But first we take you to the Esalen Institute where a non-professional recorder was there
 and recorded Alan Watts.
 Not well, but good enough for the night people.
 USA 2000, Abstraction or Reality from 1968.
 Got to put the microphone in their face.
 There are so many threats from so many different portals when you consider just adding up nuclear
 warfare, biological warfare, overpopulation, bad conservation, racial strife, civil war.
 Take your choice.
 Either one or any mixture of them.
 And we shan't be here.
 That is to say, we shan't be here in the sense of a territory, a biological world.
 We may exist in some abstract sense, like, "See, I was right after all.
 Better dead than red."
 Now here exactly lies the problem of the future.
 When I make prophecies from a purely realistic and hard-boiled point of view, I tend towards
 the extremely gloomy side of things.
 I have never yet voted in an election where the candidate of my choice won the election.
 And I tend to feel that practical politics is a matter of assessing.
 That human beings are so stupid that they will always do what they can do.
 What can be done must be done.
 And that means that we will go like the galleries wind down the hill.
 And if I were betting on it, and I had somewhere to place my bet, I would bet on it that way.
 But I don't have anywhere to place my bet.
 And furthermore, I can look at it from a point of view where I'm not just an objective bystander
 looking at this situation as something which I'm just going to predict about.
 I'm involved in it.
 And as I'm involved in it, I'm damned if I'm going to let it happen that way.
 There is then the other alternative, that if the United States of America ceases to
 exist in our minds and in our hearts as an abstract political nation, and we focus our
 attention instead upon the physical people and upon the physical environment and the
 lover, then we have some chance of creating by the year 2000 a most extraordinary state
 of affairs.
 But it is based upon the realization of that distinction, I repeat, between the territory,
 the people, and all the biological life that goes with that situation, on the one hand,
 and on the other, the United States as a nation with pride and honor.
 You know, quite recently the Congress passed an act against burning the flag, with all
 sorts of patriotic speeches.
 And those same congressmen are responsible directly for burning that for which the flag
 stands, by absolute callousness as to the care of the physical nation—the water, the
 air, the crops, the forests.
 So this is the great confusion of civilization, and if we don't find some way of overcoming
 it, I'm afraid 2080 will see us as a non-geographical expression.
 The point then is this, that civilized man has developed the incredible technique of
 symbolization of words which represent things and events, of numbers which represent patterns
 and arrangements of physical nature, of social institutions, laws, states, family patterns,
 and so on.
 And in these terms he represents the physical world in the same way as the menu represents
 the dinner.
 But he has been so fascinated by the power of this symbolic way of looking at things,
 that he very easily confuses it with what it represents, and so has a tendency to eat
 the menu instead of the dinner.
 And this is precisely the disease from which those congressmen who were raving about burning
 the flag are suffering from.
 Now this disease assumes much more serious forms, and the one I want to talk about first
 as the major obstacle to the survival of the territory of the United States in the year
 2000 may be symbolized by the confusion of money with wealth.
 You remember, don't you, the Great Depression, when suddenly the whole country is in a state
 of poverty, for the reason that there was what they call a financial collapse.
 There was no diminution of our natural resources, there was no diminution of our physical strength,
 of our intelligence, but suddenly almost overnight we had an economic depression, incredible
 poverty and suffering, because of a financial slump.