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
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.
