Elija’s Reviews > The Individual, Society and the State > Status Update

Important as the economic factor is, it is not enough. the rejuvenation of mankind needs the inspiration and energising force of an ideal.

It is not the negative. thing of being free from something, because with such freedom you may starve to death. Real freedom, true liberty is positive: it is freedom to something; it is the liberty to be, to do; in short, the liberty of actual and active opportunity.

It is power that corrupts and degrades both master and slave and it makes no difference whether the power is wielded by an autocrat, by parliament or Soviets. More pernicious than the power of a dictator is that of a class; the most terrible - the tyranny of a majority.

(GRAAH!!) Socially speaking, the criterion of civilisation and
culture is the degree of liberty and economic opportunity which the individual enjoys; of social and international unity and co-operation unrestricted by man-made laws and other artificial obstacles; by the absence of privileged castes and by the reality of liberty and human dignity; in short, by the true emancipation of the individual.

!!! The ability to travel at the rate of 100 miles an hour is no evidence of being civilised. True civilisation is to be measured by the individual, the unit of all social life; by his individuality and the extent to which it is free to have its being to grow and expand

senses have been dulled by the deadly routine of work and bc they must eke out an existence.

it is not truth or falsehood which serves as the criterion of the opposition he meets. It is not the validity or usefulness of his thought or activity which rouses against him the forces of the State and of "public opinion."

One of the insane characteristics of this struggle is the complete negation of the relation of the producer to the things he produces. The average worker has no inner point of contact with the industry he is employed in, and he is a stranger to the process of production of which he is a mechanical part. Like any other cog of the machine, he is replaceable at any time by other similar depersonalised human beings.

only mutual aid and voluntary co-opera-tion - not the omnipotent, all-devastating State - can create the basis for a free individual and associational life.

the struggle for physical survival goes merrily on though the necessity for it has entirely disappeared. Indeed, the struggle 1s being continued apparently because there is no necessity for it. Does not so-called overproduction prove it?

Moreover, the inherent conservatism of government, of authority of any kind, unavoidably becomes reactionary. For two rea-sons: first, because it is in the nature of government not only to retain the power it has, but also to strengthen, widen and perpetuate it, nationally as well as internationally.

Life begins and ends with man, the individual. Without him there is no race, no humanity, no State. No, not even "society" is possible without man. It is the individual who lives, breathes and suffers. His development, his advan-ce, has been a continuous struggle against the fetishes of his own creation and particularly so against the "State."