Suppose eating, not sex, were the taboo of our century? Suppose it was illegal for more than two people to eat together and suppose even they had to get a license for it and eat in secret, while children were fed alone in dark closets? Suppose our billboards and newspaper ads, movies and books and art, devoted themselves to pictures of food--but never to one glimpse of anybody eating? (That's what we'd done about sex--or tried our best to do.) Wouldn't it result in secret, general passions to try esoteric foods? And wouldn't people like to get together, law or none, and talk about the tabooed object? I thought about Bali, where people actually were a little ashamed of eating meals in public. An animal indecency to be ritualistically concealed. I felt the familiar stab of indignation. How long would it take my fellow men to realize what they had done to themselves, and _why_ they had done it? To hide the real creature. To dress up the pretense that we are not instinctual. Would we ever see? Learn? Break down the conceited barricade we'd lifted up since beyond the Stone Age--the wall between the old brain and the new cortex? Or would we, too, decay? Enter our Toynbean time of troubles, turn military, tyrannical, lucubricious and guilty--instead of loving and free, and so in the end fall prey to the outlying barbarian horde--the rest of the world, that outnumbered us sixteen to one? Was a Presbyterian, a Catholic, a collegiate agnostic, a Unitarian, a socialist nearer to insight than an old Roman? I juggled the breathless doubt in my mind. "The misery and aggression of the world, the hate and warlike sentiment," a great psychiatrist had said the other day, "are due to two causes: physical hunger in the Orient; in the Occident, the fantastic sex repressions derived from Christianity, so called, and obtaining still in the materialist societies." There it was--in the words of a psychological scientist. Not a single statesman that I knew of had picked up the thought. "A penny," Gwen said. I apologized. "It's too intricate. It's a summing up of various truths rejected or denied. We're out of the habit of seeing them. So it might take me a couple of years to explain." Gwen laughed. "Swell! I'll come by, an hour a day--and lie on your couch--and you can explain." "Maybe," I said, "if they'd listened to you just now--and compared what you said with what they honestly feel--but they won't!" "They will if you get them in the mood--and alone." "Many?" "Darned near all--that I ever see. You'd be astonished." "Still--that doesn't matter. Because when they act they act as a mob. And as a mob--they never admit what they really think and feel and dream and wish and long for. They just fight." An expression came into her eyes that was part speculative and part cautious. "Some like that, too. Like to be hurt." "Sure. The guilt again. The old quid pro quo." She watched me. "They get a kick out of it."