Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

THE SENATE INITIATIVE 143

science, the arts, education and so forth is the ultimate consumer of the products of the economic system. The proper concern of politics is with human relationships and in facilitating the distribution of the outputs of the economic system for the sake of the cultural realm. Each and every individual plays a part in each of these three spheres of society. Consequently any organic ordering of social life would need to take account of the fact that each individual has certain definite responsibilities and tasks in the realms of economics, culture and politics and requires the necessary power and authority to freely fulfill such functions to the best of their abilities.

In developing his vision of an organic social order Mitrinovié was seeking to sketch out the guiding principles of the ideal society: a society made up of free and autonomous individuals where chaos is avoided not by the imposition of external force and central state coercion but by the feeling of unity between all members, the awareness that they are all part of and responsible for each other and that they are all equal to each other. The only basis for such a society was an organic one. The unity of the organism was the only kind compatible with such an anarchistic vision. An organism is not governed by any authority imposed from above. Each cell is free to do its ‘own thing’ as a function within the whole. There is no conflict between the self-fulfillment of the individual cell and its function within the whole organism of which it is a part. Each cell is equal to those around it, there are no top or central cells which regulate the functioning of all the others. The model of the organism provided Mitrinovié with a vision of society of complete unity and complete individual autonomy—a harmonious social order which would not be free of conflict but which, like the harmony in music, would be maintained so long as the tension between conflicting notes was held in balance.

Stated so baldly, of course, such a vision can be quickly dismissed as so much idealistic, wishful and misguided thinking. Apart from anything else there is a fundamental difference between a natural organism and society that resides in the nature of their constituent ‘cells.’ The cell in the human body or any other natural organism lacks the essentially human characteristic of being able to interpret its own life and that around it in creatively symbolic terms. People are not programmed. They create their own activities according to their own interpretations of their own interests in the situations in which they find themselves. It is not ‘naturally given’ to human beings to act in pre-ordained fashion in ways that will further the general well-being of the collectivity of which they are a part. The idea that a group of random individuals could get together and immediately create the perfect anarchist society simply by each of them doing their own thing and being tolerant