218
PARTISAN REVIEW
was not one of the most urgent
aims
of reason itself-you have
denied yourselves the benefit of some, the control of others; you have
refused the task of guiding or directing them, of cultivating their
seed or of sucking out their poison: you have left the usufruct to the
lowest riff-raff. You have neglected the blaze of light which some
of these moments of pa..o;sion have the virtue of casting upon reason.
Finally, you have made your so-called, your
closed
Reason, so
morose and have shown her up as being so powerless, that you have
estranged from her a constantly growing number of reasonable be–
ings; you have flung them back into darkness and into the clutches
of the worst adventurers, who have had a clear field. Do you realize
that you bear a very great responsibility for the unleashing of the
present cataclysm in which universal reason may well
be
engulfed?
Two centuries ago, with the growth of rationalism, humanity thought
it could already see the close of the era of
divine
right, and its cortege
of arbitrary rule fade away. Nevertheless it is this same rationalism
which, because it has been allowed to become jejune and atrophied,
has brought us to the epoch of tyrants by
human
right.
The ideas about tyrants which still prevail today date from
antiquity, and are still impregnated with the illusion that a leader
must be imposed from above or from outside. Modem reality is
tragically otherwise. The present-day tyrant is indeed proposed, fi–
nanced and supported by powers above or abroad, but because
this
fact must not become known he affects an open hostility towards
these powers. He incessantly overstates this hostility the more easily to
conceal the protection which enables
him
to organize costly propa–
ganda, fanaticize his followers and create his myth. He is then swept
to power, not by the direct intervention of his protectors, but by the
bewildered multitude, fuddled with demagogy. The modern tyrant
gets himself elected by plebiscite; his allowing himself the luxury of
juggling with the percentages by terrorism and corruption, and of
falsifying the results, might for a moment be mistaken for vanity
rather than for lack of certainty; for if collective excitement has
been carefully worked up his majority must be assured. In reality,
the use of intimidation by terror is needed chiefly to hasten success,
but in most cases the modern tyrant can, at a given moment, get
him–
self plebiscited with no faking. This does not mean that terrorism is
an unnecessary luxury for
him
and that he is not obliged to be ready
to use it, knowing as he does in advance that a small part only of
his promises will
be
kept, and that he could not face a second plebi–
scite nor even guarantee his power without physically crushing his
adversaries and bribing his supporters.
