Never in recorded history was the capacity of man to modify nature and exploit society more publicly tested out than in the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the purposeful devastation of jungle life and village life in large parts of Vietnam and Cambodia.  Reported in the public press and pictured, live, over radio and television, these latest developments in the ugly record of man’s exploitation of nature have become part of the record of the decline and dissolution of western civilization.

Exploitation of human society for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many is an old story that extends through the entire record of written history.  Every civilization has produced a cluster of institutions and practices that enabled a few rich and privileged to live in affluence at the expense of the impoverished many.  This juxtaposition of riches and poverty is the logical outcome of a system of social relations designed to provide the few with comfort and luxury while the many are forced to accept penury and hardship.  Exploitation, carried to its logical conclusion, permits and requires a parasitic minority to live in abundance while the majority must content itself with scarcity, extending to death from malnutrition.

Another goal presented to individuals by the promoters and fashioners of civilization is individual perfection, physical, mental, emotional, moral.  Every generation of human beings contains individuals who are beyond the average—­bigger, stronger, more talented, seeing farther, searching more deeply, endowed with greater sensitivity, working more conscientiously, imbued with a love of their fellows and determination to serve them.  Such individuals have genius in one or another form and offer themselves and their products as a gift to the general welfare of their generation.  Scientists, poets, musicians, inventors, artists, teachers, healers, philosophers, statesmen have appeared in each civilization adding their mite to the sum-total of community culture.

Innovators, moralists and counselors of perfection have played a noteworthy part by advocating and often by living noteworthy lives.  Reports of their sayings and doings are part of the folklore and the history of each civilization.  If they did not set the tone of their generation, they provided it with a model toward which their less talented, less creative fellows might aspire.  If they were creative artists their works provided models which were admired, copied and emulated by their successors.  If they were moralists or philosophers their sayings were recorded, respected and repeated by successive generations.

Each civilization has adopted lines of thinking and codes of action which embody the best and most advantageous in theory and in practice.  These codes of thought, feeling and action are attributed to some outstanding individual and passed on from generation to generation as codes of conduct to which all right-thinking individuals may or should aspire.