(acoustic piano music)
- It's a great pleasure to introduce Kurt Vonnegut.
(audience applauds)
- I left Indianapolis following puberty.
When I went to high school in Indianapolis,
I learned how to walk around looking tough
'cause everybody had to do that.
And I went out to Indianapolis 'cause I
go out there occasionally, and they're still doing it.
Just walking around looking very tough.
'Cause something might happen you know.
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I was raised by a black maid by the name of Ida Young.
I probably talked to her more than anybody.
So whatever is nutty about me
was nutty about her too I think
'cause I saw a lot more of her than I did of my parents.
And here comes a rather intimate part,
is I used to keep it a big secret
and I used to have awful guilt feelings.
My mother was crazy toward the end.
She was alright in the day time unless
you tried to take her picture.
Or you would get a bizarre reaction at night.
She would really get wild swearing people away
and crashing around the house.
That was barbiturates.
These were supposed to tranquilize her
and they turned her brain to cobwebs.
And I can't get mad at my mother
because I pitied her so much with what she went through.
(dramatic music)
I went and saw my parents tombstone
a couple of months ago and I cried
and I hadn't cried for a long time
and what I was crying about was
I wished they had been happier than they were.
And I think this is probably a dumb thing to do.
I think probably parents are
much happier than the parents realize.
I remember I asked my father what
the happiest day of his marriage had been.
This was after my mother died.
And he said well they had an Oldsmobile
and they broke into the Indianapolis 500 Mile Speedway
one Sunday and just drove around
and around and around and around.
(audience laughing)
(contemplative music)
I've heard that a writer is lucky because
he cures himself every day with his work.
What everybody is well advised to do is
to not write about your own life.
This is if you want to write fast.
You will be writing about your own life anyway
but you won't know it.
And the thing is in order to sit alone
and work all day long you must be a terrible over reactor.
And you're sitting there doing what paranoids do
is putting together clues, making them add up you know.
Putting the fact that they put me into room 471,
you know and what does that mean and everything.
Well nothing means anything except
the artist makes his living by pretending,
by putting it in a meaningful hole
though no such holes exist.
And you need paranoia for energy too.
You must be terribly worried and secretly full of hate.
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I am now older than George Orwell when he died.
I'll soon be older than Jack Kerouac when he died.
Anyway I've wondered why all these people killed themselves.
And I think that writers, creative writers
are in the process of becoming.
They are humanity becoming.
It's like reaching in to the mouth of a student
and taking a hold of a piece of tape
in the back of the mouth without getting bitten
and seeing what the hell's written on it.
And then just keep pulling it out.
And the person doesn't know what the hell it is.
And I think it becomes an exhausting thing to do.
That's about it, a lot of people decline to do it anymore.
And it becomes too unpleasant.
(fast piano music)
I had written story called the Big Space Fuck.
(audience laughing)
And it's about this big--
(audience laughing)
It's about the end of the world.
All are left are lamprey's and human beings.
And they're turning into man eating lamprey's.
The space program now has built this enormous spaceship
and the hope is that human life will somewhere go on.
It's got a big warhead on it filled with sperm you see.
And they're firing this thing out there
hoping it'll hit something you see and life--
(audience laughing)
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- It's a question of education
to teach people to be on their guard
against the sort of verbal booby traps
into which they're always being led,
to analyze the kind of things that are said to them.
I think it's terribly important
to insist on individual values,
that every human being is unique.
And it is of course on this genetical basis
that the whole idea of the value of freedom is based.
- [Narrator] This is Aldous Huxley,
a man haunted by a vision of hell on Earth.
Mr. Huxley wrote Brave New World.
A novel that predicted that someday the entire world
would live under a frightful dictatorship.
Today Mr. Huxley says that his fictional world of horror
is probably just around the corner for all of us.
- There are a number of impersonal forces which
are pushing in the direction of less and less freedom.
The first of them can be called overpopulation.
The whole essence of biological life on Earth
is a question of balance and what we have done is
to practice death control in a most intensive manner,
without balancing this with birth control at the other end.
In the underdeveloped countries,
people have less to eat and less goods,
and the central government has to take over
more and more responsibility for keeping
the ship of state on an even keel.
And then of course you're likely
to get social unrest under such conditions,
with again an intervention of the central government.
One sees here a pattern which seems to be
pushing very strongly towards a totalitarian regime.
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- [Narrator] Are there specific devices,
or methods of communication which diminish our freedoms?
- Well there are certainly devices
which can be used in this way.
Hitler used terror on the one kind, brute force on one hand.
But he also used a very efficient form of propaganda.
He had the radio which he used to the fullest extent,
and was able to impose his will
on an immense mass of people.
I mean the Germans were highly educated people.
We mustn't be caught by surprise
by our own advancing technology.
This has happened again and again in history,
and suddenly people have found themselves
in a situation which they didn't foresee,
and doing all sorts of things they didn't really want to do.
The presence of television I think
is being used quite harmlessly but I mean imagine,
which must be the situation in all communist countries,
where the television where it exists,
is always saying the same thing the whole time.
It's always driving along.
It's drumming in the single idea all the time.
It's obviously an immensely powerful instrument.
All technology is in itself morally neutral.
These are just powers which can either be used well or ill.
It's the same thing with atomic energy.
We can either use it to blow ourselves up,
or we can use it as a substitute
for the coal and the oil which are running out.
In this book of mine Brave New World,
I postulated a substance called soma,
which was a very versatile drug.
It would make people feel happy in small doses,
make them see visions in medium doses,
and it would send them to sleep in large doses.
I think it's quite on the cards that
we may have drugs which will profoundly change
our mental state without doing us any harm.
Well, what is going to happen in the future,
is the dictators will find as the old saying goes,
that you can do everything with bayonets except sit on them.
But if you want to preserve your power indefinitely,
you have to get the consent of the ruled.
And this they will do partly by drugs,
partly by these new techniques of propaganda.
They will do it by bypassing the sort of
rational side of man and appealing
to his subconscious and his deeper emotions
making him actually love his slavery.
I mean I think this is the danger that actually people
may be in some ways happy under the new regime.
But they will be happy in situations
where they oughtn't to be happy.
(acoustic piano music)
(beeping)
- Who are you Ayn Rand?
You have an accent which is...
- Russian.
- Russian, you were born in Russia?
- [Ayn] Yes.
- [Mike] Came here?
- [Ayn] Oh about 30 years ago.
- [Mike] And whence did this philosophy of yours come?
- [Ayn] Out of my own mind with
the sole acknowledgement of a debt to Aristotle,
who was the only philosopher that ever influenced me.
I devised the rest of my philosophy myself.
(acoustic piano music)
- Okay.
(beeping)
You are married?
- Yes.
- Your husband is he an industrialist?
- [Ayn] No he's an artist, his name is Frank O'Connor.
- Does he live from his paintings?
- [Ayn] He's just beginning to study painting.
He was a designer before.
- Is he supported in his efforts by the state?
- [Ayn] Most certainly not.
- He's supported by you for the time being?
- No by his own work actually in the past.
- Well I know that--
- By me if necessary but that isn't quite necessary.
- [Mike] And there is no contradiction here
in that you help him?
- No because you see I am in love with him selfishly.
It is to my own interest to help him if he ever needed it.
I would not call that a sacrifice because
I take selfish pleasure in it.
(acoustic piano music)
I say that man is entitled to his own happiness
and that he must achieve it himself
but that he cannot demand that others
give up their lives to make him happy,
nor should he wish to sacrifice himself
for the happiness of others.
I hold that man should have self esteem.
- And cannot man have self esteem
if he loves his fellow man?
Christ, every important modern leader
in man's history has taught us
that we should love one another.
Why then is this kind of love in your mind immoral?
- [Ayn] It is immoral if it is a love placed above oneself.
It is more than immoral it's impossible,
because when you are asked to love
everybody indiscriminately that is
to love people without any standard,
to love them regardless of whether they have
any value or virtue you are asked to love nobody.
- [Mike] But in a sense in your book
you talk about love as if it were
a business deal of some kind.
Isn't the essence of love that it is above self interest?
- Well what would it mean to have love above self interest?
It would mean for instance that the husband
would tell his wife if he were moral
according to the conventional morality
that I am marrying you just for your own sake.
I have no personal interest in it but I am so unselfish
that I am marrying you only for your own good.
- [Mike] Well should husbands and wives--
- Would any woman like that?
I agree with you that it should
be treated like a business deal
but every business has to have
its own terms and its own kind of currency.
And in love the currency's virtue.
You love people not for what you do
for them or what they do for you.
You love them for their values, their virtues.
You don't love causelessly.
You don't love everybody indiscriminately.
You love only those who deserve it.
Man has free will.
If a man wants love he should correct his flaws
and he may deserve it but he cannot expect the unearned.
- There are very few of us then in this world
by your standards who are worthy of love.
- Unfortunately yes, very few.
But it is open to everybody to make themselves worthy of it
and that is all that my morality offers them.
- If they will--
- A way to make themselves worthy of love
although that's not the primary motive.
(acoustic piano music)
- [Mike] Isn't it possible that we are all basically
lonely people and we are basically our brother's keepers?
- [Ayn] Nobody has ever given a reason
why man should be their brother's keepers.
And you see the examples around you
of men perishing by the attempt
to be their brother's keepers.
- You have no faith in anything?
- Faith no. - Only in your mind?
- And that is not faith, that is a conviction.
Yes I have no faith at all, I only hold conviction.
(acoustic piano music)
(tape rewinding)