THE MOB AND THE eliTE
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ogists, with whose theories they sometimes seem to have so much
in
common, their chief distinction is their greater authenticity and pas–
sion. They had been more deeply touched by misery, they were more
concerned with the perplexities and more deadly hurt by hypocrisy
than all the apostles of good will and brotherhood had been. And they
could no longer escape into exotic lands, could no longer afford to
be dragon-slayers among strange and exciting people. There was no
escape from the daily routine of misery, meekness, frustration, and
resentment embellished by a fake culture of educated talk; no con–
formity to the customs of fairy-tale lands could possibly save them
from the rising nausea that this combination continuously inspired.
This inability to escape into the wide world, this feeling of being
caught again and again in the trappings of society-so different from
the conditions which had formed the imperialist character-added a
constant strain and yearning for violence to the older passion for
anonymity and losing oneself. Without the possibility of a radical
change of role and character, such as the identification with the
Arab national movement or the rites of an Indian village, the self–
willed immersion in the suprahuman forces of destruction seemed to
be a salvation from the automatic identification with pre-established
functions in society and their utter banality, and at the same time to
help destroy the functioning itself. These people felt attracted to the
pronounced activism of totalitarian movements, to their curious and
only seemingly contradictory insistence on both the primacy of sheer
action and the overwhelming force of sheer necessity. This mixture
corresponded precisely to the war experience of the "front" genera–
tion, to the experience of constant activity within the framework of
events which were completely determined from outside.
Activism, moreover, seemed to provide new answers to the old
and troublesome question, "Who am
I?"
which always appears with
redoubled persistence in times of crisis.
If
society insisted, "You are
what you appear to be," postwar activism replied: "You are what
you have done"-for instance the man who for the first time had
crossed the Atlantic in an airplane (as in Brecht's
Lindbergh Flug)–
an answer which after the second World War was repeated and
slightly varied by Sartre's "You are your life" (in
Huis Glas).
The
pertinence of these answers lies less in their validity as redefinitions
of personal identity than in their usefulness for an eventual escape
