Part XXVI
4 Truth, and all the truth is essential to Industrialization, and axiomatically, so is free speech.
5 You can’t sell the U.S.A.ers, now accustoming themselves to highway traffic control by airplane and radio relay, the idea of arbitrary misstatement or false propaganda.
6 You can’t tell them that there is no car coming in the other direction when they know that probably there is.
7 And U.S.A.ers don’t feel silly and reverently ‘‘gutless’’ if, having taken precautions, ‘‘nothing happens.’’
8 Those games of self-deceit and inferiority-complex chest puffing, say the U.S.A.ers, may be played by men on foot in the old static world, but not by people mechanically extended in the dynamic world of Industrialization.
9 Long before the 1939--40 French and British expeditionary force debacle in Europe in the path of the BLITZKRIEG Americans had learned and only by actual personal mechanical extension experience, as Europe obviously had not learned, that you can’t play puss in the corner and blind man’s buff with Mack Trucks let alone with fire vomiting galloping ‘‘steam rollers’’ of forged steel.
10 Those politicians and the selfish schemers who manipulate them who believe they are going to save their silly diamond or green paper chestnuts by brandishing whole industrial systems at their special personal nemeses without even taking the personal trouble to learn elementary physics, chemistry, or trigonometry, or to keep reasonably abreast of the applied effects of their latest refinements, will never know what hit them as they splash piecemeal through space.
11 Now whether the hypothesis is in itself valid or not, Industrialization, considered as constituting a tacit religion even for the sake of argument, provides a precise fulcrum for prying loose many fairly satisfactory explanations regarding puzzling phases of the U.S.A, and world trends, past, present, and future.
12 And in further justification of assuming this arbitrary hypothesis it is to be noted that many (if not all) of the most important scientific discoveries have been evoked by earnest assumption
13 of ‘‘fulcrum’’ concepts which were later discarded
14 it is true
15 as being ‘‘fantastic’’
16 after providing
17 the successful introduction unexpectedly of a true scientific event.
18 However, in every such case
19 the latter outcome
20 was completely unforeseen
21 at the time of adoption
22 of the ultimately to be discovered to be invalid assumption.
23 For instance, there was the assumption in 1697 that fire was an element, called ‘‘Phlogiston.’’
24 This assumption by embryo chemists
25 that fire was not just a mystical phenomenon, served at least
26 to isolate that phenomenon
27 from the known materials present, and from the events
28 immediately
29 preceding and following
30 the occurrence of fire.
31 By thus tactically deciding upon
32 positive action
33 combustion was at least omni-circumscribed. The unknowns within the zone of isolation were thus placed under scientific scrutiny and ‘‘their’’ behavior catalogued.
34 Among those thus observing and cataloguing was Priestly who himself still assuming the ‘‘phlogiston theory’’ seventy-seven years after its nomination, discovered and proved by carefully measuring that an invisible ‘‘something’’ was combining with the original tangible materials burned.
35 He determined this because the weight of the isolated materials present was increased after the conversion by combustion. Priestly died, however, still assuming phlogiston to be an ‘‘element.’’ It remained for Lavoisier to go farther, though Lavoisier also assumed phlogiston at the outset. He found that the combining ‘‘something’’ was an until then nothing-ness—air which nothingness differentiated into a plurality of associated gases at least one of which was a new and unknown element—which combining element he named ‘‘oxygen.’’ Thus was the latter experimentally isolated.
36 And its isolation attainment was so important to man through the immediately useful ramifications of the discovery that it inspired Lavoisier’s creation of the basic procedure, nomenclature, and tenets of modem chemistry,—so that was the end of alchemy and of the tricksters with truth ensconced in its obscurity.
37 And there is implicit in the story of the phlogiston episode at least one objective justification of our assumption that Industrialization constitutes a tacit ‘‘religion.’’