"The World As I See It": An Essay by Albert Einstein

[Kire]

"How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people -- first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving...

"I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.

"My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude..."

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"My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality... The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

More: http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/essay.htm

[alittlelark]

1. There are hundreds of his quotes that should be utilized.....

my favorite one from this mini-essay is -

<snip>"This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!


My guess is he means Rumsfeld et al.... and NOT the troops.

[punpirate]

2. Actually, Einstein meant...

... armies in toto, and all that they brought to society. He didn't just mean their leadership. To his way of mind, war was the worst calamity to befall mankind. Get rid of the instruments of war (including armies) and you've solved the problem. He was a bit too reductive in his younger years to see that such wasn't likely (this essay was written in his late `40s or very early `50s, I think).

As he grew older, he became a good deal more ironic and cynical, and was perhaps resigned to the persistence of militaries. After WWII, he would be more concerned with the pace of military technology: "I do not know with which weapons World War III will be fought. But, I do know that World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

Cheers.

[Daphne08]

3. Einstein died in 1955.

[neweurope]

4. I never could understand how many here differentiate between

the troops and the leadership. Without troops a leader cannot fight a war, period. Alexander, Hitler, Napoleon, each and every one would have been exactly zero without the troops. Each and every soldier is a little wheel in the war machine. The responsibility of the leader might be greater but every individual in a war machine is responsible to a point. The more so in a voluntary army.

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Remember Fallujah

Bush to The Hague!