Record of a Friendship

(Ben Green) #1

has broken through in our age, striving for release and creating new
forms of life and confusing all human beings. The old forms have
brought society into the abyss of war and destruction. The new forms
are not yet born and nobody knows what they will look like. But one
fact is clear: the perversities and lunatic happenings which were brought
to the peak by Hitler can only be conquered by life itself. I think we can
only try to understand and help as much as we can. There is no authority
born yet in this field and should an authority once be created, then I
am afraid a new setback would take place.
I had very good news from Copenhagen. They are working, and more
and more people are beginning to trust them and to help them. Please
write again soon.


Bion-Cancer Research Laboratory
Forest Hills, New York


My dear Neill:



  • ••


April 2, 1941

Your letter of March 20 arrived today, a few days later than
your first letter. I was very glad to have it. You ask a very important
question based on a very correct statement: How to run a state without
the bureaucrats. It is my deep conviction that perhaps not the state in
the usual old sense of the word, but human society can be run without
bureaucrats, and even better so. It is my deep belief that bureaucracy is
not necessary, but is to be compared to a cancerous growth on the body
of the society which works, searches for truth, improves living conditions,
and suffers from the bureaucrats. Today, the social process is run in
two ways: by the real working process of its own, and by the bureaucracy
which imposes itself upon this working process. In the future it may be
that the first, the working process which exists and works today, will
administrate life quite on its own.
I, personally, would never, happen what may, submit to any minister
of education or any minister of anything who is not a specialist in the
field and does not know more than I do.
What you call the immediate post-war world will be either a work
democracy, a society based upon the rational working process carried
on and cared for by the people who work in all the fields which are
necessary for sustaining life--or it will be a pre-war world with a new
war within the next 10 to 20 years. I do not think there is any other

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