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Chapter XXThe End of the Curve of ReasonTHE RATIONAL collectivist idea of society has at firstsight a powerful attraction. There is behind it a greattruth, that every society represents a collective being andin it and by it the individual lives and he owes to it all that hecan give it. More, it is only by a certain relation to the society,a certain harmony with this greater collective self that he canfind the complete use for his many developed or developingpowers and activities. Since it is a collective being, it must, onewould naturally suppose, have a discoverable collective reasonand will which should find more and more its right expressionand right working if it is given a conscious and effective meansof organised self-expression and execution. And this collectivewill and intelligence, since it is according to the original ideathat of all in a perfect equality, might naturally be trusted toseek out and work out its own good where the ruling individualand class would always be liable to misuse their powerfor quite other ends. The right organisation of social life on abasis of equality and comradeship ought to give each man hisproper place in society, his full training and development forthe common ends, his due share of work, leisure and reward,the right value of his life in relation to the collective being,society. Moreover it would be a place, share, value regulatedby the individual and collective good and not an exaggeratedor a depressed value brought to him fortuitously by birth orfortune, purchased by wealth or won by a painful and wastefulstruggle. And certainly the external efficiency of the community,the measured, ordered and economical working of its life, itspower for production and general well-being must enormouslyincrease, as even the quite imperfect development of collectiveaction in the recent past has shown, in a well-organised andconcentrated State.