Speaker 1: You see, the reason you want to be better is
Speaker 1: the reason why you aren't. We aren't better because we
Speaker 1: want to be because the road to hell is paved
Speaker 1: with good intentions. Because all that do gooders in the world,
Speaker 1: whether they are doing good for others or doing it
Speaker 1: for themselves, are trouble makers on the basis of kindly.
Speaker 1: Let me help you, or you'll drown, said the monkey,
Speaker 1: putting the fish safely up a tree. We White Anglo
Speaker 1: Saxon Protestants, British, German, American have been on a rampage
Speaker 1: for the past hundred or more years to improve the world.
Speaker 1: We have given the benefits of our culture, our religion,
Speaker 1: our technology to everybody except perhaps the Australian Aborigines. And
Speaker 1: we have that they received the benefits of our culture,
Speaker 1: even our political styles, our democracy. You had better be
Speaker 1: democratic or we'll shoot you. And having conferred these blessings
Speaker 1: all over the place, we wonder why everybody hates us. See,
Speaker 1: because sometimes doing good to others, and even doing good
Speaker 1: to oneself is amazingly destructive, because it's full of conceit.
Speaker 1: How do you know what's good for other people? How
Speaker 1: do you know what's good for you? If you say
Speaker 1: you want to improve, then you ought to know what's
Speaker 1: good for you. But obviously you don't, because if you did,
Speaker 1: you would be improved. So we don't know. And what
Speaker 1: seems a good thing today or yesterday, like DDT, turns
Speaker 1: out tomorrow to have been a disaster. What seemed in
Speaker 1: the moral and spiritual sphere, too, like great virtues in
Speaker 1: times past, are easily seen today as hideous evils. Let's take,
Speaker 1: for example, the Inquisition. In its own day. Among Catholics,
Speaker 1: the Holy Inquisition was regarded as we today regard the
Speaker 1: practice of psychiatry. You see, you feel that in curing
Speaker 1: a person of cancer, almost anything is justified. The most
Speaker 1: complex operations, the most weird surgery, people suspended for days
Speaker 1: and days on end, on the end of tubes with
Speaker 1: X ray penetration, burning or people undergoing shock treatment, people
Speaker 1: locked in the colorless, monotonous corridors of mental institutions. In
Speaker 1: all good faith, they knew that which in heresy, we're
Speaker 1: terrible things, awful plagues, imperiling people's souls forever and ever,
Speaker 1: so any means we're justified to cure people of heresy.
Speaker 1: We don't change, We're doing the same thing. Today, but
Speaker 1: under different names. We can look back at those people
Speaker 1: and see how evil that was, but we can't see
Speaker 1: it in ourselves. So therefore beware virtue. Lautsa, the Chinese philosopher, said,
Speaker 1: the highest virtue is not virtue, and therefore really is virtue.
Speaker 1: But inferior virtue cannot let go of being virtuous, and
Speaker 1: therefore is not virtue. Related in more of a periphrastic way,
Speaker 1: the highest virtue is not conscious of itself as virtue,
Speaker 1: and therefore really is virtue. Lower virtue is so self
Speaker 1: conscious that it's not virtue. In other words, when you breathe,
Speaker 1: you don't congratulate yourself on being virtuous, But breathing is
Speaker 1: a great virtue. It's living. When you come out with
Speaker 1: beautiful eyes blue or brown or green, as the case
Speaker 1: may be, you don't congratulate yourself for having grown one
Speaker 1: of the most fabulous jewels on earth, just just eyes,
Speaker 1: and you don't account it a virtue to see, to
Speaker 1: entertain the miracles of color and form. You say, oh,
Speaker 1: that's just, But that's real virtue. Virtue in the sense
Speaker 1: that the old sense of the word a strength is
Speaker 1: when we talk about the healing virtue of a plant.
Speaker 1: That's real virtue. But the other virtues are stuck on
Speaker 1: they're air sights, their imitation virtues, and they usually create
Speaker 1: trouble because more diabolical things are done in the name
Speaker 1: of righteousness. And be assured that everybody of whatever nationality
Speaker 1: or political frame of mind or religion, always goes to
Speaker 1: war with a sense of complete rightness. The other side
Speaker 1: is the devil. Our opponents, whether in China or Russia
Speaker 1: or Vietnam, have the same feeling of righteousness about what
Speaker 1: they're doing as we have on our side, and a
Speaker 1: plague on both houses, because, as Confucius said, the goody
Speaker 1: goodies are the thieves of virtue, which is the form
Speaker 1: of our own proverb, the road to hell is paved
Speaker 1: with good intentions.