Confirmation from the past

"with whatever ideals they begin, the power to "manage" people, even for their own good, almost always leads to a sort of weary contempt for them, and a sense of one's own superiority to them. Even if the leader is handling them for their own good, he is not handling them according to their human liberty. It is bad for him, as I have just said.

From a neglect of the essential nature of man by those who have to handle the social order, two main streams of consequence flow. In the first place there will be social action which, in varying degrees of error, treats man as what he is not. And in the second place when it becomes unavoidably clear that society, in the persons who constitute it, is sick and must be healed, there is no right notion of human wholeness guiding the efforts of the reformers, so that they are forced to go on experimenting more or less in the dark.

Consider one or two ways of treating man as what he is not. Man is a union of matter and spirit, with the power to see reality and to plan his own activities in relation to the reality thus seen. A major dignity of man is that he is responsible; indeed his eternal future depends upon the use he makes of his responsibility. Time and time again in the history of man-kind social orders are to be found which ignore the spiritual element in man and concentrate upon his material well-being, or ignore the responsibility of man and make more and more decisions for him. For almost any misuse of man, there are two successive reactions. Men begin by rebelling but usually pass from rebellion to a dulled acquiescence. The misusing of man is always evil, but it does most harm in the second stage, when men have settled down to it, do not feel oppressed by it, take it so completely for granted that they do not know that they are taking it for granted. At this stage the misuse no longer torments, but devitalizes all the more. Treating any being as what it is not makes it still less completely itself. But vitality is altogether bound up with a thing's being completely itself. Whatever the motive, if a being is diminished, its vitality in them is dried up. If you treat men as though they were bodies only, the spirit is not fed, and undernourishment and devitalization proceed hand in hand.

Because man was made for God, God Built man with certain powers by which he is to take hold of God, and certain needs by which he is moved to the exercise of these powers. Thus the power to adore, and the need to adore, are as truly in the human make-up as the power and the need man has to nourish himself by food -- as truly and much more deeply. They are simply facts. Just as an infant, who has never heard of food, has the power to absorb food, and the need for food, and will certainly perish without it; so every man has the power to adore and the need to adore and will certainly perish if the need is not met. When you have a need as profound as this, and a power as great, they are bound to seek an object. Not knowing God, who is the true Object of their power to adore, men will seek a pseudo-object." Frank J. Sheed, "society and Sanity" 1953