Quality Comes First

It is interesting to observe what happened. This devoted friend of freedom had given up the mass-production concept of educating “the man in the street,” of setting straight “the millions who have votes.” He had concluded that these others were not some vast impersonal collective that could be made to follow him in his designs. These others were persons, not too unlike himself. They had will and self-determination. They decided for themselves, the same as he, what they would think. From these observations he deduced that the freedom problem has to be approached qualitatively and not quantitatively. As for himself, he turned to the sole origin of quality to which he had access: his individual self, realizing that his only route to truth was through his own person. By this seemingly selfish approach more and more people sought his counsel because it was to their profit to do so. This demonstrated to his satisfaction the only manner of coping with the quantitative problem. “Chance comes to those who have prepared themselves for it.”