Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism by Earl Bertrand Arthur William 3rd Russell
page 112 of 134 (83%)
work, and their education is scamped. Wherever, as in barbarous or
semi-civilized countries, labour is too weak or too disorganized to
protect itself, appalling cruelties are practised for private profit.
Economic and political organizations become more and more vast,
leaving less and less room for individual development and initiative.
It is this sacrifice of the individual to the machine that is the
fundamental evil of the modern world.

To cure this evil is not easy, because efficiency is promoted, at any
given moment, though not in the long run, by sacrificing the
individual to the smooth working of a vast organization, whether
military or industrial. In war and in commercial competition, it is
necessary to control individual impulses, to treat men as so many
"bayonets" or "sabres" or "hands," not as a society of separate people
with separate tastes and capacities. Some sacrifice of individual
impulses is, of course, essential to the existence of an ordered
community, and this degree of sacrifice is, as a rule, not regretable
even from the individual's point of view. But what is demanded in a
highly militarized or industrialized nation goes far beyond this very
moderate degree. A society which is to allow much freedom to the
individual must be strong enough to be not anxious about home defence,
moderate enough to refrain from difficult external conquests, and rich
enough to value leisure and a civilized existence more than an
increase of consumable commodities.

But where the material conditions for such a state of affairs exist,
the psychological conditions are not likely to exist unless power is
very widely diffused throughout the community. Where power is
concentrated in a few, it will happen, unless those few are very
exceptional people, that they will value tangible achievements in the
DigitalOcean Referral Badge