observed.

LATHAM. Just what are these effects?

NIEMAND. Well, they're common enough, goodness knows. As old as the world, in fact. Yet strangely enough it's hard to describe them in exact terms.

LATHAM. Can you give us a general idea?

NIEMAND. I'll try. Let's see ... remember that speech from "Julius Caesar" where Cassius is bewailing the evil times that beset ancient Rome? I believe it went like this: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings."

LATHAM. I'm afraid I don't see—

NIEMAND. Well, Shakespeare would have been nearer the truth if he had put it the other way around. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in ourselves but in our stars" or better "in the Sun."

LATHAM. In the Sun?

NIEMAND. That's right, in the Sun. I suppose the oldest problem in the world is the origin of human evil. Philosophers have wrestled with it ever since the days of Job. And like Job they have usually given up in despair, convinced that the origin of evil is too deep for the human mind to solve. Generally they have concluded that man is inherently wicked and sinful and that is the end of it. Now for the first time science has thrown new light on this subject.

LATHAM. How is that?

NIEMAND. Consider the record of history. There are occasional periods when conditions are fairly calm and peaceful. Art and industry flourished. Man at last seemed to be making progress toward some higher goal. Then suddenly—for no detectable reason—conditions are reversed. Wars rage. People go mad. The world is plunged into an orgy of bloodshed and misery.

LATHAM. But weren't there reasons?

NIEMAND. What reasons?

LATHAM. Well, disputes over boundaries ... economic rivalry ... border incidents....

NIEMAND. Nonsense. Men always make some flimsy excuse for going to war. The truth of the matter is that men go to war because they want to go to war. They can't help themselves. They are impelled by forces over which they have no control. By forces outside of themselves.

LATHAM. Those are broad, sweeping statements. Can't you be more specific?

NIEMAND. Perhaps I'd better go back to the beginning. Let me see.... It all started back in March, 1955, when I started getting patients suffering from a complex of symptoms, such as profound mental depression, anxiety, insomnia, alternating with fits of violent rage and resentment against life and the world in general. These people were deeply disturbed. No doubt about that. Yet they were not psychotic and hardly more than mildly neurotic. Now every doctor gets a good many patients of this type. Such a syndrome is characteristic of menopausal women and some men during the climacteric, but these people failed to fit into this picture. They were married and single persons of both sexes and of all ages. They came from all walks of life. The onset of their attack was invariably sudden and with scarcely any warning. They would be going about their work feeling perfectly all right. Then in a minute the whole world was like some scene from a nightmare. A week or ten days later the attack would cease as mysteriously as it had come and they would be their old self again.

LATHAM. Aren't such attacks characteristic of the stress and strain of modern life?

NIEMAND. I'm afraid that old stress-and-strain theory has been badly overworked. Been hearing about it ever since I was a pre-med student at ucla. Even as a boy I can remember my grandfather deploring the stress and strain of modern life when he was a country doctor practicing in Indiana. In my opinion one of the most valuable contributions anthropologists have made in recent years is the discovery that primitive man is afflicted with essentially the same neurotic conditions as those of us who live a so-called civilized life. They have found savages displaying every symptom of a nervous breakdown among the mountain tribes of the Elgonyi and the Aruntas of Australia. No, Mr.