What would you do if you were God? Or let me put it in a simpler way: supposing that every night you could dream any dream you wanted to dream. What would you do? Well, first of all, I’m quite sure that most of us would dream all the marvelous things we wanted to happen. We would fulfill all our wishes. And we might go on that way for months. Besides, you could make it extraordinarily rich by wishing to dream 75 years in one night full of glorious happenings. But after you had done that for a few months, you might begin to get a little tired of it. And you would say, “What about an adventure tonight in which something terribly exciting and rather dangerous is going to happen? But I’ll know I’m dreaming, so it won’t be too bad. And I’ll wake up if it gets too serious.” So you do that for a while. You rescue princesses in distress from dragons, and all sorts of things. And then, when you’ve done that for some time, you say, “Now, let’s go out a bit further. Let’s forget it’s a dream and have a real thrill!” Ooh! But you know you’ll wake up. And then, after you’ve done that for a while, you get more and more nerve until you sort of dare yourself as to how far out you can get. And you end up dreaming the sort of life you’re living now.
You are not some separate little puppet which is being kicked around by omnipotence. You are omnipotence in disguise.
What sort of a game do you want, anyway? You will find out, you see, that all good games—games that are worth playing, that arouse our interest—are constructed like this: if you have the good and the evil equally balanced, the game is boring. Nothing happens, it’s stalemate. The irresistible force meets the immovable object. On the other hand, if it’s all good and there’s hardly any evil—maybe just a weeny little bit of a fly in the ointment—it also gets boring. Just in the same way, for example: supposing you knew the future and could control it perfectly. What would you do? You would say, “Let’s shuffle the deck and have another deal.” Because, for example, when great chess players sit down to a match and it suddenly becomes apparent to both of them that white is going to mate in sixteen moves and nothing can be done about it, they abandon the game and begin another. They don’t want to know. There wouldn’t be any “hide” in the game, any element of surprise, if they did know the outcome.
You must watch this in practical politics: every in-group (or group of nice people) needs an out-group of nasty people, otherwise they wouldn’t know who they were. And you must recognize, then, that this out-group is your necessary enemy, whom you need. He keeps you on your toes. But you mustn’t obliterate him. If you do, you are in a very dangerous state of affairs. So you have to love your enemies in this sense, regard them as highly necessary, and to be respected chivalrously. We need the communists and they need us. The thing is to cool it and play what I call a contained conflict. When conflicts get out of hand, all sides blow up.