This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series The New Liberty, given by Ralph Daringdorf, was originally broadcast in 1974.

The strange tale which I want to recount in this lecture goes to the heart of our problems in modern societies.

It is the tale of how the expanding society reaches a point at which all good

things turn sour, or rather stale, and all attempts to create justice, in fact create a new

bondage. For example, we want to break those rigid traditions which confine women to a limited horizon of children,

church and charles.

So women are guaranteed equal rights under law.

But as soon as these rights are granted, they are threatened by a new rigidity

which forces every government department, firm and organization, to have a proportion of women on its staff,

or even, like the Swedish Liberal Party, 40% women members on all committees.

In this way, we not only jump from the frying pan of male chauvinism into the fire of women's lib,

but we also program new contradictions which undo the solutions of yesterday's

problems. Let me give an example which is even more central to people's lives. A deliberate

policy of full employment is one of the great advances which developed societies have made

since the crisis of the Great Depression.

But again, somehow something has gone wrong about this principle.

Instead of telling people that every effort will be made to provide a job opportunity for

everybody and a nearly equivalent income whenever unforeseen problems occur,

there is a tendency to assure people that they can stay where they are.

This has absurd consequences, like carrying token firemen on diesel trains,

but it becomes positively threatening to the very right it provides

...