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

90 · LIFE AND IDEAS OE MITRINOVIĆ

their selfish, egocentric life goals, or destruction would follow. The central problem of society was the individual. If there was to be social change, there must first be a change of attitude on the part of individuals. Thus, if the first part of Adlers programme as an individual Psychologist was to help create self-reliant individuals who were willing and able to take responsibility for their own lives, the complement to this was to help these self-reliant individuals to cooperate with their fellows and neighbours for the welfare of society as a whole. For Adler the meaning or purpose of life was cooperation:

... Our functions and feelings are developed rightly if a person is concerned about the whole of mankind and feels the need for cooperation.!°

He fully endorsed Dostoyevsky’s proposition that “each is responsible to all for all.”

On the question of how to proceed, Adler adopted an essentially pragmatic approach which recommended his work to Mitrinovic. No one possessed absolute truth. “There are,” he wrote, “as many meanings to life as there are human beings .. . True means true for mankind, true for the purposes and aims of human beings.”!! According to Mitrinovi¢ the real significance of Adler lay in the fact that he emphasised in modern and scientific terms what religions had always known, that humanity was the source of all meaning and value, that “man, with his free will, can produce every vision, can draw every power from himself.”!

For Mitrinovic the world was out of joint, a world in which individuals, groups and nations were struggling against each other for their selfaggrandisement rather than for the sake of humanity as a whole. Moreover, people had lost confidence in their individual and collective ability to shape the world according to their ideals.

We have lost the notion that the whole is more important than the parts . . . We, as a race, especially in the Western civilization, are losing confidence in our whole being. We doubt the whole concept of free will, and the possibility of arranging the human household and the organic order of mankind according to our human intuition and needs, although we are the sovereign beings and the world is for our needs, where we can realise our own ends.!3

Humanity itself was the only saviour of the world. A key responsibility therefore fell upon those who realised this fact:

... Only that which is really best, only that which is self-conscious, and only that which believes in mankind, has the supreme value; that alone can govern