A Folly of Socialism, By GK Chesterton
At least sixty Socialists out of a hundred, when they have spoken of common laundries, will go on at once to speak of common kitchens. This is just as mechanical and unintelligent as the fanciful case I have quoted. Sticks and umbrellas are both stiff rods that go into holes in a stand in the hall. Kitchens and washhouses are both large rooms full of heat and damp and steam. But the soul and function of the two things are utterly opposite. There is only one way of washing a shirt; that is, there is only one right way. There is no taste and fancy in tattered shirts. Nobody says, “Tompkins likes five holes in his shirt, but I must say, give me the good old four holes.” Nobody says, “This washerwoman rips up the left leg of my pyjamas; now if there is one thing I insist on it is the right leg ripped up.” The ideal washing is simply to send a thing back washed. But it is by no means true that the ideal cooking is simply to send a thing back cooked. Cooking is an art; it has in it personality, and even perversity, for the definition of an art is that which must be personal and may be perverse. I know a man, not otherwise dainty, who cannot touch common sausages unless they are almost burned to a coal. He wants his sausages fried to rags, yet he does not insist on his shirts being boiled to rags. I do not say that such points of culinary delicacy are of high importance. I do not say that the communal ideal must give way to them. What I say is that the communal ideal is not conscious of their existence, and therefore goes wrong from the very start, mixing a wholly public thing with a highly individual one. Perhaps we ought to accept communal kitchens in the social crisis, just as we should accept communal cat’s-meat in a siege. But the cultured Socialist, quite at his ease, by no means in a siege, talks about communal kitchens as if they were the same kind of thing as communal laundries. This shows at the start that he misunderstands human nature. It is as different as three men singing the same chorus from three men playing three tunes on the same piano.
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Links
Poems
Posting and analysing some important poems.
Rudyard Kipling
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
The Benefactors
The Female of the Species
The Benefactors
Edgar Guest
Keep Going
One More Turn
The Glory of the Garden
It Takes a Heap O’Livin
Sue’s Got a Baby
Only a Dad
Is Anybody Happier?
Can’t
On Quitting
Thomas J. Williams
Once to Every Man or Nation
JRR Tolkien
I Sit Beside the Fire and Think
Quotes
A bunch of fun and significant quotes:
"This shows at the start that he [the socialist] misunderstands human nature."
That, probably, is the source of all who have a genuine belief in socialism, as way to organize society. (I believe that most socialists, though, now just see it as a way to get control of other people.)