Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

176 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

the world as a whole, and the conscious organisation of humanity as an organic whole can be brought about only on the basis of the free will of individuals. Moreover, the pattern for the organic restructuring of the world in macrocosm lay within the microcosm of the individual organism:

The whole is the concern of each and every individual. Individuals only can comprehend the whole, because the gestalt of the whole is contained in the individual. The content of every individual is the whole human race. Man has no canon by which to judge the whole except his own nature. The form which unites and relates the functioning organs of the whole world, and the form which unites and relates the functioning organs of the single man, are the same. . . . . 3

Although Mitrinović in his early years had been working politically for the liberation of his country, and whilst in The New Age he had been writing about races and nations, he saw that he personally could deal only with individuals, not with states. Only through individuals could the world be changed. A new social and international order could be brought about and maintained only by individuals who had radically changed their ways of thinking and acting. Particularly during the period of The New Britain Movement he had used the phrase “Self-change for world-change,” and it was probably in awareness of this need that he had earlier formed the British branch of The International Society for Individual Psychology after having met Alfred Adler.

In the second “World Affairs” series which he wrote in the New Britain Weekly he emphasised throughout the primacy of the individual.

The true wholeness is in personality only. In nations and inter-nations, classes, institutions, there is no centre. The God-centre and the worth and essence is of individuality only... Therefore nations should not be adored, nor classes, nor sexes, nor ages of man. No collective, no mass and block should be lawgiven and worthy of worship and true love. Individuals matter. Freedom matters greatly. It is freedom and self-accomplishment of human singles that matters.

The Senate Radius

According to Mitrinovié the principle which related the individual parts to each other and to the whole was that of function. Social order must be a conscious organic order in which all individuals and groupings of individuals are recognised as functioning parts of the whole. There must therefore be radical devolution and many different kinds of federation. The