Well now, I said that one of the aspects of cosmic gamesmanship that we were going to
 deal with would be group theory. And of course I don't mean exactly by that a sort of mathematical
 meaning. But the relationship that's tremendously important and that is not sufficiently recognized
 between in groups and out groups. You know how you've heard about little birds where
 they're cold and they're all huddling together, the idea being to see who can get most inside.
 And human beings are just like that, and so also is everything else. Because this is an
 absolutely basic requirement of having an identity. To have an identity is in some way
 or other to be in. I often try the experiment in giving a lecture of drawing a circle on
 the blackboard and asking the assembled multitudes what I have drawn. And people will almost
 invariably say that I have drawn a circle, a ring, or a ball. Only very rarely does some
 bright person suggest that I have drawn a wall with a hole in it. Because the Gestalt
 theory of perception shows us that our attention is captured by enclosed areas as against open
 areas and by moving objects rather than still. And so always therefore we tend to prefer
 the in situation. That is something, you see. The star is an in situation with respect to
 space. The space is the out situation. And so we feel that space is not important, it
 is nothing, it is just unimportant in a way. But the in situation is something. So then
 whenever human beings get into an out situation, like being a rejected minority, living on
 the wrong side of the tracks, they will find reasons for convincing themselves that their
 situation is the truly in one. And that the people who claim to be in are really out.
 So as I have sometimes said before, I hope this doesn't bore too many of you, but in
 Sausalito we have exactly that situation. We have the hillbillies, who are the old-time
 people, who regard themselves as in, because they have the money and they live in the fancy
 houses up on the hill. And then we have the waterfront people, whom they regard as out,
 as a nefarious bunch of beatniks and bohemians and scallywags. And so the people at the hill
 top fortify themselves at their cocktail parties with conversation about how awful the people
 are down on the waterfront. And at the cocktail parties down on the waterfront, people fortify
 themselves by discussing the squares on the hill. And we believe down here that we have
 the true way of life, that we are not beating our heads out making money to buy pseudo-rocket
 ships. Although I do own a pseudo-rocket ship, but it was wished on me. Because you see,
 I try to be a bridge person. That's what's called a pontifex. One who, between opposed
 classes, points out the connections. Because the connection is that neither class would
 know who they were without the other. So it's tremendously necessary to have an outgroup
 in order to know that you're an ingroup. In other words, if you belong to the church,
 which is the assembly of the elect of God, or if you belong to the synagogue, which is
 to be a member of the chosen people, an outsider, all those goys, then you know you're in. You
 see? But you must have the outsiders to know that you're in. There must, in other words,
 be beyond the pale of the village, the howling waste. And then you feel cozy, you feel protected,
 you feel you're there. And so in that way, bodies have skins, eggs have shells, and so
 on all through nature. Inside versus outside. But this versus must be understood as a form
 of symbiosis. And this is the crucial matter. This is absolutely of critical importance
 to anyone who wants to understand politics or military strategy or any of the real hard,
 tough games of life. That social conflict or conflict between the various biological
 species is a form of symbiosis. Now ordinarily we consider the symbiotic relationship to
 be one of mutual support, as is obviously the case between bees and flowers. Which came
 the first, bee or flower? This is the same question as which came the first, egg or hen.
 Because where there are no flowers, there can't be bees. And where there are no bees
 or other fertilizing insects, there cannot be flowers. So the truth of the matter is
 that bees and flowers, different as they are in appearance, and separated as they may be
 in space, they constitute a single organism. This is the real lesson of the bees and the
 flowers. And the same must be said truly of man and woman. There are no men without women.
 There are no women without men, because it always takes a man and a woman to produce
 a human being. So we are a man-woman arrangement, a woman-man arrangement, whichever way you
 want to look at it. And so although, you see, therefore, we move and look as if we are individuals
 and separate from each other, this is not the case at all. So now this, what I want
 to point out is that this same sort of relationship exists between groups that would seem to be
 hostile to each other. Now what are some of the bases of hostility? The real basis of
 hostility is that the biological order is a mutual eating society. It's a very curious
 game indeed, and if you are philosophically inclined, it is one which might bother your
 conscience. When you realize that you as an organism are a compound of murders, you are
 actually a bag of water, because the human organism consists mostly of water. And this
 water is held together and prevented from slobbering all over the floor by a very complex
 arabesque of tubes and cells and films, the material of which was invariably belonging
 to some other being before you got it. You had to kill a chicken, a cow, or a cabbage,
 or an apple, in order to get that tensile film of tube or whatever to hold the water
 in you and as you. And so we are as human beings a predatory creature. In fact we are
 more predatory than anything else in nature. The sharks are supposed to be predatory, but
 they stay in the ocean. The piranha fish are supposed to be very predatory, but they stay
 in the Amazon. The eagles are predatory, but they stay in the air and on the land. Only
 man ranges the whole range of elements, earth, air, and water, and preys on things, and he
 eats like a swarm of locusts. Not only does he prey on the living beings, he preys on
 the minerals. And someone recently described our civilization as a lot of people sitting
 in the middle of a sewage dump shooting rockets at the moon. Because if you read, get Playboy
 magazine for September, and read about the use of water, or rather the misuse of water,
 in our civilization, and it is absolutely horrifying. We've got to get that atomic power
 bringing us water from the ocean in nothing flat, or we're going to be very thirsty. And
 you can see how we use water in the most amazingly uneconomical ways. So we are a predatory monster
 eating up the planet. And I have seen, say, a sorrel plant in the country covered with
 green flies. One day it is full of little green succulent bodies having a ball. A day
 or two later, stalk with grey dust all over it. See, they've eaten up, they multiply to
 the point of eating up the plant, and so they turn into grey dust. Human beings could do
 just exactly the same thing. And the reason why human beings are in danger of this is
 that they have refused membership in a mutual eating society. They want to be top and only
 eater, and do not want to be eaten. So that instead nowadays of returning what you ate
 to the earth, we return our remains to the earth in an unassimilable form. Our remains
 include not only mummified formaldehyded bodies, courtesy of the morticians, encased in concrete
 so that no worms even can get in, but also the fact that many things that we return to
 the earth are no longer in the organic cycle. For example, rust does not assimilate properly.
 All sorts of chemicals, all sorts of gases that we give off do not return into the organic
 cycle. And we are ruining, we are actually abolishing animals. Wild animals have less
 and less of a prospect of living. Wild birds are being greatly reduced in numbers. Whales
 have almost, are ceasing to exist because the whaling industry is getting rid of them.
 And what is more, some of the animals we farm, like chickens, are no longer chickens. They
 are strictly non-chickens which lay pseudo-eggs because they are raised in enormous wire cell
 blocks and fed on chemicals under the superstition that anything fed to a chicken will turn into
 chicken. And it won't. That is why you may have noticed that the chickens you buy don't
 taste like chickens could taste, especially those that have been allowed to run around
 in the sunlight and scratch. Those can become real chickens. Because you see, the necessary
 thing about any species that you live on is that you must love it. I love you so much
 I could eat you. Or, I eat you so much I could love you. But where you get things raised
 without love, you cannot love a whole cell block of chickens. You cannot love wheat when
 it is grown in vast wastelands or out of any trees and it is sheared off the earth and
 then winnowed and reduced to pancake make-up and then chemicals are added to it and it
 is converted into this styrofoam material called bread. Now you know, like one converts
 milk into casein, so one converts wheat or rye into a plastic material which is a kind
 of universal solvent which is nothing at all and tastes of nothing at all. In fact, you
 know when you feed babies that kind of nasty white pabulum and you feed it and they always
 spit it back into the spoon, well our white bread reduces itself to that instantly on
 the contact with liquid and becomes a miserable paste. It's not bread at all. So, if you are
 unwilling, you see, to join the mutual eating society and you want to conquer everything
 and not be eaten by anything, the penalty you pay for this is the annihilation of your
 species and you eventually annihilate through eating things that taste like chalk and string.
 That's what it will come to because you don't love what you eat. You have no respect for
 the raw materials. So, what we haven't understood then is that all groups need an enemy group,
 but that the enemy group which preys upon it is actually a kind of friend because the
 enemy group prunes your own group. It keeps your population at a reasonable level and
 it keeps you on your toes because you have to defend yourself against it so you don't
 become flabby. But you see, we have lost the meaning of chivalry in all war situations
 and all conflict situations. Chivalry is indicated, for example, still in such customs as that
 the partners to a fight salute each other before beginning to fight and salute each
 other again at the end. You shake hands before boxing. You do these various things. You bow
 before a judo contest and so on. And that means that you recognize the opponent as an
 honorable opponent, as somebody with whom a fight is a really important matter. And
 that is really one of the most essential laws of survival. To recognize that enemies, unless
 they are predatory locusts who have no respect, who do not in other words farm the species
 that they prey upon. That's the essence of the thing. You must cherish the species you
 prey upon. You must see, like for example in lumbering, you must re-sow. You must plant
 a tree for every tree you take. That is cherishing the species. And if you farm cows, you don't
 treat your cows, you often treat them better than you would your servants. Because the
 servants can go hang, but the cows are valuable. And so you nurture them because they're going
 to sell as beef and they're going to provide milk or whatever it is. So the perception
 of the fact that it is absolutely necessary to have an outgroup for your having an ingroup,
 and that you cannot do without it, is the beginning of sociability. And so what you
 get then in that case is a situation of contained conflict. A conflict gets out of hand when
 an ingroup does not realize that it needs the outgroup. Then it says, "Let's get rid
 of the outgroup. Get the dirty communists off the face of the earth." But do you realize
 what a fix we'd be in without communists? The whole economy would fall apart, because
 there would be no external threat. And the communists are in exactly the same situation.
 Their kind of politics would fall apart unless there were some wretched capitalistic imperialists
 with whom they could contrast themselves and against whom they could organize their energies.
 Because it is a curious thing.


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