The Next Step: A Plan for Economic World Federation

by Scott Nearing

Those who believe that the race learns only through hardships and suffering should bear in mind: first, that most of the knowledge communicated to the individuals of each generation is communicated indirectly through some process of education; second, that society is composed of those individuals; third, that modern communities have built a vast machine whose sole purpose it is to influence opinion by teaching (indirectly) in the school, in the church, through the printed page and the film. In Japan this machine is employed to teach the people the sanctity of the emperor; in Britain it is used to convince the masses of the sanctity of business-as-usual; in France it is used to proclaim the sanctity of property; in Russia it is used to inculcate the sanctity of the revolution. If people learned only through first hand experience, these propaganda machines would be failures. In practice, they are highly successful.

Social disaster is not the only path to social knowledge. It is not necessary for a generation to suffer from typhus or to be ruined by war in order to be convinced that these dread diseases are menaces. The desire to prevent famine is felt by millions who have never come any nearer to it than the stories in the papers. Society learns, indirectly, through education—slowly of course, but none the less surely.

The average man is convinced of the desirability of trying to avoid disease, hunger and the other ills that effect him personally and immediately. He is not yet convinced of the efficacy of a similar attitude toward war, revolution and other disasters which inevitably destroy some portion of society, and which, in the end will prove as preventable as disease and famine. Social disaster seems more inevitable because it strikes more people at one time, while individual disaster has been more carefully studied, is better understood and is more localized.

Grave dangers menace present-day society. Economic breakdown, war and social dissolution with their terrible scourges—pestilence and famine—have already overtaken millions. It is plain that some new course of social action must be planned; that some social experiment must be inaugurated that will ward off the impending disasters.

Social experiments should be made, as chemical and electrical experiments are made, after all of the available facts have been carefully considered and digested. The results of such wisely planned experiments in the social field may be just as dramatic as the results of similarly planned experiments in the field of natural science.

Never in the history of social change has there been an intelligent direction of social processes. Many men in many ages have had ideals and aspirations, coupled, in some cases, with a limited knowledge of social practice, but social changes have come upon mankind for the most part, as a meteor comes upon the earth's atmosphere—unexpected and unheralded, startling those who have seen it by the suddenness of its appearance. Nor has there been any attempt on the part of the ruling powers to instill a different point of view with regard to these matters. On the contrary, there has been a determined effort to convince men that social changes were beyond their ken. The air of mystery has been blown away from natural phenomena, but it is encouraged and permitted to surround social changes. While it endures, an intelligent direction of social life is, of course, quite out of the question.

This attitude is being broken down, however. The past hundred years of experiment and experience with a competitive order have convinced multitudes that such an order is unworkable. During the same period, the development of economic organization on ever broader lines has emphasized the need of common purposes and common activities.

Recent social experience teaches plainly that an injury to one is an injury to all; that a benefit to one is a benefit to all; that men rise in the scale of well-being with their fellows and not from them, and that a co-operative social life is the only one that will prove livable and workable. These four propositions include the best thinking of the modern world on the fundamentals of a social structure that will prove livable and workable.

The acceptance of any such standards of social life involves a right-about-face in the basic social philosophy of the world.

1. The doctrine of laissez-faire must be accepted for what it is—an exploded theory that has promoted, not social well-being, but the interests of favored classes.