Erich Gutkind : as prophet of the New Age

some universally acknowledged meaning and value and direction?

We are beginning, says Gutkind, to experience new needs. The need for material wealth is still with us, but it could be amply satisfied if we would learn to live together in unity and distribute to all mankind the wealth which we could produce. Poverty was once valuable in the development of man, because it also taught him to develop spiritual qualities in defiance of bodily discomfort. Capitalism was similarly a necessary stage in the development of individuality. But poverty no longer has any value for the building of man’s character. It merely delays the time when men will urgently feel new needs beyond. So long as there is poverty, material wealth will continue to be what men chiefly desire. This is the meaning of socialism today. And how could it be otherwise? You cannot tell people who have not enough to eat that they should have desires beyond food. But the paradox is that not until enough people feel over-full with the satisfaction of their worldly demands will they long for the new socialism which will make possible the free distribution of wealth to the many. Not until man grows weary of the world which he has built up, will he want to break into new realms beyond.

But where? And into what? Only if you have ever asked this question, only if you have at some time felt in yourself that man’s present life is narrow or empty or meaningless and that you wish to burst out into the skies beyond—only then has Gutkind anything to say to you. If you have not, if youare still driven by the impulses of an acquisitive society to fight to accumulate things for your personal satisfaction, or knowledge for your own self-esteem, or power or popularity to puff yourself up with, or any of the things the popular press and the advertisers tell you you ought to want, then Gutkind has no message for you. “The lower paradises,’ he says in World Coriquest, ‘must be outlived through satiety’. He does not moralise at you or tell you that you ought to rise above such things. He is not preaching some kind of asceticism. Rather he is proclaiming a new wealth and luxury and super-abundance so far beyond the present worldly wealth, that you cannot imagine it unless you are, as he puts it, ‘suffocating in the straitness of a wantless society’ and ‘yearning for new needs, immense and abysmal needs’.

He compares this state to the state of a seed which has grown

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