THE
ORIGINAL SIN OF
THE
INTELLECT
57
all these played a role in winning me over, in making the impossible
appear possible to me and many others: the transformation of the
system from inhumanity to humanity, the elimination of the shadow–
kingdom of the slave camps, at whose expense these artists live in the
upper spheres.
What is the deception, the great illusion? Is it based on the
material and psychological bribery of belonging to the privileged
"ruling caste," of sharing its privileges and power, of having the
right of co-determination in the council of the gods, instead of
being merely the subject of regulations? All this certainly contributes
to convincing the intellect, yet it is an illusion, too, an illusion which
can be traced to a first cause, a basic error. This, in my opinion,
and not only in mine, consists in reading our own concepts and
feelings into the concepts and appearances of the system; we ap–
proach it with the preconceptions derived from our European educa–
tion, and in this way we come to think that we are seeing some–
thing which is not really there, which is foreign to the system and
exists only in us.
The system even makes concessions, because it gambles on this
deception from the beginning. When all its victims have been sub–
jugated to its power and transformed into more or lesS unwilling
tools, it no longer needs to fear their disillusion. Such a system
of pure expediency was foreign and inconceivable to us. We believed
in the existence of human values and truth. We knew that error and
even falsehood may be preached as the truth, but one possibility
never occurred to us: that one can preach an entire system of
values and truths, and claim that they have the objective validity of
natural laws, without even believing in the existence of human
values and truths- that one can impose this system on hundreds of
millions of men while denying that man is a spiritual and intellectual
being-all as a means to the end of power.
This is so infernal, so inhuman, that thousands of intellectuals
in
the West, and even many of those in the Iron Curtain countries,
fail to imagine it; they try to explain their own experience of
the system in some other way, and the Party helps them by supplying
a mass of theoretical explanations. Until they themselves have fallen
victim to the system, they believe that they are witnessing transitory
