"...It is not merely that 'power corrupts': so also do the ways of attaining
power. Therefore, all efforts to regenerate society BY VIOLENT MEANS
lead to the cellars of the OGPU, Lenin leads to Stalin, and would have
come to resemble Stalin if he had happened to survive...
"...Koestler records some fantastic conversations with fellow victims in
the concentration camp, and adds that till then, like most middle-class
Socialists and Communists, he had never made contact with real proletarians,
only with the educated minority. He draws the pessimistic conclusion:
'Without education of the masses, no social progress; without social
progress, no education of the masses'...
"...Since about 1930 the world has given no reason for optimism whatever.
Nothing is in sight except a welter of lies, hatred, cruelty and ignorance,
and beyond our present troubles loom vaster ones which are
only now entering into the European consciousness. It is quite possible
that man's major problems will NEVER be solved. But it is also
unthinkable! Who is there who dares to look at the world of today and
say to himself, 'It will always be like this: even in a million years it
cannot get appreciably better?' So you get the quasi-mystical belief that
for the present there is no remedy, all political action is useless, but
that somewhere in space and time human life will cease to be the miserable
brutish thing it now is...
"...The only easy way out is that of the religious believer, who regards
this life merely as a preparation for the next. But few thinking people
now believe in life after death, and the number of those who do is
probably diminishing. The Christian churches would probably not survive
on their own merits if their economic basis were destroyed...
"...The real problem is how to restore the religious attitude while
accepting death as final. Men can only be happy when they do not assume
that the object of life is happiness...
"...Perhaps some degree of suffering is ineradicable from human life, perhaps
the choice before man is always a choice of evils, perhaps even the aim
of Socialism is not to make the world perfect but to make it better. All
revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure."
|
