There is only one choice, and that choice is between only two options.  When they are seen clearly and defined precisely, all other important choices are either representations of that one choice or implications of one of the options.  That one choice organizes and illuminates all of human history generally and a good deal of it precisely.  That choice is between control and freedom.

Most men live in a world where people either give orders or take orders.  The goal of the ambitious is to get into a position to give more orders than they take, and the goal of the unambitious is to get into a position where the orders they take are perfectly clear.  There is no room in that world for anyone who does not want to either give or take orders, to whom the idea of orders is repugnant.  That world, in fact, denies the existence of such people, but they do exist, and it is their separation from the world of control that provides the one division that makes true the statement that "there are two kinds of people."

The division has been expressed in many different ways, but perhaps it has been illustrated most clearly only recently, with the journey of the behaviorists to the implications of their assumptions.  B.F. Skinner's world is the world of control.  In Beyond Freedom and Dignity,Skinner says that if we are to survive very much longer we must recognize the concept of freedom as false and increasingly dangerous, and use the rapidly evolving techniques of behavior control to create a "Walden II" paradise.  Buckminster Fuller, approaching the same problem technologically rather than psychologically, says that we now have the means to create a utopian environment, and that if we do not soon create that environment, we will have chosen oblivion.

Fuller offers to guide us to paradise, and Skinner says that we are ready to board the bus--once we abandon the myth of freedom, a small price to pay for happiness.  After all, he says, freedom is a myth, flattering but illusory.  It has at times been a useful crutch, but it is rapidly becoming dangerous, because it is man's notion that he is autonomous, and that alone, which is preventing him from embracing the controls which are the key to heaven on earth.  It is only the man who accepts the fact that he is a machine, unable to act until he is acted upon, and then only acting in order to be acted upon more benevolently in the future, who will be able to build utopia.  It is only by accepting the fact that he is controlled that man will be able to takecontrol, to build a new environment and step into a new world.

The magnitude of the control we are asked to assume and assent to makes the decision we are faced with seem unique, but it is different only in degree from the central decision man has always been faced with.  It is no more central now--it is simply more final.  Civilization has always been a process of reducing the risks and increasing the convenience, of turning environmental variables into societal constants.  A society is functioning when it is refining its thermostat, bringing nature under control and freeing its citizens from uncertainty.  With certainty comes control; security has always been bought with freedom.  What is new now is that we seem to have within our reach the possibility of ultimate security, and that requires the total abandonment of freedom.  We are approaching a climax, and we will be forced to accept the consequences of a decision we made long ago.

Skinner regards freedom as a fantasy; he cannot evaluate it as anything but a nuisance.  The "Grand Inquisitor" chapter of The Brothers Karamazovdiscusses the same problem, but reaches different conclusions.  In a "poem" by Ivan Karamazov, Christ comes to Spain during the Inquisition, in the same form that He had come the first time, and the people recognize Him instantly and ecstatically.  When the Cardinal (the Grand Inquisitor) sees Him, he takes Him to his chambers arid tells Him that he will burn Him at the stake the next day, and that even those who had cheered most loudly would throw wood on the fire.  He says that Christ, in His answers to Satan in the wilderness, had given up the right to return and say anything else.  Each of Satan's temptations was infinitely wise and each time Christ gave the same answer.  Satan said that if Christ would lead men He should give them bread, because men will follow whoever feeds them and keeps them warm.  Christ replied that man had been given freedom, and that buying men with bread would be interfering with their choice.  Satan said that Christ should jump off the temple and be rescued by angels, ending all doubt about His divinity, because men want to worship something, but demand certainty.  And he said that Christ should establish an empire, because men want to worship and be warm with a sense of belonging, a sense of community  Twice more Christ said that men should be allowed to make their choices freely.

When he has finished his monologue on the temptations, the Grand Inquisitor tells Christ that He has overestimated men, that Satan had read them rightly, that most men are incapable of making free choices, that if you give them freedom the one choice they will make is to lay their freedom at someone else's feet.  He says that he, and others like him, have yielded to Satan's temptations.  They have given men bread, miracles, and community--they will control men and make them happy.  The Grand Inquisitor's position is precisely the behaviorist position, and his secret is that he doesn't believe in God.

That, of course, is the heart of the matter.  The myth of freedom will only be abandoned if it is really a myth, and it is only a myth if there is no God.  It is on the question of the existence of God that everything else rests.  We must answer it before we can answer anything else, and once we have answered it nearly everything else is already decided.  Either of the two possible answers becomes the fundamental assumption of a self-consistent system of thought.

If the universe is a closed system and man is a machine, controlled by his environment, then we are on the growing tip of an evolutionary thrust that has thus far been mechanical and threatens to end in disaster if we do not soon seize the controls.  Since seizing the controls would theoretically mean universal happiness as well as salvation from doom, it must frustrate the behaviorists to see so little being done about the opportunities that seem so pressing and enticing.  Their position is an inevitable working out of the assumption that there is no God (if Skinner did not exist it would be necessary to invent him), and it is either lack of vision or lack of courage that keeps those who share that assumption from coming to behaviorist conclusions.

If the universe is not a closed system, and it is not the environment that is autonomous but man because of God, behavior control is an entirely different matter.  Freedom is then not a misconception but an inalienable right. If it is important that God not interfere with our freedom, it is equally important that we do not surrender it, and society itself represents surrender.  Every society (or nearly every society) attempts on a small scale what Skinner would have us attempt enormously.  Every society attempts to control the environment in order to offer its citizens security, and requires the obedience of those citizens in return for that security.  A choice for control is simultaneously a choice to be in control and under control.  And that is the wrong choice.

God's people, then, are to be found on the fringes of society, either psychically or physically.  To believe in God in a world which has rejected God is to be an outlaw.  But let us create another "poem'' (one of those things which are true even if they didn't happen) like the "Grand Inquisitor."  Let us say that God could see that the Grand Inquisitor had a point, that nearly everyone was making the wrong choice because it was so difficult to make the right one, or even to see what the right one was.  Christ had shown them, and for a while the Christians had seemed to know what they must do.  For a while it had been obvious to everyone that these people were a threat to an order based on a denial of the one thing they believed in.  But then the Grand Inquisitor and his kin infiltrated the movement, and began to control in the name of God.  "Christians" began to fit,and rejection of the world was defined as merely rejecting pleasures.  The necessity of real rejection was forgotten, and those few who remembered were nearly always dependent on the society they had left.

So let us say that God decided to interfere in history again, this time to give His people a chance to get far enough away from society at a single leap to make that society's control over them nearly impossible to enforce.  Let the place they had leaped to, He decided, be the best piece of real estate on the planet.  Let them get strong enough to break the bonds with civilization, and let them set up a society based on freedom, with a framework which will prevent anyone from taking over, which will prevent everyone from asking anyone to take over.  Let us see what man can do under ideal conditions.

And what happened?  From the start freedom was not equally distributed, and when the time came to set up the new society the main battle was fought over precisely predictable principles.  Thomas Jefferson said that people could make a good showing in a free society.  Alexander Hamilton told him that, "The people, your people, sir, is a great beast."  There was little room for compromise.  Each assumption implies a whole system of government, and both the assumptions and the systems are incompatible . Jefferson won that battle, and the Constitution set up a free society, but Hamilton won out in the end.  As Americans we realized that we were somehow a special case, but with paradise in our back yard and no one to bother us, we used our advantage not to establish patterns of freedom but to use technology to tame the wilderness and to build a machine like the world had never seen and could not have imagined.  Deprived of an opportunity to choose a human master, we built a mechanical one, and became not primarily a free people but a successful people, apparently oblivious to the fact that the kind of success we sought and achieved is incompatible with freedom.  We built a pervasive, interdependent economic system on Hamilton's premises and camouflaged it with Jeffersonian rhetoric.

It worked so well that utopia is on the horizon.  We have the technology to create a world of domed cities, climate-controlled and dust-free, of enough of everything for everybody, to be purchased by thumb print from computers.  If we can only discard the Jeffersonian camouflage, we will at last be able to completely control our environment--we can at last become like gods.

No, we cannot.  The theory hangs together; it makes perfect sense.  The one problem is that the assumption it is based on is false .  If freedom is a myth, it should be a simple matter to stamp it out and move on.  If it is not a myth, there are two viable choices and some people will always be making the other choice.  In this society this works out very neatly.  The one essential fact about this society is that it is based on satisfying material needs, and that to do that as many as possible of the people within the society must operate on a materialistic value system.  But when the machine does its job well, and does satisfy the material needs of a large segment of the population, those people are free to order their lives around something other than material goods.  They will seek a human value system, which will necessarily be diametrically opposed to the machine's value system.  The machine creates its own dissent and eventually causes its own destruction.

If there really are only two viable choices, then perceptive individuals who have always been comfortable are left with only one choice.  It is possible to run a materialistic society under a totalitarian system, where the discontents can be either eliminated or broken.  And it was possible to run one here as long as the frontier could act as a safety valve.  The discontents became pioneers and moved west, leaving the others to enjoy their bread and their technological miracles in a nearly perfect sense of community.  But then the frontier stopped, and the pioneers had to stay within the system, where they became an irritant.  And thirty years after Frederick Jackson Turner pronounced the frontier closed, the machine collapsed. That should have taught us a lesson, but it didn't. We built the machine again--the same machine--stronger this time, but pointed in the same direction, programmed by men to attempt an endeavor that has been programmed by God to fail.

If the machine's collapse in 1929 was the final event in an inevitable process, and if the process is being repeated, then the nineteen-twenties are important as a record of the final stages.  Those stages should be repeated just before the next collapse--and they have all been repeated.  Every major concern of the twenties has been echoed in the sixties and the seventies, with enough precision to make the two periods seem alike and unlike any other times.  The machine will collapse again, and it may collapse soon.  In any case, there is nothing we can do about it.

Three things will make this collapse more serious than the last:  (1) The machine is different.  It is far more advanced technologically and far more interdependent.  Nearly everyone in the country is dependent on an intricate network of pickups and deliveries.  It runs better when it runs but if it stops it will completely stop.  (2) We are different.  There are more of us, especially in the cities, and in those cities there are a lot of people who have very little to lose .  Not many of them would stand in line for bread and soup.  It is the cities that contain the machine's power centers .  (3) The world is different.  We are now half of a bi-polar stalemate.  Our collapse would leave only one superpower.

Perhaps the machine will not collapse soon, but there are powerful forces pushing it toward the breaking point.  The Grand Inquisitor, B.F. Skinner, and Alexander Hamilton all have followers.  If they are to be resisted (and resisting them will not save the machine) they must be resisted at the basis of their argument.  It is freedom that they say we must abandon, and it is freedom that we must most passionately preserve.  The two forces of freedom and control will not meet in a frontal assault.  The assumptions they are based on are simply not compatible.  One is a denial of the other, but the "other" contains the first, so that a diagram of the world could simply be two circles, one inside the other .  The mechanists are inside the inner circle, and deny the existence of the outer one.  The mystics, in moving out of the inner circle, are in the difficult position of rejecting the only reality that can be seen in favor of a higher reality they can only sense.

To believe in God in a world which rejects God is to be an outlaw.  To believe in God and to be strong in such a world is perhaps inevitably to be a martyr, to buck the system on a larger and larger scale until the system takes final action.  That necessity, though, has been removed.  Christ died so we wouldn't have to.  But we must accept Christ, accept the inevitability of his death and the necessity of total rejection of a world based on control.  But simple rejection is not enough, and here also Christ is central.

The values upon which human relationships must be based (justice, morality, courtesy) are as ambiguous as the human condition itself, and plugging them into specific situations is extremely difficult.  So societies set up guidelines to protect the basic values.  Law is supposed to further justice, moral codes are supposed to preserve morality, and etiquette is supposed to facilitate courtesy.  But people enjoy the security of John Mitchell, Billy Graham, and Amy Vanderbilt, and either forget or ignore the fact that law, codes, and etiquette are only means to higher ends.  When they become ends in themselves they become the biggest obstacles in the way of the values they are supposed to protect.  Law replaces justice, etiquette hinders courtesy, and the codes make true morality difficult to attain.

Rejecting the guidelines is not enough.  If you break the law you must do it in the interests of justice.  Bob Dylan said it shortest:  "To live outside the law you must be honest."  If you abandon etiquette you must always be courteous and if you break the codes you must be that much more moral.  Those values are essential because they are part of Christ's character, and He is our best guide in achieving them.  He died so we wouldn't have to, and lived to show us how to be human.