"Albert Einstein. The world as I see it (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

always contrasted oddly with my pronounced freedom from the need for direct
contact with other human beings and human communities. I gang my own gait
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 an obstinate sense of detachment, of the need for solitude-a
feeling which increases with the years. One is sharply conscious, yet
without regret, of the limits to the possibility of mutual understanding and
sympathy with one's fellow-creatures. Such a person no doubt loses something
in the way of geniality and light-heartedness ; on the other hand, he is
largely independent of the opinions, habits, and judgments of his fellows
and avoids the temptation to take his stand on such insecure foundations.

My political ideal is that of 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 respect from my fellows
through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the
desire, unattainable for many, to understand the one or two ideas to which I
have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite
aware that it is necessary for the success of any complex undertaking that
one man should do the thinking and directing and in general bear the
responsibility. But the led must not be compelled, they must be able to
choose their leader. An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion, soon
degenerates. For force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it
to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels.
For this reason I have always been passionately opposed to systems such as
we see in Italy and Russia to-day. The thing that has brought discredit upon
the prevailing form of democracy in Europe to-day is not to be laid to the
door of the democratic idea as such, but to lack of stability on the part of
the heads of governments and to the impersonal character of the electoral
system. I believe that in this respect the United States of America have
found the right way. They have a responsible President who is elected for a
sufficiently long period and has sufficient powers to be really responsible.
On the other hand, what I value in our political system is the more
extensive provision that it makes for the individual in case of illness or
need. The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not
the 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.

This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of the herd nature, the
military system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching in
formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has
only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed. This
plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed.
Heroism by order, senseless violence, and all the pestilent nonsense that
does by the name of patriotism-how I hate them! War seems to me a mean,
contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in
such an abominable business. And yet so high, in spite of everything, is my
opinion of the human race that I believe this bogey would have disappeared
long ago, had the sound sense of the nations not been systematically