64 Communism and socialism strengthen capitalism and Christianity, and vice versa. Both sides dream of the total extermination of the other; but in the now they need each other, and counter-support each other.
65 In a world in which many societies and racial blocs are on the verge of growing so large that they will have to exterminate one another to survive, and in which the means rapidly to effect such an extermination are at hand, conservatism, the philosophy of unrestricted free enterprise, of self, of preserving the status quo, is obviously the wrong and dangerous one. If conservatism, the right wing, has so much power and influence in the so-called ‘free’ world today it is because autocratic doctrinaire socialism of the Communist kind seems a worse alternative. If humans have to choose between an unfair free society and a fair unfree one, they will always swing to the first alternative, because freedom is man’s magnetic north. There is thus more hope for mankind in parliamentary socialism of the kind evolved in Western Europe than in any other political tendency; and this is in spite of the doctrinaire and other weaknesses I have suggested earlier.
66 Above all, socialism enshrines the vital concept that there is too much inequality in the world; and that this inequality can be remedied. The best socialism wishes to achieve a maximum of freedom with a minimum of social suffering. The intention is right, however wrong the means may sometimes be.
67 The task before parliamentary socialism is that of articulating and advocating its policies to an ill-educated electorate in a society where there is freedom to choose one’s representatives; in short, where there is always the danger that the electorate will choose self rather than society. Where for electoral reasons its policies imitate conservatism, where it insists on measures for doctrinaire reasons, I reject socialism; and where its policies attack the fundamental freedom of choice of the electorate, as in Communism, I reject it. But when it expresses the desire of people freely able to choose other more self-advantageous policies to choose the inauguration of a juster world, I accept it. And how can men of good will support any other political creed?
FASCISM
68 Fascism maintains that it is the duty of the powerful and intelligent to gain control of the state so that the Many may be organized and controlled. At its Platonic best it is the most realistic of political philosophies. But it always breaks on the same rock: the individual.
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 soi-disant existentialists who are really anarchists or bohemians, and open to attack from those who hold the traditional views of social responsibility and the social contract.
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.