A COMMUNIST AND HIS IDEALS
439
But on the other hand, if we still conform, not to all, but to any
of the features I have been describing, we still linger in the darkness
of our former allegiance.
If,
say, we no longer depreciate the worth of
our nation or of our class, but still depreciate ourselves as thinking
persons, then in that measure we still give sustenance to a culture
which means to destroy us as thinking persons. Stalinism is against life
because it is against what is life-giving in a proper estimate of the self.
It is against freedom because it is against the only kind of freedom that
means anything-the kind the self recognizes and grows by.
We are here to discuss myth and freedom. I can think of no myth
that supports freedom, for how can an artifact support a reality? And
either freedom is a reality, or it is indeed a myth. I have already men–
tioned, however, what I think is the most powerful and destructive
myth operating among decent and supposedly thoughtful people to rob
them of their freedom-the myth of selflessness. We are moral people,
peculiarly conscious of the values by which we live. When we deny, as
political and cultural Stalinism insists that we do, a full sense of
our own value, when we deny the worth of ourselves, then inevitably
we must substitute for our own worth the worth of something which
is not ourselves. This is the psychology of subservience; we become serv–
ants. And where there are servants there are masters. This is the path
by which an ideal politics, a politics of supposed freedom, becomes
a real politics of repression. It is the path by which Communism has
become a totalitarianism as bad as fascism. First it teaches us to put but
a poor price on ourselves; then it puts but a poor price
on
us.
But in speaking as firmly as I do against the self-depreciation of
the idealist, am I suggesting that we adopt the fascist principle of self-ap–
preciation? No, I am not suggesting that we dedicate ot.t.rselves to a
life of self-interest. I am not asking us to stop being idealists-but just
to stop being the wrong kind of idealists. I believe it is dangerous
to undervalue what is our own-whether it is our own nation, class or
intellects. This does not mean that, instead, I think we should act as if
only that which is ours is worth bothering about. I believe that the
dominant idealism of our time is unwholesome. This does not mean
that I am against idealism. Quite the contrary, it seems to me that the
major work which must now be undertaken by our culture is the work
of reconstituting a new and healthier idealism-an idealism which would
properly relate the requirements of the self to the requirements of
others.
I t is the business of all personal growth to learn how to harmonize,
or adjudicate between, contradictory forces. We live in a predatory
