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

144 . LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIĆ

of those around them doing likewise is hopelessly naive. It is the rock upon which many utopian experiments have foundered. Somehow or other this group of people would have to agree to organise themselves functionally. Each would have to freely choose their function, and their choice be freely accepted by the others. Each would have to be completely satisfied with the functions chosen, foregoing any claim to impose their demands on others against their will.

The possibilities for mal-functioning and conflict are endless. Apart from personal conflicts between individuals, some would be envious of the functions of others; some functions would appear more ‘glamorous,’ more intrinsically rewarding, or more powerful than others. Some, out of dissatisfaction with their function or out of a feeling of inadequacy would refuse to play their part. Some would try to obstruct others in the performance of their function. Some would invest so much of their personality and sense of individual worth in a single function that they would be unable to cooperate satisfactorily in the functions of others. Moreover, the organic social order to which Mitrinovié aspired could not be imposed on people by force or coercion. It could only exist on the basis of the free will and mutual cooperation of the participants.

Clearly, then, world change required self change as the columns of New Britain Weekly had pronounced. To achieve an organic social order individuals would have to rise to a higher order of consciousness, to transcend the narrow confines of their individual consciousness. Such a level of consciousness would involve people living as much in and for the rest of humanity as they did in and for themselves. In practice it meant people living as much for those with whom they associated as for themselves, or, as Polonius advised in Hamlet, “to thine own self be true. And it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” Such an injunction rested on a deep faith in the ultimate unity of humanity—that if anyone expressed their true will and remained true to the innermost promptings of their soul, then their will would not prove to be incompatible in the final analysis with the reality of another person. For, as Weininger wrote:

_.. there is only one duty and only one morality. Man acts either morally or immorally, and if he is moral towards himself he is moral towards others.!

But such a change of consciousness could not be achieved overnight. How was such a transformation in the stance people adopted towards themselves and the rest of the world to be attained? Furthermore, even if an organic social order was created, even if the institutions of society were transformed in the ways advocated by New Britain, there would still