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The Prohibitionist - Verbotenist: A Study in Neuroses
There is in science a constant progress towards Unity.
The chemist, who a century or so ago was astounded by the discovery of the elements as radically different fields of matter, has now learnt, since Prestley in 1828 and Mendelejeff following him, that these apparently diverse substances are but on a scale similar to the colours of the spectrum, that the difference is more in degree than in hand. Further research has shown that these elements are in some still mysterious way multiples of a single element. This thesis, theoretically most probable, has received the best possible confirmation through the discovery of radium, and the actual transmutation of certain elements which followed this.
Similarly, the old antithesis between matter and spirit is disappearing. The materialists went so far as to say "Thought is a secretion of the brain" while their opponents retorted that the brain itself was but an idea in the mind.
The controversy between these schools is (evidently) merely verbal. One cries "x is y"; the other "y is x". All we care is that the identity exists.
The problems of psychology and physiology are now admitted on all hands to be interdependent. We see, for example, a man suffering from general paralysis of the insane, who talks wildly of imaginary wealth or power. We can trace these thoughts to a lesion in the brain substance. But what caused that lesion? Certain 'evil' thoughts of the man which led him into foolish curses. Then what caused those thoughts? Physiology again supplies the answer.
So we find mind react on body, and body on mind, until the question as to which first arose is as foolish as that old joke: "Which came first, the hen or the egg?"
The practical issue to which I propose to call attention in this paper is that a man's opinions reflect his physical constitution. They are not based upon abstract ideals of justice, except in the case of very exceptional first-class men, who have no weak spots in their organization, and have in addition practised the philosophical art of detachment.
Let us take one or two obvious illustrations.
Consider the steeple-jack or the expert mountaineer. Either of these persons will laugh at the idea of danger, and maintain that any "accident" is no accident at all, but utter foolishness on the part of somebody or other. It is lack of care or foresight. I have heard of only one 'unavoidable accident' on a mountain in my life, and that was the death of Norman Nernda [?], who dies of heart disease—so it was not a true mountain accident after all.
Now consider the attitude of other people towards these. We may class them as follows:
1. Ambitious. "By Jove, I'd like to climb the Matterhorn too!"
2. Admiring. "What splendid brave fellows those are, to climb the Matterhorn!"
Fearful. "Oh how dreadfully dangerous to climb the Matterhorn. I wouldn't do it for the world!"
4. (I leave it to the reader to name) "It's a most dreadful dangerous thing; and it might not be allowed."
Is it unfair of me to claim that these classes represent progressive stages of ignorance and cowardice?
The positive attitude of Class 4 is really the weakest of all. It is dictated by a sense of inferiority so acute that its victims are unable to bear the fancied scheme of their incompetence and cowardice. They therefore wish to destroy all persons superior to themselves.
Their sense of inferiority is itself a neurotic symptom. Everyman has not the capacity to climb great peaks; it is no shame to him. He may excel in some other branch.
Mr. Walter Winaus is a much better shot than I am, and I possibly know ice-craft better than he does. We shall not quarrel about this; we shall give each other the respect for the special aptitude. We are each happy and confident. If we met on a shooting range, I should gladly beg him to give me a lesson; if on a glacier, he would follow my advice about the route without a bitter thought. So with any person at all who has found himself in any line; success has heart, toleration and comradeship.
But Mr. Winaus has bitter enemies, I make no doubt; and I am sure they are all rotten bad shots. My own enemies are mostly bad climbers.
Now there are some people whose failure to meet the conditions of life is absolute; and it is naturally and necessarily these who, having no ability to compete with their fellows, no generosity to admire them, no courage even to support their lot in silence, take the fourth course; and condemn them.
To such people every success, every triumph, is a pang, and they react with envy of a type which often reaches the degree of murder.
We certainly do not find the banker condemning the financial system; the Harvard fullback complaining of the roughness of football; if they did, we might believe that there was something really wrong.
Does Ty Cobb want to suppress baseball, or Annette Kellerman agitate for a law against swimming?
No: nor does the average healthy man, who couldn't hit a ball in a week, or survive a dozen strokes. But the average healthy man is functioning in his average healthy way, and he leaves other people alone.
Any man who is functioning is happy. "God's in his heaven. All's right with the world" even to a little slave of the silk-mills on her one bright holiday morning. One does not have to be a great general or a brilliant pianist or a smart drummer; most of us are healthy animals, and so long as we eat and drink and love and are amused without too much worry about the future, we jog along more or less merrily, and do not hate our neighbour because he is a little richer, or stronger, or wiser, than we are.
But Mr. Normal Average Healthy Man, if you stop functioning even for an hour or two, you know well what happens. It is a matter of physical well-being. Fail to digest heartily and eliminate strongly, and your thoughts soon take sick. You get gloomy about yourself, and the next step is to hate everybody else in the world. Luckily for you, Mr. N.A.H. Man, it's only a matter of an hour or so, and a dose of Epsom Salts; you function again, and all the world's your brother.
But use your imagination for a minute! Think of all the poor devils who are misfits from their mother's breast. Think what a man musts be like at forty, if he has never been able to enjoy a good dinner without agonies of indigestion, to take a drink without dizziness, nausea and fainting, or to love a woman without reactions of collapse and remorse. Isn't it natural that such an unfortunate should envy his luckier fellows? If he doesn't, it is an absolute certainty that there is some plane or other on which he functions fully, so that he doesn't care too much about the things he's missing.
For example, to chess, to gardening—anything will serve a man of good will for compensation. But if he has no such fulfilment of his being, his mind tends to craving for things unattainable; he cries 'sour grapes', or curses all those who can reach them.
Now let us examine this argument from the other end. Is it not certain that when we have a man jest at scars he has never felt a wound. Had Mercutio ever been crossed in love, he would have sympathized with Romeo. Well, no, he might have been crossed' but braced himself to it and conquered it.
To take actual cases, can we not read Tolstoi's constitution from his character? What is the meaning of his eternal diatribes against women? What but a symptom of his incapacity to defeat them on the chosen battle-field? Is there no connection between Shelley's idealism and his high-pitched voice?
Is not his constant representation of swooning as the highest bliss indicative of the weak constitution which killed John Keats?
Sanity and good health abide this test: to normal stimulus, normal reactions.
Exaggeration or defect alike imply a disturbance of the proper harmony of being. If a man be insensible to the charms of beauty, he is callous or inadequate; if he flies into a rage of appreciation, and commits suicide, he is overdoing it.
Further, sanity and good health abide this other test; any opinion is compared with all other opinions, and a balance struck.
One man's balance may differ hugely from another's without either being insane; I think Augustus John a more important person than any Prime Minister that England ever had, because he can make a Prime Minister and you can't make a painter. You may think commerce more important than war, cotton more useful to mankind than oil, a strong judiciary more necessary to a state than a wise legislature. But, if you are sane, you will attach at least some value to the thing you like less; and if you are very sane indeed, you will bear with tolerance all arguments on the other side of the question, and keep a more or less open mind.
But there are some people who fail to get this balance at all. [illegible] they may start [illegible] to death. There are plenty of people about who attribute all evil whatever to the Jesuits, the Freemasons, the Jews, the Germans, the 'black magicians', or heaven only knows who.
These people are on the brink of persecution-mania; it is only one short step to thinking that Mr. Edison is pursuing you with electricity, or that your next-door neighbour is poisoning you with 'mental arsenic'.
This last-class is really less dangerous to society than the others, since the sufferer is at once recognized as insane.
But there is so much truth and plausibility in the [illegible] of the 'political maniac' as we may call him that his disease is contagious.
We find people who attribute all that is wrong with the world to a single cause: it may be "[illegible]", or "Wronged Womanhood", or the Exchange System, or anything else.
These folks can make out a case which it is impossible to rebut. If they would only say "Much evil" instead of "All evil" we could agree with them, or even if we disagreed, we could respect and value their opinion.
But no sane man can accept the monstrous hypothesis that one thing, and one alone, is responsible for every ill. Nor do the advocates of such hypothesis advance their cause by the virulence of their language, their intolerance of all other opinions, their impatience of contradiction, and their readiness to conceive of themselves as martyrs.
This again is a symptom of the most dangerous type of mania. Dr. Henry Maudsley gives to people so afflicted the name of 'persecutor-persecuted—a rather clumsy term, but descriptive enough. Such a person conceives that the whole world is in league to torment him. God alone is on his side, according to him. Then surely it will please God if he, becoming his prophet, smite His enemies, that is, all the world. He then proceeds to murder an absolutely inoffensive stranger.
All this may be considered a development of the original sense of inferiority.
When a good man is beaten in fair fight, he doesn't complain. He knows he is good; well then if his opponent is better still, he is glad to have met him. It is a stimulus, an incentive; he will work harder than ever and reverse the verdict on the next opportunity. He fears no ill-will.
But the inferior man, when beaten, seeks refuge from reality. He begins to tell himself lies. The other man cheated. If he cannot quite dope himself to that point, he begins to argue about 'luck'. Or he proves how he ought to have won, if ———
That idea 'ought' is terribly popular among people who are scuttling away from reality. Often it determines the issue; the victim decides to claim a 'moral victory'.
"Morality! heavenly [illegible]! To thee I'll eternally drink! I'm awfully fond of that heavenly bond, "Morality! heavenly [illegible]!"
Perhaps the other man did win; but he had no business to do so. So the man who has failed to learn Latin talks contemptuously of 'dead languages'; the man who has lost a bet denounces gambling; the poor man calls all decent living luxury and waste, though if he came into a fortune, he would hoard it or squander it madly.
There's much hypocrisy inherent in this business of explaining of the incurability of other people. It is a little more than compounding.
"The [illegible] that we're inclined to by damning those we have no mind to" for this is no question of exculpating oneself at the bar of public opinion, but of plain envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness, excited by inability to function.
It is perfectly true that Might makes Right; what is our own 'Right' but that which we or our forebears imposed by force upon those who disagreed?
The Declaration of Independence didn't convince England, any more than Magna Charter convinced King John. What is democracy itself but an appeal to the majority, an agreement to acquiesce in a court of fists? It's all very well to be right, but we need men to defend the right, or the right will suffer.
Consequently, we may assume that people who are always talking about Right, instead of enforcing it, are weaklings. If an anarchist challenges my right to my property, I reply that the Law is on my side, and that the police and the army and navy are ready to defend me with their lives. If he makes a successful revolution, it is through the failure of the physical forces on my side; and he in his time will be compelled to establish similar forces to defend his opinions. In other words, he will make a new Law. But no amount of fine talk will enable him to contract out of the Law of Physical Force.
If all men were converted suddenly to 'humanitarian' principles, how long would it be before the race was swept from the planet by some no longer checked species of wild animal, such as the wolf, or even the rat, with his fearful weapon, the Plague?
Now the first condition of Liberty (as we are told) is eternal vigilance, but we must add: readiness to fight for the rights that we have won.
But if we fight only for those rights that we ourselves value, we shall be split up into a thousand sects. We must therefore fight for other people's rights as for our own. The story man can do this; the weak man, selfish and short-sighted, can never put the general welfare before his own, or even, weigh the consensus of mankind, the testimony of history, the opinion and practice of the best men, with his bad.
We all recognise instinctively that the man who plays personal profit, in business or in politics, while his country is fighting for its life, is as much a traitor as the vilest spy.
What then are the rights for which we must fight? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We are then to see to it that no man deprives us of these things; if we are citizens of the American Republic, we accept this duty as a prime condition of our citizenship.
This will involve us in the most altruistic risks. If a cannibal chief should eat a missionary of a sect abhorrent to me, I must nevertheless go and knock the stuffing out of that chief.
It does not matter what my personal inclinations may be. I may hate football; I may, indeed I must, be ready to resist to the death any tyrant who may try to make me play it; but I must also resist the tyrant who wants to prevent my fellow-citizen from playing it if he chooses.
The only right of restriction against any man arises when he wishes to do something to infringe my equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This I may an must prevent murder, imprisonment without due form of law, and all actions calculated to interfere with my well-being or pleasure. I must prevent a man from pursuing happiness by spreading disease, for one obvious example.
All this is trite; but at present there's such terrible danger of its being forgotten that it may as well be repeated.
One of the worst defects of civilization is that the excretory system of nature ceases to function. Society to-day is clogged with faecal matter, because the weakling does not die. He is not cast out, but remains to infect us. There was a time when a man had to be able to catch a wild horse and ride him, to sleep out in every weather, to feed on what he could kill. If he didn't, he dies, and left no heirs to his inferiority.
We have made mere living progressively easier, and the result is that most people would be better dead. They live, but without being equal to life, joyous conquerors of nature; and all they can do is to complain.
They do not even believe in strength and beauty any more; they have persuaded themselves that all men are as weak and ugly as they are themselves.
They feel their inferiority so acutely that they are forced to invent a morality—the slave-morality of Nietzsche—and they gnash their teeth to see that the real men, the people who are functioning as they themselves cannot do, laugh at their pretensions.
You remember Aesop's Fable of the Fox who had lost his Tail, and tried to persuade the other Foxes that it was a great advantage?
But nowadays that Fox is foxier; he tries to get a law passed prohibiting Tails.
It is not so ridiculous as it sounds; for there are many such Foxes about. And those Foxes, having nothing else to think of but their Tailessness, may perhaps sneak something through when the other Foxes are out hunting.
Worse, some of the biggest Foxes get to thinking that it wouldn't be such a bad thing to pass that law, as tending to keep some of the other Foxes in their place. They themselves will always be able to find a way to evade the new Law; for they are the biggest Foxes; and indeed some of them are so big that they honestly don't mind losing their own tail, provided that by so doing they can get a bigger pull over the poor Foxes who do mind very much indeed.
The whole structure of civilization is being levelled to the ground by the efforts of this 'persecutor-persecuted' type of neurotic. To put one brick upon another is so unfair and cruel to the lower brick: that is the theory to which we are supposed to subscribe in the name of Democracy. It is unfair to the rest of men to claim a woman's love for oneself alone. That is modern "Altruistic Morality". All aptitudes are to be condemned; we must not ride in an automobile while there are still some who cannot afford it. And we must not walk, because it makes the poor cripples feel bad about it.
I have dealt with this theory in the most general terms, for it is theory that is responsible. But there is a particular and imminent case of the mania of the 'persecutor-persecuted' which has already endangered a great part of the liberties of this people, and threatens worse things yet.
[this essay was left uncompleted by Crowley]
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