The Burning Question of Original Sin

Extract

That there is something seriously wrong with the world and that this could and should be put right, are two commonplaces so commonly held as to verge on triteness. This universal consensus however is quickly turned into a discord of clamant and contradictory voices, when, preparatory to any attempt at curing the ill, an explanation is sought of the cause and origin of it.

On the one hand there is Jean Jacques Rousseau and all his spiritual descendants, who premising that man himself was originally perfect, happy and free, believe that man lost his happiness and his freedom when first he bowed to authority. In this line of thought we get philosophical anarchists, like Kuropatkin and Tolstoy, who go the whole way, maintaining that if only one did away with all government all ills would automatically disappear too and the Golden Age of humanity reappear. Some do not go as far as that, though agreeing that government must be reduced to a minimum if things are to right themselves: to which tribe belong Proudhon and the syndicalists who consider local government permissible but rule out anything approaching government on a national scale. There are also the doctrinaire liberals who, without becoming specific, hold generally that the less government there is the better. From this we shade off into rugged individualism and into the belief that, to make the world happy, all that is needed is to give it the vote.