DEMOCRACY

1 Democracy

The seven deadly virtues of democracy are liberalism, individualism, consumerism, humanism, technomania, universalism and nationalism. These will end up overturning all the restraints that make life possible.

In our consumer democracies all politics is performed as a series of fierce wrangles over small differences.

No one now dares fault democracy itself. And we don’t dissent from the government line unless to object that it ought to be more democratic.

In a monarchy the king or queen may have held unchallenged sway, but the state itself was weak and limited. In a democracy there are a host of checks on governmental power, but the state is strong and omnipresent. ‘Nothing is strong in a democracy,’ Tocqueville wrote, ‘save the state.’

2 Liberty, equality, fraternity

The french revolution bore a monster with three heads, democracy, which promises too much liberty, socialism, which imposes too much equality, and nationalism, which enforces too much fraternity.

Liberty sets a limit to equality. Equality puts a halter on liberty. And fraternity does away with both. Liberty and equality form a toxic compound. And when mixed with fraternity they form an explosive one.

Individualism stunts the individual. Populism corrupts the people. And nationalism degrades the nation.

3 Liberty and the love of power

A state thrives by the liberty of its citizens which will soon rip it apart. And it must strive to free them from its own might, which is the one force able to secure their freedom.

Our love of freedom is no more than our infatuation with our power. We don’t want freedom for ourselves, but dominion over others and all the earth. And we are happy to destroy them and the earth and ourselves to get it.

We each think that the right kind of regulation is the sort that will leave us free to do as we like, while banning others from doing what they like.

With true freedom comes responsibility. But we want the kind of freedom that allows us to act irresponsibly.

4 The dangerous freedom of democracy

Rousseau proclaimed that ‘Man was born free, but everywhere is in chains.’ But man was born in chains forged by nature and custom, yet everywhere he has been set free. And he promptly put the earth in chains.

Freedom is not a gift of nature. The human condition does not condemn us to be free. Neither man nor the citizen is forced to be free, as Rousseau argued. But capitalism condemns each of us to act as a free consumer, loosed from all the old trammels which would hold us back from soaking up its overproduction.

In the next hundred years the masses will prove how woeful they can make their plight with no need of gods or great men to prey on them. They will at last be free to do just as they please. And they will use their freedom to pull down the sky on their own heads.

The freedom that America is so keen to share with all peoples is the freedom that would force them to be like americans.

A liberal state is one that hosts more parasite lawyers than productive engineers.

5 Freedom of the press in democracy

Free speech is a right, but free thought is a duty. And we much prefer to assert our rights than to fulfil our duties.

A democracy needs free media to tell its citizens what they think. But mass media, it seems, were not stupid, ephemeral or trivial enough. So capitalism had to come up with the internet and social media.

Shame is one of the casualties of democracy. The people has no shame, and it will flock to leaders who mirror its own shamelessness.

A society made up of shameless self-admirers will place no value on privacy. And there’s no place for shame in our age of publicity, self-promotion and self-righteousness.

The more we optimize the conduits of communication, the more we degrade their content.

We insist on our right to know. Yet we seal our eyes to all the bad news. ‘Prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things, prophesy deceits.’

6 Equality

Nature seeds superiorities. But the state singles out which types it will water and cause to grow.

We need to hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, because it is so evident that they are not. A self-evident truth is one that lacks all evidence. People are not equal. They are incommensurable. And on any scale by which we can measure them they don’t come out equal. And what rights has nature, our creator, endowed us with? It snips our thread capriciously, has not made us free, and mocks our pursuit of happiness.

7 Equal by shared superiority

Take away rank and superiority, and equality goes too. The members of one group are equal only by virtue of their shared difference from other groups. ‘Inequality of rights,’ as Nietzsche notes, ‘is the condition for there being rights at all.’ Equality results from the enforcement of ranks, differentiations, layers, gradings, tiers and hierarchies. And now the whole human species is equal because it is cut off from all the rest. A class of beings comes to be coequal by asserting its own rights over those that are lower than it. And it maintains its own equal rights by refusing them to all the rest, and this is what it calls justice and fair-dealing. It constitutes itself as a class by severing itself from all the others.

Each successive age is sure that it has set up a perfect justice, since it has enlarged the caste that is equal and therefore empowered to mash all those that are below it.

8 Class in democracy

The middle class makes the future of a state, the working class will make no more than its future middle class. The bourgeoisie is the sole revolutionary class, as capitalism is the sole system that is continuously revolutionizing itself. But the proletariat is no more than the obsolete tool of one of its phases.

There is one drive that unites the members of the proletariat, their shared resolve to climb out of it.

The middle class watch politics and vote for a party as the lower class watch sport and shout for a team.

9 Capitalism is the end of class war

The class struggle is not the cause of historical change. It is at most an effect of it. It is one of the accidents of the superstructure and not an essential part of the economic base of society. Marxism was part of ideology.

Capitalism makes class and class war things of the past. Capital is hyperactive. It can’t stay still, but circulates so rapidly, that though it piles up deep inequalities of wealth, it dissolves stable class structures. Class is one of the solid things that it melts into air. By disaggregating individuals, by breaking down privilege and primogeniture, by putting an end to discrete rights and duties, by opening all careers to talent and education to all, by permitting estates to be sold, by cutting off family continuity, and by disrupting all relations, it puts an end to fixed and permanent castes. It is the last phase of the demolishment that had been going on since mediaeval times. And so there is no ruling class in capitalism, because there are no classes at all.

The history of all hitherto existing societies may have been the history of class struggles, but as Marx himself showed, capitalism gave rise to a kind of society like no hitherto existing one.

A society can’t reach its maximum velocity till it has been horizontally flattened by equality.

Human beings had to be equalized, so that capital could grow unhindered. And each had to be freed to act as a unit, so that all could be made subject to the rule of quantity.

National feeling takes the place of class solidarity, since capital can use this to consolidate the state.

10 Beneficiaries

The system may have an interest which its beneficiaries do not share. No boss wants to pay high wages, yet capitalism needs each boss to pay high wages, so as to prop up the demand for all its goods. And though capitalists may favour a small night-watchman state, market capitalism needs one with a colossal regulative and redistributive apparatus.

Capital can thrive only by being passed from hand to hand. And it does not care whose hands it happens to be in at the moment. They are temporary surrogates which it makes use of to reproduce itself.

The middle class is the beneficiary of capitalism but not its master.

The ruling class may be sitting in the first class carriage, but the train will take them where capital wants to go.

11 Aristocracy and democracy

The old aristocracies were the realm of form and quality. Democracy and capitalism are the realm of matter and quantity.

A true aristocracy is self-selecting. How did the children of Israel come to be the chosen seed, if not by choosing themselves?

An aristocracy is an invaluable institution made up of worthless men and women. An academy is a worthless institution made up of notable men and women.

Monarchy was the narcissism of one man or woman. Aristocracy was the narcissism of a select few. Democracy is the narcissism of all of us. In a monarchy one is sacred. In an aristocracy a few are sacred. And in a democracy all are sacred. Hence it is that much more voracious and invincible.

12 The voracious present of democracy

We presume that the only people who matter are the ones that are alive now. But all the people who matter are long since dead. And we are the hungry ghosts who haunt this world of voracious mediocrity. We ‘but live where motley is worn.’

As human kind grows more unified in the present, it is more and more cut off from all its many pasts.

The ravening majority of the hour outvotes the select majority of the ages. The living are like the rich and well set-up, free to tread on or neglect the dead, who are as defenceless as the poor and despised.

13 Democracy eats the future

‘People will not look forward to posterity,’ Burke warned, ‘who never look backward to their ancestors.’ And an age that lives for nothing but the future will wreck the world for those who come after it. Posterity is always in the right. And democracy will prove how wrong it was by leaving no posterity. But it won’t care, since it will have had its day of repletion. Democracy is the narrowest and most wolfish oligarchy that has ever been. It excludes the true majority, that of the past and the future, those who are gone and those still to come, the earth and its tutelary gods. It disenfranchises all but the iron cohort of our own time and place.

Democracy has cancelled our compact with all those who will come after us. It devours the future to stuff its own insatiable maw. It lives entirely for the present, and won’t make a thing that will outlast it. The present presumes that the ordinances of the past have no right to bind it. And yet it usurps the right to eat up the inheritance of the future.

14 Fraternity

We are all brothers and sisters. Why else would we hate each other so bitterly? Fraternity is a fratricidal virtue. It tells you who your comrades are, so that you can band with them to slaughter the aliens who are not. It takes for its byword, as Chamfort said, ‘Be my brother, or I kill you.’

If it’s true that the one who has wronged me is still my brother, then it’s no less the case that my brother is always the one who has wronged me.

A people has common fears and hatreds, but only private hopes and loves. So capitalist states stand in such danger of being torn apart by their competitive greeds, that they can be kept whole only by their shared fears and loathings of enemies at home or abroad. The market needs to keep the people greedy, and the state needs to keep them fearful.

Every nation, like each one of us and our whole species, is sure that it is exceptional yet central, unique yet indispensable. Tell it that it’s the chosen race, and you are sure to have avid listeners.

In order to win the people’s hearts, you have to give them an enemy to hate and a pretext to love themselves more. And this is not hard, since they’re so ready to do both.

15 Nationalism

The nation state is the most fertile ground that capital has found to grow in. And we are so much the robots of capital that we assume it is the natural form to foster our freedom and happiness.

The nation state was a tool of producer capitalism. Globalism is a tool of consumer capitalism. And though the world will grow more and more globalized, it will never be internationalized.

A nation, even more than a person, owes its character more to the ebb and flow of events than to the so-called spirit of its people.

Races have seemed so distinct because there is so little difference between them, that they had to invent a lot of customs to distinguish themselves. And then they took these for their nature.

Modern states have not evolved organically through the centuries. They have been forged by monetary interests and welded close with cables, roads and railways with a view to promoting trade. Most european states are artefacts fashioned by nineteenth century nationalism. And most of the rest are leftovers from nineteenth century imperialism. The spider of empire sucked the life out of its victims, and then deposited in it the poisoned eggs of nationality.

National feeling did not create nation states. They whipped up national feeling to create themselves.

Nationalism does not promote the real national interest. It panders to a false national vanity.

16 Love of country, hatred of its people

Nationalism is an assertion by the nation’s most worthless citizens of its most worthless traits. It is maintained most vociferously by those who add least to the lustre of their nation. The same self-infatuation that exalts the mob self in the individual exalts the mob identity of the nation.

Nationalism does not bind the citizens to one another. It binds them as servants to the state.

Nationalism unifies the state by dividing its citizens. It sets each against the other in mutual suspicion, resentment and contempt.

Patriots feel that their country would be perfect, if only half its citizens were hanged or guillotined.

Nationalism is a cancerous growth of decrepit nations in their second childishness. It is the frenzy of adolescent minds in a senile polity.

What a blessing, to have been born in a land that holds out no temptation to patriotic pride.

We venerate the flag at the same time as we vandalize the land. All flags are soaked in blood and lies. Why else would we hold them so dear?

17 The social bond

Society is held together not by truth but by lies, not by love but by jealousy, not by charity but by avarice, not by justice but by rivalry, not by courage but by cowardice, not by solidarity but by indifference. And if there were nothing but conscience to hold people in check, they would soon be tearing each other to pieces.

Society stays at peace because each of us agrees to keep in check our hostile intents, since we know that the harm that others could do us is far greater than the small sum of good that they might wish to do us. We feel grateful to no one more than to the torturer who slackens the knife. So why is it we are not more grateful to death?

A shared resentment links a stronger bond than a shared love, since it is forged from our lust for power. We love singly, but we loathe in common. We are united by what we hate, but we are divided by our desires.

What unites us most deeply is our shallow selfishness. And what we share with others is a brittle compromise with their wants and fears. If we weren’t so egoistic, we would have much less in common with others. Money is the means that we use to satisfy our desires, but money is a social fiction. ‘Money,’ as Rousseau wrote, ‘is the real bond of society.’

CHANGE

18 All change in democracy

The citizens of a democracy want everything to change. But they want it all to change in the same direction that it’s going, since it all seems to be going so well for them. ‘They like change, but fear revolutions,’ as Tocqueville said.

We don’t mind if we’re on the road to nowhere, so long as we hope that we’ll get there quick. We can’t stop now, or slack our pace, or go back. So we have to go on and on, faster and faster to our doom.

We have to stake all our hopes on change to set the world right, since change has sent it so wrong.

Our overstuffed and unabashed age boasts that it can jettison the old ways and yet still profit from the past.

Now that the world is spinning so fast, it alters more slowly than ever. It has so much momentum, that it can’t change course.

19 Reforming democracy

People come to accept change not by theoretical arguments which prove its rightness but by the accomplished fact that it has already been made. Our love of change is itself a kind of inertia and surrender to the current state of affairs.

Timid people lose hope when affairs don’t alter, but they grow apprehensive when they do. They hate and fear change. Yet they like to be tinkering with a few things all the time, just to shake them up. ‘Daily, they alter, change, and renew things of secondary importance, but they take care not to touch fundamentals,’ as Tocqueville wrote of the citizens of democracy.

Some people can’t bring themselves to make slight reforms till they have had great ones thrust on them. They dread innovations which they adapt to with ease when they come.

20 The state feeds on crisis

All that we learn from dealing with our crises is to try to control all the processes of nature, which will make our future crises so much more dire.

A crisis can change everything except how we think, since we scarcely think at all. Each fresh emergency elicits the same old reflexes of thought.

We can think of no better way to meet an unprecedented threat than to deploy our old schemes of thought. The left are sure that state planning will do it, the right trust to free enterprise. Progressives think we need more progress, and the pious that we need to go back to God. Technocrats prescribe more technology, and humanists want to reaffirm human values.

The state grows in size with each crisis that it confronts, and gains with each loss that leaves society weaker. All crises, be they wars, plagues or recessions, make the citizens more abject, clamorous and dependent, and the state more paternalistic, overweening and intrusive. And the state has no need to force its citizens to yield up to it their freedom. The citizens beg it to take it from them.

Threats to our common life might make us pull together for a short time, but they leave no enduring sense of solidarity. We soon revert to our old habits, and they tear us apart and make us all the more self-involved.

21 Revolution

A revolution is neither a rupture with the past nor a return to it. It does not change the course that a society will take. It’s an unshackling of the forces of production from the obsolete political structures which are holding them back. It does not lay down a new road. Rather, it drives a new vehicle so that it can go faster to the same goal. It is a change in velocity, not in direction. It does not touch the economic base of its society. On the contrary, it is the economic base restructuring its social and political arrangements. It smashes the moribund forms that stand in the way of the full development of its already operating productive forces.

It may be that society can be changed only by a revolution in the human soul. But the human soul could be changed only if there were first a revolution in society. It is just because the human heart is as it is that the world is on the brink. But no change in the human heart could bring it back.

Bourgeois reformers plan to end the abuses by which they have profited. And bourgeois revolutionists plan to end the liberties with which they have made free.

22 Radical and conservative

A true conservative should be, like Montaigne, jovial but not hopeful, and sceptical but not despondent.

Each camp is sure that it has history on its side, conservatives because they are striving to pass it on intact, reformers because they have learnt from its blunders, and incendiaries because they are fulfilling its iron law of change. Radicals assume that they can throw off the yoke of the past, reformers that they are ameliorating it, reactionaries that they can bring it back, and traditionalists that they can hand it on unscarred. But it will form the future in ways that none of them can foretell or control.

Conservatives are sure that the world was in a good way up to the time when they were young, and that it’s only since then that it has all gone to pot. When they think that they are harking back to the pristine past, they get no further than their own childhood. And like all lovers, they have to misunderstand the past which they think they love.

An autocracy that tries to regenerate, such as the France of Louis the sixteenth or the Russia of the tsars or the catholic church, will shortly crash, as Tocqueville showed. But it won’t crash because it tries to reform. It tries to reform because it has long been doomed to crash. But at first it may grow more repressive, though for the same reason and with the same results.

23 The reactionary

Reaction is the politics of despair. And so it is the one point of view that fits our desperate times. But it’s also the one stance that we lack the courage to take up.

Reactionaries are despairing radicals. They know that only root and branch change could save the world, and that it’s too late for that.

There is now nothing worth conserving. So a reactionary must first of all be a revolutionary. How else could we retrieve the past but by seizing the future? ‘What is tumbling,’ Nietzsche says, ‘we should still push.’ It would only be by pressing onward that a state could go back and recuperate its old health.

The past was better than the present, because it was too wise, or at least too weak, to be always trying to improve.

24 The paradox of reaction

The paradox of reaction. No doubt the past ought to serve as the great guide of the present. But since the past has shaped the present, and the present has gone so wrong, it would be mad to look to the past as a guide. The reactionary must hope for a clean break from the past, but that would be the most catastrophic thing of all, if it could be done.

The past has made us what we are, and it forbids us to return to it. It has shaped us as the sort of beings who can only go forward. In order to change the future, we would have to change the past. But we can’t change the past, which will push us into the future by the road that it has laid down.

Reactionaries hate change so much, that they pin their hopes on returning to the past, when change had not yet wrecked all that was good. And that is the one change that it is not in our power to make, and which would send the world on a worse course than ever.

25 The fragility of tradition

Nothing is at once more robust and more fragile than tradition. It is self-perpetuating, and continues by dint of its own continuity. But then the least interruption from outside can bring it down. And once it crumbles to dust, nothing can bring it back to life.

There’s no point trying to reintroduce communitarian and traditionalist values as one option in a system of self-determining individualism. It would be of no more use than grafting a long-dead organism on an unstoppable machine. ‘Tradition,’ as Johnson said, ‘is but a meteor which, if once it falls, cannot be rekindled.’

By the time we find how much we need roots, they have been cut through and can never be regrown.

It’s fatal to dig at our roots, just because they are so thin and shallow.

Our roots seem deep because the soil they grow in is so thin.

All the customs and institutions which in a traditional culture serve to keep up the old ways, such as religion, family and the state, in an innovating one help to tear them down.

When we let go of our few irrational first principles, the world rationally goes to hell. We are sensibly sustained by our deranged delusions. ‘Banish sagacity, discard knowledge,’ Lao Tzu says, ‘and the people will be benefitted a hundredfold. The sage rules by emptying their hearts and filling their bellies.’

POWER OF ILLUSION

26 The power of illusion

Knowledge may be power, but they gain most power who know how to use the ignorance of others to bend them to do their will.

When illusion collides with illusion, the blood that they shed is real.

The real world is a battlefield of furiously competing falsehoods. It is a realm of illusion because it is a realm of power.

‘Truth,’ Heidegger said, ‘is that which makes a people certain, clear and strong.’ On the contrary, if they were ever to stumble on the truth, it would make them doubtful, dithering and weak. The more confused our ideas, the more confident our will. Strong illusions impart some of their own strength to those who hold them. Clarity of action is a gift of confusion of thought.

Those who crave power must fool their dupes so as to get their hands on it. And those who have no power must fool themselves as a sop for failing to get it. The one thing denied to the powerful is the freedom to speak or to hear the unvarnished truth. But this is one more privilege that their power has won for them.

Their schemes prosper so suavely, that hustlers don’t doubt that it serves you right when they take you in. The fox scorns the chickens for having been ensnared with such ease. And powerful people are contemptuous of the schmucks they exploit.

27 The power of interests in democracy

Interest is power, and illusion is power. And the most astute place-hunters know how to multiply people’s self-interest by their illusions and how to put both of them to use to serve their own ends. Politicians convert the interests of others into their own supremacy, as capitalists convert the wants of others into their own wealth.

Power is acutely vulnerable to friction. So those who have it must learn to use no more of it than they need to. Like the gods, they resort to coercion only when they can’t gain their ends by fraud and dissimulation. Lies that are not buttressed by force rule precariously. And force that is not underpinned by lies soon falls down. Dominion undoes itself by being too hesitant or too harsh to no purpose. Totalizing states soon fall apart, because they are spendthrifts of their own might. Democracy lasts longer because it is more frugal.

A political party, like a bird, has two strong wings and a very small brain.

Power corrupts people by enabling them to give rein to their base will. And powerlessness corrupts them by coercing them to compromise their high principles.

28 Playing to the crowd

Both dreamers and hardheads have no doubt that their worldview will soon be proved true when it wins the hearts of the majority.

Intriguers, such as Nixon, steal the people’s love by being hated vociferously by the right enemies. They know that if they make enough of these, they will make them all the friends they need.

Few things are more ticklish to control than public opinion, since few things are more easy to manipulate. Like the surf, it is soon whipped up since it is all on the surface, and it’s blown this way and that by the least flurry of wind. And now that it can be so minutely quantified, we are more in its grip than ever. The crowd is persistently demanding but cheaply impressed.

The United States ended up with the worst of both federalist centralization and hillbilly jeffersonian populism.

29 Flattering democracy

What two prescripts must all the people’s tribunes heed? Woo the rabble’s truculent self-regard, and gorge the gaping jaws of its greed. How could they hope to win the crowd’s trust, if they don’t start by flattering its judgement? No one, said Tocqueville, ‘whatever be his eminence, can decline to pay this tribute of adulation to his compatriots.’

We live in an age of mass insolence and mass flattery. Common people are now too proud to court those in power. But those in power must stoop to fawn on those below them. They bow down to the electorate the better to tie its hands. The day that Burke feared has come, when rulers act as ‘flatterers instead of legislators, the instruments, not the guides, of the people.’ Kings and queens used to thank the Lord for enduing them with humility. Demagogues now thank the mob, which clamours to be grovelled to the whole time. It refuses to be fooled till it has been flattered how shrewd and discerning it is.

30 The demagogue and democracy

A populist politician is ready to do the right thing so long as it’s popular, and won’t do the unpopular thing except when it’s wrong. When they have the courage of their convictions, it’s others that will be sent off to die for them.

The demagogue rides into the new Jerusalem on a scapegoat.

Hypocrisy is one of the gifts of the true leader. Sincerity is one of the ploys of political-brawlers and populists.

The demagogue has to tell the public stupid lies, so that it will believe that he is as smart and truthful as itself.

A demagogue fans the crowd’s fears, so as to fire up its more malevolent resentments and craving for power.

In order to lure the people to give up to him their freedom, the demagogue need only tell them that there is a sinister minority plotting to seize it from them.

Mendacious leaders feel sure of their own frankness when their followers answer their glib frauds with a commensurately glib faith.

Some people rush to submit to a tyranny so as to stop others stealing their freedom.

31 The Caesars of democracy

Democracy robs its citizens of the self-determination which they need if they are to act as good participants in a democracy. By rendering them mild and compliant, is it readying them to be offered as helpless prey to a coming god of blood? It is the benignant dictatorships that are the most degrading. They don’t confiscate our freedom by force, but lure us to give it up of our own volition. As Tocqueville wrote, the caesarism that democracy might lead to ‘would be more widespread and kinder, it would debase people without tormenting them.’ In our sheep’s paradise it is the sheep who swathe the wolf in sheep’s clothing, so that they can feel safe that it won’t eat them.

Brutal tyrants paved the way for democracy by consolidating the power of the state. And now democracy may be preparing the world for kindly tyrants who will give way to all the people’s childish whims.

In the past, when the population was young, the despotism that democracy had to fear was that of schoolmasters and nannies. Now the population is so old, that the despotism we have to fear is one of doctors and nurses. And both of them are at once strict and coddling.

The state used to make serfs of its citizens by brutally repressing them. Now it does so by benevolently indulging their wants.

32 Pretending to persuade

Trimming politicians use the currency not of belief but of personal trust. They don’t strive to change your views but to hitch your self-interest to their cause. They know how to win your vote even when you don’t believe what they say. Their aim is not so much to convince you as to flatter you that they need to. They make do with facades, since they know that nothing in this world has more force or substance. All they ask is that you should pretend to have faith in them, since they are merely pretending to persuade you. And we don’t care what lies they tell, so long as we feel sure that they won’t hurt us. We are too shrewd not to allow their frauds to fool us.

Rabble-rousers economize not only with the truth but with falsehood as well. They are so skilled in manipulating appearances, that it’s rare that they need to tell a lie. ‘The best liar,’ as Butler wrote, ‘is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.’

A leader who has the brains to see what needs to be done won’t be fit to cajole the crowd to do it.

33 Tartuffe at the ballot-box

The public demands to be lied to. And the first lie that it wants to be told is that it wants to be told the truth. As Plato said, it is the worst of all sophists. One of the hardest jobs for a lying politician is to keep pace with the pious dissembling of the public. It is so self-righteous, that it leaves them no alternative but to act like prigs and charlatans. It tutors them to mimic its own hypocrisy, and then reviles them when they act like hypocrites. Having elected them to lie to it, it then rails sanctimoniously when it finds that they have done so. And it votes in one more rascal whose lies it hopes will yield it more loot.

Cunning politicians know that the best way to trip up their opponents and rob them of the people’s trust is to lure them to blurt out the truth.

The public expects its leaders to keep up the most scrupulous standards of tartuffery. They might not act like whores if we didn’t urge them to it like avid lechers.

We are smitten with those candidates who protest that they won’t act like slimy politicians, till they refuse to bribe us with all a politician’s oily enticements.

34 The democracy of righteousness

We have turned the world into hell, and so the politicians that we deserve are devils.

Our leaders must flatter us that we do our best at all times. But we do the least best that we can get away with. And yet we do go as straight as we have to in our race to snap up as much as we can. And most of us are ready to do the right thing once it’s too late to be of use. We won’t wake to the horror that our greedy dreams have made till it’s too late to put a halt to it.

In order to set in train great evils, a malevolent leader need only unleash the evil inherent in a nation. But in order to do great good, a leader would need to deceive, cajole and fight the nation.

The public is so sanctimonious and yet so voracious, that its representatives can’t afford to be too nice in the methods they use to lead it to do the right thing.

The people makes its leaders as bad as it needs them to be. And leaders allow the populace to be as bad as it wants to be.

You can count on the people in their intermittent fits of disgust with the lies of politicians to flock to the most impudent knave to save them.

35 The pretence of good intentions

In their efforts to seduce our prim pretences, malign leaders have to talk finer than they mean to act, and well-meaning ones have to talk worse.

A democracy is a marketplace of competing lies, in which the majority sits in judgment on which ones best seem to flatter its self-regard and feed its self-interest.

Governments now act both more equitably and more destructively than individuals. We want them to deploy on our behalf the lucrative brutality which we dare not use and to mouth the showy virtues which we are too mean to pay for. We deem that groups or nations make interests innocent. And we are proud to pursue in the mass schemes and stratagems that we would blush to own up to as private citizens. The nation knows no shame. As Cavour remarked, ‘What scoundrels we would be, if we did for ourselves what we stand ready to do for Italy.’ But fetterless individualism now grants to each of us the right to act as recklessly as a mob.

INDIVIDUAL AND STATE

36 Rights and democracy

We must act as if we all had the same rights, since we quake to think what we might do to each other if we did not.

Global capital spreads universal rights and values, so that it can circulate more rapidly round the world. Individual rights were not invented till capital had need of a large market of individual consumers.

How stridently people now clamour for their rights. And how contentedly they lived without them for thousands of cruel years.

The social contract is not a pact made by the people to protect the rights of all. It is a deal made by property-holders to protect their goods from the predations of the propertyless.

A regime of human rights is better at extending the rights of those who already have some than it is at protecting those who have no rights.

37 The system shapes the individual

The individual does not shape the system, the system is prior to the individual and shapes it. As Marx said, ‘capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.’

Capitalism must atomize individuals, the better to aggregate capital.

In order to solve the problem of production, factory capitalism had to mould its workers as a globular mass. But in order to solve the problem of demand, consumer capitalism has had to split up the middle class into diverse units.

To the end that the world might be globalized, each of us must first be individualized. Once we have been freed to choose, we all pick from the same stock of homogenized commodities of the world market. ‘Variety is disappearing from the human race,’ Tocqueville wrote, ‘the same ways of acting, thinking and feeling occur in every corner of the globe.’

The individual is one of those illusions which have had such disastrous effects in the real world. ‘An imaginary cause,’ Gibbon wrote, ‘is capable of producing the most serious and mischievous effects.’ But though we may have found out that the self is a fiction, the ego is as real and as fierce as it ever was.

38 The individual, the market and the state

People do not shape the economy as they wish. The economy fabricates the sort of people that it needs in order to keep it whirring. They are not the cause of the kind of economic system they form part of. They are one of its effects. And the ultimate product of mass capitalism is the individual consumer, shorn of its past, its roots, its regional links, its ethnic identity and its corporate memory, free to move unencumbered through the wonderland of the world market, in its orgy of getting and spending. It’s this that makes for the limitless proliferation of wants and the limitless multiplication of profit.

In a system of free choice each choice entrenches the system, and no choice could change it.

The system can leave its citizens free to choose what they want, because it has formed them as consumers that want the sorts of things that the system wants to give them. It may not give them all that they want, but it is all the time giving them more and more to want.

Where each of us is free to choose, no choice makes a difference, and the course of the future is fixed by the system of choice.

Capitalism has changed our sense of self. We are no longer what we recall of our past through our memories. We are far more the self that we project into the future through our hopes and desires.

Individualism will steadily grind down the world’s finely graded diversity to oblivious uniformity. By liberating all our manifold desires, it will make the lush world the same everywhere.

39 The atomized individual and the centralized state

In a traditional culture society is a solid. In a civilization it is a liquid. But with us it is an unstable gas. Each atom, loosed from its tight molecular bonds, jiggles with a febrile energy, rendering the whole volatile, unstable, ephemeral and thin.

Now there is nothing but the atomized individual and the centralized state. There is no obedience or allegiance to what should lie between them, no fealty to tribe, class, creed, clan, club, guild or locality.

The market eats away the commons from below, and the state stamps on it from above.

The modern state exists to serve the greed of the individual. And the isolated individual exists only to add to the power of the consolidated state. And both work to speed up the growth of capital.

Between the boundless greed of the individual and the boundless force of the state the green earth will be pounded to a mash.

Every failure of the state, as much as every success of the state, makes each of us more dependent on the state.

40 The state against the people

Peoples lose their identity as they assert their nationality. ‘Where there is still a people,’ Nietzsche said, ‘it does not understand the state and hates it.’ But now that there are no distinct peoples, all that we know or trust is the state. And now that jews have a state like the rest of us, they are at risk of becoming as oafish as the rest of us.

Why do people who have been bludgeoned by the state, and have seen all the havoc that the state can cause, put their faith in a state of their own to keep them safe?

Distinct peoples had to be pulverized in order to turn them into heaps of units, who could then be aggregated in unified states and co-opted into the world market.

As the community grows more atomized, the state comes to be more centralized, so that the market can work unhindered. And as the state comes to be more centralized and standardized, it compels each of us to grow more uniform.

We are not isolated units, but cells in the living organism of a community. But capitalism has made the cells cancerous, and each of us now preys on the body.

The state used to be a small part of society. Now society is a small part of the state.

If the state is to grant its citizens liberty, it must have a strong centralized apparatus and a police force.

41 Individualism against the individual

Individuals are all that matter, since they alone give birth to great achievements. But regimes are all that matter, since they alone breed great individuals.

Fine capacities flourish only where foul injustice stunts most fine capacities. Preeminent individuals are reared by states in which a privileged caste has the sole charter to make individuals. Strong individuals are made by strong forms, laws, castes, customs, traditions and authorities. And where these are decayed, the individual will be as weak as they.

Great individuals are one of the first victims of a system of individualism. They are the megafauna, which have no place in the characterless, levelled societies which it makes.

Where there are only individuals, there will be nothing but mass.

42 Mass individualism

Mass individualism spawns an infestation of narcissists, but few individuals. As Kraus wrote, ‘where every scatterbrain has individuality, individuality becomes scatter-brained.’ We think that the individual is so precious because we each have our share of individuality. But individuality is so precious because the real individual is so rare. And now that there are so many billions of us on earth, there is not enough individuality to go round.

The human race now contains so many zeroes, that its value comes close to infinity.

The system of mass individualism caters to the mass part of each one of us, and starves the best and most individual part.

We have the greedy individualism which will devour everything. But we lack the generous individualism that could create anything. We live in the epoch of the indiscriminate ant hill.

43 Totalitarianism and democracy

Authoritarian states outlaw or enlist all the forms of civil society. Democracy leaves them to die of neglect.

Totalitarianism is the birth throes which nations go through when they try to modernize too fast. Or else it is the shortcut which undeveloped countries take to grow into liberal market ones. It makes use of the machinery of the state to smash the intermediate framework of civic society so as to leave nothing but fragmented consumers.

Despotism and fundamentalism serve as harnesses which keep a state strapped together so that it won’t fall apart while it’s hurtling towards modernity.

Democracy panders to the optimistic egoism of greed. And totalitarianism panders to the pessimistic egoism of fear. And an agitator who knew how to yoke these dual passions would soon be unassailable.

44 The paradox of pluralism in democracy

The more we tolerate differences, the fewer differences there will be to tolerate. As we make room for personal diversity within the state, we will flatten the abiding diversity between states which makes for dynamic cultures. By trying to show respect to differences we raze them.

Intolerant societies keep alive the diversity between cultures. Tolerant societies which allow for the free intercourse of peoples and ideas reduce the globe to an undifferentiated mass. The ages of great variousness have been ages of great intolerance and great inequality.

Democracy swings back and forth from a condescending universalism to a craven relativism.

When we can all get to know other cultures, there will soon be no other cultures left to get to know.

45 Freedom of thought in democracy

Freedom of thought is no more than freedom of choice in the realm of opinion. We don’t want to waste our time thinking our own thoughts, but we are jealous of our right to pick out our views from the ones that are on display in the marketplace of ideas. Most of us make use of our freedom to think as we like by not thinking at all.

In a tyranny all are forced to think the same, and in a republic all are free to choose to. ‘America,’ as Tocqueville wrote, ‘is a country where they have freedom of speech but all say the same thing.’ Democracy has found that the best way to neuter thought is to tolerate it. Where all views can be voiced, we all grasp that truth is the one thing that no one wants to hear.

People ought to be free to think for themselves, but no regime will do more damage to the earth than one that gives them the right to do so.

46 The fruits of intolerance

Thought thrives best where it has less than total licence. ‘Freedom of thought and spiritual freedom grow best under absolutism,’ as Ibsen said. But the state now sanctions its citizens to speak as they wish, since it knows that it can trust them all to think alike. ‘People,’ says Kierkegaard, ‘never use the liberties they do have, but demand those that they don’t have. They have liberty of thought, they demand liberty of speech.’

When lawgivers censor artists for moral or political ends, they free them from ministering to moral or political aims. Censorship has been the sole contribution that the state has made to art. It has served as the shears which prune and preserve art and prevent it from going to seed. Now everything is permitted, and nothing is possible.

47 Utopia

The state can’t make its citizens happy, but for most of time it has made their life unspeakably grim. The rare outbreaks of justice in world history have led to reigns of terror, as projects of mass welfare will end in mass wretchedness. When flesh and blood presumes that it is made for heaven, it is sure to make for its own flawed self a hell on earth. Utopias at least remind us how much worse our life might have been.

We deem a good society to be one that would prize our own metier at a higher rate. In a philosopher’s utopia philosophers reign as kings, and in a dentist’s utopia dentists do.

Human kind has spent as little effort imagining its utopias as it has to make them real. It’s as mindless in planning them as it has been merciless in policing them. They are all as dull and predictable as they are vain and impractical. We have too much obsessive fantasy not to go on projecting them, yet too many unruly cravings to confine ourselves to them.

A utopia works as an atrocious engine of correction on those who, unlike its founders, are not yet fit for it.

DEMOCRACY OF GREED

48 The immaculate majority of democracy

Under mass rule the majority is blessed with an unimpeachable innocence. Not the least offence is to be laid at its door. These days the multitude must be fawned on for all its fake virtues and exonerated from all its frank crimes. Like our sycophancy and our sentimentality, our indignation has now been democratized. All our ills must be the doing of some nefarious minority. As Tocqueville said, the common herd ‘lives in the perpetual utterance of self-applause.’

The herd is always wrong, even when by some fluke it turns out to be in the right once in a while. If it hits on the right conclusion, it will be for the wrong reasons. Fickle in all but self-flattery, it will be retracting tomorrow what it is espousing today. ‘Surely the people is grass.’ But we now know that the majority must be right, since the majority says so, and even the minority bows to its high good sense. Truth is for the few. But the many feel sure that they are the truth. And in a system that counts heads, the few will be as likely to be wrong as the many.

To be out of step with the herd is the beginning of virtue.

49 The democracy of greed

Democracy has redeemed greed, and christened it as the one virtue that all are obliged to practise. Greed is the irreproachable democratic vice, and the sole democratic virtue. ‘For the many,’ as Aristotle points out, ‘are more eager to make a profit than to win honour.’ Each of us now has a right to seize as much as we can, and a duty to grab more than we have. Greed, in the guise of the work ethic, is the first duty of the citizen in a democracy. It is now our wants that lead us to cleave to our liberties. We wage wars to make the world safe for plutocracy. The sole freedom that most of us care for is the freedom to get and spend.

Bygone epochs used to feast the rapaciousness of a small favoured class. Our own calls all of us to share in the spree. The moderate greed of the multitude will chew up far more of the earth than the monstrous greed of the few.

The old patrician states put the long glory of the few above happiness. Our new democracies put the instant greed of the many above happiness.

Democracy is a get-rich-quick scheme which has bankrupted civilization and beggared the earth.

Republican virtue sprang up as a tall tree with shallow roots, which was soon dug out to plant the squat but hardier bush of democratic greed.

50 Democracy reigns, but capital rules

Capital makes the climate of democracy. The state makes only its weather. The people may reign, but capital rules. And democracy is the eunuch that takes charge of affairs in the palace of capital. As Balzac wrote, ‘it is not Louis Philippe who reigns, but the five franc piece.’ And so political deliberations are a means to gauge which course of action capital will give its assent to.

The ruling power in capitalism is not a class. It is capital itself. And the state is not, as Marx claimed, ‘a committee for organizing the affairs of the bourgeoisie.’ It is an apparatus for organizing the affairs of capital.

51 Democracy is the tool of capital

Individuals need a strong state to quiet their fears, since capital has snapped the bonds of society which used to keep them safe, while the state needs greedy individuals to finance all its largesse.

Capitalism will degrade the globe to a vast workshop to stock a vast shopping mall. And socialism will reduce what is left to a vast sickroom. The right would burn up the earth as an unholy offering to liberty and material self-interest, and the left to equality and moral self-conceit.

52 Democracy and demand

Because capitalism was so successful in solving the problem of scarcity, the whole world had to be turned into a consumer free-for-all, to soak up its surplus goods.

Consumer capitalism has solved the problem of scarcity, while evading the problem of ennui, by keeping us unsatisfied, so that we will go on consuming.

Capitalist states have lost the will to fight the wars which might solve their periodic crises of over-production by stimulating aggregate demand and removing excess supply. The welfare state was one means they used to take the place of war. Now they have to depend on debt to do it. And soon they may have to count on manmade natural catastrophes.

The welfare state is a cow of gold, dispensing day by day the milk of human kindness from its distended udders.

53 The greed of left and right

Our grand struggles for justice are squabbles over how to divide the spoils won by our injustice. The factions in a democracy are cartels contending to snatch the most loot to portion out to their members, the left to those who have not earned it, the right to those who have no need of it.

Conservative insist on their right to keep on consuming in the careless way that they’ve grown used to, which is the very thing that has turned the old world on its head. They aim to conserve the economic structures which have torn apart all the things that would have been worth conserving. They want nothing to change, so they might be free to get and spend in the same way that is bound to change the whole world.

Thinkers on the right have to fool themselves that they can preserve the old forms of society when its whole base is revolutionizing itself. And thinkers on the left have to fool themselves that they can direct the course of change when it is the needs of capital that mould it.

Conservatism is a symptom of the disease of which it claims to be the cure.

Collectivism does not do away with the capitalist lust for gain. It merely redistributes it more widely.

Capitalism is more contagious than communism, as greed is more addictive than envy.

54 Unrestrained democracy

Not freedom but restraint, not equalizing but subordination, not fraternity but the solidarity which links one generation to the next. These alone might have saved us. But since we are too uncontrollable to put up with them, we have no hope of being saved at all.

To bring down the system would require not hope and audacity but restraint. And restraint is the one thing that the system does not allow. Personal unrestraint is one of the system requirements of capitalism and democracy.

A democracy is able to do everything but check its ungovernable greed. Its animating principle is lack of self-control. The people has won the right to rule itself, but has lost the strength to restrain itself.

55 Democracy unbound

As Burke wrote, ‘Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites.’ But the sole kind of liberty that we now crave is that which breaks all the chains off our own appetites. And civilization has come apart, not, as Freud claimed, by too much repression of our indwelling instincts, but by too much indulgence of our competitive greeds.

For the last two centuries democracy has drummed into our ears that we are mature enough to be free. So it’s too late to put a check on our childish desires, now that they have caused such giant havoc. It grants a limitless licence to beings who lack the will or capacity to curb their limitless cravings.

The state used to try to set bounds to the greed of its citizenry. Now its sole task is to feed it.

56 Democracy and capitalism the opiates of the people

The system of capital does not work by ruthless domination and repression. It works by irresistible seduction and eager surrender. It does not make the world of scarcity, self-denial and thrift which Marx berated. If it did, it would do far less harm. It makes a world of plenty, possibility and self-indulgence, which will drain all life from the earth. And this is why it has no need of a unified ideology. It is able to deliver in this world what old states and their cults could only promise in the next.

The opiate of the masses is now capitalism itself. But the drug does not calm us. It is an amphetamine which keeps us jigging its St Vitus dance.

Capitalism is the most ruthlessly real system, and yet it turns the real world into gaudy but empty images, which it then retails back to us as a premium lifestyle.

Capitalism does not dehumanize human beings. It humanizes the earth. That is, it turns it into a machine to feed our desires.

57 Emancipated to be slaves of greed

All the liberators of the previous two centuries, who crowed that they were sabotaging capitalism, were in fact fortifying it, by enfranchising more and more of us to get and spend. They were doing the work of the system which they hoped to bring down. And yet the system could have got by without them. They untied us from the restrictions of all the old authorities, so as to bind us to the tyranny of our own desires. Greed makes all the revolutions. But it drapes itself in the tricolour of equity to lead them.

The producer phase of capitalist accumulation called on the puritan virtues of thrift, self-denial, prudence and self-control. Now the consumer phase of excess needs the vices of extravagance, self-affirmation and self-indulgence.

Capitalism makes use of progressive politics by freeing oppressed groups to act as producers and consumers. All those who think that they are subverting the regime are helping it to revolutionize the relations of production.

Mammon is a jealous god. It won’t rest till it has untethered all of us to buy and sell, and has snarled us all in the net of the world market.

Now that people are free to do what they want, they have no choice but to work as hard as they can to get more of what everyone else wants.

58 The freed slaves of democracy

The civil war was fought not to free the slaves, but to free capital from the chains of obsolete modes of production, of which slavery was one. Its aim was to extend to the south the same freedoms that capital enjoyed in the north. It was the sledgehammer of avarice that broke the slaves’ manacles, ‘not,’ said Tocqueville, ‘for the sake of the blacks, but for the sake of the whites.’ The slaves were sure to be emancipated, once their taskmasters learnt that they toil more compliantly when they have been loosed from their fetters. Liberate them, and they labour as productively as robots. ‘The work done by free men,’ Adam Smith points out, ‘comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.’

Slavery was abolished, not because it is unjust, but because it proved uneconomic. The market had no use for it. Profit needs employees and consumers, not slaves. And the law had to put a stop to child labour because extended adolescence is one of the conditions of consumer capitalism.

These days, when all of us have sold our souls as willing slaves, we are indignant that there were once forced ones.

59 Degenerate democracy

All things go to seed in the rank air of democracy. All forms of democracy are bad, and they get worse the closer they come to its pure form.

In a democracy the great problems are not dealt with till they are at length taken out of the hands of the people. But the people won’t rest till they have pulled down all the institutions of democracy which make them free. And the legacy of every leader is to weaken democracy by yielding to popular whims, while undermining republican institutions.

Democracy has debased progress as it has debased all that it has touched. In the past philanthropists hoped that humankind, unfettered and right-thinking, would one day rise to a moral perfection. Now the most glorious goal we can aim at is to get rich.

Happiness degenerates in democracy. It began as the rich flourishing of our highest faculties. But only a small elite could keep up such an arduous calling. So first the enlightenment replaced this with the pursuit of happiness for all. Then democracy and utilitarianism lowered it to a mere succession of pleasant sensations. And now mass capitalism markets it as a premium consumer experience. The wider it is spread, the shallower it gets.

CREATIVE STATE

60 The creative state

It takes a whole culture to breed one or two spendthrift generations, and a whole generation to breed half a dozen choice souls, and half a dozen souls to make a few masterful books, buildings, theories, symphonies and statues. But now that we have each been taught that we are unique, none of these half dozen will be made.

People used to be stifled by the material squalor which they lacked the means to escape. Now they find fulfilment in the spiritual squalor which they have chosen.

All epochs are spiritually impoverished. But the great ones have enriched their heirs with works which redeemed their destitution of soul.

The state may be the supreme work of art, as Plato claimed, but those who have sought to reshape it on the plan of art have had such poor taste, that they have made it supremely ugly.

61 The creative class in democracy

The ruling class lends a state its order, and the middle class lends it its force. A society grows pregnant when its old lordly forms are fecundated by the unresting dynamism of the bourgeoisie, which is invigorated by its new freedom and by its ancestral animosities. Most of the finest art has been brought forth by states in which a hereditary military caste was giving place to a new mercantile gentry.

The upper class ought to rule, since it is good for nothing else. When the merchant class rules, it makes itself good for nothing at all.

Artists and thinkers rise out of the middle class to mutiny against the middle class.

62 Sterile democracy

Past civilizations were hard like a diamond or the claws of a jaguar. Ours is hard like a rock drill tearing up the earth. Previous epochs were realms of force. Ours is the realm of mass.

The sweet works of imagination, whose creation and contemplation make life worthwhile, were framed when life for most people was not worth living. And now that we have made life worth living for most people, we have lost the power to frame the sweet works which make it worthwhile.

It’s not by freedom but by repression that human kind gains the power to make what is of real worth.

63 Creative inequality

‘The sole live societies,’ Claudel wrote, ‘are those that are energized by inequality and injustice.’ We can’t eradicate misery by imposing equality. And by seeking to do so we will only sterilize all excellence. So we must choose between large achievement and a shrunken justice. There will be no grand art or thought where there are no gross inequalities. And it takes a ton of societal repression to set free a few artists to make art. ‘Talent,’ as Kant wrote, ‘cannot be developed save by means of inequality. The majority provide the necessities for the leisure of others who work at the unnecessary elements of culture, science and art.’ But we have surrendered to a levelling sameness, and so have lost the gift for freewheeling imagination.

Great wealth corrupts the state. But deplorable inequality may stimulate its highest energies. Vast and murky earnings form the muck in which the things of the spirit flower. They were all bedded in the foul mire of usury or extortion. But our once fecund culture has made itself a eunuch for the kingdom of Mammon’s sake. It lacks the sap to make anything but money. So it smelts the gold of genius to coin the small change of huckstering innovation.

64 Meritocracy, mediocrity and democracy

The merit that meritocracy pays so well is the sort of competent mediocrity that can be put to use to fill the present need, which stifles true merit.

True merit is flattened and cooped by the conditions which make a meritocracy, its compulsive tabulating and bureaucratic gradations. A meritocracy opens the field for all sorts of talents, barring the few that are worth nurturing. If you hope to make headway in one, you must be extraordinarily good at being average. You must excel at being second-rate. As Tocqueville said, ‘They strain their faculties to the utmost to achieve paltry results, which soon cannot fail to narrow their vision and restrict their powers.’

Meritocracy cheapens real merit by rewarding mediocrity so exorbitantly.

In our meritocracies we now mistake success for merit, as in the past they used to mistake birth for merit. In feudal states the talentless were born at the top. But in a commonwealth they must grope their way up to it. In days of old, as Shaw said, only martyrs and kings could win fame without the need to earn it. Now anyone can.

The old aristocratic states were the dominion of pride. The new meritocratic states are the dominion of greed. They give rise to mediocrity in all but money-making, hustling and haggling. ‘There is not a single american,’ Tocqueville wrote, ‘who is not eaten up with the desire of bettering himself, but you meet virtually no one who appears to cherish great hopes or to aim very high.’

WAR

65 Altruism at war

War is the one grand altruistic act that has pervaded the whole course of our growth.

The same obedience that makes dutiful citizens in peace makes diligent killers in war. ‘It is,’ Brodsky says, ‘the army that finally makes a citizen of you.’

Solidarity can be mobilized on a vast scale only where it is motivated by aggression against a common enemy. So people will spill their blood in large numbers only if it gives them the chance to kill those whom they have learnt to look on as their foes.

66 War the acme of civilization

War is not an aberration from civilization. It is its quintessence. Civilizations make war, and war has made civilization. They are both structurings of energy and violence. Their patron deity is Minerva, the goddess of order and the mind, not Mars, the god of chaotic savagery. She sets up hierarchy, subordination, efficiency, discipline, inventiveness and state power. Only those species, such as ants, that have cities, federations, agriculture, specialization, organization, territorial demarcations, intricate modes of communication and complex communal codes, will wage war as well.

Cultures have warriors, civilizations have armies. Tribal cultures fight skirmishes, more advanced ones fight wars.

War is, as Heraclitus said, the father of all. Pacifism won’t cut its throat. It will only castrate it.

A state that can’t make war won’t make much else. Those who lack the daring to destroy will lack the courage to create.

67 The end of war

A world in which we have made all things safe would be one not worth protecting. As Franklin said, those who trade liberty for security have forfeited their right to both. But we will be sure that we have grown surpassingly wise and good when we are all of one mind that we have no principles worth fighting for. And most of us are happy to trade other people’s safety to keep our own liberty, and other people’s liberty to maintain our own safety.

Those who judge that no cause is worth dying for will soon find that they have no cause that is worth living for.

68 Democracy at war

Democracy has taught dictators that even the masses are worth exterminating. War used to slay only the combatants, who were a small cadre of highborn men. Now it massacres vast conscript armies and civilian populations as well. Mass persuasion makes all of us worth deceiving. And mass warfare makes all worth slaughtering. ‘The wars of the peoples,’ Churchill warned, ‘would be more terrible than those of kings.’

In our quest to bring peace to the earth, we will gradually give in to a global despotism. Governments that pledge to make their citizens secure from all hazards will soon have them consenting to be serfs. By endeavouring to render fear needless, we will make bravery otiose.

The second world war began abjectly with the appeasement of one tyrant who had just annexed half of Europe, and it finished triumphantly with the appeasement of another.

69 The art of war

The aim of the art of war, like the art of rhetoric, is to make the lesser force the greater. Out of slim differences it spins decisive advantages. It turns your vulnerabilities into strengths, and your enemy’s strengths into vulnerabilities, correcting your own weak points and capitalizing on your foe’s.

To win allies is better than winning wars. And to refuse to give battle may be the best defence. ‘To subdue the enemy without a fight,’ Sun Tzu says, ‘is the apex of skill.’

All inherent advantages imperil you. A moral advantage that you can’t convert to force is no help at all, and you will waste more of your means to guard it than it’s worth. Defence yields a real material assistance and not a sham moral one. If you win, you feel no need to prove your cause legitimate. And if you lose, it will soon have sunk from sight. ‘The loser is always in the wrong,’ as the spanish proverb has it.

70 Might makes right

No victorious war seems ill-advised or unlawful. Even the losers, if they get a sound enough thrashing, grant that those who beat them must have been in the right. Justice rides with the conquerors. The god of war absolves all winners. A clear victory blots out the worst wrongs, and gives a sanction to the most vicious creeds. ‘Successful crimes alone are justified,’ as Dryden wrote.

Victory proves nothing. But that’s why people crave it. It sets them above the need to prove anything.

A stonyhearted tyrant knows that might makes right, a mealy-mouthed one loves to bleat that right makes might. If this were the case, then the powers that be would indeed be ordained of God, and the downtrodden would have no claim to redress. Since power is the one thing that we worship, we cling to the superstition that right must bear some relation to it, be it as its cause or as its effect. Power is our one god. So we view its mere assertion as an irrefutable proof that its cause must be just.

We trust that right will triumph, because we are sure that triumph shows to us what is right.

It suits us to believe that right makes might, since we have no doubt that all the right is on our side.

71 Internationalism

The growth of political institutions lags behind the problems that they are required to solve. When Europe had need of the nation state, it was still torn apart by local feudal warlords. And now that the world needs supranational powers to deal with global threats, it still has to make do with outdated nation states. The world is always in such disorder, because its social and political structures are so far behind the economic conditions which are dismantling and rebuilding them.

72 The original sin of empire

An empire is the murder of the cultures that it conquers, and the suicide of the civilization that hopes to suck life from them.

How righteously we now condemn the evil of colonialism, yet how tightly we cling to all the land and booty that it gained us.

Conquistadors and colonists have drawn the map of the world in the blood of the conquered, who are now all afire to spill more of their blood in order to redraw it.

To explore the world has been the first act in exploiting it. ‘To find a new country and to invade it,’ Johnson said, ‘has always been the same.’

Colonies were the pulsating tumours by which the cancer of capitalism metastasized round the globe.

All settler societies are wrong from the start. They were conceived in sin, and brought forth in iniquity. Their original sin is their seizure of a land that they have no right to, irrespective of the good or ill that they have done thereafter.

Australia was set up as a penal colony for petty thieves by pious men who had just stolen a continent. It is a comical country burdened by a tragic past and threatened by a dark future.

73 Righteous empires

All empires are as moralistic as they are brutal. They place their trust in violence and providence, which have put the weak in their power. ‘The strongest poison ever known,’ Blake wrote, ‘came from Caesar’s laurel crown.’ Ruthless aggressors take it that they owe their hegemony more to their piety than to their might. They thank God that he grants his favour to those who use it for his glory. ‘Not unto us, O Lord.’ A long-continued crime, such as the outrages of imperialism, comes in time to form the bedrock of law and the state. Time, power and numbers suffice to absolve any illegality. Democracy can justify any wrong by a plurality. It has legitimated colonialism by sanctioning those states in which the settler population grew to outnumber the native one.

Now that the old colonial states have ceased to rape and plunder their colonies, they have turned to lecturing them on how far they fall short of the fine principles they have given them.

74 Empires of the chosen

Prior to entering the promised land, the chosen must first show that they are fit for it by subjugating or liquidating the sub-humans who by some oversight are in possession of it. ‘Thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them, thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them.’ And now we are all the chosen. And the whole globe is our Canaan, which we must clear to make room for our sacred race.

Cicero said that though each nation overleapt Rome in some feat, it had conquered them all by its godliness. The romans were the dullest people, self-righteous, self-pitying, incurious, smug, covetous of dainties but careless of beauty, soulless technicians and administrators not imaginers. So they of course thought it their duty to lord it over the world. Now we are all romans.

HISTORY

75 Crisis makes the leader

Great leaders in history twist the interests of emerging castes to their own ends. Each is half self-convinced messiah and half ham showman. They rise up at times of crisis, to unite burgeoning interests, or to sever strong interests from outmoded structures. They can’t change which way the wave of events will go. But they do increase its amplitude, deepening its troughs, though not heightening its crests.

Nations are not great because they have great leaders. They breed great leaders once they have grown great. Great states and great crises make great leaders. Small ones provide too confined a stage.

Napoleon was a relic of the antique noble regime which the new world made use of as a battering ram to break down the old one. Tyrants drive the locomotive of liberty and progress forward. Too bad they use corpses to stoke its boiler. And they mince flesh and bone to sawdust which they use to stuff their own reputations. ‘A man like me,’ as Napoleon tells us, ‘does not fret much about a million men.’

76 A great leader is a middling mind

A great man or woman of action is a middling intellect in the service of an excessive ambition. They are play-actors who know how to stage-manage their effects. Napoleon may have been the only one to have had a first-class mind.

Politics is not complex or deep, but it is so impossibly involved, that only a second-rate mind can master all its twists. All it skill lies in the number of balls that have to be juggled.

The great man is the iron tool which the iron laws of history use to shape events.

Great men and small accidents cause great carnage, but they don’t alter the current of events.

The laws of history care no more for individuals than the laws of physics care for atoms. They control them, but feel no solicitude for them.

77 Hero and crisis

Some heroes call up a crisis, and some crises call up a hero to confront them. A bloody catastrophe brings out great men, as the blistering sun brings out maggots in carrion. They have the good luck to arrive on the scene at the very worst time.

War is the poetry of history, peace is its uneventful prose. A leader who lacks a war is like a poet who has not yet found the grand theme on which to build a lasting fame. Like a taper in daylight, they would be hard to piece out in the absence of its dark background. They are matches which need a cataclysm to strike flame from. And what do they care how many lives the blaze might singe? Had Lincoln not been embroiled in the civil war, he might have turned out to be no more than a wily temporizer.

A great leader is more an accident of time and place than an expression of character, as a people is made by its history more than it makes it. In the grand events of life chance must use the tools it has to hand to get its work done. But in art and science it must find a genius to do it.

There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it, as Cicero remarked. And there is nothing so absurd and ruinous, but some wise statesman has done it.

78 The school of history

Books of history distract us from the lessons they might teach. By piling up the fine dust of facts, persons and places, they prevent us from discerning its most basic patterns. And by concentrating on hinge events, they pretend that it might have come out differently, if a few circumstances had been altered.

If events take place once only, then history can teach us nothing. And if they happen over and over, what need is there to study more than one or two of them?

People do not make history, history makes people. This is why there is no point trying to learn from history.

The human race is not a single being with a heart awash with good intentions which can learn from its blunderings by studying them.

History and experience teach people to grow prudent, not to be wise. They guide them how to get what they want, not to want what they ought.

History is not philosophy teaching by examples. It is ideology obfuscating by examples.

History keeps a school for cynics.

I like to read history, because it gives a nobody like me the chance to sit in judgment on the few men and women who were somebody.

79 The rupture

Marx was not enough of a historicist or materialist. The laws of history are not universal in space or time. The system of capital has made a complete break from all epochs of the past, as great as the break from tribal cultures to civilized states. It has reframed all aspects of the superstructure of the state, laws, customs and mores, the family, civil society, and religion.

Capitalism is at once the culmination of history, a total rupture from it, and its end.

80 Causes

The sole question that matters in the study of history is what sorts of forces are causative. But this is the one question that historians seem unable to ask. Yet they all write as if they knew the answer, and that nothing could be more clear.

We impute events to trivial and transitory causes, because we see no more than the trivial and transitory effects.

The world is right to judge by the crudest and most superficial criteria, since it is by being crude and superficial that things and people gain success. ‘In analyzing history,’ Emerson advised, ‘do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.’ And it is the deepest and most real causes that are the most superficial of all. But ideas, being the deepest things, have the shallowest effects, though we are so shallow too, that we take it that they must have the most profound ones.

Events are not quite so superficial as to be changed by empty symbols. But people are superficial enough to believe that they are.

In order to make sense of the springs of world events, a deep mind must vulgarize itself.

81 We do not make our own history

It may be that human kind makes its own history, but it does not do so till history has made it. And though our existence may precede our essence, as Sartre said, history and society precede both our essence and our existence, and it is these that shape us. We are not free to make our own destiny.

The only changes that make a real difference are those that take place independent of human will, agency or direction. And though we may be able to alter events, we can’t alter the forces that shape them.

Even if we could learn from the past, we would still have no control over how it will shape the future.

As people gain more and more power, they lose the strength to resist the lure of where it will take them and what it will make of them.

If we can know only what we have made, as Vico claimed, that explains why history is one of the things that we cannot know.

Most of what we do, capitalism makes us do. And what it does not make us do has next to no effect.

We praise those leaders who pushed events the way they were going, since they have led up to our world. And we curse those who set out to turn it in a different direction. Yet tyrants such as Hitler who seemed to be fracturing the world did as much to unify it as the purest idealists.

82 Ideas do not change the world

Ideas do not change the world. And while ideas have never seemed to matter more, they are not ideas, but schemes for using inventions to make more money. These send it spinning faster in the grooves in which it’s set. And the only ideas that make a difference now are inventions. The motor car has changed the world more than marxism. And the use of electricity will prove to be of far more consequence than the adoption of democracy.

We pay lip-service to our creeds, which don’t change even our own conduct, and then we declare that ideas change the world.

Ideas are not the cause of big historic events. They are not even the cause of big historic ideas. Yet they still rouse a lot of fake feeling, and spill a lot of real blood. They provide the costumes and play the music that events march to, but they don’t choose the road they will take. Like the thunder of history, they may make a big noise, but they have no lasting effects. At most they serve as pretexts for those who would have done wrong without them, and who have no lack of them in any case.

Events are effects, not causes. And ideas are not even events.

83 The impotence of ideas

We have built a cerebral civilization in which ideas have no influence.

The ideas that reign in a society don’t rule. And the ideas that rule are not ends in themselves or means to truth, but only means to power and wealth.

Thoughts that come on doves’ feet do not guide the world, in spite of what Nietzsche claimed. It is only the world of thought that they guide. But of course the thinker mistakes that for the world.

The renaissance was not a rebirth of paganism or hellenism. It was a new birth of capitalism.

A dictator starts out as an intellectual, and shares the intellectuals’ vanity that there is nothing more dangerous than an idea. And so he shows his respect for them by putting them in gaol.

The powerless have no weapon but their inflammatory words to fight their oppression by the strong. And the strong use these words to prove that they need to keep oppressing them.

An idea can influence the course of events only if it is misunderstood.

No regime needs a priori principles or a founding narrative to justify itself, and no such principles can be valid. And yet each regime puts its own ones forward as cover for the fact that it does not need them.

84 The end of ideology

Capital doesn’t care what you believe, so long as you keep buying and selling. It has no need of the fantasies of ideology, since the fantasies of avarice and advertising fill our minds. And why would it keep us compliant, when it’s so easy to keep us consuming?

Capital holds all the tools to shape the superstructure of the state and its ideology. But it has no need to, since it can thrive under all sorts of regimes. It can do its work as well in a one-party dictatorship as in a democracy. But it needs the state to be centralized and the citizen to be detached. And so all things now tend to these twin ends.

Legitimacy is not the keystone of authority. It is an effect of achieved power.

Most ideas are not made by the economic base, because they are of no use to it. The only ideas that it shapes are the ones that affect its productive forces or relations.

Ideology in capitalism is not essential and foundational. It is practical and functional.

Democracy needs capitalism in order to keep its citizens happy and compliant more than capitalism needs democracy for capital to thrive.

85 Morality and economy

The moral code of an age is not made by its ruling class. It is the one required by its economic system.

No society could be governed by a slave morality. But it may pay lip service to one as an ideology which the masters preach to keep the slaves in their place. The moral rule that took the place of the brutal and chivalric code of the middle ages was not a christian slave code of altruism, guilt, asceticism and resentment. It was the code required by capitalist accumulation.

The principles of a moral reformer such as Wilberforce do not triumph till the economic system can use them to give fresh impetus to its productive forces.

86 Cut off from the past

The study of history is a sign of our divorce from the past. And the historical sense did not grow up till the new age of capital had made a total rupture from all its pasts.

History has come of age in an epoch that is cut off from the past. So even if it could teach us any lessons they would be of no use to us.

History’s tide turns so fast, that those who take it at the flood are soon left stranded.

Now that history is more than mere lore or legend, it has nothing to teach us. And when it has come to form a science, we won’t learn a thing from it. A society that lives by immutable custom has no history, only mythology. And a state that can recall its past has lost it a long time back. A traditional culture is controlled by its past, but it can’t remember it. It is still living it. History is the legend which is engraved on the tombstone of tradition.

It is only because we live in the future that we have built up a usable past. But since we are off In the future, the past is of no use to us.

Tradition itself at last falls as a victim of tradition. It picks up such momentum, that it breaks free from the past and can only career wildly into the future. Progress is tradition that has reached escape velocity from the orbit of the past.

87 Flattered by the past

The smugness of times to come will mock the smugness of our own.

The complacent present asserts its highhanded jurisdiction over the past by presuming to learn from it. The one lesson that we have gleaned from history is that we are now free of the past which has shaped us, and that we can shape the future as we wish.

History is the bad conscience of humankind, from which we draw the unlikely lesson that we must be illimitably perfectible.

88 The poison of the past

Those who forget the past are condemned to relive it. But so are those who can recall it. And those who have pored over its registers will best know how to reprise its crimes. The monsters who plan to perpetrate a future holocaust could cull as many hints from the past as those who aim to prevent one. Men and women of goodwill go to the school of history to find out how to fight tyrants. But the tyrants graduated from that college long ago. While well-meaning citizens are labouring to learn from history, the mad and malignant are already hard at work making it. As A. J. P. Taylor wrote of Napoleon, ‘Like most of those who study history, he learnt from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.’

We are able to diagnose the human plight, but nothing we do can cure it. The disease will take its course.

We are determined to repeat the past, but in a more brutal form and at the expense of other innocent victims.

Those who claim to recall the past are wild to kill each other to impose their own side’s version of it. As much harm has been done by remembering the past as by forgetting it. Those who believe that they remember the past are condemned to rewrite it.

89 Repeating the past

History is what we argue over while the past is finding new ways to repeat itself.

We recall the past for a purpose, and our main purpose is to learn how to thrash our enemies. And that is how the past repeats.

Orwell claimed that ‘who controls the past controls the future.’ But a democracy has no need to control the past. The past is dead and done with, and all are too dazzled by what’s to come to care what it was like.

People have long memories for things that never happened.

90 Fables of the past

People try to recount events, but all they do is reconstruct them as fables. Yet they trust that when they do so they grasp what they mean. But they only falsify them, though they do grasp what their falsifications mean. Once an event has been turned into a story, it is lost to truth for good. But it may survive as a narrative long after it has been killed as a fact. If we live by telling our stories, it’s because they are lies. And if we are the sum of the stories that we tell, then there is not one word of truth to us.

In order to make the past useful, you have to misunderstand it.

Nature, the past and experience are dumb. It is we who put in their mouths the things that we want them to teach us. And we choose the stories that will teach us what we wish to hear. The deep precepts taught by the daughters of memory rehash the latest cant. Anyone who thinks that the past instils a simple schoolbook code of right and wrong will be too simple to glean a thing from it.

Leaders now spend their term in office failing to make any history and their retirement in trying to rewrite it.

91 The memory of catastrophe

We need exemplary catastrophes in history as well as in our own lives. And each age needs its own catastrophe to confirm its prejudgments. The eighteenth century, disputing divine providence, had its Lisbon earthquake. And the twentieth century, disputing human melioration, fastened on the holocaust. The shoah, which was so prosaic in its operations, has come to stand for us as a terminal and sublime poetry.

We have lived through too much savage history to find our way back to the green world’s savage innocence.

How softly the horrors of history tinkle when they happen, but how deafeningly they re-echo. The nightmare of history may take a generation to seep into our dreams and poison us. How belatedly the sons and daughters learn to be haunted by the spectres of what their parents lived through. The world had to wait twenty years to feel the aftershock of the holocaust. ‘Late resounds what early sounded,’ as Goethe wrote.

92 A history of the future

The United States is what the whole world is now or is on course to become, a republic of hucksters, pacific and bellicose, jittery and bullying, shiny new and already rusting, cold-hearted and maudlin, wide-eyed and wised-up, populist and plutocratic, coordinated and disorderly, conformist and exhibitionist, regimented yet anarchic, bumptious and epicene, just being born and a long while dying, a light to the nations and an abomination, a dustbowl flowing with milk and treacle, puritan and lewd, a giant blinkered by its own sanctimoniousness, rich and in debt, globalized and parochial, self-intoxicated and self-doubting.

The United States is not a country but a plague, the pox americana. It has infected the globe with the fever of its venal optimism, so well-meaning and so self-serving. It is a land of optimists who live in terror of some enemy which their own fears have conjured up. The union may have grown great had it been content to stay small. But it chose to swell to a colossal continental empire. The statue of liberty is its fit symbol, gigantic, brassy and hollow, a miracle of engineering and a monstrosity of taste. It fulfilled its manifest destiny by betraying its founding principles. How was the frontier of pioneering self-reliance paved over so soon to make the sale-yard of huckstering self-promotion?

 

See also:           Virtues,              The end