“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.
“With respect to other methods of treatment, naturally if a person is truly insane, suffering from physical lesions, whether congenital, traumatic, or pathological, we treat by physical means, surgery, chemical therapy, physical therapy, and so forth. Frequently there is little we can do other than care for them, keep them from harming themselves, or others, and prevent them from reproducing. But in any case in which the brain and nervous structure are not injured, we have not yet failed to achieve a satisfactory re-training into a state of full sanity. Yours is not even a difficult case, my boy. I feel sure that both of us will be satisfied with the result.”
Perry stirred uneasily in his seat. “What you say may be true and I would hesitate to contradict you in your own field. Certainly I have acquired a lot of new ideas and new concepts and new ways of thinking about things in the past weeks. Nevertheless, I don’t feel any different about the thing that landed me in this mess. I’m still in love with Diana, and I’m jealous as hell of her. I enjoyed taking a poke at that guy Bernard and would enjoy doing it again. I don’t want any man to lay a finger on her. In spite of my inability to define human nature, I think you know what I mean by the term, and I think its in human nature that I should feel as I do, and I don’t see how you can change human nature, mine or anybody else’s.”
Hedrick smiled and put the tips of his fingers together carefully, cocked his head on one side and replied, “You are right, my dear boy, entirely right, except about the immutability of human nature, in which you are partially wrong. I am quite prepared to believe that you are physically jealous of your woman in an acutely emotional manner. It is true that this emotion results from your own ‘human nature’ and that it is potentially present in all males and also in females, although it arises in females from a different source of more recent origin and less deep seated in character. The jealousy of the male for the female may be observed in animal life, in the battling of torn cats, the duels to death of stag deer, and the fighting cock bird. It is present in all animals, human and otherwise, and is both a necessary consequence and a determining cause of the survival of all bisexual life. It is very simple. The male who was unwilling to fight other males for the privilege of sexual intercourse did not reproduce; his line died out. Each generation, by and large, was descended from males who would fight for the females. Any factor in human nature which is necessary or helpful to the continuance and propagation of life may be termed a ‘survival factor’ and each generation will exhibit by necessity these factors; sexual urge, belly hunger, group loyalty, heliotropism, whatever they may be. You may term, if you wish, the resulting complicated manifold of instincts, desires, reflexes, emotions, and so forth, ‘human nature’, ‘animal nature’, or the ‘nature of life’. But you must remember that these are complex terms, implying many factors, and arising from myriad environmental circumstances in the history of the race. And you must remember that environments change. Now, a factor in ‘human nature’ remains a survival factor only as long as the environment continues to make it so. For example on a dairy farm sexual jealousy is no longer a survival factor for bulls; on the contrary a bull is not allowed to fight; his major survival factor is his ability to breed daughters who are big milk producers. It is useless to argue that he is in an artificial environment; the distinction is a specious one. A man-made environment is as ‘natural’ as that of the jungle, unless you insist on a purely verbal distinction that divorces ‘Man’ from the rest of nature.