The new state : $b Group organization the solution of popular governmentFollett, Mary Parker
Science
The new state : $b Group organization the solution of popular government
Follett, Mary Parker
Democracy; Political participation; Social psychology; State, The
I believe that the realization of oneness which will come to us with a
fuller sense of democracy, with a deeper sense of our common life, is
going to be the substitute for what men now get in war. Some
psychologists tell us that fighting is one of the fundamental instincts,
and that if we do not have war we shall have all the dangers of thwarted
instinct. But the lure of war is neither the instinct of hate nor the
love of fighting; it is the joining of one with another in a common
purpose. “And the heart of a people beat with one desire.” Many men have
gone joyfully to war because it gave them fellowship. I said to some one
that I thought the reason war was still popular in spite of all its
horrors was because of our lack of imagination, we simply could not
realize war. “No,” said the man I spoke to, “I know war, I know its
horrors, and the reason that in spite of it all men like war is because
there we are doing something all together. That is its exhilaration and
why we can’t give it up. We come home and each leads his separate life
and it seems tame and uninteresting merely on that account, the deadly
separateness of our ordinary life.”
When we want a substitute for war, therefore, we need not seek for a
substitute for fighting or for hating; we must find some way of making
ourselves feel at one with some portion of our fellow-creatures. If the
essential characteristic of war is doing things together, let us begin
to do things together in peace. Yet not an artificial doing things
together, we could so easily fall into that, but an entire
reorganization of life so that the doing things together shall be the
natural way—the way we shall all want to do things.
But mere association is not enough. We need more than the “collective
life,” the mere “getting-together,” so much talked of in these days; our
getting together must be made effective, must exercise our minds and
wills as well as our emotions, must serve the great ends of a great
life. Neighborhood organization gives all an opportunity to learn the
technique of association.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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