Lecture: Rugged Individualism (1955)

You walk into a government agency and you give them any problem that is related to that agency but is not exactly right in the middle of the paragraph that tells it what it could do and it won’t have a single thing to do with it. So you go over to another agency and they look in the middle of the paragraph which tells them what they can do, and if your problem isn’t in the middle of that paragraph — and maybe your problem lies dead between these two agencies — it’ll never be done.

You know that civil defense is being conducted as a different organization than atomic energy in this country? That’s impossible, but it is. And the information in atomic energy is so secure that nobody in civil defense could find out about it. They’re very individualistic. Well, where — where would you think this would lead in terms of war, hm? Hm? Where would this go in terms of war? That would finish a nation which got involved in an atomic war. All right, there’s only one little sign of that.

About all you’ve got in this universe is a game. And the only way you can fall out of contact or get really buried and dulled in this universe, would be to fall away from playing a game. And if you can be driven far enough out of playing a game, you’re done. That’s all he got, is a game. That’s all a government is, is a game. That’s all people are, is a game. Well, it gets to be very interesting to watch a country fall apart and become ineffective and inefficient to the degree that its individual citizens can no longer play a game.¹

Notes