28 But the most common refuge against the nemo is the marriage, the family, the home. Children, the long-walk of the blood, are the real life-insurance. Yet the nemo may cause abuse in this situation. It may force the individual to act the part at home that he or she cannot act in public and can act only otherwise in the world of dreams. The would-be dictator becomes the domestic dictator; the remembered in this room. It may force parents to be tyrants; the husband or wife into infidelity. There is no commoner flight from the nemo than into a forbidden bed.
29 The ordinary man and woman live in an asphyxiating smog of opinions foisted on them by society. They lose all independence of judgement and all freedom of action. They see themselves increasingly as limited special functions, as parts of a machine, with neither need nor right to perform any other than their role in the economic structure of society. The civic sense becomes atrophied. It is the job of the police to prevent crimes, not yours or mine; it is the job of the town councillor to run the town, not yours or mine; it is the job of the underprivileged to fight for their rights, not yours or mine. Thus more and more live in cities, and yet more and more become decitizenized. What began in the suburbs reaches right to the city’s heart.
THE POLITICAL NEMO
30 The atrophy of the civic sense is one of the most striking social phenomena of our age. Man is a political being; and this atrophy is caused by the fact that however successful we may be in other fields in dealing with the nemo, we are all almost no more than helpless cogs in the political machine.
31 We have no political power at all. This is not a new state of affairs, but there is a new quasi-existentialist awareness that the state exists.
32 In the world as it is, democracy, the right of any sane adult to vote freely for the freely-elected candidate of a freely-constituted party with a freely-evolved policy, is the best system. It is the best system not because it will necessarily produce the best regime, but because it gives most freedom of choice to beings whose most urgent need is freedom of choice. No electorate, if allowed to choose, will choose the same general policy unanimously. This key political reality, based on the fact that there is no economic equality anywhere in the world, means that any regime maintaining that the right choice of general policy is so obvious that the electorate need not and should not be given the opportunity to vote for any other policy is a danger nationally and internationally; and this is so even when the regime is demonstrably right in its choice of policy. It is a national danger mainly because it is also 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.