Constant vigilance that one will not die, that is death.
 What we call life is fundamentally willingness to die.
 Constant jumping of being into not being.
 So long as you do that, it goes on.
 So long as you shake the dice and you don't know how they're going to come out and flip,
 the game goes on, you see.
 So long as you take a chance.
 Now then, sensible people say, of course, that's a very imprudent attitude because you
 can't be sure.
 First of all, you can't trust other people.
 There are some nice people, but most of them are rascals.
 It's not wise.
 And furthermore, you can't trust yourself.
 Underneath the thin veneer of civilization, you have an unconscious, and as Freud has
 told us, this unconscious is libidinous, and it's a blind urge of pure animal lust and
 rage and fear.
 And so watch out for yourself.
 You're a dreadful animal, only just barely disciplined and fit to be human.
 Now it's true, of course, that a lot of people can't be trusted, and that so far as oneself
 is concerned, every one of us has in us what the Hebrews call the Yetzirah.
 They say that God made it and put it there.
 The Yetzirah is the perverse spirit.
 I call it the element of irreducible rascality.
 We all have that.
 But in the wisdom of that great moral philosopher, Confucius, he included this element of rascality
 in his definition of human-heartedness.
 That he put as the crown of all the virtues.
 It isn't, the word in Chinese is often translated "humaneness," but it means a good deal more
 than that.
 It means being like a human being.
 That is to say, a complete man or woman, which includes the angel as well as the animal,
 reason and the passions, and all those aspects of us.
 Indeed the great triumph of humanity is to be able to be both angel and devil, both reasonable
 and passionate, both mystic and sensualist.
 For he felt, you see, that this peculiar combination was the whole beauty of human beings.
 And he would trust that humaneness or that human-heartedness.
 He would put more reliance on that than he would on virtues, righteousness, programmed
 behavior.
 And this is a very wise attitude.
 It isn't, you see, only the goodness in human beings that is to be trusted.
 They are also to be trusted to be a little bad.
 They are to be trusted to be selfish, because you know a person who is not frank about selfishness
 is a big troublemaker.
 You may go into a situation with high ideals and say, "I promise this, I promise that,
 I promise the other thing, I will be true, I will knock myself out to achieve this."
 But the reason you said it was to put on a good front at the moment, and also to square
 yourself with your own conscience.
 You think, "Well, I really ought to be that kind of person, and I'm going to commit myself
 to being that."
 And in that moment you have grossly deceived those who depend on you.
 Why?
 Because even if you keep your word, and you are reliable to the extent that you said you
 would be, they are going to absorb from you by a kind of emotional osmosis the fact that
 you hate doing it.
 And that's the condition you see many an aging parent gets in, when some faithful son or
 daughter surrenders their own life to look after the invalid.
 Very nice and noble.
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 To be selfish to a certain extent, and you should for yourself be selfish to a certain
 extent, and make it very plain to others what your wishes are.
 One of my best friends is a woman who is invariably outspoken, and she is never, nobody ever treads
 on her, nobody ever presumes on her, because she doesn't let them.
 She says, "It's inconvenient for me to have you for dinner or to stay or whatever, I've
 got something else to do."
 But the result of this is, I'm very fond of her because you know exactly where you are
 with her.
 You don't worry about, "Am I imposing or anything like that?"
 You can't impose on her.
 And it's very, it's very refreshing.
 I like that sort of person.
 And we have a certain duty, you might say, to be like that to others.
 Because there is in our nature a selfish thing as well as an other-regarding thing, tendency.
 And it's the two of them together that constitute our nature.
 And it is this nature that's to be trusted.
 Therefore, righteous people who ignore that they have this element of irreducible rascality
 or the yetzahara, are great troublemakers.
 In fact, they've probably made more trouble in the world than deliberately wicked people.
 Because they are the people who wage, for example, ideological wars, which are not nice
 wars waged in order to capture the property and the personnel of the enemy, in which case
 you know one always takes care to preserve them.
 But they are wars waged as a matter of principle, not really between people, but wars between
 utterly irreconcilable ideas.
 And in such a fight, there can be no quarter.
 There can be no quarter between good and evil, because as defined, they are mutually exclusive.
 But when people fight each other, they are not...


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