Chapter 1: Every Single Willing Hand A roaming tramp who had seen a man hang himself because nobody wanted his labor and enthusiasm – broke off his stay abroad and hastened home when young, perceptive John F. Kennedy entered the White House. Here, thought our traveler (my unhumble self), is a man who thinks, and who cares. Two secret service…

Chapter 2: Children’s Hour All who might help lift our economy to a higher and more natural level were once children. What happened to them then? How did that affect their later behavior, judgment, and ability to listen, think and feel? Yale University was the first to build a dome, of such wonder that a child placed inside could be…

Chapter 3: The Unsettled In their senior year of high school they came to me. They had found out what nobody else had found out: That I was working on the challenging riddles of energy, ecology, the economy. I had sent book manuscripts and articles east and west. They came back. Nobody cared. To these young people I sent nothing,…

Chapter 4: Generation Bridge Why do Chinese and Japanese families maintain the precarious parent-child relationship more successfully than the rest of us? Are they more tolerant of their children, or are the latter more respectful of their parents? When I lived in the home of an American Colonel stationed in Japan, his Japanese servants practically ran the house, decided on…

Chapter 5: Vendettas and Morality “Morals,” said Bernard Shaw, “is suspecting your neighbors of not being legally married.” “Morals,” said an American teenager, “is a noble art practiced between two persons who know each other’s needs.” The latter kind of morals has a lot to do with a nation’s economy and social stability. Another word for it is consideration. The consideration…

Chapter 6: The Good Samaritan and Computers Computers, lie detectors and good Samaritans sway people, their communities, economics. Those super sleuths, who know everything, told us that President Truman didn’t fire General MacArthur before he had consulted the computer. The computer was asked whether we could, at that time, afford a war as big as MacArthur proposed. The computer said…

Chapter 7: A Symbol is an Ocean in a Drop The United States, whose citizens hail from all corners of the world, has absorbed the widest variety of gold nuggets or butterflies of wisdom, hidden in the symbols that thrill, embolden and inspire men. To touch this community, its economics and employment, for example, one might wish to delve into…

Chapter 8: Communicators Communication, to some, means language, which, they feel, is coterminous with human life. Jagjit Singh, with tongue in cheek, quotes a contrasting viewpoint in his Information Theory, Language and Cybernetic: “The word remains upon the speaker’s lips and refuses to go and rest upon the thing, making language an absurd medley of sounds and symbols beyond which flows…

Chapter 9: War The Nazi occupiers tried to force Norwegian youth to fight its Russian allies during World War II. They would have succeeded were it not that the Americans bad kept their powder dry and threw out the Nazis. Worse, if Hitler had not been defeated by war, he would today have been running the world, based on nuclear power,…

Chapter 10: Riots: A Challenge? Science has the healthy habit of reversing itself before it becomes stale. For some time now, psychiatry has told us crowding caused. violence and since crowding was obviously increasing, violence was too — a good alibi for doing nothing. Then some doubters took a look at London, Tokyo, Holland, where people live in a more…