1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
|
---
title: 20191227T104929
tags: stuff;
---
It is true that, under existing conditions, a few men who have had private means of their own, such as Byron, Shelly, Browning, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and others, have been able to realize their personality, more or less completely. Not one of these men did a single day's work for hire. They were relieved from poverty. They had immense advantage. The question is whether it would be for the good of Individualism that such an advantage should be taken away. Let us suppose that it is taken away. What happens then to Individualism? How will it benefit?
It will benefit in this way. Under the new conditions Individualism will be far freer, far finer, and far more intensified than it is now. I am not talking about the great imaginatively realized Individualism of such poets as I have mentioned, but of the great actual Individualism latent and potential in mankind generally. **For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain, not growth, its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.** One's regret is that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful to him - in which, in fact, he misses the true pleasure and joy of living. An enormously wealthy merchant may be - often is - at every moment of his life at the mercy of things that are not under his control. If the wind blows an extra point or so, or the weather suddenly changes, or some trivial thing happens, his ship may go down, his speculations may go wrong, and he finds himself a poor man, with his social position quite gone. Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. **Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What man really has, is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.**
*The Soul of Man (Under Socialism)*, Oscar Wilde
|
