Future of the Mind 
privilege and benefit from the ruling authority. Every prince 
and king was surrounded and supported by people who 
garnered some share of his power, wealth and privileges. The 
will of the prince or king or emperor still constituted a first 
moral obligation; it was the law. Loyalty to that law was 
enforced on pain of imprisonment, torture and death and was 
bounded by the welfare of the survival group still, whether it 
was the principality, the kingdom, or the empire. 
Right up to the present time the ancient belief that: “The 
welfare, prosperity and power of the group into which I 
happened to be born is more important than the welfare, 
prosperity, power, or even the lives of the members of any or all 
other groups”’ has been held by most of the human race. Along 
with that faith is also held another: “‘Whenever we are 
frightened or feel threatened, the right, effective and virtuous 
thing to do is to increase our ability to kill other people”. That 
was our normal method of ensuring the survival of our group 
in the past, but its success depended on the defensibility of our 
group or its ability to overcome the defences of competing 
groups. No group can any longer defend itself against death 
from attack from outside, nor can it effectively attack other 
groups without great risk of complete destruction of its own 
people. It is no longer possible to “‘win”’ a war. 
The whole method of survival by groups in competition to 
the death with other groups has broken down. The survival 
group, for the first time in human experience, has become the 
human race itself. From now on we will survive as members of 
the human race or not at all, but we have no previous experience 
of this situation and no traditional concern or education for 
survival of the human race. The occasion for such concern had 
not arisen until about fifteen years ago and was not foreseen or 
provided for by our parents or ancestors. Now we are all 
threatened with extinction by our own traditional survival 
patterns, a position which most of us still find impossible to 
accept as real, because we have been taught from infancy to 
depend on our “‘conscience’’ values, and even to consider 
changes in them is commonly felt to be immoral and disloyal. 
SS, 
