The commentators series on KPFA has met with universal praise so far as its concept, its idea is concerned. This idea is the not especially unique or foreign idea of having men and women of significantly different points of view and prejudices speak on the events and problems of our time -- each of them for fifteen minutes, on the weekdays; and then to have these same persons join in a weekly roundtable, on Sunday evenings, both to examine each others views and to experience that direct confrontation of opinions which, in the end, should aid in defining and clarifying one's own.

Now this is a splendid idea. And during the 15 months that KPFA Interim was on the air,¹ with its little signal here in Berkeley, we tried it out. We tried to find people, naturally, who had some basic qualification to discuss the subjects they were interested in; but more than this, we sought commentators who were able to relate to themselves, their personal selves, to the problems and events they criticized. For as everyone know[,], an expert, with every fact at hand, may still be a fool. And in fact, there are some who say that the world is full of this species -- the expert fool. Well, in any case, it is not this species we want on the commentator series. And during our past experimental operation, we strove for a series which, if it didn't contain the latest inside diplomatic rumors from Washington, did present some facet of the human wisdom which evolves from the Socratic dictum, know thyself.

The series on KPFA-Interim was sometimes successful, perhaps more often not. There were good and exciting commentaries to be heard every week. But too often we tended to put on the air either purely philosophical speculation insufficiently grounded in facts, or factual summaries insufficiently informed by philosophical insight. In renewing KPFA's operation, we have set our sights a little higher than before. The present result is that the commentators series does not, in any full sense, exist yet. For I assure you that the kind of comment I am indulging in at the moment is not what we seek for the regular series; and at present thee are only two or three individuals who, after long conversations with the staff, sample script preparation and studio auditioning, are prepared to join a regular series.

The problem we have encountered can be pinpointed pretty exactly. I do not wish to venture that there was never before a time in civilized history when people in general were as insulated from their own instincts as now. But I will venture that there was never a time when that was more the case. The basic instincts, or what we normally call instincts in most of us when we wish to speak of the sources of our unreflective acts, -- these instincts in our society are deeply conditioned by an ethic which in one or another of many varieties is historically Christian. The basic ethic of western culture is of course set out in the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. This is an ethic which for many centuries has taught that loyalty to God -- for which many moderns substitute some other term of idealism -- is above all other loyalties. That it is evil to kill, to steal. The average citizen of the Bay Area, and all the super-average citizens too, are steeped in that ethic, whatever the color or vintage of their intellectual points of view. But it is a notorious fact that we live in a society in which this ethic is untenable -- insupportable, if by ethic we still mean criteria for the actual conduct of life. In our society, and this is as true of America as of any other country, but only more subtly true -- the supreme loyalty cannot be to God or to an idealization of the values of good; that loyalty is demanded by the state and the state's expediences. In our society it is not only not evil to kill, but that is specifically the service in which the state demands the citizen's supreme loyalty. And as for stealing: there is scarcely a sensitive man alive today who does not deeply feel somehwere [sic] in his innards, that our economic life as well as our political is mired in the sublimated motivations of theft. The propaganda of government attempts the theft of the soul; that of advertising the theft of the will. These are mundane conditions, so common around us that, like poeple [sic] in every century, we can scarcely imagine, perhaps, that things were ever really different, or that, if they were, they were ever any better.

But whether or not the evil has achieved the commonplace, it is certainly evident that America and the other nations of today are not in any major part populated by evil persons. And this is the difficulty, the short circuit so to speak, which KPFA encounters when it seeks a commentator who, if he is not an expert, at least is not a fool. People still respond with the deeply conditioned instincts I have referred to before. It is wrong to kill, and it is true that the human spirit attaches its loyalty to something more general, more timeless than the machinations of the foreign offices. Whenever a man looks deeply into himself in relation to what is going on these days, he obtains at least a faint illumination of these instincts. And it troubles him to do so. If he is called to the studios of KPFA to discuss the Korean crisis, he is likely to find himself in trouble with himself. For in relation to the public affairs of today, it is extraordinarily difficult for one whose focus remains upon the deepest center of the value in himself to avoid statements which are downright revolutionary. That is not inevitable; and I shall not pause here to examine what meaning we can attach to the term revolutionary. But to sum up, it is simply frightening to try to formulate an objective and satisfactory response to one's ethic[a]l instincts in relation to the more prominent affairs of the modern governments and agencies thereof. And rather than suffer that fright, we find, in our little arena of exploration, that people insulate themselves from those instincts. Rather than face the problem of what is wrong and what a man must do about it who still believes in himself and any form of reality greater than the dollar, most people would rather talk about the present decline in sulphur imports to Britain.

Well, that sums up our problem. So our research in the construction of a valuable commentators series must no doubt be prolonged. There are some similar but differently oriented problems regarding the KPFA roundtables, which I should like to share with you at another time in the near future. In the mean time I hope you can bear with us. We believe strongly that the exploration of political and other general events in the modern world is vital. But we also believe that this exploration will have little value unless it probes the human as well a the social realities that confront everyone alike. It is easy for one to talk about the last major role in the House, as it reflects the actions of your congressman. It is not so easy for an American to talk about himself in relation to the Indian famine. That is the kind of talk we seek on the KPFA Commentators Series. If you think we're wrong, please correct us.

Lewis Hill, May 25, 1951

¹The founders of KPFA in 1949 called it "KPFA Interim" because it operated on a tiny signal, a temporary FCC license, and its parent organization, the Pacifica Foundation, had yet to receive IRS non-profit status. Not surprisingly, the station went off the air in early 1950 for lack of subscribers. A listener fundraising drive got it back on the air in 1951 with a much larger transmitter, and the KPFA experience has been smooth sailing ever since [insert laugh track here].