NOTES TOWARDS A UTOPIA
517
that has been lost in Western society, and perverted in Eastern,
though it still agitates the minds of a few thinkers or, as they
are contemptuously called, "dreamers."
But, some readers might ask, why should any individual feel
guilty in reference to a yet unrealized social order? Why should
whole societies be infected with that guilt? Because all know, or
sense dimly, that the present order is ridden with desperate con–
tradictions and, for reasons too numerous to list, unworthy of
man; that it is up to all individuals, at every moment of their
lives, to work towards a resolution of these contradictions and the
establishment, finally, of an order of things which man can con–
front, if not with pride, at least without blushing. Yet since there
is no common vision, the cooperative motive is lacking; and in the
absence of cooperative motive our individual motivations are bound
to languish: they become capricious, inane, freely interchange–
able with one another.
It
is our putative final move which deter–
mines our next, i.e., immediate move: this deep insight of every
teleology (and of Pragmatism) has now been largely forgotten.
What remains is a nervousness, now 'fidgety now frantic, about
what to .do next,
both on the collective scale and on the petty
scale of our personal lives. A cumulative neurotic dissatisfaction
suggests to us, after each event, that we should have been up
and doing when we were sitting still, and been sitting still when
we were up and doing.
This lack of motive, or insufficiency of motive (not to be con–
fused with that
impatience
of motive which gives rise to gratuitous
acts) induces guilt as easily, insidiously and deeply as any of the
familiar causes of guilt so brilliantly analyzed by Nietzsche and
Freud. It certainly is a more powerful "guilt-maker" than either
the "wrong" or the "bad" motive, which makes us, respectively,
regret or repent what we have done; as all guilt attendant on
omission affects us both more profoundly and more obscurely than
guilt incurred through commission.
4. To remove this basis of guilt, a mere wish for a better order
of things is obviously not sufficient. What is needed are substantive
proposals. Of these there have been quite a few in recent decades,
ranging from facile, unwarrantable nostrums to brilliant projec–
tions of the future society, but in no case, to my knowledge, has
