WHERE ANARCHY BEGINS
135
cause the fascist state is REALISTIC. It looks at things AS THEY
ARE. Theft is part of reality, so it is taken over and regulated. The
only change is from dilettantism to science. You are not insured
against theft, you are insured against surprise. Nothing will scare you,
which, you will admit, is excellent for people with a heart condition.
The unexpected is banished from life. You know exactly what to
expect, and you don't waste your time in vain hopes and fears."
"But then.... "
"Then hell. Don't interrupt me. I am here to explain what the
social sciences are all about, and you disturb the course of my thought.
Now follow me: what must the citizen do in order to be insured
against surprise, against the peril of breathing? He must declare. The
State must know who you are; it's only logical, isn't it? So your
parents begin to declare for you until such time as you're able to
do it for yourself.
As
you grow up you're taught to declare the date
of your birth, your name, those of your parents, everything. You fill
out application blanks and forms, which cost you two or three lire
a sheet, because you're a patriot, and you write and re-write your
name hundreds of times to all sorts of authorities. But while you keep
introducing yourself to the State, your introduction is never acknowl–
edged. The authorities never declare anything to you, except thcir
intention to go on protecting you for the rest of your life, and you
must be grateful to them, because, you see, even the work of putting
you in chains is in itself a job, a service again. Thousands upon thou–
sands of policemen and name-readers and librarians who classify your
declarations and pass them on to the Anatomists of the Body Politic,
who can tell on sight in what archives your declaration will have to
be
kept against burglars and invaders,
all
these people are in the
service of the Fatherland, to help you and protect you against the
Peril. They don't know how and where it all started any more than
you or I know who was the first man. And the hell they care. A
thought lost in the thickness of the past has become a huge fact, and
this fact has authority and power now. It has become Nature. It's
the Paper Age. You go into an office and ask for a copy of one of
your old declarations, and you find there hundreds of people applying
for the same paper which they had won with the sweat of their pen
years before, and for which they got nothing but protection. And
there, behind a counter, you see a bunch of ill-fed and decalcified
bureaucrats whose only privilege in life is that of living very close
to the Forms. They can ACTUALLY touch and handle hundreds of
brand-new application blanks whenever they want; they can make
their own declarations while lying in bed, and re-write them ten times
