MINORITIES VERSUS MAJORITIES.

"Why do you not say how things will be operated under Anarchism?" is
a question I have had to meet thousands of times. Because I believe
that Anarchism can not consistently impose an iron-clad program or
method on the future. The things every new generation has to fight,
and which it can least overcome, are the burdens of the past, which
holds us all as in a net. Anarchism, at least as I understand it,
leaves posterity free to develop its own particular systems, in
harmony with its needs. Our most vivid imagination can not foresee
the potentialities of a race set free from external restraints.
How, then, can any one assume to map out a line of conduct for those
to come? We, who pay dearly for every breath of pure, fresh air,
must guard against the tendency to fetter the future. If we succeed
in clearing the soil from the rubbish of the past and present, we
will leave to posterity the greatest and safest heritage of all ages.

The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out
one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or
personality. Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance, is decried as a
hater of the weak because he believed in the UEBERMENSCH. It does
not occur to the shallow interpreters of that giant mind that this
vision of the UEBERMENSCH also called for a state of society which
will not give birth to a race of weaklings and slaves.

It is the same narrow attitude which sees in Max Stirner naught but
the apostle of the theory "each for himself, the devil take the hind
one." That Stirner's individualism contains the greatest social
possibilities is utterly ignored. Yet, it is nevertheless true that
if society is ever to become free, it will be so through liberated
individuals, whose free efforts make society.

These examples bring me to the objection that will be raised to
MINORITIES VERSUS MAJORITIES. No doubt, I shall be excommunicated as
an enemy of the people, because I repudiate the mass as a creative
factor. I shall prefer that rather than be guilty of the demagogic
platitudes so commonly in vogue as a bait for the people. I realize
the malady of the oppressed and disinherited masses only too well,
but I refuse to prescribe the usual ridiculous palliatives which
allow the patient neither to die nor to recover. One cannot be too
extreme in dealing with social ills; besides, the extreme thing is
generally the true thing. My lack o