The Individual and the Crowd
The individual frightens us
Therefore we owe individuals all that we are and have been; and yet we have prosecuted them, almost without exceptions. Where the individual is born, immediately an antagonistic force comes to life – a mob ready to eliminate him. And this mortal game of guards and thieves between individuals and the crowd, which began in the mists of time, still continues and is the Gordian knot of the political vision. The massacre of the innocents can be removed through the universal scientific paradigm.
The mass is the antagonist of the individual.
It has always been so, without exceptions, and has scorned its wise men from every latitude and every age. The individual is alive, the masses are antibiotics. And the struggle between the individual and the masses, the persecution of individuality, is a constant in our history. We need the individual, and at the same time, as a species, we have an irresistible urge to suppress him.
The individual frightens us…
Only by direct contact with a true individual, listening to his voice, and seeing him act, can we realize our laziness, our sloth, and our unbearable inner deformity.
The effort needed to change is too great. We prefer to eliminate the object of confrontation. Smashing the talking cricket with a hammer, suppressing this persistent voice that pushes us to be more, to become better, always seems to be the simplest solution.
The suppression of the antagonist, if it succeeded, would lead to a greater crisis, a more unimaginable abyss being thrown open in front of the winner. From a vertical point of view, the masses and the individual show themselves to be a single reality, two pistons of the same motor. One could not exist without the other, in the same way that a stick with only one end is unimaginable. They are inseparable aspects of one reality.
Therefore politics is a ‘game’ if guided by a vertical man. If guided by an ordinary man politics is arrogance, vanity, misuse of power, hate and death.
Politics as division and conflict is finished. It’s dead. It does not have solutions unless it rises to a new level. Politics as we know it is the static expression of existence; but made dynamic, vertical, this becomes the Art of Dreaming.
A detached, self-aware politics is born, viewed as a game, part of the “dream”.
A future political leader must dream, renew himself continually;
he must become a poem and in so doing,
effect a process of integration with his own Being.
Education is a subversive activity
Education can create the conditions for the growth of men who have eliminated every conflict from their being, who think in terms of a ladder, who have transcended the divisions between beliefs, political parties, wealth and race.
These men will create a new politics and a new economy. For this we need new Schools and new universities. When at its best, education is the elimination of stupidity, in all its forms and manifestations; and due to its potential to prepare extraordinary men, education is a subversive activity.
