ABSTRACT
If a planned economy, even under democratic collectivism, were to produce merely a more orderly and mechanized world, without stress and friction but also without a joyousness and a heightened feeling of creation, then a planned economy would be only a cold achievement in blueprints. The state is not only power. It is not only order. It is also creativeness and comradeship and warm human decency. The quality of a culture must, of course, be sought in the achievements of isolated individuals, in the level of creativeness of an élite; but it must above all be sought in the conditions of the living and striving of the mass. The biggest obstacle that stands between us and such a concept of humanism is the esteem many of us feel for the elites of the world and the contempt that some of us still have for the common man.
