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

192 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

combines a respect for the integrity of the individual with an holistic awareness of the inter-relationship between all things, then a question mark must be raised about the very survival of humanity. The exploitation of the working Classes in the industrialised world is mirrored in the relationship between the developed and under-developed world, and is reflected everywhere in the way we treat the natural resources of our globe—whilst the threat of nuclear holocaust continues to hang over us all. When we cast round for ways out of this state of virtual barbarism, what do we find? On the whole the answers and remedies we get from the established ‘respectable’ and conventional authorities and technological élites are programmes of lesser evils, evils which can hardly be distinguished from each other. There is a crying need in the world for some wider, deeper vision. Without the kind of vision displayed by people like Mitrinovi¢ we shall lose any sense of how we might live or how we ought to live. Karl Mannheim observed that with the relinquishment of utopias, people would lose the will to shape history and thereby their ability to control it** That other great German sociologist, Max Weber, affirmed that “all historical experience confirms the truth that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached for the impossible.”** To be ‘utopian’ is to be out of step with taken for granted views of the world, to be utopian is to believe in the human power to transform the given in the direction of a potential reality—a ‘heaven on earth, a true commonwealth. Whatever sense one makes of the particulars of Mitrinovi¢’s thought—however inappropriate to the modern age some of his images might seem—the lesson we should take from his life is to dare to dream about how the world might be reconstructed, and the courage to work towards that vision in true fellowship with those around us.