There are a lot of other historical instances of savage conflicts between the rebellious new and the reactionary old. To mention a few:

Socrates maintained the integrity of his beliefs despite all opposition and eventually stood up to execution to assert simply that man was an immortal spirit.

The Roman Emperor, Scilla the Monster, executed the philosopher Merameris for outlining some of the mechanisms of the mind.

And in modern times, Freud was driven out of Austria for daring to assert that physical illness could be traced to mental conflicts.

I am certainly not of such stellar stuff but in my small way, have had some rather threatening years.

Before 1950, as a writer in the movies and for various magazines and as an expedition leader, the newspapers were usually very kind and pleasant to me.

In 1950, overnight I pressed some fatal trigger in the citadels of hidebound tradition. And ink was scarcely drying the flood of books before I was being represented as a sort of two-horned, cloven-hoofed beast.

I hardly knew myself. One moment I was a moderately well thought of writer and the next I was the devil, tail and all.

To friends and people who liked my work and benefited from it, I remained simply “Ron.” But to others who had never met me, I became quite something else!

Efforts were made to kidnap me and spirit me away. Attack followed attack until, in several parliaments and agencies, I and all who used my work were being personified as fiends tearing at the very roots of tradition and fit only for banishment. England locked its doors against students. Rhodesia and South Africa, in a fit of terror that I might free their blacks, forbade my entrance.

You would have thought that at the very least I was inciting whole populations to revolt and governments to fall.

All I really was doing was trying to tell man he could be happy, that there was a road out of suffering and that he could attain his goals.

It is a painful process to have a few antagonistic men seeking out your tiniest human frailty. No flawless man was ever built. And every flaw I might have had has been magnified to a high intensity. Even my own university disowned me twice, once for becoming their own professional writer and once for writing about Scientology.

But when it comes at last to be a crime to help your fellow man find happiness and love and to do your job and work with all sincerity to map out a road to immortality and happiness, on that day the human race will die.