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

34 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

With the Dutchman Frederik van Eeden, Gutkind was engaged in seeking to create an association of the leading spirits of the time who, they anticipated, through coming together and sharing their lives and ideas, might act as an essentially moral force to influence the path of the world’s development in the direction of peace and harmony. This proposed association or community of the leaders of world thought and culture came to be known by the name of the Blut-bund or “blood-brotherhood.” The prime mover behind it was undoubtedly van Eeden, a man of far more active nature than the scholarly Gutkind.

Born in Haarlem in 1860, van Eeden had led a rich and varied life. After studying medicine he had established an Institute for Psychical Therapy in Holland, based on the belief that “the body could be cured by the mind.” As he pursued his medical career, he also attained national and international fame as a writer of novels, poems, and plays. Moved by an awareness of the ills of humanity and the search for remedies, he read the works of Robert Owen, Henry George, Shelley and Ruskin, and was profoundly influenced by the example of Thoreau. He eventually arrived at the conclusion that the answer to the evils of society was not to be found in the works of Marx, who stood “with both feet in the swamp of materialism,”2> but through cooperative living based on fraternal love and friendship.

Accordingly, in the best tradition of the utopian socialists for whom he held such admiration, he established in 1898 a cooperative colony at Bussum, Holland, named “Walden” in honour of Henry Thoreau’s “high minded example.” Always fond of nautical analogies, van Eeden likened Walden to “a small pilot ship in the great economic fleet, seeking a proper route over the shallows to the harbour.”™ Financial difficulties forced the closure of the colony in 1907. Between 1908 and 1910 van Eeden made several trips to the U.S.A. where he sought the assistance of, amongst others, Upton Sinclair, in the promotion of cooperative ventures that would further his vision of a benevolent world-wide brotherhood of capitalist and worker.?>

Throughout his life van Eeden held the view that the working classes, brutalised and incapacitated by the harsh struggle for existence, needed the enlightened leadership of people of intelligence and vision if they were ever to attain true socialism. The publication of Sidereal Birth in 1910 caused him great excitement, for here was another advanced thinker who stressed the necessity of social change through individual personal transformation and cooperative effort rather than through class conflict and the struggle for political power, and who emphasized the key role to be played by intellectuals and the spiritually advanced in sowing the seeds of the new age.