DISCUSSION 
century as compared to a ten-fold increase in the total popula- 
tion. The breakdown of scientific communication is just one 
aspect of it. 
It is clearly time that we spent more effort not only in trying 
to build up world society, and in defining the dynamics of 
politics, but simply in trying to understand the dynamics of 
cultural interaction in other spheres, including the institutions 
by which science itself is going to be able to survive. It is 
becoming more and more difficult for individuality of any kind 
to develop and to express itself, but we have somehow to learn 
to live within this enlarging framework. Paradoxically, to 
communicate with the rest of the world we must organize 
ourselves in some more rational way than we do at present, 
perhaps in some series of hierarchical institutions. We are not 
in very good touch with our neighbours in world science, and 
we are going to be further out of touch as they grow up and 
begin to compete with us for the opportunity of creative 
performance. ; 
Comfort: Professor Coon spoke, perhaps a little apprehen- 
sively, of the tendency to arrive at a universal police state as the 
end-point of scientific culture. It certainly is a risk of our time, 
and perhaps it always has been, but I do not think we should 
leave it on record that a universal police state is a necessary 
consequence of science. Totalitarianism seems to be inimical 
to the continued development of science and, moreover, since 
psychiatry is also a science, the exposure of the psychopatho- 
logical character of police states and the motives which underlie 
them is quite as much a consequence of science as atomic 
energy is. I would not like to predict that science will enable 
us to avoid such an outcome; perhaps the answer may be in 
Coon’s own observation that universal education produces ten 
rebels for every one genius. Indeed, perhaps that is its real 
justification. It inculcates contra-suggestibility of the type that 
MacKay has mentioned and it will perhaps at least ensure that 
so long as there are tyrants around there may also be daggers. 
That brings me to a point that Professor MacKay made— 
the possibility of having a computer to govern us. I wonder 
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