Now he has a civilization all laid out that should run according to plan and everybody ought to be free and happy and we shouldn’t have any laws, and the prisons ought to be empty and there shouldn’t be any insanity and there ought to be plenty to eat. This would be a real control of the environment and man, and we don’t have that.

What is standing in the road? These brutal and savage instincts, maybe? Something man picked up when he was swinging from trees or hiding in caves or even earlier. Kill, tooth and claw — these instincts, perhaps, he has carried forward with him into his modern, civilized world, until you can actually get a man to consent to go out and be trained to have a rifle put in his hand and shoot another man in the name of something or other.

Man hasn’t been able to escape his heritage. We found that out. He is grasping wildly today for some method of restraining the brutality of his fellows or even himself. He looks toward government — community government, state government, city, national and even an international government — to restrain the brutality of his fellows and maybe even himself.

Perhaps he is motivated in all that brutality by all the crimes which lie back in the yesterdays, which remain, somehow, as built-in instincts.

Freud said brutal instincts exist. He said that man had to fight them down and repress them, that this conflict caused human and social illness. Well, what are the instincts? Where are they? How brutal are they? How does one go about getting rid of them? For, logically, if something exists, one can certainly do something about it.

Further, how would man react if he did get rid of these instincts? Would all of his ambitions, his freedom, his forces, his imagination be gone? Or would they be better? Would he have more imagination and more freedom and more power and strength and better health if these instincts were gone? That question has to be answered too.

It is all very well to have a lot of theories. Theories are wonderful things. As long as you don’t have phenomena, you can have all the theories you want to. That is a rule in engineering. You get a theory and then you try to apply the thing, and if it doesn’t apply to the physical universe you throw it out and get another theory.