THE SCHOOL FORDICTATORS
23
rid of concrete problems being to solve them and not to ignore them.
It is, of course, true that the Socialists, with their eyes fixed on the
class struggle and on practical politics, were taken by surprise by
the savage irruption of Fascism, failed to understand the reasons and
/
consequences of its strange and unheard-of words and symbols, and
did not for one moment imagine it possible that a movement of
such a primitive nature might gain control of and manage a mechan-
ism as complicated as the modern state. The Socialists were unpre-
pared to understand the efficacy of Fascist propaganda because their
doctrine was formulated by Marx and Engels in the nineteenth
century, since when it has not made any great advances. In a passage
in
The Eighteenth Brumaire
Marx rightly wrote that "the tradition
of the dead generations hangs like an incubus over the brains of
the living," but he could not anticipate the discoveries of modern psy-
chology concerning the structure of the human mind. For a Marxist
of the past century it was still permissible to believe that the limita-
tion of man's conSciousness was a consequence of the division of
society into classes and the economic exploitation resulting therefrom,
and that the· proletarian revolution, by emancipating the productive
process from its last shackles, would also completely emancipate the
human mind. Such a belief would seem puerile today; nevertheless it
is
still
carefully preserved in the intellectual baggage of every orthodox
Marxist. Now it is to be expected that men's ways of feeling will
undergo many future changes; but these
will
not suffice to modify
man's psychological structure, or to bring into consciousness the
tangled mass of psychic activity that constitutes the unconscious.
If
the backwardness of Socialist theory in regard to man's internal life
had had no practical consequences, it would not be worthwhile men-
tioning it now. It was, -however, one of the reasons why the Socialists,
and for that matter all the old parties, failed immediately to appre-
ciate the danger of Fascist propaganda, and have so far fought it
with arguments that strike into the void.
PROFESSOR PICKUP
Do you mean, perhaps, that the irrational is stronger than the
rational? And that to put the masses in motion one should always
appeal to their primitive instincts and not to rational arguments?
If
so,
you would agree with what the philosopher Huizinga said to us
when we visited
him
in Holland: "The crisis of our civilization,"
he said, "is the crisis of reason, the weakening of the critical faculty.
There is a conflict between life and reason, and modern youth prac–
tices an idolatrous worship of life."
THOMAS THE CYNIC
I must confess that I am unaware of any struggle between the
