You Can’t Shoot an Idea

Nonetheless, he wanted to stop this social disease. But how? Again, he referred to his own past experience as a guide for future actions. Had someone stopped him from believing in the use of force as a means to achieve social performance? The speaker at the banquet had stimulated him to study the matter and test his own beliefs—that was all. What actually, had happened to his former beliefs in the use of force? Had someone else destroyed these beliefs? They still persisted in the minds of others, and he wasn’t certain that he himself was yet wholly free from them. He found, when reflecting on his own experience, that an idea or a belief is never destroyed; it is merely accepted or rejected by a person, nothing more. In his own case he had rejected his beliefs in the inordinate use of force because he had accepted a new belief that took their place, a belief that society can be best served by the release of human energy—that is, by men acting voluntarily and freely. This acquisition was a process governed by his own person. No one else had any command of the process except as he considered someone else to be ahead of him in understanding, and could thus be chosen by him as his teacher.