562
DAVID
T.
BAZELON
Americans and Russians and more to follow-committed ourselves to
scientific industrialism, we necessarily also took on a considerable de–
gree of bureaucracy. The issue is freedom as possible decentralization
of power, opposed to slavery as absolute centralization of power.
How
to decentralize power in a highly organized bureaucratic society is
the
one true issue.
The cold war
is
a holding action to give the West time
in which to come up with fresh solutions to this problem.
The social cost of private control of capital-and non-elected
managers of it-is very high. Some of this cost may well have been a
good buy historically, for the extent of decentralization achieved or
perpetuated by it. But we have such a large, intricate social economy
that it is absolutely necessary that it be effectively and purposefully
organized. The profit motive alone
is
absurdly inept as an exclusive
principle to accomplish this.
Democracy as we believe in it was a result of bourgeois property
and "free" labor; we are now too big to rely on such old-fashioned
grounds for democracy. We have the same problem as the Russians,
with perhaps more unrealized opportunities:
to create a means tor
democratic participation in the institutions and activities of mass in–
dustrial-scientific society.
That is the situation. There is only one other
thing: the inherent freedom of Western culture available to those very
few men who participate in the tradition as free-thinking individuals.
They can
be
counted in the tens of thousands throughout the Western
world; there are three billion people on the planet and more every
second. I know many cultivated intellectuals believe that mention of
these facts in conjunction is not much more than a sentimental refer–
ence. They are wrong.
A final word on this Russian-American comparison: generally
speaking,
other people are not that different.
Our insistence that they
are is just one of the means we have for not understanding them-and,
consequently, ourselves. We suffer from a deadly drive toward Rus–
sophobic paranoia, which is especially dangerous because the cure is
apt to
be
worse than the disease. Paranoia involves a deep identifica–
tion with the hated object, particularly as its power is revealed by a
cumulation of successes. The hate returns more and more to the fear
that created it, and the feared object looms so large on the emotional
screen that an identity with it, however distorted, is the only remaining
means of making the world bearable. There is a deep well of weakness
in this posture, as if fear and hatred are welcomed because the truth
cannot be faced.
So let's face the truth: Two hundred million Russians are not
