On Helping Others

"Archimedes said, 'Give me a fulcrum and I will move the Earth'; but there isn't one. It is
like betting on the futture of the human race - I might whis to lay a bet that the human
race would destroy itself by the year 2,000, but there is nowhere to place the bet. On the
contrary, I am involved in the world and must try to see that it does not blow itself to
pieces. I once had a terrible argument with Margaret Mead. She was holding forth one
evening on the absolute horror of the atomic bomb, and how everybody should spring into
action and abolish it, but she was getting so furious about it that I said to her: 'You scare
me because I think you are the kind of person who will push the button in order to get rid
of the other people who were going to push it first'. So she told me that I had no love for
my future generations, that I had no responsibility for my children, and that I was a
phoney swami who believed in retreating from facts. But I maintained my position. As
Robert Oppenheimer said a short while before he died, 'It is perfectly obvious that the
whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not
attempt to prevent it from doing so.' You see, many of the troubles going on in the world
right now are being supervised by people with very good intentions whose attempts are to
keep things in order, to clean things up, to forbid this, and to prevent that. The more we
try to put everything to rights, the more we make fantastic messes. Maybe that is the way
it has got to be. Maybe I should not say anything at all about the folly of trying to put
things to right but simply, on the principle of Blake, let the fool persist in his folly so that
he will become wise."