Bert Kelly, “Problems of a pressure-packed society,”
The Bulletin, October 26, 1982, p. 138.
(This was earlier published as: A Modest Member of Parliament [Bert Kelly], “Fred wants to cull the human herd,” The Australian Financial Review, February 21, 1975, p. 3. Perhaps that title was a good reason for republishing under a different title.)

Many people, particularly parents of teenage children, tell me about the unfair pressures brought by the wicked world on the rest of the community and on young people in particular. “It’s not fair,” they say. “How can you expect young people to stand up against such pressures? The government should do something about it — pass some laws to stop it.”

I know that there are pressure problems.

The glossy advertisements, the insistent pleas of TV; these are just examples of what people read and hear in these days.

But dash it all, they don’t have to read or hear it. They can always turn the page or decide to switch the wretched thing off.

There is pressure for drugs and grog but here again it is not new laws that are needed but higher moral standards. And these are not going to be gained by legislation.

Fred is old fashioned about many things. He is a keen sheep-breeder and follows genetics carefully in his muddled manner. He knows that you can breed faults into a flock easier than you can breed virtues and he goes to great trouble to keep faults out of his flock.

For instance, he culls any sheep that gets fleece rot because he knows that this encourages body strike and he knows that a flock liable to body strike takes an awful lot of looking after in his district.

So he tries to breed it out and no matter how good a ewe hogget is, however fine its show points or even how heavy its fleece, out it goes if it shows any sign of fleece rot.

“You mustn’t breed faults into a flock,” he is always saying. “Cull the ones that are genetically faulty.”

That advice may be excellent for sheep but the trouble is Fred wants to apply the same system of culling to the human herd.

“You have to cull somehow,” he says. “You mustn’t protect fools from their folly, otherwise you will breed foolishness into the flock.” He doesn’t go quite as far as the Scots and “let the weak uns dee,” but I think that may be in the back of his mind.

But how far should we go to protect fools from their folly? For instance, should we try to prevent false packaging? As long as we insist on the correct weight being put on the packet, is that not enough? If a person is silly enough to be taken in by a lot of hot air coming from the TV, even in living colour, is it the legislator’s duty to prevent him from behaving foolishly? If he had any sense he wouldn’t buy the product again.

Fred would certainly say that we should not protect fools from their folly in this way.

Going back to pressures on the young, how much should we try to shelter the young beggars? Certainly doing so will not make them love us but, even more important, will it help them in the end?

It is true that people of my generation did not have to contend with the present pressures but we had plenty of pressures of other kinds. We had the pressure of having to work a lot harder, we had to do without things, we had to depend on ourselves more and on the government less. If work was short where we lived we had to go out looking for it.

But contending with problems did us no harm, unpleasant though it may have been at the time.

I suppose that the young generation would be sorry for us if they had enough time to think about it but they are usually too busy being sorry for themselves because of all the temptations with which they have to contend.

I wonder what kind of a human herd we will have in 100 years if we keep on sheltering everyone from temptation, or look after them if they spend all their money on grog or put it all into poker machines.

William J. H. Boetcker once said:

  1. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
  2. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
  3. You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.
  4. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
  5. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
  6. You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
  7. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
  8. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
  9. You cannot build character and courage by destroying man’s initiative and independence.
  10. And you cannot help a man permanently by doing for him that which he can and should do for himself.

Truths do not become less truthful just because they were uttered many years ago.