"No, they aren't. Let us drop the analogy before it leads us into absurdities. Nevertheless I think you see that what I said is true, quite independently of the analogy. Men are moved to act by very complicated motivations tagged duty, love, sin, and so forth. You yourself are moved by them and yet you are unable to define what you mean by these terms. You have accepted these concepts more or less unconsciously yet you know so little about them that you cannot possibly know whether they lead where you want to go, or to disaster. If you attempted to pilot a plane with as little knowledge of the controls, you would be sure to wreck it. You are here because you did such faulty piloting of your own life, and smashed another person in the chin in the process."
"Granting that what you say is true—and I don't concede yet that I was wrong to hit that fellow—how do you discover proper meanings for these words that will enable me to conduct myself properly by them?"
"How did you discover how to design gunsights that would enable you to hit the mark?"
"Why the theory of gravitation makes it a mathematical necessity."
"Are you sure? I seem to remember that the theory of gravitation was turned upside down and inside out in your lifetime. Did that cause all the gunsights to be junked?"
He slapped his thigh. "By God, you're right. Exterior ballistics evolved by purely empirical means, trial and error. Whenever we got enough data to analyze we invented formulas to fit. We never tried to make the practice fit the theory. When the theory didn't fit, we junked it and made up a new one. But it worked. We built machines in that way that were marvels of accurate prediction," he said and thought, then his face clouded. "But how can you apply that technique to the problems of living?"
"Well, Perry, so far as I know there are just two ways of working out a practical theory of human relations that will enable us all to live happily together. One is the hard way of trying to work out empirical principles from what we know of the real world. The other is by divine revelation. I won't say that the second way is impossible, but we moderns have grown to distrust it. Our conclusions in 2086 from the first method are embodied in the current code of customs. He who complies with that code will live with reasonably little conflict in 2086 whether he believes that the code is a list of final truths or simply rough generalizations. The code embodies our 2086 meanings for these troublesome words that you could not define. You have other meanings, unspoken, and in my opinion your meanings are both inaccurate and dangerous, for I believe that if you were able to define your code in spoken objective words you would find that your code did not correspond to the real world around you."
"But that still doesn't tell me how you arrive at these customs, or empirical formulas for conduct, or whatever you care to call them."
"Much as you perfected the art of ballistics. By a willingness to junk theories that didn't fit the facts. For example, the churches, by and large, set their faces against divorce. Divorce was a 'sin'. No attempt was made to study marriage and divorce objectively, divorce was 'sin' by divine revelation and that settled it. It is almost inconceivable the amount of harm that was done by that one false generalization alone. By rejecting the dogmatic viewpoint and examining the problem in its environment we reached quite different conclusions. In the 2086 environment divorce is not a 'sin', although it is possible to conceive different social patterns in which divorce would be 'sin'. Consider again the subject of clothing as a taboo. Again a dogmatic generalization for social conduct decreed that it was 'wrong', 'dishonorable', 'immodest' to appear unclothed. Original sin was involved, complicated aesthetic ideas were given a false objective reality, and so forth. An amazing mass of philosophical nonsense was written on this one taboo alone by people who would never think of taking off their clothes in the presence of others in order to see what it felt like. Their faces were resolutely set against such irreverent experiment, even as the scholasticists of the Middle Ages refused to watch any experiment which threw doubt on the perfection of Aristotle's Mechanics, and yet the experiment was always available and easy to perform. In 2086 from purely experimental considerations, the clothes taboo is destroyed. It does not appear in our code of customs, and one may dress or not as convenience and personal aesthetic taste indicates.
"Again, take politics. For centuries philosophers attempted to formulate the perfect state, reasoning from their own unexamined prejudices, which they usually assumed to be divine revelation. In 2086 we consider that the 'perfect state' is a meaningless sound having no objective reality. Instead we set up a political system to achieve whatever we wish to accomplish in 2086. We have no notion that it would have suited 1000 A.D. nor that it would suit contemporary Europe nor that we will leave it unchanged in the future. But we do believe that we have evolved a technique by which we can make the state serve our purposes in any age."
She glanced at the chronometer. "I have other things that I must do now, and I believe that you should think over and develop for yourself any new ideas from this talk. Bye bye!"
VIII
These exercises in realistic thinking continued in various ways. Perry found himself unable to distinguish between activities which were a part of his treatment, events simply intended to entertain and thereby keep him happy in his environment, and activities which he had selected for his own edification or fulfillment. Early in his stay he had expressed a desire to continue with his study of modern mathematics. He was given every facility to do so, but in time lost interest in the face of other activities and, especially, his rapidly growing friendship with Olga. He was surprised to receive a call from Hedrick who urged him to pursue his mathematical studies to the limit and, if possible, to develop some new aspect of the art. Perry inquired if this were standard psychiatric procedure. Hedrick hastened to reassure him, "Not at all, not at all, but if a person under treatment has a mathematical pre-disposition the development of that bent may be used very handily to clear up his particular difficulty. Yours is a case in point. You think very admirably in the field of physics in which your terms are almost entirely mathematical. You are able to make useful predictions and are able to avoid fallacious identification of terms. You are able to appreciate and even invent little mathematical jokes based on a deliberate confusion of terms. You can 'prove' to me that one plus one equals one or air cars won't fly, for our mutual amusement. This does you no harm because you have deliberately confused certain terms and used them with different meanings in the same problem in order to achieve a willfully ludicrous result. When your thinking in social relationships reaches the same order of development, you will no longer be tortured by the emotional upsets that impelled you to consult us."
"Is that all that insanity amounts to, a confusion of terms?"
"Oh my, no. Even in your own case confusion in terms is not the only problem. You not only confuse the various meanings of some terms, but you also fail in certain respects to perceive the pattern of your structural relationship to your environment. This produces trouble which may be likened to that experienced by a thirsty traveler who believes that a heat mirage is a lake. Your trouble is not of that simple order of perception of physical phenomena, but in a much higher order of abstraction. Yet it is as difficult for me to explain to you the exact nature of your trouble as it would be for you to explain a mirage to an ignorant savage. Your only hope of getting the savage to understand a mirage in the fashion in which you understand it would lie in giving him a long course of basic instruction in modern science, having first—and this is very important—un-taught him a thousand superstitions and false identifications with which his mind is crowded. You are now in the process of unlearning your errors and superstitions. At the same time you are beginning to teach yourself a more satisfactory concept of the cosmos. But I haven't answered your question. You are not insane, any more than our savage. You are simply confused, as the savage was. In each case the confusion can be eliminated by proper training. Yours might well have taken place in a children's development center had you been of the proper age. Moreover, because of the maturity and exceptional ability of your mind we can enable you to re-train yourself in a fraction of the time necessary to train a child.