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
The group consciousness of right thus developed becomes our daily
imperative. No mandate from without has power over us. There are many
forms of the fallacy that the governing and the governed can be two
different bodies, and this one of conforming to standards which we have
not created must be recognized as such before we can have any sound
foundation for society. When the ought is not a mandate from without, it
is no longer a prohibition but a self-expression. As the social
consciousness develops, ought will be swallowed up in will. We are some
time truly to see our life as positive, not negative, as made up of
continuous willing, not of restraints and prohibition. Morality is not
the refraining from doing certain things—it is a constructive force.
So in the education of our young people it is not enough to teach them
their “duty,” somehow there must be created for them to live in a world
of high purpose to which their own psychic energies will instinctively
respond. The craving for self-expression, self-realization, must see
quite naturally for its field of operation the community. This is the
secret of education: when the waters of our life are part of the sea of
human endeavor, duty will be a difficult word for our young people to
understand; it is a glorious consciousness we want, not a painstaking
conscience. It is ourselves soaked with the highest, not a Puritanical
straining to fulfil an external obligation, which will redeem the world.
Education therefore is not chiefly to teach children a mass of things
which have been true up to the present moment; moreover it is not to
teach them to learn about life as fast as it is made, not even to
interpret life, but above and beyond everything, to create life for
themselves. Hence education should be largely the training in making
choices. The aim of all proper training is not rigid adherence to a
crystallized right (since in ethics, economics or politics there is no
crystallized right), but the power to make a new choice at every moment.
And the greatest lesson of all is to know that every moment _is_ new.
“Man lives in the dawn forever. Life is beginning and nothing else but
beginning. It begins ever-lastingly.”
We must breed through the group process the kind of man who is not
fossilized by habit, but whose eye is intent on the present situation,
the present moment, present values, and can decide on the forms which
will best express them in the actual world.
To sum up this point: morality is never static; it advances as life
advances. You cannot hang your ideals up on pegs and take down no. 2 for
certain emergencies and no. 4 for others. _The true test of our morality
is not the rigidity with which we adhere to standard, but the loyalty we
show to the life which constructs standards._ The test of our morality
is whether we are living not to follow but to create ideals, whether we
are pouring our life into our visions only to receive it back with its
miraculous enhancement for new uses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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