The New State · Part I · Chapter 13 (2/2)

We know what happened on that lonely island in a distant sea when the young Prince came to the people of the Kingdom of Cards, who had always lived by Rules, and taught them to live by their Ichcha, their will. Images became men and women, rules gave place to wills, the caste of the Court cards was lost, a mechanism changed into life. The inhabitants of the Kingdom of Cards, who had never thought, who had never made a decision, learned the royal power of choosing for themselves. Regulations were abandoned, and the startling discovery was made that they could walk in any direction they chose. This is what we need to learn⁠—that we can walk in any direction we choose. We are not a pack of cards to be put here and there, to go always in rows, to totter and fall when we are not propped up. We must obey our Ichcha.

Already the change has begun. I have said that we are beginning to recognize this power⁠—there are many indications that we are beginning to live this power. We are no longer willing to leave human affairs to “natural” control: we do not want war because it is “natural” to fight; we do not want a haphazard population at the dictates of “nature.” We no longer believe that sickness and poverty are sent by God; people are being taught that they need not be sick, that it is largely in their own hands, their own collective hands (social hygiene etc.). Modern charity is not aimed at relieving individual poverty, but at freeing the individual from the particular enslavement which has produced his poverty, in freeing society from the causes which produce poverty at all.33

Our once-honored blind forces are more and more losing their mastery over us. We are at this moment, however, in a difficult transition period. We are “freer” than ever before; the trouble is we do not know what to do with this freedom. It is easy to live the moral, the “social,” life when it consists in following a path carefully marked out for us, but the task given us today is to revalue all the world values, to steer straight on and on into the unknown⁠—a gallant forth-faring indeed. But conscious evolution, the endless process of a perfect coordinating, demands vital people. War is the easy way: we take to war because we have not enough vitality for the far more difficult job of agreeing. So also that kind of religion which consists of contemplation of otherworldliness is the easy way, and we take to that when we have not enough vitality deliberately to direct our life and construct our world. It takes more spiritual energy to express the group spirit than the particularist spirit. This is its glory as well as its difficulty. We have to be higher order of beings to do it⁠—we become higher order of beings by doing it. And so the progress goes on forever: it means life forever in the making, and the creative responsibility of every man.

Conscious evolution is the key to that larger view of democracy which we are embracing today. The key? Every man sharing in the creative process is democracy; this is our politics and our religion. People are always inquiring into their relation to God. God is the moving force of the world, the ever-continuing creating where men are the co-creators. “Chaque homme fait dieu, un peu, avec sa vie,” as one of the most illumined of the younger French poets says.34 Man and God are correlates of that mighty movement which is Humanity self-creating. God is the perpetual Call to our self-fulfilling. We, by sharing in the life-process which binds all together in an active, working unity are all the time sharing in the making of the Universe. This thought calls forth everything heroic that is in us; every power of which we are capable must be gathered to this glorious destiny. This is the True Democracy.35