Today’s expression: “It’s not rocket science.”

Meaning: It’s simple; it’s not complicated; it’s easy to understand. “It’s not rocket science” can also be used sarcastically in the event that information actually is quite difficult to understand, or that a task is difficult to execute.

Example: “Basketball is a simple game. All you do is put the ball in the hoop. It’s not rocket science.”

---

Below, I present to you John Steinbeck’s phalanx theory found in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, Edited by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten.

Don’t worry. It’s not rocket science.

---

A letter from John Steinbeck to Carlton “Dook” Sheffield:

The coral insect working with hundreds of billions of others, eventually creates a strange and beautiful plant-like formation. In the course of time numberless plants create the atoll. Architecturally, the atoll is very beautiful and good. Certain groups in Europe at one time created the Gothic spire. They seem to have worked under a stimulus as mysterious, as powerful and as general as that which caused the coral insects to build.

Note – in Mendocino county a whole community turned against one man and destroyed him although they had taken no harm from him. This will sound meaningless to you unless you could see the hundreds of notes that make them meaningful to me. It is quite easy for the group, acting under stimuli to viciousness, to eliminate the kindly natures of its units. When acting as a group, men do not partake of their ordinary natures at all. The group can change its nature. It can alter the birth rate, diminish the number of its units, control states of mind, alter appearance, physically and spiritually. All of the notions I have made begin to point to an end – that the group is an individual as boundaried, as diagnosable, as dependent on its units and as independent of its units’ individual natures, as the human unit, or man, is dependent on his cells and yet is independent of them. The greatest group unit, that is the whole race, has qualities which the individual lacks entirely. It remembers a time when the moon was close, when the tides were terrific. It remembers a time when the weight of the individual doubled itself every 28 days, and strangely enough, it remembers every step of its climb from the single cell to the human. The human unit has none of these memories.

As individual humans we are far superior in our functions to anything the world has born – in our groups we are not only not superior but in fact are remarkably like those most perfect groups, the ants and bees.

The fascinating thing to me is the way the group has a soul, a drive, an intent, an end, a method, a reaction and a set of tropisms which in no way resembles the same things possessed by the men who make up the group. These groups have always been considered as individuals multiplied. And they are not so. They are beings in themselves, entities. Just as a bar of iron has none of the properties of the revolving, circling, active atoms which make it up, so these huge creatures, the groups, do not resemble the human atoms which compose them.

Why the individual is incapable of understanding the nature of the group. That is why publishing is unsure, why elections are the crazy things they are. We only feel the emotions of the group beast in times of religious exaltation, in being moved by some piece of art which intoxicates us while we do not know what it is that does it. Are you as nuts as I am now?

A note by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten: “The fictional symbol which will act as a vehicle for the phalanx theory appeared in several guises…notably, in The Grapes of Wrath. Professor Richard Astro of Oregon State University mentions the famous turtle in Chapter Three of that novel, ‘symbolically representing the Joads’ weary trek westward,’ and points out that an ancient Roman phalanx in close-order advance with shields locked overhead was called a testudo or tortoise.”

---

Brain teaser:

What single word can be used to complete all the words below?

D E _ _ _ S T

C _ _ _ E R

S T _ _ _ 

P _ _ _ N T