I think that we are here also talking of the kind of fear that a young boy has for a group of boys who are approaching at night along the streets of a large city. If an automobile were approaching him, he would know what was required of him, even though he might not be able to act quickly enough. With the group of boys it is different. He does not know whether to look up or look aside, to put his hands in his pockets or to clench them at his side, to cross the street, or to continue on the same side. When confronted with a drunk or an insane person I have no notion of what any one of them might do to me or to himself or to others. I believe that what I do has some effect on his actions and I have learned, in a way, to commune with drunks, but certainly my actions seem to resemble more nearly the performance of a rain dance than the carrying out of an experiment in physics. I am usually filled with an uneasiness that through some unwitting slip all hell may break loose. Our inability to explain why certain people are fond of us frequently induces the same kind of ritual and malaise. We are forced, in our behavior towards others, to adopt empirically successful patterns in toto because we have such a minimal understanding of their essential elements.

Our collective policies, group and national, are similarly based on voodoo, but here we often lack even the empirically successful rituals and are still engaged in determining them. We use terms from our personal experience with individuals such as ``trust,'' ``cheat,'' and ``get tough.'' We talk about national character in the same way that Copernicus talked of the compulsions of celestial bodies to move in circles. We perform elaborate international exhortations and ceremonies with virtually no understanding of social cause and effect. Small wonder, then, that we fear.