Chauncey C. Riddle
7 January 1965
Speech given to BYU Young Americans for Freedom
I appreciate this opportunity to discuss the concept of freedom. I hope that through this we can perhaps do a little mind-stretching and enlarge our horizons.
I think it’s a worthwhile initial premise that the thing we need to do in talking about freedom is to come to understand different understandings of freedom. You say, “What is freedom?” Well, freedom is many things to many people. There are many sincere people the world over who are worming for what they call freedom, for what they call peace, for what they call happiness. Words confuse men, and these people many times are working for every different ends; I think we need to be careful about impugning motives. So, for the sake of, I think, gentlemanly fair play, let us assume that people’s motives are good and try and understand of different concepts of freedom and why perhaps they might different from our own.
We cannot fully understand the concept of freedom until we take into account the nature of man. Different people have different concepts concerning the nature of man. What is he? As you’re perhaps aware the majority of the intellectuals in the world believe that man is an evolved organism, that he is a complex, highly adapted beast. He is a being who has only a body, a relatively highly-developed central nervous system, no soul, no spirit, no pre-mortal existence, and no hope for immortality. The best that this being can enjoy is a season of gratification, you might say; a short time of existence on this earth wherein certain pleasantries are vouchsafed to such an individual. And thus it is that people who have this idea of main see the great obstacles to man’s happiness as those things that would prevent his gratification. They see the terrible obstacles as war, for instance, where men have to give up their lives. They feel that to deliver men from war is an ultimate objective. Therefore, anything short of war that will stop a war is legitimate in their minds. They believe that since there is no after life that men ought to have the privilege of enjoying as much of this life as possible, and it’s better to be a slave and to be alive and to enjoy life as one can than to be dead, because if one is dead there is no existence. It’s a simple matter of logic, isn’t it? So, in the minds of these people, they are perfectly consistent in being willing to do virtually anything to have the freedom to live. They’re afraid of poverty. They think that the important thing in life is to enjoy an abundance of material possessions, and therefore in any good system of society every moral act of every man will be to deliver all the goods of society to every man. As a man enjoys this life he will have a bounty of all that can be afforded him of the fruits of the earth. These people see disease as a great threat, and therefore freedom from disease is another great challenge. Anything that can be done to deliver the masses of mankind from disease is a thing to be imposed upon him. They see that much of mankind is grasped in the claw of fear, and this for various reasons. Therefore, to deliver men from fear is a prime objective, to give them those ideas that will enable them to feel comfortable in the world, to remove from their horizons any black cloud that might threaten them, that might make them feel uneasy. Now, this is a simple explanation of what some people think. I think it’s recognizable as the thinking of much of the world. But, if that is not the nature of man, then perhaps these things are not appropriate, at least in this framework.
For instance, supposing that man is not just a beast. Supposing that man is a child of God and that he has intelligence and a spirit in addition to his physical body and that the important thing about man is to help this intelligence and this spirit to grow, to assert control over the physical body, to learn to handle the materials of this earth and subdue this earth, to learn to live together in society in peace and happiness. If this is the nature of man. And if this is his ultimate objective, then the things we have just talked about can be seen as, shall we say, such poverty-stricken approaches to the concept of man and his opportunity that in a very real sense they are worth of being fully rejected, at least in the manner in which they are approached.
Now, supposing we hold this latter concept of man, what does freedom mean now? Freedom for this man now is not the opportunity to be protected in all things from his environment. It is more the opportunity to have the opportunity to develop and to grow, to exercise free agency, to exercise stewardship, to have a chance to perform experiments in the world and the chance to reap the benefits from his experiments and the chance to achieve whatever level of happiness he seeks. Now, one of the fundamental things to which we must accord ourselves is the fact that there are truths in the universe; there are laws. Everybody has learned to recognize this fact about the physical universe. There are certain laws that apply. If you want this microphone to work, you have to hook it up a certain way. That’s all there is to it. If I say I don’t want it hooked up that way and I must hook it up the way it pleases me, then we cannot be certain that the microphone will work. And yet, when we get into the realm of social matters and especially into the realm of developing the nature of human individuals, many people like to think this way. They like to think: “Let’s do what we please. Let’s pretend that the results of our actions are good, and let’s try and make sure that we are not exposed to the consequences of our acts.” So, when we say “what is freedom?” we have to have in mind what is the framework of mind from which we are operating.
Freedom basically to each individual is the opportunity to pursue his own desires, to do what he wants to do. A human being who has no wants and desires is already free, isn’t he? If a person has a conception of nothing but that which he has and desires nothing but that which he has, he’s free; he’s not under any sense of restriction. A person who can lie still looking up at the stars and think that he is perfect free as long as he doesn’t try to move. He can be of that mind; but when he, like Gulliver, starts to try to move and discovers that in his repose he has been bound then he becomes aware of the fact that he does not have freedom simply because of the fact that he cannot pursue his own desire. But as long as he desires nothing, the problem of freedom never arises. So freedom is very closely connected with desire, and the desires of human beings are different. So we have to say, what kind of freedom shall we have? Shall we free those individuals who desire to be free as to the nature of the animal, the first group of people? Or shall we please those who desire to be free as to the nature of the soul and the spirit to become individuals? In fact, this is the struggle of our times. There are those individuals who champion the freedom of the man who is a machine and those who champion the freedom of the man who is a child of God. So where do you and I find our place in all of this? I think that we will simply have to make up our mind what our ultimate commitments are. I think there is a great deal we can say about freedom in the world to convince people who think that man is a beast there ought to be more freedom than they think. Frankly speaking, you don’t have to work very hard on the people who have a testimony of the gospel. If they really understand the gospel, they understand that the spirit of man is important and man must be left free to work out his salvation, and that if government tries to take care of him it destroys him. But then these aren’t the people that we need to be concerned with particularly. The other people we can help probably most by teaching them the gospel of Jesus Christ. If they will not accept that, at least they can see some things. Now let’s point out the things about freedom as an asset in the ordinary world. Let’s take the freedom of the market to begin with.
Most people fear the time when they shall not be able to provide their own needs, when there won’t be enough food and enough clothing to take care of them; and so they demand that somebody in the society set up a system that will vouchsafe to them a fulness of these blessings, that somehow the economy will be geared so that three will always be plenty of these things at a reasonable price. Now this sounds like a sensible thing to do under most circumstances, but it breaks down at this point. The human mind is not sufficient to calculate all the contingencies of the future, all the necessities, all the natural calamities, all the needs. There simply is not the ability to do this. Whereas, if the market is left free, then we have a convergence on the scene of a kind of intelligence which is different. When you try to get a government to control the economy, what you are doing is making the mind of one man or a few men try to meet all the problems. But, when you have a free society and a free economy, you’re turning every man loose to use his ingenuity, his knowledge, his wisdom, his immediate skills and opportunities in the solution of the problems of society. As a practical example of what I’m talking about, let me mention a certain event in history, In the 17th century, the city of Brussels was besieged. It was known several months in advance that this was going to take place, and the price of foodstuffs in the city began to rise. The city fathers thought that this was a terrible thing, that to have the price of things rise would be to prevent many people from enjoying sufficient food, so they clamped an absolute law on the society sawing that the price would not be allowed to rise and they went into the shops of people who were discovered to be selling for higher prices and destroyed their shops. Well, this succeeded in keeping the price of foodstuffs down, and then the war began. A siege settled in around the city, and it went along nicely for a while; but after a short time the food gave out. Why did the food give out? The city collapsed because of plain hunger whereas it seems quite likely it could have gone on for some time had they not imposed this rigid restriction, had they left the price free to fluctuate. As soon as they saw that the price started rising, foodstuffs from all over the part of Belgium started to flow into Brussels. Why? Because that’s where the best price was. And people began to store up stocks and thus to raise the price. If this thing had been left free, people would have stored a lot of food, and not only that but food production facilities would have been put into motion that would have created a greater supply to meet that greater demand. Now, it’s certainly true that some people would have had a more difficult time getting food; and this is the humanitarian aspect that people always want to bring up. Now take the poor man that has a difficult time getting food. If food is of importance to him, he will take all that he has and he will get the food and get it on hand have it ready to go. But on the other hand, what food is he going to choose? Well, he’s going to choose the food that is at the lowest price, isn’t he? He’s going to choose that food from which he can get the most nourishment for the lowest price and thus he is going to satisfy his needs the most efficiently possible, and possible he will create a greater demand for this thing and maybe even greater production facilities will be brought into play. It’s historically notable that whenever a great demand is created for something the production facilities go into motion and the price actually drops over the long-run. So the poor man, too, is going to be benefited if this thing is free enough, if it has a long enough time to run. Well, at any rate, if we multiply this kind of example through history, we can see that one of the principle barriers to the progress of mankind has been the placing of limits and barriers, stopping prices, either at the top or at the bottom. Now we’ll go on to some examples in other areas.
Let’s take any example—say a political example, for instance, what would happen if every nation on the earth suddenly “There are no restrictions anymore on what country you live in. You can go to any country you wish and live in that country.” You know what would happen immediately, don’t you. The countries that are best to live in, that provide the most opportunities for their people would immediately flooded, wouldn’t they? Well, what would happen to other countries? Other countries would find that they are not enjoying, say, a population. They would do things to make themselves more attractive so that people would enjoy living there and producing. If you said that money can go anywhere you want it to go in this world, people would put their money where it’s the safest. The leaders of countries would say: “We’d better be careful that we don’t expropriate funds; otherwise, we won’t have any capital in our country.” Capital would flow following the law of supply and demand wherever it was most needed in the world, if there were no restrictions on it. Countries that needed capital would provide a favorable environment for the reception and the protection of capital, and it would go into those countries and would be protected. United States foreign policy at certain times in our history has had the ideal of protecting United States investments. Recently, this hand has been reversed. As I read magazines and business reports, I see that there is a tremendous anxiety, a reflection that people need to be pretty careful in which countries they make their investments. You don’t want to just go to any foreign country to make your investments no matter what the economic opportunity seems to be.
Now, the let’s apply this to education. This is pretty close to home for all of us. What does freedom in education mean? Suppose you had the freedom to learn anything you wanted to learn. Now the situation you enjoy today is one of fairy severe restriction. You are forced in certain channels, certain requirement to pass certain courses. You have to fill up your curriculum with so much of this and so much of that, according to the expert planning of those who think that they know what all students need. But I ask you, what kind of student does this produce? I think that if you look around and look at the average college graduate, he is not particularly outstanding in anything. Most companies discover that it’s what they do after they get these people that counts and not what they got before they came. It’s true that have acquired a certain measure of conformability or a certain measure of understanding of the world and something of history; yet these things are sufficiently distorted sometimes so as to be value. But, to find that a student is really outstanding in our system is somewhat rare. Supposing the academic situation was free. There would be terrible consequences, but let’s picture some of them. Supposing that any class could grow to any size in the university and that no one would be required to take classes form any given man. Can you see what would happen to teachers? What would happen? Some teachers would have their classes so full that they would swallow half of the university; other teachers would never have a soul in their classes. And wouldn’t this be a good thing for education? Now I admit that there are people who are irresponsible in education, who are willing to go listen to teachers who put forth only sweet diatribes, who really don’t educate in any way; but, on the other hand, that kind of person who does not have that power of discrimination really doesn’t belong in a university anyway. People who know what they’re after, who have some power of discrimination in knowing a good teacher from a bad teacher—these are the only ones that are really students in my book. I’m not saying you could do this on a high school level or on a grade school level, but I think you could do it on the college level and surely on the graduate level. We have a tradition of forcing conformity that stultifies higher education. We find certain other nations that are producing much more than we are in some fields. For instance, in my own field of philosophy, as I read the journals and look at what people are saying, I see very few Americans who are saying anything significant. Most of the things are being said by people from one or two foreign countries who have a system that fosters a high degree of freedom in their intellectual activities.
Now the traditional method of paying for this in our present society is to shove the payment on to our children, if you know what I mean. The delights of our present government system which intends to vouchsafe to us the great society are being paid for by future generations to a great extent; and it’s going to get worse and worse as time goes on. I think this is obvious. We’re going to force our children to pay for World War II. We’re enjoying the blessings and assets of World War II, but our children are going to pay for it because nothing is being done about paying for it. Well, this gets into the argument about the national debt and whether an ever-expanding economy can always afford to increase its debt, etc. But I simply say this. An economy which will not pay its own debts is an amoral economy in the first place, and secondly, it’s an inefficient economy simply from the standpoint that if future generations did not have to pay off our debts and cope with our interest payments and cope with our monumental expenses they would have much greater freedom to pursue their own goals and have a much greater society in their own times, if you will, but according to their own desires, not according to the yoke that we place upon their necks.
One of the most important things we need to think of, therefore, in this concept of freedom is this matter of making people responsible for their acts. The best way to destroy a child and make him incapable of meeting life is to protect him from everything. Children have to have freedom to grow, to develop, to learn, to have judgment, to be mature individuals. The only way that they can develop is by their own experiments and by making mistakes. One of the hardest things there is in the world for parents to do is to sit back and watch a child do something wrong, to watch him burn himself, or cut himself, or fall down; and yet if you protect a child from all of these experiences they will think that there is no danger in life and they will not be cautious, they will not be wary of the real dangers that do exist. Now we have to be careful as a parent that we don’t let our children destroy themselves in this process. There has to be restrictions, some limitation; but nevertheless we have to give them enough freedom to make mistakes. I talked with a young man yesterday who said that his parents were converts to the Church, and that as a youngster he had the opportunity to visit many other churches with his friends. When he came to the age of eight years, his parents said to him: “You’ve looked at all these other churches. We’ve taught you the gospel. Wouldn’t you like to be baptized? It’s strictly up to you. If you would like to, you’ve got to remember you’re the one that has to the live the covenants.” He accepted it. He joined the Church of his own free will. How much better is that than just having the children baptized automatically at age eight. That isn’t freedom. That isn’t teaching the child to be a responsible mature person. The scriptures tell us that we are supposed to teach our children that by age eight they can know for themselves, but very, very few parents do it. They believe in protecting their children. They won’t let them make any major decision. How many times have I talked to people and discovered that the first time in their life they ever had to make a major decision was when they were deciding whether to marry somebody or not. That’s a sad plight to be in, and parents who have done this to their children have in a very effective way cursed their children. Sometimes by good fortune these children manage to make good marriages, but they also are going to have a very, very rough time for the first few years while they learn to be people, while they learn to take responsibility, while they learn that there are laws of reality that must be respected when one makes decisions.
I make my thesis, then, simply this; that the best possible thing that can be done for men is to allow them to be free to pursue their own desires inasmuch as they do not conflict with the pursuit of desires of other men. A paternalistic government which does all things for people destroys them as individuals. In giving them the freedoms from all the wants they have, they create for men what might be called a nirvana, a nothingness, a nonexistence, where they are not. People who are supplied in all of their wants are not individuals; they are just lost in the mass. But, on the contrary, if people are given the liberty to pursue and to work out in accordance with the laws of nature their own goals then they’re going to be real people. Whatever they are, they will be themselves; they will not be part of a mass. They’ll be individuals, and I think this is the great good to be obtained. The most important thing in the world is people; and the most important thing we can do for people, I think, is to let them develop themselves as they wish.
Now, I’ve made some general statements. I’d like to turn the time now to questions realized that this is where the best of our discussion would come. It’s very difficult to say things like I have and have them fully understood. In a question and answer situation, we can have better communication. Are there questions or comments?
Q. This idea of government providing security, is there a difference between providing security for old people and providing it for those who are unable to provide it for themselves?
A. Yes, indeed, there is; but where do you draw the line?
C. But you have to draw the line.
A. You have to draw it, indeed.
Q. Should you forget the people who cannot provide for themselves?
A. Well, let me say what the ideal would be, and then let’s talk about the approximation we have to make to the ideal. As I understand the ideal, if human beings were taught to love one another as they should, every helpless person would find that someone else would take care of him voluntarily. This is the society that Church projects. As I understand the Gospel, no person who lives the Gospel would ever turn their parents over to state welfare because in doing so they are selling an opportunity to show love and to extend blessings to these who have done so much for them. I think they are missing out on a great opportunity in that respect. But I think that that’s a little bit ideal for our present national situation. We can’t even get members of the Church to support those whom they should support, so how can we expect all of the people of this nation to support whom they should support? So we are going to have to provide for the poor people of society who cannot provide for themselves. This is where wisdom needs to come. If we had administrators who were so wise that they would go out and give people only that help in such areas where they could not provide for themselves, this wouldn’t be bad; this would be good. But the tendency in government always is to extend beyond that and to make a political football of out welfare, saying that we will give you more and more and more regardless of your needs. Medicare is being pushed on the people of United States, in a sense indiscriminately, not in accordance with actual needs, as simply a great propaganda device that can be foisted upon the people regardless of the fact that it will be very inefficient, that it will not really do the job that needs to be done. So, I would say that anybody who promotes freedom, anybody who would like to say that government ought not to do some of these things at the same time has to stand up and promote morality. One of the big difficulties with many of our national leaders who want to cut back on government is that they have nothing to offer in its place. If they would say to people, “Come, let’s do this voluntarily. Let’s do good things of our own accord so that government won’t have to.” I think that the people, many of them, would follow. I think that a strong moral leader could lead this nation into righteousness, maybe not celestial righteousness but at least a terrestrial righteousness where many people would do many good things of their own free will and not have to be forced by government.
C. But, I wonder. If the individual family doesn’t take care of this, the next best thing might be local care.
A. Well, certainly that’s the program of the Church.
C. I mean it as opposed to the Federal Government being forced to do the job.
A. Yes, I think that is a good thing. When you decentralize government programs you make the individual program more appropriate to the local needs. Of course, the opponents of this will say, “But you can be much more efficient by having a centralized organization legislating for everybody.” But this idea always operates on the assumption that everybody is the same and all situations are nearly equivalent. We hear, for instance, that private enterprise could not develop the Colorado River. I don’t believe that. I think private enterprise could very easily have built every one of the dams on the Colorado River to take care of all the power and the irrigation companies and do the whole works if people simply had the freedom to cooperate. We could form stock companies and sell enough stock to do this. It’s been done with hundreds of other kinds of enterprises, some of them just as big. I think, personally, that it is just a lot of propaganda that government has to do this. I think free enterprise could do it much better. Just imagine what would be the benefits to the State of Utah and to the surrounding states if all these dams were private property and had to pay taxes. If you assessed them anywhere near what other things are assessed, this would be a tremendous boon to the state, wouldn’t it? And not only that, but it would tend to equalize all over the country. All these federal projects, if they paid taxes as private enterprises, they would contribute to the society tremendously; and they would make government that much better able to take care of its needs. But you promote inefficiency by having government run these things.
One of the basic necessities of freedom is competition. If you don’t have competition, you don’t have freedom simply because you don’t have a choice to make. If you don’t have a choice, there is no freedom. Now, if there were competition in these matters, if the government had to compete with private enterprise on an equal basis and pay the consequences out of its own funds, it would go down the drain rather rapidly. If you’ve ever been in the army you know how very inefficiently the army operates: Tremendous waste everywhere. Private companies couldn’t afford to operate that way. They’d go broke in a hurry, but the American government can always charge this off to future generations or print more money and take it out of the hides of people on fixed incomes, or something like that. So, I think that we need to push for more freedom in society, more competition, making things responsible to the free play of the market.
Q. What do you understand to be meant by anarchy? What are its limitations and values?
A. I understand anarchy to be no government at all, and to me there is an inverse ratio between morality and the necessity for government in a society. If people are moral, you could not have anarchy because nothing bad would happen, because every individual would be governed from within himself and would not have to be governed from without whereas in a society where men are not moral you have to have more and more and more government just to keep the population from being destroyed by themselves. Now this is what we are going into in the United States. We are getting a civilization which is more and more immoral. Therefore, just for self-preservation we are going to have more and more government, and the only possibility of reversing the trend is to increase morality.
Q. Two questions. First of all, isn’t the old couples’ dilemma not being afforded by their children a result of their failure to teach their children, a failure, a consequence of their own acts, and secondly, on the concept of freedom, how do you correlate and tie in the Rockefeller theory of the American Beauty Rose which destroyed competition with complete freedom?
A. Well, let’s take the first one first. It’s certainly true that people need to teach their children, but on the other hand you can’t guarantee what your children will do once you’ve taught them. They must be free, too; in other words, you can’t force them to take care of you. So, that’s a factor; but it does not entitle us to say, “Well, let the old people suffer the consequences for not having taught their children.” I think we have to be a little more charitable than that, but I think you have a good point in the sense that parents ought to teach their children this and they ought to demonstrate by taking care of their own parents that they believe in this. As they do this, this will increase the morality of society and government will not have to step into so many of these cases. Lots of poor people would get busy and work if they were not supported in their indolence. Some would not, but then they would have to be content with a subsistence existence which is all a lot of people really want. I didn’t understand your second question.
Q. The second question relates to the theory of freedom and competition which earlier in history this country produced not only in the oil industry but other industries, what Rockefeller called the theory of the American Beauty Rose; that is, if you trim off all the rest of the buds, you will have one giant blossom.
A. Granted, that if you want to make one rose all important, you trim off all the rest.
C. What I am saying is if there is completely free competition historically it tends to—
A. Tends to what? Kill off everybody? I’m not aware of that in my reading of history. The way I read history, where you find freedom is where you see competition arising and prices going down and good being made available to everybody. The American Automotive industry, I think, is a great example of this thing. If you had to go out and make an automobile by hand as they used to, none of us would have one; but the fact is that there has been competition and a constant lowering of prices. It’s my personal feeling that if we would knock down some trade barriers, automobile prices in the United States would drop by many hundreds of dollars. They’re being kept artificially high now, so we can afford certain inefficiencies, certain luxuries. The thing that complete freedom does is it tends to favor the most efficient operator, and the most efficient operator can deliver.
C. The most efficient operator, of course, would have prices below everybody else’s and run them out of business. Then, of course, he would raise prices.
A. But you see, as soon as he started to do that, what would happen?
C. He’d have competition.
A. Somebody would come along and undercut him.
C. Right, but then all he would have to do is lower his prices in one particular area.
A. It all depends on whether there is freedom of movement or not. One of the big problems is that there is an artificial barrier set up where you compartmentalize society. But if goods and people can move, if for instance in the labor market, if there is freedom for people to move and people are not fixed in one job and one situation in one section of the country, if they’ve got a lot of mobility, if they can rise to any skills, to any wage they wish to move to with other things being equal, then we have a good society. Well, you see what is happening in Germany. You’ve got a growing economy, and they have a labor shortage. I think that if we would allow free competition, prices on many things would drop so rapidly that a lot of nations of the world that haven’t yet been able to afford so-called luxuries would begin to gobble up these luxuries which would provide employment for so many more people that we would have a real demand for labor which would provide a mobility and freedom for labor it hasn’t enjoyed much of the time.
Q. Dr. Riddle, we often hear the fact that the gross national product is increasing rapidly. It is presented as justification for an increase in the national debt. Is this a legitimate argument for this?
A. Lots of people use this argument. Legitimate by whose standards? I think simply again that it’s immoral to make somebody else pay for our luxuries. As I said, I think it’s inefficient in the sense that so much of our energy has to go just paying the interest on the debt. It’s always there. If we want to move ahead, we have to get rid of this first. I can see that we can increase the national debt proportionally and not suffer unbearably. In other words, we won’t be suffering any more than we are now and we won’t be any more inefficient than we are now as it goes up. But I don’t think the present situation is optimal. I think we ought to do better than that; therefore, I would favor reducing the national debt.
Q. Do you favor monopoly and anti-trust legislation or anti-monopoly?
A. I think this is one of the legitimate businesses of government, to provide freedom from monopoly. Sometimes businesses make artificial deals you might say and they create legal monopolies. In my own mind, I think that anytime we put restrictions on prices and wages, we may achieve a short-run good, but we achieve a long-term evil. We ought to let the market be the determiner of what goes on.
Q. You talked about freedom as an asset in the way of the market. What about the farm problem we have today when the government is imposing prices on the production of the farmers?
A. I think that this is not good to say the least.
C. Well, before they were imposed there was so much competition that the farmers were pricing themselves out of business.
A. For instance.
C. Well, the over-production of grain, for example, lowered the price of grain per bushel and thus lowered the farmers’ income.
A. And yet the farmer is able to produce more bushels at a lower cost, right? What this does is take the people out of the farming business who are inefficient. It allows the efficient operators to continue, and the price dives so that the hungry people of the world can buy cheap grain, which is a good, isn’t it? That is such a great good that the United States government believes in giving grain to other nations and paying the difference. Why not just sell it to them in an open market situation, and then we wouldn’t have people producing things inefficiently, using up resources that are not used efficiently. That’s my idea. Now, I admit that I’m talking about something utopian. I frankly doubt we’ll ever see it in our lifetime. I don’t think we’ve got the chance. I don’t think we’ll have a completely free economy, ever; but I’m simply saying this: You and I can exert a pressure to stop the advance of government monopoly. There have always been men who have said, I am wise enough to run the lives of all you people. Just give me the power, and I’ll make sure that you are well taken care of. And people have always fallen for it. I don’t know why they won’t read history books and see that this is the common political trick of every age, to promise the people the sky and put them into slavery and enjoy lording it over them. Tyranny is the most common factor of history.
If there were a free economy, people would have to be careful they didn’t live from hand to mouth, wouldn’t they? They’d have to be careful that they had enough money in their pockets to ride over some bumps in the economy. But wouldn’t that be a good thing? I think that would be a tremendous stabilizing factor for our society. People would have to plan ahead a little bit, and that would be a very good thing. They’d have to have some insurance of various kinds, but people whose future is completely assured can be completely irresponsible. They don’t have to care for anything but the pleasure of the moment, which does not promote morality.
Q. Do you believe then that this government spending is creating immorality, that it is putting these community service organizations out of business? Is it teaching children to not worry about their parents and more or less teaching us to not really care what happens to anybody who is being taken care of by the government?
A. I think so. Maybe you’ve seen this little story book that children get about the little squirrel that decided he didn’t want to do like his fellow squirrels and store up acorns for the winter. He just went to the big white house and hollered, and somebody threw him out an acorn; and this is the pattern that our children are being taught in their primers, that the important things is to know where the blessings lie and to go ask for them, not to work for them; not to store, not to plan, not to buck reality but just put yourself at the disposal of the government and let it support you. I think this is immoral, personally. At least from a Latter-Day Saint point of view, it does not produce righteousness.
Q. This beautiful type of education you were speaking of, do you think there is any possibility that this could ever happen? Especially, here?
A. You’d get this inverse ratio between morality and government. If students were moral and didn’t have to be whipped through the paces, we could do it today; but the results would be so frightening that it would scare everybody to death. I had an experience with this a few years ago when I was a bishop. Those of you who are members of the Church will know what I’m talking about. We were doing very well with genealogy work in the wards, but it was our feeling that it ought to be the responsibility of the Melchizedek priesthood quorums to promote temple work and not the genealogy committee. Let the genealogy committee work on the research, and the Melchizedek priesthood promote the temple work. We finally talked the stake presidency into turning all the temple work in the stake over to the Melchizedek priesthood quorums. The first month after the Melchizedek priesthood quorums took the responsibility the temple attendance dropped 50 per cent. The next month it dropped another 50 per cent. By that time the stake presidency was ready to have no more, so they put it back on the old basis. This is the kind of thing that happens when you let people have their freedom. Freedom has to be issued gradually, you might say. You remember the story in the Book of Mormon about the pruning of the olive trees. They didn’t cut back the wild branches too fast or too far lest the root would overpower the young shoots. This is a kind of the way freedom is. You have to be careful that it’s given by degrees. It’s being taken away from us by degrees, so delightfully that we apparently don’t mind; and we’ve got to return it the same way. My own attempts in education are to move it over this freedom by degrees, not all in one wallop. This would destroy it. But it is my desire to move in that direction, slowly but surely, and at the same time to build an atmosphere, an eagerness for learning which would really make this thing click. I hope we make it someday.
Q. It seems that in the field of education that grades tend to increase competition. However, at the same time there is so much emphasis on grades we have a tendency to lose creativity or production when the students tend to give back what the teacher wants. What do you think would be a good medium to follow?
A. I would like to see eventual abolition of grades, except maybe one final grade on the individual to say that in his major field he is equipped to do such and such or not equipped. He’s either skilled or relatively skilled or unskilled in this particular area. I’d like to put the burden of attainment on the student who brings to a certain point in life an ability to achieve. Now, if you take most students and ask them within a month after the end of the last semester what they learned out of a particular course, frankly they can’t tell you very much because they didn’t learn very much. A lot of our learning is frankly useless. We keep struggling with a curriculum, but I think there is a lot of dead wood in the curriculum which we could cut out. I think we need to gear education toward developing minds as tools, getting language skills, getting quantitative skills, teaching people to be able to do. Of course, you have to have a background of knowledge to do.
Q. You said that some restrictions should be placed on children. Now aren’t we all children in a sense? All of us need some government restriction or educational restrictions.
A. We’re all children relative to whom?
C. Well, children relative to the amount of knowledge we have.
A. Relative to whom?
C. Well, we are children relative to knowledge of someone who has more knowledge than we do.
A. Like who?
C. Well, anyone has more knowledge—God, for instance.
A. Very good. I’m willing to accept us as children of God and that he ought to exercise control over us.
Q. Also, don’t you think that people in government positions have more knowledge than we do?
A. I think that this is a history of tyranny. When you look back in the history of the world, one of the most common bits of folklore is that there is an aristocracy in the world of certain people who are smarter than everybody else who are entitled to rule. Isn’t that true? And this is the basis of tyranny in every age and generation. The current theory is supported by the idea that every age and generation. The current theory is supported by the idea that these people have been to college and therefore they know how to calculate what grain prices ought to be so they will balance the thing very delicately. But it doesn’t work; they always fail.
Q. Then are you saying we don’t need any government at all?
A. Did I say that?
Q. Without any government restrictions where would the restrictions come from?
A. The government restrictions ought not to control certain things. Government ought to provide the freedom to move, to sell, to buy, to learn, to live as long as we do not infringe upon the rights of any other person. That’s the business of government, to preserve these basic freedoms to everyone, the freedom of conscience, the protection of life, the right and control of property. These are the basic, fundamental freedoms. It is government’s business to preserve these, not to guarantee everybody a fixed income, not to guarantee them the opportunity for their individual personality to struggle with reality and develop and grow and become a mature, responsible individual. Okay? I take it you don’t agree. Do you honestly believe that there are people smart enough to tell us what to do in all things?
C. Well, I don’t think that any of us know everything.
A. Is there anybody that knows enough to run your life or my life for us?
C. No, not necessarily. I don’t think but I think that like a little child we need—
A. But a little child is relative to whom?
C. Relative to their parents.
A. Right. But is there anybody in our society as much smarter than you or I as parents are compared to a little child?
C. Well, I agree with your ideal. Your ideal is fine, but I think the government should help us reach that ideal, should impose some restrictions and kind of lead us in that direction until we are capable ourselves to have this freedom ourselves.
A. But does government teach people to be individuals, to accept more and more responsibility? Is that the historical course of government?
C. No, but I think it is good.
A. How?
C. Well, now for instance, like the British Commonwealth. They have all these commonwealths and they teach these different nations to learn to govern themselves and to demonstrate their independence, and as they get more and more capable they let them have their independence.
A. Yes. What have they turned out?
C. It’s not what they have turned out. I think it could be possible.
A. You mean you won’t judge them by the fruits of their actions?
C. Well, I will admit that they haven’t turned out too good.
A. Well, that’s the point, you see. Until you build the people from within, you fail. Next question.
Q. On this school situation. You were talking about the grades. I was wondering how you felt about the type of democratic school where the teacher is only one member of the class? It’s a group and he has no more authority than anyone else and the group together decides what they are going to study and how they are going to study it and how they are going to be graded. It’s a completely democratic thing instead of having a leader.
A. May I pursue a certain axe I love to grind and point out there is no such thing as democracy? It’s impossible to have a democratic group because you never find a group where you have equals, and democracy can only function among equals, isn’t that true? In any group you wish to select, leaders will arise out of the group because they have certain abilities that are superior to other members of the group. You always have this. It’s just as natural as night and day. People should be free to join groups they wish to join and find leaders they wish to follow and then indeed let them follow as they will; but don’t call it democratic, call it a free society of people who wish to grow and progress and achieve. I’m afraid that’s all we have time for. Thank you.