Quote of the Week

Generally speaking, all attempts to deprive the majority or even a substantial group of society its freedom, of its ability to participate creatively in social life, and to transform all or part of society into the dead tool of a small group of rulers lead, on the one hand, to the greatest weakening of society as a whole, to a kind of social atonia which leaves unused the reserve forces contained in free activity, and, on the other hand, to the accumulation of destructive, anarchic forces. When it is arrested in its normal manifestation, all organic aspiration that emanates from the depths of the individual not only acquires an especial potential tension, but also undergoes a peculiar morbid degeneration. Freedom is normally realized as free participation in social life and social creativity as free service. Restrained and repressed, freedom degenerates into the destructive fury of self-assertion. Whatever their political aims and conscious slogans, all revolutions are, in their spiritual and psychic aspect, explosions of anarchic passions that have accumulated in human souls as a result of extreme pressure and lack of outlets for the normal manifestation of free activity. In their essence, such explosions can only be destructive; driven underground, the thirst for freedom is combined with greed, envy, hate, and is transformed into blind revolt, into the turmoil of base human forces, the chaos of the psychic element. In itself, a revolution can free or heal a social order as little as the explosion of a boiler can repair the boiler. But in revolution society experiences immanent punishment for the suppression of that free, spontaneous human energy, that living creative principle, which in its normal manifestation is the source of social health and strength.