Action is

a high road to self-confidence and esteem. Where it is open, all energies flow toward it. It comes readily to most people and its rewards ate tangible. The cultivation of the spirit is elusive and difficult and the tendency toward it is rarely spontaneous, whereas, the opportunities for action ate many.

The propensity to action is symptomatic of an inner unbalance. To be balanced is to be more or less at rest. Action is at the bottom -- a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one's balance and keep afloat. And if it is true, as Napoleon wrote to Catnot, "The art of government is not to let men grow stale," then, it is an art of unbalancing. The crucial difference between a totalitarian regime and a free social order is, perhaps, in the methods of unbalancing by which their people ate kept active and striving.