We have dealt in the preceding two chapters with great classes and
assemblages of human beings as, in the mass, likely to be more or less
antagonistic to the Open Conspiracy, and it has been difficult in those
chapters to avoid the implication that “we,” some sort of circle round
the writer, were aloof from these obstructive and hostile multitudes,
and ourselves entirely identified with the Open Conspiracy. But neither
are these multitudes so definitely against, nor those who are with us
so entirely for, the Open Conspiracy to establish a world community as
the writer in his desire for clearness and contrast and with an all too
human disposition perhaps towards plain ego-centred combative issues,
has been led to represent. There is no “we” and there can be no “we” in
possession of the Open Conspiracy.
The Open Conspiracy is in partial possession of us and we attempt
to serve it. But the Open Conspiracy is a natural and necessary
development of contemporary thought arising here and there and
everywhere. There are doubts and sympathies that weigh on the side of
the Open Conspiracy in nearly everyone, and not one of us but retains
many impulses, habits and ideas in conflict with our general devotion,
checking and limiting our service.
Let us therefore in this chapter cease to discuss classes and types and
consider general mental tendencies and reactions which move through all
humanity.
In our opening chapters we pointed out that religion is not universally
distributed throughout human society. And of no one does it seem to
have complete possession. It seizes upon some of us and exalts us
for one hour now and then, for a day now and then; it may leave its
afterglow upon our conduct for some time; it may establish restraints
and habitual dispositions; sometimes it dominates us with but brief
intermissions through long spells and then we can be saints and
martyrs. In all our religious phases there appears a desire to
hold the phase, to subdue the rest of our life to the standards and
exigencies of that phase. Our quickened intelligence sets itself to
a general analysis of our conduct and to the problem of establishing
controls over our unilluminated intervals.
And when the religious elements in the mind set themselves to such
self-analysis and attempts to order and unify the whole being upon
this basis of the service and advancement of the race, they discover
first a great series of indifferent moods, wherein the resistance to
thought and work for the Open Conspiracy is merely passive and in the
nature of inertia. There is a whole class of states of mind which may
be brought together under the head of “everydayism.” The dinner-bell
and the playing-fields, the cinema and the newspaper, the week-end
visit and the factory siren, a host of such expectant universal things,
call to a vast majority of people in our modern world to stop thinking
and get busy with the interest in hand, and so on to the next, without
a thought for the general frame and drama in which these momentary
and personal incidents are set. We are driven along these marked and
established routes and turned this way or that by the accidents of
upbringing, of rivalries and loves, of chance encounters and vivid
experiences, and it is rare for many of us, and never for some, that
the phases of broad reflection and self-questioning arise. For many
people the religious life now, as in the past, has been a quite
desperate effort to withdraw sufficient attention and energy from the
flood of events to get some sort of grasp, and keep whatever grip is
won, upon the relations of the self to the whole. Far more recoil in
terror from such a possibility and would struggle strenuously against
solitude in the desert, solitude under the stars, solitude in a silent
room or indeed any occasion for comprehensive thought.
But the instinct and purpose of the religious type is to keep hold
upon the comprehensive drama, and at the heart of all the great
religions of the world we find a parallel disposition to escape in
some manner from the aimless drive and compulsion of accident and
everyday. Escape is attempted either by withdrawal from the presence
of crowding circumstance into a mystical contemplation and austere
retirement, or--what is more difficult and desperate and reasonable--by
imposing the mighty standards of enduring issues upon the whole mass
of transitory problems which constitute the actual business of life.
We have already noted how the modern mind turns from retreat as a
recognisable method of religion, and faces squarely up to the second
alternative. The tumult of life has to be met and conquered. Aim must
prevail over the aimless. Remaining in normal life we must yet keep
our wills and thoughts aloof from normal life and fixed upon creative
processes. However busied we may be, however challenged, we must yet
save something of our best mental activity for self-examination and
keep ourselves alert against the endless treacheries within that would
trip us back into everydayism and disconnected responses to the stimuli
of life.
Religions in the past, though they have been apt to give a preference
to the renunciation of things mundane, have sought by a considerable
variety of expedients to preserve the faith of those whom chance or
duty still kept in normal contact with the world. Modern religion,
which has no alternative to constant normal contact with the world,
cannot lightly forgo the experiments of the old religions in such
expedients. Meetings for mutual reassurance, confession and prayer,
self-dedication, sacraments and seasons of fast and meditation need
to be modernised or replaced by modern equivalents if the religious
vitality of the Open Conspiracy is to be sustained. At present,
except in the case of a few friends and lovers, the modern religious
individual leads a life of extreme, wasteful and dangerous spiritual
isolation. He may forget and he has nothing to remind him; he may
relapse and he will hear no reproach to warn him of his relapse.
“Everyday” has many ways of justifying the return of the believer
to its sceptical casualness. It is easy to persuade oneself that
one is taking life or oneself “too seriously.” The mind is very
self-protective; it has a disposition to abandon too great or too
far-reaching an effort and return to things indisputably within its
scope. We have an instinctive preference for thinking things are
“all right”; we economise anxiety; we defend the delusions that we
can work with, even though we half realise they are no more than
delusions. We resent the warning voice, the critical question that
robs our activities of assurance. Our everyday moods are not only
the antagonists of our religious moods, but they resent all outward
appeals to our religious moods and they welcome every help against
religious appeals. We pass very readily from the merely defensive to
the defensive-aggressive, and from refusing to hear the word that might
stir our consciences to a vigorous effort to suppress its utterance.
Churches, religious organisations, try to keep the revivifying phase
and usage, where it may strike upon the waning or slumbering faith
of the convert, but modern religion as yet has no such organised
reminders. They cannot be improvised. Crude attempts to supply the
needed corrective of conduct may do less good than harm. Each one of
us for himself must do what he can to keep his high resolve in mind
and protect himself from the snare of his own moods of fatigue or
inadvertency.
But these passive and active defences of current things which operate
in and through ourselves, and find such ready sympathy and assistance
in the world about us, these massive resistance systems, are only the
beginning of our tale of the forces antagonistic to the Open Conspiracy
that lurk in our complexities.
Men are creatures with other faults quite beyond and outside our common
disposition to be stupid, indolent, habitual and defensive. Not only
have we active creative impulses but also acute destructive ones.
Man is a jealous animal. In our youth and adolescence our egotism is
extravagant. A great number of us at that stage would rather not see
a beautiful or wonderful thing come into existence than have it come
into existence disregarding us. Something of that jealous malice,
self-assertive ruthlessness, there is in all of us. At his worst man
can be an exceedingly combative, malignant, mischievous and cruel
animal. And few of us--none of us--are altogether above the possibility
of such phases. When we consider the oppositions to the Open Conspiracy
that operate in the normal personality, we appreciate the soundness of
the catechism which instructs us to renounce not only the trivial world
and the heavy flesh, but the active and militant devil.
To make is a long and wearisome business, with many arrests and
disappointments, but to break gives an instant thrill. We all know
something of the delight of the bang. It is well for the Open
Conspirator to ask himself at times how far he is in love with the
dream of a world in order, and how far he is driven by hatred of
institutions that bore or humiliate him. He may be no more than a
revengeful incendiary in the mask of a constructive worker. How safe
is he then from the reaction to some fresh humiliation? The Open
Conspiracy which is now his refuge and vindication may presently
fail to give him the compensation he has sought, may offer him no
better than a minor rôle, may display irritating and incomprehensible
preferences. And for a great number of things in overt antagonism to
the great aim of the Open Conspiracy, he will still find within himself
not simply acquiescence but sympathy and a genuine if inconsistent
admiration. There they are, waiting for his phase of disappointment.
Back he may go to the old loves with a new animus against the greater
scheme.
Man has pranced a soldier in reality and fancy for so many generations
that few of us can altogether release ourselves from the brilliant
pretensions of flags, empire, patriotism and aggression. Business men,
especially in America, seem to feel a sort of glory in calling even
the underselling and overadvertising of rival enterprises “fighting.”
Pill vendors and public departments can have their “wars,” their
heroisms, their desperate mischiefs, and so get the Napoleonic feeling.
The world and our imaginations are full of the sentimentalities, the
false glories and loyalties of such refurbishing of the old combative
traditions, trailing after them, as they do, so much worth and virtue
in a dulled and stupefied condition. It is difficult to resist the fine
gravity, the high self-respect, examples of honour and good style in
small things, of the military and naval services, for all that they are
now no more than noxious parasites upon the nascent world commonweal.
In France not a word may be said against the army; in England, against
the navy. There will be many Open Conspirators at first who will
scarcely dare to say that word even to themselves.
But all these obsolete values and attitudes with which our minds are
cumbered must be cleared out if the new faith is to have free play. We
have to clear them out not only from our own minds but from the minds
of others who may be or become our associates. The finer and more
picturesque false loyalties, false standards of honour, false religious
associations, may seem to us, the more thoroughly must we seek to
release our minds and the minds of those about us from them and cut off
all thoughts of a return.
We cannot compromise with these vestiges of the ancient order. Whatever
we retain of them will come back to life and grow again. It is no good
to operate for cancer unless the whole growth is removed. Leave a crown
about and presently you will find it being worn by someone resolved to
be a king. Keep the name and image of a god without a distinct museum
label and sooner or later you will discover a worshipper on his knees
to it and be lucky not to find a human sacrifice upon the altar. Wave
a flag and it will wrap about you. Of yourself even more than of the
community is this true; there can be no half measures. You have not
yet completed your escape to the Open Conspiracy from the cities of
the plain while it is still possible for you to take a single backward
glance.
And at last when we conceive that we have given ourselves altogether
to the Open Conspiracy frustration may overtake us. Then it is, when
we are assured that we are possessed by the Open Conspiracy, that we
shall be most disposed to think and act as though we possessed the Open
Conspiracy. And if we have made sacrifices, if we are conscious of
substantial success, then still more shall we be in danger. One of the
most disagreeable features of Christian hagiology is the value set by
the blessed saints upon their special privileges. The poor souls loved
to think they had caught the peculiar attention of God by their sores
and mortifications. This “weakness of the eminent claim” pervades all
religions. Most of those who will serve the Open Conspiracy will be
tempted to think they have deserved well and to compare their merits
and their share of influence and recognition in the movement with those
of others.
The Open Conspiracy will be no more free from rivalries, heartburnings,
distrust, touchy suspicions, mutual interference and disingenuous
negligences, than any other great human co-operation. The disciplines,
the trainings and methods of organisation that must be evolved as the
movement grows may be effective in restricting the mischief of such
humanities; they will certainly not suppress them altogether. Many a
good and serviceable man may die embittered by the preoccupation of his
fellow workers in this huge campaign. But the Open Conspiracy will grow
as science grows, greater at last than all its outer antagonisms, than
ancient tradition or instinctive resistance, greater than the conscious
or unconscious disloyalties of its adherents, greater than all the
present vices of mankind.
* * * * *
Beware of malice in this movement. Remember that man is a malicious
animal and you are human. Do not fall foul of your allies and
associates because some of them affect your richer nature as prigs or
pedants; do not be too scrupulous about the motives of others; your own
also may be misconceived; do not interpret enthusiastic service either
as conceited self-assertion or calculated self-advancement, nor give
way to excessive chagrin when some honourable task you had promised
yourself is seized upon by someone else. Avoid the belittlement of
useful work upon our side because it is not perfect. Do not let
differences of accent and idiom annoy you. Many great movements have
been crippled, many great opportunities lost, by the minor spites of
the elect. Vindictive self-assertion is an invariable characteristic of
the hopelessly damned. Watch yourself for the minutest first specks of
this leprosy.
The Open Conspiracy may learn a useful lesson if it bears in mind the
early phases of Christianity and Islam and guards itself against such
sordid dissensions as sprung and enfeebled those mighty initiatives
before even the first generation of disciples had passed away.
_Chapter XII_
THE OPEN CONSPIRACY MUST BEGIN AS A MOVEMENT OF EXPLANATION AND
PROPAGANDA
And now, having taken the measure of the array of current things
against which the Open Conspiracy must pit itself, we may go on to
consider the germination and development of the Open Conspiracy.
It is fairly obvious that the primary and earliest task is to express,
develop and propagate the idea of the Open Conspiracy, to make its
external form clear, convincing, attractive and commanding to as many
people as possible. The primary organisation must be a propagandist
organisation.
The idea of the Open Conspiracy rests upon and arises out of a system
of historical, biological and sociological realisations. In the
case of people with sound knowledge in these fields we may look for
these realisations already; such people are prepared for adhesion
without any great explanatory work; there is nothing to set out to
them but the project. They do already constitute the Open Conspiracy
in an unorganised solution and will not so much adhere as admit to
themselves and others their state of mind. Directly we pass beyond that
comparatively restricted world, however, we shall find that we have
to deal with partial knowledge, distorted views or blank ignorance,
and that a revision and extension of historical and biological ideas
and a considerable elucidation of economic misconceptions has to be
undertaken.
For the past twelve years, the present writer has given much thought
and work to the question of presenting these foundation ideas for a
modern moral and political activity in a practicable form, and it will
be the easiest method of statement for him to describe the outcome of
his experiments and reflections. He reports therefore upon what he has
done and is doing not because that is in any way final or universally
applicable, but because it gives something sufficiently full and lucid
to serve as a concrete illustration of his idea. He has schemed out a
group of writings to embody the necessary ideas of the new time in a
form adapted to the current reading public and he considers what he is
doing as a sort of provisional “Bible,” so to speak, for some factors
at least in the Open Conspiracy. As the current reading public changes,
his work will become obsolescent so far as its present form and method
go. But not so far as its substantial method goes. That he believes
will remain.
These writings, this modern Bible scheme, has taken a threefold
form and he believes the mental basis of the Open Conspiracy must
necessarily retain this threefold form if only on account of its
lucidity of presentation. He has already written and published the
opening third of his scheme, first in a full and then in a compacter
book, as the _Outline of History_ and as _A Short History
of the World_. This furnishes a framework of fact within which
the general political ideas of the reader can be put in order. It
presents the history of life as a progress from fragmentation towards
world unity, mental and material. A second third of this statement
of fundamental modern ideas he is now preparing in collaboration
with two more specially qualified writers. This will be a companion
and parallel to the _Outline of History_ and it will be called
_The Science of Life_. It will be a summary of what is known
of the nature and possibilities of life. It will give the data for
personal conduct within a biologically conceived world society, just
as the _Outline of History_ gives a frame for the individual
political life in a unifying world state. The remaining third of this
encyclopædia, the third dealing mainly with inorganic and economic
science, is still a mere sketch and skeleton. It will treat of
economic and social organisation considered as the problem of man’s
exploitation of extraneous energy for the service of the species. Its
prospective title, _The Conquest of Power_, will perhaps convey
the spirit of its design. The general idea of these writings is to
present altogether, first a complete modern world outlook, politically
speaking, then the moral data of the new time, and then the forecast
of a collective economic policy, in a form accessible to a person of
ordinary education. It is the presentation of the threefold basis for a
modern ideology, historical, biological and economic. It is a pioneer
attempt to get this written down connectedly.
For a considerable section of the moderately educated public, with
historical ideas fragmentary and restricted to mere periods and
countries, the compilation of the _Outline of History_ has served
already, and still serves, as a stimulant and a release--and no doubt,
when its work is supplemented by its two companions and when all that
can be done now with life and matter is realised the three will help in
a great number of cases to pull people’s minds together into a shape
that will dispose them to full participation in the new movement. But
at the most exaggerated estimate possible, these works constitute a
merely provisional “Bible,” and the measure of their success will be
marked by the promptitude of their replacement by worthier successors.
Such compilations cannot but have many of the characteristic defects of
pioneer and elementary work; they have often to achieve their ends by
going rather roughly over secondary difficulties that would otherwise
delay their production indefinitely. Yet at the outset they will be
of use in marking out the shape and scope of the general concepts
of the Open Conspiracy. At the outset, the Open Conspiracy, as it
reaches beyond the range of exceptionally well-informed and mentally
active people, must be very largely an educational propaganda of such
material. Only later can it hope to relinquish this part of its task to
renascent educational organisations which can be trusted to ensure a
firm foundation for the modern conception of life.
The form in which the Open Conspiracy will first appear will certainly
not be that of a centralised organisation. Its most natural and
convenient method of coming into being will be the formation of small
groups of friends, family groups, groups of students and employees
or other sorts of people meeting and conversing frequently in the
course of their normal occupations, who will exchange views and find
themselves in agreement upon the general idea. Fundamentally important
issues upon which unanimity must be achieved from the outset are,
firstly, the entirely provisional nature of all existing governments,
and the entirely provisional nature, therefore, of all loyalties
associated therewith; secondly, the supreme importance of population
control in human biology and the possibility it affords us of a
release from the pressure of the struggle for existence on ourselves;
and thirdly, the urgent necessity of protective resistance against
the present traditional drift towards war. People who do not grasp
the vital significance of these test issues do not really begin to
understand the Open Conspiracy. Groups coming into agreement upon these
matters, and upon their general interpretation of history, will be in a
position to seek adherents, enlarge themselves and attempt to establish
communication with kindred groups for common ends. They can take up a
variety of activities to develop a sense and habit of combined action
and feel their way to greater enterprises.
We have shown already that the Open Conspiracy must be heterogeneous in
origin. Young men and young women may be collected into groups arranged
upon lines not unlike those of the Bohemian Sokols or the Italian
Fasci. Such groups may easily have an athletic and recreational side.
These initial groups will be of no uniform pattern. They will be of
very different size, average age, social experience and influence.
Their particular activities will be determined by these things. It
is highly improbable that the name of the Open Conspiracy will be
applied to any of them. That is just a provisional name in these Blue
Prints. Their diverse qualities and influences will express themselves
by diverse titles. A group of students may find itself capable of
little more than self-education and personal propaganda; a group of
middle-class people in a small town may find its small resources fully
engaged at first in such things as, for example, seeing that desirable
literature is available for sale or in the local public library,
protecting books and news-vendors from suppression, or influencing
local teachers. Most parents of school-children can press for the
teaching of universal history and sound biology and protest against the
inculcation of aggressive patriotism. On the other hand, a group of
ampler experience and resources may undertake the printing, publication
and distribution of literature, and exercise considerable influence
upon public opinion in turning education in the right direction. The
League of Nations movement, the Birth Control movement and most radical
and socialist societies are fields into which groups may go to find
adherents more than half prepared for them. The Open Conspiracy is a
fuller and ampler movement into which these incomplete activities must
necessarily merge as its idea takes possession of men’s imaginations.
From the outset, the Open Conspiracy will set its face against
militarism. There is a plain present need for the organisation now,
before war comes again, of an open and explicit refusal to serve in any
war--or at most to serve in war, directly or indirectly, only after the
issue has been fully and fairly submitted to arbitration. The time for
a conscientious objection to war service is manifestly before and not
after the onset of war. People who have acquiesced in a belligerent
foreign policy by silence right up to the onset of war, have little
to complain of if they are then compelled to serve. And a refusal
to participate with one’s country in warfare is a preposterously
incomplete gesture unless it is rounded off by the deliberate advocacy
of a world _pax_, a world economic control and a restrained
population, such as the idea of the Open Conspiracy embodies.
The putting upon record of its members’ reservation of themselves from
any or all of the military obligations that may be thrust upon the
country by military and diplomatic effort, will be, I think, the first
considerable overt act of the Open Conspiracy groups. It will supply
the practical incentive to bring many of them together in the first
place. It will follow closely upon the beginning of the propaganda and
it will probably necessitate the creation of regional or national _ad
hoc_ committees for the establishment of a collective legal and
political defensive for this dissent from current militant nationalism.
It will bring the Open Conspiracy very early out of the province of
discussion into the field of practical conflict. It will from the
outset invest it with a very necessary quality of present applicability.
The anticipatory repudiation of military service, so far as this
last may be imposed by existing governments in their factitious
international rivalries, need not necessarily involve a denial of the
need of military action on behalf of the world commonweal, for the
suppression of nationalist brigandage, nor need it prevent the military
training of members of the Open Conspiracy. It is simply the practical
form of assertion that the normal militant diplomacy and warfare of
the present time are offences against civilisation, processes in
the nature of brigandage, sedition and civil war, and that serious
men cannot be expected to play anything but a rôle of disapproval,
non-participation or active prevention towards them. Our loyalty to our
current government, we would intimate, is subject to its sane and adult
behaviour.
These educational and propagandist groups drawing together into an
organised resistance to militarism and to the excessive control of
individuals by the makeshift governments of to-day, are the possible
and probable form in which the Open Conspiracy will appear in the
world. But they constitute only the earliest and more elementary grade
of its activities, and we will presently go on to consider the more
specialised and constructive forms its effort must evoke. Before doing
so, however, we may say a little more about the structure and method
of these initiatory groups.
Since they are bound to be different and miscellaneous in form, size,
quality and ability, any early attempts to organise them into common
general action or even into regular common gatherings are to be
deprecated. There should be many types of groups. Collective action had
better for a time--perhaps for a long time--be undertaken not through
the merging of groups but through the formation of _ad hoc_
associations for definitely specialised ends. The groups will come into
these associations to make a contribution very much as people come into
limited liability companies, that is to say with a subscription and
not with their whole capital. A comprehensive organization attempting
from the first to cover all activities would necessarily rest upon and
promote one prevalent pattern of group and hamper or estrange the more
original and interesting forms.
There is a detestable sort of energetic human being which preys
upon human societies, delighting in procedure, by-laws, votings,
stereotyping and embarrassing “resolutions,” the “capture” of
committees and organisations, the delegation of powers and suchlike
politicians’ mischief. It is a blighting and accursed type, living
and multiplying in rules and precedents as bugs in old wallpaper. The
less the Open Conspiracy devotes itself to such elaborations in its
gatherings, the better for its spirit. Always it will be well to keep
its comprehensive organisation easy and simple.
Each group should come together and develop its ideas, frankly and
freely, at something like a common level of understanding and in a
friendly atmosphere. It would be advisable that most groups should
assemble with some regularity, and since in a large part of the world
Sunday is recognised as the day set apart from the concerns of the
individual for the consideration of wider issues, that day may well be
the usual day for group gatherings. A weekly meeting at which everyone
attempts to be present seems to be indicated as the normal habit of
a group. A member who finds weekly attendance at his group meeting
irksome, probably belongs to the wrong group and should seek another.
A normal group in the early stage of its existence will find most
of its energy engaged in confirming and cleaning up its conception
of the Open Conspiracy and in dealing with people invited to join
in, trying out its ideas upon interested visitors and so forth.
It will also experiment in outside activities determined by its
special circumstances. The ordinary group must bear in mind that
these practical activities must at first be preparatory and mainly
self-educational. It must not subordinate its general mental task in
them.
The clear conception of the Open Conspiracy is a considerable but
necessary intellectual effort. A group of historical, biological and
economic ideas and interpretations has to be assimilated and they are
not by any means simple and obvious ideas. And in addition--and what
is perhaps the more difficult part--many prevalent habits of mind and
current assumptions have to be got rid of. The conception of the Open
Conspiracy involves, for example, a sceptical and destructive criticism
of personal-immortality religions and also of the sacred formulæ
of communism. It can work, and may go far in certain ways, with
Christians or Communists, but it cannot incorporate them so long as
they are Christians or Communists. Vague goodwill for mankind, or for
progress, and adhesions based on some partial approval of its spirit,
its methods or its objective, are of no real value to an enterprise so
huge in its ultimate intentions.
For the furtherance of its aims, the Open Conspiracy may work in
alliance with all sorts of movements and people, but to take them
into its own essential substance is an altogether different matter.
Propaganda and education are seed-sowing and only in revivalist
religion is an immediate, a simultaneous reaping attempted with the
sowing of the seed. The general run of people are more eager to do than
to understand, and from the beginning of its first overt activities the
Open Conspiracy will have to deal with the friendly advances of those
who will want to share in its effort without any proper assimilation of
the ideas that promote it. This will be another reason for projecting
its practical activities into the form of _ad hoc_ associations,
into which outsiders with different or undeveloped religious,
political, social and philosophical views may come without penetrating
as permanent members into the actual groups, and it will also justify
the helpful participation of the Open Conspiracy groups in definitely
restricted movements which attend only to a portion of its programme.
But many of those who first come into touch with the Open Conspiracy
simply as helpers and allies will no doubt go on to a careful study of
its general concepts and so to complete participation.
The groups of the Open Conspiracy, it may be reiterated, will vary
much in leisure, knowledge, ability and scope. In the student world,
in the associated world of special social, political and philosophical
studies and in the world where speculative thought is combined with
writing and discussion, groups will appear which turn naturally to the
development and expression of the Open Conspiracy as their distinctive
contribution. The concepts of the Open Conspiracy will appear
increasingly in books and periodicals until some of these latter become
recognised definitely as means of communication within the movement. It
will acquire or provoke its own periodic literature. Such circles of
“intelligentsia” will also supply lecturers and leaders of discussions
who will be drawn upon by other groups and group combinations for
visits of stimulus and elucidation.
From that, the spreading, growing and ripening groups will go on to
combine with one another for local and regional meetings. People
who have met first in _ad hoc_ activities will find themselves
developing naturally and progressively into social association
and a loose general organisation with the Open Conspiracy. Such
an organisation should leave the fullest scope for group or even
individual autonomy in particular cases. The only binding restraint
upon independent initiatives in the Open Conspiracy should be its broad
essential requirements, namely:
(1) The complete assertion, practical as well as theoretical, of the
provisional nature of existing governments and of our acquiescence in
them;
(2) The resolve to minimise by all available means the conflicts of
these governments, their militant use of individuals and property and
their interferences with the establishment of a world economic system;
(3) The determination to replace private local or national ownership of
at least credit, transport and staple production by a responsible world
directorate serving the common ends of the race;
(4) The practical recognition of the necessity for world biological
controls, for example, of population and disease;
(5) The support of a minimum standard of individual freedom and welfare
in the world; and
(6) The supreme duty of subordinating the personal life to the creation
of a world directorate capable of these tasks and to the general
advancement of human knowledge, capacity and power.
The admission therewith that our immortality is conditional and lies in
the race and not in our individual selves.
_Chapter XIII_