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

76 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIĆ

of themselves as separate, free agents. This had reached its peak, its limit, in the twentieth century in what Erich Gutkind termed “the zero point of pure isolated individuality’—the narrow competitive individualism characteristic of the west where people sought to increase their individual status by the acquisition of possessions of every sort. This was a major source of conflict and hostility. It was vital therefore that a new kind of consciousness develop to supersede mere individual self-consciousness: a consciousness of the world and humanity as one and indivisible on the basis of the individual’s own self-conscious awareness of the part he or she had to play in the whole. This was the meaning of Mitrinovic’s claim that the world was “one great mind in process of becoming self-conscious.”36

It was the religions of the East that expressed the intuitive awareness of humanity as one. Guided by these belief systems and mythologies, the people of the East led a life ruled less by their conscious analytical reason than by their virtually instinctive sense of being a natural part of a single, divinely-ordained order.3? Christianity, by contrast, was the religion of individuality and reason. No other religion placed the individual person at the centre of its faith, as a vehicle into which God could incarnate, thereby enabling the individual to become an actual aspect of the Godhead. It was through the influence of Christianity that humanity, especially in Europe and the West, had taken on a degree of conscious control over their individual lives, assuming “what had before been only God’s responsibility.”3 Socialism would rest on the foundation of these two orientations towards the worldthe synthesis of the instinctive sense of one world and the will to independent existence. The foundation of Universal Humanity resided in the natural oneness of the world, instinctively recognised in the East, and the freewill and reason of self-conscious individuals in the West, upon whom a key task fell in creating the world organic order.

In stressing that different peoples and races were characterized by different orientations to the world, held different visions of the nature of reality, and thereby had different functions to perform within the world, Mitrinovic was not attempting to rank one race or nation as superior to another. He maintained that in the functional organisation of the world “every race and nation has its indispensable part to play.”3? Moreover:

It is not the virtue of the world-student to take sides in a partisan strife, even when the strife concerns whole races. It is altogether a question of values; and, above all, of values in relation to the intention of the world spirit. The world, we believe, has a divine dharma or purpose... it can be summed up in the phrase, the functional organisation of the world as one. Looking at the problem before us in the light of this affirmation, our judgment of values must depend,