The attempt to base social order on human will dominates public life today to the point that objective moral order has become unthinkable. Technological hedonism, the rational organization of all things to give each man what he wants, is universally accepted as the guiding ideal.
The current situation has grown up in stages. The First World War marked the end of tradition and religion as stated principles of order. The conception of legitimacy that vanished then depended on a religious establishment that could no longer serve as the basis of politics. Thrones fell because their authority was no longer viewed as divinely ordered or simply part of the way things were. Instead, government had to base itself entirely on the will of the governed. In the absence of God, the will of Man became the source of law.
What followed displayed the implications of Man’s enthronement. The Second World War was the victory of egalitarian hedonism over the particularities that make men and societies what they are — race, nation, the state as an aesthetic or organic whole that gives sense and life to its parts. That victory was inevitable. Divorced from cosmic order, the defining particularities for which the Axis fought could not ground an enduring social order because they were arbitrary. A particularism that stood for nothing larger than itself lacked direction. Equal satisfaction of wants seemed rational and compelling in comparison. Allied victory therefore meant the end of the European Right, and since 1945 the absolute supremacy of economics, of the principle that social order exists to get men what they want rather than express an essence or ideal, has been basic to Western public life.
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of order based on collective rather than individual purposes. The death of socialism was the triumph of the principle that society is a matter of technical rationality, that the purpose of social order is to satisfy the arbitrary desires of men simply as individuals. That triumph was also inevitable. Once wants had become the standard of goodness, and whatever could not be reduced to concrete desire had been put radically in doubt, men became dubious of “the will of the people” and other invisible attributes of collectivities. They wanted proof before giving up their particular desires, and found the shopping mall a more compelling vision than New Soviet Man.
1989 also meant loss of faith in history, refuted by the triumph in history of a radically individualistic and therefore ahistorical principle. History had abolished its own significance. As a result of these developments — the death of God, the reduction of the human essence to appetite and technological reason, the dissolution of “the people,” the end of history as a meaningful process — no conception of the common good can be publicly accepted today. Values are thought to be a matter of individual wants, and the only moral principles recognized as authoritative are formal principles for the furtherance and mutual accommodation of individual wills.
Understood theologically, this situation implies a religion of individual man as the source of value, the doctrines of which are equality, autonomy, and hedonism. Understood politically, it implies the twin sovereignty of world markets and transnational bureaucracies as rational means for maximizing equal satisfaction of desire. Responsible leaders in Church, State and elsewhere now view cooperative effort toward such a new order as their foremost responsibility. Dissent is all but criminal, since the alternative is thought to be poverty, tyranny and bloody chaos.
The ruling outlook combines low goals with boundless ambition. It makes control of the world for men’s arbitrary purposes the goal of morality and politics. The social and (to the extent possible) natural order are to be transformed into a single rational system wholly subject to man’s will. Body and soul are to be subjugated to desire. Human mastery is to become boundless. More and more we control things physically. Beyond that, the understandings that determine what things are for us are molded by symbolism, social relationships, and biochemistry. Men today believe they can manipulate such factors, and so expect that physical and social technology will permit comprehensive reconstruction of reality, in part social, in part physical, in part through managed reinterpretation.
Because the world is to be recreated for man’s pleasure, human power, and thus the means of power — money, position, manipulative skill — are all that truly matter. Educated and serious men today treat politics and economics as supreme ordering principles, and see serious rejection of technocracy as ignorant or disingenuous. For them, denial of man’s omnipotence can only be nihilism or obfuscation. Whatever men say they want, their real purpose must be to get their own way, and their claimed opposition to hedonism is simply a rhetorical maneuver motivated by the desire to supplant what others want with what they want themselves.
So well-accepted have technocratic presumptions become that non-interference has come to seem only another form of manipulation. All situations are interpreted as human constructions that can be reconstructed intentionally, and failure to reconstruct is seen as support for the existing situation over known alternatives. Failure to reconstruct race relations, for example, is “institutional racism,” an instance of the more general vice of “social injustice” — failure to remake all things in line with egalitarian hedonism. Even traditionalists fall into viewing the world as a human construction, and seeing acceptance of tradition as a decision to construct the world in a particular way. From such a perspective traditionalism becomes pointless, since it depends on our need for wisdom greater than our own, and its adherents become unable to explain their views even to themselves.
While the modern standpoint makes it impossible to see the world as traditionalists do, that standpoint is not inevitable. In spite of its self-understanding, the antitraditional point of view is neither scientific nor rational. The attempt to make the world a closed circle beginning and ending with the human will is based not on knowledge but on desire and fear that lead to denial of such obvious truths as man’s inability to create himself.
Antitraditionalists shrug off objections to their position because they are afraid that acceptance of human limitations — denial of man’s divinity — would lead to despair or to subjection to an authority other than themselves. The traditionalist does not share that fear, because he recognizes purposes larger than his own will, and believes that the world is neither alien nor senseless. He is therefore willing to deal with things as they are. He accepts that we cannot master the world, that any knowledge we can possess falls short of it, and that good, evil and the other things that make it what it is do not depend on us but we on them. He therefore recognizes that our power is limited, and technology, including social technology, can not be omnipotent. Since the exact sciences owe their power to limitation, to narrowing the range of issues they are willing to consider, a science, let alone technology, of the whole is impossible.
We need tradition because we are not self-sufficient and cannot fully know the whole upon which we depend. Tradition makes possible the relationship to the whole that is needed for our thoughts and actions to be well-founded, because it makes possible a stable way of life that takes into account fundamental things that are too subtle or comprehensive to deal with directly. We cannot invent or manipulate our relationship to the whole. Nor can any abstract system be comprehensive enough to define a world adequate to human life. A useable relationship to the whole must grow out of the thoughts, experiences and inspirations of many men and generations, accumulated, refined, and made coherent by tradition. To act rationally requires loyalty to a particular community and its ways; through that loyalty things we need that would otherwise escape us become accessible as habits, attitudes and symbols.
Tradition deals with things that are greater than we can grasp, and we can only accept it as a gift from those who came before us. It orients all human action, the work of natural scientists as much as anything else, and it cannot be manipulated, reconstructed or made scientific. Habits, attitudes and symbols are concrete, so traditions differ and each must rely on his own. The differences are no argument against relying on any particular tradition. Reliance is unavoidable, because we can think, know and act only from a particular traditional standpoint; other sources of guidance, such as social science, philosophy and personal opinion, are far too conflicting and fragmentary to create a general point of view anyone could live by.
Fortunately, the differences among the great religious and moral traditions are much less important than what they have in common, especially when opposed to the technocratic outlook. The traditions deal with one issue, how to make moral and spiritual order concrete in human life, technocracy with quite another, the satisfaction of desire. It is the former that touches us more deeply. Desire as such is a notoriously deceitful guide, and we look for something more solid. We would rather live by stable goods than endure the self-betrayal of an amoral life, however successful socially and materially.
We insist on making sense of our actions, and recognize their sense in relation to a larger and ultimately universal system that does not depend on us. Bringing what we do into relation with such an overarching scheme is our most comprehensive and enduring goal. Men’s willingness to sacrifice pleasure to meaning, to the demands of a more inclusive system that gives sense to particulars, shows up in low ways, for example the sacrifice of practical interests to revenge, but in others as well. When a man identifies with his family or country, or with his understanding of what it is to be noble and good, it becomes rational for him to sacrifice for those things because the sacrifice becomes a sacrifice of lesser to greater interests.
The view that our relation to the universal is fundamental raises the issue of the conflict between “universalism” and the concrete goods men live by. The objection to universalism must be properly understood. It is not that universals are useless or unreal, or that we should ignore them. As universal assertions themselves, such claims are self-defeating. What makes universalism destructive is simple identification of the universal with a single way of life, and consequent suppression of goods that do not fit a particular concrete scheme. That is an error that results not from recognition of universals but from ignoring their nature.
Rejection of universals as such is not a cure for universalism but a symptom of the disease — disregard of the nature of things — that leads to it. Men dislike universals because they set limits to the human will. If all men are mortal, then Socrates, if he is a man, is mortal whether he likes it or not. Men also dislike particulars, because particulars are incomplete, and thus require choice and exertion. They therefore try to avoid the opposition of universal and particular, the dualism of One and Many, by denying one of the opposing principles. By denying that and other dualisms they hope to avoid conflicts and get all they want without risk or exertion.
Which principle they deny depends on whether it seems more important to do nothing or to get their own way in everything. In the West today men take getting their way in particular matters too seriously to think of denying the Many. In contrast, denial of the One is common; as a denial of the transcendent, and thus of things that irremediably exceed our understanding and control, it is characteristic of modernity. The denial is futile. The practical demands of life force us to deal with things comprehensively, and to do so we must have a grasp of principles by which the world becomes a whole. Reasoned choice requires interrelated stable meanings that only universals can provide; if universals did not exist they would have to be invented. In the end we must recognize, at least in practice, a hierarchy of principles that culminates in the One, or at least something we treat as such.
That recognition need not mean “universalism” or tyranny. Universals are necessary for even tolerance to make sense. We become tolerant when we recognize others as fellow men sharing a common human nature, whose goods express more general goods that in some way are also goods for us. If there were men with whom we lacked all common ground, whom we found hopelessly opaque, what significance could they have for us? We would have no reason to treat them differently than rocks, trees and other objects we encounter and use for our own purposes.
Since universals are indispensable, a man who turns his back on what is universal will make up his own universals. Since he has abolished the One, his recourse is to take some particular thing — a race, class, party, or system of thought, or a particular good such as power, happiness or equality — and treat it as the ultimate standard to which all things must be referred. The man who wants to abolish universals thus turns in the end to a tyrannical universalism in which something that is not a universal is forced to do duty as such. The more he opposes transcendent standards the more he insists on some other final standard, a negative formal standard like radical skepticism or a crudely pragmatic one like success, and applies it everywhere. Only by doing so can he escape the transcendent.
The motive for treating particulars as universals is that doing so appears to abolish one of the permanent difficulties of human life, the need to pay adequate regard to both the One and the Many, necessity and choice, the eternal and the temporal. The need to accept seemingly irreconcilable principles is a standing demonstration that man is not the measure, and we do not like it. Men can hope to control particulars, and by treating them as universals they imagine they can dominate the world. If race or economics is everything then eugenics or nationalizing industry is the key to utopia. Modern ideologies are the consequence.
The actuality, of course, is that attempting to treat particulars as universals leads to madness and oppression rather than liberation. If the validity of universals like “man” is denied, men will be dealt with not as men but in accordance with the simple will of the powerful. Since treatment of particulars as universal is radically at odds with the nature of things it is extraordinarily destructive. The great totalitarianisms of the past eighty years are a demonstration. Attempts to create a universal whole subject to man’s will make those who hold power into gods; what becomes absolute is not Man, from the anti-transcendental point of view a mere abstraction, but the particular men at the top. Nazis, Bolsheviks and contemporary liberals reject the transcendent in favor of concrete realities such as race, class and human wants, supposedly to eliminate obfuscation and deal frankly with things as they are. In fact, denial of the transcendent plunges them and their followers into a maze of unreality that deprives things of their nature and forces them to comply with standards foreign to them.
The lesson of modern totalitarianism is that we cannot do without the One. When it is driven out it returns in a distorted and tyrannical form. The alternative to destructive universalism is not denial of universals but traditionalism. In essence, traditionalism is recognition that we need universals but cannot simply possess them. We must approach them indirectly, through acceptance of the attitudes, practices and symbols that make up a concrete way of life. Traditionalism is acceptance of the nature of things. It recognizes that in general we already know what we need to know; if we did not, life would quickly come to an end, just as a sick man would die right away if his body were not mostly healthy. We need learning less than recollection; tradition is a form of recollection, an all-inclusive form that helps us live well in the most comprehensive way possible.
Traditionalism thus opposes totalitarianism on all points. It accepts the supreme reality and importance of the One, and consequently the reality of human limitations. It sees that we cannot impose order on the world but must accept the order already present. It therefore begins not with a New Order but with acceptance of the fundamental goodness of what exists, especially what is common and enduring, and with respect for particular men and peoples.
The claims of tradition are thus compelling, but how to satisfy them under current conditions is not obvious. How can a man live by inherited understandings when tradition itself has been disestablished? The whole tendency of public life today is antitraditional. All dominant voices — popular entertainers, advertisers, journalists, politicians, experts, educators — deny traditional authority. Science and liberal democracy, the guiding lights of the day, are thought to have superseded it. Rejection of tradition is taught in the schools, presumed in public discussions, expounded and praised by all reputable authorities; it is believed to combine idealism and realism to the highest degree. Opposition is thought irrational, and uniformly fails.
We need tradition because we are social, and follow it out of loyalty, but for those very reasons find it difficult to live in a manner at odds with public consensus. If the settled social understanding is antitraditional, to what does a man appeal when he appeals to tradition? Tradition exists largely in the form of social understandings, and traditionalism has come to appear willful and self-contradictory. Nor is modern rejection of tradition merely a matter of sentiment. The organization of much of life today opposes tradition. Tradition is largely habitual and preconscious, and must be learned through example and contact. It becomes difficult to pass on in a world that tries to replace enduring personal loyalties with formal institutions, rational self-interest, and universal communications networks.
Such changes in social organization have affected basic philosophical conceptions in ways that reduce talk about tradition, loyalty, integrity and the like to window-dressing. Traditional society is grounded on settled common understandings: what men and women are, what a friend is, what constitutes a Christmas dinner or a well-spent life. In a society based on contract and bureaucracy the function of such conceptions evaporates. Shifting human purposes and technical considerations become what count, and things come to depend on what men make of them at the moment rather than anything enduring.
To put the matter in general terms, tradition is concerned with essential qualities, modernity with technical factors and temporary relationships. The change in outlook cripples not only traditionalism but any sort of opposition to the spirit of the times. If things are only what men make of them, any sort of independence — economic, social, intellectual, or spiritual — becomes all but impossible. A man who wants to take the lead from something other than fashion or government cannot do so today so in a way that seems publicly meaningful, because in the absence of a recognized objective moral order he can appeal to nothing but willfulness. To his fellows, he can only be a rebel without a cause.
As an established public view, technocracy appears utterly triumphant. In spite of all appearances, however, its dominance is an illusion. It is an impossible attempt to replace the universal and transcendent order to which tradition points with one men have invented, convincing enough to deceive and destroy but not real enough to build on. Technocracy fails to provide a functioning pattern of human life, because it does not deal with the world realistically, as something we can neither dominate nor fully understand. It exists parasitically, with the aid of understandings alien to it that it denies and undermines. To deal with things as they are men must be spiritual, moral and rational as well as appetitive. Technocracy has no room for such qualities because they require men to have moral character as well as desire and technical skill. Its final victory would destroy the honesty and public spirit a tolerable society needs, putting an end even to the mutual trust required to maintain technology as a human institution.
Antitraditional ideals do affect conduct. There are fewer marriages, fewer children, and more divorces today. Juvenile well-being has declined radically in the midst of vastly increased wealth and expenditures. Fraud is a growing problem in intellectual life. The armed forces are unable to retain members or take casualties. Nonetheless, it is not the ideals publicly declared that order and maintain society today. Now as always, loyalty, sacrifice and mutual love are what make social life possible; it would fall apart if the new order were as pervasive and well-established as it appears to be. While technocracy is accepted in all respectable public discourse, actual attitudes and conduct are at odds with it.
Mutual dislike and suspicion between populace and ruling elites manifests a fundamental division between the principles publicly accepted and the actual life of the people. Elites consider the people ignorant and bigoted while the people think their rulers self-seeking and mendacious. Those judgments reflect actual human qualities less than social role; the elite stands for public principle, the populace for day-to-day life, and their opinions of each other display the relation between accepted theories and real-life morality. The latter remains what it was. Men and women continue to marry and have children, and to sacrifice themselves for their families, even though such conduct is thought sentimental at best and blameworthy at worst — sexist, abject, codependent or whatever. Women still look after the babies and men bring home most of the bacon. Honesty and loyalty are admired, no-one knows why. There are still soldiers willing to risk their lives for their country, even though such conduct has become incomprehensible and even somewhat frightening. Recent war monuments tell the story: they have to do with suffering or presence at an event rather than a heroism that no longer makes public sense.
Willingness to do what is very difficult for the sake of loyalty or principle is still necessary for social survival, as are other ordinary virtues, but such things can no longer be justified or explained and have almost become secret vices that men are ashamed to mention. They continue to exist through unacknowledged attachment to tradition and the transcendent. Men do not know how to talk about that attachment, and their practice of the virtues is less complete than it might be if public principles were different, but life cannot go on without it and so it remains.
Liberal society has always been a combination of explicit secularism and an implicit transcendentalism that is now in hiding. In spite of the progress of the former the latter can still be seen, starved of intellectual content, in the nostalgia liberalism warns against, in ecological mysticism, in continued churchgoing, in the interest in spirituality, the occult, angels, flying saucers and so on, and in the inarticulate consciousness popular cynicism manifests that there is something seriously lacking in current ideals. The conflict between the two sides of liberal society has progressed to the point of threatening its long-term survival. It has made the old virtues into the new vices, and vice versa. The greatest virtue today is acceptance and approval of all ways of life consistent with the reign of money and bureaucracy, a habit of mind not far from what was once called simple immorality. In contrast, attachment to tradition and the transcendent is inseparable as a practical matter from the reverence for standards not based on desire, and the loyalty to one’s people and their ways, that are now classified as bigotry. Political correctness, the insistence on the demonic evil of non-liberal ways and imposition of a comprehensive system of thought control and re-education to stamp them out, displays liberal consciousness of the power of the hidden implicit opposition to technocracy.
The appearance of success has a variety of causes. Irreconcilable conflicts are depressing, and it is easier to pretend one side does not exist. Men see what they want to see, and the technocratic point of view flatters them. It makes them gods while transferring all responsibility to a system designed to accommodate their desires and eliminate the discipline to which they would otherwise have to submit. The conquest of nature has been spectacularly successful, and men expect methods that solve some problems so well to solve all. The prestige of modern natural science makes it difficult for discussions on any issue to take non-technocratic approaches seriously. Common sense must put on technocratic form to get a hearing; even traditionalists feel compelled to adopt the jargon of the age. Further, technocracy has the support of social technocrats, a powerful class called into being by modern communications and organizational technology, that includes media people, academics, politicians, civil servants and lawyers. Control of communications and public life generally by that class means that technocracy is treated publicly as the sole legitimate approach to social life. Finally, technocracy is by nature explicit, while the virtues inconsistent with it can act without show.
The effect is that technocracy is presumed without question, facts and perspectives inconsistent with it denied, ignored or trivialized. Whatever happens is given a technocratic explanation. Traditional ways are presented as the simple negation of whatever the New Order thinks virtuous, exaggerated evils attributed to them and treated as characteristic. Destruction of gender and ethnicity as ordering principles are presented as supremely good and necessary goals, no matter what disorders result, obvious declines in civility, morality, family life, artistic achievement, and so on ignored or denied. Growing violence is said to be the fault of sex roles, theft of social injustice, suicide of stereotyping; the clear tie between such conduct and the disintegration of traditional standards is not discussible and is treated as nonexistent. Even the standards by which decline might be measured are driven out of public discourse as racist, sexist or whatever — essentially, as leading to the wrong conclusions, and so inconsistent with the new order.
So what is to be done? Basic matters like following traditional morality in daily life are clear enough. More and more the world enforces other demands as the price of integrity. The situation of traditionalists is becoming that of religious minorities in Europe before 19th century emancipation. Technocracy makes traditional beliefs on matters such as relations between the sexes and the place of the transcendent in social life hopelessly opposed to the understandings now demanded. Official insistence on commitment to antitraditional views has begun to make it difficult for a traditionalist to accept a responsible job in a mainstream institution, or permit his children to be educated by the public system. In the coming years such difficulties are likely to affect more and more of life.
A radical traditionalist movement has thus become necessary. The immediate function of such a movement would be to make life as a traditionalist easier for those so inclined; the ultimate function to restore tradition to public life. The first goal can be pursued piecemeal and as occasion offers; the second is mostly a matter of maintaining principle. Pragmatic success on any large scale is likely to be slow, because the traditionalist outlook is so deeply at odds with modern public understandings. Nonetheless, the views of even a tiny minority can be influential, especially if they express durable aspects of human life that established views ignore, because they change the setting in which men act.
That effect can be cumulative; if the public outlook has gone radically astray steady maintenance of an alternative can eventually transform what views seem plausible. The traditionalist outlook has great long-term advantages. To say values are human creations, as technocrats do, is to reduce morality to a statement of what others want and make it utterly ineffectual. Rational hedonism can motivate only what is self-serving, and formal liberal principles like utility or the categorical imperative are insufficient for the concrete demands of life. Effective common action requires faith in something that encompasses and transcends us, so lasting success goes to those who care about something more substantive than winning. Traditionalism connects morality to the nature and tendencies of things, and so grounds the trust in the world needed to motivate a comprehensive system of action.
In any event, grand public success is ultimately not the point. Honesty and maintenance of principle is itself victory. Traditionalism means that politics depends on things more important than itself, that our purpose in life is not pragmatic success but living in accordance with spiritual and moral order. We must give our lives a footing in what is real; from that all else follows. At a time when good and evil are proclaimed the offspring of desire, and all the means of publicity and tricks of rhetoric are used to foreclose discussion, it requires thought, effort and independence of mind to do so.
Independence does not mean denial of our surroundings and connections; the world would have ended long ago if good were not more pervasive and enduring than evil. The point of tradition is not to fabricate anything but to secure and foster the good everywhere implicit. The means are at hand, since we learn to live well in attempting to do so. Natural feelings lead us toward right patterns and understandings. Living memory and recent history tell us of a way of life, much of it still available to us, that is far more explicitly at odds with technocracy than the one that now prevails. Formal study also helps: the history of modernism shows how we got where we are, and the classics put us in touch with what preceded. Discussions with others, those sympathetic and those opposed, help clarify and broaden our thoughts and provoke thought in others.
The current situation demands something different from each of us. The traditionalist movement is an alliance of traditions, each with its own doctrines and authorities, working together against a pervasive common enemy that would destroy humanity as such. Such a movement has its strains and paradoxes, since traditions oppose each other, but its necessity is clear. As it evolves it will come to have its own standards, although each tradition will see what is needed somewhat differently.
On some points unified action is called for. We are social beings, and as such must confront the new order together and publicly. Its nature tells us what weapons to use against it. The power of technocracy comes from an unquestioned acceptance that is not well-founded and in some ways is difficult to maintain. Nonetheless, the language and habitual assumptions of public discussion make it hard for those sympathetic to traditionalism even to articulate a position different from the one dominant. Objections stutter and fall silent before the confidence and seeming coherence of the technocrats.
The political battle today is therefore in men’s minds rather than the legislative chamber, the polls, or the streets. Men naturally revert to tradition unless it is continually disrupted and suppressed. What is necessary is less to enforce particular traditions than to weaken antitraditionalism. Those who are not against us are for us; our job is not to overcome our fellow citizens but to bring them to realize where their fundamental sympathies lie.
The overwhelming public success of the technocratic outlook makes it an easy target. The ability to break its spell by forceful and repeated questioning and by providing an articulate alternative is an enormous power, one possessed by traditionalists right now if they would only use it. In spite of New Class dominance, Western polities allow anyone to participate in public discussion. There are ways of suppressing discussion , but also a thousand forums — dinner table conversations, local meetings, letters to editors and public officials, Internet discussions, little magazines, campaigns of minor political parties — that permit any of us to present almost any view he thinks right. A few intelligent and forthright voices in each forum arguing against the new order and for traditional ways would have a powerful effect on the balance of intellectual forces and eventually the social order itself.
The language of public discussion must therefore be contested. Technocratic rhetoric must be deflated, modernism deprived of the appearance of moderation and its brutal implications displayed. The possibility of social technology must be disputed, the failures of the new order driven home, and traditional understandings justified. Man must be shown to be a creature that lives by blood loyalties and transcendent goods, human life a compound not only of impulse and appetite but of essences — man and woman, Confucian and Christian, Turk and Jew.
Confronting technocracy, of course, is only preparatory. As men our main goal must be to put our own lives in order, and for that something more definite is necessary than clearing obstacles and indicating general directions. Truth exists for us in concrete forms, one of which each of us must accept as authoritative. To establish a life better than the one offered by individualistic liberal choice — in practice, by experts, advertisers and popular entertainers — it is necessary to accept and submit to a specific community and its traditions. That is not easy when social practice is too diffuse to make the authority of any tradition a given, but in times of dissolution each of us has no choice but to find his way to something to which he can give himself wholly.
At bottom, the answer to today’s confusions lies in faith, the realization that we do not make the world, that we recognize rather than create the Good, Beautiful, and True, and that to do so adequately we must draw on a wisdom greater than our own. Our acts can be fruitful only as part of an order for good founded in the nature of things. In spite of its apparent strength technocracy is based on fear of anything greater than ourselves and refusal to face obvious human limitations. It must fail because it has no way to deal with realities. Success is far more likely than appears. The world is ours: we need only throw off the chains of illusion.
Publication of the preceding essay is pending.