Marceline Bradfield, a Registered Nurse, housewife, mother of three children, landlady, and small investor, also has found time to pursue graduate studies in Cultural Geography at Los Angeles State College.
Education is frequently cited as both a preventative for and a weapon against communism. Most people in the Free World concur in this belief, nor should we dissent. Nevertheless, while the various educative media, that is, the schools, the press, other communications, and the clergy, pound away desultorily at the political, economic, and military challenges we face in combating the international communist movement, scarcely a voice is heard to denounce the ideology at its grass roots where it is weakest. Startling discoveries by Western scientists in the field of parapsychology have in recent years completely shattered the basis of communist materialism. Too long have these revelations passed almost unnoticed and unheralded in the world, particularly among the educated classes.
Contrary to popular opinion, the poverty-stricken, hungry two-thirds of the world are not the rabid proselytes of communism. They could not care less. Their main concern in life is survival: from where—and whether—the next meal is coming. Immersed in their own abject misery, they are swayed only by the lure of a full belly for their children and themselves—then by the hope of a better life. Promises of political freedom strike empty chords for men who know not freedom even from malnutrition and death by starvation. Democracy and communism are equally meaningless words to men like these.
Men who are enlightened and able, however, find appeal in Marxist ideology. Throughout the world dialectical materialism offers to increasing numbers of intellectuals an explanation of the nature of man which superficially rings true. Even in the West, where communism is rejected, men of learning and letters are badly divided within themselves over the basic issue with which communism began—an attempt to assess man’s nature and his relation to society and the universe. This schizophrenia arises from the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of correlating religious dogma with the mechanistic interpretation of life expounded in institutions of learning.
No necessity and no intention to attack the rights of free men to choose and practice a religion are here implied. What is explicit here is the fact that millions of intellectuals the world over have become disenchanted with backward-looking religious institutions. Rational people demand rational explanations for man and his relation to the universe—not fairytale revelations from the past. One does not have to be an atheist to realize that most religious dogma founds itself upon a combination of fantasy and faith. Men of higher learning have been taught to demand facts and proof as the basis for their convictions. They have been taught by prevailing scientific principles that physical laws are the only natural laws. Thus, they have been compelled either to reject formal religion entirely or to live as split personalities with dual philosophies.
A further cause of the disenchantment of the intelligentsia with religious philosophy is the inescapable fact of mankind’s plight of hunger and poverty. Despite thousands of years of high-sounding ideals and noble wishful thinking, religion has thus far netted very little in practical application to the alleviation of the suffering of most of its followers. The hollowness, the lack of foundation and the ritualized doctrine of religious philosophy have proved inadequate to provide even a satisfactory life, much less a richer, better one for the majority of human beings. Intellectuals, themselves often having arisen by sheer will or by fortuitous circumstance from squalor, are deeply concerned with the failures of ecclesiastical institutions. For many of them the alternative has seemed to be the pseudo-scientific materialism of Karl Marx.
About Face!
The only implication for religion here is not that the clergy should immediately give up and drop dead, but that, in order to recapture the great thinking minds of the world, the clergy must turn their heads 180° from past to future. With feet planted squarely in the present and eyes directed to the future, religious leaders can find factual bases in science for viable, solid, dynamic doctrines. For science and rationality are enemies not of religion—only of dogmatism. Religion’s prime adversary is the philosophy of materialism. Communism has succeeded best where it has been able to supplant long-entrenched spiritual institutions dedicated to the salvation of humanity. And communism’s foundation, materialism, has seemed to offer a fresher look and a brighter hope to intellectuals for the solution of humankind’s dilemma than religion has offered in all of the past. Thus it happens that some American scientists, African men of letters, and Venezuelan students are taken in by Marxian materialism.
What does it matter, anyway, if a few eggheads turn to materialism and thence to communism? The intelligentsia comprise a bare minority in any nation’s population.
The importance of this small percentage is that they form the elite. Where they lead, the rest of the people follow. A handful of Bolshevik intellectuals pirated the Russian Revolution, a minority of Chinese scholars overthrew Chiang, and a small band of Cuban students ousted Batista.
Why, therefore, should we feel that in education lies the answer to the challenge of communism? If it is the intellectuals who are responsible for accepting communism, should we not encourage less education rather than more?
The Idea of Materialism
The key to these questions abides in the idea of materialism. Marxian materialist philosophy maintains that people are merely a conglomeration of living material elements: everything in the universe can be explained in terms of matter in motion. Marx’s atheism further asserts that human values, therefore, should center around material considerations, pleasures, and satisfactions; human history must be interpreted in terms of material elements.
Dialectical materialism was a product of the turbulent times in which Marx lived and wrote. The growth of communism was and is a direct result of the disturbing fact that the great urgent problems affecting human life have been grossly neglected.
Materialism, however, is merely an arrested phase of scientific development and thought. Even in Marx’s time it was not an advanced idea, but only a rehash of the mechanistic thought of past ages. The Russian communists captured the idea, dogmatized it, and swallowed it entire. There has been and will be no progress in scientific thought regarding the nature of man in the U.S.S.R. since Lenin. Instead, the Soviets try to fit human beings and human conduct into their political gospel of materialism. There is even at present a concerted Machiavellian attempt through Sino-Soviet research in cybernetics to find ways and means of controlling human thought, the better to mold “good” communists in keeping with the production-line precepts of “communist man.” All this because communists, for all their claims of being scientific, have failed to explore beyond the mechanistic concept of materialism.
Scientific Refutation
In many places in the Free World, on the other hand, scientists have carried inquiry into the nature of man beyond the stagnation of a physicalistic interpretation. The time has long since arrived to impugn communist materialism on the basis of the findings of these researchers. For definite scientific evidence, obtained through carefully controlled experiment, has completely shattered the entire basis of communism’s concept of man as merely dust without soul or spirit! Experiments carried out by scientists of every continent over the past thirty to forty years have uncovered incontrovertible proof that man and the universe itself do not conform to the tenets of materialism.
In the United States the Parapsychology Laboratory of Duke University, under the direction of Dr. Joseph B. Rhine, has helped lead the way to this amazing discovery. There the phenomena of extrasensory perception (mental telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition) and psychokinesis (mind’s influence over matter) have been extensively tested by painstaking laboratory and statistical methods. While recognizing that the study itself is merely in an embryonic stage similar to that of physical science in general a century or two ago, Dr. Rhine and his colleagues throughout the Western World have already proved that ESP and PK take place normally in human beings. Telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis exist. This means that mental processes occur in man which are unexplainable by physical law. The unavoidable conclusion is that, quite contrary to the belief that all natural law is physical law, some process operates in man which transcends the laws of matter, making manifest a nonphysical or spiritual law.”¹
This is a major break-through for science, as well as for religion. For science it provides a springboard not only into new concepts in mental therapy and psychological research, but into new information of the universe. It is a discovery as basic as the use of fire or the wheel, as the mastery of electricity and steam, as atomic radiation and the theory of relativity.
For religion it establishes a firm foothold at least for further factual revelations regarding the true nature of man in his universe. It promises religious pioneers a fund of new, firmly-based knowledge upon which to formulate fresh, flexible doctrines.
And, in the present crises between East and West, it is a break-through which renders thoroughly obsolete the foundations of the entire Marxist-Leninist ideology.
The Challenge to Education: Bring It Up-to-Date
Here, then, is the challenge to education: Let the institutions of learning continue to teach the perils to freedom of communist totalitarianism. Let the communications industry hammer home the economic fallacies of socialism. Let the church preach again and again the idiocy inherent in the belief in the inevitable triumph of atheistic communism.
But first, let educators, scientists, the press, and the clergy bring education up-to-date. Let them expose to light, for all the world to see, the fact that man is more than a mobilized chemical equation. Let the common man of the world know that science has proved he has a spiritual existence. Above all, let the intellectuals of the planet in particular be informed that scientific research has shown man to be a heterogeneous system composed of a physical body plus an extra physical order of processes within himself.
Then the foundations of communism will be eroded into the mere dust which they claim man to be. For how can dialectical materialism’s appeal to the intellectual withstand the onslaught of man with a spiritual nature verifiable in science?
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Institutions
As a snowdrift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up.
Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle
