We Do Not Need To Be Able

To Consider Powerful Souls As If They Were A Useful Public Resource Is Quite Foreign To Our Customs. In A Small Sense It Is Undemocratic, For It Assumes That Some People Really Know Better In A Way That Must Seem Arbitrary To Most. In A Large Sense It Is Certainly Democratic, In That It Makes The Great Man Serve As A Man.

The Issue Is Not Whether People Are 'good Enough' For A Particular Type Of Society; Rather It Is A Matter Of Developing The Kind Of Social Institutions That Are Most Conducive To Expanding The Potentialities We Have For Intelligence, Grace, Sociability And Freedom.

It Is By Losing Himself In The Objective, In Inquiry, Creation, And Craft, That A Man Becomes Something.

In A Milieu Of Resignation, Where The Young Men Think Of Society As A Closed Room In Which There Are No Values But The Rejected Rat Race, ... It Is Extremely Hard To Aim At Objective Truth Or World Culture. One's Own Products Are Likely To Be Personal Or Parochial.

The Importance Of The Beats Is Twofold: First, They Act Out A Critique Of The Organized System That Everybody In Some Sense Agrees With. But Second-and More Important In The Long Run-they Are A Kind Of Major Pilot Study Of The Use Of Leisure In An Economy Of Abundance.