Which town?

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A collective organization, in order to be viable and progressive, must elicit on the part of each of its members a free adhesion to a practical discipline in many domains of the daily existence. It must be simple enough to be grasped by all and flexible enough to integrate all new situations without compromising its guiding principles. Then, on one hand selfishness and inertia with their retinue of complaints, resignations and jealousies begin to weigh, obstruct or foil and, on the other, the exhilaration procured by the power to decide, institute and direct, with its procession of rivalries, arrogance and enmity begin to falsify, distort, deviate and usurp. This elementary evolutionary difficulty was now further complicated by the arrival of an enormous administrative machine which was going to exact its share of accounts, reports and definitions in its own language - the specter of a puissant anonymous hierarchy, intrusive and peremptory. One therefore would be tempted, either to retire as much as one could from the coming developments, considering them almost as foreign to the original path of progress, or to join in the fray with the hope of some consequent role to play. The least arbitrary imposition engenders an alienation = “they” and “us”.

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In most cases however, neither one of these temptations was practicable.

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