Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

category, and today the Takers and the Fakers outnumber (and outvote) the Makers.

Today it takes more dollars each year to service the National Debt than the

total budget for the last and most expensive year of the Korean War. I am not going

to state here the amount of our National Debt. If you have not heard it recently,

you wouldn’t believe me. If you don’t know, telephone your Congressman and ask; he

has a local office near you. If the telephone information service can’t (won’t) tell

you, the city room of any newspaper does know his number.

Our National Debt will never be paid. We are beyond the point of no return.

Inflation will continue and get worse . . . and the elderly on fixed incomes and the

young adults trying to start families will continue to bear the brunt.

Every congressman, every senator, knows precisely what causes inflation. . .

but can’t (won’t) support the drastic reforms to stop it because it could (and

probably would) cost him his job. I have no solution and only once piece of advice:

Buy a wheelbarrow.

The Age of Unreason

Having been reared in the most bigoted of Bible Belt fundamentalism in which

every word of the King James version of the Bible is the literal word of God- then

having broken loose at thirteen when I first laid hands on THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES and

THE DESCENT OF MAN-I should have been unsurprised by the anti-intellectual and

anti-science ground swell in this country.

I knew that our American temperament, practical as sharp tools on one side,

was never more than three quarters of an inch from mindless hysteria on the other

side. I knew this-my first long story was IF THIS GOES ON-, a yarn based on the

assumption that my compatriots were capable of throwing away their dearly-bought

liberties to submit to a crude and ridiculous religious dictatorship.

(In forty years of letters about that story no one has ever criticized this

assumption; I infer that I am not alone in believing it.)

I had read much about the Ku Klux Klan during the Tragic Era, talked with

many who had experienced it, then experienced its nationwide recrudescence in the

early 1920’s. I had seen damfoolishness from dance marathons to flagpole sitters,

and had made considerable study of crowd behavior and mass delusions. I had noted,

rather casually, the initial slow growth of anti-science-&-intellect-ism.

Yet the durned thing shocked me. Let me list some signs:

a) I CHING;

b) Back-to-nature cults;

c) The collapse of basic education;

d) The current respectability of natal horological astrology among

“intelligentsia”-e.g. professors, N.Y. lit’rary people, etc.;

e) “Experts” on nuclear power and nuclear weapons who know nothing whatever

of mathematical physics and are smug in admitting it;

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f) “Experts” on the ecology of northern Alaska who have never been there and

are not mathematically equipped to analyse a problem in ecology;

g) People who watch television several hours a day and derive all their

opinions therefrom-and expound them;

h) People who watch television several hours a day;

return of creationism – “Equal time for Yahj) The return of witchcraft.

The mindless yahoos, people who think linearly like a savage instead of

inductively or deductively, and people who used to be respectful to learned opinion

or at least kept quiet, now are aggressively on the attack. Facts and logic don’t

count; their intuition is the source of “truth.”

If any item on the above list strikes you as rational, I won’t debate it

with you; you are part of the problem.

But I will illustrate what I mean in categories where I think I might be

misunderstood.

a) I CHING- easier than “reading the augurs” but with nothing else to

recommend it. Chinese fortune cookies are just as as accurate-and you get to eat the

cookie. Nevertheless this bit of oriental nonsense is treated with solemn

seriousness by many “educated” people. It is popular enough to make profitable the

sale of books, equipment, magazine articles, and personal instruction. Paralleling I

CHING is the widespread use of Tarot cards. Fortunetelling by cards used to be a

playful parlor game, a mating rite-a nubile girl limited by the vocabulary and