2 Living in Revolution
ceive our revelations of what there is to know and to be-
come. Real living is incurably reciprocal.
This revolutionary idea is nothing new. In like manner
the radical discovery that the world was round was noth-
ing new. The earth had been round for a long time before
the fact became plain enough to revolutionize navigation.
All discovery is no more than a fresh grasp of wτhat was
always so, but overlooked.
In our western world we have all been living a great lie,
like the lie that the world was flat. The long battle to es-
tablish freedom for individuals obscured this basic truth
that no man is self-made, self-sufficient, and self-determin-
ing. We are each of us rooted and grounded in relations.
As John Donne put it, “No man is an island, but part of
the main.” Totalitarian dictators have called our attention
to the fact that the machine age has produced a new situa-
tion where the relatedness of men becomes so inescapable
that something collective has to be done about it. To be
sure, they have capitalized on this discovery and made a
racket of it, like modern bandits taking advantage of the
newest weapons. But no scramble of individuals, however
free, can meet the revolution which they lead. The lie of
individualism cannot stand against the connectedness of
human life.
On the other hand mere connectedness, wrongly under-
stood, may become another lie. Organization may be wor-
shipped as a false God until the result is the conversion of
society into an impersonal chain-gang, ruled by gangster
cunning and the ethics of conspiracy.
Our business is not to condemn the revolution but to
meet it, learn to live in it, and give it a right chance to
transform our thought and practice from the bottom up.
★
First we must see what it actually means to be tied to-
gether. In this field many Americans may feel like colts,