Page:Neurath O. (1942) International Planning for Freedom.pdf/8

Rh trast to Brandenburg-Prussia, where not even one ruler has been killed during the last six centuries. Somebody may be inclined to say that in Prussia more people than in other countries obey the authorities, to such an extent that not even a small group of plotters has a sufficient chance to do anything successfully against the ruler, whereas the Russians became accustomed to rulers being killed; therefore if somebody, sometimes a competitor, wanted to kill a Tsar he was certain to find helpers, often even civil servants, officers and soldiers who supported him. In France the atmosphere looks mostly unstable; three kings, many leaders of the revolution and two presidents have been killed. But in England the story runs differently: up to the middle of the 17th century some royal persons were killed, then the period of the civil wars, rebellions and revolutions gradually ended, and what is usually called 'modern democracy' was formed, continuing along with some features of a developing constitution. One can hardly relate this atmosphere to a certain typical English preparedness to obey. The English and also the Russian transformations teach us that we should not over-estimate the doubtlessly existing relative endurance of such habits of a social pattern.

Should we want to enter into research, we will need some items which might be used as characteristics, e.g. the 'freedom' of a democratic country might be described by the fact that each member is permitted to have more than one loyalty, e.g. to his family, to his local community, to his profession, to his political party, to his church, to his lodge, to an international movement and to his country. One expects, in a democratic country, that a citizen knows how to handle these various loyalties and to assemble them in one way or another; and thus, in general, suspicion and spying do not belong to a democratic atmosphere. In such an atmosphere, the civil servants have sometimes to be tolerant of strange whimsicalities of the citizens, as also citizens towards other citizens. More than that, in such an atmosphere the mode of being tolerant towards a multiplicity of attitudes within one's own behavior sometimes develops. "I am not a wittily constructed work of fiction; I am a human being and full of contradiction."

In a dictatorial one-party state, irrespective of how it may be organized in detail, there is a strong tendency for one, and only one, loyalty to 'devour' all the others, and various loyalties are not permitted to grow up side by side; that would be regarded as a kind of high treason.