Literature/1928/Wells


 * The Open Conspiracy: What Are We To Do With Our Lives (revised 1931, 1933)
 * http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0201081.txt

Excerpts
  The Present Crisis in Human Affairs  The Idea of the Open Conspiracy  We Have to Clear and Clean Up Our Minds  The Revolution in Education  Religion in the New World  Modern Religion is Objective  What Mankind Has to do  Broad Characteristics of a Scientific World Commonweal  No Stable Utopia is Now Conceivable  The Open Conspiracy is not to be thought of as a single Organization; it is a conception of life out of which efforts, organizations and new orientations will arise.  Forces and Resistances in the Great Modern Communities now prevalent, which are antagonistic to The Open Conspiracy. The War with Tradition  The Resistances of the less industrialized peoples to the drive of The Open Conspiracy  Resistances and antagonistic forces in our conscious and unconscious selves  The Open Conspiracy begins as a movement of discussion, explanation, and propaganda  Early constructive work of The Open Conspiracy <li> Existing and developing movements which are contributory to The Open Conspiracy and which must develop a common consciousness. The Parable of Provinder Island <li> The creative home, social group and school: the present waste of Idealistic Will <li> Progressive development of the activities of The Open Conspiracy into a World Control and Commonweal: the hazards of the attempt <li> Human life in the coming World Community </OL>
 * The world is undergoing immense changes. Never before have the conditions of life changed so swiftly and enormously as they have changed for mankind in the last fifty years. [...] We are only now beginning to realize the force and strength of the storm of change that has come upon us.
 * It seemed to me that all over the world intelligent people were waking up to the indignity and absurdity of being endangered, restrained, and impoverished, by a mere uncritical adhesion to traditional governments, traditional ideas of economic life, and traditional forms of behaviour, and that these awaking intelligent people must constitute first a protest and then a creative resistance to the inertia that was stifling and threatening us.
 * Let us get together with other people of our sort and make over the world into a great world-civilization that will enable us to realize the promises and avoid the dangers of this new time.
 * It amounted to a protest, first mental and then practical, it amounted to a sort of unpremeditated and unorganized conspiracy, against the fragmentary and insufficient governments and the wide-spread greed, appropriation, clumsiness, and waste that are now going on. But unlike conspiracies in general this widening protest and conspiracy against established things would, by its very nature, go on in the daylight, and it would be willing to accept participation and help from every quarter. It would, in fact, become an "Open Conspiracy," a necessary, naturally evolved conspiracy, to adjust our dislocated world.
 * Fundamentally the Open Conspiracy must be an intellectual rebirth.
 * The new world demand new schools [...] to give everyone a sound and thorough mental training and equip everyone with clear ideas about history, about life, and about political and economic relationships instead of the rubbishy head-content at present prevalent.
 * A lucid, dispassionate, and immanent criticism is the primary necessity, the living spirit of a world civilization. The Open Conspiracy is essentially such a criticism, and the carrying out of such a criticism into working reality is the task of the Open Conspiracy.
 * We know nowadays that the nineteenth century expended a great wealth of intelligence upon a barren controversy between Individualism and Socialism. They were treated as mutually exclusive alternatives instead of being questions of degree. Human society has been, is, and always must be an intricate system of adjustments between unconditional liberty and the disciplines and subordinations of co-operative enterprise.
 * In nearly every country of the world there is a vast degrading and dangerous cultivation of loyalty and mechanical subservience to flags, uniforms, presidents, and kings.
 * The Open Conspiracy is necessarily opposed to all such implacable loyalties, and still more so to the aggressive assertion and propaganda of such loyalties. When these things take the form of suppressing reasonable criticism and forbidding even the suggestion of other forms of government, they become plainly antagonists to any comprehensive project for human welfare.
 * But there remain a net of special classes in every community, from kings to custom-house officers, far more deeply involved in patriotism because it is their trade and their source of honour, and prepared in consequence with an instinctive resistance to any reorientation of ideas towards a broader outlook. In the case of such people no mental sanitation is possible without dangerous and alarming changes in their way of living. For the majority of these patriots by metier, the Open Conspiracy unlocks the gates leading from a fussy paradise of eminence, respect, and privilege, and motions them towards an austere wilderness which does not present even the faintest promise of a congenial, distinguished life for them.
 * From such classes of patriots by metier, it is manifest that the Open conspiracy can expect only opposition.
 * This tangle of traditions and loyalties, of interested trades and professions, of privileged classes and official patriots, this complex of human beings embodying very easy and natural and time-honoured ideas of eternal national separation and unending international and class conflict, is the main objective of the Open Conspiracy in its opening phase. This tangle must be disentangled as the Open Conspiracy advances, and until it is largely disentangled and cleared up that Open Conspiracy cannot become anything very much more than a desire and a project.
 * To begin with, the Open Conspiracy is necessarily a group of ideas.
 * The Open Conspiracy itself can never be imprisoned and fixed in the form of an organization, but everywhere Open Conspirators should be organizing themselves for educational reform.
 * And also within the influence of this comprehensive project there will be all sorts of groupings for study and progressive activity. One can presuppose the formation of groups of friends, of family groups, of student and employees or other sorts of people, meeting and conversing frequently in the course of their normal occupations, who will exchange views and find themselves in agreement upon this idea of a constructive change of the world as the guiding form of human activities.
 * To-day it may seem no more than a visionary idea; to-morrow it may be realized as a world-wide force of opinion and will. People will pass [...] from saying that the Open Conspiracy is impossible to saying that it has always been plain and clear to them, that to this fashion they have shaped their lives as long as they can remember.
 * The new life that the Open Conspiracy struggles to achieve through us for our race is first a life of liberations.
 * The oppression of incessant toil can surely be lifted from everyone, and the miseries due to a great multitude of infections and disorders of nutrition and growth cease to be part of human experience.
 * And nor only from natural evils will man be largely free. He will not be left with his soul tangled, haunted by monstrous and irrational fears and a prey to malicious impulse.
 * Our battle is with cruelties and frustrations, stupid, heavy, and hateful things from which we shall escape at last, less like victors conquering a world than like sleepers awaking from a nightmare in the dawn. From any dream [...] one can escape by realizing that it is a dream; by saying "I will awake."
 * The Open Conspiracy is the awaking of mankind from a nightmare, an infantile nightmare, of the struggle for existence and the inevitability of war. The light of day thrusts between our eyelids, and the multitudinous sounds of morning clamor in our ears. A time will come when men will sit with history before them or with some old newspaper before them and ask incredulously, "Was there ever such a world?"


 * See more
 * http://www.panarchy.org/wells/conspiracy.1933.html

Wikimedia

 * World government
 * The World State
 * New World Order (conspiracy theory)


 * Future studies
 * World Brain
 * Utopia

Chronology

 * W. Warren Wagar (2001). The Open Conspiracy: H.G. Wells on World Revolution (Praeger Studies on the 21st Century), Praeger.
 * W. Warren Wagar (2001). The Open Conspiracy: H.G. Wells on World Revolution (Praeger Studies on the 21st Century), Praeger.
 * W. Warren Wagar (2001). The Open Conspiracy: H.G. Wells on World Revolution (Praeger Studies on the 21st Century), Praeger.

Reviews

 * www.panarchy.org
 * Note @ http://www.panarchy.org/wells/conspiracy.1933.html
 * H. G. Wells launched the idea of an Open Conspiracy in a booklet in 1928 and then, in a more extended text, in 1933. Here we offer some extracts from the various chapters of the later work. The vision that emerges from this selection is that of a conspiracy of cosmopolitan individuals for the organization of a world community that leaves behind the heavy burden of nationalism and militarism. This view is sometimes associated with a slightly different one of a world state run by a world directorate for the advancement and the well-being of humanity.
 * When Wells wrote this essay the dominant progressive thinking was that of gigantic companies that would totally replace small firms; besides that, planning was conceived only as coming from a directing centre that would eliminate waste and the wrong allocation of resources. Now we know that these were just myths, devoid of any foundation on reality. Moreover, we now live in a technological reality of instant communication and ubiquitous information that has shown the ineffectiveness of both gigantism and dirigisme.
 * Having said so, the analysis of Wells still remains interesting and many of his remarks and suggestions are still fresh and powerful as when they were first formulated.


 * www.amazon.com
 * Book Description @ W. Warren Wagar (2001) below
 * In 1928 when [H.G. Wells] wrote this cry for a new age of worldwide knowledge networking, there was no Internet. Yet Wells was already convinced that if only thinking people across the planet could somehow pull together and pool their expertise, energy, and insights into sort of cerebrum for humanity, then the world would be a saner, safer, better, fairer place. Anyone aware of how the Internet already reflects both the vices and the virtues of society and wonders how a world-renowned visionary like H.G. Wells envisaged knowledge networking as working in practice will enjoy this book. It is a hymn to the practical possibilities of world group action.


 * W. Warren Wagar (2001) : The Open Conspiracy: H.G. Wells on World Revolution (Praeger Studies on the 21st Century), Praeger.