“Now, during the past thirty-five years, under the ideological banner of Dialectical Materialism, a small group of ruthless men in Russia seized political power and the entire state apparatus and established a dictatorship. Rationalizing human life to the last degree, they launched a vast, well-disciplined program of industrialization which now rivals that of the United States of America in pretentiousness and power…Again I say that what happened in Russia, just as with what happened in America, could have happened under a dozen different ideological banners…If you lived in Russia and made such a statement, they’d shoot you; and if you lived in America and made such a statement, they’d blacklist you and starve you to death…Modern man still believes in magic; he lives in a rational world but insists on interpreting the events of that world in terms of mystical forces. The simple fact is, the social cat can be skinned in many different ways. The coming history of the many new nations now launching their industrial programs will prove this to be true…”
“So!” Blimin exploded, “you sneer at our ideology? You ignore the role of the working class, hunh? You see no difference between Russia and the rest of the imperialist powers?”
“Mr. Blimin,” Cross said patiently, “I’m talking to you as one man to another. I’m propaganda-proof. Communism has two truths, two faces. The face you’re talking about now is for the workers, for the public, not for me. I look at facts, processes—”
“You’re slandering—”
“Don’t impute motives to me,” Cross insisted. “Am I condemning you and men like you for what you’ve done? You did what you did because you had to! Anybody who launches himself on the road to naked power is caught in a trap…You use idealistic words as your smoke-screen, but behind that screen you rule…It’s a question of power!”
“I’ll not tolerate your reducing the noble aims of Lenin to a power-hungry man,” Blimin raged.
“But Lenin admitted it,” Cross told him. “Lenin repeatedly chided his comrades for lacking the will-to-power…Again, Mr. Blimin, if you want to talk to me, please understand that I’m not naïve. Your propaganda is not for me…Do you get that? Now, let me get back to my point…
“You may like industrialization or you may hate it. You may think that the process of industrialization ought to be stopped, that it has done great harm to mankind. Or you may feel that it is best to flee from this industrial machine and find haven in some tropical island. (Those little islands, too, are being caught up in the global tide of industrialization and soon there will be no hideaways.) Neither attitude really has anything to do with the basic reality of industrialization itself, which is a neutral process. Industrialization is simply an efficient way of making and doing things, labor-saving, a life-saving way of living. Industrialization is simply a hammer or a saw which has grown infinitely complex and, in itself, is not evil and cannot be evil…We can either find ways of controlling this complex hammer or saw and make it serve us, or we can simply drift, let industrial life bog us down, as we have already done. In any case, the sweep of industrialization has gone so far, its spirit has entered so deep in the hearts and habits of men, that we cannot stop it now even if we wanted to. It is a part of us and we are a part of it; if we go on, it goes on, so organically is it a part of our living…It cannot be stopped unless we all die or revert to a manner of living which would reduce our lives to a kind of Old Testament simplicity, which is highly unlikely.
“Quickening the process of industrialization was the marriage of scientific knowledge and industry. The interaction between the two progressed like a game of leapfrog. The more society became industrialized, the more men learned about the nature of the world in which they lived, and the more knowledge they gained from that world, the more skill they had in applying their knowledge to the methods of industry…
“Now, had this global tide of industrialization consisted only of this, we’d have no problem at all. Indeed, the world would be piled high with products and this earth would be the long-dreamed-of goal of mankind.
“What I’ve described becomes interesting only in the light of one question: What kind of a queer animal is this being called man who embarked—and without quite knowing it!—upon this program of industrialization? Well, his most dominant characteristic is an enormous propensity toward fear. He is the most scared and trembling of all the animals, and I’m not forgetting those wild ones who live in jungles…Learned men have long declaimed upon the thinking and loving capacities of man, but we have yet to hear of man’s fears. It might well be that the most important part of human existence is fear itself…
“Primitive man, naked and afraid, found that only one thing could really quiet his terrors: that is, Untruth. He stuffed his head full of myths, and if he had not, he might well have died from fear itself. How many people on this earth die from fear is something we’ve yet to find out; but that is another story…
“The degree and quality of man’s fears can be gauged by the scope and density of his myths, that is, by the ingenious manner in which he disguised the world about him. Man was afraid of the clamoring world of storms, volcanoes, and heaving waves and he wanted to change that world. His myths sought to recast that world, tame it, make it more humanly meaningful and endurable. The more abjectly frightened the nation or race of men, the more their myths and religions projected out upon the world another world in front of the real world, or, in another way of speaking, they projected another world behind the real world they saw, lived, suffered, and died in. Until today almost all of man’s worlds have been either pre-worlds or back-worlds, never the real world…(The ancient nations today we call great are the ones who left behind them those towering monuments of fear in the forms of their so-called cultures!)
“That real world man did not want; he was not stouthearted enough to endure its dangers and uncertainties…In making his pre-worlds, he always saw reality as a wonderful drama enacted for his special benefit; there were gods and counter-gods locked in deadly conflict the outcome of which spelled good or evil for him, all shaping his destiny. In making his back-worlds man was vain enough to believe that this real world could not be all, that there was another world into which he could somehow escape when he died. Entrance into that back-world depended upon how faithfully he observed certain compulsive rituals which he, in his fear and anxiety, had created over eons of time to placate his sense of dread.
“Man cringed even before the ordinary workings of his own mind; he would not even dare admit the authorship of his own fantasies. He found himself so complex that he fled from himself. That which transpired in his heart he projected out into the skies, or else he would not have been able to sleep at night…
“War, famines, earthquakes, epidemics, and social upheavals made no impact upon man’s myth-worlds; indeed, calamities served but to strengthen them, for man felt that he was somehow guilty when he was overwhelmed with disaster, had somehow failed to pronounce the magic talisman correctly when catastrophe descended upon him. One thing, however, did get at those myth-worlds, did gnaw at them until they fell from man’s eyes and left him staring in dismay at the real, natural, workaday world from which he had for millions of years tried to hide.
“The ravaging scourge that tore away the veil of myth-worlds was science and industry; science slowly painting another world, the real one; and industry uprooting man from his ancestral, ritualized existence and casting him into rational schemes of living in vast, impersonal cities. A split took place in man’s consciousness; he began living in the real world by the totems and taboos that had guided him in the world of myths…But that could not last for long. Today we are in the midst of that crisis…The real world stands at last before our eyes and we don’t want to look at it, don’t know how to live in it; it terrifies us. All of the vast dramas which man once thought took place in the skies now transpire in our hearts and we quake and are moved compulsively to do what we know not…”
“You deliberately and consistently omit to mention the role of the working
class,” Blimin pointed out, smil ing. “It was oppression that awakened man from his slumber…”
“Oppression was simply an added irritant,” Cross said. “Even if man had not been oppressed, this crisis would have taken place, and you know it. Oppression was a part of the process of industrialization—”
“And wars? You omit war altogether,” Blimin said.
“When used as it was used,” Cross told him, “industrialization was a kind of war against mankind. That same war might be going on in Russia today, for all I know…But let me get on.
“Now, this real world in which we live today has a strange tone and aspect. We Twentieth Century Westerners have outlived the faith of our fathers; our minds have grown so skeptical that we cannot accept the old scheme of moral precepts which once guided man’s life. In our modern industrial society we try to steer our hearts by improvised, pragmatic rules which are, in the end, no rules at all. If there are people who tell you that they live by traditional values and precepts—such as the English sometimes pretend—then they are either lying to you or to themselves; maybe they are lying both ways…There is no modern industrial nation on earth today that makes decisions based upon anything remotely resembling the injunctions of the Old or New Testament; this holds true in their domestic as well as in their foreign policies.
“Of course, the historical transition from the unreal myth-worlds of yesterday to the bleak, terrifying world of today was not sudden, did not take place all at once. Acting as a brake upon the hot winds of scientific knowledge and the tidal waves of industrial erosion was a group of wonderful people, unhappily now extinct, called liberals. Full of the juices of human kindness, these people decided that they were going to be good, honest Christians without believing in Christianity which their logical minds found offensive. Let reason prevail, they declared. But these kindhearted atheists got scared. They went so far down the godless road that they could see a black nothingness looming as its final end. They retreated in fear. They helped to undermine the old world, but they discovered that the building of a new world was much harder than they had suspected. They called for new systems of ideas, and when no valid ones were forthcoming, they demanded new myths that would not insult the intelligence of man. For their pains they got programs for wars and revolutions…
“But one must not overlook the fact that, had it not been for these liberals, the full flood of a senseless existence would have long since broken through the myths of progress which have sustained modern man so far. They did an impossible job with great skill, those liberals. Future history will regard the liberals as the last great defenders of that which really could not be defended, as the last spokesmen of historical man as we’ve known him for the past two thousand years.
“All of this brings us to one central, decisive fact: the consequences of the atheistic position of modern man, for most men today are atheists, even though they don’t know it or won’t admit it. They live, dream, and plan on the assumption that there is no God. The full implications of this are enormous. It means that God no longer really concerns us as a reality beyond life, but simply as something projected compulsively from men’s minds in answer to their chronic need to be rid of fear, something to meet the obscure needs of daily lives lived amidst strange and threatening facts.”
“At least we agree on something,” Blimin muttered, eyeing Cross askance. “You see the central fact, so why don’t you admit the rest? Only the Party can save this world, give it guidance, direction—”
“Mr. Blimin,” Cross overrode him, “since religion is dead, religion is everywhere…Religion was once an affair of the church; it is now in the streets in each man’s heart. Once there were priests; now every man’s a priest. Religion’s a compulsion, and a compulsion seems to spring from something total in us, catching up in its mighty grip all the other forces of life—sex, intellect, will, physical strength, and carrying them forward toward—what goals? We wish we knew…Compulsions exist as much in the individual as in society. Lucky is the man who can share his neighbor’s religion! Damned is the man who must invent his own god! Shun that man, for he is a part of the vast cosmos; he is akin to it and he can no more know himself than he can know the world of which he is in some mysterious way a part…Blessed is the artificial man, the determined man, the social man…
“Mr. Blimin, I’m not even an atheist. To me it’s just too bad that some people must lean on imagined gods, that’s all. Yet I’d not have it otherwise. They need religion. All right; let them have it. What harm does it do? And it does make for a greater measure of social stability. But I object if somebody grabs me when I’m a defenseless child and injects into me a sedative—the power of which lasts for a lifetime!—which no one would ever be able to tell if I’ll ever need or not!
“Now, what does this mean,—that I don’t believe in God? It means that I, and you too, can do what we damn well please on this earth. Many men have been doing just that, of course, for a long time, but they didn’t have the courage to admit it. They pretended that they were following higher laws, practicing virtue, etc. But such clumsy games exposed themselves before long. Naive governments allowed historical records to be kept! Imagine the British, past masters of exploitation and duplicity, allowing a Karl Marx into their British Museum to pore over and unravel the pretensions and self-deceptions of British banditry! Such records of blatant chicanery served thoughtful and astute men as guides in the building of new, scientific, and more efficient methods of deception!
“Today governments, democratic or totalitarian, are much wiser. It is better, they feel, for mankind to be unconscious—or ignorant, which is the same thing—than knowing. They regard the writing of history as the most supremely important of all tasks. Modern governments today watch their history and since men seem to have developed a habit of wanting to know what has happened, they doctor up events, rewrite the past, improvise limited myths and give those myths to the masses of men. But this history is a simple, inspected history, fumigated, purged, and sterilized of all contagious ideas that might lead to the illnesses of independence, freedom, and individuality. Mankind is coming of age…
“Those few strong men who do not want to be duped, and who are stout enough in their hearts to accept a godless world, are quite willing, aye, anxious to let the masses of men rest comfortably in their warm cocoons of traditional illusions. Men are more easily and cheaply governed when they fear ghosts more than guns! The real slaves of the Twentieth Century are not those sharecroppers who wince at the stinging swish of a riding boss’s whip; the slaves of today are those who are congenitally afraid of the new and the untried, who fall on their knees and break into a deep sweat when confronted with the horrible truth of the uncertain and enigmatic nature of life…
“It is the strong at the top, however, who represent modern man. Beyond themselves, their dreams, their hopes, their plans, they know that there is nothing…
“Now, the next point, Mr. Blimin—Most of the decisive historic events that happen in this world are not known until after they have happened. Few are the people who know the meaning of what they are living through, who even have an inkling of what is happening to them. That’s the big trouble with history…
“Now, Mr. Blimin, keep that point in mind while I remind you of what is happening in the great cities of the earth today—Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburg, London, Manchester, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and the rest. These cities are, for the most part, vast pools of human misery, networks of raw human nerves exposed without benefit of illusion or hope to the new, godless world wrought by industrial man. Industrial life plus a rampant capitalism have blasted the lives of men in these cities; those who are lucky enough not to be hungry are ridden with exquisite psychological sufferings. The people of these cities are lost; some of them are so lost that they no longer even know it, and they are the real lost ones. They haunt the movies for distraction; they gamble; they depress their sensibilities with alcohol; or they seek strong sensations to dull their sense
of a meaningless existence…
“Now, Mr. Blimin, above these so-called toiling masses, for whom I have some sympathy but not as much as you’d expect, are the few industrialists and politicians who yell night and day about freedom, democracy, high wages, etc. These are the exploiters of the millions of rats caught in the industrial trap. That they make great profits out of the exercise of their lordship is perhaps the least of their crimes—”
“Oh, you’re showing your true colors,” Blimin snorted. “Are you defending exploitation now? Next you’re going to tell me what wonderful philanthropists these capitalists are—”
“Not at all. It just so happens, Mr. Blimin,” Cross explained, “that I think that their crime is a blacker one than mere exploitation. The end-results of their rule is that they keep the lives of their rats pitched to a mean, sordid level of consciousness. It’s right here where you and I disagree deeply. Your wonderful trade unions for a quarter of a century have been fighting for so-called standards of living for workers, fighting for higher wages…Had I had anything to say about the goals of those trade unions, I’d have insisted that their fight be to escape completely the domination of the capitalists…Not that the workers become richer, but that they become more human, freer…You don’t want that, Mr. Blimin, and the capitalists don’t want it. Why? Because you cannot dupe free men who can think and know…
The Outsider Page 46
