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Stegiel's avatar

Think of Covid. Mass death and mass sadism. "not as the monstrous and unnatural expression of a demoniac will. These methods were, rather, the premature but at bottom rigorously logical expression of a state of mind which all around us we can see becoming more and more general,"

It seems to me very important to notice that the methods which our enemies used during the war in dealing with inhabitants of occupied countries, labour conscripts, or deportees, should be looked at from this point of view, and not as the monstrous and unnatural expression of a demoniac will. These methods were, rather, the premature but at bottom rigorously logical expression of a state of mind which all around us we can see becoming more and more general, and that, moreover, in countries where the majority must be thought free of that madness which is itself, nevertheless—as Chesterton for instance saw so clearly—only a rationality that has broken out of its proper bounds. The only thing that appears as in some sense superfluous, as implying an excess of horror, inexplicable in itself, and not fitting neatly into a logical system, is. the sadism of certain kinds of torturers. But this, again, may be only a superficial view; we have certainly no clear notion of the conditions in which the sadistic mentality is developed; it may after all represent a kind of explosion of the irrational in a world of false rationality. But the fact, for instance, that certain poor wretches whose output had fallen below a given minimum were hurried away to the crematorium does not appear at all an irrational fact, if westart with certain premisses. If man is thought of on the model of a machine, it is quite according to the rules and it conforms to the principles state health economy that when his output falls in nae cost of his maintenance and when he is not worth repairing’ (that is, not worth sending to hospital because the cost of patching him up would be too much of a b n_in proportion to any result to be expected from it, it is quite logical that he should be sent to the scrap heap like a worn-out car, thus allowing any still useful parts of him to be salvaged (as, if I am not mistaken, the Third Reich in wartime salvaged the fatty elements of corpses). If such attitudes and methods still appear monstrous and absurd to us, it is because we refuse to acknowledge that man really can be thought of on the model of a machine; that is a premise which we reject spontaneously and with horror; and it is well that we should do _ so,but a pale emotional reaction is not— we have to ask ourselves if we can translate our emotional reaction into terms of thought, for otherwise it will be all too easy for the doctrinaires of the new rationality to see in this emotional re- action only the residual life, the last kick, of an out-of-date and exhausted attitude of mind.

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Stegiel's avatar

Everything tends to show that, in what is very pretentiously called present-day civilization, it is the man whose output can be objectively calculated—as I showed just now, when dealing with the special case of the taxable earnings of the artist or man of letters—who is taken as the archetype: that is to say (and let us note this carefully) the man who by his type of activity seems to be most directly comparable to a kind of machine. One might say that it is starting with the machine, and in some sense on the model of the machine, that man at the present time is more and more commonly thought of, and one should remember that this is true also of, and is perhaps the essential truth about, a rebellious protest against the human condition in an industrialized world. Yet Marxism seems to have shown itself incapable of resisting the fascination exercised on it by the spectacle of this very world against which it first revolted. It is therefore quite as one would expect that, given such conditions, the genuinely creative man who sees things in terms of quality should find himself out of favor and even actively discredited.

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