It starts out all right, with the good, and love, and
Christ, and so on, and it builds itself up until it's afraid of an enemy. And
then it forgets its original idea. It turns itself inside out and becomes absolutely
contrary to the beginning. I believe that the people who start some of these
things, especially the volunteer ladies of Altadena, have a good heart and understand
a little bit that it's good, the Constitution, and so on, but they are lead
astray in the system of the thing. How, I can't exactly get at, and what to
do to keep from doing this, I don't exactly know.
I went still further into the thing and found out what the study group was about,
and if you don't mind I'll tell you what that was about. They gave me some papers.
There were a lot of chairs, you see, in the room, and they explained to me,
yes, that evening they had a study group, and they gave me a thing which described
what they were going to study. And I made some notes from it. It had to do with
the S.P.X.R.A. In 1943 the S.P.X. research associates- which turns out to be
the... well, I'll tell you what it turns out to be- came into being through
the professional interests of intelligence officers then on active duty in the
armed forces of the United States concerning the Soviet revival of a long dormant
tenth principle of warfare. Paralysis. See the evil. Dormant. Mysterious. Frightening.
The mystic people of the military orders have had principles of warfare since
the Roman legions. Number one. Number two. Number three. This is number ten.
We don't have to know what number seven is. The whole idea that there are long
dormant principles of warfare, much less that there is a tenth principle of
warfare, is an absurdity. And then what is this principle of paralysis? How
are they going to use the idea? The boogie man is now generated. How do you
use the boogie man? You use the boogie man as follows: This educational program
concerns itself with all the areas where Soviet pressure can be used to paralyze
the American will to resist. Agriculture, arts, and cultural exchange. Science,
education, information media, finance, economics, government, labor, law, medicine,
and our armed forces, and religion, that most sensitive of areas. In other words,
we now have an open machine for pointing out that everybody who says something
that you don't agree with has been paralyzed by the mystic force of the tenth
principle of warfare.
This is a phenomenon analogous to paranoia. It is impossible to disprove the
tenth principle. It's only possible if you have a certain balance, a certain
understanding of the world to appreciate that it's out of balance, to think
that the Supreme Court- which turns out the be an "instrument of global
conquest"- has been paralyzed. Everything is paralyzed. You see how fearful
it becomes, the terrible power which is demonstrated again and again by one
example after the other of this fearful force which is made up.
This describes what a paranoia is like. A women gets nervous. She begins to
suspect that her husband is trying to make trouble for her. She doesn't like
to let him into the house. He tries to get into the house, proves that he's
trying to make trouble for her. He gets a friend to try to talk to her. She
knows that it's a friend, and she knows in her mind, which is going to one side,
that this is only further evidence of the terrible fright and the fear that
she's building up in her mind. Her neighbors come over to console her for a
while. It works fairly well, for a while. They go back to their houses. The
friend of the husband goes to visit them. They are spoiled now, and they are
going to tell her husband all the terrible things she said. Oh dear, what did
she say? And he's going to be able to use them against her. She calls up the
police department. She says, "I'm afraid." She's locked in her house
now. She says, "I'm afraid." Somebody's trying to get into the house.
They come, they try to talk to her, they realize that there is nobody trying
to get into the house. They have to go away. She remembers that her husband
was important in the city. She remembers that he had a friend in the police
department. The police department is only part of the scheme. It only proves
it once again. She looks through the window of the house, and she sees across
the way someone stopping at a neighbor's house. What are they talking about?
In the backyard, she sees something coming up over a bush. They're watching
her with a telescope! It turns out later to be some children playing in the
back with a stick. A continuous and perpetual buildup, until the entire population
is involved. The lawyer that she called, she remembers, was the lawyer once
for a friend of her husband's. The doctor who has been trying to get her to
the hospital is now obviously on the side of the husband.
The only way out is to have some balance, to think that it's impossible that
the whole city is against her, that everybody is going to pay attention to this
husband of mine who's such a dope, that everybody's going to do all these things,
that there's a complete accumulation. All the neighbors, everybody's against
her. It's out of proportion. It's only out of proportion. How can you explain
to somebody who hasn't got a sense of proportion?
And so it is with these people. They don't have a sense of proportion. And so
they will believe in such a possibility as the Soviet tenth principle of warfare.
The only way that I can think to beat the game is to point the following out:
They're right. And like my friend with the bottle with the label, the Soviets
are very, very ingenious and clever indeed. They even tell us what they're doing
to us. You see, these people, these research associates are really in the hire
of the Soviets who are using this method of paralysis. And what they want us
to do is to lose faith in the Supreme Court, to lose faith in the Agriculture
Department, to lose faith in the scientists and all the people who help us in
all kinds of ways and so on and so on, and lose faith in all sorts of ways,
and it's a way that they have entered into this movement of freedom that everybody
wanted, this thing with all the flags and the Constitution, and they've gotten
in on it, and they're getting in there, and they're going to paralyze it. Proof.
In their own words. S.P.R.X.A. has qualified, under oath, in the United States
court as the leading, American authority on the tenth principle. Where did they
get the information? There's only one place. From the Soviet Union.
This paranoia, this phenomenon- I shouldn't call it a paranoia, I'm not a doctor,
I don't know- but this phenomenon is a terrible one, and it has caused mankind
and individuals a terrible unhappiness.
-Richard Feynman