|
Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Sunday, 30 March 1924
die Sol.
Days have been sadly mixed of late. Saturday A.M. however Alostrael [Leah Hirsig] arrived, and all will go well. Have analyzed O.P.V.'s [Norman Mudd] propositions. He still doesn't understand me one scrap. Also, he can't see that it's beneath my dignity to ask for damages and be versus any body: Judex sum. I may start the case, but be most careful to bring out the truth impartially, so that the Judge in Summing up shall have no comment that he couldn't have done it better.
[The following is in the handwriting of Leah Hirsig.]
Sol Mar. 30.
11 30 A.M. (Daylight saving's time). Bailey's Festus. There must be something good in his work, even great, because tho I know nothing of either the work or the writer I remember the combination as noteworthy. Bailey tried to do something big, and Festus, whatever it is may have been the best he could do. I don't know the date of the beastly book and it comes into my mind because I am trying to fill in a gap in English literature.
12.45. Can it be possible that the world was meant by the gods to play, to lead pastoral lives, heroic lives, as in the Greek stories? And that the suffocation of that kind of life by successive developments, has been the mere checkmate of that intention? I am driven to this remark chiefly by a train of thought arriving after many years of experience of fountain pens refusing to work. It seems somehow as if machines were being choked. There's too much excrement about society; that excrement being light, comes on top. Hence America of to-day. But the process is going to be general and overwhelming. Industry after industry is going to have to shut down for reasons which it will attribute to entirely superficial causes, such as matters of remuneration, but simply because the planet cannot maintain the industry that it pretends. I see the whole process. Some optimists get together in the commercial centre. They say let us establish a totally unnecessary service to such and such a place, access to which was before a matter of difficulty and danger by the beneficent arrangement of nature. They subscribe the capital from previously stolen money; they borrow more money, preferably from people who have really earned it in order to advertise their plan and the new steamship line is launched. When I say totally unnecessary above, I exaggerated. There was sufficient need to justify a monthly sailing service, let us say. The course of the transaction should be obvious. Local accidents apart, a certain amount of business is done, mostly paper and the concern gradually slides into a series of disasters. The notion that flourishes is one that is based in a real need and this sort of thing got on perfectly well before capital was heard of. This is the fundamental fallacy at the base of the capitalistic argument and probably the reason why I started my ideal colony without any thought of capital. I trusted to Nature's bounty, apparently, in essence, and I am still not sure whether this may not be the proper course. The main point is however that the industries are rapidly choking the planet with ever increasing frequency. They came to a stop, at least temporary, and they usually get going again by the injection of some sort of dope, fresh capital, or what not, with the result that the people as a whole become more and more starved from having to support all these monstrous inventions. Not the most fatal form of machine is that for speeding up agriculture. It makes the very necessities of life dependent on the artificial life of the city. Once the breakdown seriously begins it should be merely a matter of weeks to depopulate the planet by starvation.
|