The Potential Of The Modern World

Until our century creative thinking was the private estate of a few men. Most of the inventions, which led up to our modern world, were developed by pure and unadulterated chance.

In the past fifty years, however, there came a development, which attempted to eliminate this element of chance. We put the scientific method to work in great research laboratories, which organized knowledge into narrow fields and made its explorers specialists, Ph.D.’s with many years of advanced study. This work will still go on, and it should.

But now to supplement that effort we have a new emphasis on creative thinking. We have discovered how everyone, with formal education or without it, can attack his problems creatively. The principles of creative thinking can be taught. We can all brainstorm the problems of our world.

In our democracy we are blessed with the freedom to own property, the freedom to vote, the freedom to worship, the freedom to receive an education. We have the freedom to think creatively, to have ideas, and most important, the freedom to express them.

This is our new frontier, and we desperately need pioneers to explore that frontier and develop its resources before it is too late. This is your mission. This revolution has come none too soon. The march of Christianity, of all that is good in Western and Eastern culture, in fact the progress of man depends on the strength of our ideas.

The Bomb has made it essential that we have the political, economical, and religious-philosophical ideas, which will make it possible for man to live in peace with man. Our world is becoming smaller and smaller. We have extended life, and we must learn how to support that life and make better use of it. We need more resources, especially that vital resource that exists only in our minds. Not long ago a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology looked at our world a hundred years from now, our children’s world.

They saw two to four times as large a population, two to four times as many mouths to feed, yet they saw no want; instead, a great machine civilization making use of every resource. This could come about, they reported, if we develop the brain power to design and run this great global technological civilization.

They cited as our greatest problem the development of brain power. They gave high priority to developing much further the creative brain power of women, who make up half our population but one per cent of our engineers; to realizing the full benefit of the brains which are imprisoned in minority groups; to salvaging the two thirds of our highly intelligent youths who do not get advanced education and who never utilize their intelligence in their life work.

That study was but one of many which has emphasized this need for increased brain power. Leaders in all fields have dramatized how much we need the full potentialities of the human brain.