From Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

I have known many persons, some quite intimately, who thought it was their duty to take “the social point of view” on mankind’s many doings and misdoings, and to support various proposals, mainly political, for the mass-improvement of society. One of them is a friend of long standing who has done distinguished service of this kind throughout a lifetime, and is directly responsible for the promulgation of more calamitous and coercive “social legislation” than one could shake a stick at. In a conversation with me not many months ago, this friend said mournfully, “My experience has cured me of one thing. I am cured of believing that society can ever be improved through political action. After this, I shall “cultivate my garden.”

Il faut cultiver notre jardin. With these words Voltaire ends his treatise called Candide, which in its few pages assays more solid worth, more informed common sense, than the entire bulk of nineteenth-century hedonist literature can show. To my mind, those few concluding words sum up the whole social responsibility of man. The only thing that the psychically-human being can do to improve society is to present society with one improved unit. In a word, ages of experience testify that the only way society can be improved is by the individualist method which Jesus apparently regarded as the only one whereby the Kingdom of Heaven can be established as a going concern; that is, the method of each one doing his very best to improve one.

In practice, however, this method is extremely difficult; there can be no question about that, for experience will prove it so. It is also clear that very few among mankind have either the force of intellect to manage this method intelligently, or the force of character to apply it constantly. Hence if one “regards mankind as being what they are,” the chances seem to be that the deceptively easier way will continue to prevail among them throughout an indefinitely long future. It is easy to prescribe improvement for others; it is easy to organise something, to institutionalise this-or-that, to pass laws, multiply bureaucratic agencies, form pressure-groups, start revolutions, change forms of government, tinker at political theory. The fact that these expedients have been tried unsuccessfully in every conceivable combination for six thousand years has not noticeably impaired a credulous unintelligent willingness to keep on trying them again and again. This being so, it seems highly probable that the hope for any significant improvement of society must be postponed, if not forever, at any rate to a future so far distant that consideration of it at the present time would be sheer idleness.