Looking Forward by Kenneth Jr. (snow like ashes .txt) 📗

way of life. They were certainly not ethical guides by which people could run their lives.”

“When you evolve your own standards of growth, you can feel greater worth and dignity every day,” Scott continues intently. “Sometimes simply listening to a moving piece of music will enlarge your esthetic experience and make you feel you’ve grown. Reading will add to your store of knowledge to give this feeling of increased being. Simply sensing your own feelings and developing a deeper insight into the powers of your brain can add to the feeling of worth. When you make personal growth a way of life, a feeling of individual fulfillment comes automatically.”

“Since our feeling of worth is within our own control,” says Hella, “we have a security our ancestors lacked. We can give to other people in ways that they could seldom give. Our ancestors could usually be generous toward their immediate families. But they didn’t have the resources to be generous toward a larger group. They had to compete too strongly with other people. Individuals in a larger group would hurt them and would take advantage of them. They had to wrestle money from them, they had to fight them for position, power, and prestige.”

“You’re limited in adding to the happiness of others,” Scott concludes, “unless your own life is fulfilling.”

Love Without Jealousy

“In previous times there was never enough of anything—money, security, or love,” Hella says. “People developed feelings of possessiveness. The murder I recently saw revolved around the desire of a man to possess a woman. He seemed to feel he owned her—that he could tell her how to live her life.”

“How barbarous,” says Scott. “I can’t imagine anyone trying to hold love by force or threats. You hold love with an open palm, not a closed fist.”

“Yes, but they couldn’t feel that way,” Hella replies. “Their jealousies were brought on by feelings of inferiority and insecurity. A man was afraid that if the woman he loved was with another man, she would find this other man more attractive and not come back to him.”

“When you’re with someone else, I’m glad.” Scott’s tone is warm. “I know you’ve found a relationship that adds to your life. When you’re with me, I have the satisfying feeling that we’re together simply because we want to be with each other. In the past if a man and woman loved each other and wanted an intimate type of companionship, society expected them to bind themselves with a legal arrangement called marriage. Of course, this was done to provide for children during their growth years. But can you imagine fettering love and companionship with legal rights and obligations?”

“Sounds awful. If you enjoy being with me, it’s wonderful.” Hella’s hand touches Scott gently. “If our paths grow apart, we’ve found more satisfying relationships elsewhere. Either way, we’re ahead.”

“Our open ways of feeling about each other and our ethical standard of being true to ourselves are perhaps the greatest social inventions of mankind,” Scott philosophizes. “They could be realized only to a limited extent in previous societies. Only today’s cybernated world can permit their full flowering. Warped children grow into warped adults. People who labor under an inferiority complex can’t fully enter into this new way of feeling and acting.”

“In the past,” says Hella, “children spent their first five years of life under conditions that gave them a permanent inferiority complex. No matter how worthy they later became, no matter how learned, no matter how much power or skill they acquired, they always felt inferior to some extent.”

“Those who struggled hardest for power, such as the Napoleons or Hitlers, were usually short men who had been heavily structured by the authority of their parents in their early years,” adds Scott. “In an attempt to fight off their inferiority complex, they developed what outwardly looked like a superiority complex. But inside there always remained a scared little boy, insecure, trembling, and afraid someone would find out what he really felt. As long as people had an inferiority complex, it was impossible for them to get a fully secure feeling of worth based on their own inner development.”

The Obscene Past

“The only thing that made me laugh while I was observing the resurrected twentieth-century people was their warped standards of obscenity,” says Hella with a remembering smile. “One of the men had a drawing of a man and woman engaged in intercourse. Every woman that saw it acted shocked, and this seemed to give the man a perverse delight. I understand back in Victorian times a nude figure of a woman was considered obscene. Later, mores in Western society were revised so that only representations of the act of love were classified as lewd.”

“Idiotic,” Scott explodes. “How could a picture of one of the most beautiful experiences in life ever be considered obscene! A drawing might be crude, yes. It might be untalented...”

Hella interrupts. “We have a different way of applying the label ‘obscene.’ I have just witnessed the most obscene thing—a man hitting a woman in the face, a man turning on another person to kill him, a social group choking him to death with a rope.” She shudders.

“Anything that degrades, debases, or dehumanizes a human being is considered obscene today,” generalizes Scott. “Our ancestors in the twentieth century had a tremendous amount of obscenity. They plastered it all over their magazines, television screens, newspapers, and books. Murders, race prejudices, wars, etc.

“Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Dachau—ovens that devoured live, screaming human beings. Grotesque piles of human corpses—these are obscene things that were shown to men, women, and children in ‘civilized’ countries in the latter part of the twentieth century.

“Perhaps one of the most obscene things of all was a man in an electric chair twitching and writhing as the shock of electricity burned through his body,” Scott grimaces. “I think the most obscene word used in twentieth-century America was the word ‘nigger.’ But few people seemed to realize it. They felt that their most obscene words were four-letter symbols for sexual and