pt 1 Through its secular disguise – socialism – the papacy will be restored
pt 2 Transforming them into a herd through education
For, succumbing to the third temptation offered by Satan, "we took Rome and the sword of Caesar from him and proclaimed ourselves rulers of the earth, the sole rulers. [...] Oh, the work is only beginning. [... B]ut we will triumph and will be Caesars, and then we will plan the universal happiness of man." (p. 132)
The third temptation offered Christ had, of course, been precisely this – all the kingdoms of this world if "thou wilt fall down and worship me." What Christ refused, the Grand Inquisitor accepted.
Dostoevsky then sketches the utopia, the secularized theocracy (or, I suppose, Satanocracy) that after centuries more of chaos and bloodshed and confusion, will finally come into being under the priesthood that the Grand Inquisitor prefigures:"Had you accepted the third counsel of the mighty spirit, you would have accomplished all that men seek on this earth – that is, someone to worship, someone to keep his conscience, and some means of uniting everyone in one indisputable general and unanimous anthill, for the craving for universal unity is the third and last anguish of men. [...] Had you taken the world and Caesar's purple, you would have founded the universal state and have given universal peace. For who can rule men if not he who holds their conscience and their bread in his hands? We have accepted the Sword of Caesar, and in taking it, of course, rejected you and followed him." (pp. 132 f.)
The disjunction of freedom or happiness, choice or security, is nowhere posed more starkly than in this monologue. There are, of course, many more elaborate, more empirically grounded and better balanced presentations of this dichotomy, but none that cuts more directly and ruthlessly to the heart of the matter. The human anthills of twentieth-century dystopian fiction – Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Victor Rousseau's Messiah of the Cylinders, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Bernard Wolfe's Limbo, Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 – with their child-like, ovine citizens and paternalistic dictators, stem, directly or indirectly, from Dostoevsky's Legend: the Grand Inquisitor stands as the prototype of all the Big Brothers of literature – and of history."With us everybody will be happy and will neither rebel nor everywhere destroy each other anymore as they did under your freedom. Oh, we will persuade them that they will only become free when they renounce their freedom to us and submit to us. [...] We shall show them that they are weak, that they are only pitiful children, but that childlike happiness is the sweetest of all. [...] They will marvel at us and will be awe-stricken before us. [...] They will tremble more weakly before our wrath, their minds will grow fearful [...] but they will be just as ready at a sign from us to pass to laughter and rejoicing, to happy mirth and childish song. [...]
And they will have no secrets from us. [... T]hey will bring everything, everything to us, and we will have an answer for everything. And they will be glad to believe our answer, for it will save them from that great anxiety and terrible agony they now endure supplying a free, individual answer. And everyone will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, will be unhappy. [...] They will die peacefully [...] and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we will keep the secret, and for their happiness we will tempt them with the reward of Heaven and eternity." (pp. 133 ff.)
But how accurate is the Grand Inquisitor's assessment of the human condition?
D.H. Lawrence and others have argued that, whatever Dostoevsky's intent, the Grand Inquisitor speaks the truth about mankind, that his analysis is "unanswerable because borne out by the long experience of humanity". *) 30
If he is correct, then the mass of mankind – weak, pitiful, childish creatures – could hope at best for a Platonic utopia, in which their destinies would be controlled by the wise, strong few capable of bearing the burden of choice for all. But to accept the Grand Inquisitor's evaluation of man at face value, even in light of the plentiful evidence of history that lends it credence, is to ignore the fact that most social theorists define human nature in ways to validate their particular theories. Machiavelli in The Prince, for instance, propounds a view of man that necessitates the practice of Realpolitik. "For on men in general this observation may be made: they are ungrateful, fickle, deceitful, eager to avoid dangers, and avid for gain, and while you are useful to them they are with you, offering you their blood, their property, their lives and their sons so long as danger is remote [...] but when it approaches they turn on you." *) 31 Despite the claims made for Machiavelli's realism, he does not, in fact, describe how men behave – always and everywhere – as much as how they must behave if his political philosophy is to appear valid. His theory, that is, determines what the nature of man must be, not vice versa. And thus his highly selective, often radically distorted use of historical evidence is designed to support hypotheses arrived at a priori, not a posteriori. "In keeping with Machiavelli's didactic purpose in The Prince," writes one critic, "his historical illustrations function rhetorically as a means of persuading his audience that his theories actually have the status of historical fact." *) 32
Like Machiavelli, the Grand Inquisitor greatly exaggerates the weakness of man: his servile nature, his inability to bear the responsibility of freedom, his need for paternalistic authority to restrain his "social cannibalism". And he does so, again like Machiavelli, because his analysis serves the goal of his political ideology. If man were not a weak, childish creature, incapable of freedom, what need would he have for Grand Inquisitors?
The authoritarian's will-to-power thus determines his view of human nature, a view that justifies his tyranny. While the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century do lend some historical credence to the Grand Inquisitor's generalizations and qualify Dostoevsky as the reluctant prophet of terrible things to come, still they are counterbalanced by liberal democratic regimes that, whatever their manifold flaws, depend on a wholly different conception of man and have proved, historically, more viable.
Dostoevsky, as we have seen, conceived of the world in apocalyptic extremes, casting the mytho-history of the Legend as a Manichean sociomachia between Good and Evil. Not surprisingly, then, the Grand Inquisitor espouses an extreme, apocalyptic position, marked more by its power and vehemence than by its balance and discrimination. Even in the wake of the cataclysms of recent history, his reading of the human condition seems neither accurate nor fair. The preponderance of quotidian experience is left unaccounted for in his ideological melodrama, which nevertheless appeals to a certain kind of mentality because it reduces all human experience to simplistic antinomies: anarchy or despotism, superman or slave. If the philosophical anarchists, say, romanticize the goodness and strength of man, the totalitarian exaggerates the wickedness and weakness of man, in order to provide self-justification. Neither deals with complex, multidimensional historical beings, but with abstractions. In an essay that tests the Grand Inquisitor's claims against everyday experience, Neal Riemer arrives at a modest, unremarkable conclusion that has none of the awesome grandeur of Dostoevsky's Legend, but is merely truer: "We may still reasonably conclude that the individual, operating within the framework of a healthy, constitutional, democratic, pluralistic society, is strong enough to bear the burden of freedom.
The flight from freedom is not inevitable. The rightful happiness does not necessarily rest upon [the Grand Inquisitor's] allegiance with the Devil. If democracy is never assured, it is, at least, not impossible." *) 33
Despite the Grand Inquisitor's overgeneralizing distortions of the human condition, still the Legend must strike us as remarkably prescient in adumbrating the practice of totalitarianism, not always the same as its theory.
To gauge the difference, compare, for instance, Trotsky's claim that under Communism "the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx" with life as it is lived in the Gulag in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Still, numerous parallels can be and have been drawn between his philosophy and the modus operandi of Lenin and Stalin, Hitler and Mao. *) 34
Among the most intriguing features of the Legend, in fact, is the remarkable precision with which it captures the psychology of totalitarianism – that of both the rulers and the ruled.
The Grand Inquisitor's characterization of man as a servile, pavid and sheep-like race seems borne out by the behavior of the masses under totalitarian regimes: a few strong souls may resist, but the great majority acquiesce in or, indeed, even relish their subordination to the Party or the Leader. However, totalitarian regimes arise not so much because it is man's nature to be a slave as because they find effective ways of converting men into slaves. That is to say, such regimes, in so far as they are able and through a variety of coercive means, create a man in the image of their ideology, the image advanced by the Grand Inquisitor.
Rousseau anticipates this argument in the opening pages of The Social Contract:
Similarly, Bruno Bettelheim describes the psychological mechanisms through which the Nazi state sought to effect a slavish dependence on obedience to Party and Leader. Drawing the (by now) basic distinction between earlier despotisms and modern totalitarianisms, he writes:"Aristotle [...] said that men are by no means equal naturally, but that some are born for slavery, and others for dominion. Aristotle was right, but he took the effect for the cause.
Nothing can be more certain than that every man born in slavery is born for slavery. Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them: they love their servitude. [...] If then there are slaves by nature, it is because there have been slaves against nature. Force made the first slaves." *) 35
"Like the totalitarians we know, despotic systems of the past permitted no opposition. Whoever tried to oppose the regime was crushed. But in the past, the despot did not demand agreement from his subjects, did not require an inner acceptance of his creeds and methods.
It was possible for an opponent to survive and still to maintain a certain degree of self-respect. In the modern totalitarian State, on the contrary, it is not possible to retain that self-respect and live in inner opposition to the system." *) 36
The Superego
Such regimes deprive people, in Benjamin Constant's memorable phrase, of even "their right to silence" – that right that Winston Smith strives vainly to maintain in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. This is so, Bettelheim continues, because "the inescapable power of the totalitarian regime rests exactly on its ability to reach into even the most minute and private life activities of the individual." *) 37 By forcing the individual into outward conformity to principles that he privately despises, the regime damaged or destroyed his inner integrity, "forced him to work on his own ego's destruction." Indeed, claims Bettelheim, "the very essence of totalitarianism [...] is that it sets out to destroy the independent ego, as well as the independent superego." *) 38
The state assumes the role of parent and, through its presumption of omnipotence (such as, to a child, the parent seems to possess), forces the individual to interject its values as his own ego-ideal.
In short, Bettelheim shows that the totalitarian state, like the Grand Inquisitor's utopia, seeks to keep its subjects in a state of perpetual childishness, insecure, seeking approval from authority, dependent upon the surrogate parent to make decisions for them. It does not, that is, find man slavish, servile, childish by nature, but attempts to make him so. Their ideology demands such a man, so their practice produces such a man – insofar as they can. *) 40"The power to create unmanageable inner conflicts which the parent figure acquires for the child should be compared with the power of the totalitarian system which can create similarly unmanageable conflicts in the minds of the persons living in it. The child [...] originally hated the power that thus controlled him. But the power which is so strong also exercises a tremendous appeal [...] and successful power over the child has such a great appeal that it becomes internalized as a superego. [...] The inner desire to be loved by the superego is extremely strong, and the weaker the ego becomes, the stronger the desire. Since, in the totalitarian system, the most powerful superego surrogates are the rulers and their representatives, in short the system itself, one can be approved of by the superego only by going along with them and the system." *) 39
The personality type thus engendered is, argues Erich Fromm in Escape from Freedom, masochistic.
Defining masochism as not merely a sexual but a social phenomenon, Fromm suggests: "The different forms which the masochistic strivings assume have one aim: to get rid of the individual self, to lose oneself. In other words, to get rid of the burden of freedom. This aim is obvious in those masochistic strivings in which the individual seeks to submit to a person or power which he feels as being overwhelmingly strong." *) 41
The concordance between Fromm's characterization of the masochistic personality fostered by totalitarianism and the Grand Inquisitor's of human nature in general is obvious."The masochistic person [...] is saved from making decisions, saved from the final responsibility for the fate of his self, and thereby saved from the doubt of what decision to make. He is also saved from the doubt of what the meaning of his life is or who "he" is. These questions are answered by the relationship to the power to which he has attached himself.
The meaning of his life and the identity of his self are determined by the greater whole into which the self has submerged." *) 42
To this degree, then, the diagnoses of the psychoanalyst and the proto-totalitarian cardinal coincide precisely: except, of course, that what the former views as a particular socio-pathology, the latter holds to be the essential nature of humanity.
But if masochism describes the psychology of the ruled in totalitarian societies, what explains the psychology of the rulers? Fromm's answer is: sadism. Totalitarian rulers are sadists, he contends – again in the sociological, not purely sexual sense. I want to argue that the Grand Inquisitor stands as a paradigm of that psycho-social personality type, the utopian sadist. Initially, such a characterization appears to fly in the face of the cardinal's self-professed benevolence: he claims to have sacrificed his own happiness to that of the masses, to have accepted the terrible burden of freedom so that it might be lifted from them, to have suffered more for the sake of man than even Christ suffered. In the peroration of his monologue, the Grand Inquisitor rises to a frenzy of amour propre at his own selflessness.
When, at the Second Coming, Christ returns with his elect,
Thus everyone will be made happy, "all the millions of creatures," except those who must rule them: "For only we, who guard the mystery, will be unhappy," we who have taken on ourselves "the curse of the knowledge of good and evil." Quite moving, all that monumental self-sacrifice – and all of it a subterfuge."then I will stand up and point out to you the thousand millions who have known no sin. And we who have taken their sins upon us for their happiness will stand before you and say: 'judge us if you can and dare.' Know that I fear you not. Know that I too have been in the wilderness. [...] I too blessed the freedom with which you blessed men, and I too was striving to stand among your elect, among the strong and powerful. [...] But I awakened and would not serve madness.
I turned back and joined the ranks of those who have corrected your work. I left the proud and went back to the humble, for the happiness of the humble. (pp. 135 ff., emphasis in original)
Though one need not doubt that the Grand Inquisitor believes his own rationalization, we ought not share his delusion. "A great number of apparently insoluble problems disappear at once," Fromm notes, "if we decide to give up the notion that the motives by which people believe themselves to be motivated are necessarily the ones which drive them to act, feel and think as they do." *) 43 So it proves with the Grand Inquisitor: his benevolence, his paternalism, his self-sacrifice but mask the sadistic will-to-power over the lives of others.
Not the infliction of pain per se, but the "wish for power", Fromm suggests, "is the most significant expression of sadism," which "appears frequently under the guise of love. The rule over another person, if one can claim that to rule over him is for the person's own sake, frequently appears as an expression of love, but the essential factor is the enjoyment of domination." *) 44
Indeed, the sadist may give his victim "everything – everything except one thing: the right to be free and independent," since "He actually 'loves' them because he dominates them." *) 45 The "love" that the benevolent sadist displays, that is, depends entirely on his ability to dominate, and if this power ceases, so does his "love". Psychologically, then, sadism is the reverse side of masochism, both tendencies "the outcome of one basic need, springing from the inability to bear the isolation and weakness of one's own self." And both aim for symbiosis, "the union of one individual with another self [...] in such a way as to make each lose the integrity of his own self and make them completely dependent on each other. The sadistic person needs his object just as much as the masochistic needs his. [...] In both cases the integrity of the individual self is lost."
Therefore, Fromm concludes perceptively, "in a psychological sense, the lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness. It is the expression of the inability of the individual self to stand alone and live." *) 46
If we read the Legend in this light, one paradox disappears: why, that is, the Grand Inquisitor would sacrifice his own soul for the sake of a race that he most clearly holds in utmost contempt. He "loves" them merely because he needs them – needs their subservience, their weakness, their worship of him: he needs them to need him. The kiss that Christ bestows on the cardinal at the end and that "burns into his heart" should be read as Christ's understanding of his fatal weakness, his pathetic need to play God (and thus deny God) in his illusion of his own selflessness. The kiss burns because Christ sees through his rationalization to the sadistic motive that he has hidden even from himself. Fromm again notes: "The driving forces are not necessarily conscious as such to a person whose character is dominated by them. A person can be entirely dominated by his sadistic strivings and consciously believe that he is motivated only by his sense of duty." *) 47 Such is the case with the Grand Inquisitor, although his creator – a master, of course, at probing the unconscious dimension of human motivation – knew better. Dostoevsky was fully aware of the phenomenon of benevolent sadism, exemplified, for example, in the episode in Notes from Underground where the Underground Man destroys the defenses of the prostitute Liza and makes her emotionally dependent on him precisely through feigning pity, even "love" for her. The Underground Man, however, admits to himself that he is playing a game with Liza, designed to increase his importance in her eyes and motivated by his own crippling weakness: the game, he knows full well, is played for his sake, not hers. *) 48 The Grand Inquisitor, playing the same power game not with one fallen woman but with all mankind, is just as sadistic as the Underground Man, but not as honest with himself.
He disguises his motive even from himself in the cloak of utopian benevolence.
It involves no great leap of imagination to see that the sadistic impulse to dominate others provides the motive force of totalitarian rulers. However much their theories may proclaim the good of mankind – or of the Party, or of the State – as their raison d'être, their brutal policies belie their pronouncements. In the face of the Holocaust, the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution and Cambodia's killing fields, sadism as an explanation of the psychological substructure of totalitarianism requires little defense. The term is so fraught, however, with connotations of overt cruelty – jack boots and torture chambers – that it may elicit resistance when applied to purely theoretical structures, like literary utopias, or purely fictional characters, like the Grand Inquisitor, whose protestations of benevolence have no actual history against which they can be tested. Even with Fromm's qualification that the sociological sadist may sublimate his drives so that they appear, objectively, like acts of concern, even of kindness toward frail humanity, still sadism may strike some as too pejorative a term.
But the reality itself, not the name given it, is what matters. And the illusion of benevolence disguising the will-to-power – disguising it even from those engaged most relentlessly in the quest for power – is not so unfamiliar as to unsettle our minds overmuch: Fromm's analysis merely provides the shock of recognition. *) 49
If we grant, then, that sadism underlies the Grand Inquisitor's utopian benevolence, we will not be wholly confounded - as so many critics have been – when we encounter Orwell's ultimate reduction of the authoritarian will-to-power to its unsublimated essentials in Nineteen Eighty-Four. O'Brien, there, removes the saintly mask worn by the Grand Inquisitor and reveals the face of totalitarian sadism without disguise:
If we begin to understand O'Brien, we will, I think, begin to understand the Grand Inquisitor."The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others, we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness. Only power, pure power. [...] We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others [...] were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that.
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution, one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" *) 50
In one of his aphorisms Nietzsche claims:
For the Grand Inquisitor's crypto-totalitarianism, a similar claim must be made: the resolution to find men weak and servile serves to make them weak and servile. The mechanisms of psychic manipulation through which such desired behavior is elicited from the ruled are, in turn, capable of explanation in terms of the social-psychopathic drives of the rulers, ideological heirs of the Grand Inquisitor. In an epigram in his Fusées, Baudelaire sums up the view that Dostoevsky excoriates in the Legend as the essence of authoritarian utopianism:"The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad, made the world ugly and bad."
The Grand Inquisitor is such a saint, the utopian as sadist."The true saint is he who flogs and kills people for their own good."
footnotes)
*) 30 D.H. Lawrence, "The Grand Inquisitor", Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal, Heinemann, London 1955, pp. 233 f.
Edward Wasiolek, Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 1964, p. 165) notes that, in addition to Lawrence, Leo Shestov and Vasily Razanov both contend that Dostoevsky stood secretly on the side of the Grand Inquisitor and concludes: "The revolt of so many distinguished readers against Dostoevsky's conscious intention is, whatever else, a testimony to the force and persuasiveness with which Dostoevsky was able to state the other case." But for Dostoevsky's own response to such criticism, see his comments cited in Ernest J. Simmons, Dostoevski: The Making of a Novelist, Oxford University Press, New York 1940, p. 383
*) 31 The Prince, trans. T. G. Bergin, Crofts, New York 1947, pp. 48 f.
*) 32 Peter E. Bondanella, Machiavelli and the Art of Renaissance History, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 1973, p. 59
Bondanella amply demonstrates that Machiavelli played fast and loose with historical fact for what Bondanella charitably calls "artistic" purposes. Joseph Kraft, "Truth and Poetry in Machiavelli", Journal of Modern History, (33/1951, pp. 109-121) effectively dispatches the notion that Machiavelli is an "objective realist" by showing how he systematically distorted the historical record for ideological ends. Cf. John Dewey: "It would [...] appear that during the greater part of the history of European thought conceptions of human nature have been framed not with scientific objectiveness but on the basis of what was needed to give intellectual formulation and support to social movements." Quoted in "Introduction", Human Nature in Politics, eds. J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman, New York University Press, New York 1977, p. 7
*) 33 "Some Reflections on the Grand Inquisitor and Modern Democratic Theory", Ethics, 68/1957, p. 254
See also David Reisman, "Individualism Reconsidered", Individualism Reconsidered and Other Essays, (Free Press, Glencoe, IL 1954, pp. 26-38) and Andrew Hacker, "Dostoevsky's Disciples: Man and Sheep in Political Theory", Journal of Politics, 17/1955, pp. 590-613
*) 34 See, e.g., Rene Fueloep-Miller, "Fyodor Dostoevsky: Insight, Faith, and Prophecy", trans. Richard and Clara Winston, Scribner's, New York 1950, ch. 7
*) 35 The Social Contract, trans. G.D.H. Cole, Dutton, New York 1973, p. 167
*) 36 "Remarks on the Psychological Appeal of Totalitarianism", American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 12/1952, p. 89
For elaboration of the ideas in this essay, see Bettelheim, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age, 1960, rpt. by Avon, New York 1971, esp. pp. 97-107
*) 37 "Remarks on the Psychological Appeal of Totalitarianism", p. 91
*) 38 Ibidem p. 93 (emphasis in the original)
*) 39 Cf. Robert Waelder, "Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism: Psychological Comments on the Problem of Power", in Psychoanalysis and Culture: Essays in Honor of Geza Roheim, ed. George B. Wilbur and Warner Muensterberger, International Universities Press, New York 1951, pp. 192 f.) "Rebellion against the totalitarian power is inhibited not only by its overwhelming might but also by the fact that part of the superego sides with the totalitarian demands. Once rebellion is impossible, inner peace can only be won by destroying, or surrendering, the nonconforming parts of the superego. The impact of totalitarianism upon the mind of the pluralist within its power is likely to be this demoralization. Totalitarianism operates in the encounter with the pluralist like a scientifically devised breakup of personality."
See also the remarkable account of the subconscious complicity with Nazism even by some hostile to it, as revealed in their dreams, in Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams, Quadrangle, Chicago 1966
*) 40 Ibidem pp. 93 f.
For a more detailed account of the psychological techniques of dominance in totalitarian societies, see T.W. Adorno, "Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda", 1951 in Sigmund Freud, ed. Paul Roazen (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1973, pp. 82-102), for his argument that such behavior is not man's "nature", see esp. pp. 99 ff.
But see also David Reisman, "Some Observations on the Limits of Totalitarian Power", Individualism Reconsidered, pp. 414-25
*) 41 Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941), rpt. by Avon, New York 1965, p. 173 (emphasis in the original)
*) 42 Ibidem pp. 177 f.
Cf. J.L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (Praeger, New York 1960, pp. 39 f.): "In recent times we have had examples of the strange combination of psychological ill-adjustment and totalitarian ideology. In some cases, salvation from the impossibility of finding a balanced relationship with fellow-men is sought in the lonely superiority of dictatorial leadership. The leader identifies himself with [...] absolute doctrine."
*) 43 Escape from Freedom p. 158
*) 44 Ibidem p. 183
*) 45 Ibidem p. 168 (emphasis in original)
*) 46 Ibidem pp. 180, 184 (emphasis in original)
*) 47 Ibidem p. 185
*) 48 See, e.g., I. Traschen, "Dostoevsky's 'Notes from Underground'", Accent 16/1956, pp. 255-264
*) 49 Cf. Bertrand Russell's comment, The Scientific Outlook (1931, rpt. by Norton, New York 1962, p. 205) on attempts to create artificial societies (that is, utopias):
*) 50 Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), rpt. by Clarendon Press, Oxford 1984, p. 386"The pleasure in planned construction is one of the most powerful motives in men who combine intelligence with energy. Whatever can be constructed according to a plan, such men will endeavour to construct. [...] They are likely to suppose themselves actuated by some idealistic motive, and it is possible that such may play a part in determining what sort of society they aim in creating.
But the desire to create is not itself idealistic, since it is a form of love of power, and while the power to create exists there will be men desirous of using this power even if unaided nature would produce a better result than any that can be brought about by deliberate intention."
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