"Russell, Bertrand - Proposed Roads to Freedom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russell Bertrand)

and Anarchism, as it moved the inventors of ideal
commonwealths in the past. In this there is nothing
new. What is new in Socialism and Anarchism, is
that close relation of the ideal to the present
sufferings of men, which has enabled powerful political
movements to grow out of the hopes of solitary thinkers.
It is this that makes Socialism and Anarchism
important, and it is this that makes them dangerous
to those who batten, consciously or unconsciously
upon the evils of our present order of society.

The great majority of men and women, in ordinary
times, pass through life without ever contemplating
or criticising, as a whole, either their own
conditions or those of the world at large. They find
themselves born into a certain place in society, and
they accept what each day brings forth, without any
effort of thought beyond what the immediate present
requires. Almost as instinctively as the beasts of
the field, they seek the satisfaction of the needs of
the moment, without much forethought, and without
considering that by sufficient effort the whole
conditions of their lives could be changed. A certain
percentage, guided by personal ambition, make the effort
of thought and will which is necessary to place
themselves among the more fortunate members of the
community; but very few among these are seriously
concerned to secure for all the advantages which they
seek for themselves. It is only a few rare and exceptional
men who have that kind of love toward mankind
at large that makes them unable to endure
patiently the general mass of evil and suffering,
regardless of any relation it may have to their own
lives. These few, driven by sympathetic pain, will
seek, first in thought and then in action, for some
way of escape, some new system of society by which
life may become richer, more full of joy and less
full of preventable evils than it is at present. But
in the past such men have, as a rule, failed to interest
the very victims of the injustices which they wished
to remedy. The more unfortunate sections of the
population have been ignorant, apathetic from excess
of toil and weariness, timorous through the imminent
danger of immediate punishment by the holders of
power, and morally unreliable owing to the loss of
self-respect resulting from their degradation. To
create among such classes any conscious, deliberate
effort after general amelioration might have seemed
a hopeless task, and indeed in the past it has
generally proved so. But the modern world, by the