In dark days, men need a clear faith and a well-grounded hope; and as
       the outcome of these, the calm courage which takes no account of
       hardships by the way. The times through which we are passing have
       afforded to many of us a confirmation of our faith. We see that the
       things we had thought evil are really evil, and we know more
       definitely than we ever did before the directions in which men must
       move if a better world is to arise on the ruins of the one which is
       now hurling itself into destruction. We see that men's political
       dealings with one another are based on wholly wrong ideals, and can
       only be saved by quite different ideals from continuing to be a source
       of suffering, devastation, and sin.
       Political ideals must be based upon ideals for the individual life.
       The aim of politics should be to make the lives of individuals as good
       as possible. There is nothing for the politician to consider outside
       or above the various men, women, and children who compose the world.
       The problem of politics is to adjust the relations of human beings in
       such a way that each severally may have as much of good in his
       existence as possible. And this problem requires that we should first
       consider what it is that we think good in the individual life.
       To begin with, we do not want all men to be alike. We do not want to
       lay down a pattern or type to which men of all sorts are to be made by
       some means or another to approximate. This is the ideal of the
       impatient administrator. A bad teacher will aim at imposing his
       opinion, and turning out a set of pupils all of whom will give the
       same definite answer on a doubtful point. Mr. Bernard Shaw is said to
       hold that _Troilus and Cressida_ is the best of Shakespeare's plays.
       Although I disagree with this opinion, I should welcome it in a pupil
       as a sign of individuality; but most teachers would not tolerate such
       a heterodox view. Not only teachers, but all commonplace persons in
       authority, desire in their subordinates that kind of uniformity which
       makes their actions easily predictable and never inconvenient. The
       result is that they crush initiative and individuality when they can,
       and when they cannot, they quarrel with it.
       It is not one ideal for all men, but a separate ideal for each
       separate man, that has to be realized if possible. Every man has it
       in his being to develop into something good or bad: there is a best
       possible for him, and a worst possible. His circumstances will
       determine whether his capacities for good are developed or crushed,
       and whether his bad impulses are strengthened or gradually diverted
       into better channels.
       But although we cannot set up in any detail an ideal of character
       which is to be universally applicable--although we cannot say, for
       instance, that all men ought to be industrious, or self-sacrificing,
       or fond of music--there are some broad principles which can be used to
       guide our estimates as to what is possible or desirable.
       We may distinguish two sorts of goods, and two corresponding sorts of
       impulses. There are goods in regard to which individual possession is
       possible, and there are goods in which all can share alike. The food
       and clothing of one man is not the food and clothing of another; if
       the supply is insufficient, what one man has is obtained at the
       expense of some other man. This applies to material goods generally,
       and therefore to the greater part of the present economic life of the
       world. On the other hand, mental and spiritual goods do not belong to
       one man to the exclusion of another. If one man knows a science, that
       does not prevent others from knowing it; on the contrary, it helps
       them to acquire the knowledge. If one man is a great artist or poet,
       that does not prevent others from painting pictures or writing poems,
       but helps to create the atmosphere in which such things are possible.
       If one man is full of good-will toward others, that does not mean that
       there is less good-will to be shared among the rest; the more
       good-will one man has, the more he is likely to create among others.
       In such matters there is no _possession_, because there is not a
       definite amount to be shared; any increase anywhere tends to produce
       an increase everywhere.
       There are two kinds of impulses, corresponding to the two kinds of
       goods. There are _possessive_ impulses, which aim at acquiring or
       retaining private goods that cannot be shared; these center in the
       impulse of property. And there are _creative_ or constructive impulses,
       which aim at bringing into the world or making available for use the
       kind of goods in which there is no privacy and no possession.
       The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the
       largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest. This is no new
       discovery. The Gospel says: "Take no thought, saying, What shall we
       eat? or What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?"
       The thought we give to these things is taken away from matters of more
       importance. And what is worse, the habit of mind engendered by
       thinking of these things is a bad one; it leads to competition, envy,
       domination, cruelty, and almost all the moral evils that infest the
       world. In particular, it leads to the predatory use of force.
       Material possessions can be taken by force and enjoyed by the robber.
       Spiritual possessions cannot be taken in this way. You may kill an
       artist or a thinker, but you cannot acquire his art or his thought.
       You may put a man to death because he loves his fellow-men, but you
       will not by so doing acquire the love which made his happiness. Force
       is impotent in such matters; it is only as regards material goods that
       it is effective. For this reason the men who believe in force are the
       men whose thoughts and desires are preoccupied with material goods.
       The possessive impulses, when they are strong, infect activities which
       ought to be purely creative. A man who has made some valuable
       discovery may be filled with jealousy of a rival discoverer. If one
       man has found a cure for cancer and another has found a cure for
       consumption, one of them may be delighted if the other man's discovery
       turns out a mistake, instead of regretting the suffering of patients
       which would otherwise have been avoided. In such cases, instead of
       desiring knowledge for its own sake, or for the sake of its
       usefulness, a man is desiring it as a means to reputation. Every
       creative impulse is shadowed by a possessive impulse; even the
       aspirant to saintliness may be jealous of the more successful saint.
       Most affection is accompanied by some tinge of jealousy, which is a
       possessive impulse intruding into the creative region. Worst of all,
       in this direction, is the sheer envy of those who have missed
       everything worth having in life, and who are instinctively bent on
       preventing others from enjoying what they have not had. There is
       often much of this in the attitude of the old toward the young.
       There is in human beings, as in plants and animals, a certain natural
       impulse of growth, and this is just as true of mental as of physical
       development. Physical development is helped by air and nourishment
       and exercise, and may be hindered by the sort of treatment which made
       Chinese women's feet small. In just the same way mental development
       may be helped or hindered by outside influences. The outside
       influences that help are those that merely provide encouragement or
       mental food or opportunities for exercising mental faculties. The
       influences that hinder are those that interfere with growth by
       applying any kind of force, whether discipline or authority or fear or
       the tyranny of public opinion or the necessity of engaging in some
       totally incongenial occupation. Worst of all influences are those
       that thwart or twist a man's fundamental impulse, which is what shows
       itself as conscience in the moral sphere; such influences are likely
       to do a man an inward danger from which he will never recover.
       Those who realize the harm that can be done to others by any use of
       force against them, and the worthlessness of the goods that can be
       acquired by force, will be very full of respect for the liberty of
       others; they will not try to bind them or fetter them; they will be
       slow to judge and swift to sympathize; they will treat every human
       being with a kind of tenderness, because the principle of good in him
       is at once fragile and infinitely precious. They will not condemn
       those who are unlike themselves; they will know and feel that
       individuality brings differences and uniformity means death. They
       will wish each human being to be as much a living thing and as little
       a mechanical product as it is possible to be; they will cherish in
       each one just those things which the harsh usage of a ruthless world
       would destroy. In one word, all their dealings with others will be
       inspired by a deep impulse of _reverence_.
       What we shall desire for individuals is now clear: strong creative
       impulses, overpowering and absorbing the instinct of possession;
       reverence for others; respect for the fundamental creative impulse in
       ourselves. A certain kind of self-respect or native pride is
       necessary to a good life; a man must not have a sense of utter inward
       defeat if he is to remain whole, but must feel the courage and the
       hope and the will to live by the best that is in him, whatever outward
       or inward obstacles it may encounter. So far as it lies in a man's
       own power, his life will realize its best possibilities if it has
       three things: creative rather than possessive impulses, reverence for
       others, and respect for the fundamental impulse in himself.
       Political and social institutions are to be judged by the good or harm
       that they do to individuals. Do they encourage creativeness rather
       than possessiveness? Do they embody or promote a spirit of reverence
       between human beings? Do they preserve self-respect?
       In all these ways the institutions under which we live are very far
       indeed from what they ought to be.
       Institutions, and especially economic systems, have a profound
       influence in molding the characters of men and women. They may
       encourage adventure and hope, or timidity and the pursuit of safety.
       They may open men's minds to great possibilities, or close them
       against everything but the risk of obscure misfortune. They may make
       a man's happiness depend upon what he adds to the general possessions
       of the world, or upon what he can secure for himself of the private
       goods in which others cannot share. Modern capitalism forces the
       wrong decision of these alternatives upon all who are not heroic or
       exceptionally fortunate.
       Men's impulses are molded, partly by their native disposition, partly
       by opportunity and environment, especially early environment. Direct
       preaching can do very little to change impulses, though it can lead
       people to restrain the direct expression of them, often with the
       result that the impulses go underground and come to the surface again
       in some contorted form. When we have discovered what kinds of impulse
       we desire, we must not rest content with preaching, or with trying to
       produce the outward manifestation without the inner spring; we must
       try rather to alter institutions in the way that will, of itself,
       modify the life of impulse in the desired direction.
       At present our institutions rest upon two things: property and power.
       Both of these are very unjustly distributed; both, in the actual
       world, are of great importance to the happiness of the individual.
       Both are possessive goods; yet without them many of the goods in which
       all might share are hard to acquire as things are now.
       Without property, as things are, a man has no freedom, and no security
       for the necessities of a tolerable life; without power, he has no
       opportunity for initiative. If men are to have free play for their
       creative impulses, they must be liberated from sordid cares by a
       certain measure of security, and they must have a sufficient share of
       power to be able to exercise initiative as regards the course and
       conditions of their lives.
       Few men can succeed in being creative rather than possessive in a
       world which is wholly built on competition, where the great majority
       would fall into utter destitution if they became careless as to the
       acquisition of material goods, where honor and power and respect are
       given to wealth rather than to wisdom, where the law embodies and
       consecrates the injustice of those who have toward those who have not.
       In such an environment even those whom nature has endowed with great
       creative gifts become infected with the poison of competition. Men
       combine in groups to attain more strength in the scramble for material
       goods, and loyalty to the group spreads a halo of quasi-idealism round
       the central impulse of greed. Trade-unions and the Labor party are no
       more exempt from this vice than other parties and other sections of
       society; though they are largely inspired by the hope of a radically
       better world. They are too often led astray by the immediate object
       of securing for themselves a large share of material goods. That this
       desire is in accordance with justice, it is impossible to deny; but
       something larger and more constructive is needed as a political ideal,
       if the victors of to-morrow are not to become the oppressors of the
       day after. The inspiration and outcome of a reforming movement ought
       to be freedom and a generous spirit, not niggling restrictions and
       regulations.
       The present economic system concentrates initiative in the hands of a
       small number of very rich men. Those who are not capitalists have,
       almost always, very little choice as to their activities when once
       they have selected a trade or profession; they are not part of the
       power that moves the mechanism, but only a passive portion of the
       machinery. Despite political democracy, there is still an
       extraordinary degree of difference in the power of self-direction
       belonging to a capitalist and to a man who has to earn his living.
       Economic affairs touch men's lives, at most times, much more
       intimately than political questions. At present the man who has no
       capital usually has to sell himself to some large organization, such
       as a railway company, for example. He has no voice in its management,
       and no liberty in politics except what his trade-union can secure for
       him. If he happens to desire a form of liberty which is not thought
       important by his trade-union, he is powerless; he must submit or
       starve.
       Exactly the same thing happens to professional men. Probably a
       majority of journalists are engaged in writing for newspapers whose
       politics they disagree with; only a man of wealth can own a large
       newspaper, and only an accident can enable the point of view or the
       interests of those who are not wealthy to find expression in a
       newspaper. A large part of the best brains of the country are in the
       civil service, where the condition of their employment is silence
       about the evils which cannot be concealed from them. A Nonconformist
       minister loses his livelihood if his views displease his congregation;
       a member of Parliament loses his seat if he is not sufficiently supple
       or sufficiently stupid to follow or share all the turns and twists of
       public opinion. In every walk of life, independence of mind is
       punished by failure, more and more as economic organizations grow
       larger and more rigid. Is it surprising that men become increasingly
       docile, increasingly ready to submit to dictation and to forego the
       right of thinking for themselves? Yet along such lines civilization
       can only sink into a Byzantine immobility.
       Fear of destitution is not a motive out of which a free creative life
       can grow, yet it is the chief motive which inspires the daily work of
       most wage-earners. The hope of possessing more wealth and power than
       any man ought to have, which is the corresponding motive of the rich,
       is quite as bad in its effects; it compels men to close their minds
       against justice, and to prevent themselves from thinking honestly on
       social questions while in the depths of their hearts they uneasily
       feel that their pleasures are bought by the miseries of others. The
       injustices of destitution and wealth alike ought to be rendered
       impossible. Then a great fear would be removed from the lives of the
       many, and hope would have to take on a better form in the lives of the
       few.
       But security and liberty are only the negative conditions for good
       political institutions. When they have been won, we need also the
       positive condition: encouragement of creative energy. Security alone
       might produce a smug and stationary society; it demands creativeness
       as its counterpart, in order to keep alive the adventure and interest
       of life, and the movement toward perpetually new and better things.
       There can be no final goal for human institutions; the best are those
       that most encourage progress toward others still better. Without
       effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a
       finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination
       and hope are alive and active.
       It is a sad evidence of the weariness mankind has suffered from
       excessive toil that his heavens have usually been places where nothing
       ever happened or changed. 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 less violent. This is the state of affairs at present
       in international relations, owing to the fact that no international
       government exists. The results of anarchy between states should
       suffice to persuade us that anarchism has no solution to offer for the
       evils of the world.
       There is probably one purpose, and only one, for which the use of
       force by a government is beneficent, and that is to diminish the total
       amount of force used m the world. It is clear, for example, that the
       legal prohibition of murder diminishes the total amount of violence in
       the world. And no one would maintain that parents should have
       unlimited freedom to ill-treat their children. So long as some men
       wish to do violence to others, there cannot be complete liberty, for
       either the wish to do violence must be restrained, or the victims must
       be left to suffer. For this reason, although individuals and
       societies should have the utmost freedom as regards their own affairs,
       they ought not to have complete freedom as regards their dealings with
       others. To give freedom to the strong to oppress the weak is not the
       way to secure the greatest possible amount of freedom in the world.
       This is the basis of the socialist revolt against the kind of freedom
       which used to be advocated by _laissez-faire_ economists.
       Democracy is a device--the best so far invented--for diminishing as
       much as possible the interference of governments with liberty. If a
       nation is divided into two sections which cannot both have their way,
       democracy theoretically insures that the majority shall have their
       way. But democracy is not at all an adequate device unless it is
       accompanied by a very great amount of devolution. Love of uniformity,
       or the mere pleasure of interfering, or dislike of differing tastes
       and temperaments, may often lead a majority to control a minority in
       matters which do not really concern the majority. We should none of
       us like to have the internal affairs of Great Britain settled by a
       parliament of the world, if ever such a body came into existence.
       Nevertheless, there are matters which such a body could settle much
       better than any existing instrument of government.
       The theory of the legitimate use of force in human affairs, where a
       government exists, seems clear. Force should only be used against
       those who attempt to use force against others, or against those who
       will not respect the law in cases where a common decision is necessary
       and a minority are opposed to the action of the majority. These seem
       legitimate occasions for the use of force; and they should be
       legitimate occasions in international affairs, if an international
       government existed. The problem of the legitimate occasions for the
       use of force in the absence of a government is a different one, with
       which we are not at present concerned.
       Although a government must have the power to use force, and may on
       occasion use it legitimately, the aim of the reformers to have such
       institutions as will diminish the need for actual coercion will be
       found to have this effect. Most of us abstain, for instance, from
       theft, not because it is illegal, but because we feel no desire to
       steal. The more men learn to live creatively rather than
       possessively, the less their wishes will lead them to thwart others or
       to attempt violent interference with their liberty. Most of the
       conflicts of interests, which lead individuals or organizations into
       disputes, are purely imaginary, and would be seen to be so if men
       aimed more at the goods in which all can share, and less at those
       private possessions that are the source of strife. In proportion as
       men live creatively, they cease to wish to interfere with others by
       force. Very many matters in which, at present, common action is
       thought indispensable, might well be left to individual decision. It
       used to be thought absolutely necessary that all the inhabitants of a
       country should have the same religion, but we now know that there is
       no such necessity. In like manner it will be found, as men grow more
       tolerant in their instincts, that many uniformities now insisted upon
       are useless and even harmful.
       Good political institutions would weaken the impulse toward force and
       domination in two ways: first, by increasing the opportunities for the
       creative impulses, and by shaping education so as to strengthen these
       impulses; secondly, by diminishing the outlets for the possessive
       instincts. The diffusion of power, both in the political and the
       economic sphere, instead of its concentration in the hands of
       officials and captains of industry, would greatly diminish the
       opportunities for acquiring the habit of command, out of which the
       desire for exercising tyranny is apt to spring. Autonomy, both for
       districts and for organizations, would leave fewer occasions when
       governments were called upon to make decisions as to other people's
       concerns. And the abolition of capitalism and the wage system would
       remove the chief incentive to fear and greed, those correlative
       passions by which all free life is choked and gagged.
       Few men seem to realize how many of the evils from which we suffer are
       wholly unnecessary, and that they could be abolished by a united
       effort within a few years. If a majority in every civilized country
       so desired, we could, within twenty years, abolish all abject poverty,
       quite half the illness in the world, the whole economic slavery which
       binds down nine tenths of our population; we could fill the world with
       beauty and joy, and secure the reign of universal peace. It is only
       because men are apathetic that this is not achieved, only because
       imagination is sluggish, and what always has been is regarded as what
       always must be. With good-will, generosity, intelligence, these
       things could be brought about.
       ___
       End of Chapter I - Political Ideals
       [Bertrand Russell's essay: Political Ideals] _