For the immense wealth of what has been produced in the past is precisely what makes it illegitimate for us to assign a limit in advance to what man is capable of producing in the future; or to assume that a time will come when, man’s capacity for creative innovation being exhausted, he will be doomed merely to repeat himself throughout all eternity. Thus we come to conceive of man not as an agglomeration of finite specifiable elements, but rather as an infinitely flexible, protean force, capable of appearing in innumerable guises, according to the perenially changing demands of his circumstances. Far from its being the case that humanity in its entirety achieves full fruition at some one particular moment of history, there is in each of us a multitude of unrealised potentialities, seeds which may be dormant in the ground for ever, but which may also blossom into life if called upon by the force of circumstance.

You’ve asked me, ‘What might you be?’ Now I answer you: ‘I am a Wobbly.’ I mean this spiritually and politically. In saying this I refer less to political orientation that to political ethos, and I take Wobbly to mean one thing: the opposite of bureaucrat. […] I am a Wobbly, personally, down deep, and for good. I am outside the whale, and I got that way through social isolation and self-help. But do you know what a Wobbly is? It’s a kind of spiritual condition. Don’t be afraid of the word, Tovarich. A Wobbly is not only a man who takes orders from himself. He’s also a man who’s often in the situation where there are no regulations to fall back upon that he hasn’t made up himself. He doesn’t like bosses –capitalistic or communistic – they are all the same to him. He wants to be, and he wants everyone else to be, his own boss at all times under all conditions and for any purposes they may want to follow up. This kind of spiritual condition, and only this, is Wobbly freedom.

‘No man is an island.’ Our values, our attitudes, and our customs derive from our interaction with others and, more generally, from social milieus and our society. Yet milieus and societies differ vastly, and ‘proper’ behavior in one context may be seen as ‘strange’ and even ‘uncivilized’ in another.

The point is that today the apparatus to which the individual is to adjust and adapt himself is so rational that individual protest and liberation appear not only as hopeless but as utterly irrational. The system of life created by modern industry is one of the highest expediency, convenience, and efficiency. Reason, once defined in these terms, becomes equivalent to an activity which perpetuates this world. Rational behavior becomes identical with a matter-of-factness which teaches reasonable submissiveness and thus guarantees getting along in the prevailing order.

The Puritan wanted to be a person with a vocational calling; we must be. For to the extent that asceticism moved out of the monastic cell and was carried over into the lif e of work in a vocational calling, and then commenced to rule over this-worldly morality, it helped to do its part to build the mighty cosmos of the modern economic order - namely, an economy bound to the technical and economic conditions of mechanied, machine-based production. This cosmos today determines the style of life of all individuals born into this grinding mechanism, and not only those directly engaged in economically productive activity. It does so with overwhemling force - and perhaps it will continue to do so until the last ton of fossil fuel has burnt to ashes. The concern for material goods, according to Baxter, should lie on the shoulders of his saints like “a lightweight coat that one can throw off at any time.” Yet fate allowed this coat to become a steel-hard casing. To the exent that asceticism undertook to transform and influence the wolrd, the world’s material goods acquired an increasing and, in the end, inescapable power over people - as never before in history.

If one acquires the habit of contemplating vast horizons, overall views, and fine generalisations. one can no longer without impatience allow oneself to be confined within the narrow limits of a special task. Such a remedy (a liberal education) would therefore only make specialisation inoffensive by making it intolerable, and in consequence more or less impossible.

The picture of another man that a man gains through personal contact with him is based on certain distortions. These are not simple mistakes resulting from incomplete experience, defective vision, or sympathetic or antipathetic prejudices. They are fundamental changes in the quality of the actual object perceived, and they are of two types. We see the other person generalized, in some measure. This is so, perhaps, because we cannot fully represent to ourselves an individuality which deviates from our own. Any recreation of a person is determined by one’s similarity to him. To be sure, similarity is by no means the only condition of psychological insight, for dissimilarity, too, seems required in order to gain distance and objectivity…It seems, however, that every individual has in himself a core of individuality which cannot be recreated by anybody else whose core differs qualitatively from his own. And the challenge to recreate is logically incompatible with psychological distance and objective judgment which are also bases for representing another. We cannot completely know the individuality of another.