The open conspiracy

This book states as plainly and clearly as possible the essential ideas of my life, the perspective of my world. Everything else that I have been or done seems to me to have been contributory to or illustrative of these ideas and suggestions. My other writings, with hardly an exception, explore, try over, illuminate, comment upon or flower out of the essential matter that I here attempt at last to strip bare to its foundations and state unmistakably. This is my religion. Here are my directive aims and the criteria of all I do.

Since the subject of this book is the whole destiny of man, and the whole duty of man, it will certainly be called a pretentious book. That will be a charge too obvious to miss and we can consider it made. But it is no more pretentious to work upon the whole of life than upon parts and aspects of life; it is a question of scale and method; the intellectual effort needed, the quality of the work required for making the map of a continent may be less than and inferior to that demanded by the chemical examination of a muscle fibre or the investigation of atomic structure. A man is not pretentious because he works with the theodolite instead of the microscope. Some men work upon the bulkier common issues; some upon finer and subtler questions. To every man his task. There is no hierarchy in human thought.

Here, given tentatively, with many evident faults and gaps, is a scheme for all human conduct. It discusses what should man be doing and what should men be doing. It states a general form and direction for the crowding rush of modern ideas and impulsions. I believe that upon such lines as I have drawn, the creative forces in our species can be organised and may be organised, in a comprehensive fight against individual and collective frustration and death. I believe also that there is no other direction but this direction along which mankind can escape from the insecurity of an animal which has been evolved and which may presently be degraded or extinguished in the play of material things. The accident of a great opportunity, I hold, has happened to our kind. It is opportunity and not destiny we face.

So I bear my witness and argue my design. This is, I declare, the truth and the way of salvation. If I could, I would put this book before every mind in the world. I would say, tell me where this is wrong, or tell me why you do not live after these principles.

I pray the reader for a patient reading. This is, I submit, matter of very great moment to him. My phrasing, my idiom of thought may not be his. Will he forgive that for the sake of the substance I am putting before him? It is astir already in many intelligences and it is an amplifying group of ideas. I am merely the observer who notes his own adhesion and draws attention, eagerly and earnestly, to what is going on and to the quality of our present occasion. Will the reader at least try to understand before he refutes? I am discussing here the possibility of an immense and hopeful revolution in human affairs and of an enlivening and ennobling change in our lives. I am discussing whether our species, he and I with it and part of it, is to live or die.