an international one.
33 The Platonic republic could impose humanity and nobility on its citizens, but this very imposition of what might have been freely expressed on what might have freely expressed it immediately sets up a tension that vitiates the theoretical goodness of the measures imposed. I can stick artificial flowers on this tree that will not flower; or I can create the conditions in which the tree is likely to flower naturally. I may have to wait longer for my real flowers, but they are the only true ones.
34 Democracy tries to give choice to as many as possible, and this is its saving virtue; but the wider the franchise and the larger the population grows, the sharper becomes the irony.
35 A few dozen act while millions stand impotent.
36 That everyone has the vote is a general guarantee of some sort of freedom; but it means nothing in itself. My vote influences nothing, decides nothing. Whether I vote or not is immaterial.
37 I vote because not to vote represents a denial of the principle of right of franchise; but not because voting in any way relieves my sense that I am a pawn, and a smaller and smaller pawn, as the electorate grows.
38 An informed man of fifty is the equal at the polling booth of a shopgirl who left school when she was fifteen and knows no more of the real issues on which she is voting than a parrot. They must, to satisfy democracy, be equal at the polling booth; the informed man of fifty would probably be the first to say so. Yet there is a cruelty in this situation, an irony, and an absurdity. An intelligent man is not the same as an ignoramus; yet this is what the polling booth says.
39 A common result of this necessary yet merciless equality; I have no real say in the way the society and country I live in are run; I will do for them what they force me by law to do; but all the rest of my energy and resources will be for my private ends. This sense of total non-participation, of being a pawn in the hands of the chess players, the governors and ministers, is seemingly paralleled in the cosmic situation; and our view of that situation is coloured, darkly, by our view of our virtually non-existent part in the government of our own country.
40 My vote is a futile scrap of paper tossed in a great river; and my life seems a futile atom lost in the endless flux. Resentment becomes pragmatic; egocentric-ity, logical; and the expression of political feeling by illegal and dangerous means – anarchy, rioting; subversion – inevitable.
41 There is only one practical way of lessening this pawn complex and that is by adding to the usual definition of democracy (the right of all adults to vote freely) the rider ‘and as frequently as is conveniently possible’. We can now certainly cope with the technological and social problems of a more frequent general vote on great national issues; and in most Western countries we can, or could, provide the indispensable safeguards of a free press and an unbiassed service of information together with a sufficiently high general standard of education to comprehend and assess it.
42 The one group of people who would certainly reject this idea are the politicians themselves, although they increasingly pay attention to what is a form of unofficial (and dangerously manipulatable) plebiscite: the opinion poll. Their arguments are familiar – the fickleness and emotional nature of public opinion, the impossibility of governing without continuity of policy, the need to keep secret certain factors in decision-making, and so on. These arguments are not without reason. But men in power are never wholly disinterested in retaining power. However much they may disagree with their opponents over policy, they will agree on the rules of the power game; who gets control may fight tooth and nail to keep it.
43 The public is woman before emancipation. If she was fickle and emotional in her decisions it was because she had never been allowed or expected or conditioned to be anything else; and just as this was a dangerous situation for society, so is the present total non-participation in government by the vast majority of adults.
44 A more frequent vote system would not greatly alleviate the individual predicament, which is strictly a numerical one. The single vote must always count for nothing. But it is the first step towards a less isolating situation. Meanwhile, we shall remain the impotent millions.
THE NECESSITY OF THE NEMO
45 And yet the nemo, like hazard, like the indifference of the process to the individual, is essential to man. It is the effect in him of knowing that human existence is unequal. It is both the passive horror of this condition and the active source of the energy needed to remedy it.
46 The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it.
4
RELATIVITY OF RECOMPENSE
1 If we allow ourselves to be trapped between the jaws of our imagination and our reality – between that better world we dream of and the worse one we inhabit – we may find our condition a very unsatisfactory one; and one of our traditional compensations is to look down at all those lower’ forms of life to which we suppose ourselves superior in happiness. Our human world may seem cruel and brief; but in the rest of nature at least it is worse. This consolation does not bear close scrutiny, for what is revealed then is not a universe of hazard-bestowed privilege, one in which man stands highest on the ladder of luck, but one in which – with a single exception – there reigns a mysterious balance and equality among all the forms of animate matter. I call this equality in existing relativity of recompense.
2 It can be defined thus:
3 But if man is an exception it is in relation to his own age, not to past or future ages. That there are ‘perfect’ and ‘imperfect’ stages of evolution is, from the point of view of the pleasure to be derived from being, a mirage. There is no justification for saying that in general the humanity of our own age is happier or less happy than the humanity of any or some other age, past or future. We have no means of assessing the intensity of the pleasure other ages found or will find in existing; and it is certain that whole sources of pleasure and modes of feeling, like whole species, can fall extinct. This vitiates any calculation of special absolute recompense.
4 Our world may seem more secure, another may have seemed more adventurous. Our world may seem more knowledgeable; another, more full of mystery. There is no apparent special advantage of our age that cannot be balanced by some special advantage in every other.
5 All life lies parallel in each moment of time. In the scale of happiness evolution is horizontal, not vertical.
6 All dogs, past, present and future, are equally happy. It is clear to us humans that they are not; but no dog knows this. Man then has been exiled from contemporary relativity of recompense by consciousness. The enormous price of knowledge is the power to imagine and the consequent power to compare. The ‘golden’ age was the age before comparison; and if there had been a Garden of Eden and a Fall, they would have been when man could not compare and when he could: between Genesis 3:6 and Genesis 3:7.
7 Every human object of envy raises two doubts. Is he as happy in his circumstances as I imagine him to be? Would I be as happy in his circumstances as I imagine I would? These doubts should lessen the effects of
