I’m going to read from a little pamphlet that I pre­pared for you today. It’s not pretty, but I am your friend, and I believe your friends are allowed to be blunt with you. They will tell you things that your enemies won’t tell you.

Your enemies will merely butter you up, and tell you what a sweet nice person you are, and continue to feed on your stupidity.

All right, businessmen. All right, mothers and fathers. Here goes. Most people are dedicated to the process of devising ways to get something out of someone, such as more work from employees, more love and appreciation from families. Do you think this is right? To motivate people to get more out of them? To exact the love that should come from them naturally? Well, I tell you NO! 

That you’re murdering them. You motivational experts, you’re killing the people. You mothers and fathers that motivate your children to be good, you’re killing them. Because if you had love, you could not do what you are doing.

But since you don’t have love, you refuse to see what you are doing. You’re blind. You can’t see it.

The time you spend trying to figure out how to get something out of someone else could be all the time you need to bring forth your own good. We do a great deal of harm to ourselves and to others by these insane practices.

Supposing you do succeed in compelling, or obligating, someone to love, give, or do some job of work for you. You feel proud of that, don’t you?

Well, let me show you what you’re taking pride in, because you don’t see the grave implications. No. Foolishness is not seen right away.

It takes time to reveal itself. First, in motivating others: factory workers, your own children—I don’t care who it is—your husband or your wife—whoever it is, you are making him function before his time. You are making him depen­dent on being pushed.

You have robbed him of his grace of offering, and he will hate you for it, even as he becomes dependent on your unloving pressure. So you push him more and more, and he needs to be pushed more and more.

Obligating and pressuring others is a great injustice to them and to yourself. If you succeed in your motivating tactics, because of your impatience and lack of love, you may feel a sense of accomplishment.

And the satisfaction you feel will prod you to more of the same obnoxious behavior. You will be quite oblivious to your own wrong­doing. Your victim will respond more and more, as he will lack the virtue to resist you correctly; otherwise, you could not have succeeded with him in the beginning.

The result is two very frustrated people: one, dependent on being pushed, never able to function out of his own understanding; the other, going insane with schemes to motivate his brother.

Mothers, stop and think. Aren’t you getting more frustrated in your attempts to motivate your son? You’re having to spend more and more time doing just that, and your son is becoming more pitifully dependent upon this motivation, less able to function out of himself.

"Obligating and pressuring others is a great injustice to them and to yourself. "

How about your husband? Is it the same thing with your husband? He doesn’t want anything to do with you any more? Unless you pressure him and pressure him and pressure him? Isn’t this what’s wrong with society? One half is enslaved to the other half.

And both halves are idiotically locked together in an unholy relationship.

In other words, one group is disabling itself from true creativity by thinking up insane ways to enjoy the service of the enslaved other half. There must come a point when those who are pressured—to buy, to give, to work—cannot be motivated any more, for they have no more to give. 

By that time, the motivation men will also be at a loss for new ways to motivate. The frustration on both sides must finally reach a saturation point.

And that is the impasse we find ourselves in today, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s look at the situation. Advertising is becoming less effective, and we’ll go on with this in a few moments. The motivator, because of his dependence on the one he motivates, does not know how to live a productive, self-dependent existence.

He simply learns to leech, or milk, his brother. The motivated one cannot function without the other’s push, but eventually when he has nothing left to give, he becomes sick and tired.

In society, we see this happening all the time. The motivated ones become divided into two groups. One group becomes aware of the obnoxious methods being employed by the motivators to motivate him. As the motivators are compelled to dig deeper into their bag of tricks, they do become very obvious—just look at television and you’ll see what I mean.

The horrible commercials leave you with a determination not to buy the product, if you belong to the “aware” group. The frantic efforts of the motivator are becoming more and more apparent, as the need to stimulate business (or children, in the case of parents) becomes more and more urgent.

When this fact becomes clear to the victim, the power of motivation is diluted—it becomes less compelling—and the victim rebels against the now-obvious intrusion into his life. So, the “aware” ones, the ones who see the obviousness of the motiva­tional tactics, rebel, and they don’t buy. Advertising becomes ineffectual.

Children rebel—they won’t do as they’re told.

The second group, the zombies, those who are less aware as a result of having excused themselves, dis­honestly, from the sight and presence of Reality, in favor of indulging the irrational behavior they “love,” continue blissfully to be “sold,” and pushed, even after they have run out of money.

Now the motivators have created two problems: the ones who can buy are happily enjoying resistance to the hard-sell, so money in the bank reaches an all-time high. The ones who respond to the pressures can’t pay. They go right on buying without feeling the slightest guilt about their inability to pay.

Why should they? The moti­vators aren’t feeling guilty for having motivated.

Then follows the usual slump: the court cases, the bankruptcies, the divorces, the fighting, the fussing, and the rebellions in the home, the growing bitterness—all because we’re not learning to give out of our hearts.

We’re learning to take. And because we have nothing to give, no love, that which we have can be taken from us. We all expect something from someone. And when we do not get what we expected, we resent and become bitter, and- devise ways of getting it before the time of maturation.