good, they are not evil, they are people. And that is why wisdom in settling quarrels
 is always a matter of compromise. That's why a good Confucian always settles disputes out
 of court, because somebody eventually says, "Oh, come off it." Look, we are both rascals,
 and there let be honor among thieves. And that's the spirit, you know, that's the real
 spirit of repentance. Not that you say some idiot notion that you're going to turn over
 a new leaf and kid yourself into the idea that you'll never do a thing like that again.
 You know very well you will. True repentance is to admit in all humility, you see, that
 you are not a saint. And therefore you better not go fooling people that you are, because
 they will rely on you and then be disappointed. So then this is basic trust in yourself, not
 as an integrated, mature person, not as a responsible citizen, but as a human being,
 with your light side and with your dark side. With your outgoing affection as well as your
 ingoing self-affection. Both must be there. Now you see then, because of this, as I said,
 there will always be the risk that although you gamble, you may not always win. In fact
 you may lose your shirt. But that's the risk one takes. Life is taking the risk of death.
 And if you don't take it, you don't go anywhere. You don't even step into your car. So that
 although there will be mistakes, although you may lose your shirt, the alternative to
 making this gamble is total loss of freedom, I would say total gravity, total seriousness,
 no game. That's why all kind of extra square, I would say cubic personalities are very,
 very serious. You know, policemen and soldiers and people like that are always very rough.
 Because that role is expected of them. But when you carry seriousness to its full extent,
 you've got a cosmic jail. And who is prisoner? Who is warder? Same fellow. But he doesn't
 know it. He won't gamble. And so the ultimate, you see, the ultimate prisoner is the guard.
 Think of 1984. Think of the super big brother, sitting in his inner, inner sanctum. All the
 security systems outside, all little television things to inspect what people are doing, checks
 on checks. Who's the prisoner? See the spider's caught in its own web. He can't goof off.
 Can't even sleep. Because somebody might creep in. He can't trust the most trusted guard.
 Always might be poison. And then of course this great electronic age, when every kind
 of deviltry and snoopery becomes more and more subtle. Just think of the possibilities
 of being the man who controls it all.
 Now this also implies that in behaving with each other, in making the gamble, in playing
 the game of existence, there must also be rules. There is both order and randomness.
 But you see, the difficulty is that our attitude to the rules of behavior is rather curious.
 We tend always to derive our game rules from the past. We tend to be uninventive and uncreative
 in thinking about the rules of the human game and refer back, say, to such an ancient Bronze
 Age document as the Ten Commandments. Now here was a set of game rules for a certain
 kind of society, but somehow the idea, you see, that this set of rules is sacrosanct,
 or whatever other set of rules. It might be the laws of Manu or something in India. But
 always the idea that there is a right way to live, which is somehow laid down like tramlines.
 "There was a young man who said, 'Damn, for it certainly seems that I am a creature that
 moves in determinate grooves. I'm not even a bus, I'm a tram.'"
 And you see, we have this idea also about the laws of nature. Although this is not the
 current, I would say, view of a physicist about the laws of nature, it is traditional
 in our culture to think of certain rules that have been laid down in advance, which the
 universe obeys. We talk about obeying natural law. And so human law is very often thought
 of on the same model, or vice versa, the law of nature on the model of human laws, that
 there is an authoritative lawgiver who is grandpa and says, "This is the way it's going
 to be around here, and you had better follow."
 Now actually, it doesn't seem that nature obeys laws. But rather that when we watch
 nature behave and study the regularities in its behavior, and write those regularities
 down and make notes of them, we find that those regularities can be gambled on. They're
 liable to go on again. And it's only a kind of figure of speech that one talks, therefore,
 about the world itself obeying laws. The laws of nature, I mean, it's like saying because
 you've devised a clock and it goes tick-tick regularly, you're suddenly astounded to find
 that the earth in its rotations is obeying the clock. You see, it's actually the clock
 which is the law thing is obeying the world, if anything. But this is the law. It's why
 we alter our clocks for summertime. Instead of being sensible and getting up an hour earlier,
 we have to alter the law so that we have authority for getting up earlier.
 But you see, the rules of human behavior, they're highly necessary, because we've got
 to agree about how we're going to communicate with each other and deal with each other for
 exactly the same reason that we have to agree about the rules of language. Otherwise, we
 just don't understand each other. But do you suppose that the rules of language are fixed
 and unalterable? We are changing them all the time. We're constantly inventing new words,
 new forms of expression, getting rid of old ones. We are very creative, especially in
 this country. People are amazingly creative with language. Where I come from, in England,
 they're not so creative, because they're more traditional, more conservative. But here,
 there's a wonderfully creative language. And so what happens is that the linguists and
 the people who make dictionaries, they observe how the people are in fact talking, and then
 they chronicle all that, so that everybody is informed through the dictionaries of what
 rules are being used. Now, the same sort of thing must go with morals. Actually, human
 beings are always changing morals. But there's a terrific fight constantly goes on between
 the people who say, "Well, let's try it another way," and the people who say, "No, no, no,
 no, you can't get away with that. It's against the will of God," or something.
 [LAUGHTER]


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