"The technical achievements of the past hundred years have produced a type of society different from any that has ever before existed, posing novel problems for mankind. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, it has changed the character of the adaptions the individual has to make to his environment. His is now a straggle with society and not with nature. The vicissitudes that now afflict him come from what he has done in association with other men, and not from a physical relationship with the forces of nature. The division of labour into which he is born weaves his own life into a series of interdependencies involving not only his own personal surroundings, but moving in everwidening circles until they encompass most parts of the earth. Modem industrial society is no longer a multiplication of a number of simple self-sufficient social groupings, each able to detach itself from the others without damage to itself. It is multicellular, not unicellular. Each part is connected as though by an infinite variety of nerves with all the others, so that separation is now a mutilation. It is similar to a physical organism, but with this difference: that it has no head and therefore no mechanism with which to receive and co-ordinate the vibrations. This is so, not only between nations, but within each nation of the laissez-faire type, because such a philosophy by its very nature rejects the propriety of an a priori principle. There is no way of saying how far such a society has realised the intentions of its architects, because there was no architect and no intention. There is only an emergent. Science works for predictability: capitalist society is profoundly unscientific. It proceeds upon no hypotheses, because that would imply an order of values."
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Members of the Parliament of the United KingdomHumanistsAtheistsLabour Party (UK) politiciansDemocratic socialists
Original Language: English
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p.46-47
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aneurin_Bevan
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Aneurin Bevan
Aneurin Bevan (15 November 1897 – 6 July 1960) was a Welsh Labour Party politician who is best known for overseeing the creation of the National Health Service in the Labour government after World War II. Bevan, a left-winger, was intermittently in trouble with the Labour leadership; in the 1950s he astonished his supporters by opposing unilateral nuclear disarmament. He overcame a speech impediment and was regarded as one of the most eloquent public speakers of his day.
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