Good and Evil in 1976: A Forgotten Esalen Archive Dialogue

On an evening in 1976, in the Bel Aire School in Tiburon, California, a hall full of Marin County listeners waited for a microphone to be carried down the aisle so they could ask questions about one of the oldest and least comfortable subjects in human life: good and evil. Onstage were a psychologist who had spent decades writing about anxiety, love, and creative courage, and a former Marine and Harvard-trained economist who had recently been tried for handing the Pentagon Papers to the press. The reel-to-reel recording of that dialogue, preserved from the Esalen archives, is a rare document of two serious minds working through a question that modern life keeps trying to outsource to slogans, therapies, and the evening news. The talk makes a case that is easy to nod along to and hard to live by: that evil is not solved by refusing to look at it, and that the cost of looking away has been paid in history.

What was happening in that room in 1976?

The recording opens with the kind of framing an audience expects from a community benefit. Sam Stern, introducing the archive in the podcast-style intro that now precedes the reel, explains that the tape was discovered among a stack of dusty reels and was likely recorded and preserved by the archival figure Paul Herbert, even though the event did not take place at Esalen itself. The evening was a benefit for the Marin Association for Mental Health. Its host introduced Rollo May as a man whose work had been central to American psychology for decades, and who had recently published The Courage to Create, alongside Love and Will and Power and Innocence.

What makes the opening worth slowing down for is the premise. The organizers had chosen a topic that sounded almost quaint in a county famous for its breathwork, its encounter groups, and its open-ended spiritual experiments. Yet May, speaking at 4 minutes into the recording and beyond, made the choice sound urgent rather than academic. He treated the subject as a matter of public health.

Why would a psychologist say we repress evil?

May's central argument is that Californians, and perhaps Americans broadly, have developed remarkable techniques for living only on the bright side of experience. He was blunt about it. "Out here in California," he told the audience, "there are fantastic means of living only on the good side of life and repressing every aspect of evil." To prove the point, he described picking up a directory of spiritual and therapeutic groups in Marin County at a Safeway, a list that ran past one hundred entries with names ranging from the playful to the aspirational. His objection was not that these groups were worthless. It was that they shared an unspoken premise: that evil could be escaped by a sufficiently good enough method.

The argument has a sharper edge than it first appears. May was not claiming that self-improvement is dishonest. He was claiming that a worldview which cannot admit evil into its picture of reality will misperceive the world the way a radio tuned to one station misses everything else on the dial.

What did Hitler teach May about blindness?

The clearest illustration he offered came from his own youth. He recalled being a pacifist in college in the early 1930s, sure that there would never be another war and certain he knew how to prevent one. When Hitler came to power in Europe, he said, his circle did not see what was coming. "We were blocked off from taking seriously the matter of Hitler," he recalled. The reports seemed to be a mistake. The idea seemed too monstrous to fit inside their sense of how history was supposed to behave.

"We could not take evil in to our system. It seriously curtailed our sense of reality and tied our hands."

That line is the hinge of the whole talk. May's point is that the failure was not a failure of intelligence. It was a failure of acceptance. Evil that could not be admitted as a real force became impossible to act against, because the mind had already filed it under things that could not happen. The lesson is uncomfortable because it reverses the usual moral story: the danger is not only the person who does harm, but the decent person who has arranged their inner life so that harm never comes into focus.

What does the devil poll reveal about how we handle evil?

May then turned to the cultural mood he saw developing in the mid-1970s. He cited a Harris poll from a couple of years earlier in which 48 percent of respondents said they believed in the devil, a rise of 10 points from the year before. He observed that more people in that survey seemed to believe in the devil than in a benevolent spirit, and he found the imbalance strange. His own view was that the devil is a mistaken and destructive way of personifying evil. Yet he thought the poll showed something valuable: people were taking the problem seriously, even if they were picturing it in a form that made it easier to project outward.

He extended the observation to popular film. The enormous success of Jaws struck him as a simple, direct struggle with evil in nature, a grosser cousin of Moby-Dick, and he grouped it with disaster movies that, in his telling, expressed a deep public concern with evil even as they turned it into spectacle. The argument is worth remembering as a kind of cultural diagnostic. Audiences were not short on appetite for confronting darkness. The question was whether that appetite ever reached the moral and political institutions where decisions were made.

What does obedience have to do with conscience?

The second half of the dialogue moves from abstraction into the mechanics of moral failure. The conversation turns to Stanley Milgram's experiments at Yale on obedience to authority, and to the question of how ordinary people come to inflict harm when told to do so. It is here that Daniel Ellsberg's experience gives the discussion its weight. The talk keeps returning to a pair of tensions that run through any serious account of evil: the pull of obedience against the pull of conscience, and the pressure of institutions that reward going along.

Ellsberg speaks from inside those institutions. He had been a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation and had worked in the Defense Department, where, as the program notes make clear, he helped shape nuclear war planning and American policy in Vietnam. The talk's later segments move toward nuclear weapons and the question of whether anyone has a right to kill, and they weigh the conscience of the individual against the claims of command. Listeners who know the Pentagon Papers story will hear the conversation as a reckoning from someone who had crossed from the inside of a system to the outside, and who had paid for it with a possible sentence of 115 years before charges were dismissed in 1973 because of government misconduct.

Why does the 1976 timing change how we hear this?

The timing gives the recording its emotional charge. The Vietnam War had ended only a year earlier. Ellsberg's prosecution was a few years in the past. May had just released a book about creative courage, and both men were reflecting on the same terrible question from different angles: how human beings can make something new and good, and how they can do enormous harm in the name of order. The conversation does not resolve those tensions. It keeps them open, which may be the most honest thing a public dialogue can do.

What lingers is the refusal to simplify. Neither speaker offers a formula that makes evil disappear. May offers an insight about perception. Ellsberg offers the perspective of someone who has seen what authority does when conscience is quieted. Together they suggest that good and evil are not only abstract categories to debate, but habits of attention, and that a society is safest when it is willing to see the worst things it might do.

How should a modern reader use this recording?

Listening now, it is tempting to treat the talk as a historical artifact. But its core challenge is current. May's warning about repression describes a culture that still sells routes out of discomfort, and his Hitler anecdote describes the way reasonable people can fail to see danger that does not fit their picture of the world. Ellsberg's testimony about obedience and conscience speaks to any reader who has ever been asked to go along with something they sensed was wrong. The recording was made for a benefit in one room in Tiburon, but its questions were built to travel.

The most useful way to approach it is slowly, with the same patience the speakers bring to their own sentences. Pause at the moments where they name a failure of nerve, and ask where that failure might be operating in your own life or institutions. The talk does not offer comfort. It offers something more durable: a reason to take evil seriously enough to see it clearly.

Where to go from here

Start with the full 1976 recording and listen for the moments when the speakers move from abstraction to specifics. Then read May's books named in the introduction, especially Power and Innocence and The Courage to Create, to see how the themes of this conversation developed in his own writing. For Ellsberg's account of the Pentagon Papers and the case that followed, look to his own published accounts rather than secondhand summaries. Finally, return to the Milgram experiments and consider them alongside May's Hitler story. The two together make a compact education in how moral failure happens, and how it might be interrupted.