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its nature as openly as this only in societies where it encountered lit–
tle democratic resistance .
It might seem as if extreme poverty contributed to the need for
centralized planning. But economic "backwardness" is simply a good
precursor for nationalization, a kind of baby food. When the culture
of socialist planning has matured, it realizes that it came into this
world to be society's ruler, progress's God, in a civilization created
for its sake .
Stalin's metaphor envisages a society in which his followers can
afford to experiment with variety and depoliticization. But the state
artist remains the engineer of the soul even in a "decentralized"
society . We no longer wish to cut the umbilical cord that connects us
with the whole of society, because our soul is like that of an engineer.
Translated from the Hungarian
by
Katalin
and Stephen Landesmann
