CHAPTER XXXV
Returned depressed from
an evening with Helen and half a dozen of her young political friends.
Such a passion for 'liquidating' the people who don't agree with
them! And such a sincere conviction that
liquidation is necessary!
Revolting – but only to be expected. Regard the problems of reform exclusively as a
matter of politics and economics, and you must approve and practise
liquidation.
Consider
recent history. Industrialism has grown pari
passu with population. Now, where
markets are expanding, the two besetting problems of all industrial societies
solve themselves. New inventions may
create technological unemployment; but expanding markets cure it as it's made. Each individual may possess inadequate
purchasing power; but the total number of individuals is steadily rising. Many small purchasing powers do as much as
fewer big ones.
Our
population is now stationary, will soon decline. Shrinkage instead of expansion
of markets. Therefore,
no more automatic solution of economic problems. Birth control necessitates the use of
co-ordinating political intelligence.
There must be a large-scale plan.
Otherwise the machine won't work.
In other words, politicians will have to be about twenty times as
intelligent as heretofore. Will the
supply of intelligence be equal to the demand?
And
of course intelligence, as Miller's always insisting, isn't isolated. The act of intelligently planning modifies
the emotions of the planners. Consider
English politics. We've made plenty of
reforms – without ever accepting the principles underlying them. (Compare the
king's titles with his present position.
Compare our protestations that we'll never have anything to do with socialism
with the realities of state control.)
There are no large-scale plans in English politics, and hardly any
thinking in terms of first principles. With what results?
Among others, the English politics have been on the whole very
good-natured. The reason is simple. Deal with practical problems as they arise
and without reference to first principles; politics are a matter of
higgling. Now higglers lose tempers, but
don't normally regard one another as fiends in human form. But this is precisely what men of principle
and systematic planners can't help doing.
A principle is, by definition, right; a plan, for the good of
the people. Axioms
from which it logically follows that those who disagree with you and won't help
to realize your plan are enemies of goodness and humanity. No longer men and women, but personifications
of evil, fiends incarnate. Killing men
and women is wrong; but killing fiends is a duty. Hence the Holy Office,
hence Robespierre and the Ogpu.
Men with strong religious and revolutionary faith, men with
well-thought-out plans for improving the lot of their fellows, whether in this
world or the next, have been more systematically and cold-bloodedly cruel than
any others. Thinking in terms of first
principles entails acting with machine-guns.
A government with a comprehensive plan for the betterment of society is
a government that uses torture. Per
contra, if you never consider principles and have no plans, but deal with
situations as they arise, piecemeal, you can afford to have unarmed policemen,
liberty of speech and habeas corpus.
Admirable.
But what happens when an industrial society leans (a) how to make
technological advances at a constantly accelerating speed, and (b) to
prevent conception? Answer: it must
either plan itself in accordance with general political and economic
principles, or else break down. But
governments with principles and plans have generally been tyrannies making use
of police spies and terrorism. Must we
resign ourselves to slavery and torture for the sake of co-ordination?
Breakdown
on the one hand, Inquisition and Ogpu rule on the other. A real dilemma, if the plan is mainly
economic and political. But think in
terms of individual men, women, and children, not of States, Religions,
Economic Systems and such-like abstractions: there is then a hope of passing
between the horns. For if you begin by
considering concrete people, you see at once that freedom from coercion is a
necessary condition of their developing into full-grown human beings; that the
form of economic prosperity which consists in possessing unnecessary objects
doesn't make for individual wellbeing; that a leisure filled with passive
amusements is not a blessing; that the conveniences of urban life are bought at
a high physiological and mental price; that an education which allows you to
use yourself wrongly is almost valueless; that a social organization resulting
in individuals being forced, every few years, to go out and murder one another
must be wrong. And so on. Whereas if you start from
the State, the Faith, the Economic System, there is a complete transvaluation
of values. Individuals must
murder one another, because the interests of the Nation demand it; must be
educated to think of ends and disregard means, because the schoolmasters are
there and don't know of any other method; must live in towns, must have leisure
to read the newspapers and go to the movies, must be encouraged to buy things
they don't need, because the industrial system exists and has to be kept going;
must be coerced and enslaved, because otherwise they might think for themselves
and give trouble to their rulers.
The
sabbath was made for man. But man now behaves like the Pharisees and
insists that he is made for all the things – science, industry, nation, money,
religion, schools – which were really made for
him. Why? Because he is so little aware of his own
interests as a human being that he feels irresistibly tempted to sacrifice
himself to these idols. There is no
remedy except to become aware of one's interests as a human being, and, having
become aware, to learn to act on that awareness. Which means learning to use
the self and learning to direct the mind. It's almost wearisome, the way one always
comes back to the same point. Wouldn't
it be nice, for a change, if there were another way out of our
difficulties! A short
cut. A method
requiring no greater personal effort than recording a vote or ordering some
'enemy of society' to be shot. A salvation from outside, like a dose of calomel.