Henry nodded, smiled a little. “Sure. You read much about the unconscious mind?
Subconscious? Whatever they call it?”
“Some, Henry. Why?”
“You believe in it?”
The editor laughed. “Have to. Can’t explain a single thing otherwise. Take you and Alton Bowers. You agree on every solitary fact taught in school. Comes to religion—you’re a Presbyterian, Alt’s a Baptist. Why? Something unconscious, something not faced fair and square by you both, right there.”
“Never thought of it that way,” Henry admitted. “I was only thinking about Civil Defense. Atom bombs. I get a lot of what the Government calls ‘Material.’ Even psychology stuff. It’s all about how people will act. It’s all based on studies of how they did act in other disasters. But if people have unconscious minds, how in Sam Hill can any psychologist figure what they’d do, facing utterly new terrors?”
“Some psychologists know a lot about how even the unconscious mind works—and why.”
“Not the ones the Government hires! All their birds are mighty chirky about the American people. Think they’d do fine if it rained brimstone. I’m not so sure. I’m far from sure!
I suspect the worst thing you can do, sometimes, is to keep patting people’s backs. Keep promising them they’re okay because they’ll do okay in a crisis. Makes ’em that much more liable to skittishness, to loss of confidence, if the crisis rolls around and they find they’re not doing letter perfect.”
Coley nodded. “I’ll buy that. It’s like the armed forces. Always calculating what’s going to happen on the basis of what happened before. Trying to convince themselves, even now, that an atom bomb is just another explosion—when it’s that, times a million, plus an infinite number of side effects, and not counting the human factor. The factor you call ‘unconscious’-and rightly.” The editor nodded. “They ought to look back over the military panics that have followed novel weapons. Next, they ought to reckon on how much less a civilian is set for uproar than troops. People go nuts, easy.”