movement of people, beginning, like all organic construction, with a small nucleus and developing in ever expanding concentric circles until it embraces humanity. But it must be based on reality and accurate diagnosis of the malady if it is not to continue to be mere crisis management of chaotic and negative impulses as described by Paul Petit who said that the social is not a source but the visible projection of the secrets of conscience, the sum of personal defects, the spreading cancer of individual egoism. The president or prime minister is no more guilty than I am and if he has more power for misguidance it is because we allow him to exercise it by failing to make ourselves adequately aware of the root-causes of what is happening.

Extending this principle, we have to turn the spotlight not only on ourselves and our crimes of omission but also more broadly on the reflection of ourselves in our society instead of what is at best futile and at worst war-mongering, the practice of projecting criticism onto some Reaganite 'evil empire' on the asinine basis that criticism of the West plays into the hands of the East or of some other nefarious interest. Worse than that, there is a tendency to descend to the level of those whom the Western Establishment considers to be their inferiors, where we have had a secretary of state advocating organised terrorism by his government, an earlier one talking in his 'can do' style of brashness of 'taking out' Quadafi the way they 'took out' Allende, and the CIA publishing a handbook a few years ago to show terrorists how to terrorise in Nicaragua. If the West cannot hold itself to higher moral standards than these, its claim to leadership and superiority is hollow pretence.

Not to question is not to think and not to think is to let one's life slip away in a kind of living death, to which the terrible sentence applies, 'Let the dead bury their dead'. Nothing should be omitted

from your criticism. The scientific approach is to question everything (including science itself, its long-term objectives, its premises, its methods and its findings). You have a duty to think unconventionally, which, by definition, is the only possible way to think. If you do not strive to be of the argumentative elite you will be opting for membership of the new intellectual lumpenproletariat who have abdicated responsibility and devoted themselves to rehashing safe and received ideas, which enables The System to take them to its bosom and pay them handsomely. They thus become criminal accomplices of the evils of society, incapable of analysing the human predicament.

As in the physical sciences, so in human affairs, nay, much more in human affairs, nothing is given once and for all; everything must be questioned and held up to pitiless examination. When the early civilisations of Messopotamia and Egypt had become congealed for some two thousand years of repetition and mere technology, the Greek breakthrough was a breakaway, from accepted ways into critical, irreverent thinking and the mental freedom to which it led. No Babylonian or Egyptian, even the most intelligent, ever dreamt of such a quantum leap from received ideas. The clouds burst and the heavens opened. In a mere two centuries, by their fearless questioning and challenging, the Greeks laid the foundations of biology, anatomy, history, political science, philosophy and all subsequent open-ended enquiry. Nothing was sacred or safe from that questioning spirit, which produced its first martyr in Socrates, accused of blaspheming and corrupting the youth of Athens. It was a similar questioning spirit of criticism that launched the Italian Renaissance, as it was the spirit of criticism that set Martin Luther on his way. Hegel, among others, has shown that ideas and criticism pursue their majestic march in seeming isolation but have a powerful impact on the material world.