en I saw them, moreover, they were not dancing; nor were they working.
They were doing nothing. Which, in my opinion (and I trust yours), was
the finest thing they could do.

THE SECTARIAN OF SOCIETY

A fixed creed is absolutely indispensable to freedom. For while men are
and should be various, there must be some communication between them if
they are to get any pleasure out of their variety. And an intellectual
formula is the only thing that can create a communication that does not
depend on mere blood, class, or capricious sympathy. If we all start
with the agreement that the sun and moon exist, we can talk about our
different visions of them. The strong-eyed man can boast that he sees
the sun as a perfect circle. The shortsighted man may say (or if he is
an impressionist, boast) that he sees the moon as a silver blur. The
colour-blind man may rejoice in the fairy-trick which enables him to
live under a green sun and a blue moon. But if once it be held that
there is nothing but a silver blur in one man's eye or a bright circle
(like a monocle) in the other man's, then neither is free, for each is
shut up in the cell of a separate universe.

But, indeed, an even worse fate, practically considered, follows from
the denim of the original intellectual formula. Not only does the
individual become narrow, but he spreads narrowness across the world
like a cloud; he causes narrowness to increase and multiply like a weed.
For what happens is this: that all the shortsighted people come together
and build a city called Myopia, where they take short-sightedness for
granted and paint short-sighted pictures and pursue very short-sighted
policies. Meanwhile all the men who can stare at the sun get together on
Salisbury Plain and do nothing but stare at the sun; and all the men who
see a blue moon band themselves together and assert the blue moon, not
once in a blue moon, but incessantly. So that instead of a small and
varied group, you have enormous monotonous groups. Instead of the
liberty of dogma, you have the tyranny of taste.

Allegory apart, instances of what I mean will occur to every one;
perhaps the most obvious is Socialism. Socialism means the ownership
by the organ of government (whatever it is) of all things necessary to
production. If a man claims to be a Socialist in that sense he can be
any kind of man he likes in any other sense—a bookie, a Mahatma,
a man about town, an archbishop, a Margate nigger. W