Solitary Cogs
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Solitary Cogs |
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Extracts from
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| It is all very well to insist that man is a social animal -
the fact is obvious enough.
But that is no justification for making him a mere cog in a totalitarian machine - or in a religious one … |
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Society, to merit its name, must be made up not of numbers,
of mechanical units, but of persons.
To be a person implies responsibility and freedom, and both of these imply a certain interior solitude, a sense of personal integrity, a sense of one's own reality and of one's ability to give oneself to society - or to refuse that gift. |
| When men are truly submerged in a mass of impersonal human beings pushed around by automatic forces, they lose their true humanity, their integrity, their ability to love, their capacity for self-determination. |
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When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. |
… when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, the society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment and hate. |
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| No amount of technological progress will cure the hatred that eats away the vitals of materialistic society like a spiritual cancer. The only cure is, and must always be, spiritual. |
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