This crisis is also about replacing real thing with printed matter, that is to say, the growth of bureaucracy. Contemporary man tends more and more to put between himself and nature an abstract and complex machinery that casts him into solitude. Only when there is no more bread do bread coupons appear.
The people of France subsist on 1200 calorie-a-day diet, but they have at least 6 different forms and a hundred official stamps on each one of those forms. It is the same way everywhere where bureaucracy is expanding. To get from France to America I used a lot of paper in both places, so much paper that I could have probably printed enough copies of this talk to have it distributed here without having to show up.
With so much paper, so many offices and functionaries, we are creating a world in which human warmth has disappeared. Where no one can come into contact with anyone else except across a maze of what we call “formalities”. The German officer who spoke with care of the shredded ears of my comrade thought this was fine, since tearing them was part of his official business, and there could not, therefore, be anything wrong with it. In sum, one no longer dies, one no longer loves, and one no longer kills, except by proxy. This, I suppose, is what is called good organization.
The crisis is also about replacing real men with political men. Individual passion is no longer possible, only collective, that is to say, abstract passions. Whether we like it or not, we cannot avoid politics. It no longer matters that we respect or prevent a mother’s suffering. What counts is ensuring the triumph of a doctrine. Human suffering is no longer considered a scandal, it is merely one variable in a reckoning whose terrible sums has not yet been calculated. It is clear that these different symptoms can be summed up by something that might be described as the cult of efficiency and abstraction. This is why Europeans today know only solitude and silence. They can no longer communicate with others through shared values. And since they are no longer protected by mutual respects based on those values, their only alternatives is to become victims or executioners.
This is what the men and women of my generation have understood. This is the crisis they face and are still facing. We attempted to solve it with the values at our disposal, by which I mean no values at all other than an awareness of the absurdity of our lives. It was in this frame of mind we were introduced to war and terror, with no consolation or certainty.
We only knew we could not yield to the brutes taking charge in the 4 corners of Europe. But we had no idea how to justify our resistance. Even the most lucid among us realize they knew of no principle in whose name they could oppose terror and repudiate murder. For if one believes in nothing, if nothing makes sense and one is unable to affirm any value, then everything is permitted and nothing is important. Hence there is neither good nor evil, and Hitler was neither wrong nor right. One could lead millions of innocents to the crematorium as easily as one may devote oneself to curing leprosy; one can tear a man’s ear with one hand and soothe him with the other; one can clean a house in front of men who had just been tortured; one can honor the dead or throw them in the garbage. It is all the same.
And since we thought that nothing made sense, we had to conclude that the man who succeeds is in the right. And this is so true that even today plenty of intelligent skeptics will tell you that if Hitler had by chance won the war, history would have paid him homage and consecrated the hideous pedestal in which he perched. And there can be no doubt that history, as we conceive of it today, would have consecrated Hitler and justified terror and murder just as we all consecrate murder and terror when we have the temerity to think that everything is meaningless.
Some among us, it is true, did think it might be possible in the absence of any highervalue to believe history had meaning. In any case, they often acted as if they thoughtso. They said that this was necessary as it would liquidate the air of nationalisms and prepare for a time where empire would finally give way, wither without a fight, to universal society and heaven on earth. With this thought they came to the same conclusion that we did: nothing made sense. For if history has meaning, that meaning must be total or be nothing at all. These men thought and acted as if history obeyed some transcendent dialectic, as if we were all moving together to some definite goal. They thought and acted according to Hegel’s detestable principle: “Man is made for history, not history for man.”
In truth, the political and moral realism that hold sway in today’s world is heir to a Germanic philosophy of history according to which, all of humanity is on the march, moving rationally towards a definitive universe. Nihilism has been replaced by absolute rationalism, and in both cases, the results are the same. For if it true that history obeys a transcendent and inevitable logic, if it is true according to this German philosophy that the feudal state must replace the state of anarchy, that nation-states must replace feudalism, and that empires must then take the place of nation-states until at last, they lead to the creation of a universal society, then anything supporting this inevitable process is good and the achievements of history are definitive truth. And since these achievements can only be obtained by the usual means of wars, conspiracies, and individual and mass murders, actions cannot be justified on the basis of good or evil but only by how efficient they are.
And so in today’s world, the men and women of my generation had been lured by a double temptation: thinking that nothing is true or thinking that only the inevitable forces of history are true. Many of them succumb to one or the other of these temptations, which is how the world came to be ruled by the will to power and, consequently, terror. For if nothing is true or false, good or bad, and if the only value is efficiency, the rule of the day is to be the most efficiency, meaning the strongest.
The world is no longer divided into the just or unjust, but into masters and slave. He who is right is he who enslaves. The housekeeper is right, not the victim of torture. The German officer who tortures and the one who executes, the SS men transformed into grave diggers, these are the reasonable men of this new world.
Look around you and see if it isn’t still the case. Violence has a stranglehold on us. Inside every nation, and the world at large, mistrust, resentment, greed, and the race for power are manufacturing a dark, desperate universe in which each man is condemned to live within the limit of the present. The very notion of the future fills him with anguish, for he is captive to abstract powers, starved and confused by harried living, and estranged from nature’s truth, from sensible leisure, and simple happiness.
Perhaps you who dwell in this still happy America do not see this or cannot see it clearly. But the men I am talking about had been seeing it for years, and had felt this evil in their flesh, read it on the faces of those they love, and deep in their ailing hearts, a terrible revolt will rise up that will sweep everything away. They are still haunted by too many monstrous images to imagine it will be easy to do, but they are too deeply marked by the horror of those years to allow it to continue.
Here is where their true problem begins. If the features of this crisis are the will to power, terror, the replacement of real man by political and historical man, the reign of abstraction and fatality, and solitude without a future, then these are the features we have to change to resolve this crisis.
Our generation found itself faced with this immense problem and all that it negated. We had to draw the strength to fight from these very negations. It was perfectly useless to tell us “you must believe in god, or in Plato, or in Marx,” precisely because we did not have that kind of faith. The only question was whether we were going to accept a world in which we could only be a victim or
