308 deep freedomensuring that the manner of providing economic and educational op-
portunity to the Indian nation not predetermine the outcome, produc-
ing, by the very fact of its availability, the yet more complete assimila-
tion (and the consequent destruction of the distinctive culture) that the
Indians should collectively be empowered to embrace or to reject.
Th e individual Indian, however, is a citizen of the republic. From the
republic, he must receive, if he so desires, the economic and educational
tools with which to diverge from the path of the collectivity. Once again,
these tools must be neither so inaccessible to the individual that they
cease to be real options nor so ready to hand that their easy availability
undermines the collective choice to tread a separate path.
Th e rights and wrongs of policy toward the Indians in such a cir-
cumstance are the rights and wrongs of empowered dissidence, in a
free society, from the doctrine of that society. What we owe to them we
owe to ourselves.
Th e principle of plurality
Th e institutional structure of a society is decisive for all our material
and moral endeavors. Our interests and ideals always remain hostage
to the institutions and practices that represent them in fact. If the reli-
gion of the future is to speak to the condition of society, it must do more
than defend and support a par tic u lar conception of a free society. It must
have an institutional program. Rather than treating the institutional de-
sign of society as a circumstantial aft erthought to the enunciation of its
po liti cal principles, it must recognize that there is an internal relation
between our thinking about ideals and interests and our thinking about
institutions and practices.
Th e direction sketched by the remaining principles of a free society
reveals the po liti cal consequences of the religion of the future. It is also
meant to suggest the general character of the po liti cal, economic, and
social institutions on the basis of which we can today best hope to sat-
isfy the desire for a greater life. Th e task here is not to describe this di-
rection of institutional change. It is to address the problem and the op-
portunity resulting from the variety of regimes through which the
conception of a free society can plausibly be made actual. Th ere is no