Do we not see that power of theories and ideas everywhere around us,
even in the most trivial things? The most splendid gown is nothing but
an object of contempt if it is the fashion of the day before
yesterday. In lands where titles and decorations are a traditional
idea, the little piece of tin may be more coveted than any treasures
of wealth. Through ideas only can the great social question be solved.
No distribution of income can change in the least the total sum of
pleasure and displeasure in the world, and the socialistic scheme is
of all the useless efforts to increase pleasure and to decrease
displeasure the least desirable, because it works, as we have seen, at
the same time against those mental functions which secure the most
forceful progress of economic life. A true change can come only from
within. The superficial, unpsychological theories of human happiness,
which have been hammered into the working population of our age, have
made true happiness more and more difficult to attain. There is small
chance that this inner conversion will come in our day through
religion, however much religion may help toward it. There is still
smaller chance that philosophy can do it and that the average man will
take the attitude of Antisthenes who claimed that it is divine not to
need anything and that he who needs least is nearest to the ideal. But
there is every chance that mankind will remember again more vividly
the deeper lasting values of humanity. Society must be sobered after
the frenzy of this present-day rush for external goods. The shallow
disappointment is felt too widely already. The world is beginning to
discover once more that this scramble for pearls and palaces and motor
cars among the rich, and for their showy imitations among the middle
class, and the envy of material profits and the chase for amusements
even among the poorest, leave life meaningless and cold and silly. As
soon as the industrial community turns to a new set of ideas and
becomes inspired by the belief in the ideal value of the work as work
and as a necessary contribution to the progress of mankind, the social
question will be solved, as all the differences which socialism wants
to eliminate then appear trivial and insignificant.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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