The Decadent Worker

“Democracy means a belief that people are worthy; it means trust in the good faith and the dignity of the averae man. The chief reason why the average man is not now worthy of more trust… is simply that he has not been trusted enough in the past.” — Randolph Bourne

“That same freedom which we demand for ourselves, we must grant to every one. Instead of falling with spite upon those who vary from the textbook rules of life, we must look upon their acts as new and very interesting hypotheses to be duly tested and judged by the way they work when carried out into action. Nonconformity, instead of being irritating and suspicious, as it is now to us, will be distinctly pleasurable, as affording more material for our understanding of life.” — Randolph Bourne

“Bourne had little patience with those who argued that the methods of rational science, if judiciously applied by disinterested experts, would lead to a more ordered and controlled society. ‘One does not have to live very long,’ he wrote in reference to the progressives’ programs that were designed to enhance social and economic efficiency, ‘to see that this belief in the power and desirability of controlling things is an illusion.’ Because, like James, Bourne was aware of the limits of scientific inquiry to determine the truth, he urged fellow radicals to explore ‘the boundless puzzling world’ without maps and charts, guides that, in the final analysis, he felt, offered little more than the satisfying fantasy of security and control. ‘It isn’t any static life to which we must get adjusted,’ he argued, ‘but a lot of moving tendencies.’ Although Bourne did not know it, the artists at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, 291, based their new revolutionary work on the same principle.” (p. 43)

“As early as 1913 he (Bourne) pointed out that ’society… is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue it likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.’” (p. 45)

“Following the romantics of the nineteenth century, Bourne declared that children were not empty vessels into which authorities should pour wisdom and knowledge but rather were active, creative, even superior individuals who needed only opportunities for personally directed growth.” (pp. 55-6)

“Bourne’s ‘Trans-National America,’ an important essay inspired by the feverish debate over the war and Americanization of 1916, expressed his opinion that the immigrants possessed an antidote to the sterility of Anglo-Saxon culture. He wrote that they represented the injection of a new vitality into the nation that might yet prevent America from becoming ‘a tasteless, colorless fluid uniformity.’ Bourn proposed instead that the United States develop into what he called ‘a cosmopolitan federation of national cultures.’” (p. 66)

“War is the health of the State.” — Randolph Bourne

These quotations are from The Lyrical Left by Edward Abrahams (University Press of Virginia, 1986) - Atlanta Public Library Central: 700.973.

LANGUAGE IS THEFT - Astrology: Conspiracy theories about the stars. — Ho Chi Zen

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