If we are a republic where all men are equal, everybody—every single citizen of the United States, however well or not well educated—has a right to the access to all information. That’s supposedly what we believe in. That is another way of saying—listen to this!—that is simply another way of saying that you are all God.
The trouble with the United States is that this republic is peopled by a lot of people who believe that the universe is a monarchy.
Even St. Thomas Aquinas gives away the secret that the saints in heaven occasionally walk to the edges of the battlements and look down at the squirming, burning sufferings of the damned in hell, and give praise to God for the administration of divine justice—he said that!—so that by contrast with the sufferings of the damned, they know in what bliss they are.
If we made the element of experience—the thing that happens to us that is not in our control—if we put that completely under our control, we would be bored to death. It would be like screwing a plastic woman. Nobody wants that.
The whole technological enterprise of the West (which is designed to control the universe by technological methods) is in the end not sufficiently conscious of itself to know where it’s going, and it is all moving towards—because, you see, we don’t understand: it is not part of our education that we understand this relationship between opposites. We are so frantic to survive and so terrified of the night of death that we are going to destroy the planet out of our anxiety to survive.