Vijaya took one hand off the wheel, beat his chest and uttered a loud ferocious roar. “Don’t tease the gorilla,” he said, and laughed good-humoredly. Then, “Think of the other great dictator,” he said to Will, “think of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. Hitler’s the supreme example of the delinquent Peter Pan. Stalin’s the supreme example of the delinquent Muscle Man. Predestined, by his shape, to be an extravert. Not one of your soft, round, spill-the-beans extraverts who pine for indiscriminate togetherness.
No—the trampling, driving extravert, the one who always feels impelled to Do Something and is never inhibited by doubts or qualms, by sympathy or sensibility. In his will, Lenin advised his successors to get rid of Stalin: the man was too fond of power and too apt to abuse it. But the advice came too late. Stalin was already so firmly entrenched that he couldn’t be ousted. Ten years later his power was absolute. Trotsky had been scotched; all his old friends had been bumped off. Now, like God among the choiring angels, he was alone in a cozy little heaven peopled only by flatterers and yes-men. And all the time he was ruthlessly busy, liquidating kulaks, organizing collectives, building an armament industry, shifting reluctant millions from farm to factory.
Working with a tenacity, a lucid efficiency of which the German Peter Pan, with his apocalyptic phantasies and his fluctuating moods, was utterly incapable. And in the last phase of the war, compare Stalin’s strategy with Hitler’s. Cool calculation pitted against compensatory daydreams, clear-eyed realism against the rhetorical nonsense that Hitler had finally talked himself into believing. Two monsters, equal in delinquency, but profoundly dissimilar in temperament, in unconscious motivation, and finally in efficiency. Peter Pans are wonderfully good at starting wars and revolutions; but it takes Muscle Men to carry them through to a successful conclusion. Here’s the jungle,” Vijaya added in another tone, waving a hand in the direction of a great cliff of trees that seemed to block their further ascent.
A moment later they had left the glare of the open hillside and had plunged into a narrow tunnel of green twilight that zigzagged up between walls of tropical foliage. Creepers dangled from the overarching branches and between the trunks of huge trees grew ferns and dark-leaved rhododendrons with a dense profusion of shrubs and bushes that for Will, as he looked about him, were namelessly unfamiliar. The air was stiflingly damp and there was a hot, acrid smell of luxuriant green growth and of that other kind of life which is decay.
Muffled by the thick foliage, Will heard the ringing of distant axes, the rhythmic screech of a saw. The road turned yet once more and suddenly the green darkness of the tunnel gave place to sunshine. They had entered a clearing in the forest. Tall and broad-shouldered, half a dozen almost naked woodcutters were engaged in lopping the branches from a newly felled tree. In the sunshine hundreds of blue and amethyst butterflies chased one another, fluttering and soaring in an endless random dance. Over a fire at the further side of the clearing an old man was slowly stirring the contents of an iron caldron. Nearby a small tame deer, fine-limbed and elegantly dappled, was quietly grazing.
“Old friends,” said Vijaya, and shouted something in Palanese. The woodcutters shouted back and waved their hands. Then the road swung sharply to the left and they were climbing again up the green tunnel between the trees.
“Talk of Muscle Men,” said Will as they left the clearing. “Those were really splendid specimens.”
“That kind of physique,” said Vijaya, “is a standing temptation. And yet among all these men—and I’ve worked with scores of them—I’ve never met a single bully, a single potentially dangerous power lover.”
“Which is just another way,” Murugan broke in contemptuously, “of saying that nobody here has any ambition.”
“What’s the explanation?” Will asked.
“Very simple, so far as the Peter Pans are concerned. They’re never given a chance to work up an appetite for power. We cure them of their delinquency before it’s had time to develop. But the Muscle Men are different. They’re just as muscular here, just as tramplingly extraverted, as they are with you. So why don’t they turn into Stalins or Dipas, or at the least into domestic tyrants? First of all, our social arrangements offer them very few opportunities for bullying their families, and our political arrangements make it practically impossible for them to domineer on any larger scale.
Second, we train the Muscle Men to be aware and sensitive, we teach them to enjoy the commonplaces of everyday existence. This means that they always have an alternative—innumerable alternatives—to the pleasure of being the boss. And finally we work directly on the love of power and domination that goes with this kind of physique in almost all its variations. We canalize this love of power and we deflect it—turn it away from people and on to things. We give them all kinds of difficult tasks to perform—strenuous and violent tasks that exercise their muscles and satisfy their craving for domination—but satisfy it at nobody’s expense and in ways that are either harmless or positively useful.”
“So these splendid creatures fell trees instead of felling people—is that it?”
“Precisely. And when they’ve had enough of the woods, they can go to sea, or try their hands at mining, or take it easy, relatively speaking, on the rice paddies.”
Will Farnaby suddenly laughed.
“What’s the joke?”
“I was thinking of my father. A little woodchopping might have been the making of him—not to mention the salvation of his wretched family. Unfortunately he was an English gentleman. Woodchopping was out of the question.”
“Didn’t he have any physical outlet for his energies?”
Will shook his head. “Besides being a gentleman,” he explained, “my father thought he was an intellectual. But an intellectual doesn’t hunt or shoot or play golf; he just thinks and drinks. Apart from brandy, my father’s only amusements were bullying, auction bridge, and the theory of politics. He fancied himself as a twentieth-century version of Lord Acton—the last, lonely philosopher of Liberalism. You should have heard him on the iniquities of the modern omnipotent state! ‘Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Absolutely.’ After which he’d down another brandy and go back with renewed gusto to his favorite pastime—trampling on his wife and children.”
“And if Acton himself didn’t behave in that way,” said Dr. Robert, “it was merely because he happened to be virtuous and intelligent. There was nothing in his theories to restrain a delinquent Muscle Man or an untreated Peter Pan from trampling on anyone he could get his feet on. That was Acton’s fatal weakness. As a political theorist he was altogether admirable. As a practical psychologist he was almost nonexistent. He seems to have thought that the power problem could be solved by good social arrangements, supplemented, of course, by sound morality and a spot of revealed religion. But the power problem has its roots in anatomy and biochemistry and temperament. Power has to be curbed on the legal and political levels; that’s obvious. But it’s also obvious that there must be prevention on the individual level. On the level of instinct and emotion, on the level of the glands and the viscera, the muscles and the blood. If I can ever find the time, I’d like to write a little book on human physiology in relation to ethics, religion, politics and law.”
“Law,” Will echoed. “I was just going to ask you about law. Are you absolutely swordless and punishmentless? Or do you still need judges and policemen?”
“We still need them,” said Dr. Robert. “But we don’t need nearly so many of them as you do. In the first place, thanks to preventive medicine and preventive education, we don’t commit many crimes. And in the second place, most of the few crimes that are committed are dealt with by the criminal’s MAC. Group therapy within a community that has assumed group responsibility for the delinquent. And in difficult cases the group therapy is supplemented by medical treatment and a course of moksha-medicine experiences, directed by somebody with an exceptional degree of insight.”
“So where do the judges come in?”
“The judge listens to the evidence, decides whether the accused person is innocent or guilty, and if he’s guilty, remands him to his MAC and, where it seems advisable, to the local panel of medical and mycomystical experts. At stated intervals the experts and the MAC report back to the judge. When the reports are satisfactory, the case is closed.”
“And if they’re never satisfactory?”
“In the long run,” said Dr. Robert, “they always are.”
There was a silence.
“Did you ever do any rock climbing?” Vijaya suddenly asked.
Will laughed. “How do you think I came by my game leg?”
“That was forced climbing. Did you ever climb for fun?”
“Enough,” said Will, “to convince me that I wasn’t much good at it.”
Vijaya glanced at Murugan. “What about you, while you were in Switzerland?”
The boy blushed deeply and shook his head. “You can’t do any of those things,” he muttered, “if you have a tendency to TB.”
“What a pity!” said Vijaya. “It would have been so good for you.”
Will asked, “Do people do a lot of climbing in these mountains?”
“Climbing’s an integral part of the school curriculum.”
“For everybody?”
“A little for everybody. With more advanced rock work for the full-blown Muscle People—that’s about one in twelve of the boys and one in
