There are also, of course, in the world a number of phenomena that you cannot beat that are just the result of a general stupidity. And we all do stupid things, and we know some people do more than others, but there is no use in trying to check who does the most. There is some attempt to protect this by government regulation, to protect this stupidity, but it doesnt work a hundred percent.
For example, I went on a visit to one of the desert sites to buy land. You know they sell land, these promoterstheres a new city going to be built. Its exciting. Its marvelous. You must go. Just imagine yourself in a desert with nothing but some flags poked here in the ground with numbers on them and street signs with names. And so you drive in the car across the desert to find the fourth street and so on to get to the lot 369, which is the one for you, youre thinking. And you stand there kicking sand in this thing discussing with the salesman why its advantageous to have a corner lot and how the driveway will be good because it will be easier to get into from that side. Worse, believe it or not, you find yourself discussing the beach club, which is going to be on that sea, what the rules of membership are and how many friends youre allowed to bring. I swear, I got into that condition.
So when the time comes to buy the land, it turns out that the state has made an attempt to help you. So they have a description of this particular thing that you have read, and the man who sells you the land says its the law, we have to give you this to read. They give it to you to read, and it says that this is very much like many other real estate deals in the state of California and so on and so on and so on. And among other things, I read that although they say that they want to have fifty thousand people at this site, there is not water enough for a number which I better not say or Ill get accused of libel, but it was very much lessI cant remember it exactlyit was in the neighborhood of five thousand people, somewhere like that. So, of course they had noticed that this was in there before, and they told us that they had just found water at another site, far away, that they were going to pump down. And when I asked about it, they explained to me very carefully that they had just discov- ered this and that they hadnt had time to get it into the brochure from the state. Hmmmm.
Ill give another example of the same thing. I was in Atlantic City, and I went into one of thesewell, it was sort of a store. There were a lot of seats, and people were sitting there listening to a man speaking. And he was very interesting. He knew all about food, and he was talking about nutrition, different things. I remember several of the important statements which he made, such as even worms wont eat white flour. That kind of stuff. It was good. It was interesting. It was truemaybe it wasnt true about the worms, but it was good stuff about proteins and so on. And then he went on and described the Federal Pure Food and Drug Act, and he explained how it protects you. He explained that on every product that claims to be a good health food thats supposed to help you with minerals and this and that, there must be a label on the bottle which tells exactly whats in it, what it does, and all claims must be explicit, so that if its wrong, so on and so on. He gives them everything. I said, How is he going to make any money? Out come the bottles. It comes out, finally, that he sells this special health food, of course, in a brownish bottle. And it just so happens that he has just come in, and hes been in a hurry, and he hasnt had time to put the labels on. And here are the labels that belong on the bottles, and here are the bottles, and hes in a hurry to sell them, and he gives you the bottle, and you stick it on yourself. That man had courage. He first explained what to do, what to worry about, and then he went ahead and did it.
I found another lecture which was somewhat analogous to that one. And that was the second Danz lecture given by myself. I started out by pointing out that things were completely unscientific, that things were uncertain, particularly in political matters, and that there were the two nations, Russia and the United States, at odds with each other. And then by some mystic hocus-pocus it came out that we were the good guys and they were the bad guys. Yet, at the beginning, there was no way to decide which was the better of the two. In fact, that was the main point of the lecture. So by some sort of magic I produced some kind of relative certainty
out of uncertainty. I told you about the bottle with the labels, and then I came out on the other end with a label on my bottle. How did I do it? You have to think about it a little bit. One thing, of course, that we can be certain of, once were uncertain, and that is that we are uncertain. Somebody says No, maybe Im sure. Actually, though, the gimmick in that particular lecture, the weak point in the whole thing, the thing that requires further development and study is this one: I made an impassioned plea for the idea that its good to have an open channel, that theres value in uncertainty, that its more important to permit us to discover new things, rather than to choose a solution that we now make upthat to choose a solution, no matter how we choose it now is to choose a much worse thing than what we would get if we waited and worked things out. And thats where I made the choice, and I am not sure of that choice. Okay. I have now destroyed authority.