30
PARTISAN REVIEW
the simple, automatic ones. I am not speaking now of the serious cases
which require actual psychiatrical intervention, but of ex-service men
and unemployed generally, and their families, and
all
those who have
been subjected to intense emotions for a long time. Save in exceptional
cases, experience has shown that men's internal equilibrium cannot
survive such super-human ordeals. They oscillate between black des–
pair and naive optimism, and fall an easy prey to every demagogic
phrase. Physical insecurity and uncertainty about their livelihood,
if
protracted for years, lead even the most normal, most cultured, best–
educated men back into a state of primitive anxiety, a state that after
many centuries of development seemed definitely to have been super–
seded. That, Mr. W., is the state of grace in which Fascists are
formed; not the drawing-room Fascists, but the real Fascists, the
desperate ones, whose sole presence at a meeting of their opponents
is sufficient to cause terror and panic.
PROFESSOR PICKUP
What you say, Mr.
Cyni~
reminds me of some words of the
Spaniard Ortega y Gasset, whom we met in Paris. "The man who is
now beginning to come to the top," he said to us, "is, in comparison
with the complex civilization in which he was born, a primitive, a
barbarian, a man who emerges from the cellar, a vertical invader. He
is, in fact, a different kind of man: a man who can act only in a group,
in a word a mass-man." The mobilization of millions of mass-men by
means of Fascism is nevertheless not the whole of Fascism. At most it
may explain some noisy aspects of the movement, but the essence of
Fascism is in its idea. Mass-man is the brute force which the Fascist
idea uses in order to triumph. The two things must not be confused.
To state it in strictly scientific terms, masses are masses, but ideas
are ideas.
MR.
w.
Why do you insist on wasting our time? You know very well that
there are plenty of ideas everywhere in America, but not in politics.
PROFESSOR PICKUP
My dear Mr. W., once more let me repeat that that is the whole
trouble. It is the very thing we must fight against and put an end to.
Without ideas our country will remain throughout the ages the pic–
turesque hotch-potch it has hitherto been. I believe the hour is ap–
proaching predestined by fate to be the beginning of a new era; when
America will cease to be a vast, uncoordinated patchwork and
will
for the first time become a real, ordered, and stable society. That mir–
acle can only be accomplished by the Fascist idea, shining as a bright
light to show the way to millions of mass-men. Only the Fascist idea
