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Times Must Change — An Article by L. Ron Hubbard
Unless there is a vast alteration in man's civilization as it stumbles along today, man will not be here very long and none of us. Times must change. Today, we, as a culture, poise on the brink of destruction. It does not matter whether that destruction will come with a dramatic bang or by political upheaval or by the putrefaction of social decay. It will come. I do not have to tell you what is wrong. You can look around yourself and see a number of conditions, all signs of decay and sources of pain. You know they should not be that way. To pretend all is well today is like whistling in a hurricane. It does no good. Death waits. He is never announced. He simply arrives gradually or suddenly. He waits for each of us and for mankind. Yet man today does nothing effective to halt death. Indeed he knows little or nothing about it. He even greets any effort to understand it with jeers or a shrug. Man is sick and nations have gone mad. You would not even tolerate for one moment the conduct in an individual that is commonplace in the acts of some nations. You would lock up such a person. We cannot, any of us, go on pretending all is well or that all will be well. It is not so. Unless a large and effective effort is made to halt man's decline, this planet will revert to barren desert. Certainly, with his bombs, racism and inhumanities, he is trying hard enough. Times must change. We have too long gone downward toward personal and social oblivion. We have a way to do this. We are the only group on Earth that does have a workable solution. It's time we realized it and used it, every one of us. Thousands of philosophers couldn't have been totally wrong. They sought, every one of them from Socrates to Russell, the way to salvage the individual and the society. The one common denomination of their search was a deep knowledge there was a way out and that somewhere someday, somebody would find it. All right, we have found the way out. Let the ignorant laugh; the ignorant always do. Let the smug and pompous ride their toboggan to nowhere. We have an answer and we are using it. If each of us moves up toward higher states of effectiveness, we can then expect enough pressure collectively to set things right. That's easy. We have the way if we follow it. Times must change. The hard thing to do is to try to keep society the way it is; the cruel thing to do to oneself is to do nothing. Times must change. No pressure of governments, no campaign by the incompetent "healers" who have already failed, no threat of ridicule or punishment must be let stand in our way. We have the technical materials. We are making our way already all the way. Now we must not stop. There is not one more single thing we need to know to accomplish all. We weren't effectively prevented from attaining our knowledge—the hard part of the journey. Now we cannot be prevented from applying it. Times must change.
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It is all very well to sit back and hope for "the best in this best of all possible worlds" but it's the course of personal and national suicide.