Page:Gregg - Gandhiism versus socialism.pdf/25

 bilitating. Gandhi is himself a man of action, and he asks action from all his followers.

There is another value prevalent all through the West, in Communist Russia as well as in capitalist Europe and America. It is the idea of large size. People highly value great size in all sorts of organizations. They strive for vastness in all enterprises. They aim to create bigger and bigger associations of all sorts—cities, churches, industrial corporations, newspapers, farms, universities, rail roads, banks, states and empires. This is more than mere greed. People feel comforted merely to associate with some large organization. This emphasis on size is probably largely a result of the growth of modern credit and the development of power-driven machinery and science. It is perhaps also a form of megalomania.

Gandhi mistrusts these huge aggregations and the bureaucracies they inevitably entail. He believes instead that life is best when lived in small groups such as villages. He recognizes that the villages must be integrated into larger units—political, economic and social. But he would have that integration much looser and freer than that to which we are accustomed in the West.

It seems probable that Western people believe strongly in large, closely-knit, highly centralized political organizations partly because Western States are all based on military violence. In a crisis the Western States all rely on guns, poison gas and bayonets as the ultimate control. They all spend a large part of their income on armament. Indeed it seems that, although large-scale organization in some ways tends toward security and stability, large size