POLICIES

Broadly These Are Our Policies

· To promote service to the Christian revelation of God.

· Loyalty to the Australian Constitutional Monarchy, and maximum co-operation between subjects of the Crown Commonwealth of Nations.

· To defend the Free Society and its institutions - private property, consumer control of production through genuine competitive enterprise, and limited decentralised government.

· To promote financial policies, which will reduce taxation, eliminate debt, and make possible material security for all with greater leisure time for cultural activities.

· To oppose all forms of monopoly, either described as public or private.

· To encourage all electors always to record a responsible vote in all elections.

· To support all policies genuinely concerned with conserving and protecting natural resources, including the soil and environment reflecting natural (God's) laws, against policies of rape and waste.

· To oppose all policies eroding national sovereignty.

· To promote a closer relationship between the peoples of the Crown Commonwealth of Nations and those of the United States of America, who share a common heritage.

The Foundation of Western Civilisation.

The overall purpose of this website is to point Western Man back to the fork in the road where he took the wrong fork in the road -- and lost his direction. It seeks to point to a history of the Western World from a traditional Christian point of view -- where answers might be found to such questions as:
· Why has this civilisation floundered?
· Why is it so obviously disintegrating?
· Where did we go wrong?
· Where did we take the wrong fork in the road?

We do not believe the breakup is inevitable; the idea that it is inevitable is based on a philosophy of fatalism, and, as Christians, we do not subscribe to such a philosophy.
We believe it is possible to retrace our steps back to that fork in the road, but to do so, we need to have "a map of our own history" to see where we are now and how we got here.
If we don't know where we are now, how can we retrace our steps?

The following articles were sourced from a number of writers. The sources will be listed at the end.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO THE WESTERN TRADITION
The word Western, has been italicized as its precise meaning is a cardinal point in the following contentions.
By the Western tradition is meant a particular set of values which happen to have found their chief home in Europe, but which are not confined to Europe. It was the values which made Europe, not the other way round.
By Western tradition, we do not mean what now passes for 'democracy' as presented by the values of American Neo-conservatism. These values should be more accurately defined as Jewish-American ideals - they are not traditional Western values.
Western traditional values are independent of race, climate, and/or geography. Their assimilation by any people anywhere has a transforming effect, just as their renunciation must in the long run effect a transformation in the contrary sense.
Either way it is a moral and spiritual revolution; for they represent values, not a technology, although the people who had adopted them are in fact responsible for a great part of mankind's technical achievement.

AN INTEGRATED WHOLE:

The true Western tradition is an integrated whole; its chief components have been:
· The Greek sense of form, balance, and harmony.
· The Greek search for quality and distinction, all transmitted through their art and literature to Rome.
· The Roman sense of law and order. And the ideal, common to both, of the free complete man (though the Romans denied it in the case of slaves and barbarians).
· And thirdly, the Christian concept of the unique human person, free to live in harmony with his supernatural destiny, though tending always to lapse into spiritual revolt and variations on all the deadly sins.

These three main sources were integrated into one great central tradition during the Middle Ages, much stimulated by the infusion of the new blood of the tough adventurous Northern Barbarians.

During the centuries when Europe was a community of peoples united by a common belief in this tradition, these peoples were emerging from six centuries of barbarism which followed the disintegration of the Roman Empire; technical resources and technical knowledge were only beginning to be rebuilt.

Their material conditions which were a legacy from the past, have obscured the gigantic possibilities and actual advances which were diverted into other channels by two quite different, but constantly confused, revolutions:
· The catastrophe of the religious wars
· The conquest of the European mind by a mental atmosphere in which man became the centre of the universe and
· Technical achievement became the supreme good
· And unlimited confidence was placed in human reason.

The growth of this attitude was of course stimulated by reaction to the devastation of the religious wars.
The real meaning of the two revolutions was only becoming apparent in the 20th century, because the moral framework of the old unity was-illogically-partly maintained, and indeed some of the chief values such as:
· The rule of law
· Personal freedom and
· Spiritual equality…though torn from their context, were even exalted and pursued with greater fervour.
The world became full of isolated Christian principles running wild.

Even the façade of European unity was maintained until the French Revolution, by the international use of Latin and French, by the international "Front" of the governing classes and the scholars, above all by the maintenance in all Western countries, till recent times, of most of the traditional Christian morality with its insistence on the supreme importance of the family as the essential pillar of society.

FAITH ALONE WITHOUT WORKS
The chief exception had been the radical change in the attitude to wealth and industry, which, largely as a result of Martin Luther's insistence on justification by faith alone without "works," became divorced from morals and charity, and became in themselves the test of respectability and virtue.
Anatole France's secretary relates how the satirist found in an old book the words "the Widow C. was wealthy and respectable." He rewrote it in a story of his own as "The Widow C. was wealthy and therefore respectable"!
In that one word "therefore" he summed up the change in values inherited from the sixteenth century!

It was not realized that outside Western Christendom the vast majority of mankind did not accept the moral values which the men who were gradually discarding the ideological basis of those values, imagined would nevertheless be permanent and self-evident.

WESTERN VALUES AND TRADITION
Outside the Western tradition the tendency has been to regard man as the hopeless victim of an irredeemably evil and hostile universe; a profound pessimism expressed in the Hindu Karma, the Buddhist ideal of self-annihilation, Moslem fatalism, the Slav obsession with evil, the Teutonic cult of action and destruction, the magic of the ancient West Asian civilizations, the Egyptian obsession with death, or the hardly-veiled devil-worship of the Aztecs or Phoenicians.

The systems reject personal dignity and freedom of choice:
All these pessimistic systems tend logically to the rejection of the personal dignity and freedom of choice of the individual, the passive acceptance of tyranny and capricious authority, the propitiation of evil spirits and deities associated with sex and fertility.

It seems to be a law that an exaggerated emphasis on the spiritual and subjective, and corresponding depreciation of the body and the world of Nature, lead in practice, through pessimism, to their opposite reaction in the acceptance of evil.
The rule of law-what Sir E. Barker calls the reign of "expectability"-cannot exist, the family loses its strength, dignity, and stability, in a world of slavery, polygamy, child marriages, the omnipotence of corrupt and capricious authorities, and the general prevalence of squalor and undernourishment among the masses.

Utilitarianism and Marxism:
The gradual realisation that Christian moral ideas had no real authority without their theological basis took shape in the two most influential nineteenth-century philosophies- Utilitarianism-the "greatest happiness" principle which became the unavowed creed of the triumphant bourgeoisie- and Marxism, which frankly made economic determinism the basis of everything, but combined its dreary philosophy with an irrational Messianic gospel of an earthly paradise to be won by class warfare, and became after half a century the only live and aggressive survivor of all the philosophies of the 20th century.

One of the great paradoxes of the time is that a doctrine based solely on materialism has been, through the peculiar genius of Karl Marx, coupled with a messianic irrational promise, and inspires its devotees with a fervent religious emotion quite inconsistent with the doctrine itself.

The breakdown of traditional moral values accelerated by the disillusionment caused by the Great Wars of the 20th century-in fact the final revolt against the surviving Christian ideals-at last has had its counterpart in the revolt against rationalism itself.
Every possible intellectual "ism" had been worked out and gone out of fashion; it remained only for the Pragmatists, LogicoPositivists, Phenomenologists, and Existentialists to deny, at least by implication, the validity of reason itself, to reject the possibility of any absolute standard of truth and value; the reasoning conscience has followed the moral conscience into the abyss.

Great historical events, themselves both causes and symptoms, have contributed to the break-up.
Martin Luther's (1483-1546) purely theological revolt, locally successful through his alliance with the German princes and made permanent by the organising genius of John Calvin (1509-1564) undermined the mystical dogma of 'charity" by his exaltation of faith against works, and was ultimately responsible for the form taken by the Industrial Revolution; because the latter took shape from an already existing background of ruthless competition and the concentration of wealth and investment-capital in a few hands.

Because the Industrial Revolution came after the partial breakdown of the Western system, the great advances in technology- admirable in themselves-created an inhuman social structure and like Frankenstein's proverbial monster have escaped from human control, culminating in the supreme example of the nuclear bombs.

Prussianism:
They have been allowed to create conditions which man cannot control, and to which he has failed to adapt himself. In another direction, the religious wars turned the scale inside Germany in the endless conflict between the European idea and the old Teutonic mysticism of race and conquest, and decisively favoured the rise of the military Baltic State of Prussia as the eventual creator of German unity.

Stage set for Soviet Empire, Nazism and Second Great War:
The French Revolution completed the influence of Luther by the levelling of the German States, by provoking the German reaction towards romanticism, by the impulse it gave everywhere to the new religion of nationalism.
For a time the new German Empire, the old Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires, thanks partly to an efficient diplomatic technique, maintained an uneasy equilibrium and stability over Central and Eastern Europe; their collapse in 1918 finished the main work of the French Revolution and set the stage for the Soviet Empire, Nazism and the Second Great War.

All these things are facts; to state them is not to disparage the great technological advance of the last two and a half centuries, nor does it imply advocacy of a spurious neo-mediaevalism, nor of Gothic post offices.

Gradual abandonment of values which created him:
The point is that the evolution of the Western world during the last four centuries has been bedevilled and deviated by the gradual abandonment by Western man of the values which as a whole had created him, and that the ultimate consequences have been accelerated by the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the revival of German paganism, radically different though these were from the general intellectual revolt.

Whatever may be thought of this thesis-and many presumably will disagree-as to how our present condition has come about, it is difficult for thinking people to have very different opinions about the nature of our condition or to deny the plausibility of the sociologists' pessimism.
We can now see that during the 20th century we entered a phase of mass civilisation in which standards of mass, quantity, speed, and mediocrity became the accepted standards of value.
While our Western countries are committed to unheard-of expenditure on education, the educational machines are set for mediocrity and to act as a brake on quality or distinction.

Content of education at fault:
It is not the ideal of the "educational ladder" which is at fault, but the content of the education itself. Its character grows ever more technical, and those who try to pursue humanist studies find themselves, at the universities, equally in an atmosphere of narrow specialism.

The idea of a "liberal" education has died out, and with it the old intellectual fraternity between the educated people of the different Western peoples; the last link in their spiritual unity being broken.

THE CRISIS IS PRIMARILY SPIRITUAL:
The Nature of Man and Society
The crisis we are in, is primarily a spiritual crisis and our political and economic difficulties are its surface manifestations.
Failure to realise this is natural, if the crisis is itself ultimately due to false ideas about the nature of man and society.

The central Christian tradition:
The central Christian tradition is that man is a composite creature of body and soul or, in modern terms, of body and psyche.
In his biological functions man belongs to the animal world, but he is a unique creature, different in kind to all other living things, and has a personality or body-spirit; so varied and paradoxical that his reactions cannot be measured or predicted on any mechanical scientific basis.

He is capable of the most opposite extremes. On one hand of unlimited self-sacrifice for spiritual motives, of analysing his own mental processes and the Laws of the universe; of attaining to a balanced harmonious integration of his whole person and of expressing it in creative work marked by form, balance and harmony.

On the other hand he is capable of unlimited cruelty, selfishness and materialism, of conflict and divisions inside his personality expressed in creative work which is formless, disconnected, incongruous; capable-and this has been the normal state of the majority-of living in ignorance and making no mental effort beyond the minimum required by his daily work.

The contradiction between his unlimited aspirations and his finite limitations is an unending source of internal conflict, mal-adjustment, discontent and perversity.

We believe the way to self-control and integration is through humility and self-denial; the negation of this is spiritual pride and revolt, ultimate source of wrong thinking and wrong action.

This spiritual personality has not essentially varied since it first appeared. In his various civilisations man has acquired (and often lost) a great knowledge of nature and made great technological achievements, but there is no evidence that his mental capacity and moral nature have undergone any evolutionary modification.

Christian heresies which insisted that his moral nature was totally corrupt and depraved, and "humanists" who believed in his infinite perfectibility by his own sole efforts, were both wrong, but the former had the more factual justification.

The outstanding fact in man's moral history is his constant tendency to lapse into moral degeneracy culminating in a conscious cult of evil; this is not a primitive trait but apt rather to coincide with an improvement in material technique.

This conception was totally rejected in the later nineteenth century by a new philosophy which in practice superseded the older rationalisms. It applied to mankind the dogma of evolution through natural selection, asserting as a scientifically established fact that man in all his aspects had evolved by a purely mechanical process from an animal condition.
It assumed a natural transition from organic to mental life and a gradual broadly continuous moral progress and growth in creative capacity. This was a speculative theory suggested by the analogy of the physical sciences, but it was accepted as a proved scientific law and became the basic axiom of all the new or re-created sciences dealing with man.

The five main human sciences-psychology, anthropology, the comparative history of religions, history, and sociology-were all given their modern form by men who accepted these philosophic assumptions as proved facts.
One of the main objects has been to suggest that these branches of study were initially falsified by the fixed idea that the facts must be forced to conform to the a priori theory; that later workers in each department have been building a different picture, and that in each case the resulting tendency is leading back, often unintentionally, to the central Christian tradition of man's nature and destiny.

Modern psychology undoubtedly dates from Freud's emphasis on the unconscious, on the influence of the irrational sources on conduct and ideas. Unfortunately all his work was based on the presupposition that the forces moving human nature were exclusively biological and that all mental phenomena were derived from impulses. His system contained a substratum of selected manipulated mostly abnormal facts, a string of scientific hypotheses, and a whole elaborate philosophy of life based or rather superimposed upon them.
His system assumed that satisfaction was the only form of pleasure; it left no room for a continuous mental life, no room for the ego or soul, no room for freedom or free will. He derived the whole structure of the personality from his one constructive force, the " libido."

Further successive stages of the development of modern psychology are;
· Adler's work on the social factors (the will to community against the will to power);
· Jung's work on the collective unconscious and in developing the psychotherapist's true aim of educating the individual to moral freedom and independence;
· finally the tendency of the later American and other schools to act on a constructive theory of the personality as a coherent whole, at once physical, social and spiritual, with a dynamic purposeful unity which is the source of all behaviour and the whole psychic life.

Comparative religions, culture and religion:
In anthropology and the overlapping study of comparative religions, the early history of culture and religion was turned upside down to suit the presuppositions.
Obvious facts like "palaeolithic art or the beliefs of existing primitive peoples were ignored or given absurd explanations-as that primitive men did not know about sex and did not know when people were dead.
The theory implied that the life of primitive man was, as Hobbes said, "nasty, brutish and short," without morals, religion or art; that later he gradually "evolved" through superstition and magic to polytheism and then monotheism, from scratching doodles to the art of Phidias and Rembrandt, from imitative sounds to Cicero and Demosthenes, from communal promiscuousness to monogamous marriage, and so on. If one thing is superior to another, it must for that very reason have come later.

"Higher Criticism" had a specially undermining effect among the Christian clergy, inspiring a revival of ancient heresies incompatible with Christian ideology, under the attractive but unwarranted label of "Modernism."

The general trend of the evidence indicates that magic and polytheism, and all the derivative ritual of human sacrifice, phallic worship, sorcery and general diabolism, are comparatively late lapses from primitive monotheism; that they are apt to be associated with material progress; and that this is true of polygamy and slavery.
This is not to say that they invariably coincide with material improvement; but that there is no equation between material and moral improvement.

The Myth of Inevitable Progress:
History proper-the study of man based on his documentary records-has not escaped the befogging influence of the myth of inevitable progress. Historians have tended first to justify success as both inevitable and right, secondly to attribute it to the action of the ideas which it finally comes to represent, thirdly to justify its further effects because they are its effects and therefore also right and inevitable.

In discussing the old perspectives in history the French Revolution can be cited as a classical case of a false historical legend. Misrepresentation of that great upheaval has clouded the judgement of succeeding generations on their own current affairs.
Because the French Revolution was judged to be both inevitable and the result of conscious volition, and therefore right, its disastrous consequences have been condoned, including the economic wastefulness of conscription with its logical conclusion in "total" war; the implacable unreasoning hysteria of modern nationalism (Europe's boomerang gift to Asia); the dogma that we as individuals have absolutely no rights whatever which a majority vote cannot lawfully take away.
It was regarded as axiomatic that the French Revolution was of immense benefit to France; yet France, once the greatest nation and the cultural model for Europe, in the 1950s, had half the population of Germany (which was unified and nationalised by the French Revolution), had been torn for nearly two centuries by a corrosive "cold" civil war; enjoyed 13 Constitutions since 1789, had 93 Governments during the 65 years of the Third Republic, and had 16 Governments in seven years, and, out of those seven years, six months altogether during which there was no Government at all.

By the 1950s, depopulation, political instability, religious war, class-war, and German supremacy, were among the direct fruits for France of the Revolution; these are indisputable facts, but the official textbooks of the French Republic and English and American Liberalism have consistently disregarded them.

IDEAS PLAY SO LARGE A PART IN HUMAN AFFAIRS
Ideas play so great a part in human affairs that the analysis of their subtle far-reaching effects should be the historian's most important duty; but too often their action has been oversimplified, exaggerated or minimized.

Subversive criticism:
An aspect of their influence which is frequently ignored is the effect of subversive criticism, not in spreading a definite new belief, but in creating a climate of doubt and bewilderment and thereby undermining the self-confidence of the active minorities who influence the course of affairs.
Illustrations have been cited of the spirit created in the eighteenth century by the French Intellectuals- hardly any of whom anticipated or desired the Revolution-and the effect on the English-speaking peoples in the 20th century of H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw and, one might add, of Sigmund Freud after they had lost hope.

Shaw had incomparably more wit and mental fertility than Wells, but Wells with his second-hand and second-rate ideas exerted equal or greater influence through his great power as an imaginative novelist; and he never wrote a better novel than his Outline of History, which carried into millions of English homes a colourful rehash of the Rationalist Press Association's outfit of thirty years earlier.
The active executive politically conscious minority became unable to see where they are going or to be sure of what they want; they cease to give an intelligent lead, and instead look themselves for a lead from mass " public opinion."

Nineteenth-century Liberalism had given the active minority (apart from those who had the moral courage to oppose it) a clear fighting creed of which the backbone was the passion for personal liberty.
Artistic creation- the visible or audible manifestation of every great civilisation-became either a stylised repetition of old models or a gradual reversion to the formless, disconnected, disharmonious art of the great pessimistic cultures.
The urbanised masses, uprooted and cut loose from their own social traditions and ancestral memories, get no guidance; though their common-sense may have rejected the gospel of Marx, they can make no alternative faith out of academic subtleties or the false pseudo-sciences of a hundred years ago which are still being hashed up and which have become the mental background of millions who have never read the original authors and have not heard of their successors.

Abandoned 'faith' in favour of 'works':
For Europe the Christian tradition has become associated in the mind of the largely dechristianised masses with the bourgeois "camp," although in fact the long campaign against Christianity has been directed from within that camp.
It has also been narrowed by an over-literal verbalistic and unhistorical treatment of the Bible which ignored the figurative language of Eastern writers and interpreted it without reference to the whole body of Christian tradition to which the books belonged, and many of the clergy and their followers, demoralized by the flood of pseudoscientific propaganda, have exactly reversed Luther's principle of faith instead of works and have abandoned religious faith in favour of ethical works.

Unfortunately, it adopted as well the principles of equality and unlimited majority rule, which when fully developed in association with a completely materialist standard of values seldom "coexist peacefully" with personal freedom.
In Europe it also took over from the French Revolution, as a main tenet, a fanatical secularism, and worked for the exclusion from all influence of its opponents.

It used all the resources of the State, especially through education, to undermine belief in the unique value and dignity of each human soul, although in the last resort this belief is the only rational justification of personal freedom.
Liberalism was a useful corrective but a bad master; it could not control the forces it had released and it perished in the shock of the First World War, leaving the way clear for its opposites-Nazism, Fascism, and Communism.

ECONOMIC RATIONALISM NEXT
Due to:
· The general breakdown of standards of judgement
· The undue influence of uninformed mass opinion
· The confusion between diplomacy and foreign policy
· Muddled thinking about the relations of armed strength and foreign policy
· And the historically unprecedented degree in which from 1918 onwards, shams and catchwords uncritically reiterated were substituted for reality in international affairs
There has never been an age in which the fable of the emperor and his clothes was so applicable and illustrate the woolliness and confusion of twentieth-century opinion.

A valuable corrective to orthodox history and all social sciences affected by the Progress myth has been supplied by the modern sociologists. No one of the various cycle theories agrees in its classifications with the others and is factually adequate in itself; or indeed can be, for all such theories are inherently pessimistic and exclude both chance and free will.
They have however established an important body of significant facts, analogies and rhythmic patterns, and though no two systems or classifications coincide, the points on which they do agree carry great weight for that reason.
Points on which they all agree are:
First that the long line of past civilizations have passed through certain broadly similar stages and Each in turn perished by a process of disintegration of which the causes and symptoms have had a marked similarity,
And secondly that the symptoms associated with disintegration in former civilizations are all notably present in our Western civilization-which in fact they unanimously agree is in its last stage.

In the modern urbanized mass, uprooted and without any positive guidance, the subconscious non-rational instincts of the herd-Jung's "archetypes "-must inevitably come to the top. In the individual the loosening of the opposites- the disassociation of the conscious elements in the personality- leads to hysteria and if unchecked, through neurosis to insanity.
In a collective group, when the controls internal and external are weakened, the same process is at work. In the gradual weakening of all forces of resistance-school and university, the family, the local groups, the leadership of the educated, the press, above all, of the Churches-one institution alone grows stronger and claims more and more insistently the heritage of all the rest-the State.
Its claims are becoming unlimited and its self-deification, which is already a fact in the whole Communist orbit, is beginning in the Western countries.
In many respects its power is already unlimited, and while all criticism of the old values is both permitted and fashionable, criticism of the State and its actions is becoming dangerous and is well on the way to being made illegal-as it already has become in time of war.

Nothing short of a moral and spiritual revolution can now arrest the flood tide of materialism, loss of critical standards, and the final omnipotence of a parasitic bureaucracy enthroned over a dying civilization.

That is however the central issue-the sociologists have formulated a universal law of the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations and do not believe that the chain of historical cause and effect can be broken by moral and spiritual revolutions.
For they believe that the values men hold are themselves the manifestation of the particular phase or life-period on which a civilization has entered; that the return of a society to the outlook of an earlier period is no more possible than for an old man to recover his youth, or an old woman to have a child.
This analogy with the life of an organism-and it is implicit in the theories even of those sociologists who condemn it in Spengler-can only be really refuted by those who hold the old Western and Christian concept of man as a unique personality with the gift of free will.
It is this which has accounted for the extraordinary exuberance and energy of Western man, his incessant creative activity and changes of mind.
Western men-the first in history who have attached serious value to time-can "set the clock back" if they wish -what they have made by false ideas, they can unmake if they will return to the right ones.

"Our" Western civilization is tending to disintegrate through the gradual rejection of the spiritual values on which it was built-the values represented by the fusion of the best elements in Greek form and Roman character with the central Tradition of historic Christianity; and the disintegration can only be arrested by our conscious re-acceptance of those values.
At first sight the prospects of such a return do not look bright, for the opposing forces seem to he accelerating and consolidating; but as their real nature becomes more evident, the realisation is bringing into existence a reaction by active intelligent minorities which hardly existed a century ago. When the great sultan in Chesterton's epic was awaiting the approach of Don John of Austria before Lepanto, he warned his staff of the great issues at stake:
It is he who says not Kismet, it is he who knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!

No one can assume the mantle of Peter the Hermit or St. Bernard, but we have something to learn from the spirit of the men whose great castles dotting the Near East still witness to the driving force of a living idea. There is still-far more indeed than there was a generation ago-a great fund of good will, an anxious feeling that we are on the wrong road.

People want guidance and are deprived of it by "the treason of the clerks," the orthodox academic intellectuals who can pick holes, analyse, quote each other, snigger at the now unorthodox traditional values, but to often are happy in a purely negative role and boast that they can give no coherent inspiring message. Though Milton meant the words in a very different sense to mine, they are not inappropriate today:
The hungry sheep look up,
and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread.
Taken from "The Hungry Sheep" by Sir David Kelly, 1955.

PRINCIPLES GOVERNING HUMAN ASSOCIATIONS
Human nature is the one constant in human history:
The major constant in human history has been human nature, which contrary to the theories of the various schools of idealists, has changed very little, if at all.

The principles governing human associations have been tested and observed over many thousands of years. The tradition of a people is, in part, the accumulated wisdom of the past, and the attack on tradition tends to cut man off from a knowledge of those fundamental truths essential for an understanding of the principles of human association.

Working in harmony with such principles are essential for satisfactory results.

The fundamental nature of humans being what it is, it can be predicted with certainty what will happen under given conditions. The individual reacts very much differently in a big crowd, stimulated by the spectacle of a thrilling game, or the oratory of a demagogue, than he does in a small group.

The bigger and more concentrated a group becomes, the more it becomes a mob in which the individual loses control of himself.

The more the individual is organised into bigger, centralised groups, the further down the scale of existence he is driven, losing his most divine attribute, creative initiative.

Soviet Empire-Communism as example: In fact, the lessons of history teach us that the concentration of power into fewer and fewer hands invariably tends to produce corruption.
The bigger and more highly centralised any human association becomes, the fiercer becomes the struggle for place and power, the greatest intensity being near the top.
(The whole world is now experiencing the United State of America's push for the concentration of world power in 2004).
The worst not the best features are made manifest:
The worst, not the best, features of man are manifest. No sophisticated theorising can alter this truth. The realist faces the truth about man and seeks to ensure that human associations are based on principles which when applied produce the most satisfactory results in terms of human satisfaction.
Taken from "Social Dynamics" by Eric D. Butler

A HUMAN SOCIETY IS:

Traditional Christian morality insists on the supreme importance of the family as the essential pillar of society.

We are speaking 'metaphorically' when we speak of families as 'building blocks of society' and it is always important to know how far a metaphor can be taken and at what point it starts to promote harmful assumptions.
At this point we have to discard the metaphor and proceed with a different one or revert to non-figurative language. The usefulness of the metaphor is not negligible but is strictly limited.
It conveys with clarity, though little originality, the truth that society consists of families in relationship. The strength of the whole depends on the strength of the parts - 'society' is as strong as its weakest parts and the security of the bonding between them.

Then if we allow the image into our subconscious, it goes on to do harm. A block or brick is an inert thing locked into a solid structure - immovably and without freedom to grow or develop in itself or in relation to other bricks.
Thinking of a family as a brick and society as a wall encourages governments to assume, and the people to accept, that the edifice may be built according to someone's specification and design… that the government knows best - and this seems to be the trouble with governments.

A far richer metaphor, which avoids this solid-state conception of society, is, "Ye are members one of another," suggesting a lively relationship within the family and society as a family of families.

"Society" consists of the relationships between individuals and their association in countries and nations, between individuals and their association in groups, organic (living, dynamic) relationships
Dr. Geoffrey Dobbs in "The Local World".

THE NATURE AND ROLE OF MECHANISM

The word is derived from the Greek 'mekhane' signifying 'means' or 'expedients,' which provides the fundamental clue. A mechanism is a means to an end. The close connection of this word with engineering in the 19th century has given it a popular meaning which obscures its nature.

A mechanism, instead of being regarded essentially as a means to a desired end, came to be thought of as an apparatus or device whose members were constrained to a rigid sequence of events, as opposed to the members of a living creature.

It is the essence of a mechanism that it is pre-determined towards a specific objective, but the conception of the pre-determinism occupied people's minds to the exclusion of the specificity of the objective. In this way, there arose 'mechanical' conceptions of the universe, and hence the mechanistic (as opposed to the vitalistic) philosophy, which doctrine held that organic life consisted solely in material and mechanical forms and operations. This philosophy is, in fact, the complete negation of mechanism, which can never be automatic or self-determinative, but must be an agency operating, or operated, towards its specific end.

The word in the first instance was applied to machinery proper, that is, physical apparatus "designed to produce a desired effect." The word then acquired a derived meaning in current use which is defined as "an organised system under definite control for carrying out specific functions, together with the persons engaged in the work, and the prescribed methods according to which they act:
The machine of government (e.g., the social machine; the political party machine)."
Both quotations from Wyld's Universal English Dictionary.

For further detail refer to "Human Ecology" by Thomas Robertson.