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Nov. 20, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: How to make every second of your life come first
Caroline B. Glick: Whither American Jewry
Nov. 19, 2009
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: Please Listen to this Godcast (5 minutes)
Jonathan Tobin: ADL Crosses the Line with Report Bashing Obama Critics
Nov. 18, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: What Judaism has to say about the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile
JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Sept. 20, 2007 / 8 Tishrei 5768

Who Will Say ‘I Promise to Lay Off’?

By Paul Johnson


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Throughout history writers have drawn attention to the admirable way in which creatures like ants and bees organize their communities. Their cooperation, common spirit and lack of egoism are seen as keys to their success. In the West the founders of the Cooperative Movement and early socialists drew inspiration from the bees and their hives. Ants were less commonly chosen as models by these ideologues (most of whom were pacifists), because ants were seen as warriors as well as workers. But Lenin praised them, the "worker ant" being one of his terms of approval.


In designing their utopian societies, however, these idealists omitted to ask themselves an important question: Where had the tremendous instinct for cooperation that animated the bees' hive and the ants' nest actually gotten the creatures that live in them? Nests and hives have existed for tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of years--and are still the Original Model. Nothing has changed since Aristotle analyzed the activities of ants and Virgil wrote so charmingly of bees. But in the meantime mankind has multiplied, lives three times as long, is bigger and healthier, has turned the luxuries of the rich into the ordinary necessities of the poor, has conquered the planet and is now reaching for the stars.


A Crucial Difference


What is the difference that makes ants and bees engage in endless repetition, remaining static, while humanity relentlessly changes and advances? The difference is summed up in one quality that the culture of the hive and the nest so conspicuously and necessarily lacks: individualism. There is no such creature as an individualist bee or ant. They are not identical; each has a life to live and lose. But none thinks for itself. All accept the burdens and conformity, the monotony and changelessness of communal society. In this instinctual acceptance lies the secret to their successful survival, as well as their failure to advance.


Now, human beings have never mindlessly accepted society as they find it or the methods of doing things as handed down by their forebears. The earliest of archeological traces reveal novelty, be it only in the chipping out of a flint tool or the assembly of a crude necklace of pebbles.


Human beings can often work well in teams, but they are at their most creative alone. That is how Archimedes discovered how a lever works. Copernicus was not part of a university team. Galileo worked out the relationship between the Earth and the Sun on his own. Newton, Darwin and Einstein were men accustomed to long hours engaged in solitary thought, the reclusive examination of specimens or the hermitlike working out of long pages of equations. Only a few hundred yards from where I write this, Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, the key step in the advent of the antibiotic drugs that have prolonged countless lives. At that crucial time Fleming didn't even have a lab assistant.


Most of the industrial pioneers operated by themselves during the most fruitful periods of their careers. This was true even of Thomas Edison, who later became famous for creating a workshop culture in which clever individuals worked together on inventions. But I stress the word "individual," for that is what they remained. As the long list of Nobel Prize winners testifies, the essence of discovery lies in the skill with which men and women find partners for mutual encouragement and critical support while still giving their individual inventiveness full rein.


In material terms individuality is the most precious of all human characteristics. When it is forcibly restrained, as it was in Stalin's Russia or Mao's China, or systematically discouraged, as it was in the India dominated by Nehru's Congress Party, living standards remain low and stagnant. The unleashing of the individual to create and run independent businesses in today's China has demonstrated how quickly such freedom can improve the way in which hundreds of millions of people live. Whenever human beings are permitted to pursue their own ideas and exercise their ingenuity without being bullied into conformity by authority, the results are always surprising and often sensational.


A Critical Choice


The U.S. is approaching a presidential election, with candidates laying out their platforms and policies. Who will speak for the individual or think in terms of what the individual wants from government? That is what interests me. For, just as the U.S. was created by individuals exercising their uniqueness under the rule of law, so the continuance of its prosperity and its power to uphold right in a dangerous world will depend upon whether individualism flourishes or not.


Creative spirits do not need favoritism. They instinctively recoil from special treatment. They can prosper without subsidies or tax relief. All they ask for is the huge, echoing silence of government inactivity. They long for a pristine world in which laws and lawyers do not trip them at every step, where they can work quietly, industriously and productively by themselves. I believe such creative individuals are more numerous than ever and that the opportunities for them to enrich themselves and improve life for all are greater now than at any other time. They ask only for a candidate and future President who will use five vital words: "I promise to lay off."

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Previously:

07/24/07: Greed is safer than power-seeking
04/02/07: Benefactors must be hardheaded
03/07/07: American idealism and realpolitik
11/28/06: Space: Our ticket to survival
10/24/06: Envy is bad economics
10/11/06: Better to Borrow or Lend? Rethinking conventional wisdom
08/22/06: Don't practice legal terrorism
08/08/06: A summer rhapsody for a pedal-bike
08/03/06: Why is there no workable philosophy of music?
07/11/06: Historically speaking, energy crisis is America's opportunity
07/06/06: The misleading dimensions of persons and lives
06/06/06: First editions are not gold
05/23/06: A downright ugly man need never despair of attracting women, even pretty ones
04/25/06: Was Washington right about political parties?
04/12/06: Let's Have More Babies!
04/05/06: For the love of trains
03/29/06: Lincoln and the Compensation Culture
03/22/06: Bottle-beauties and the globalised blond beast
03/15/06: Europe's utopian hangover
03/08/06: Kindly write on only one side of the paper
02/28/06: Creators versus critics
02/21/06: The Rhino Principle

© 2006, Paul Johnson

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