Change Versus Progress

A Cosmotheist lecture never before transcribed

by Dr. William L. Pierce

THURSDAY, as some of you may know, I was out of the office, because I had to go to a juvenile court. My two sixteen year-old sons — it was a relatively minor thing — had been riding with some girls in the back of a pick-up truck belonging to their friend, and the friend managed to overturn his truck in a field. No one was hurt, but the owner of the field charged everyone with trespass.

When the court finally got around to hearing the case involving my sons and their friends, the judge dismissed the charges, but meanwhile I had to sit through several other cases.

One of the cases involved two sisters, about sixteen and seventeen years old, who had run away from home. Both girls were really quite pretty, one a blonde and one with long brown hair. But the parents were middle-aged, working class people, nondescript except that the mother looked rather hard. It was easy to imagine her in front of her TV set every day, curlers in her hair, a drink in one hand and a cigarette in her mouth. Well, the judge asked the father what the problem had been which had caused his daughters to run away. The father wasn’t really sure, but he said that in general he couldn’t control the girls and that he had given up on them. The judge asked him if he was ready for his daughters to come home again, and the man hesitated, and then he said with obvious reluctance that he would give it another try if the girls would promise to behave. But then the mother spoke up and said she was fed up with both girls and didn’t want them back. So the judge ordered the matron, who was with the girls, to take them to the state penitentiary for juveniles, and they were led away crying.

It was the first time I had seen something like that, and I was shocked. Talking to other people in the court afterward, though, I realized it happens pretty often. In this particular case, there was no way for me to tell what the underlying problem was, whether the girls were really incorrigible, or the parents had made life at home intolerable for them, or perhaps both. But to deliberately send young girls like that, who had not committed any crime, off to a detention home, where they would be mixed with Blacks, just seemed sick to me, and I was reminded of something I’ve been writing about for our paper.

There are groups of parents in the District of Columbia — middle-class White parents — who have deliberately moved into mostly-Black neighborhoods, and who send their children to the mostly-Black neighborhood schools. A couple of these parents have been interviewed by the Post and the Star. In the most recent interview, about two weeks ago, one White mother reported on the experiences of these White parents and their children, and one of the things that she had found out was that when the White children are in the minority in the school, they tend to seek acceptance from the Blacks rather than banding together and maintaining their own identity. And this woman was really quite happy about this discovery. She proudly described how her children had learned to speak the Black dialect and how one of her daughters had gone off on a camping trip with her Black classmates. She had come back with her blonde hair done in the Negro ‘cornrow’ style.

It is hard to understand such sickness. I can only surmise that these White parents in Washington have been so brainwashed by Jewish racial propaganda that they have become guilt-ridden, and, by exposing their own children to Blacks and destroying their feelings of racial identity, they are in some way punishing themselves for what they feel is their racial guilt. But, whatever the reason, I can imagine the sick, hopeless, lost feelings of their kids. It must be just as bad for them as for those poor girls I saw on the juvenile court. I doubt that the parents in juvenile court were guilt-ridden liberals, like the ones in Washington — probably just slobs, just poor White trash. But, in both cases, the parents had done something to their kids, which makes it almost impossible for them to grow up to be healthy, productive, creative adults.

I’m certainly not one of those bleeding hearts who believes that there’s no such thing as a bad boy or a bad girl, and who believes that society is to be blamed for everyone who turns out bad. I know, and you know, that there are plenty of people who are born wrong. And we both know that there are people who are born good and who remain decent, wholesome people despite rotten home environments. But certainly in a great many cases, it’s possible to damage or ruin a child’s natural potential by forcing him or her into an unnatural or an unhealthy environment. It’s possible to produce screwed-up adults and a screwed-up society in this way. Certainly none of us should be surprised if the two girls from the juvenile court end up as prostitutes, and the children of the sick White liberals in Washington end up marrying Negroes.

I think it’s clear that the healthier and more natural an environment a society can provide for its children, then the healthier adults those children will grow into, and the healthier the whole society will remain in the next generation. And I think it’s also clear that if we want to fulfill our racial mission, then we must do whatever we can to assure the healthiest possible society for our people.

We can’t, of course, build a perfect society — because we are not perfect. And we must always count on having people who are born wrong or who go bad. But we certainly can have a society which is much, much healthier than this.

You know, we are not conservatives: We are not interested in going backward in time. Yet, thinking backward into our own experiences of a few years ago, I believe most of us can see several important ways in which the society in which we grew up was a healthier one than the society in which today’s kids are growing up. When I think back to my own school days, I’m thinking back twenty-five to thirty-five years — others here may think back further, some may not be old enough to think back that far — but even fifteen or twenty years ago is far enough back to see some significant differences.

Let’s see if we can pick out the ones that are really important.

The difference that the materialists are always emphasizing is that today’s society is much richer, much more affluent. In the old days, no kid could even dream of owning a digital wristwatch, for example, or an electronic calculator that would give him logarithms or functions at the punch of a button. Today everyone can afford those things, even the poorest members of our society.

Science and technology have done many wonderful things for us and can continue to do so in the future. Some of the new gadgets that we have acquired in recent years, of course, are mixed blessings. Television is one such, and I’m not really referring here to the fact that it’s an instrument in the hands of our enemies being used to enslave our minds and souls. Even if we could strangle the last Jew on Earth, television would still be a mixed blessing. A few years ago, when a kid, or an adult for that matter, wanted a quiet hour or two of relaxation by himself, he read a book. Today, he turns on the TV. And there are certain penalties to be paid for that. Nevertheless, I believe that in a new society with the proper safeguards, we can learn to live even with TV.

Technology can be used to enrich man’s life, and, more important, to provide him with more powerful tools for accomplishing the mission ordained for him by the Creator. It can also degrade and weaken him, if there is not a little wisdom shown in introducing new technological developments into our society.

For many years, Western technology increased man’s standard of living by increasing his productivity. He had to work fewer hours each day to earn his daily bread. Now, we are in a sort of a transitional period, where technological developments are being approximately offset by a decline in the average quality and the average motivation of the national workforce, so that productivity is no longer rising. In fact, the average standard of living for the American production worker has fallen about seven per cent over the last four years. There are more and more gadgets for us to buy now, fancier hi-fi equipment, TV sets, CB radios, lots of other things — but we have on average, less money left, after the groceries and the rent, with which to buy these gadgets.

But the average quality of the workforce is something we can do something about in our new society. Productivity can and will be made to rise sharply again after we settle some racial matters.

But then we’ll be faced with a really fundamental problem related to technology. That problem is how to hold off the process we’ve been undergoing recently — of becoming softer and more decadent — as we continue to increase our standard of living. This will require some of the most difficult and most drastic decisions that we will be required to make. Actually, this is a subject that, although is vitally important, I just don’t want to get into tonight. It’s something we’ll talk about at length later.

But I think that we can refute the materialistic notion that our richer society today provides a healthier environment in which to raise our children.

When I was a little boy, I went to classes in school buildings that were mostly more than twenty years old. They had wooden floors. They had paint peeling from the walls in places, and in general they showed the wear and tear of educating many thousands of kids over the years. And I got to and from those buildings by walking, often more than a mile. There were school buses of course, but they were not considered an absolute necessity in those days and for the most part they were provided for those kids who had further to go than I did. Today, the idea seems to have taken hold that a school is no good unless it is less than ten years old, is built according to the latest architectural ideas, is air-conditioned and has wall-to-wall carpeting, and everyone drives to school.

I’m sure that, although one ought to be able to give kids just as good an education in the new glass and air-conditioned school buildings as in the old ones with wooden floors, there is no way that one can give them a better education in such schools, no matter how much more the new schools cost than the old ones. The new schools may provide a fancier, even a more convenient, environment — but certainly not a more spiritually healthy one. And I’m convinced that the greater use of school buses these days is actually a step backward.

But it’s not primarily the material things which have made the important differences in the environment in which young people grow up everywhere. I believe one of the more important factors is the false notion that all change and all growth are equivalent to progress. And I believe that another important factor is the loss, or partial loss, of our sense of community. Both of these are big subjects in themselves. But perhaps we can get at least some idea of their significance just by recalling our own experiences.

Progress requires change. It does not necessarily require growth — that is, a bigger population or bigger gross national product. And by no means does every change imply progress. Our society has changed vastly, in the last thirty years or so. Yet, very little of that change represents true progress from our standpoint, as conscious agents of the Creator.

But even more that that — and I say this at the risk of sounding like a conservative, which I’m not — there is great danger in too much change, in too rapid change, even when that change is substantially progressive. The danger lies in the loss of our roots, the loss of our orientation.

When we were in school, certainly when I was in school, society was changing less rapidly than it is now. One very important consequence of this slower change is that one had time to become accustomed to things. One could develop a certain feeling for life, for the world, for society, as it was. And one could relate one’s knowledge, one’s feelings, to things as they were in the past. And one could be reasonably confident as to what the world would be like tomorrow. One could gradually learn to know and appreciate the traditions of one’s people. One could develop a sense of historical continuity, a sense of having roots in a society, of being the inheritor of social traditions and of cultural developments — traditions and developments which meant something in the past, and would still mean something tomorrow.

This feeling of permanence, one might say, allowed one to value one’s traditions, one’s cultural inheritance, and it gave one a great deal of confidence in facing the future. And one could keep one’s orientation, one’s roots, even while planning changes for the future — truly progressive changes.

But when changes begin coming too fast, whether these changes are progressive or not, one doesn’t really have a chance to become accustomed to them, one can lose one’s orientation. The outside world, in becoming less permanent, becomes less real to us, and we retreat into egoism. Everything becomes devalued. Traditions and social institutions lose their significance. We lose our confidence in the future, and we tend to live only for the present. A rootless child, an egoistic child, a child with no strong sense of values and no confidence in the future, is a spiritually unhealthy child. The same applies, of course to an adult, to a nation, or to a race.

Now, our whole outlook, our whole view of life as expressed in our Truth, is based on the idea of progress, of never-ending evolution toward Godhood. But the evolution we want is clearly not what has been taking place in recent years. Change has been far too rapid. And, although we are now obliged ourselves to work for a revolutionary rebuilding of society, we must in the future find an optimum rate of progress which allows us to keep our roots and our sense of continuity as we ascend the Upward Path.

Today, of course, there are people who deliberately introduce change for the sake of change, because they want to destroy our roots; they want us to lose our orientation; they want to keep our children from developing a strong sense of values or a feeling of historical continuity. We know what we must do about these people when we are able.

One of the most important and most spiritually destructive changes of the last thirty years has been a decrease in the sense of community felt by the average American, and especially for the average child.

When I went to school all my classmates were White, and all my teachers were White — except for the unfortunate exception that there were a few Jews amongst us because we made the mistake of considering them White.

Now, certainly, when I went to school, and when you went to school, we didn’t “love everyone” and everyone didn’t love us. There were bullies; there were smart-alecks; and there were teachers we thought weren’t fair. We got into fights; we had all sorts of other problems. And yet we always had the feeling, or most of us did, that we belonged to the school and that the school belonged to us. We had a feeling of community which was based on a shared set of values, a shared outlook, shared traditions, a common racial and cultural heritage, and a common destiny. There were many differences between us, but there was also an essential spiritual homogeneity, based on racial homogeneity, without which there can be no true sense of community.

Today, the homogeneity is being deliberately and consciously destroyed, all over America. In many places, the destruction is already virtually complete. And, as homogeneity goes, so goes our sense of belonging, our sense of community, our sense of responsibility for anyone or anything but ourselves.

This destructive process is happening, not only in our schools, and not only to our children. It’s happening to all of us, in our neighborhoods, in our colleges and universities, and in the places where we work, where we shop, and where we take our recreation.

This loss of our sense of community is, more than anything else, at the root of America’s problems and especially at the root of the problems facing our young people. For the people responsible for this loss there can be no excuse, no forgiveness, and no mercy when the time comes to deal with them. But, even before we can deal with them, we have to deal with ourselves, here in the Alliance.

We have to provide for ourselves and for our children a substitute for the lost roots, the lost values, and the lost sense of community which America has suffered, if we are to grow in numbers and in strength so that we can someday do what needs to be done in the larger society.

It used to be that the individual family to a large extent provided roots and values and a sense of community. But today it is becoming harder and harder for the family to compete with the schools, with TV, and with all the other influences which have become to a large degree destructive of the things essential to good spiritual health.

If our children are to grow up healthy — and if we ourselves are to be healthy — then, in the long run, we must be able to provide them, and ourselves, with a racially and spiritually homogeneous community. That is the immediate and urgent task of the Alliance today.

If we cannot achieve that, then it’s not likely that we’ll achieve anything else. But to the extent that we do make of the Alliance a true racial and spiritual community, we will not only be able to lead happier and more useful lives — we will not only hope to avoid for our children the sort of tragedy that I saw in the juvenile court Thursday — but we will gain for ourselves and for our race the source of spiritual and moral strength needed to carry out our racial mission, and we can become a working model for the transformation that we must one day bring about everywhere.

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Source: transcribed by Daniel S. Forrest, author of Suprahumanism