Setting the Stage

After World War II, America was the undisputed champion of the world. For a while everyone loved us, even our former enemies. But soon people began to resent us due to our superior attitudes. We Americans thought that was unjustified and ungrateful. In one particular country, the unrest was beginning to have strategic implications during that delicate time of detente. Dr. Humphrey’s job was to find out what the problem was and solve it.

The basic problem was that the Americans working in that poor ally country thought that the local people were smelly, ignorant, violent, dishonest and lazy and let them know it. No matter what he did, Dr. Humphrey couldn’t stop the negative talk; partially because some of it was true! As a result, though, the local people wanted the Americans to go home.

One day, as a diversion, Humphrey decided to go hunting for wild boar with some people from the American embassy. They took a truck from the motor pool and headed out to the boondocks, stopping at a village to hire some local men to beat the brush and act as guides.

The Village

This village was very poor. The huts were made of mud and there was no electricity or running water. The streets were unpaved dirt and the whole village smelled. Flies abounded. The men looked surly and wore dirty clothes. The women covered their faces, and the children had runny noses and were dressed in rags.

It wasn’t long before one American in the truck said, “This place stinks.” Another said, “These people live just like animals.” Finally, a young air force man said, “Yeah, they got nothin’ to live for; they may as well be dead.”

What could you say? It seemed true enough.

But just then, an old sergeant in the truck spoke up. He was the quiet type who never said much. In fact, except for his uniform, he kind of reminded you of one of the tough men in the village. He looked at the young airman and said, “You think they got nothin’ to live for, do you? Well, if you are so sure, why don’t you just take my knife, jump down off the back of this truck, and go try to kill one of them?”

There was dead silence in the truck.Humphrey was amazed. It was the first time that anyone had said anything that had actually silenced the negative talk about these local people. He says that his mouth dropped open and he thought to himself, “Good God, he is talking about the equality of life and all of these rich Americans are buying it.” This was what he had be looking for!
The sergeant went on to say, “I don’t know either why they value their lives so much. Maybe it’s those snotty nosed kids, or the women in the pantaloons. But whatever it is, they care about their lives and the lives of their loved ones, same as we Americans do, even with all our money. In fact, both in combat and in freezing prison camps, they hung in there after a lot of Americans was yelling quit.”

Humphrey forgot about hunting that day and followed that Sergeant, asking his two questions. Perhaps Humphrey says it best on page 49 of Values for a New Millenium:

“He told (or lectured) me that while we were looking down on those peasants and insulting them, it really embarrassed him because even though the villagers didn’t speak any English, htey understood exactly what we were saying. They could tell from our tone, and had given him almost exact translations on previous occasions when he had stayed with them overnight.”

He added, “You know, when we are making fun of them, they are looking back up at us there on that truck an dsaying, ‘Laugh, you bas***ds in your fancy clothes, but we don’t care how sweet you smell, or how rich you are, or where you come from. We value our lives and the lives of our loved ones just as much as you do yours. And if you don’t give us that, you have got to go.‘”

Humphrey asked him what we Americans, with all our wealth, could do to prove our belief in the peasants’ equality despite their destitution? The Tennessee sergeant answered easily, “You got to be able to jump off the back of this truck in your fancy boots, walk through the sheep manure to the dirtiest, smelliest guy in town, look him in the face and let him know, just with your eyes, that you know he’s a man who hurts like we do, and hopes like we do, and wants for his kids just like we all do. It is that way or we lose.”

Follow-up

Dr. Humphrey convinced his translator to help him interview some of the locals. The more they level with him, the more he understood that this equality-of-life concept was their meaning. What they all said independently was, “We are the friendly people in the world; but no one can tread on us.”

It was from this experience that Dr. Humphrey developed what he called the “Dual-Life Value” or “Balanced-Live Value” and from which the Life Values System is derived.

Human equality is a universal (Natural Law) concept, and it is the only unshakable justification for political freedom. Because we are equal as human beings, we are each entitled to an equal voice in the government over us. Political freedom, if you will.

If humans are not equal, then dictatorship of the superior persons over the inferiors is justifiable. Those who plead the cause of freedom but reject human equality actually plead a different cause: consciously or unconsciously, they defend preferential status and a license to exploit others.

As seen in the responses to Humphrey’s questionnaire, equality is something deeper than logic; it is an irressible feeling in each person. The disregard of the human-equality/political-freedom principle on any grounds will cause problems, just as it did in 1776.

- paraphrased from pg 46, VFNM

So if all this is a repeat of 200 years ago, the question of “What is Human Equality” still remained. Dr. Humprey figured that the best way to find the answer was to ask for assistance from a few well respected institutions he was affiliated with.

He wrote back to his scholarly colleagues around Harvard, MIT, and the Fletcher School of Diplomacy. Replies included comments about “equality of opportunity” and “equality under the law.” The American GIs and host-nationals laughed at those ideas as “intellectual suicide.” A simple glance at the circumstances and one could see why.

The Declaration of Independence

Going back to what one could argue is one of the most foundational literary works that our country is based on, are “all men created equal” or not? According to that group of “higher ups” the answer is no.

A religious person might say that, “Yes, we are all equal because we are all created in the image of God” or perhaps, “Yes, because we are all God’s children” or perhaps, “We are equal because God loves us all and His love and value of our lives gives them worth.” But not all religions agree so we have to step beyond even that.

A lawyer might state “equality in the eyes of the law” but isn’t that, in some ways, communism at its best? Don’t forget that there was also a misunderstanding of human equality versus economic equality with regard to this as well. The list could go on.

Mission: Impossible

Days went by, then months. Dr. Humphrey found no answers, but he did clarify the issue into two crucial questions:

1. How does one teach equality?

2. What, exactly, does human equality mean?

He eventually found himself going on a few hunting trips, and it was on one of these trips that the answer came from a very unexpected source.

Read about The Hunting Trip next.

The U.S. Ambassador said to not bother with a survey. Dr. Humphrey simply replied that, if it was ok, he wanted to proceed with questioning the locals, anyway. And he did. Those two simple questions were:

1) What do you want from America?

2) What can Americans do to (or not do) to make things better?

The amazing thing was that he actually got the same answer back to BOTH questions!

Respect Us as Equals

The overwhelming majority (upper 90%) of answers came back in some way to say, “Respect us as equals”:

1. Stop treating our women like trash.
2. Stop laughing at us when we do something you don’t understand.
3. Stop looking down on our customs and traditions.
4. Stop thinking your culture is superior to ours.
5. Remember you are a guest in our country.
6. Don’t assume we’re idiots.

Those answers all boil down into one word: Respect.

Note: When most large groups of people were asked to guess the answer back then, no one hardly ever guessed correctly. Five decades ago, the idea of “respect” in this manner wasn’t even thought of. Most were shocked when they found out it was the answer because they thought the locals really did want more money or for the Americans to leave.

Higher-up response

Dr. Humphrey couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It was actually too good to be true! In fact, it simply went back nearly 200 years to our nation’s own idea of “Human equality” – after all, he thought, “we hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.”

Humphrey went with glee to the “higher ups” and basically told them, “Guys, great news! They don’t want us to leave. They don’t even want more money. They just want us to respect them! It should be easy, right? Our own ‘Declaration of Independence’ supports human equality and that is what we need here… recognition that we are all equal.”

The reply? First, one of the gentlemen (keep in mind this is senior military and political leaders) simply looked with that adult-to-child look and basically said, “But Dr. Humphrey, we’re not all equal. Some are tall, some are short, some smarter than others, etc. Besides, even Jefferson had slaves. The Founding Fathers just said all that equality stuff to enrage the masses and get cannon fodder.”

“Besides,” it was even stated, “we’re not here for human equality… we’re here for Freedom!”
Second, there was an ideological problem with what Humphrey was saying. To say that we are all equal was to admit that Communism was right (this fallacy will be covered in the next post). They didn’t tell the good Doctor to simply take his survey and go home… they actually told him to burn the results and never mention them again.

However, Dr. Humphrey didn’t want to fail in his mission, and he knew he had “stumbled” upon the key. He just needed to figure out how to get the GI’s to respect the locals. So he did what we try to do even today:

Cross cultural Day

Let’s have a cross cultural day! “Cultural Awareness Day”, if you will. We’ll invite the locals to a big party, and we’ll each each other’s food, learn the culture and then we will appreciate each other more. Well, picture the day.

The Americans were all about, “Come try our food! Hamburgers! Hot Dogs! A real Bar-B-Que! Yummy!” But what do you think happened when it was the local’s turn. The Americans basically said, “What? Are you kidding me? I ain’t eating this stuff.” (nevermind what hot dogs are actually made of, right?). And the fact was that very few Americans even bothered to show.

Ok, strike the Cultural day. But wait! We can do something better:

Learn the Language

You know… we’ll teach the American some of the local language, etc., they’ll learn to be polite, say thank you and all that and then eventually learn to respect the people and their culture.

Hmmm… what do you think the first words most GIs ever learn in a foreign language are? So that went over about as well as a slingshot in a china shop.

Mission: Failure

Doctor Humphrey did what any self-respecting contractor would do when they find themselves in an impossible situation… he started playing golf on the weekends. Ok, so not quite like that, but he did end up doing some hunting, and it was on one of these hunting trips that he discovered the secret to recognizing human equality and activating it within others.

I’ll explain “The Hunting Story” in a little bit, but first, a short discussion on human equality.

See you in a bit!
KermitJr