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CHAPTER NINE 

 SECURITY VERSUS INSECURITY 



MORE than a decade has passed since the Borsodi fam- 

 ily took flight from the city. Experimentation, and 

 interpretation of the experiments, on the Borsodi 

 homestead finally reached a point where what had 

 been learned had to be given utterance. The result was 

 that protesting essay which I called This Ugly Civi- 

 lization. It was an effort to interpret our quest of 

 comfort and to develop from it a program which 

 might lead to the conquest of comfort for individuals 

 and families, if not for society as a whole. But it ap- 

 peared in 1929, when the country was most deliri- 

 ously celebrating the great boom of which Henry 

 Ford was the prophet and mass production the gospel. 

 Virtually no one wanted to be told that the whole 

 industrialized world was mistaken; that there was 

 another way and a better way of making a living and 

 of providing ourselves with our hearts' desires than 

 through organized, integrated, centralized labor. The 

 way which I urged as desirable for the individual and 

 essential to the salvation of society seemed romantic 

 to some who read my book; practicable only for ex- 

 ceptional families to other readers, and hostile to the 

 social centralization for which others were working. 



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