# Literature/1928/Wells

Authors :
* A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z &
* The Open Conspiracy: What Are We To Do With Our Lives (revised 1931, 1933)
* http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0201081.txt

## Excerpts

* The Present Crisis in Human Affairs
** The world is undergoing immense changes. Never before have the conditions of life changed so swiftly and enormously as they have changed for mankind in the last fifty years. [...] We are only now beginning to realize the force and strength of the storm of change that has come upon us.
* The Idea of the Open Conspiracy
** It seemed to me that all over the world intelligent people were waking up to the indignity and absurdity of being endangered, restrained, and impoverished, by a mere uncritical adhesion to traditional governments, traditional ideas of economic life, and traditional forms of behaviour, and that these awaking intelligent people must constitute first a protest and then a creative resistance to the inertia that was stifling and threatening us.
** Let us get together with other people of our sort and make over the world into a great world-civilization that will enable us to realize the promises and avoid the dangers of this new time.
** It amounted to a protest, first mental and then practical, it amounted to a sort of unpremeditated and unorganized conspiracy, against the fragmentary and insufficient governments and the wide-spread greed, appropriation, clumsiness, and waste that are now going on. But unlike conspiracies in general this widening protest and conspiracy against established things would, by its very nature, go on in the daylight, and it would be willing to accept participation and help from every quarter. It would, in fact, become an "Open Conspiracy," a necessary, naturally evolved conspiracy, to adjust our dislocated world.
* We Have to Clear and Clean Up Our Minds
** Fundamentally the Open Conspiracy must be an intellectual rebirth.
* The Revolution in Education
** The new world demand new schools [...] to give everyone a sound and thorough mental training and equip everyone with clear ideas about history, about life, and about political and economic relationships instead of the rubbishy head-content at present prevalent.
* Religion in the New World
* Modern Religion is Objective
* What Mankind Has to do
** A lucid, dispassionate, and immanent criticism is the primary necessity, the living spirit of a world civilization. The Open Conspiracy is essentially such a criticism, and the carrying out of such a criticism into working reality is the task of the Open Conspiracy.
* Broad Characteristics of a Scientific World Commonweal
** We know nowadays that the nineteenth century expended a great wealth of intelligence upon a barren controversy between Individualism and Socialism. They were treated as mutually exclusive alternatives instead of being questions of degree. Human society has been, is, and always must be an intricate system of adjustments between unconditional liberty and the disciplines and subordinations of co-operative enterprise.
* No Stable Utopia is Now Conceivable
* The Open Conspiracy is not to be thought of as a single Organization; it is a conception of life out of which efforts, organizations and new orientations will arise.
* Forces and Resistances in the Great Modern Communities now prevalent, which are antagonistic to The Open Conspiracy. The War with Tradition
** In nearly every country of the world there is a vast degrading and dangerous cultivation of loyalty and mechanical subservience to flags, uniforms, presidents, and kings.
** The Open Conspiracy is necessarily opposed to all such implacable loyalties, and still more so to the aggressive assertion and propaganda of such loyalties. When these things take the form of suppressing reasonable criticism and forbidding even the suggestion of other forms of government, they become plainly antagonists to any comprehensive project for human welfare.
** But there remain a net of special classes in every community, from kings to custom-house officers, far more deeply involved in patriotism because it is their trade and their source of honour, and prepared in consequence with an instinctive resistance to any reorientation of ideas towards a broader outlook. In the case of such people no mental sanitation is possible without dangerous and alarming changes in their way of living. For the majority of these patriots by metier, the Open Conspiracy unlocks the gates leading from a fussy paradise of eminence, respect, and privilege, and motions them towards an austere wilderness which does not present even the faintest promise of a congenial, distinguished life for them.
** From such classes of patriots by metier, it is manifest that the Open conspiracy can expect only opposition.
** This tangle of traditions and loyalties, of interested trades and professions, of privileged classes and official patriots, this complex of human beings embodying very easy and natural and time-honoured ideas of eternal national separation and unending international and class conflict, is the main objective of the Open Conspiracy in its opening phase. This tangle must be disentangled as the Open Conspiracy advances, and until it is largely disentangled and cleared up that Open Conspiracy cannot become anything very much more than a desire and a project.
* The Resistances of the less industrialized peoples to the drive of The Open Conspiracy
** To begin with, the Open Conspiracy is necessarily a group of ideas.
** The Open Conspiracy itself can never be imprisoned and fixed in the form of an organization, but everywhere Open Conspirators should be organizing themselves for educational reform.
** And also within the influence of this comprehensive project there will be all sorts of groupings for study and progressive activity. One can presuppose the formation of groups of friends, of family groups, of student and employees or other sorts of people, meeting and conversing frequently in the course of their normal occupations, who will exchange views and find themselves in agreement upon this idea of a constructive change of the world as the guiding form of human activities.
* Resistances and antagonistic forces in our conscious and unconscious selves
* The Open Conspiracy begins as a movement of discussion, explanation, and propaganda
* Early constructive work of The Open Conspiracy
** To-day it may seem no more than a visionary idea; to-morrow it may be realized as a world-wide force of opinion and will. People will pass [...] from saying that the Open Conspiracy is impossible to saying that it has always been plain and clear to them, that to this fashion they have shaped their lives as long as they can remember.
* Existing and developing movements which are contributory to The Open Conspiracy and which must develop a common consciousness. The Parable of Provinder Island
* The creative home, social group and school: the present waste of Idealistic Will
* Progressive development of the activities of The Open Conspiracy into a World Control and Commonweal: the hazards of the attempt
* Human life in the coming World Community
** The new life that the Open Conspiracy struggles to achieve through us for our race is first a life of liberations.
** The oppression of incessant toil can surely be lifted from everyone, and the miseries due to a great multitude of infections and disorders of nutrition and growth cease to be part of human experience.
** And nor only from natural evils will man be largely free. He will not be left with his soul tangled, haunted by monstrous and irrational fears and a prey to malicious impulse.
** Our battle is with cruelties and frustrations, stupid, heavy, and hateful things from which we shall escape at last, less like victors conquering a world than like sleepers awaking from a nightmare in the dawn. From any dream [...] one can escape by realizing that it is a dream; by saying "I will awake."
** The Open Conspiracy is the awaking of mankind from a nightmare, an infantile nightmare, of the struggle for existence and the inevitability of war. The light of day thrusts between our eyelids, and the multitudinous sounds of morning clamor in our ears. A time will come when men will sit with history before them or with some old newspaper before them and ask incredulously, "Was there ever such a world?"

### See more

    http://www.panarchy.org/wells/conspiracy.1933.html

## Wikimedia

| w: World government w: The World State w: New World Order (conspiracy theory) | w: Future studies w: World Brain w: Utopia |

## Chronology

* Reagle Jr., Joseph Michael (2010). Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia. MIT Press. $^{[^]}$
* Wallace, Danny P. (2007). Knowledge Management: Historical and Cross-Disciplinary Themes. Libraries Unlimited. $^{[^]}$
* W. Warren Wagar (2001). The Open Conspiracy: H.G. Wells on World Revolution (Praeger Studies on the 21st Century), Praeger.
* Gillies, James & Robert Cailliau (2000). How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web. Oxford University Press. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1999/Berners-Lee $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1999/Gardner $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1999/Garfield $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1999/Mayne $^{[^]}$
* Rayward, W. Boyd (1999). "H.G. Wells's Idea of a World Brain: A Critical Reassessment," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(7): 557-573. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1999/Stallman $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1999/Swann $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1999/Todd $^{[^]}$
* Campbell-Kelly, Martin & William Aspray (1996). Computer: A History of the Information Machine. Basic Books. $^{[^]}$
* Cunningham, Ward (1995). WikiWikiWeb. Portland Pattern Repository, Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki $^{[^]}$
* Rayward, W. Boyd (1994). "Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and Hypertext." Journal of the American Society for Information Science 45(4): 235-250. $^{[^]}$
* Buckland, Michael (1992). "Emanuel Goldberg, Electronic Document Retrieval, and Vannevar Bush's Memex." Journal of the American Society for Information Science, vol. 43, no. 4 (May 1992), pp. 284-294. $^{[^]}$
* Gloor, Peter A. ed. (1991). Cybermap: Yet Another Way of Navigating in Hyperspace (HYPERTEXT'91 Proceedings of the third annual ACM conference on Hypertext). New York, NY: ACM. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1990/Berners-Lee $^{[^]}$
* Kochen, Manfred, ed. (1989). The Small World: A Volume of Recent Research Advances Commemorating Ithiel de Sola Pool, Stanley Milgram, Theodore Newcomb. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corp. (January 1, 1989). $^{[^]}$
* Adler, Mortimer J. & Geraldine van Doren (1988). Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind. New York: Macmillan. $^{[^]}$
* Trigg, Randall H. & Peggy M. Irish (1987). "Hypertext Habitats: Experiences of Writers in NoteCards." HYPERTEXT '87 Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Hypertext. New York, NY: ACM. $^{[^]}$
* Trigg, Randall Hagner & Mark Weiser (1986). "TEXTNET: A Network-based Approach to Text Handling," ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) Vol. 4, No.1 (Jan. 1986) pp. 1-23. $^{[^]}$
* Weyer, Stephen A. & Alan H. Borning (1985). "A Prototype Electronic Encyclopedia," ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) vol. 3, no. 1 (Jan. 1985) pp. 63-88. $^{[^]}$
* Levy, Steven (1984). Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Press/Doubleday. $^{[^]}$
* Shneiderman, Ben (1983). "Direct Manipulation: A Step Beyond Programming Languages," Computer, Vol. 16, No. 8 (August 1983) pp. 57-69. $^{[^]}$
* Trigg, Randall Hagner (1983). A Network-based Approach to Text Handling for the On-line Scientific Community. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, MD. $^{[^]}$
* Adler, Mortimer J. & Paideia Group (1982). The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto. New York: Simon & Schuster. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1982/Brown $^{[^]}$
* Kornfeld, William A. & Hewitt, Carl E. (1981). "The Scientific Community Metaphor." IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 24-33. $^{[^]}$
* Preece, Warren E. (1980). "Notes toward a New Encyclopedia Part 1," Scholarly Publishing vol. 12, no. 1 (Oct. 1980) pp. 13-30; "Part 2," ibid vol. 12, no. 2 (Jan. 1981) pp. 141-157. $^{[^]}$
* Lyotard, Jean-François (1979). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. University of Minnesota Press, 1984. $^{[^]}$
* Pool, Ithiel de Sola & Manfred Kochen (1978). "Contacts and Influence." Social Networks, 1, pp. 1-51. $^{[^]}$
* Soergel, Dagobert (1977). "An Automated Encyclopedia: A Solution of the Information Problem?" International Classification, 4(1): 4-10; 4(2): 81-89. $^{[^]}$
* Belkin, Nicholas J. & Stephen E. Robertson (1976). "Information Science and the Phenomenon of Information," Journal of the American Society for Information Science (Jul-Aug 1976) 27 (4): 197-204. $^{[^]}$
* Kochen, Manfred, ed. (1975). Information for Action: from Knowledge to Wisdom. New York: Academic Press. $^{[^]}$
* Rayward, W. Boyd (1975). The Universe of Information: The Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and International Organisation. (FID 520). Moscow: VINITI (for FID). $^{[^]}$
* Wersig, G. & U. Neveling (1975). "The Phenomena of Interest to Information Science." The Information Scientist. 9 (4): 127-140. $^{[^]}$
* Merton, Robert K. (1973). The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. University of Chicago Press. $^{[^]}$
* Kochen, Manfred (1972). "WISE: A World Information Synthesis and Encyclopaedia." Journal of Documentation, 28: 322-341. $^{[^]}$
* Licklider, J. C. R. (1965). Libraries of the Future. MIT Press. $^{[^]}$
* Price, Derek J. de Solla (1965). "Networks of Scientific Papers." Science 149 (3683): 510-515. $^{[^]}$
* Einbinder, Harvey (1964). The Myth of the Britannica. New York: Grove Press. $^{[^]}$
* Garfield, Eugene (1964). "Science Citation Indexing -- A New Dimension in Indexing." Science 144 (3619): 649-654. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1963/Gabor $^{[^]}$
* Kessler, M. M. (1963), "Bibliographic Coupling between Scientific Papers." American Documentation, 14 (1): 10-25. $^{[^]}$
* Licklider, J. C. R. (1960). "Man-Computer Symbiosis." In: IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, vol. HFE-1, pp. 4–11. $^{[^]}$
* Snow, Charles Percy (1959). The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Rede Lecture). Cambridge University Press, 1959. $^{[^]}$
* Garfield, Eugene (1955). "Citation Indexes for Science: A New Dimension in Documentation through Association of Ideas." Science, 122(3159): 108-111. $^{[^]}$
* McCarthy, John; Marvin Minsky; Nathan Rochester & Claude Shannon (1955). A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. $^{[^]}$
* Orwell, George (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker and Warburg, 1949. $^{[^]}$
* Skinner, B. F. (1948). Walden Two. Macmillan Co., 1948. $^{[^]}$
* Bush, Vannevar (1945). "As We May Think." The Atlantic Monthly (July 1945): 101-108. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1944/Wells $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1940/Wells $^{[^]}$
* Bernal, J. D. (1939). The Social Function of Science. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. $^{[^]}$
* Wells, H. G. (1938). World Brain. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co. $^{[^]}$
* Wells, H. G. (1936). World Encyclopaedia. Lecture delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, November 20th, 1936. $^{[^]}$
* Davis, Watson (1933). Project for Scientific Publication and Bibliography (Scientific Information Institute). Science Service, Washington, D.C., August 19, 1933. $^{[^]}$
* Korzybski, Alfred (1933). Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. 5th ed., Institute of General Semantics, 1994. $^{[^]}$
* Wells, H. G. (1933). The Shape of Things to Come. Hutchinson. $^{[^]}$
* Huxley, Aldous (1932). Brave New World. Harper Perennial, 1932. $^{[^]}$
* Ogden, C. K. (1930). Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar. London: Paul Treber. $^{[^]}$
* Wells, H. G. (1928). The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints For A World Revolution. Doubleday, Doran. $^{[^]}$
* Wells, H. G. (1927). The Way the World is Going: Guesses and Forcasts of the Years Ahead. London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1928. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1925/Wells $^{[^]}$
* Wells, H. G. (1923). Men Like Gods. Cassell and Co., Ltd. $^{[^]}$
* Wells, H. G. (1914). The World Set Free. Macmillan & Co. $^{[^]}$
* Welby, Victoria Lady (1911). Significs and Language: The Articulate Form of Our Expressive and Interpretive Resources. H. Walter Schmitz, ed., John Benjamins, 1985. $^{[^]}$
* Wells, H. G. (1905). A Modern Utopia. New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2005. $^{[^]}$
* Wells, H. G. (1898). The War of the Worlds. William Heinemann. $^{[^]}$

## Reviews
### www.panarchy.org

    Note @ http://www.panarchy.org/wells/conspiracy.1933.html
    H. G. Wells launched the idea of an Open Conspiracy in a booklet in 1928 and then, in a more extended text, in 1933. Here we offer some extracts from the various chapters of the later work. The vision that emerges from this selection is that of a conspiracy of cosmopolitan individuals for the organization of a world community that leaves behind the heavy burden of nationalism and militarism. This view is sometimes associated with a slightly different one of a world state run by a world directorate for the advancement and the well-being of humanity.
    When Wells wrote this essay the dominant progressive thinking was that of gigantic companies that would totally replace small firms; besides that, planning was conceived only as coming from a directing centre that would eliminate waste and the wrong allocation of resources. Now we know that these were just myths, devoid of any foundation on reality. Moreover, we now live in a technological reality of instant communication and ubiquitous information that has shown the ineffectiveness of both gigantism and dirigisme.
    Having said so, the analysis of Wells still remains interesting and many of his remarks and suggestions are still fresh and powerful as when they were first formulated.

### www.amazon.com

    Book Description @ W. Warren Wagar (2001) below
    In 1928 when [H.G. Wells] wrote this cry for a new age of worldwide knowledge networking, there was no Internet. Yet Wells was already convinced that if only thinking people across the planet could somehow pull together and pool their expertise, energy, and insights into sort of cerebrum for humanity, then the world would be a saner, safer, better, fairer place. Anyone aware of how the Internet already reflects both the vices and the virtues of society and wonders how a world-renowned visionary like H.G. Wells envisaged knowledge networking as working in practice will enjoy this book. It is a hymn to the practical possibilities of world group action.

### w: W. Warren Wagar (2001)

    The Open Conspiracy: H.G. Wells on World Revolution (Praeger Studies on the 21st Century), Praeger.