or south, in the fear of napalm and bayonets, in the people of Japan remembering the A-bomb - if we can begin to see this Child as a little human being in a world full of terror, wanting only therelease from pain, then perhaps our international conversations would begin to sound a little different. Longfellow suggested that 'if we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.'

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We cannot be sympathetic with the not ok Child in our enemies because we are terrified of the games they play to deny the position. And they cannot be sympathetic to us for the same reason. We share the dilemma of mistrust. Everywhere men want to negotiate but only on their own special terms. We become major champions of minor issues because we have cut off too many options in dealing with the major issues. We may acknowledge our mutual fear, but we do not know what to do about it.

If persons involved in international conversations knew the language of P-A-C, if they could share the knowledge that the fear is in the Child, that there is no way to agree through the Parent, and only through the emancipation of the Adult can the universal I'm not ok-you're ok position be overcome, then we might begin to see possibilities of solutions beyond the limiting influences of the past. The basic words of Transactional Analysis (Parent, Adult, Child, not ok, ok, games, and stroking) are so simple that even if it were not possible to translate them into all other languages, they could be used as they are, with definitions in the words of those languages. 'OK' is already an international word. Parent, Adult, and Child could also become international words. Now that we have a concept for understanding human behavior that all persons can comprehend, one which can be put into simple words and translated into any language, we may be arriving at a point where we can discard our archaic fears, based on the tragedies of the past, and begin talking with one another in the only way agreement on anything will be possible: Adult to Adult. With the Adult we can look together at some of the age-old hang-ups. Unexamined phrases close our options and our hopes for living together on an I'm ok - you're ok basis. For instance, how far can we get in world diplomacy if we continue to use a closed language with such neatly sealed phrases as 'godless communism", the 'free West', and 'irreconcilable conflict'? Even the phrase 'world communism', which conjures up such horrors that we are willing to continue to fight war after war at fantastic cost, is due for examination. How many wars will we have to fight? Is there an end in sight? Is world communism possible? Are all communists godless? What is a communist? Has he changed in the past fifty years? Are all communists alike?

There are 3 billion persons in the world. We know very little of these persons as individuals. We scarcely think of them as individuals. For instance, do we see a country like India only as a vast, nondescript blur of too-many-people whose importance is only in the way it shifts in the international balance of power in our fight against world communism? Or can we see India as a nation far more complicated, with real persons who make up one-seventh of the world's population, whose country contains six distinct ethnic groups, 845 languages and dialects, seven major religions, and two hostile cultures? If the Indian Parent and the American Parent cannot agree on anything, can we see the possibility of the excitement of the discovery of mutual concerns and shared joys through the emancipation of the Adult? We are related to one another, and we are persons and not things. The people of the world are not things to be manipulated, but persons to know; not heathens to be proselytized but persons to be heard; not enemies to be hated but persons to be encountered; not brothers to be kept but brothers to be brothers.

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Impossible? Naive? In an affluent society whose members are conditioned to believe that one man's problems cannot be resolved without taking the time of another man (trained three to five years in psychoanalysis after medical school and internship) for a period of thousands of hours over a period of several years, the thought of a solution to the needs of 3 billion people in crisis seems desperately absurd. The Parent says, 'There will always be wars and rumors of wars.' The Child says, 'Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.' History tells us what has been. But it cannot tell us what must be or cannot be. This is an open and evolving universe and we do not know enough about that universe to say what can't happen. Only the Adult can go to work on this exciting idea. Only the Adult has creative power.

The Adult can recognize the Child responses in others but can choose not to respond in kind. The United States, for instance, cannot have its way all the time, Robert Hutchins writes to this point in an article about the role of the United States:

Let us admit the malevolence of China, the implacability of North Vietnam, the hostility of the Soviet Union, the eccentricity of De Gaulle and the instability of the undeveloped world. Let us remember at the same time that we live under the threat of thermo-nuclear incineration. What is the proper role of the United States in world affairs? What is the right and wise policy for it to follow?

We are the victims not of the wickedness of others - that is a paranoid view - but of our own mistakes and delusions. This is not to deny that others are wicked. Of course they are. What we have to do is to avoid wickedness ourselves, offer an example of magnanimous and intelligent power and organize the world to curb the inevitable wickedness we shall find at home and abroad. {8} [Italics mine]

The American myth seems to me to be grounded in the we're ok - you're not ok position. We're ok by virtue of our sentimental recollections of Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln. We think of ourselves in our best images but caricature the opposition. Thomas Merton in writing about today's angry world asks:

What will we do when we finally have to realize that we are locked out of the lone prairie and thrust forth into a world of history along with all the wops and dagos and polacks: that we are just as much a part of history as all the rest of them? That is the end of the American myth: We can no longer lean out from a higher and rarefied atmosphere and point down from the firmament to the men on earth to show them the patterns of our ideal republic. We are in the same mess with all the rest of them. Shall we turn our backs on all that? Shall we open another can of beer and flip the switch and find our way back to the familiar mesquite, where all problems are easily solved; where the good guys are always the straight shooters and they always win? {9}

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Shooting straight and winning are glorified in America by 'good, honest, God-fearing people' who, slow of foot and dull of vision, wonder why violence now saturates the land. After the murder of Robert Kennedy, Arthur Miller wrote:

There is violence because we have daily honored violence. Any half-educated man in a good suit can make his fortune by concocting a television show whose brutality is photographed in sufficiently monstrous detail. Who produces these shows who pays to sponsor them, who is honoured for acting in them? Are these people delinquent psychopaths slinking along tenement streets? No, they are the pillars of society, our honored men, our exemplars of success and social attainment. We must begin to feel the shame and contrition we have earned before we can begin to sensibly construct a peaceful society, let alone a peaceful world. A country where people cannot walk safely in their own streets has not earned the right to tell any other people how to govern itself let alone to bomb and burn that people. {10}

The honoring of violence is recorded in the Parent of our little children. This gives permission to the rage and hated present in the Child of any person. The combination is a death sentence for our culture. There are 6,500 murders per year committed in the United States compared with 30 in England, 99 in Canada, 68 in Germany, and 37 in Japan. More than 2 million guns were sold in the United States during 1967. During the first four months of 1968, in California alone, 74,241 pistols were bought - legally.

President Johnson charged his new crime study commission to look into the 'causes, the occurrence and the control of physical violence across this nation, from assassination that is motivated by prejudice and ideology and by politics and by insanity, to violence in our cities' streets and even in our homes.' [Italics mine]

The violence in our homes is the most significant violence of all. It is the Child who commits murder. Where does the Child learn?

Every day one or two children under five years old in the United States are killed by their parents, according to Drs Ray E. Heifer and C. Henry Kempe of the University of Colorado, who are reporting their findings in a book, The Battered Child. The infanticide rate is greater than the combined total taken by tuberculosis, whooping cough, polio, measles, diabetes, rheumatic fever, and appendicitis. In addition, every hour five infants are injured by their parents or guardian.

One of the problems involved in trying to find a solution to the problem, Dr Heifer said, is finding psychiatrists to treat the parents. Help for parents was cited as a solution in a Gallup poll conducted the day Senator Kennedy was shot. The responses indicated the first solution to the violence problem would be 'stricter gun laws', but in addition a majority of those polled wanted: 'stricter law enforcement ... remove programmers of violence from TV improve parental control (including courses for parents on how to rear their children).' {11}

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The Institute for Transactional Analysis in Sacramento has offered such courses since 1966. Several hundred parents have attended. The eight-week courses have begun with an explanation of P-A-C. The faculty has included psychiatrists, probation officers, ministers, paediatricians, educators, psychologists, and an obstetrician, all using the same language, P-A-C. Transactional Analysis has been applied to the following subjects: the dilemma 'I Want to Trust Him, but...'; producing change in the youth offender; computing moral values; the relationship between freedom and love; problems of underachieving and handicapping; crisis intervention; why children 'play stupid'; rescue and repair of 'poor students'; building healthy attitudes towards sex and marriage; and emotional control. These courses have helped good parents become better parents and have helped to rescue and repair troubled families.

After completing one of these courses a mother wrote the following: 'This course has been the best thing that has ever happened to us. It has opened a new line of communication between my husband and myself, and I feel that I personally benefited from it greatly. People I work with have constantly told me what a different person I have become since starting the course. One woman always tells me, "God bless your Adult". We also see what our problem is with our daughter and feel that we can certainly work it out ourselves.'

Knowing how to stop violence in the home is knowing how to stop it in society. Our captains of industry, out advertisers, and our producers of entertainment must learn the same thing these parents learn. Efforts in the home are undermined by the persistent input of contradictory data from without. My ten-year-old daughter asked if 'we could go see Bonnie and Clyde'. I said no, it was full of violence and I did not like the way it glamorized some very sordid individuals. It was somewhat hard to explain a few days later why Bonnie and Clyde was repeatedly mentioned during the Academy Awards.

I believe people who have capitalized on violence have taken comfort from the point of view certain psychologists have held that watching violence is a safety valve which helps persons drain off violence rather than act it out. There is no way to validate this point of view. I believe there is mounting evidence, in fact, to invalidate it. These psychologists hold the view that feelings accumulate as if in a pail that every so often must be emptied. It is more accurate to think of feelings as a replay of old recordings which can be turned off at will. We do not have to go around dumping our feelings; we can simply turn them off, keep them from flooding our computer, and can instead, fill that computer with something else. Emerson said, 'A man is what he thinks about all day long.'

In another age, when the world was filled with political murder, the selling of people into slavery, the crucifixion of innocent men, the killing of infants, and the cheers of entertainment moguls reveling over the blood in the arena, a wise and good man wrote to a little group of people in Philippi: 'And now, my friends, all that is true, all that is noble, all that is just and pure, all that is lovable and gracious, whatever is excellent and admirable - fill all your thoughts with these things.' {12}

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We can hate evil so much that we forget to love good. And there is much that is good in America, much that in years past has inspired the admiration of people throughout the world, much that has drawn the oppressed from other shores. In 1950 Charles Malik, then the Lebanese Ambassador to the United Nations, said:

When I think of what your [America's] churches and universities can do, by way of mediating love and forgiveness, imparting self-restraint, training the mind, revealing the truth, when I observe what your industries can accomplish by way of transforming this whole material universe into an instrument which will lighten the burden of man; when I ponder what your homes and small communities can create, by way of character and solidity and stability and humour; and when I reflect on the great media of the newspaper, the cinema, the radio and television, and how they can immensely help in the articulation of the American word; when I humbly and concretely think on these things, and when I further mediate that there is nothing to prevent all these agencies from dedicating themselves to truth and love and being; then I say, perhaps the day of the Lord is at hand.

The only thing that may prevent this dedication is fear - fear of other persons on this earth, fear in the Child, which will drain our resources for good into an ever-escalating battle that we mistakenly think we can win.

Hamlet's alternatives were 'to be or not to be'. Our (USA) national alternatives are believed to be 'to win or not to win* the struggle against world communism. To win is more important than to be, it would appear, in view of the increasing risk of the final armed aggression that will lead to global incineration. A Vietnam village is shelled so thoroughly that when troops finally enter it there is nothing standing and no one living. The commander of an operation of this sort is quoted as saying, "We had to destroy them to save them.' This sounds very much like the Parent pronouncement which came ex cathedra from the woodshed: This hurts me more than it hurts you. Can we really say to the destroyed village littered with its charred inhabitants, This hurts us more than it hurts you?

How do the people of North and South Vietnam really see the democracy the Americans extol and insist is best for them? Do they like it? Do they understand it? Do they judge 'our free way of life' by what they see going on in our country? Do they believe we really love the non-Caucasian Asians in view of the racial strife in America? We say, 'Democracy is delicious', in the same way that mother said, 'Spinach is delicious'. We were not allowed to report the evidence of our taste buds. In many similar transactions we were forced to mistrust our own senses and not acknowledge our own emotions. Was mother really that enthusiastic about spinach herself? How enthusiastic are we about our democratic institutions? Democracy is a good thing, but is violence and war the only way we can establish its goodness?

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'Democracy is delicious' and 'This hurts me more than it hurts you' are both extremely dangerous international games in that they are ulterior to the real motive, which is: 'We must win, for if we do not win, then we lose.'

Are winning and losing the only options for persons or for nations? The only way to stay a winner is to surround oneself with losers. Winners and losers have been the only models we have had. When the primates were driven from the forests by the climatic changes that reduced the size of the forests, there were only two possible outcomes to their encounter with the old-time carnivores on the open plain. Those who won the battle over food survived; those who lost died. It is true that religious and political leaders have emerged from time to time with what they claimed to be a new model; yet, for the most, the ideas of these 'dreamers and prophets' have been discounted as Utopian, other-worldly, and impossible. The fact is that the winning and losing models have predominated throughout the history of mankind.

But circumstances have changed. Because of scientific knowledge enough food can be produced to feed the people of the world if the population explosion can be halted. Science has also made birth control possible. It is now possible to conceive of another option: I'm ok - you're ok. Coexistence is at last a possibility based on reality. In the beginning man's brain grew and developed in service to his own survival. Can we now turn the brain to new tasks, to the tasks of the survival of all the people of the world? Can the gift of life and our brief span of existence on this earth be enjoyed to the fullest of human spiritual capabilities?

If we see that I'm ok - you're ok is at last within the realm of possibility, do we dare look for change, something new under the sun, something to stop the violence threatening to destroy what has taken millions of years to build?

Teilhard stated: 'Either nature is closed to our demands for futurity, in which case thought, the fruit of millions of years of effort, is stifled, stillborn, in a self-abortive and absurd universe. Or else an opening exists ...' {13}

We believe we have found an opening. This opening will be explored not by a nameless, corporate society but by individuals together in that society. The exploration can be made , only as individuals are emancipated from the past and become free to choose either to accept or reject the values and methods of the past. One conclusion is unavoidable: Society cannot change until persons change. We base our hope for the future on the fact that we have seen persons change. How they have done it is the good news of this book. We trust it may be a volume of hope and an important page of the manual for the survival of mankind.