MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
519
condition of one part in a collective whole, of one impersonal being
in the herd - then it is perhaps not inaccurate to say that certain theo–
cratic or political tyrannies like that of the Ayatollah, or ideological
ones like Hitler's Germany, the China of the Cultural Revolution, or
the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge, grant a sort of blissful stupefac–
tion , a happy lethargy, to those same masses whom they force into
conformity, exempting them from the nuisance of having to choose
or to doubt or to create .
Renouncing freedom is, of course, one possible option.
It
is not
only nations which succumb, at times, to this temptation, under the
spell of a religion or an ideology. Individual people do so as well.
That among the latter there should be many who, like intellectuals
and artists , depend on freedom in order to function, is only an ap–
parent paradox . Freedom saddles man with a terrible responsibility
which nobody experiences more intimately, at the very heart of his
work, than the creative artist. Existentialist philosophy, which was
still in vogue when I was a student, derived from the anguish of that
ultimate situation : the situation ofman who is condemned, on account
of his free condition, to choose a self at every moment, plotting his
own destiny , deciding at each instant between the vast or tiny options
open to him. This distressing and heartrending state - of having to
choose without respite, of having to adopt one choice and reject others
through the course of every hour and every day- is simply intolerable
for some intellectuals. And so they try to dodge it, disowning it. Thus
are born those painstaking theories intended to prove that freedom is
an abstract and relative concept, a formal privilege which accompa–
nies power and wealth; a mirage, by means of which dominant mi–
norities disguise the exploitation and injustice exercised upon the
majorities .
Curiously enough, however, once that freedom which they call
fictitious and false and classist is done away with, whether by a right–
wing military dictatorship or a Marxist revolution, those who abused
it so find that they are the first victims when freedom is eclipsed.
That without that "mirage," it is their own work that becomes a trap
and a lie, a permanent frustration. And on the other hand , that the
cause of true justice does not advance one iota without it. Then artists
and intellectuals go on to become its most ardent defenders . This is a
phenomenon of our times that should lead us to some reflection: free
countries teem with intellectuals and artists committed to totalitarian
