by John Fowles
51 Socialism-Communism is an attempt to readjust and to reinterpret Christianity. But among the features of Christianity it sent to the guillotine was the essential one: mystery. Christianity rots because it attempts to preserve a false mystery; socialism will rot because it attempts to abolish a true one.
52 Like Christianity, it has retained the launching mechanism too long after the launching. In order to achieve a greater social justice, the early socialists disseminated various striking but crude theories of equality, of materialism, of history; they idolized the proletariat and blackened all that was not the proletariat. They turned socialism into a bludgeon, a vast explosion. What we need now is not a vast explosion. We need less force, and more thought; less doctrine, and more assessment.
53 For all its hostility to earlier religions, socialism is a religion itself; and this is nowhere more apparent than in its hatred of heresy, of any criticism that does not take certain articles of dogma as incontrovertible statements about reality. Acceptance of dogma becomes a chief proof of one’s faith in the creed. This leads at once to petrifaction.
54 The great problem at the heart of socialism is this: in order to bring social justice to the many, the leaders of socialism were obliged to give them power. But the proletariat are far more skilled at discovering what they want than what they need; so giving them power constituted giving them power to say what they want, not giving them objectivity to see what they need! What the many need above all else is education; they need to be led, not to be leaders. It is this delicate balance that socialist leaders have to keep – on one hand to stay in power they must placate the desires of the many for consumer goods, for the tawdry trivia of life, sufficiently to ensure that they shall not be outbid by the right wing (and even in the most Communist countries there is a right wing), and on the other hand they have to persuade the many that there are nobler things in life than unrestrained free enterprise and the pursuit of cream cake and television circuses. They need the power, the might of the people, and then the consent of the people to the proposition that might is not right; that a universal and ill-educated electorate needs guidance as well as obedience from its elected representatives and governors.
55 Socialism has its afterlife myth, not in a hypothetical other world, but in a hypothetical future of this world. Marxism and Leninism both proclaim, use and abuse the notion of perfectibility; justifying bad means by good ends.
56 Socialism has other myths, such as that of the intrinsic nobility of labour. But it is not the capitalist who ultimately exploits the worker; it is the work itself.
57 The welfare state provides material welfare and psychological illfare. Too much social security and equality breed individual restlessness and frustration: hazard starvation and variety starvation. The nightmare of the welfare state is boredom.
58 Full employment, a planned economy, state ownership of primary industries, national insurance and free medical treatment are admirable things in a society. But such provisions require other provisions. We fortify one flank, and trust the enemy not to attack the other. But evolution knows no chivalry. The higher the standard of living, the greater the need for variety. The greater the leisure, the greater the lack of tension. And the price of salt rises.
59 The welfare state as at present envisaged annihilates factors that evolution values highly: hazard and mystery. This is not an argument against the general principle of the welfare state, but against the inadequacy of present notions of the welfare state, and of what constitutes equality. We need less egalité, and more fraternité.
60 Social stagnation is most likely to occur in extreme societies – extremely just or extremely unjust – and must lead to one of three things: war, decay, or revolution.
61 We need a science that studies the amount of variety, of excitement, of change, of risk of all kinds that the average individual and the average society needs; and why they should need them.
62 Socialism is bedevilled by the spirit of endless and unconsidered yearning towards an impossible equality, conservatism by the pig belief that the fortunate must at all costs ensure their good fortune. Christianity and socialism have both partly failed. In the no-man’s-land between the two stagnant armies there is only one philosophy: the conservative one of self.
63 Yet both Christianity and socialism gain adherents, simply because they are both fighting against a worse creed; and because they appear to be the best public utilizers of right private belief. But they are like armaments manufacturers. Their health is dependent on the continuance of the battle in which they are engaged, and therefore, paradoxically, on the very aims they profess publicly to oppose. Where there is poverty and social injustice, both Christianity and Communism may flourish.
64 Communism and socialism strengthen capitalism and Christianity, and vice versa. Both sides dream of the total extermination of the other; but in the now they need each other, and counter-support each other.
65 In a world in which many societies and racial blocs are on the verge of growing so large that they will have to exterminate one another to survive, and in which the means rapidly to effect such an extermination are at hand, conservatism, the philosophy of unrestricted free enterprise, of self, of preserving the status quo, is obviously the wrong and dangerous one. If conservatism, the right wing, has so much power and influence in the so-called ‘free’ world today it is because autocratic doctrinaire socialism of the Communist kind seems a worse alternative. If humans have to choose between an unfair free society and a fair unfree one, they will always swing to the first alternative, because freedom is man’s magnetic north. There is thus more hope for mankind in parliamentary socialism of the kind evolved in Western Europe than in any other political tendency; and this is in spite of the doctrinaire and other weaknesses I have suggested earlier.
66 Above all, socialism enshrines the vital concept that there is too much inequality in the world; and that this inequality can be remedied. The best socialism wishes to achieve a maximum of freedom with a minimum of social suffering. The intention is right, however wrong the means may sometimes be.
67 The task before parliamentary socialism is that of articulating and advocating its policies to an ill-educated electorate in a society where there is freedom to choose one’s representatives; in short, where there is always the danger that the electorate will choose self rather than society. Where for electoral reasons its policies imitate conservatism, where it insists on measures for doctrinaire reasons, I reject socialism; and where its policies attack the fundamental freedom of choice of the electorate, as in Communism, I reject it. But when it expresses the desire of people freely able to choose other more self-advantageous policies to choose the inauguration of a juster world, I accept it. And how can men of good will support any other political creed?
FASCISM
68 Fascism maintains that it is the duty of the powerful and intelligent to gain control of the state so that the Many may be organized and controlled. At its Platonic best it is the most realistic of political philosophies. But it always breaks on the same rock: the individual.
69 It is the individual in us that makes us suspect measures of which we approve. We can always put ourselves in the place of those who disapprove. Individuality is a channel, a medium through which all individuals can communicate. It is a passport to all other individuals. But it is this essential intercommunicability of individualized intelligences that fascism sets out to destroy. Fascism and imagination are incompatible.
70 Fascists attempt to found a unipolar society. All must face south, none must face north. But in such societies there is a fatal attraction towards the counter-poles of whatever is commanded. If you order man to look to the future, he looks to the present. If you order him to worship God, he worships man. If you order him to serve the state, he serves himself.
71 Society needs some conformities, as a machine needs oil and rounded edges. But many societies demand conformity in precisely the matters where nonconformity is needed,
and allow nonconformity where it should be banned. Nothing is more terrible in a society than this wastage or abuse of the desire to conform.
72 The good human society is one in which no one conforms without thinking why he is conforming; in which no one obeys without considering why he is obeying; and in which no one conforms out of fear or laziness. Such a society is not a fascist one.
EXISTENTIALISM
73 All states and societies are incipiently fascist. They strive to be unipolar, to make others conform. The true antidote to fascism is therefore existentialism; not socialism.
74 Existentialism is the revolt of the individual against all those systems of thought, theories of psychology, and social and political pressures that attempt to rob him of his individuality.
75 The best existentialism tries to re-establish in the individual a sense of his own uniqueness, a knowledge of the value of anxiety as an antidote to intellectual complacency (petrifaction), and a realization of the need he has to learn to choose and control his own life. Existentialism is then, among other things, an attempt to combat the ubiquitous and increasingly dangerous sense of the nemo in modern man.
76 Existentialism is inherently hostile to all organization of society and belief that does not permit the individual to choose, so often as he likes, to belong to it. This cussedness, this obstinate individualism, lays it open to misrepresentation by those soi-disant existentialists who are really anarchists or bohemians, and open to attack from those who hold the traditional views of social responsibility and the social contract.
77 There is an invitation in existentialism to reject traditional codes of morality and behaviour, especially when these are imposed by authority or society without any clear justification except that of tradition. There is a constant invitation to examine motives; the first existentialist was Socrates, not Kierkegaard. The Sartrean school invented commitment. But permanent commitment to religious or political dogma (so-called Catholic and Communist existentialism) is fundamentally unexistentialist; an existentialist has by his belief to judge every situation on its merits, to assess his motives anew before every situation, and only then to choose. He never belongs as every organization wants its members to belong.
78 It is to me impossible to reject existentialism though it is possible to reject this or that existentialist action. Existentialism is not a philosophy, but a way of looking at, and utilizing, other philosophies. It is a theory of relativity among theories of absolute truth.
79 To most people it is a pleasure to conform and a pleasure to belong; existentialism is conspicuously unsuited to political or social subversion, since it is incapable of organized dogmatic resistance or formulations of resistance. It is capable only of one man’s resistance; one personal expression of view; such as this book.
8
THE OBSESSION WITH MONEY
1 But the great majority of us do not live by any dogmatic philosophy – even when we claim that we do. At most there are occasions when we act more or less in accordance with some philosophy of which we approve. Much more than we let philosophies guide our lives, we allow obsessions to drive them; and there is no doubt which has been the great driving obsession of the last one hundred and fifty years. It is money.
2 This obsession has a weakening effect on other philosophies, one that is very obvious if we look at the comparative popularity of the various philosophies since the French Revolution. The most successful have been the most egalitarian; and the key philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has certainly been utilitarianism: the belief that the right aim of human society is the greatest happiness of the greatest number. All philosophies have now to sell themselves, and in a very market-place sense. In short, our obsession with money, the most obvious and omnipresent source of inequality and therefore unhappiness, colours all our beings and ways of seeing life.
3 Having, not being, governs our time.
WEALTH AND POVERTY
4 The trial of money as the-unique source of happiness has begun, in the richer countries of the West; it will fail. Wealth in itself is innocent. The rich man in himself is innocent. But wealth and rich men surrounded by poverty and poor men are guilty.
5 This tension, between the poles of poverty and wealth, is one of the most potent in our societies. It is so potent that many poor would rather remain poor with the chance of becoming rich than be neither poor nor rich with no chance of change.
6 Nothing differentiates more than wealth; nothing similarizes more than poverty. That is why we all want to be rich. We want to be different. Only money can buy both security and the variety we need. The dishonourable pursuit of money thus becomes also the honourable pursuit of both variety and security.
7 Money is potentiality; is control of, and access to, hazard; is freedom to choose; is power. The rich once thought they could buy their way into heaven; now heaven has moved to the here and now. But the rich man has not changed; and his belief that he can still buy his way into heaven-on-earth seems proved.
8 Both rich and poor countersupport the present disparity in the distribution of wealth. The more a political system equalizes the distribution of wealth, then the more popular become the ways of avoiding such equality.
9 Just as poor individuals countersupport rich individuals, so do poor countries countersupport the difference in wealth of the countries of the world. America and the West European countries are hated, but envied: and copied. A poor country is a rich one that is not rich.
10 Lotteries, football pools, bingo games and the rest are the chief protection of the modern rich against the furies of the modern poor. One hangs from the lamp-post the person one hates; not the person one wants to be.
11 We want money to buy those things that a good society would provide for nothing. That is, knowledge, understanding and experiencing; reading about the ends of the world and going to the ends of the world; not going through life not understanding most of what one sees, and therefore not seeing most of what one looks at. The terrible thing about poverty is less that it starves than that it stagnates as it starves.
12 Riches buy variety. That is the great law of capitalist societies. The only way to escape psychological frustration in them is to become rich. All the other exits are blocked.
13 It does not necessarily require any of the nobler human qualities to make money. So the making of money is a kind of equalizer. It becomes natural that a man should be judged by what he can get – money; and not by what he could never in any circumstances get if he was not born with it.
14 The dictionary calls money ‘a medium of exchange’. I call it the human answer to the inhuman hazard that dominates existence. Genius, intellect, health, wisdom, strength of will and body, good looks – all these are prizes we draw in the lottery that takes place before our birth. Money is the makeshift human lottery that half compensates those who were unsuccessful in the first cosmic lottery. But money is a poor lottery, since the prizes won in the first prenatal lottery constitute a handsome free issue of tickets for the next.
If you are lucky in the first you are more likely to be lucky in the second.
15 The poor tolerate wealth in this order; most, wealth acquired after birth by pure luck; next, wealth fairly earned according to the current system; least of all, wealth acquired at birth, inherited wealth.
16 The supreme hazard is that I am who I am. The child of a Texan multi-millionaire, or of a Central African pygmy. Gamblers though we are, it sticks in our throats that this hazard is so pure and the apparent penalties and rewards are so enormously separate. But so effective in making the harsh reality tolerable is the analogy of the lottery that even the unfairest rewards and privileges will be countersupported. I believe the analogy is an evil one and all belief in it fundamentally ignoble. We behave like gamblers who make a virtue of accepting bad luck. We say, Only one horse can win. It’s all in the luck of the game. Someone must lose. But these are descriptions, not prescriptions. We are not only gamblers, we are the horses they
gamble on. Unlike real race-horses, we are not equally well treated, whether we win or lose. And we are not horses at all, since we can think, compare and communicate.
17 We are fellow members of the human race; not rivals in it. We are given intelligence and freedom to counteract and control the effects of the hazard that underlies all existence; not to justify injustice by them.
THE MONETIZATION OF PLEASURE
18 Once man believed he could make his own pleasures; now he believes he must pay for them. As if flowers no longer grew in fields and gardens; but only in florists’ shops.
19 Capitalist societies require a maximum opportunity for spending; both for inherent economic reasons and because the chief pleasure of the majority lies in spending. To facilitate this pleasure, hire-purchase systems are developed; the various forms of lottery fascinate the would-be rich as the brightly fit booths of a travelling fair once fascinated the country peasant. All those symptoms classed under consumer neurosis appear; but there is a far worse effect than all these.
20 This is the monetization of pleasure; the inability to conceive of pleasure except as being in some way connected with getting and spending. The invisible patina on an object is now its value, not its true intrinsic beauty. An experience is now something that has to be possessed as an object bought can be possessed; and even other human beings, husbands, wives, mistresses, lovers, children, friends, come to be possessed or unpossessed objects associated with values derived more from the world of money than from the world of humanity.
