The notion of direct action, direct intercourse, direst association, is a foreign one to Megalopolis. If any action is to be taken by the whole community, or by any group in it, it is necessary to carry it through the Megalopolitan parliament, and have it established on paper, after innumerable people, who have no genuine concern in the matter, have committed their views about it to paper. If any intercourse is to be carried on, it must he largely conducted on paper; and if that medium is not directly available, subsidiary instruments, like the telephone, are used. The chief form of association in Megalopolis is that by political party, and it is through the political party that the Megalopolitan expresses his views, on paper, as to what is necessary to amend the paper constitution or promote the welfare of the paper community; albeit he realizes that the promises made by political parties are written on what Megalopolitans in their more cynical moments call “non-negotiable” paper, and will probably never pass into currency.
By its traffic in Coketown’s multifarious goods and by its command over certain kinds of paper known as mortgages or securities, Megalopolis ensures a supply of real foods and real staples from the countryside. Through incessant production of books, magazines, newspapers, boilerplate features, and syndicated matter, Megalopolis ensures that the idolum of the National Utopia shall be kept alive in the minds of the underlying inhabitants of the country. Finally, by the devices of “national education” and “national advertising” all the inhabitants of the National Utopia are persuaded that the good life is that which is lived, on paper, in the capital city; and that an approximation to this life can be achieved only by eating the food, dressing in the clothes, holding the opinions, and purchasing the goods which are offered for sale by Megalopolis. So the chief aim of every other city in the National Utopia is to become like Megalopolis; its chief hope is to grow as big as Megalopolis; its boast is that it is another Megalopolis. When the denizens of Megalopolis dream of a better world, it is only a paper perfection of that National Utopia which Edward Bellamy looked forward to in Looking Backward.
Working in connection with the Machine Process of Coketown, the Megalopolis erects a standard of life which can be expressed in commercial terms, on paper, even if it does not offer any tangible satisfaction in goods and services and perfections. The chief boast of this standard is its uniformity; that is, its equal applicability to every person in the community without respect to his history, his circumstances, his needs, his actual rewards. Hence such goods as Megalopolis creates in profusion are for the most part in the line of plumbing and sanitary devices which, if they do not exactly heighten the joy of living, at any rate make the routine of Megalopolitan life a little less formidable.
The total result of these standards and uniformities is that what was originally a fiction in time becomes a fact. Whereas the inhabitants of the national utopia may originally have been as diverse as the trees in a forest, they tend to become, under the influence of education and propaganda, as similar as telegraph poles along a road. It is not a little to the credit of Megalopolis that the National Utopia has pragmatically justified itself. It has created the sort of mental environment on paper which is necessary to a smooth adjustment of Coketown and the Country House. What is Megalopolis, in fact, but a paper purgatory which serves as a medium through which the fallen sons of Coketown, the producer’s hell, may finally attain the high bliss of the Country House, the consumer’s Heaven?
XIII
It should be plain that in describing the National Utopia and Megalopolis I have been trying to outline what Plato would call the pure form. It is equally clear, I trust, that the pure form is an idolum to which any existing national state or metropolis approximates only so far as the idolum does not conflict too grossly with the real men and women, the real communities, the real regions, the real workaday occupations which continue, despite the reign of these idola, to exist, and to occupy our main attention. Formal education has not altogether taken the place of vital education; loyalty to the state has not altogether succeeded as a substitute for deeper allegiances and affiliations: occasionally, here and there, people meet each other face to face, they eat real food, dig in real earth, smell real flowers instead of coal tar perfumes that arise from paper bouquets, and embark quite madly on real love affairs. It is true that these realities are a disturbing influence: they are always threatening to undermine the idola which the politicians and journalists and academic handymen unite so valiantly to build up; but there they are—and even the most stubborn idealist cannot help himself from occasionally confronting the world that he denies!
If you and I were perfect citizens of Megalopolis, we should never let anything come between us and our loyalty to the State: when the State called for our taxes, we should never think regretfully of the amusements we must forego in order to pay them; when the State demanded that we go to war, nothing like the claims of a family or an occupation or a moral conviction would ever step between us and our national duty. By the same token, we should never eat any other food than
