"Political Ideals" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russell Bertrand)

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 coЪpted 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.