22 Before it is performed every action requiring a conscious effort of will (that is, which is not obligatory or instinctive) is to the imagination like a sleeping princess. It lies at the heart of an enchanted forest of potentialities. The actual performance then threatens to destroy all that might have been created by other actions; and there is a close parallel with the sexual situation. It is more pleasurable to prolong the time before ejaculation. It is nice to be mean today because I shall be generous tomorrow.
23 The fourth cause of failure to enact good stems from the desire to prove to ourselves by not acting that we can choose to act. Not to act is to act. I am what I do not do, as well as what I do. The refusal to act is often equivalent to the gratuitous act. Its fundamental motive is to prove I am free.
24 The fifth cause of failure to enact is that the action contemplated is so small in relation to the final intention that it seems pointless. It is between these tiny stools – moving the Sahara grain by grain, spooning out the Atlantic – that so many good causes vanish into thin air.
25 The sixth cause of failure to enact applies to those actions that are against something. Here the mechanism of countersupporting may prevent action.
COUNTERSUPPORTING
26 If I am attracted strongly towards a moral or aesthetic or politico-social pole, I shall hate and may wish to suppress its counterpole. But I shall also know that the pole under whose positive influence I live is dependent for much of its energy on that counterpole; furthermore, I derive pleasure from being attracted. My opposition to the counterpole will in this case frequently be of a peculiar kind. I call this kind of opposition countersupporting.
27 I may offer violent physical opposition to some idea or social tendency. But violence breeds violence; strength breeds strength; resource breeds resource. Violent persecution often conceals a desire that enough of the persecuted shall survive for the exercise of more violence. Fox hunters preserve foxes. The keenest shots preserve game most keenly.
28 Violence strengthens the opposed; passion tempers it. To argue passionately against something is to give it passion.
29 Games were invented as a kind of
A great game is an unfailing well; and it is precisely this inexhaustibility that the countersupporter seeks in the enemy. The Anglo-Saxon ethic of sportsmanship and fair play, which developed out of
30
31 The most current way of countersupporting is by masked toleration. It is a general innate weakness of high intelligence. I show actionless hostility towards a counterpole; it is generally one of so vast and general a nature that it seems that however active I might be I could have no effect on the situation as a whole.
32 The masked tolerator knows that the thing he opposes is essential to his well-being. He may, indeed usually does, enjoy expressing his opposition verbally, but he rarely makes any constructive opposing action. Very often he will despise the active workers of the cause that publicly fight what he opposes. He will say that such people are pursuing private ends – they like the excitement of action, they are born extroverts – and that he himself sees too deep, too far. He knows the vanity, or futility, or illusoriness, of active opposition. This is the most felt, most shared, most enjoyed despair of our age.
33 The artistic figures considered most significant in and of our century are those that best express this conscious sense of fact of intellectual will-lessness and inadequacy – the fallen saint, the weak man; and those that express the potent contrary – the men of action, the doers. Think of the Wild Western hero; the characters in Beckett and Greene, Hemingway and Malraux.
34 The Don Quixotes of our modern La Mancha are those duped by the myth that to oppose must mean to wish to destroy; and that to be unable to destroy is a tragic situation.
35 There are two motives in all opposition; and the two motives are antipathetic. One is rightly or wrongly the will to suppress all opposition, the other is rightly or wrongly the will to prolong it. It is necessary to determine before opposing what part these two wills play.
36 There are more kinds of hypocrisy than the conscious ones. All opposition points to the opposed. Look how attractive Christianity has made sin. The best opposition is always scientific, logical, rational. The more unanswerable in reason it is, the better it is.
37 The psychiatric patient is not cured, but made less abnormal, by understanding the contradictions of his own nature. Dimly he begins to see how the forces that use him can be used. To understand is not only to forgive; it is to control.
38 Before opposing, ask these questions:
To what extent do I enjoy opposing? If I could annihilate in one blow all that I oppose, would I make that blow?
Will my opposition weaken or strengthen the thing opposed?
How effective is my proposed form of opposition likely to be?
Is it a pose or a reality?
To what extent is it caused purely by a desire to be admired, or not despised, by those I admire?
Is there anything else I could oppose more usefully?
39 My opposition is ‘my duty’; if I once admitted that my opposition was really my pleasure…
40 Tears wept on enemy graves are often peculiarly sincere; we weep our own now homeless energy.
41 So many movements of opposition are Charges of the Light Brigade. And, symptomatically, we admire their failure more than we hate their waste and futility.
GOOD EQUALS EVIL
42 There is one last desperate argument sometimes advanced against doing good actions. It is this: all actions, whether intended to be good or bad, interweave so extensively as time passes that finally their relative goodness or badness completely disappears. Both evil and good die; or are metamorphosed.
43 We all know evils to some can cause good to others; but to leap from what may be true of the whole, or true of any given action viewed historically, to the theory that the individual can be excused any moral concern about his actions is to fall into the fallacy that what is true of an action must be true of the enactor. A man must finally do good for his own and his society’s health; not for good’s sake or the action s sake.
44 If good finally becomes lost in evil, and evil in good, then it is to ensure the survival of matter; not of humanity.
45 All our judgements of right and wrong are absolutely and evolutionally meaningless. But we are like a judge who is compelled to judge. Our function is to judge, to choose between good and evil. If we refuse to do so, we cease to be human beings and revert to our basic state, of being matter; and even at his very worst the very worst among us is still something more than a few score kilograms of complaisant molecules.
WHY SO LITTLE GOOD?
46 Yet even given these reasons, given that failure to enact good must often arise from the difficulty of knowing which of several possible courses is the best or from a genuine inability to see any necessity for action (the
