The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings. - Eric Hoffer

If anything ail a man,” says Thoreau, “so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even … he forthwith sets about reforming — the world.”3

Contrary to what one would expect, it is easier for the advanced to imitate the backward than the other way around. The backward and the weak see in imitation an act of submission and a proof of their inadequacy. They must rid themselves of their sense of inferiority, must demonstrate their prowess, before they will open their minds and hearts to all that the world can teach them. Most often in history it was the conquerors who learned willingly from the conquered. The backward, says de Tocqueville, “will go forth in arms to gain knowledge but will not receive it when it comes to them.” Thus the grotesque truculence, posturing, conceit, brazenness, and defiance which usually assail our senses whenever a backward country sets out to modernize itself in a hurry stem partly from the desperate need of the weak for an illusion of strength and superiority if they are to imitate rapidly and easily.

The explosive component in the contemporary scene is not the clamor of the masses but the self-righteous claims of a multitude of graduates from schools and universities. This army of scribes is clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated. They hanker for the scribe's golden age, for a return to something like the scribe-dominated societies of ancient Egypt, China, and Europe of the Middle Ages. There is little doubt that the present trend in the new and renovated countries toward social regimentation stems partly from the need to create adequate employment for a large number of scribes. And since the tempo of the production of the literate is continually increasing, the prospect is of ever-swelling bureaucracies.