Political Ideals | Page 5

Fatigue
produces the illusion that only rest is needed for happiness; but when men have rested for
a time, boredom drives them to renewed activity. For this reason, a happy life must be
one in which there is activity. If it is also to be a useful life, the activity ought to be as far
as possible creative, not merely predatory or defensive. But creative activity requires
imagination and originality, which are apt to be subversive of the status quo. At present,
those who have power dread a disturbance of the status quo, lest their unjust privileges
should be taken away. In combination with the instinct for conventionality,[1] which man
shares with the other gregarious animals, those who profit by the existing order have
established a system which punishes originality and starves imagination from the moment
of first going to school down to the time of death and burial. The whole spirit in which
education is conducted needs to be changed, in order that children may be encouraged to
think and feel for themselves, not to acquiesce passively in the thoughts and feelings of
others. It is not rewards after the event that will produce initiative, but a certain mental
atmosphere. There have been times when such an atmosphere existed: the great days of
Greece, and Elizabethan England, may serve as examples. But in our own day the
tyranny of vast machine-like organizations, governed from above by men who know and
care little for the lives of those whom they control, is killing individuality and freedom of
mind, and forcing men more and more to conform to a uniform pattern.
[1] In England this is called "a sense of humor."
Vast organizations are an inevitable element in modern life, and it is useless to aim at
their abolition, as has been done by some reformers, for instance, William Morris. It is
true that they make the preservation of individuality more difficult, but what is needed is
a way of combining them with the greatest possible scope for individual initiative.
One very important step toward this end would be to render democratic the government
of every organization. At present, our legislative institutions are more or less democratic,
except for the important fact that women are excluded. But our administration is still
purely bureaucratic, and our economic organizations are monarchical or oligarchic. Every
limited liability company is run by a small number of self-appointed or cošpted directors.
There can be no real freedom or democracy until the men who do the work in a business
also control its management.
Another measure which would do much to increase liberty would be an increase of
self-government for subordinate groups, whether geographical or economic or defined by
some common belief, like religious sects. A modern state is so vast and its machinery is
so little understood that even when a man has a vote he does not feel himself any
effective part of the force which determines its policy. Except in matters where he can act
in conjunction with an exceptionally powerful group, he feels himself almost impotent,
and the government remains a remote impersonal circumstance, which must be simply
endured, like the weather. By a share in the control of smaller bodies, a man might regain
some of that sense of personal opportunity and responsibility which belonged to the

citizen of a city-state in ancient Greece or medieval Italy.
When any group of men has a strong corporate consciousness--such as belongs, for
example, to a nation or a trade or a religious body--liberty demands that it should be free
to decide for itself all matters which are of great importance to the outside world. This is
the basis of the universal claim for national independence. But nations are by no means
the only groups which ought to have self-government for their internal concerns. And
nations, like other groups, ought not to have complete liberty of action in matters which
are of equal concern to foreign nations. Liberty demands self-government, but not the
right to interfere with others. The greatest degree of liberty is not secured by anarchy.
The reconciliation of liberty with government is a difficult problem, but it is one which
any political theory must face.
The essence of government is the use of force in accordance with law to secure certain
ends which the holders of power consider desirable. The coercion of an individual or a
group by force is always in itself more or less harmful. But if there were no government,
the result would not be an absence of force in men's relations to each other; it would
merely be the exercise of force by those who had strong predatory instincts, necessitating
either slavery or a perpetual readiness to repel force with force on the part of those whose
instincts were